UK banks have almost all signed into a debit card agreement which gives the same protections as credit cards.
Card fraud doesn't cost you of the bank anything. The merchants are left holding the bag (lost merchandise AND money) and often collect horrific extra fees from Visa et al on top.
"I've read stories of Facebook putting up a "roadblock" screen where it won't let the user log in unless the user provides a phone number capable of receiving text messages and not shared with any other Facebook user. "
The few times I've run into this it also did voice verification after texts failed.
For such cases:
Setting up a burner number is pretty easy. I have one on a UK "070" range which costs the caller around $3/min for such cases (these cost $10/year, can be forwarded anywhere in the world, and are not overtly 09* numbers, so most filters allow them). Another "070" number is given to businesses which insist on a phone number.
If anyone other than those I _want_ to call me wants to do so, they can pay for the privilege. It keeps unwanted telemarketing to a minimum - and if I do get such calls it's amusing to keep them online and paying through the nose for as long as possible.
"I often bump into filling my phone storage. I suppose I should spring for a 32G-64G microSD since my phone is capable of that, "
Which won't help much. The/system area isn't usually big enough for custom roms and KK upwards won't use the "external" storage without a permissions patch which requires root access.
I've repartitioned my old phone - more space in system and changed the dain-bramaged partition layout away from Gingerbread's default "1Gb/data + rest in internal sd" mindlessness. Having 12Gb in/data makes a big difference from bumping up against the limit regularly and having to shuffle apps around.
The external card now gets game/map/dashcam datafiles and all seems ok.
"One wonders what remarkable scientific discoveries and conclusions will result from creative analysis of today's data, forty years hence."
None whatsoever if the data isn't curated.
One of my constant battles is to get resources to retain data from old space missions. They're flagwaving missions first and scientific expeditions second, which means there's very little interest in keeping record around for prolonged periods.
That's DESPITE pointing out that if the raw data for NOAA satellites hadn't been kept, it would have been impossible to use them to confirm the existance and development of the ozone hole, simply because the processing system discarded low data values as "equipment error" - which added 20 years to the discovery of the thing in the first place.
"Without some amazing break through in solar power efficiency and much lower prices we will not see 10% adoption by 2022."
The issue isn't so much "solar efficiency" anymore, so much as storage technology.
Forcing utilities to accept solar/wind power at fixed prices and not compensating them for the cost of having to keep backup power sources ready to roll for when those resources aren't generating full capacity is going to generate a significant backlash. Utilities are resorting to paying people NOT to connect their windpower to the grid in Europe.
At some point the subsidies are going to go away. At that point Solar/wind/tidal are going to look extremely expensive, even compared to old oil-burning plants.
Some areas have worse colourblindness rates than others.
For no apparent reason the rate of male red-green colourblindness approaches 25% in New Zealand in an area running from East Cape to Poverty Bay. As a result, red traffic lights have a bit of blue added to help them out.
In parallel with colourblindness there are also genetic abberations which knock out specific taste sensors.
This can be species-wide - cats can't taste "sweet"
About 25% of the human population have reduced sensitiivity to "bitter". A much smaller proportion can't taste it at all (I'm in that camp. It can be fun to play games with bitrex..)
Once it was spotted that there was a bunch of undeclared development going on by any means, the drone becomes the only cost-effective way of quantifying exactly how much is going on.
If a cop pulls over a car for something like fake/stolen license plates, the odds are pretty good that will just be the tip of the iceberg.
Likewise in situations like this, once it's realised that there's some illegal behaviour going on, it's fairly probable that _everyone_ is doing it, or the neighbours would be queuing up to complain about illegal development.
Which means that inspectors on the ground in the area will result in the neighbourhood grapevine being alerted, or corrupt local officials destroying evidence of collusion before they can be impounded.
"How can you not see a house built on a lot that was supposedly vacant?"
Gated areas where officials simply can't go without good reason.
Having seen it from the air you can get a warrant to inspect on the ground, whereas asking for a warrant on suspicion that people were fibbing would probably be thrown out as a fishing expedition.
In all liklihood someone who works in the department noticed the development from a commercial flight and realised there was a lot more housing there than the maps said there was.
"It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful, so you have to eat more empty calories to get the essential vitamins and minerals to keep from getting malnutrition. "
This is already happening. Contemporary store-bought fruit and vegetables are well down on vitamin/mineral levels of the same products 70-80 years ago.
"Antarctic ice has actually increased significantly in the recent cold period"
Antarctic ice _VOLUME_ is and has been decreasing at increasing rates.
Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing, partly because a lot of the land ice is ending up in the sea and partly because that land ice is freshwater and there's so much of that entering the sea around antarctica that it's essentially caused a freshwater layer floating on top of salt water (fresh is lighter than salty), and that freshwater freezes at higher temperatures. ( 0C vs -17C).
That translates to more ice on the water, but it's warmer than it has been in the past (land ice is also significantly warmer on average than it has been, which has resulted in faster glacier flows putting more ice in the water.)
Humans don't notice the temperature difference between -20 and -21, or even -20 and -40, and ice doesn't look much different until it's about to melt.
Likewise, 1 metre thick pack ice doesn't look any different to 10 metre thick pack ice, so ice pack destruction (in the arctic) happens invisibly right up to the point where the ice melts, at which point we think it's a sudden change.
The basic tenet of more frequent extreme weather events, happening to greater extremes holds true though.
Various models have shown that GW may well result in wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting dryer, but we don't have enough computer power to model the real world and projects to process satellite imagery data from the last 50 years in order to more closely quantify existant changes are struggling for funding
(Disclosure: I do support work for one group working on this. Apart from the simple issue of funding for equipment and staff, one of the largest problems is that those who have the programming skills to do this kind of thing well can get paid 20-30 times more in private industry than in a university research job)
More rain = more water flow = more nutrients being washed away.
Amazonian jungle soils are some of the poorest in the world, generally only good for a couple of seasons of crops under slash-and-burn agriculture.
This holds across most tropical regions.
More CO2 without nitrogen fixation == faster growth, but lower plant quality. Anyone who's experimented with CO2 enrichment in an aquarium setup will tell you that.
Chernobyl happened nearly 30 years ago, but it was 100+ times larger than Fukushima and released a lot more long-lived radionucleides.
Fukushima's footprint is a lot smaller and will dissipate a lot more quickly.
Both affected areas are small in comparison to their isolation zones. In general there are areas with much higher naturally occuring radiation/radioactivity levels than the isolation zones, many of which are inhabited.
Even with these accidents (and all the other incidents combined), the risk factor of nuclear power is much higher than the _direct_ dangers of coal or hydro power.
"Natural Gas is pushing out dirty coal for power generation"
The economics of shale-formation fracking, along with well production patterns which end up requiring constant new drilling(*) and the "sell it or else" laws(**) which have driven many exploration companies to the brink of bankruptcy mean that the natural gas boom is highly likely to turn into a bust.
That's quite apart from the economics which would come into play if american shale-fracking rigs were subject to environmental laws.
(*) Shale gas wells produce a burst of gas, then tail off rapidly, usually being 90% down after 12 months.
Secondary wells in a formation are showing reduced output over the initial ones.
(**) Producers are _required_ to sell gas at market prices once a well comes onstream and are prohibited from holding gas back (either by refraining from connecting, or turning off taps) until prices go up. The end result, because of the "shale rush" and a bunch of lemmings jumping on the drilling bandwagon, is that many wells will never take in enough money over their lifespan to pay for their establishment costs.
Give it another decade and natural gas prices will rise substantially.
In the meantime the _only_ reason that Wind and Solar are economic is due to subsidies and "must connect" laws which prohibit utilities from refusing their business.
As soon as low-risk LFTR nuclear rigs come onstream, solar & wind will fall back to being technologies for areas where grid connections are difficult. LFTRs should also push carbon-based generation to a niche position, as they are highly throttleable and peaking capacity can be provided by LFTR systems in conjunction with hydro (possibly also with pumped-storage and battery setups)
"The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship."
If you're using something as intrinsically UNSAFE as a boiling water reactor and a SCRAM system which requires active insertion of rods, that's no real surprise.
Molten salt devices are completely different animals to water/metal cooled ones and are low workload with fast throttleablity and low xenon poisoning susceptability.
You're not just comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with orange juice.
Even when nuclear material _has_ been directly exposed to seawater around such hulks (there are a few of them, including 3 reactors from the Lenin), radiation is undetectable more than 2 metres away from the location.
And ONLY on ISPs which are both effective monopolies and where what's coming off the 'net competes with something they offer themselves as a core business.
If there was effective competition in the USA, this wouldn't be happening. Handwaving about "Net Neutrality" is a dog-and-pony show to try and distract from the elephant in the room - which is for the vast majority of affected americans, the ISPs in question are the ONLY game in town for broadband connectivity.
"We can push over 100Mb/s over 5,000' of copper _today_ using the latest, already shipping DSL technology."
In practice, DSL signals interfere with each other.
Also in practice, the node and CPE equipment ends up costing more than running new fiber and using cheaper kit - but the telco has to pay for new cable runs itself whilst it can push the costs of DSL/CPE equipment off to the enduser.
Historically: After every event which has put a sizeable dent in the population (war, famine, plague, etc), the population has not only recovered quickly, it has substantially exceeded the previous level within 2 generations.
The natural response to a sudden decrease in population is an increase in birthrates and always has been.
"The UK benefits from Scottish oil and renewable energy."
The income from oil tax revenue is lower than the extra expenditure on Scotland.
If Scotland goes it alone and keeps the oil revenue, it will still have to find at least 20% extra money internally.
After the 3 Stooges (Cameron/Millband/boringone) made unsustainable promises if Scotland votes "No", I'd imagine that most of the english population started wishing the scottish will vote Yes.
If Scotland votes yes, it will hurt both countries, but the rest of the UK will recover quickly. Scotland is likely to face extended periods of extreme austerity, possibly as long as 20 years.
If Scotland votes no, the rest of the UK will hurt (scotland gets even more disproportionate funding) and it won't stop hurting.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends where you are in the world.
UK banks have almost all signed into a debit card agreement which gives the same protections as credit cards.
Card fraud doesn't cost you of the bank anything. The merchants are left holding the bag (lost merchandise AND money) and often collect horrific extra fees from Visa et al on top.
"I've read stories of Facebook putting up a "roadblock" screen where it won't let the user log in unless the user provides a phone number capable of receiving text messages and not shared with any other Facebook user. "
The few times I've run into this it also did voice verification after texts failed.
For such cases:
Setting up a burner number is pretty easy. I have one on a UK "070" range which costs the caller around $3/min for such cases (these cost $10/year, can be forwarded anywhere in the world, and are not overtly 09* numbers, so most filters allow them). Another "070" number is given to businesses which insist on a phone number.
If anyone other than those I _want_ to call me wants to do so, they can pay for the privilege. It keeps unwanted telemarketing to a minimum - and if I do get such calls it's amusing to keep them online and paying through the nose for as long as possible.
"No one asked for ID when I picked the name of someone I haven't talked to in decades."
Noone asked for ID when I chose "Pogue Mahoney" either (there are Greek and Russian equivalents. For English, why not use Terry Wrist or L. Kaydar?)
Better to use an obvious empty shell than possibly ID-theiving someone.
"I often bump into filling my phone storage. I suppose I should spring for a 32G-64G microSD since my phone is capable of that, "
Which won't help much. The /system area isn't usually big enough for custom roms and KK upwards won't use the "external" storage without a permissions patch which requires root access.
I've repartitioned my old phone - more space in system and changed the dain-bramaged partition layout away from Gingerbread's default "1Gb /data + rest in internal sd" mindlessness. Having 12Gb in /data makes a big difference from bumping up against the limit regularly and having to shuffle apps around.
The external card now gets game/map/dashcam datafiles and all seems ok.
"One wonders what remarkable scientific discoveries and conclusions will result from creative analysis of today's data, forty years hence."
None whatsoever if the data isn't curated.
One of my constant battles is to get resources to retain data from old space missions. They're flagwaving missions first and scientific expeditions second, which means there's very little interest in keeping record around for prolonged periods.
That's DESPITE pointing out that if the raw data for NOAA satellites hadn't been kept, it would have been impossible to use them to confirm the existance and development of the ozone hole, simply because the processing system discarded low data values as "equipment error" - which added 20 years to the discovery of the thing in the first place.
"Without some amazing break through in solar power efficiency and much lower prices we will not see 10% adoption by 2022."
The issue isn't so much "solar efficiency" anymore, so much as storage technology.
Forcing utilities to accept solar/wind power at fixed prices and not compensating them for the cost of having to keep backup power sources ready to roll for when those resources aren't generating full capacity is going to generate a significant backlash. Utilities are resorting to paying people NOT to connect their windpower to the grid in Europe.
At some point the subsidies are going to go away. At that point Solar/wind/tidal are going to look extremely expensive, even compared to old oil-burning plants.
Some areas have worse colourblindness rates than others.
For no apparent reason the rate of male red-green colourblindness approaches 25% in New Zealand in an area running from East Cape to Poverty Bay. As a result, red traffic lights have a bit of blue added to help them out.
In parallel with colourblindness there are also genetic abberations which knock out specific taste sensors.
This can be species-wide - cats can't taste "sweet"
About 25% of the human population have reduced sensitiivity to "bitter". A much smaller proportion can't taste it at all (I'm in that camp. It can be fun to play games with bitrex..)
"Made a HUGE difference to the point where I have to feel my way around if I shut off the lights too soon."
If you had that much light in the bedroom at night it's highly probable that it was interfering with melanin production when you were asleep.
Bedrooms need to be DARK
Once it was spotted that there was a bunch of undeclared development going on by any means, the drone becomes the only cost-effective way of quantifying exactly how much is going on.
If a cop pulls over a car for something like fake/stolen license plates, the odds are pretty good that will just be the tip of the iceberg.
Likewise in situations like this, once it's realised that there's some illegal behaviour going on, it's fairly probable that _everyone_ is doing it, or the neighbours would be queuing up to complain about illegal development.
Which means that inspectors on the ground in the area will result in the neighbourhood grapevine being alerted, or corrupt local officials destroying evidence of collusion before they can be impounded.
"How can you not see a house built on a lot that was supposedly vacant?"
Gated areas where officials simply can't go without good reason.
Having seen it from the air you can get a warrant to inspect on the ground, whereas asking for a warrant on suspicion that people were fibbing would probably be thrown out as a fishing expedition.
In all liklihood someone who works in the department noticed the development from a commercial flight and realised there was a lot more housing there than the maps said there was.
"It also makes the crops less nutritionally useful, so you have to eat more empty calories to get the essential vitamins and minerals to keep from getting malnutrition. "
This is already happening. Contemporary store-bought fruit and vegetables are well down on vitamin/mineral levels of the same products 70-80 years ago.
"Antarctic ice has actually increased significantly in the recent cold period"
Antarctic ice _VOLUME_ is and has been decreasing at increasing rates.
Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing, partly because a lot of the land ice is ending up in the sea and partly because that land ice is freshwater and there's so much of that entering the sea around antarctica that it's essentially caused a freshwater layer floating on top of salt water (fresh is lighter than salty), and that freshwater freezes at higher temperatures. ( 0C vs -17C).
That translates to more ice on the water, but it's warmer than it has been in the past (land ice is also significantly warmer on average than it has been, which has resulted in faster glacier flows putting more ice in the water.)
Humans don't notice the temperature difference between -20 and -21, or even -20 and -40, and ice doesn't look much different until it's about to melt.
Likewise, 1 metre thick pack ice doesn't look any different to 10 metre thick pack ice, so ice pack destruction (in the arctic) happens invisibly right up to the point where the ice melts, at which point we think it's a sudden change.
The basic tenet of more frequent extreme weather events, happening to greater extremes holds true though.
Various models have shown that GW may well result in wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting dryer, but we don't have enough computer power to model the real world and projects to process satellite imagery data from the last 50 years in order to more closely quantify existant changes are struggling for funding
(Disclosure: I do support work for one group working on this. Apart from the simple issue of funding for equipment and staff, one of the largest problems is that those who have the programming skills to do this kind of thing well can get paid 20-30 times more in private industry than in a university research job)
More rain = more water flow = more nutrients being washed away.
Amazonian jungle soils are some of the poorest in the world, generally only good for a couple of seasons of crops under slash-and-burn agriculture.
This holds across most tropical regions.
More CO2 without nitrogen fixation == faster growth, but lower plant quality. Anyone who's experimented with CO2 enrichment in an aquarium setup will tell you that.
These are possibly both true.
Chernobyl happened nearly 30 years ago, but it was 100+ times larger than Fukushima and released a lot more long-lived radionucleides.
Fukushima's footprint is a lot smaller and will dissipate a lot more quickly.
Both affected areas are small in comparison to their isolation zones. In general there are areas with much higher naturally occuring radiation/radioactivity levels than the isolation zones, many of which are inhabited.
Even with these accidents (and all the other incidents combined), the risk factor of nuclear power is much higher than the _direct_ dangers of coal or hydro power.
"Natural Gas is pushing out dirty coal for power generation"
The economics of shale-formation fracking, along with well production patterns which end up requiring constant new drilling(*) and the "sell it or else" laws(**) which have driven many exploration companies to the brink of bankruptcy mean that the natural gas boom is highly likely to turn into a bust.
That's quite apart from the economics which would come into play if american shale-fracking rigs were subject to environmental laws.
(*) Shale gas wells produce a burst of gas, then tail off rapidly, usually being 90% down after 12 months.
Secondary wells in a formation are showing reduced output over the initial ones.
(**) Producers are _required_ to sell gas at market prices once a well comes onstream and are prohibited from holding gas back (either by refraining from connecting, or turning off taps) until prices go up. The end result, because of the "shale rush" and a bunch of lemmings jumping on the drilling bandwagon, is that many wells will never take in enough money over their lifespan to pay for their establishment costs.
Give it another decade and natural gas prices will rise substantially.
In the meantime the _only_ reason that Wind and Solar are economic is due to subsidies and "must connect" laws which prohibit utilities from refusing their business.
As soon as low-risk LFTR nuclear rigs come onstream, solar & wind will fall back to being technologies for areas where grid connections are difficult. LFTRs should also push carbon-based generation to a niche position, as they are highly throttleable and peaking capacity can be provided by LFTR systems in conjunction with hydro (possibly also with pumped-storage and battery setups)
"The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship."
If you're using something as intrinsically UNSAFE as a boiling water reactor and a SCRAM system which requires active insertion of rods, that's no real surprise.
Molten salt devices are completely different animals to water/metal cooled ones and are low workload with fast throttleablity and low xenon poisoning susceptability.
You're not just comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with orange juice.
Even when nuclear material _has_ been directly exposed to seawater around such hulks (there are a few of them, including 3 reactors from the Lenin), radiation is undetectable more than 2 metres away from the location.
Is currently ONLY happening in the USA.
And ONLY on ISPs which are both effective monopolies and where what's coming off the 'net competes with something they offer themselves as a core business.
If there was effective competition in the USA, this wouldn't be happening. Handwaving about "Net Neutrality" is a dog-and-pony show to try and distract from the elephant in the room - which is for the vast majority of affected americans, the ISPs in question are the ONLY game in town for broadband connectivity.
"We can push over 100Mb/s over 5,000' of copper _today_ using the latest, already shipping DSL technology."
In practice, DSL signals interfere with each other.
Also in practice, the node and CPE equipment ends up costing more than running new fiber and using cheaper kit - but the telco has to pay for new cable runs itself whilst it can push the costs of DSL/CPE equipment off to the enduser.
Self-followup....
Environmental scientists I know all say the only way to reduce the population (and birthrate) is to make people better off.
Historically: After every event which has put a sizeable dent in the population (war, famine, plague, etc), the population has not only recovered quickly, it has substantially exceeded the previous level within 2 generations.
The natural response to a sudden decrease in population is an increase in birthrates and always has been.
Ebola will make things worse, not better.
"The UK benefits from Scottish oil and renewable energy."
The income from oil tax revenue is lower than the extra expenditure on Scotland.
If Scotland goes it alone and keeps the oil revenue, it will still have to find at least 20% extra money internally.
After the 3 Stooges (Cameron/Millband/boringone) made unsustainable promises if Scotland votes "No", I'd imagine that most of the english population started wishing the scottish will vote Yes.
If Scotland votes yes, it will hurt both countries, but the rest of the UK will recover quickly. Scotland is likely to face extended periods of extreme austerity, possibly as long as 20 years.
If Scotland votes no, the rest of the UK will hurt (scotland gets even more disproportionate funding) and it won't stop hurting.
In 12 hours we'll know the results.
"Distinction without difference. Both ice caps were supposed to melt — dangerously increasing water-levels planetwide."
Arctic ice floats on water. Melting it makes no difference to sea level.
Greenland ice is a different matter and Greenland's glaciers are moving quite fast now.
Not to mention that sea ice is very thin and disappears quickly when sunlight starts hitting it.
Contrast and compare with land-ice which is thousands of metres thick across much of the continent.
The better measurement is _volume_ of ice, not _extent_ of ice.