They specifically state that T-PED (Transmitting Personal Electronic Device) is covered by the ARC report. And handheld amateur radio transmitters with power from 1W to 7W are also specifically mentioned. Assuming that Obfuscant is using the normal definitions for QRP, his transmitter is 5 watts or less which ought to not cause any problems.
That also depends upon if you consider as part of the cost of decommissioning a plant the self inflicted political injuries that increase the cost. Little things like the "OMG, it's radioactive! We're all gonna die!" bullshit involving low level radiation. The danger is from high level radioactive material. And conveniently, such material has a short half life. Which means that it becomes harmless in a relatively short time. The indiscriminate treating of all waste as high level waste merely wastes money and effort.
Obviously you're unaware of how GCC works. Yes, it would have issued a warning message if the line was: wait4: if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && current->uid = 0)...
But the author of that little backdoor attempt added the extra 'superfluous' parenthesis around the assignment. Like this: wait4: if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))...
And GCC uses those extra parenthesis as an indication that 'The assignment is deliberate and desired. Don't warn me about it. I know what I'm doing' In fact, GCC still uses those extra parenthesis as an indication that the warning message should be suppressed.
I think that they might have issues with tracking. Or else there's something really, really screwy going on with their boat. Over a period of about 855 hours, the boat has traveled 1383 miles for an average speed of a bit over 1 mph. However, the "real time" tracking page has more than a few data points claiming outrageous speeds, like 95 mph over a 20 minute span. That figure is only the highest I saw. Also saw a few over 70 mph.
I had a job some time back and was required to take a polygraph exam. During the exam, I got a rather strong feeling that a 'game' was being played and that no one informed me as to the rules. The results were inconclusive and I was scheduled for a re-examination. Given my feelings on the subject, I decided to 'learn the rules' and research polygraphy before my reexamination. Learned quite a bit on the subject, one element of which was that there was a classified government study on the effectiveness of polygraphy. I never saw the contents of that study, but if I were a classification authority and if the study reflected what's available in the public literature, then I too would classify the study. The reason is simple since the public literature on polygraphy summed up as follows.
As a means of determining lies from the truth, polygraphy is totally useless. However, as a means of eliciting voluntary confessions from naive subjects, it is extremely effective.
Let's just say on the follow up exam, I enjoyed myself far more than the examiner.
Actually, NSA by law is allowed to intercept communications outside the United States. In fact, that's its mandate. So they don't have to be sneaky and underhanded to try and sneak around the law like the bull shit currently going on with US providers. Now using a non-US provider does mean that the intercepts have to be "on the fly", but that isn't a major problem for the NSA given the number of intercept facilities they have. To be perfectly honest, given the current state of technology, the only real protection the common citizen has is the shear volume of data involved and the fact that most people are of no interest to the government.
You're confusing the difference between the 4th amendment and the 5th. The 4th deals with search and seizure which you've nicely summarized. The 5th is self incrimination as well as other elements.
Nope. The NVIDIA GK110 has in it's design 16 clusters of 192 CUDA cores. And on the Titan, any two of those clusters may be defective and are turned off giving you a total of 2688 CUDA cores. In my opinion, that's a nice way of increasing their usable yield. On the GTX 780, they can have 4 defective clusters giving a total of 2304 CUDA cores. So chips that they would otherwise trash can still be used in a nice high end card. Isn't redundancy in design nice?
You think that a retractable antenna on a swivel would fail to meet the quality and reliability standards of the Western world? I would agree with you on that point. However, I would also say that the same thing would fail to meet the quality and reliability standards of anyone who has two or more brain cells on speaking terms with each other regardless of where they happen to live in this world.
I'm detecting a bit of a red herring in the article. Seems that the school is complaining about the cost of the required laptops in addition to the cost of the cat5 drops in the school rooms due to the shift to digital text books.
The cost of the laptops would have to be spent regardless of the school's location due to the shift to digital text books, so the only "additional" cost would be that of the cat5 drops in each room. However, the following quote from the article:
Green Bank Elementary/Middle has a strong and long-standing relationship with the scientific facility up the road - the NRAO installed Cat-5 cable throughout the school years ago, and Beaudet says the organization provides as much support as possible.
Rather strongly implies that the school is fairly well wired already. But even if they weren't, the only additional cost to the school due to its location would be that of adding the cat5 drops in each room.
I don't believe you've taken into consideration the oxygen released from converting Silicon Dioxide into Silicon and Oxygen. Looking up Silicic acid, it's a generic term for a family of related acids. Looking at the 4 simplest ones, I get the following equations.
Si + 3 H2O => H2SiO3 + 2 H2 Si + 4 H2O => H4SiO4 + 2 H2 2 Si + 5 H2O => H2Si2O5 + 4 H2 2 Si + 7 H2O => H6Si2O7 + 4 H2
For all of the above equations, each Silicon atom will result in the generation of 2 hydrogen molecules (4 atoms). Which requires 2 Oxygen atoms to convert into 2 molecules of water when burned. However, to create each Silicon atom, one had to break down a Silicon Dioxide molecule.... Which in return released the 2 Oxygen atoms needed to burn the resulting Hydrogen. And just in case you now attempt to claim that it's consuming water. If you dry out the various forms of Silicic acids, you'll find out that they disassociate into various numbers of water molecules and Silicon Dioxide.
It all balances out. All we have is a system in which we can spend energy converting Silicon Dioxide into Silicon and Oxygen. And then use the resulting Silicon to react with water to get dissolved Silicon Dioxide and Hydrogen. And finally, react the resulting Hydrogen with the Oxygen released earlier to get back water.
Not so sure about that shoe. Since the cubify site itself claims that the build area is 5.5" x 5.5" x 5.5", I kind of doubt that the shoe was actually built on a cube. The maximum length in that cube is only 9.5" (assuming going from bottom corner, to opposite corner on top of cube. A more likely dimension would be from diagonal corners at the same level (so as to build shoe upright instead of canted diagonally) and that is only 7.75" kinda small for a foot..
I used to have a computer in the pool, but removed it due to disgust with the NTP abusers out there. When I looked at the logs, I would see that the vast majority of incoming traffic was from a relatively small handful of IP address. For normal well behaved users, you would see them hit you every 64 seconds and over a period of a few hours slowly back off until they do a query only once every 1024 seconds. Reasonable and well behaved. Even a relatively low bandwidth DSL line could handle a lot of users like that.
Unfortunately, not all the users are reasonable and well behaved. There were a few addresses that were hitting me with a query per second. And you can't blacklist these anti-social idiots because if you do, they're still consuming inbound bandwidth. After a period of time where 1% of the users were consuming 99% of my donated resources, I left the pool out of disgust. Was still getting hits from the idiot users a year later.
To make their idiocy even more evident, the SHORTEST interval that NTPD will hit a server is once per 16 seconds. So those once a second idiots were using software that itself was written by idiots.
Would I donate to the pool again? Nope. Not at long as there are invalid NTP clients that hit that often. If I could be assured that the idiots are gone, then I'd donate. Until then, I don't need the headaches.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with a company seeking such an injunction against someone harming their business.
And in what way is SONY's business being harmed? SONY sold a piece of equipment and after the sale and without notice, reduced the equipment's functionality. Hotz did manage to figure out the master key allowing for the signing of software so that this deleted functionality could be restored. Mr Hotz wouldn't have attempted to determine that key if it were not for SONY unilaterally reducing the equipment's functionality. And even then, the number of people who would use the key discovered by Mr Hotz is fairly small.
Personally, I have no pity for self inflicted injuries. If someone shoots themselves in the foot, my response is along the lines of "Gee, it sucks to be you". And SONY's action is a nice example of shooting oneself in the foot.
Not so certain that you can prove one of those sets of numbers as being larger than the other considering that you can create a one to one mapping between the two sets.
The set of real numbers is a "larger" infinity than the set of integers since such a one to one mapping isn't possible.
Seems to me that it's an attempt to bypass privacy requests by users. If I get rid of a cookie, that means that *I* do not want that cookie to exist. Period. End of case. And if some site goes to the extreme measure of using evercookie to insure that their cookies are persistent even though the user has demonstrated that they don't want the cookie, well then that's a site that should be black listed.
Hmm. Seems to me that with 2 objects, one with twice the mass of the other, both being dropped at the same time, the following would happen:
The more massive object would have twice the force being used to accelerate it than the less massive object. But, in order to accelerate the more massive object, it would take twice as much force to cause the same acceleration. So the actual acceleration for both objects would be the same. Of course this isn't taking into consideration any time dilation effect due to the spacetime distortion caused by the masses.
Sigh. When the global warming people are able to explain just a couple of minor details, then and only then will I believe them. Here are a few little facts that tend to be conveniently omitted when global warming is mentioned.
1. Yes, there is a definite positive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures. Using ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., this has been confirmed. But the fly in the ointment is that the CO2 levels *lag* the temperature changes by 40 to 50 years. Excuse me? The "cause" of the global warming happens "after" things warm up? That little datum all by its lonesome is rather hard to dispute.
2. The major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't CO2. It's H2O. Yup, plain old water. The effect of the CO2 is about 1 percent of the overall greenhouse effect. And of that 1%, mankind is contributing a much smaller percentage.
3. There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
4. And finally, the polar ice on Mars seems to be also shrinking. Guess those probes we've sent there have had a massive effect on Mar's temperature as well.
Seems to me that the global warming crowd have a bit of a secondary agenda running that has nothing what so ever to do with actual global warming. When the above independently verifiable but inconvenient little facts are explained, then I will consider the GW crowd to have done due diligence and be worth listening to. But until then, it's a transparent attempted power grab and quite frankly they can take their propaganda and stuff it into the nearest fireplace. Should make 'em quite happy since paper is carbon neutral and no fossil fuels would be used.
Unless you go through all the code yourself, there's no way to be sure of anything.
Only thing that can be made about that statement is to point to a nice little presentation by Ken Thompson. Take a look at 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'. Almost certain you haven't seen it given your comment.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of power we have so far. Now if Obama will correct the damn stupid mistake Carter did, things will be a heck of a lot better. Yes, we have a nuclear waste problem and it's a large one. But it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. President Carter back in 1977 issued a directive that stopped reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste. Mind, the US nuclear industry was built with the assumption that waste reprocessing would be available. So the result is that we have more waste than planned for being stored for longer periods than planned for, all because of a decision to change the way things were done. And said decision was made without putting into place an alternate method of handling the waste. Yes people, we have a nuclear waste issue, and if Obama can reverse the brain dead stupid decision made 33 years ago, that would be one of the best possible things he could do for the United States. But some people still hear the word "nuclear" and suddenly their brains and reasoning turn off and they start thinking worse case issues and problems ignoring the fact that many of the problems are political and not technical. What about cost overruns? Well, stop dragging them into court attempting to stop construction. What about the nuclear waste? See the beginning of this post people. What about Three Mile Island? Your point is? The safety measures worked and the public never was in danger. During TMI, they debating for *three days* about whether or not to evacuate the area. Next time a damn bursts, be sure to take three days to come to the decision about heading for high ground. The safety measures *worked* even though the operators practically did everything they could to screw things up.
Given the fine article here, I see that China is one of the bad boys in actually doing bad stuff, yet the http://www.ban.org/country_status/report_card.html web site has China listed as "Excellent". So something seems more than slightly fishy. Reading again, the site merely rates how the countries in question perform lip service to a set of 4 treaties and totally disregards how the countries actually act regards limiting pollution.
Sorry people, but this is a prime example of actions speaking louder than words.
You're correct as regards two objects in the same orbit having little to no relative difference in speed.
But, think about an elliptical orbit. It's nice and stable. And there's a pretty hefty velocity difference at those points where an elliptical orbit intersects other orbits. It will either be going a lot faster than it's target at perigee and when it reaches apogee, it's going a lot slower. At either point it has a rather significant difference in velocity and can cause damage. And between those two points, there's still quite a velocity difference.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to think again. Look at appendix B of http://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/airline_operators/airline_safety/info/all_infos/media/2013/InFO13010SUP.pdf which has some supplementary information on the actual report at http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/ped/media/ped_arc_final_report.pdf
They specifically state that T-PED (Transmitting Personal Electronic Device) is covered by the ARC report. And handheld amateur radio transmitters with power from 1W to 7W are also specifically mentioned. Assuming that Obfuscant is using the normal definitions for QRP, his transmitter is 5 watts or less which ought to not cause any problems.
That also depends upon if you consider as part of the cost of decommissioning a plant the self inflicted political injuries that increase the cost. Little things like the "OMG, it's radioactive! We're all gonna die!" bullshit involving low level radiation. The danger is from high level radioactive material. And conveniently, such material has a short half life. Which means that it becomes harmless in a relatively short time. The indiscriminate treating of all waste as high level waste merely wastes money and effort.
Does it really cool you or give you just a cool feeling for a small while on your wrist?
Neither, it instead tricks your body into thinking the overall temperature is comfortable.
Obviously you're unaware of how GCC works. Yes, it would have issued a warning message if the line was: ...
wait4: if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && current->uid = 0)
But the author of that little backdoor attempt added the extra 'superfluous' parenthesis around the assignment. Like this: ...
wait4: if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
And GCC uses those extra parenthesis as an indication that 'The assignment is deliberate and desired. Don't warn me about it. I know what I'm doing'
In fact, GCC still uses those extra parenthesis as an indication that the warning message should be suppressed.
I think that they might have issues with tracking. Or else there's something really, really screwy going on with their boat. Over a period of about 855 hours, the boat has traveled 1383 miles for an average speed of a bit over 1 mph. However, the "real time" tracking page has more than a few data points claiming outrageous speeds, like 95 mph over a 20 minute span. That figure is only the highest I saw. Also saw a few over 70 mph.
I had a job some time back and was required to take a polygraph exam. During the exam, I got a rather strong feeling that a 'game' was being played and that no one informed me as to the rules. The results were inconclusive and I was scheduled for a re-examination. Given my feelings on the subject, I decided to 'learn the rules' and research polygraphy before my reexamination. Learned quite a bit on the subject, one element of which was that there was a classified government study on the effectiveness of polygraphy. I never saw the contents of that study, but if I were a classification authority and if the study reflected what's available in the public literature, then I too would classify the study. The reason is simple since the public literature on polygraphy summed up as follows.
As a means of determining lies from the truth, polygraphy is totally useless. However, as a means of eliciting voluntary confessions from naive subjects, it is extremely effective.
Let's just say on the follow up exam, I enjoyed myself far more than the examiner.
Actually, NSA by law is allowed to intercept communications outside the United States. In fact, that's its mandate. So they don't have to be sneaky and underhanded to try and sneak around the law like the bull shit currently going on with US providers. Now using a non-US provider does mean that the intercepts have to be "on the fly", but that isn't a major problem for the NSA given the number of intercept facilities they have. To be perfectly honest, given the current state of technology, the only real protection the common citizen has is the shear volume of data involved and the fact that most people are of no interest to the government.
You're confusing the difference between the 4th amendment and the 5th. The 4th deals with search and seizure which you've nicely summarized. The 5th is self incrimination as well as other elements.
Nope. The NVIDIA GK110 has in it's design 16 clusters of 192 CUDA cores. And on the Titan, any two of those clusters may be defective and are turned off giving you a total of 2688 CUDA cores. In my opinion, that's a nice way of increasing their usable yield. On the GTX 780, they can have 4 defective clusters giving a total of 2304 CUDA cores. So chips that they would otherwise trash can still be used in a nice high end card. Isn't redundancy in design nice?
You think that a retractable antenna on a swivel would fail to meet the quality and reliability standards of the Western world? I would agree with you on that point. However, I would also say that the same thing would fail to meet the quality and reliability standards of anyone who has two or more brain cells on speaking terms with each other regardless of where they happen to live in this world.
Might want to do a bit of research before saying things like this.
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/fuel_comparison_chart.pdf
Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline. However, diesel has a higher percentage of carbon than gasoline.
I'm detecting a bit of a red herring in the article. Seems that the school is complaining about the cost of the required laptops in addition to the cost of the cat5 drops in the school rooms due to the shift to digital text books.
The cost of the laptops would have to be spent regardless of the school's location due to the shift to digital text books, so the only "additional" cost would be that of the cat5 drops in each room. However, the following quote from the article:
Green Bank Elementary/Middle has a strong and long-standing relationship with the scientific facility up the road - the NRAO installed Cat-5 cable throughout the school years ago, and Beaudet says the organization provides as much support as possible.
Rather strongly implies that the school is fairly well wired already. But even if they weren't, the only additional cost to the school due to its location would be that of adding the cat5 drops in each room.
I don't believe you've taken into consideration the oxygen released from converting Silicon Dioxide into Silicon and Oxygen. Looking up Silicic acid, it's a generic term for a family of related acids. Looking at the 4 simplest ones, I get the following equations.
Si + 3 H2O => H2SiO3 + 2 H2
Si + 4 H2O => H4SiO4 + 2 H2
2 Si + 5 H2O => H2Si2O5 + 4 H2
2 Si + 7 H2O => H6Si2O7 + 4 H2
For all of the above equations, each Silicon atom will result in the generation of 2 hydrogen molecules (4 atoms). Which requires 2 Oxygen atoms to convert into 2 molecules of water when burned. However, to create each Silicon atom, one had to break down a Silicon Dioxide molecule .... Which in return released the 2 Oxygen atoms needed to burn the resulting Hydrogen. And just in case you now attempt to claim that it's consuming water. If you dry out the various forms of Silicic acids, you'll find out that they disassociate into various numbers of water molecules and Silicon Dioxide.
It all balances out. All we have is a system in which we can spend energy converting Silicon Dioxide into Silicon and Oxygen. And then use the resulting Silicon to react with water to get dissolved Silicon Dioxide and Hydrogen. And finally, react the resulting Hydrogen with the Oxygen released earlier to get back water.
Most of the posts here indicate that the fine tradition of not reading the linked article is alive and well at SlashDot..
The system Ford is proposing:
1. is for use on controlled access roads (aka Freeways)
2. Usable only at slow speeds (traffic jams)
Frankly, given what Google is doing with autonomous driving, what Ford is proposing is very disappointing.
Not so sure about that shoe. Since the cubify site itself claims that the build area is 5.5" x 5.5" x 5.5", I kind of doubt that the shoe was actually built on a cube. The maximum length in that cube is only 9.5" (assuming going from bottom corner, to opposite corner on top of cube. A more likely dimension would be from diagonal corners at the same level (so as to build shoe upright instead of canted diagonally) and that is only 7.75" kinda small for a foot..
I used to have a computer in the pool, but removed it due to disgust with the NTP abusers out there. When I looked at the logs, I would see that the vast majority of incoming traffic was from a relatively small handful of IP address. For normal well behaved users, you would see them hit you every 64 seconds and over a period of a few hours slowly back off until they do a query only once every 1024 seconds. Reasonable and well behaved. Even a relatively low bandwidth DSL line could handle a lot of users like that.
Unfortunately, not all the users are reasonable and well behaved. There were a few addresses that were hitting me with a query per second. And you can't blacklist these anti-social idiots because if you do, they're still consuming inbound bandwidth. After a period of time where 1% of the users were consuming 99% of my donated resources, I left the pool out of disgust. Was still getting hits from the idiot users a year later.
To make their idiocy even more evident, the SHORTEST interval that NTPD will hit a server is once per 16 seconds. So those once a second idiots were using software that itself was written by idiots.
Would I donate to the pool again? Nope. Not at long as there are invalid NTP clients that hit that often. If I could be assured that the idiots are gone, then I'd donate. Until then, I don't need the headaches.
Interesting.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with a company seeking such an injunction against someone harming their business.
And in what way is SONY's business being harmed?
SONY sold a piece of equipment and after the sale and without notice, reduced the equipment's functionality.
Hotz did manage to figure out the master key allowing for the signing of software so that this deleted functionality could be restored. Mr Hotz wouldn't have attempted to determine that key if it were not for SONY unilaterally reducing the equipment's functionality. And even then, the number of people who would use the key discovered by Mr Hotz is fairly small.
Personally, I have no pity for self inflicted injuries. If someone shoots themselves in the foot, my response is along the lines of "Gee, it sucks to be you". And SONY's action is a nice example of shooting oneself in the foot.
Not so certain that you can prove one of those sets of numbers as being larger than the other considering that you can create a one to one mapping between the two sets.
The set of real numbers is a "larger" infinity than the set of integers since such a one to one mapping isn't possible.
of flagging sites to blacklist.
Seems to me that it's an attempt to bypass privacy requests by users. If I get rid of a cookie, that means that *I* do not want that cookie to exist. Period. End of case. And if some site goes to the extreme measure of using evercookie to insure that their cookies are persistent even though the user has demonstrated that they don't want the cookie, well then that's a site that should be black listed.
Hmm. Seems to me that with 2 objects, one with twice the mass of the other, both being dropped at the same time, the following would happen:
The more massive object would have twice the force being used to accelerate it than the less massive object. But, in order to accelerate the more massive object, it would take twice as much force to cause the same acceleration. So the actual acceleration for both objects would be the same. Of course this isn't taking into consideration any time dilation effect due to the spacetime distortion caused by the masses.
Sigh. When the global warming people are able to explain just a couple of minor details, then and only then will I believe them. Here are a few little facts that tend to be conveniently omitted when global warming is mentioned.
1. Yes, there is a definite positive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures. Using ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc., this has been confirmed. But the fly in the ointment is that the CO2 levels *lag* the temperature changes by 40 to 50 years. Excuse me? The "cause" of the global warming happens "after" things warm up? That little datum all by its lonesome is rather hard to dispute.
2. The major greenhouse gas in our atmosphere isn't CO2. It's H2O. Yup, plain old water. The effect of the CO2 is about 1 percent of the overall greenhouse effect. And of that 1%, mankind is contributing a much smaller percentage.
3. There seems to be some viking farms being uncovered in Greenland. Yup, the glaciers are melting and in the process exposing abandoned farms. Hmm. Seems to me that if there were farms where there's currently glaciers, that would imply it being much warmer in the past.
4. And finally, the polar ice on Mars seems to be also shrinking. Guess those probes we've sent there have had a massive effect on Mar's temperature as well.
Seems to me that the global warming crowd have a bit of a secondary agenda running that has nothing what so ever to do with actual global warming. When the above independently verifiable but inconvenient little facts are explained, then I will consider the GW crowd to have done due diligence and be worth listening to. But until then, it's a transparent attempted power grab and quite frankly they can take their propaganda and stuff it into the nearest fireplace. Should make 'em quite happy since paper is carbon neutral and no fossil fuels would be used.
Unless you go through all the code yourself, there's no way to be sure of anything.
Only thing that can be made about that statement is to point to a nice little presentation by Ken Thompson. Take a look at 'Reflections on Trusting Trust'. Almost certain you haven't seen it given your comment.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of power we have so far. Now if Obama will correct the damn stupid mistake Carter did, things will be a heck of a lot better. Yes, we have a nuclear waste problem and it's a large one. But it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. President Carter back in 1977 issued a directive that stopped reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste. Mind, the US nuclear industry was built with the assumption that waste reprocessing would be available. So the result is that we have more waste than planned for being stored for longer periods than planned for, all because of a decision to change the way things were done. And said decision was made without putting into place an alternate method of handling the waste. Yes people, we have a nuclear waste issue, and if Obama can reverse the brain dead stupid decision made 33 years ago, that would be one of the best possible things he could do for the United States. But some people still hear the word "nuclear" and suddenly their brains and reasoning turn off and they start thinking worse case issues and problems ignoring the fact that many of the problems are political and not technical. What about cost overruns? Well, stop dragging them into court attempting to stop construction. What about the nuclear waste? See the beginning of this post people. What about Three Mile Island? Your point is? The safety measures worked and the public never was in danger. During TMI, they debating for *three days* about whether or not to evacuate the area. Next time a damn bursts, be sure to take three days to come to the decision about heading for high ground. The safety measures *worked* even though the operators practically did everything they could to screw things up.
Given the fine article here, I see that China is one of the bad boys in actually doing bad stuff, yet the http://www.ban.org/country_status/report_card.html web site has China listed as "Excellent". So something seems more than slightly fishy. Reading again, the site merely rates how the countries in question perform lip service to a set of 4 treaties and totally disregards how the countries actually act regards limiting pollution.
Sorry people, but this is a prime example of actions speaking louder than words.
You're correct as regards two objects in the same orbit having little to no relative difference in speed.
But, think about an elliptical orbit. It's nice and stable. And there's a pretty hefty velocity difference at those points where an elliptical orbit intersects other orbits. It will either be going a lot faster than it's target at perigee and when it reaches apogee, it's going a lot slower. At either point it has a rather significant difference in velocity and can cause damage. And between those two points, there's still quite a velocity difference.