And I guarantee that Reagan's NSA director didn't resign because he was too cozy with and taking money from the Russians.
... that is Mr Ratzo...
Mr Ratzo? The proper way to address a pope is. "Your Holiness.", or if you want to be formal: "Your Holiness, Pope Ratzo I, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God".
Loyalty means a lot to Trump. That is to say he expects other people to be fiercely loyal to him. He, on the other hand, seems to feel no obligation to be loyal to his followers.
Do you mean hacker as in programmer or hacker as the media usis it to describe a digital burlgar? If you mean the former, these days it seems to be simple stuff like checking for open ports with telnet and then having fun by typing in protocol messages: http://www.shellhacks.com/en/S..., or even simpler stuff like editing documents with vi and using command line programming tools. These used to be things that every programmer knew, I learned this in school but many of our new recruits seem to be totally unaware of this stuff. I've written programs tens of thousands of lines long with nothing but vi, gcc/g++, make, tcpdump+Wireshark, valgrind, vi and a few other choice commandline monsters but these days the GUI generation seems to need a GUI editor, preferably a GUI IDE, a GUI networking tool, a GUI debugger, etc... to do simple stuff. I don't usually even need a debugger, I can normally figure out what is wrong without one. A few years ago I was handed a.NET assignment. After much complainign and whining (Unix guy through and through) I coded it up using that primitive little Windows CMD terminal, a freely available.NET compiler and vi/make before the IT department got around to installing Visual Studio. The really funny thing was that even some seasoned.NET developers were surprised to see you could (a) run vi/make and other GNU tools on Windows and (b) compile.NET code from the command line: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-.... BTW, and this is probably heresy around here, but I really like how Microsoft seems to have a well documented API for everything as long as you are willing to bother learning.NET or Visual Basic.
Probably yes, but why not just spend the money on fixing colony collapse disorder? It seems much more efficient to just breed bees that are resistant to the varroa mite and the various viruses causing CCD and cutting down on pesticide use. If necessary it must be possible to introduce genes from resistant species of bees into vulnerable bee species elsewhere.
The flood discharge at the peak of an eruption in 1755 has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m3/s (7.1-14.1 million cu ft/sec), comparable to the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers (about 266,000 m3/s (9.4 million cu ft/sec)).
THAT is a lot of warm water.
There probably are more spectacular floods elsewhere on earth but these glacial floods are still relatively impressive
I was in Iceland during and after the last major floods. Those I-beams came from a road bridge, the beams are about 1 meter high and were bent up and torn apart like liquorice sticks. The same flood also washed out ice blocks the size of houses that took months to melt down. It was quite surreal to drive down the coast road with those massive blocks of ice lining the road like houses. Made one realise how small and insignificant humans really are.
Only the earthworks are visible. Seems somebody messed up on the units for the stones.
Much of what makes Stonehenge remarkable is simply the fact that is made of stone, other than that Stonehenge is not that much more special than other circular monuments in the UK and the rest of Europe. In fact there is a large number of circular monuments all over Europe that are as big or even bigger than Stonehenge. Most these circular neolithic monuments in Europe were actually wood 'henges' and there are literally hundreds of them that have been found in recent years all the way from Britain through Germany and Poland down into Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and into the Hungary. There is no reason to doubt that these Amazonian 'henges' were made of wood. That is to say if all of these remains even were 'henges', some of these earth works might be the remains of fortified villages.
Why, I read on Slashdot just the other day that a few remote controlled bulldozers could have Fukushima cleaned up in a month and that tree-hugging anti-growth enviros should shut their pieholes about that accident.
sPh
Nuclear is safe if you don't build it in a tsunami zone, don't build it on an earthquake fault, don't build it from substandard parts to maximise profit, don't trim the staff down to the point where people are working 10-12 hour days in order to streamline labour costs, don't nix safety procedures to cut down running costs, don't economise on maintenance in order to minimise running costs, don't run the reactors at or above than rated maximum capacity in order to increase profitability or suck up to your bosses... the list goes on. Nuclear sounds like a nice solution on paper but it is not in the real world and Fukushima and Chernobyl are textbook examples of why.
By the way - how's that custom audio jack working out for you?
It doesn't bother me at all. Some whiners complain about not being able to charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Hell, I'm rocking my tunes and posting this from my new iPhone as we speak. I don't see what the b
What bugs me is wireless charging. Presumably they will eliminate the lightning port entirely so instead of carrying a single USB chord with me that I can plug into any random USB socket to charge the phone, I now have to buy a $75 charging module to keep at work and another one to keep in my car. Chords may be annoying but they are not $150 annoying. Another gripe is that they want to eliminate physical buttons which I don't like. It was bad enough when Samsung did it... accidental input anybody??? Finally, if Apple starts charging well in excess of $1000 for their phones, everybody else who has a phone worth buying will follow suit which gives me yet another disincentive to upgrade.
It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.
The problem with nuclear is always going to be the same. It is a technology that can fail catastrophically and render large tracts of land uninhabitable when it does. One can argue that if a nuclear plant is properly run and safety standards are enforced then nuclear is a viable option and that is true. The flaw in that argument is that it only takes one ambitious corporate weasel trying to suck up to his bosses by cutting costs through nixing safety procedures, buying sub standard parts or cutting personnel to the point where the employees managing critical systems are over worked and constantly exhausted for there to be another Chernobyl. The worst enemy of nuclear is always going to be the corpocrats running the energy companies and their ongoing efforts to maximise their profits at the expense of anything else.
Isn't that if we had 100% efficiency capturing at 100% flat surface area?
With that kind of abundance of energy, does it really matter? If we can consistently bring down the price of each kilo watt hour of solar energy below that of coal, coal will be dead. With the carbon footprint it creates, the pollution it generates and the damage that comes with it, coal is a liability
Do humans count as malware? Because if they do Washington DC with all it's politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and special interest groups would win hands down.
The former Communist East Germany was a welfare state. Zero unemployment, free medical care, etc.
However, that did not mean that the folks there were living "well" when compared to the folks next door in the former Democratic West Germany next door.
That is a very right wing response, wheel out something a communist country did and argue that this idea is automatically discredited by association with communism. West Germany was and Germany today is also a welfare state. In fact it was Otto von Bismarck, a right win autocrat, who initiated the first welfare reforms by introducing old-age pensions, accident insurance, and a medical care system. According to OECD Germany is in the same social expenditure class as Sweden. The lesson here is that just because one implementation of something sucks (the welfare state in East Germany) that does not mean that all other implementations do as well. For example, I'm perfectly happy about buying a Ford Fiesta today even though back in the 70s Ford Pintos had a tendency to explode on impact.
Yeah, just as a careful surgical procedure is the same as gleefully applying a chainsaw to an innocent victim.
(But your honour, that leg may have had gangrene, you cannot be too careful with gangrene, the victim should be thankful to me.)
This ban is more like a firing a blast of double canister shot into a crowd of people at the county fair. As we have seen legal immigrants were turned away after being vetted for years, people were turned away who only wanted to attend weddings or visit relatives in the US, in one case a guy had to call off his wedding because the bride's visa was revoked, a bunch of UK school kids on a school trip to the US and who went there among other things to 'learn about US democracy' (irony abounds) had their visas revoked, Afghan and Iraqi staff who risked life and limb and those of their families while working for the US army as interpreters and intelligence staff are being sent back, and ironically enough Iraqi and Afghan air force pilots being trained to fly F-16 and A-29s in the US would be refused entry into the US under this blanket ban which has the Pentagon wanting all kinds of exemptions. So here are a couple of messages for the giant swarm of alt-right drones out there (not counting you mean pun:-) Firstly, I know you guys like to think of yourself as the 'politically incorrect people' and that you like to stick it to us 'politically correct pinkos' but blanket bans on entire groups of people based on their religion or ethnicity do little more than make you look like knuckle dragging bigots and it plays into the hands of ISIS. If your policies to fight ISIS are being applauded by ISIS it is time to eat a bit of crow, accept that you screwed up and extensively refactor your policies. Secondly, the fact that POTUS gets a xenophobia induced epileptic fit every time he comes with in 50 feet of a Muslim is not a justification for a blanket Muslim ban that will hold up in a court of law.
If these people (somehow) win, the precedent could be insane.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period. If this lawsuit wins, Sony and Microsoft could both be on the hook in a big way. I'm sure many other devices are similar.
So you are saying that just for once Apple was not being evil? A lot of people here are going to have issues with that, to them it's like claiming that liquid water isn't wet.
Real news lately look like a version of The Onion.
As a German satirist recently remarked, the US should look to Germany, they already did all of it.
They voted for a Chancellor that promised better infrastructure and he actually built many Autobahns and military airports. He made Germany great again, even bigger than their previous borders, at least for a couple of years. He had yuuuuuge approval numbers (on pain of death) and everybody liked him, if they were asked.
They also tried religious discrimination like nobody else, ever.
They also have done the Wall-building thingie a bit later, throughout the whole country and they even got the Russians to pay for it. (If you're lucky, you can even bid for a piece of that wall on eBay.)
Speaking of satire, under that chancellor, you could actually get disappeared for telling a treasonous joke.
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future
I suppose that depends on what your definition of "foreseeable" is. Quite frankly I don't see it happening during my lifetime and according to actuarial tables I probably have around another 30-40 years left.
Here is what I I do see as possibilities/likelihoods within the next 40 years. Politics could obviously interfere with any/all of this
1) Hybrid and electric cars take major amounts of market share. They won't eliminate internal combustion engines but they will substantially mitigate their impact. If charge times can be made less than 10-15 minutes, electric vehicles will dominate market share in passenger vehicles. Luxury cars will mostly be hybrids within 10-15 years and the technology will trickle down from there.
I think this evolution will be much faster in Europe. Hybrid cars are fairly common here and if, as you mention, it were possible to charge a pluggable hybrid up in 10 minutes and get 100 km out of it at a speed of around 100 km/h I'd definitely buy one. In fact the last time I was in the market for a car the only reason I did not buy a hybrid was that no pluggable ones were available. I'd do about 80-90% of my driving, commuting to work and running errands in electric mode on a car like that. If electric cars could be had with a charge time of 10 minutes and a subsequent range of ~3-400 km and if the charge station infrastructure was in place I'd buy one in a heartbeat and never look back.
2) Solar roofs will become a thing on high end houses and many commercial buildings. (added benefit of greater system reliability)
Having spent significant time driving through Germany and Denmark for over a decade I can tell you this is already a very common sight there, even on quite normal residential buildings. I actually had trouble finding a farm in Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein where the farmer hand't either set up a battery of wind turbines, covered every available roof with solar cells or done both. Stereotypical farmers are supposed to be a conservative lot but seeing them embrace new technologies with such enthusiasm leads me to doubt that.
3) Wind farms and industrial scale solar become an increasingly important part of our energy portfolio. Probably not the majority but 30%+ is realistic. 50%+ is possible.
The Germans are already at ~28% and are aiming for 60% by 2050 by which time they will have decreased their carbon footprint due to energy generation by 80–95%. At the very least they look set to get very close to that goal.
4) Batteries and power storage systems will improve significantly and solar/wind as well as transport will benefit in proportion.
Agree.
5) Coal will remain expensive as long as natural gas is plentiful from fracking but coal will remain a large % of the US and Chinese energy portfolios due to the abundant amounts available in those two countries.
6) Oil and gas based fuels will continue to play a dominant role in our energy portfolios for at least another 30-40 years. Exact percent unclear but big number without question.
Things that could accelerate matters? Widespread adoption of carbon taxes. Removal of subsidies from fossil fuel industry. Appropriate levels of taxation on diesel/gasoline fuels commensura
i doubt it'll kill off the the fossil industry because there will too many old cars a still running that need it. But there could be tipping point when there will be a stock of fuel that will need to be sold off really cheap.
I'm not expecting this to happen next year but it now looks likely to happen in my lifetime. It takes about 10-15 years for 50% of the car fleet to age out and get renewed. I'd expect that after the tipping point we could see the majority of cars being electric within 30 years or so of the tipping point. You can try to keep electric cars down by dumping fuel and make fossil fuel cars cheaper but that just depletes the oil deposits faster. Eventually oil companies will have to dip more and more into hard to exploit and more expensive to reach deposits which will drive the price of oil and gasoline up. Renewable energy sources do not have that problem, the costs of setting up X Giga Watts of capacity does not increase as you build more plants and with electric cars you have a layer of abstraction. You can swap the technology that is providing energy to every single car in the country simply by retiring coal power plants and building wind, solar, nuclear or fusion plants (whenever they become a reality). Then there is also the political aspect to consider. For countries like Germany renewables are a worth while goal simply because it makes you energy independent from warmongering dictatorships like Russia and therefor less vulnerable to blackmail , finally, in Germany environmentalism is a big election issue kind of like guns or christianity are in the US.
It depends if George Soros funds the protests or not.
Even if he does, please explain to me how he'd be doing anything the Koch brothers haven't been doing for years and how funding political movements is wrong when Soros does it but perfectly OK if the Koch brothers finance political election efforts and the associated character assassination campaigns?
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future. Will not be shedding any tears when that happens. This would also explain why Trump is in such a hurry to eradicate the EPA. If the price of clean energy keeps falling, eventually the only way Oil and Coal will be able to compete is if they do not have to respect any environmental legislation and the Trump admin fixes it so that they can pollute at will. Once the price of clean energy and electric vehicles falls below even the prices they can offer under those circumstances Oil and Coal will be in trouble. But then again who knows, maybe we will actually see numbers rivalling the women's march hitting the streets to protest the murder of the EPA in which case this may happen even sooner.
In the 40 years to 2015, not a single American was killed on US soil by citizens from any of the seven countries targeted - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen - according to research by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute.
When the Cato Institute is calling you out on racist policies you know you're up shit creek.
The real irony here is that Trump and his alt-right claque are banning travellers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and justifying it by citing 911 but the countries that the 911 terrorists came from are not on the list, especially Saudi Arabia and the UEA and keep in mind these are the same countries whose citizens are covertly funding ISIS. On top of that Trump set up a series of shell companies to handle a hotel deal in Saudi Arabia and he did it after his bid for president: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-... at the same time as he was lambasting Clinton for taking donations from the Saudis.
My favourite parts:
"They [Saudis] buy apartments from me,... They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
"I would want to protect Saudi Arabia,... But Saudi Arabia is going to have to help us economically. They were making, before the oil went down... they were making $1 billion a day.”
So rich countries that can make tribute payments to the Trump regime and whose citizens are financially benefitting Trumps companies are not destined for 'the list' even though these countries are financing terrorist organisations that attack and kill US citizens but others including some that are actually fighting ISIS in Syria make the list. I suppose Trump supporters have a hard time spelling 'hypocrisy'.
Watch that interview very carefully. There is no way she was talking about "other" facts that weren't being reported. She meant to say exactly what she said. The administration has "alternative facts" that better fit their agenda.
Look, I realize that there is this bitter rivalry in US society between liberals and conservatives. But try to put politics aside, and try to think as a sane human being.
Donald Trump is the guy who insisted Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the US. He is the guy who once claimed he owned the Empire State Building, which is false and was false at the time. He is the guy who said he has been on the Time magazine "more than anybody" which is false. He is the guy who so often claimed that he never said something he just said a few days earlier. His Trump University has been trialed for fraud. One of his advisers is a guy who owns a right-wing conspiracy theory website that is specialized on the spreading of fake news.
Try to think about this rationally.
Donald Trump is either a serial liar or simply delusional. You can look all of his insanity up. If you believe him and his administration more than established, international media networks such as CNN, you have to face the fact that you have decided to stop being a rational thinking person.
Why be rational? Maybe it's time for revenge? Let's have some fun and be totally irrational! Trump was and is a birther, he denied that Obama was born in the US and thinks Obama is a crypto-muslim. Well let's start our own 'birther' movement, something in the spirit of JJ Angleton, like claiming that Trump is an FSB asset, a Russian mole. We can call it the 'moler movement'. It shouldn't be that hard, just point to how Trump seems to have a massive man-crush on Putin, how Trump appoints Putin friendly people in key positions, how Trump seems intent on dismantling NATO which is Putin's wet dream, how Trump married two women who are secretly members of the GRU,... , the list goes on, let your imagination run riot, get in touch with your inner alt-right drone. Of course all of this stuff will be freely invented nonsense but that does not matter, we are post truth here! We believe all this is true and that makes it fact! Rex Tillerson is a Russian born sleeper agent sent to the US by the KGB during the cold war and he is Trump's FSB handler. Anybody who contradicts any of this is LYING!!! If somebody questions your theory on Tillerson ask for Tillerson's birth certificate, if they produce Tillerson's birth certificate, ask for the long form birth certificate, if they produce that claim it is forged. Always remember, in the post truth world you don't need proof, just have to believe. If they say Trump isn't an FSB asset, just ask them where the proof is, if they ask you for proof of your claims, ask they if they can disprove anything you said, wait until they have said two words and interrupt them rapidly with something like "...well then that proves me right!". Set up a web page, call the page "Schnurrbart" link to it everywhere so it tops the list of results for Trump searches on Google. Let's have four to eight years of endless fun watching alt-right crackpots getting hoisted by their own petard... Dang! Cooking up conspiracy theories is FUN!! And we haven't even gottens started on trolling the alt-right over #GoldenShowerGate...
Slashdot Mirror
Orangedog_on_crack
Interesting username. Are you that furry orange criter that sits on Donald Trumps head and makes him say silly things?
And I guarantee that Reagan's NSA director didn't resign because he was too cozy with and taking money from the Russians.
... that is Mr Ratzo ...
Mr Ratzo? The proper way to address a pope is. "Your Holiness.", or if you want to be formal: "Your Holiness, Pope Ratzo I, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God".
D'ya suppose Trump'll pardon him?
Eh, he might, but I doubt he really gives a damn.
Loyalty means a lot to Trump. That is to say he expects other people to be fiercely loyal to him. He, on the other hand, seems to feel no obligation to be loyal to his followers.
What Are Some Things That Every Hacker Once Knew?
Do you mean hacker as in programmer or hacker as the media usis it to describe a digital burlgar? If you mean the former, these days it seems to be simple stuff like checking for open ports with telnet and then having fun by typing in protocol messages: http://www.shellhacks.com/en/S..., or even simpler stuff like editing documents with vi and using command line programming tools. These used to be things that every programmer knew, I learned this in school but many of our new recruits seem to be totally unaware of this stuff. I've written programs tens of thousands of lines long with nothing but vi, gcc/g++, make, tcpdump+Wireshark, valgrind, vi and a few other choice commandline monsters but these days the GUI generation seems to need a GUI editor, preferably a GUI IDE, a GUI networking tool, a GUI debugger, etc... to do simple stuff. I don't usually even need a debugger, I can normally figure out what is wrong without one. A few years ago I was handed a .NET assignment. After much complainign and whining (Unix guy through and through) I coded it up using that primitive little Windows CMD terminal, a freely available .NET compiler and vi/make before the IT department got around to installing Visual Studio. The really funny thing was that even some seasoned .NET developers were surprised to see you could (a) run vi/make and other GNU tools on Windows and (b) compile .NET code from the command line: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-.... BTW, and this is probably heresy around here, but I really like how Microsoft seems to have a well documented API for everything as long as you are willing to bother learning .NET or Visual Basic.
Can We Pollinate Flowers With Tiny Flying Drones?
Probably yes, but why not just spend the money on fixing colony collapse disorder? It seems much more efficient to just breed bees that are resistant to the varroa mite and the various viruses causing CCD and cutting down on pesticide use. If necessary it must be possible to introduce genes from resistant species of bees into vulnerable bee species elsewhere.
From WikiPedia
The flood discharge at the peak of an eruption in 1755 has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m3/s (7.1-14.1 million cu ft/sec), comparable to the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers (about 266,000 m3/s (9.4 million cu ft/sec)).
THAT is a lot of warm water.
There probably are more spectacular floods elsewhere on earth but these glacial floods are still relatively impressive
https://baldpacker.smugmug.com...
I was in Iceland during and after the last major floods. Those I-beams came from a road bridge, the beams are about 1 meter high and were bent up and torn apart like liquorice sticks. The same flood also washed out ice blocks the size of houses that took months to melt down. It was quite surreal to drive down the coast road with those massive blocks of ice lining the road like houses. Made one realise how small and insignificant humans really are.
Only the earthworks are visible. Seems somebody messed up on the units for the stones.
Much of what makes Stonehenge remarkable is simply the fact that is made of stone, other than that Stonehenge is not that much more special than other circular monuments in the UK and the rest of Europe. In fact there is a large number of circular monuments all over Europe that are as big or even bigger than Stonehenge. Most these circular neolithic monuments in Europe were actually wood 'henges' and there are literally hundreds of them that have been found in recent years all the way from Britain through Germany and Poland down into Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and into the Hungary. There is no reason to doubt that these Amazonian 'henges' were made of wood. That is to say if all of these remains even were 'henges', some of these earth works might be the remains of fortified villages.
Why, I read on Slashdot just the other day that a few remote controlled bulldozers could have Fukushima cleaned up in a month and that tree-hugging anti-growth enviros should shut their pieholes about that accident.
sPh
Nuclear is safe if you don't build it in a tsunami zone, don't build it on an earthquake fault, don't build it from substandard parts to maximise profit, don't trim the staff down to the point where people are working 10-12 hour days in order to streamline labour costs, don't nix safety procedures to cut down running costs, don't economise on maintenance in order to minimise running costs, don't run the reactors at or above than rated maximum capacity in order to increase profitability or suck up to your bosses ... the list goes on. Nuclear sounds like a nice solution on paper but it is not in the real world and Fukushima and Chernobyl are textbook examples of why.
Yeah that was a comment from an AC. Don't read those...
But you care enough to reply to them?
By the way - how's that custom audio jack working out for you?
It doesn't bother me at all. Some whiners complain about not being able to charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. Hell, I'm rocking my tunes and posting this from my new iPhone as we speak. I don't see what the b
What bugs me is wireless charging. Presumably they will eliminate the lightning port entirely so instead of carrying a single USB chord with me that I can plug into any random USB socket to charge the phone, I now have to buy a $75 charging module to keep at work and another one to keep in my car. Chords may be annoying but they are not $150 annoying. Another gripe is that they want to eliminate physical buttons which I don't like. It was bad enough when Samsung did it ... accidental input anybody??? Finally, if Apple starts charging well in excess of $1000 for their phones, everybody else who has a phone worth buying will follow suit which gives me yet another disincentive to upgrade.
It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.
The problem with nuclear is always going to be the same. It is a technology that can fail catastrophically and render large tracts of land uninhabitable when it does. One can argue that if a nuclear plant is properly run and safety standards are enforced then nuclear is a viable option and that is true. The flaw in that argument is that it only takes one ambitious corporate weasel trying to suck up to his bosses by cutting costs through nixing safety procedures, buying sub standard parts or cutting personnel to the point where the employees managing critical systems are over worked and constantly exhausted for there to be another Chernobyl. The worst enemy of nuclear is always going to be the corpocrats running the energy companies and their ongoing efforts to maximise their profits at the expense of anything else.
Isn't that if we had 100% efficiency capturing at 100% flat surface area?
With that kind of abundance of energy, does it really matter? If we can consistently bring down the price of each kilo watt hour of solar energy below that of coal, coal will be dead. With the carbon footprint it creates, the pollution it generates and the damage that comes with it, coal is a liability
Do humans count as malware? Because if they do Washington DC with all it's politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and special interest groups would win hands down.
The former Communist East Germany was a welfare state. Zero unemployment, free medical care, etc.
However, that did not mean that the folks there were living "well" when compared to the folks next door in the former Democratic West Germany next door.
That is a very right wing response, wheel out something a communist country did and argue that this idea is automatically discredited by association with communism. West Germany was and Germany today is also a welfare state. In fact it was Otto von Bismarck, a right win autocrat, who initiated the first welfare reforms by introducing old-age pensions, accident insurance, and a medical care system. According to OECD Germany is in the same social expenditure class as Sweden. The lesson here is that just because one implementation of something sucks (the welfare state in East Germany) that does not mean that all other implementations do as well. For example, I'm perfectly happy about buying a Ford Fiesta today even though back in the 70s Ford Pintos had a tendency to explode on impact.
The past six presidents have all done it too.
See: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06...
Yeah, just as a careful surgical procedure is the same as gleefully applying a chainsaw to an innocent victim.
(But your honour, that leg may have had gangrene, you cannot be too careful with gangrene, the victim should be thankful to me.)
This ban is more like a firing a blast of double canister shot into a crowd of people at the county fair. As we have seen legal immigrants were turned away after being vetted for years, people were turned away who only wanted to attend weddings or visit relatives in the US, in one case a guy had to call off his wedding because the bride's visa was revoked, a bunch of UK school kids on a school trip to the US and who went there among other things to 'learn about US democracy' (irony abounds) had their visas revoked, Afghan and Iraqi staff who risked life and limb and those of their families while working for the US army as interpreters and intelligence staff are being sent back, and ironically enough Iraqi and Afghan air force pilots being trained to fly F-16 and A-29s in the US would be refused entry into the US under this blanket ban which has the Pentagon wanting all kinds of exemptions. So here are a couple of messages for the giant swarm of alt-right drones out there (not counting you mean pun :-) Firstly, I know you guys like to think of yourself as the 'politically incorrect people' and that you like to stick it to us 'politically correct pinkos' but blanket bans on entire groups of people based on their religion or ethnicity do little more than make you look like knuckle dragging bigots and it plays into the hands of ISIS. If your policies to fight ISIS are being applauded by ISIS it is time to eat a bit of crow, accept that you screwed up and extensively refactor your policies. Secondly, the fact that POTUS gets a xenophobia induced epileptic fit every time he comes with in 50 feet of a Muslim is not a justification for a blanket Muslim ban that will hold up in a court of law.
If these people (somehow) win, the precedent could be insane.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period. If this lawsuit wins, Sony and Microsoft could both be on the hook in a big way. I'm sure many other devices are similar.
So you are saying that just for once Apple was not being evil? A lot of people here are going to have issues with that, to them it's like claiming that liquid water isn't wet.
Real news lately look like a version of The Onion.
As a German satirist recently remarked, the US should look to Germany, they already did all of it.
They voted for a Chancellor that promised better infrastructure and he actually built many Autobahns and military airports. He made Germany great again, even bigger than their previous borders, at least for a couple of years. He had yuuuuuge approval numbers (on pain of death) and everybody liked him, if they were asked. They also tried religious discrimination like nobody else, ever.
They also have done the Wall-building thingie a bit later, throughout the whole country and they even got the Russians to pay for it. (If you're lucky, you can even bid for a piece of that wall on eBay.)
Speaking of satire, under that chancellor, you could actually get disappeared for telling a treasonous joke.
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future
I suppose that depends on what your definition of "foreseeable" is. Quite frankly I don't see it happening during my lifetime and according to actuarial tables I probably have around another 30-40 years left.
Here is what I I do see as possibilities/likelihoods within the next 40 years. Politics could obviously interfere with any/all of this 1) Hybrid and electric cars take major amounts of market share. They won't eliminate internal combustion engines but they will substantially mitigate their impact. If charge times can be made less than 10-15 minutes, electric vehicles will dominate market share in passenger vehicles. Luxury cars will mostly be hybrids within 10-15 years and the technology will trickle down from there.
I think this evolution will be much faster in Europe. Hybrid cars are fairly common here and if, as you mention, it were possible to charge a pluggable hybrid up in 10 minutes and get 100 km out of it at a speed of around 100 km/h I'd definitely buy one. In fact the last time I was in the market for a car the only reason I did not buy a hybrid was that no pluggable ones were available. I'd do about 80-90% of my driving, commuting to work and running errands in electric mode on a car like that. If electric cars could be had with a charge time of 10 minutes and a subsequent range of ~3-400 km and if the charge station infrastructure was in place I'd buy one in a heartbeat and never look back.
2) Solar roofs will become a thing on high end houses and many commercial buildings. (added benefit of greater system reliability)
Having spent significant time driving through Germany and Denmark for over a decade I can tell you this is already a very common sight there, even on quite normal residential buildings. I actually had trouble finding a farm in Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein where the farmer hand't either set up a battery of wind turbines, covered every available roof with solar cells or done both. Stereotypical farmers are supposed to be a conservative lot but seeing them embrace new technologies with such enthusiasm leads me to doubt that.
3) Wind farms and industrial scale solar become an increasingly important part of our energy portfolio. Probably not the majority but 30%+ is realistic. 50%+ is possible.
The Germans are already at ~28% and are aiming for 60% by 2050 by which time they will have decreased their carbon footprint due to energy generation by 80–95%. At the very least they look set to get very close to that goal.
4) Batteries and power storage systems will improve significantly and solar/wind as well as transport will benefit in proportion.
Agree.
5) Coal will remain expensive as long as natural gas is plentiful from fracking but coal will remain a large % of the US and Chinese energy portfolios due to the abundant amounts available in those two countries.
And what happens if the per KWh price of solar/wind drops below that of coal? Apparently solar is now cheaper than coal: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... and so is wind: https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
6) Oil and gas based fuels will continue to play a dominant role in our energy portfolios for at least another 30-40 years. Exact percent unclear but big number without question.
Things that could accelerate matters? Widespread adoption of carbon taxes. Removal of subsidies from fossil fuel industry. Appropriate levels of taxation on diesel/gasoline fuels commensura
i doubt it'll kill off the the fossil industry because there will too many old cars a still running that need it. But there could be tipping point when there will be a stock of fuel that will need to be sold off really cheap.
I'm not expecting this to happen next year but it now looks likely to happen in my lifetime. It takes about 10-15 years for 50% of the car fleet to age out and get renewed. I'd expect that after the tipping point we could see the majority of cars being electric within 30 years or so of the tipping point. You can try to keep electric cars down by dumping fuel and make fossil fuel cars cheaper but that just depletes the oil deposits faster. Eventually oil companies will have to dip more and more into hard to exploit and more expensive to reach deposits which will drive the price of oil and gasoline up. Renewable energy sources do not have that problem, the costs of setting up X Giga Watts of capacity does not increase as you build more plants and with electric cars you have a layer of abstraction. You can swap the technology that is providing energy to every single car in the country simply by retiring coal power plants and building wind, solar, nuclear or fusion plants (whenever they become a reality). Then there is also the political aspect to consider. For countries like Germany renewables are a worth while goal simply because it makes you energy independent from warmongering dictatorships like Russia and therefor less vulnerable to blackmail , finally, in Germany environmentalism is a big election issue kind of like guns or christianity are in the US.
It depends if George Soros funds the protests or not.
Even if he does, please explain to me how he'd be doing anything the Koch brothers haven't been doing for years and how funding political movements is wrong when Soros does it but perfectly OK if the Koch brothers finance political election efforts and the associated character assassination campaigns?
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future. Will not be shedding any tears when that happens. This would also explain why Trump is in such a hurry to eradicate the EPA. If the price of clean energy keeps falling, eventually the only way Oil and Coal will be able to compete is if they do not have to respect any environmental legislation and the Trump admin fixes it so that they can pollute at will. Once the price of clean energy and electric vehicles falls below even the prices they can offer under those circumstances Oil and Coal will be in trouble. But then again who knows, maybe we will actually see numbers rivalling the women's march hitting the streets to protest the murder of the EPA in which case this may happen even sooner.
. . . from Mr. "640K is all you'll ever need" (grin)
(and yes, I go back to DOS 2.x and Windows 1.x)
Brrrr.... I'd rather go back to Linux release 0.01.
From the SMH Key phrase.
When the Cato Institute is calling you out on racist policies you know you're up shit creek.
The real irony here is that Trump and his alt-right claque are banning travellers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and justifying it by citing 911 but the countries that the 911 terrorists came from are not on the list, especially Saudi Arabia and the UEA and keep in mind these are the same countries whose citizens are covertly funding ISIS. On top of that Trump set up a series of shell companies to handle a hotel deal in Saudi Arabia and he did it after his bid for president: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-... at the same time as he was lambasting Clinton for taking donations from the Saudis.
My favourite parts:
"They [Saudis] buy apartments from me, ... They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
"I would want to protect Saudi Arabia, ... But Saudi Arabia is going to have to help us economically. They were making, before the oil went down ... they were making $1 billion a day.”
So rich countries that can make tribute payments to the Trump regime and whose citizens are financially benefitting Trumps companies are not destined for 'the list' even though these countries are financing terrorist organisations that attack and kill US citizens but others including some that are actually fighting ISIS in Syria make the list. I suppose Trump supporters have a hard time spelling 'hypocrisy'.
Personality Traits Are Linked To Differences In Brain Structure.
Even that cannot explain Donald Trump. Something else is going on here: http://wumo.com/img/wumo/2016/...
Watch that interview very carefully. There is no way she was talking about "other" facts that weren't being reported. She meant to say exactly what she said. The administration has "alternative facts" that better fit their agenda.
Look, I realize that there is this bitter rivalry in US society between liberals and conservatives. But try to put politics aside, and try to think as a sane human being.
Donald Trump is the guy who insisted Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the US. He is the guy who once claimed he owned the Empire State Building, which is false and was false at the time. He is the guy who said he has been on the Time magazine "more than anybody" which is false. He is the guy who so often claimed that he never said something he just said a few days earlier. His Trump University has been trialed for fraud. One of his advisers is a guy who owns a right-wing conspiracy theory website that is specialized on the spreading of fake news.
Try to think about this rationally.
Donald Trump is either a serial liar or simply delusional. You can look all of his insanity up. If you believe him and his administration more than established, international media networks such as CNN, you have to face the fact that you have decided to stop being a rational thinking person.
Why be rational? Maybe it's time for revenge? Let's have some fun and be totally irrational! Trump was and is a birther, he denied that Obama was born in the US and thinks Obama is a crypto-muslim. Well let's start our own 'birther' movement, something in the spirit of JJ Angleton, like claiming that Trump is an FSB asset, a Russian mole. We can call it the 'moler movement'. It shouldn't be that hard, just point to how Trump seems to have a massive man-crush on Putin, how Trump appoints Putin friendly people in key positions, how Trump seems intent on dismantling NATO which is Putin's wet dream, how Trump married two women who are secretly members of the GRU, ... , the list goes on, let your imagination run riot, get in touch with your inner alt-right drone. Of course all of this stuff will be freely invented nonsense but that does not matter, we are post truth here! We believe all this is true and that makes it fact! Rex Tillerson is a Russian born sleeper agent sent to the US by the KGB during the cold war and he is Trump's FSB handler. Anybody who contradicts any of this is LYING!!! If somebody questions your theory on Tillerson ask for Tillerson's birth certificate, if they produce Tillerson's birth certificate, ask for the long form birth certificate, if they produce that claim it is forged. Always remember, in the post truth world you don't need proof, just have to believe. If they say Trump isn't an FSB asset, just ask them where the proof is, if they ask you for proof of your claims, ask they if they can disprove anything you said, wait until they have said two words and interrupt them rapidly with something like "...well then that proves me right!". Set up a web page, call the page "Schnurrbart" link to it everywhere so it tops the list of results for Trump searches on Google. Let's have four to eight years of endless fun watching alt-right crackpots getting hoisted by their own petard ... Dang! Cooking up conspiracy theories is FUN!! And we haven't even gottens started on trolling the alt-right over #GoldenShowerGate...