No, it's outright barratry by the omni-obstructionists who are determined to use every means legal or not to prevent the generation of 24x7 energy at industrial scale.
Them complaining about the costs of nuclear is the "Erik and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument.
See the uproar over the {U+0262}oogle.com domain a couple of years ago. The merry Russian prankster doing that was just playing "Hey! Look what I did! Ha Ha Ha!" with it, whoever he could get to click on it, but it was certainly obvious then that it could be used for nefarious purposes.
I look forward to them crying when SpaceX starts trying to fly their rockets as commercial airliners and start stealing their lucrative overseas routes.
Sorry horse buggy whip makers of the world your time is over.
Who mods this shit up? At best only a handful of people would pay millions to fly to Tokyo by space rocket. Why would the airlines care about that?
Blue Origin, for their "Pretend to be an Astronaut" ballistic flights, charges... what, $250K? Less than "millions".
The current vehicles are totally unsuited for regular air travel, but I could certainly imagine a "ballistic" transport that would take you anywhere on Earth in less than 90 minutes*. Having recently spent 20 air hours, each way, flying to Bangalore and back, getting rid of over 18 hours of center-seat torment would be worth... quite a bit. Not $250K of course, but about what the late Concorde used to cost? Then it starts to get really interesting.
* (Of course, you still have two hours of getting through check-in security at the airport, and an hour getting through customs...)
I was having trouble casting my phone display to my ChromeCast last night -- I kept getting disconnected after a few seconds. I never got the "Something went wrong" message, though.
In real life there are multiple factors that can disqualify you from donating blood. Having received a blood transfusion is one of them.
Depends. In the U.S., it's a year deferral, I believe. (Same deferral I got due to spending a week in Bangalore.)
However, in the U.S., having received a transfusion in Britain is a lifetime ban on donating blood, due to a certain prion disease that hit Britain pretty hard a few decades ago. Variant CJD may take decades to show up, but can be transmitted by blood in all that time.
Brin's story (his usual political hobby-horses beaten to splinters aside) is very good, but he made a mistake on the religion that bans blood transfusions. It's Jehovah's Witnesses, not Christian Science. Christian Science (it's neither)... I don't think bans, exactly, but discourages... almost all kinds of medicine. Get yourself to a Reading Room and enlighten yourself that your malady is just an illusion. JWs don't have a problem with medicine in general, but they read Leviticus to require a complete prohibition on blood transfusions. There have been court cases over this issue.
Brin's story does have one of the best depictions of a certain insight that I've ever seen -- seeing the POV character from the inside, he is clearly a perfectly vile, self-centered SOB. But what does the rest of the world see? They can't see inside him, see his motivations. They only see what he does, which is entirely admirable, the actions of someone who, apparently, richly deserved that Nobel Peace Prize.
I exercised some options on pre-IPO (i.e., completely non-tradable) stock back in 2011 because I was planning to leave the company and thought it might IPO.
Alas, it did not, but the IRS considered the difference between my option price and some theoretical measure of what the CEO claimed the stock would be worth then if it were tradable to be income. Which pushed me into AMT Hell.
The company still hasn't IPOed, and its remnants seem to be circling the drain, more or less, as near as I can tell.
I'd sure like to get that money back from the IRS. (Yeah, like getting a steak back from a pit bull...)
I never gave The Orville a chance, because it was a creation of Seth McFartjoke, who I find insufferable at best.
What I heard about the first couple of episodes didn't give me any reason to give it a chance. However, people whose taste I... am not entirely appalled by... have said it got really good later on. So, I suppose I'll have to give it a try at some point.
After I've caught up with "The Expanse." Now that's *good*.
Ugh. The Great Klingon Transmogrification was something that is utterly impossible to make sense out of. The DS9 crew was surprised at the human-looking Klingons and didn't know what they were for sure? Seriously? There were people alive in DS9 time who were alive in TOS time. At least three individual Klingons from TOS showed up on DS9, with bumpified foreheads.
The only plausible explanation is Roddenberry's: "The Klingons always had snapping turtle shell foreheads. We just didn't have the budget for all those snapping turtle shells back in 1968." In "The Trouble with Tribbles" it was a big surprise that Darvin was a Klingon, like it was a huge deal for a Klingon to pass as human. What? A shave is that improbable? But if they'd had to do serious plastic surgery on his forehead for him to pass as human... that plot point would make a lot more sense.
The proper thing for that "Back to the Tribbles" episode of DS9 was to have Michael Dorn be without the snapping turtle shell on his forehead when in the past, and no one make any mention of the difference. Or better, since they supposedly had a blank check for CGI for that episode, add digital snapping turtle shells to the foreheads of all the TOS Klingons. (Except Darvin, of course.)
Make a show about space police and I'd probably watch it.
I'd love to see a reboot of the old BBC series "Starcops". Yeah, sort of an over-reaching name for a law enforcement agency that covered the Moon and/or space stations, and later Mars, but perhaps that's where the series might have headed in later seasons if it had lasted.
As long as they did it with as much intelligence as the original, of course. Alas, they'd probably give it to Jar Jar Abrams for him to excrete all over.
I'm open to switching players. Doggcatcher has this annoying habit of just up and starting playing every now and then. At least it did; I haven't seen that happen in a while. Maybe a recent update fixed it. Hugely annoying when I've got a bunch of podcasts queued in the order I want to listen to them, "Hey, is that a voice coming from my phone? ARGH! It's been playing for three hours and lost my whole queue!!"
Again... hasn't happened in a while; maybe it's fixed.
Other than that, I like Doggcatcher a lot, and I'm used to it. I make heavy use of the 2x playback speed, and on a few podcasts, I wish I could push it a bit higher. Can the Google podcast player do that?
So why would I switch? Here's one check in the "No Way In HELL" column: "Downloading the application it appears one still cannot subscribe to arbitrary URLs and since not all podcasts are submitted to Google..."
I would love to see an updated Dante's Inferno with a special hell built just for the people who killed off so many nuclear power options...
"Inferno", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Anti-nuke in Hell has to keep a light bulb lit by peddling a generator-equipped bicycle as fast as he can. If the bulb dims, a nasty Diesel fires up to keep it lit, with the exhaust blowing right in his face.
If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.
So very much this.
The energy source that is cheaper than nuclear right now is natural gas -- and it *got* cheaper by fracking.
Guess what natural gas technology is in the crosshairs of the no-energy folks. Bingo. Fracking. Got it in one.
And natural gas is not no-carbon, it's less-carbon. Obviously, the people claiming to be oh so very very very concerned about CO2... have another agenda entirely.
That's what's already in the general area of Yucca Mountain -- a moonscape of atom bomb craters, each one lined with completely uncontained plutonium and various fission products.
So, how is storing waste at Yucca Mountain, properly contained, a bigger threat than what is already there?
Yep, I'd AC on this very reasonable posting, too, if I worked at Google and wanted to stay there. It's pretty much what Damore really said (no relationship to all the blatant out-and-out lies said about what he said) and they fired him for being sane.
How do you get shot 4 times in the chest and still make it to get 20 years?
Probably something low-power, like a.25.
("Not much stopping power. Even less with a silencer." M to James Bond, when confiscating his beloved Beretta and replacing it with a Walther PPK. Or was it Q? I forget...)
Erdogan = Khomeini Turkey is slowly becoming Iran while Atatürk is rolling in his grave
That's what it looked like.
I've heard Kemalist Turkey's political system described as "Democracy... except Turkey will never be an Islamist state. Elect an Islamist, the moment he tries to implement Islamist policies, there will be a military coup, the army will shoot as many Islamists as seems necessary, and then surprisingly soon, hold new elections. Vote better next time."
Alas, Erdogan carefully purged the Kemalists from the army before making Turkey an Islamist state, and by the time the army caught on... it was too late.
Ammonia refrigerators are commonly used in RVs. Any time you have a refrigerator that's powered by propane, it's probably ammonia based. (It uses a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen in some plumbing so that when you heat up one side, the other side gets cold.)
Then again, based on what mallyn ( 136041 ) said, maybe not.
I used to work for another big Silicon Valley megacorp, and they had a big layoff. A few months before the layoff, they had a Very Generous "Early Retirement" offer, which I had been working there just two months short of being able to take advantage of. (That sounds kind of like what mallyn described.)
The layoff, for those of us of a certain age, came with about an inch-think document of statistics of the ages of those laid off, a pretty nice severance package considerably better than industry standard, with a Very Generous super-duper severance package if you signed the "I will not sue for age discrimination" agreement. The enclosed statistics making it clear that they were well prepared to defend themselves from any such suits.
Since I already had calls from one of the company's competitors looking to hire someone to do pretty much what I was already doing, I took the money and ran.
Life in prison with no possibility of parole. That is 1/4 the cost, much more humane, and can be reversed if you realize you made a mistake...
Consider two innocent people unjustly convicted.
One sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. What are the chances that his conviction will ever be overturned, that he will not spend the rest of his life in a cell?
One sentenced to death. Lots of automatic appeals, extra examination of the evidence.
I strongly suspect that the innocent person who got sentenced to death has a greatly higher chance of getting exonerated and released than the one who got the life sentence.
as long as we insist on executing people, inert gas is far more reliable than our other methods, painless
(emphasis mine)
You hit the nail on the head here. Most death penalty proponents do not want to execute criminals, they want to see what they see as Bad People(tm) suffer. They don't want execution. They want torture, the more horrible the better.
Citation needed.
Seriously. Name one (1) person that anyone has ever heard of making this argument. (No fair finding some random wacko living in his parents basement ranting about "Bad People(tm) need to suffer."
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you did there... *clop*clop*clop*
But where did he get the coconuts? Coconuts are a tropical tree, and I don't think a swallow of whatever continental origin can carry one.
No, it's outright barratry by the omni-obstructionists who are determined to use every means legal or not to prevent the generation of 24x7 energy at industrial scale.
Them complaining about the costs of nuclear is the "Erik and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument.
Considering that one of his collections was titled Angry Candy, I'm sure he went to be angry and arrived in hell (or god-help-him, heaven) angry.
I have this image of Satan exclaiming in alarm "Oh, crap, he's coming here?!?!"
Q: How many exclamation points does it take for my spam filters to tag you as a spammer?
A: A lot fewer exclamation points than that.
See the uproar over the {U+0262}oogle.com domain a couple of years ago. The merry Russian prankster doing that was just playing "Hey! Look what I did! Ha Ha Ha!" with it, whoever he could get to click on it, but it was certainly obvious then that it could be used for nefarious purposes.
I look forward to them crying when SpaceX starts trying to fly their rockets as commercial airliners and start stealing their lucrative overseas routes.
Sorry horse buggy whip makers of the world your time is over.
Who mods this shit up? At best only a handful of people would pay millions to fly to Tokyo by space rocket. Why would the airlines care about that?
Blue Origin, for their "Pretend to be an Astronaut" ballistic flights, charges ... what, $250K? Less than "millions".
The current vehicles are totally unsuited for regular air travel, but I could certainly imagine a "ballistic" transport that would take you anywhere on Earth in less than 90 minutes*. Having recently spent 20 air hours, each way, flying to Bangalore and back, getting rid of over 18 hours of center-seat torment would be worth ... quite a bit. Not $250K of course, but about what the late Concorde used to cost? Then it starts to get really interesting.
* (Of course, you still have two hours of getting through check-in security at the airport, and an hour getting through customs...)
I was having trouble casting my phone display to my ChromeCast last night -- I kept getting disconnected after a few seconds. I never got the "Something went wrong" message, though.
He was planning to murder his friend, not "thinking about it", but making actual preparations, when his friend caught a lethal plague and died first.
The first thing I thought of was The Giving Plague by David Brin
In real life there are multiple factors that can disqualify you from donating blood. Having received a blood transfusion is one of them.
Depends. In the U.S., it's a year deferral, I believe. (Same deferral I got due to spending a week in Bangalore.)
However, in the U.S., having received a transfusion in Britain is a lifetime ban on donating blood, due to a certain prion disease that hit Britain pretty hard a few decades ago. Variant CJD may take decades to show up, but can be transmitted by blood in all that time.
Brin's story (his usual political hobby-horses beaten to splinters aside) is very good, but he made a mistake on the religion that bans blood transfusions. It's Jehovah's Witnesses, not Christian Science. Christian Science (it's neither) ... I don't think bans, exactly, but discourages ... almost all kinds of medicine. Get yourself to a Reading Room and enlighten yourself that your malady is just an illusion. JWs don't have a problem with medicine in general, but they read Leviticus to require a complete prohibition on blood transfusions. There have been court cases over this issue.
Brin's story does have one of the best depictions of a certain insight that I've ever seen -- seeing the POV character from the inside, he is clearly a perfectly vile, self-centered SOB. But what does the rest of the world see? They can't see inside him, see his motivations. They only see what he does, which is entirely admirable, the actions of someone who, apparently, richly deserved that Nobel Peace Prize.
I exercised some options on pre-IPO (i.e., completely non-tradable) stock back in 2011 because I was planning to leave the company and thought it might IPO.
Alas, it did not, but the IRS considered the difference between my option price and some theoretical measure of what the CEO claimed the stock would be worth then if it were tradable to be income. Which pushed me into AMT Hell.
The company still hasn't IPOed, and its remnants seem to be circling the drain, more or less, as near as I can tell.
I'd sure like to get that money back from the IRS. (Yeah, like getting a steak back from a pit bull...)
See "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon Dickson.
Good thing he wasn't dealing with a book club.
I never gave The Orville a chance, because it was a creation of Seth McFartjoke, who I find insufferable at best.
What I heard about the first couple of episodes didn't give me any reason to give it a chance. However, people whose taste I ... am not entirely appalled by ... have said it got really good later on. So, I suppose I'll have to give it a try at some point.
After I've caught up with "The Expanse." Now that's *good*.
Ugh. The Great Klingon Transmogrification was something that is utterly impossible to make sense out of. The DS9 crew was surprised at the human-looking Klingons and didn't know what they were for sure? Seriously? There were people alive in DS9 time who were alive in TOS time. At least three individual Klingons from TOS showed up on DS9, with bumpified foreheads.
The only plausible explanation is Roddenberry's: "The Klingons always had snapping turtle shell foreheads. We just didn't have the budget for all those snapping turtle shells back in 1968." In "The Trouble with Tribbles" it was a big surprise that Darvin was a Klingon, like it was a huge deal for a Klingon to pass as human. What? A shave is that improbable? But if they'd had to do serious plastic surgery on his forehead for him to pass as human... that plot point would make a lot more sense.
The proper thing for that "Back to the Tribbles" episode of DS9 was to have Michael Dorn be without the snapping turtle shell on his forehead when in the past, and no one make any mention of the difference. Or better, since they supposedly had a blank check for CGI for that episode, add digital snapping turtle shells to the foreheads of all the TOS Klingons. (Except Darvin, of course.)
Make a show about space police and I'd probably watch it.
I'd love to see a reboot of the old BBC series "Starcops". Yeah, sort of an over-reaching name for a law enforcement agency that covered the Moon and/or space stations, and later Mars, but perhaps that's where the series might have headed in later seasons if it had lasted.
As long as they did it with as much intelligence as the original, of course. Alas, they'd probably give it to Jar Jar Abrams for him to excrete all over.
I'm open to switching players. Doggcatcher has this annoying habit of just up and starting playing every now and then. At least it did; I haven't seen that happen in a while. Maybe a recent update fixed it. Hugely annoying when I've got a bunch of podcasts queued in the order I want to listen to them, "Hey, is that a voice coming from my phone? ARGH! It's been playing for three hours and lost my whole queue!!"
Again... hasn't happened in a while; maybe it's fixed.
Other than that, I like Doggcatcher a lot, and I'm used to it. I make heavy use of the 2x playback speed, and on a few podcasts, I wish I could push it a bit higher. Can the Google podcast player do that?
So why would I switch? Here's one check in the "No Way In HELL" column: "Downloading the application it appears one still cannot subscribe to arbitrary URLs and since not all podcasts are submitted to Google ..."
Next!
I would love to see an updated Dante's Inferno with a special hell built just for the people who killed off so many nuclear power options...
"Inferno", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Anti-nuke in Hell has to keep a light bulb lit by peddling a generator-equipped bicycle as fast as he can. If the bulb dims, a nasty Diesel fires up to keep it lit, with the exhaust blowing right in his face.
If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.
So very much this.
The energy source that is cheaper than nuclear right now is natural gas -- and it *got* cheaper by fracking.
Guess what natural gas technology is in the crosshairs of the no-energy folks. Bingo. Fracking. Got it in one.
And natural gas is not no-carbon, it's less-carbon. Obviously, the people claiming to be oh so very very very concerned about CO2 ... have another agenda entirely.
Open Google Earth.
Search for "Sedan Crater".
Scan south.
That's what's already in the general area of Yucca Mountain -- a moonscape of atom bomb craters, each one lined with completely uncontained plutonium and various fission products.
So, how is storing waste at Yucca Mountain, properly contained, a bigger threat than what is already there?
Yep, I'd AC on this very reasonable posting, too, if I worked at Google and wanted to stay there. It's pretty much what Damore really said (no relationship to all the blatant out-and-out lies said about what he said) and they fired him for being sane.
How do you get shot 4 times in the chest and still make it to get 20 years?
Probably something low-power, like a .25.
("Not much stopping power. Even less with a silencer." M to James Bond, when confiscating his beloved Beretta and replacing it with a Walther PPK. Or was it Q? I forget...)
Erdogan = Khomeini
Turkey is slowly becoming Iran while Atatürk is rolling in his grave
That's what it looked like.
I've heard Kemalist Turkey's political system described as "Democracy ... except Turkey will never be an Islamist state. Elect an Islamist, the moment he tries to implement Islamist policies, there will be a military coup, the army will shoot as many Islamists as seems necessary, and then surprisingly soon, hold new elections. Vote better next time."
Alas, Erdogan carefully purged the Kemalists from the army before making Turkey an Islamist state, and by the time the army caught on ... it was too late.
Ammonia refrigerators are commonly used in RVs. Any time you have a refrigerator that's powered by propane, it's probably ammonia based. (It uses a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen in some plumbing so that when you heat up one side, the other side gets cold.)
Then again, based on what mallyn ( 136041 ) said, maybe not.
I used to work for another big Silicon Valley megacorp, and they had a big layoff. A few months before the layoff, they had a Very Generous "Early Retirement" offer, which I had been working there just two months short of being able to take advantage of. (That sounds kind of like what mallyn described.)
The layoff, for those of us of a certain age, came with about an inch-think document of statistics of the ages of those laid off, a pretty nice severance package considerably better than industry standard, with a Very Generous super-duper severance package if you signed the "I will not sue for age discrimination" agreement. The enclosed statistics making it clear that they were well prepared to defend themselves from any such suits.
Since I already had calls from one of the company's competitors looking to hire someone to do pretty much what I was already doing, I took the money and ran.
Life in prison with no possibility of parole. That is 1/4 the cost, much more humane, and can be reversed if you realize you made a mistake...
Consider two innocent people unjustly convicted.
One sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. What are the chances that his conviction will ever be overturned, that he will not spend the rest of his life in a cell?
One sentenced to death. Lots of automatic appeals, extra examination of the evidence.
I strongly suspect that the innocent person who got sentenced to death has a greatly higher chance of getting exonerated and released than the one who got the life sentence.
(emphasis mine)
You hit the nail on the head here. Most death penalty proponents do not want to execute criminals, they want to see what they see as Bad People(tm) suffer. They don't want execution. They want torture, the more horrible the better.
Citation needed.
Seriously. Name one (1) person that anyone has ever heard of making this argument. (No fair finding some random wacko living in his parents basement ranting about "Bad People(tm) need to suffer."