It's politics following the people's will for a change. I have to applaud that and I'm glad about it.
There have been plenty of serious incidents and thousands of direct and indirect deaths and many more injuries or negative effects. Huge areas are uninhabitable for many years because of this and the costs are enormous. No country has a working and safe way to contain the remains for the necessary time or an idea how to finance that.
Nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and by no means clean. It's limited and even coal plants can be run with less pollution if investing the same amount of money.
It's pretty easy: the power plants in question are merely replacements for the aging, already existing coal plants. There is no need for new coal plants to replace the shut down nuclear power plants because Germany is a net exporter of electricity and can largely compensate the lack of nuclear power by not exporting electricity anymore. The rest can be easily covered by green energy.
It's (finally) backed by all relevant political powers and the German population. The likeliness that this will change is unlikely because it would be political suicide for anyone doing such thing. Germany's population is against nuclear power for many years now and I do not see anything that would be able to change that.
This report is highly misleading. To judge a countries electricities balance by 1 month is absurd. There were always months when Germany was importing more electricity then exporting. That still doesn't make it a net importer.
Germany is a net exporter of electricity and will (net) not change that, even after shutting down the last nuclear power plant. I don't know where you got your information from but it's clearly wrong.
Citing France as a source for power is pretty absurd because France is regularly buying electricity from Germany when they have to shut down their nuclear power plants when it's getting too hot or too warm.
There is not much of a difference here. None of the still running German nuclear power plants passes todays safety requirements. None of those plants is protected against aircraft impact from larger planes even though plenty of them are pretty close to airports or even directly within flight routes.
The German reactors are outdated and unsafe and it's about time that they go offline.
I use Gmail and gladly or sadly, depending on how you look at it, priority inbox and the built-in spam filter do an amazingly good job at keeping my inbox tidy. Sadly that encourages laziness, meaning I didn't really read my "normal" email for a while and just skimmed through the subject lines and let them rot in the inbox until a 4-digit number has piled up. Noticing that this isn't a very productive approach I took the time (several hours) to actually go through my inbox and file those emails into the respective folder, delete them, reply to them or unsubscribe from the ever growing amount of lists. After finishing this, I try to do this regularly (daily) to keep things under control and my inbox usable - and as painful as this process was, it helped a lot!
It requires little more than the ability to use a computer to be able to ddos a target to oblivion. There is pretty much no protection against attacks like this because they simply flood your uplink and most carriers don't care enough to filter the attack and instead simply null route the target.
Considering the rumors that are and were floating around and the many delays this project suffered already it's hard to believe that it will cost "only" 100 mio. incl. marketing. I heard numbers reaching as high as 250 mio. and it would surprise me if they would manage to stay below 100 mio. for development only.
Meanwhile full fledged mmos have arrived on the i-devices in the meantime. I do not see any reason why you couldn't play pretty much any game on such a platform, including shooters and racing games (pretty much the figureheads of console games).
There is a lot of true and useful information in the post above. Most significantly that a game needs to be designed with awareness of what kind of input method is available and common. Especially strategy game (also mentioned above) are very well suited for the iPad and similar devices due to the fact that touching your units (or whatever you have to deal with) or group selecting by spanning a square over the units in question is very natural on a tablet and works even better than classic mouse controls on a pc.
It's a little different when you look at jump&run games. The majority of iPad-jump&runs have questionable input methods which makes it rather difficult to play those games.
So as long as the games are designed properly (Have a look at Order&Chaos from Gameloft that has just been released, an mmo for the i-devices. It has a pretty solid control mechanism that works pretty good.) for the respective target device I don't see any reason why the iPad couldn't be a successful game platform. In fact it already is a pretty successful gaming platform.
I heard pretty similar comments when the Wii came out first (no HD, no conventional controller, etc.) and yet it was a huge success.
Apple is known for taking a different approach when trying to solve issues. That's the way they succeeded with the iPod (hard disks instead of tiny flash RAM back then), the iPhone (all touch, almost no buttons) and the iPad. I won't be so fast to predict a failure because of the lack of conventional and established controller styles here. Don't forget that there is a huge market with people who are not die-hard players, who do not care about how a PS1 controller looked like, etc.
It's a fairly common mistake to think only the hard core games matter. They only do matter if you have a hard core game. For all the rest it's the casual gamers that count and there ease of use is the key.
The foreign office is run by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP (so called "liberals") who are pretty known for having close ties to companies and the industry in general. To be more blunt: pay them enough money and they do what you want them to do. Just recently they halved the taxes on hotel bills - after receiving a noticeable amount of money from a company running lots of hotels (Mövenpick) for their election campaign a few months prior.
So it's safe to assume that some coffers with money changed owners in return for this step. They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this) and they use it where ever they can. So far they (mostly) managed to stay within the legal limits (which is not too hard considering that there are very few restrictions for politicians in Germany, so basically once elected you can do pretty much anything you like without too much fear of of any serious consequences).
Either way we are fucked. Even if it's not genetic at all (and I tend to believe that it's not). But we are still screwed because even if it's just a "learnt" behavior" it still means that the majority of the children is and will be raised in families with some shade of religious view. So the outcome is the very same: 6 religious children (in average) producing another 6 religious children (in average) while the secular people pretty much die out due to low fertility rates.
Additionally society will add some pressure on those that have a tendency towards secular thoughts because more and more people will start to preach nonsense like creationism and you only need to look into countries like Iran, Pakistan, Israel and pretty much any other country led and controlled by religious people to see what happens to society when religion is dominating and controlling a country.
I fail to see any wide approval anywhere in Europe. In Britain, the strongest U.S. supporter in Europe, essentially the election got lost by Labour because of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Approval ratings all over Europe are way below 50% and have been there pretty much since the very beginning. Please show me a link to the approval ratings that you mentioned. It would strongly surprise me to see any kind of major approval here.
And don't forget that the U.S. were those that made the Taliban strong in the 1st place by supporting them in all kind of ways. So telling that the U.S. are now liberating Afghanistan after they worked hard to fuck it up before is shading the truth.
I'm not saying that Iraq/Afghanistan were a heaven before the invasion. But that is by no means any justification to invade a sovereign country.
Besides the fact that the conflicts in Europe are on a completely different scale, they are also widely accepted as justified and humanitarian. The invasion of the Irak and Afghanistan are still widely disputed and somewhat shady (to avoid to call them illegal right away).
It might be hard for the Americans to understand but conflicts can be solved without armies. It's very uncommon over there as it seems but even you will one day learn that marching into someone else's country is the very last option and not something you choose whenever a conflict arises (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).
My point: patents are more often in the way than they actually reasonably protect someone. Especially big companies have a ton of patents at their disposal that they can use to sue others out of business. I fail to see the benefit for the society here.
How often do things like your example happen? How often does it happen that companies like GE & Co. sue the living hell out of a tiny new company that might turn into a competitor one day?
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It's politics following the people's will for a change. I have to applaud that and I'm glad about it.
There have been plenty of serious incidents and thousands of direct and indirect deaths and many more injuries or negative effects. Huge areas are uninhabitable for many years because of this and the costs are enormous. No country has a working and safe way to contain the remains for the necessary time or an idea how to finance that.
Nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and by no means clean. It's limited and even coal plants can be run with less pollution if investing the same amount of money.
Please stop speaking out of your asses if you have no clue how Germany produces energy.
It's pretty easy: the power plants in question are merely replacements for the aging, already existing coal plants. There is no need for new coal plants to replace the shut down nuclear power plants because Germany is a net exporter of electricity and can largely compensate the lack of nuclear power by not exporting electricity anymore. The rest can be easily covered by green energy.
It's (finally) backed by all relevant political powers and the German population. The likeliness that this will change is unlikely because it would be political suicide for anyone doing such thing. Germany's population is against nuclear power for many years now and I do not see anything that would be able to change that.
This report is highly misleading. To judge a countries electricities balance by 1 month is absurd. There were always months when Germany was importing more electricity then exporting. That still doesn't make it a net importer.
Germany is a net exporter of electricity and will (net) not change that, even after shutting down the last nuclear power plant. I don't know where you got your information from but it's clearly wrong.
Citing France as a source for power is pretty absurd because France is regularly buying electricity from Germany when they have to shut down their nuclear power plants when it's getting too hot or too warm.
There is not much of a difference here. None of the still running German nuclear power plants passes todays safety requirements. None of those plants is protected against aircraft impact from larger planes even though plenty of them are pretty close to airports or even directly within flight routes.
The German reactors are outdated and unsafe and it's about time that they go offline.
True, but it makes me feel uncomfortable :P
I like to have a 0 at my inbox count.
I use Gmail and gladly or sadly, depending on how you look at it, priority inbox and the built-in spam filter do an amazingly good job at keeping my inbox tidy. Sadly that encourages laziness, meaning I didn't really read my "normal" email for a while and just skimmed through the subject lines and let them rot in the inbox until a 4-digit number has piled up. Noticing that this isn't a very productive approach I took the time (several hours) to actually go through my inbox and file those emails into the respective folder, delete them, reply to them or unsubscribe from the ever growing amount of lists. After finishing this, I try to do this regularly (daily) to keep things under control and my inbox usable - and as painful as this process was, it helped a lot!
It requires little more than the ability to use a computer to be able to ddos a target to oblivion. There is pretty much no protection against attacks like this because they simply flood your uplink and most carriers don't care enough to filter the attack and instead simply null route the target.
Considering the rumors that are and were floating around and the many delays this project suffered already it's hard to believe that it will cost "only" 100 mio. incl. marketing. I heard numbers reaching as high as 250 mio. and it would surprise me if they would manage to stay below 100 mio. for development only.
Meanwhile full fledged mmos have arrived on the i-devices in the meantime. I do not see any reason why you couldn't play pretty much any game on such a platform, including shooters and racing games (pretty much the figureheads of console games).
There is a lot of true and useful information in the post above. Most significantly that a game needs to be designed with awareness of what kind of input method is available and common. Especially strategy game (also mentioned above) are very well suited for the iPad and similar devices due to the fact that touching your units (or whatever you have to deal with) or group selecting by spanning a square over the units in question is very natural on a tablet and works even better than classic mouse controls on a pc.
It's a little different when you look at jump&run games. The majority of iPad-jump&runs have questionable input methods which makes it rather difficult to play those games.
So as long as the games are designed properly (Have a look at Order&Chaos from Gameloft that has just been released, an mmo for the i-devices. It has a pretty solid control mechanism that works pretty good.) for the respective target device I don't see any reason why the iPad couldn't be a successful game platform. In fact it already is a pretty successful gaming platform.
I heard pretty similar comments when the Wii came out first (no HD, no conventional controller, etc.) and yet it was a huge success.
Apple is known for taking a different approach when trying to solve issues. That's the way they succeeded with the iPod (hard disks instead of tiny flash RAM back then), the iPhone (all touch, almost no buttons) and the iPad. I won't be so fast to predict a failure because of the lack of conventional and established controller styles here. Don't forget that there is a huge market with people who are not die-hard players, who do not care about how a PS1 controller looked like, etc.
It's a fairly common mistake to think only the hard core games matter. They only do matter if you have a hard core game. For all the rest it's the casual gamers that count and there ease of use is the key.
The foreign office is run by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP (so called "liberals") who are pretty known for having close ties to companies and the industry in general. To be more blunt: pay them enough money and they do what you want them to do. Just recently they halved the taxes on hotel bills - after receiving a noticeable amount of money from a company running lots of hotels (Mövenpick) for their election campaign a few months prior.
So it's safe to assume that some coffers with money changed owners in return for this step. They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this) and they use it where ever they can. So far they (mostly) managed to stay within the legal limits (which is not too hard considering that there are very few restrictions for politicians in Germany, so basically once elected you can do pretty much anything you like without too much fear of of any serious consequences).
Either way we are fucked. Even if it's not genetic at all (and I tend to believe that it's not). But we are still screwed because even if it's just a "learnt" behavior" it still means that the majority of the children is and will be raised in families with some shade of religious view. So the outcome is the very same: 6 religious children (in average) producing another 6 religious children (in average) while the secular people pretty much die out due to low fertility rates.
Additionally society will add some pressure on those that have a tendency towards secular thoughts because more and more people will start to preach nonsense like creationism and you only need to look into countries like Iran, Pakistan, Israel and pretty much any other country led and controlled by religious people to see what happens to society when religion is dominating and controlling a country.
The U.S. government went against EU citizen. That's all that matters. It's unimportant if Twitter has its offices in the U.S., UK or Swaziland.
The SFOR mission is hardly comparable to the invasion of Irak/Afghanistan.
I fail to see any wide approval anywhere in Europe. In Britain, the strongest U.S. supporter in Europe, essentially the election got lost by Labour because of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Approval ratings all over Europe are way below 50% and have been there pretty much since the very beginning. Please show me a link to the approval ratings that you mentioned. It would strongly surprise me to see any kind of major approval here.
And don't forget that the U.S. were those that made the Taliban strong in the 1st place by supporting them in all kind of ways. So telling that the U.S. are now liberating Afghanistan after they worked hard to fuck it up before is shading the truth.
I'm not saying that Iraq/Afghanistan were a heaven before the invasion. But that is by no means any justification to invade a sovereign country.
Besides the fact that the conflicts in Europe are on a completely different scale, they are also widely accepted as justified and humanitarian. The invasion of the Irak and Afghanistan are still widely disputed and somewhat shady (to avoid to call them illegal right away).
After explicit request (and "diplomatic" pressure) from the U.S. - the attacks got initiated by the U.S., no one else.
It might be hard for the Americans to understand but conflicts can be solved without armies. It's very uncommon over there as it seems but even you will one day learn that marching into someone else's country is the very last option and not something you choose whenever a conflict arises (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).
Two flaws: they operate world wide, not just in the U.S. and the investigation is directed towards the U.S. government, not Twitter.
I'm pretty sure that there is barely anyone that can argue that Twitter did the best they could to handle the situation.
My point: patents are more often in the way than they actually reasonably protect someone. Especially big companies have a ton of patents at their disposal that they can use to sue others out of business. I fail to see the benefit for the society here.
How often do things like your example happen? How often does it happen that companies like GE & Co. sue the living hell out of a tiny new company that might turn into a competitor one day?