The article does not mention it clearly, but those fuel cells are likely natural-gas powered. They are either very high-temperature cells (800 degrees C) or low-temperature cells (70-120 degrees C) with a reformer somewhere that converts natural gas to hydrogen. In the former case you would need to handle fuel at insanely high temperatures close to a bunch of electronics (you can guess what happens at the first leak), in the second you have to handle a hydrogen distribution network, and hydrogen is a nasty gas to work with (see for example hydrogen embrittlement); nothing that cannot be handled, but providing it to single servers or even racks? Hydrogen-proof piping is expensive, and even worse are the valves.
In any case, gas piping is never going to be as practical as power cords. You cannot bend it, coil it, join it easily, and you will need also piping to collect exhaust gases: since this hydrogen comes from natural gas, it travels with CO2, and you don't want it to accumulate in the data centre. You may also need another line to provide oxygen if the data centre ventilation is insufficient.
The argument that one would do away with power supplies is foolish: simply provide a network of DC power instead for all required voltages. FCs produce DC power, but their output voltage is unsteady and needs to be converted to the right voltage; and there are several voltages that a server requires anyway.
So, if FCs have to be, they need to be placed outside the data centre, and function as their power stations. At this point, one wonders, why should we ever consider to install FCs in power stations? Simply build a FC power station and export to the grid.
The main driver for FCs in power generation in the US is the low price of natural gas due to high shale gas production.
I am soon going to New Orleans for a conference, and the hotel charges $14.95 per day for WiFi. Knowing that hot water is not metered, that's what I plan to do:
Assumption: hot water is produced by natural gas, temperature 50 kelvin above environment. Tap capacity 10 L/min. Natural gas cost: ca. $12 per 1000 cubic feet, equivalent to one million BTU.
Cost of energy is $12 per GJ, or 43 cents per MWh.
Power for heating of fully open tap: 10/60 x 4150 x 50 = 35 kW
Cost of fully open tap: 0.00042 $/second, or $1.51 an hour
Therefore, I will let hot water flow free for about 10 hours (every night, closing it at breakfast) and offset the profit they make on WiFi.
It was only later that the climate cooled, and they were forced to change their lifestyle, and finally leave Greenland.
My favourite author, Jared Diamond, had an entire chapter on the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse. They are remarkable because many factors impacted them at the same time, and their demise was due to climate, international politics, and their own stupidity.
Climate did get colder, but the Norse also lost their most important export, walrus tusks, because the Muslims started trading elephant tusks again with the Christians after several centuries of embargo: no one wanted walrus tusks anymore. Also, the Norse had apparently a phobia for fish, which for some reason they were unwilling to eat (or were unable to catch). They were also horrible diplomats and could not have friendly relations with the Inuit (who arrived in Greenland after the Norse), who eventually displaced them. Also, they were a very religious and conservative society, using relatively enormous resources to build a cathedral that could rival that of Nidaros in Norway.
When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska.
That's a way too bold statement. Latitude is not the only predictor of temperature. I live at the same latitude as Anchorage, AK, but out temperature average is 5-10 degrees Celsius higher because we are exposed to the Gulf stream. Climate change does not have the same uniform effects in every spot.
For an individual to benefit from that corporate income, at some point it has to become their income.
Uh, no. Have you ever heard of fringe benefits? The firm (that you incidentally own) gives you a car, a house, a myriad of services whose exact quantification is to a degree arbitrary. For example, a luxury car or a private jet may be appropriate for representation in a large oil company; but who is going to check exactly the private and work-related usage quota? The IRS is not the NSA and does not have the resources to monitor everyone.
As soon as you remove corporate tax, there will be a rush among small enterprises to buy their owner's house, car etc. If anything, corporate taxation should be levied on income, not net result as it is done today, since it is all too easy to set up a fake company in the Cayman island, sell them a bead for $1, buy it back for $1,000,001, and presto! you have $1,000,000 less net income and thereby taxable dollars.
I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin, even if it does not have100% of what the Chinese characters provide. I understand the heritage and cultural proudness of having your own characters, [...]
I also honestly believe that English (and French) should reform their horrible spelling. But how would you react to:
Ay ålso änestli b'liv ðat inglisx (ænd frencx) sxuld riform ðer hårib'l spelin. Bat haw wud yu riakt tu:
(Used sx and cx for s and c with accents, Slashcode can't digest UTF8 yet)
This will look ridiculous to most people, because they are not used to it, even if it is a superior way of writing. There is even a famous quotation by Mark Twain on the subject. Note that the irregularity of English spelling is not without real-world consequences, since irregular spelling causes the effects of dyslexia (note: dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its effects manifest only when dealing with an irregular orthography. Same person who is dyslexic in English may not be in Spanish or Japanese).
And yes, English spelling is just as difficult as Chinese characters or the Japanese mixture of Kanji and Kana. Only, Chinese characters do not cause dyslexia (not to the same extent as English at least).
Britain, France, Spain, all have massive chunks of the globe speaking their respective languages as an outcome of colonialism
More than teaching the locals their language, what they did was either exterminate the locals and repopulate with their own people (as Spain did in Latin America and the UK with Australia), or put together an administrative region so diverse that they have to use the colonial language to talk to each other (e.g. India, Nigeria, most African states...), since choosing one local language may be considered a violation of other ethnic groups' status. Pakistan tried to force East Pakistan to speak Urdu instead of Bengali, so East Pakistan seceded and changed name to Bangladesh. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all colonies of European powers at some point, and none uses the colonial language anymore, because they have a strongly predominant local language.
Pay special attention to the whereas lines. They lay out the official reasons we went to war and to the best of my knowledge, the only one that has turned out to be untrue was the continuing WMD programs and stockpiles.
You may have hoped for a massive TL;DR response, but I read some of it. Several other lines were untrue: Al-Qaida in Iraq (it came during the war to support the insurgents, was not there to begin with), the fact that 9/11, I quote, "underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations" (a few knives are hardly a WMD; if anything, 9/11 underscored how easy it is to pull off a terrorist plot with simple tools and some out-of-the-box thinking), the possibility that Iraq would use WMDs in a surprise attack against the US or pass them to terrorists.
If you think the WMDs were made up, then ask yourself why the government would lie to get us into a war and not put WMDs in the sand somewhere to keep it's citizens trusting of it.
I asked myself, and I answered myself that the sheeple would not care if no WMDs were not found after the war was started. Who started the war needed an excuse to get it started, not to justify himself afterwards. No WMDs were found, yet I don't see Bush, Rumsfeld and all other war criminals (because that's what they technically are) being brought to court and sentenced to death by hanging (which is what was normally dished out for the crime of war of aggression at Nuremberg).
But in this case, the use of chemical and/or biological weapons is a no no, and outlawed by the international community for a reason. It's time to destroy any such weapons since Syria's gov does not seem to have any restrain in the use of such weapons.
Personally I do not believe Assad used chemical weapons, and this looks like a charade pulled off to start a war.
First, Assad has no reason to cause an international outcry by using chemical weapons—he's winning, the last thing he needs is giving an excuse to the US to enter the conflict.
Second, the US and Western countries were expecting the rebels to win. Currently, they are losing, and the US/NATO seem to want Syria really badly: at this point they really needed a casus belli, and guess what here it is. Coincidence?
Third, a new war is great to distract the media from whatever Snowden has to reveal.
Fourth, seriously: war over war crimes? Since when anybody started a war on principles? Cynical as I may be, I won't buy the line that suddenly all our leaders take civilian casualties so seriously.
The rebels have degenerated as they were infiltrated from so many radical groups with different agendas. At this point, if they win they will be just as bad as Assad, only less predictable. Who is the US intending to install in Syria? How are they going to control the nation? Has anyone learnt anything at all from Iraq?
Not a bad idea. I never understood why so many music players don't also come with radio tuners.
In several countries, especially in Europe, this would make you subject to a TV licence, which can be quite hefty. In Norway that is $400–500 a year, other countries vary. In South Korea, instead, it is only $30, so I guess people do not care as much. Sometimes TV licences are on a per-user or per-household basis instead of per-device, so maybe Koreans already pay for this at home.
Also, there are additional charges when playing music or video in public. I had a Nokia 5230 in Germany that actually had a radio receiver, but it would work only with the earphones plugged in. In Italy, the SIAE (the local branch of the MAFIAA) routinely raids weddings to levy fines to anyone playing recorded music (most people hire live musicians instead nowadays, given how expensive the licence is).
Norway here. There are minor antisemitic far-right groupings (Vigrid, Norgespatriotene), though modern far-right ideology is much more anti-immigrant that anti-Jewish. Muslims in their observant clothing in Oslo are far more common than in NY (yes, I have been there), some middle-easterners I know joked that parts of Oslo look like Lahore (and thank the flying spaghetti monster for that, at least there is some decent food around!). Norway has a murder rate 8 times lower than the US, and in one place where you need to defend yourself (Svalbard, from polar bears) you are handed a shotgun after getting off the plane.
I also lived in Germany, and while neo-Nazis are ostensibly banned they do have their stores (Thor Steinar chain) and their not-so-well-disguised party (NPD), plus some others. Also there, muslims wear what they want, and the murder rate is 6 times lower than the US.
Burning coal produces a lot more of radioactive dust
I am quite tired of this, but... Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.
With all due respect, you are applying 20th-century reasoning to 21st-century problems. Base load is a concept gradually on the way out, because as wind and solar are introduced to the energy mix, flexibility needs to be shifted to the consumer side, since as you say yourself wind and solar are intermittent. Flexibility on the consumer side is implemented as hydroelectric dams pumping water up to store the energy, water boilers storing heat when there is available electricity, or in the future hydrogen stations revving up and producing and storing more hydrogen for vehicles. This was not easily done before the age of IT and smart grids, now it's being introduced.
For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.
Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.
I refer to the meeting of the Great Risks Commission in L'Aquila. Granted, no scientist actually stood on a podium and proclaimed absolute certainty there would be no earthquake, but they knew very well that the meeting was just a media event to pass that message, message that was broadcast nationwide the same evening on all TV networks.
They knew very well what was going on, they manipulated the meeting minutes after the earthquake, and they should be held responsible for the deaths that resulted directly as a consequence of their actions.
And please note that the "parents' association" MOIGE is a nutjob organisation of Catholic fundamentalists, in the same basket as the Westboro Baptist Church.
They are doing this only to acquire visibility in the bigot arena.
It seems you are referring to those seismologists who were sentenced for "not having predicted the L'Aquila earthquake". This is not correct: they were sentenced, and rightly so, for having misled the public that there was a certainty that no earthquake was going to happen. That's different from saying that there was no certainty it was going to happen. Their (very public) statements convinced many to return to their homes, and die there when the earthquake happened.
throws out acquittals
It seems you are referring to the fact that in Italy prosecutors can appeal an acquittal. This is a possibility in any European country I know of. If anything, the US is special in that new information cannot be used to reopen a case after the defendant has been pronounced innocent only one time.
can't get a single charge to stick on Berlusconi
Why actually there is one. He has dodged a lot but he was sentenced for tax evasion (same as Al Capone, guess what) and already lost an appeal. There is a very real chance he will be convicted in the last degree of appeal this year and will be automatically thrown out of the Parliament. While of course he should have gone to jail long ago, and flaws in the Italian system allowed him to get off scot-free on many an occasion, but prosecutors in the Italian system have not given him preferential treatment for being a powerful politicial.
On the other hand, I have not heard about a single US prosecutor indicting G. W. Bush for starting a war of aggression. That's way worse than tax evasion, corruption, rape or murder. That's the same crime of Nuremberg. Same goes for indicting Dick Cheney for aiding and abetting torture, international kidnapping ring (known as "extraordinary renditions"), or Obama for international terrorism (because that's what drone strikes are).
There aren't a lot of places where you can say the US judicial system has better moral standing, but compared to the Italian system, it does--by a long shot.
The US system still practices death penalty, and is based on Common Law (just a notch above tribal law). The Italian system, for all its shortcomings, is not going to get you killed. Also, in lawsuits, the losing part can be and often is sentenced to pay for the other part's legal costs, so frivolous lawsuits are much less common than in the US. Thank you very much, we will keep our Roman-Napoleonic code.
There is already today an excess of food production. People do not starve because there is not enough food, they starve because they are not given the food, usually because they are too poor to afford it, or because their supply lines have been cut by wars or embargoes. There is no need to increase world food production, only to get the food to those needing it.
Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:
Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?
It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.
That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.
Amen to that. My mom used to have a Kubuntu PC I set up. It ran fine most of the time, but sometimes there were problems with Pulseaudio and Skype would not work properly. Getting my mom to install Team Viewer was not an option (she is almost completely computer illiterate, despite using a Linux machine for over 5 years now. Not the learning type), it was difficult enough to teach her to switch windows from the task bar.
For Christmas I gave her an Android tablet (Samsung GT2), and amazingly (after I configured it) I still haven't heard of any problems, even though it is a new machine, new environment, new paradigm and new control method. She even showed initiative at installing some apps to learn English.
That's far from the complete truth. The unsaid fact is that Mosaddegh was trying to nationalize British and American owned oil operations, which was what prompted our actions.
Ahem, he was trying to stop the US and the UK from stealing Iranian oil. That's a good thing. The US and the UK wanted to continue stealing, so they put a figurehead in place that would allow them to continue sacking the country.
Far from me to defend the regime of the regime of the ahund, but you are painting a way exaggerated picture. I know several Iranians at my university (and speak some Persian to boot), and I can say that:
There is no problem with shaving in Iran. You are confusing them with the Talibans in Afghanistan. Long story short, Afghanistan is like Iran's Mexico—a source of cheap labor and illegal immigrants. At my university there is one Iranian guy who is a supporter of the regime (over about a hundred who despise it openly), and he happens to have no beard.
Almost all Iranians I know are atheists or at least non-religious, and no one ever mentioned being locked up for insufficient muslim-ness. Of course you will be locked up if you insult Islam publicly (it's a lousy dictatorship after all), but they don't really care about you praying regularly.
The story of the word "pizza" being translated into Persian is a funny story of an overzealous language institute, not different from Western institutes such as the Academie Francaise that proposed "Nourriture rapide" instead of fast food. "Pizza" is a furthermore word that does not fit well Persian phonology, as they have no/ts/ affricate. Anyway, they still call it pizza in Iran, the translated word is mostly jocular.
Prison or death penalty for being raped is plain false. It may be true for tribal traditions in some areas, but then there are such backwards places in the West too. They do have death penalty for adultery, but being victim of a rape is not considered adultery. Of course, since the penalty for rape is death (for the aggressor), in a trial the aggressor will try to frame the victim as a consensual partner, a fact that for a married woman carries the death penalty. Since corruption is rampant, a rapist may buy the sentence. You don't need to make up the story of death penalty for rape victims, death penalty for adultery is bad enough.
Supporting medieval-minded terrorist groups is something that the US did as well in Afghanistan when it served their interest. Neither excuses the other, but support of terrorist activities in enemy countries is a fairly normal practice, however execrable.
Just like the driver with seatbelts who gets stuck in a burning car, the man who finds out at the wrong time he is allergic to latex in condoms, or the patient who gets a vaccine develops the disease because the virus in the vaccine batch was not really dead after all.
Not owning a gun makes you safer. You may feel safer with a gun because you think you are in control, just like people feel safer in their cars but not in aeroplanes (even though last year only over 30,000 people died on cars in the US, none in airliners AFAIK).
The whole picture includes you having a gun during a serious depression and killing yourself over a moment of desperation, your children finding the gun the one time you left it loaded, you discovering you are a sleepwalker the day you shoot your wife in your dreams, and that angry dumb person with a gun (who might have been satisfied by robbing you) that turns out to be a faster shot than you are, and leaves you in a pool of blood.
Are you always less safe with a gun? No, in some limited cases it makes sense, such as when going in areas with aggressive wildlife (e.g. polar bears). In some occasions even in normal, civilian life it might be advantageous to have a gun to scare a casual would-be thief. But on average, all things considered, statistics shows that it is a safer decision not to have a gun around.
Slashdot Mirror
The article does not mention it clearly, but those fuel cells are likely natural-gas powered. They are either very high-temperature cells (800 degrees C) or low-temperature cells (70-120 degrees C) with a reformer somewhere that converts natural gas to hydrogen. In the former case you would need to handle fuel at insanely high temperatures close to a bunch of electronics (you can guess what happens at the first leak), in the second you have to handle a hydrogen distribution network, and hydrogen is a nasty gas to work with (see for example hydrogen embrittlement); nothing that cannot be handled, but providing it to single servers or even racks? Hydrogen-proof piping is expensive, and even worse are the valves.
In any case, gas piping is never going to be as practical as power cords. You cannot bend it, coil it, join it easily, and you will need also piping to collect exhaust gases: since this hydrogen comes from natural gas, it travels with CO2, and you don't want it to accumulate in the data centre. You may also need another line to provide oxygen if the data centre ventilation is insufficient.
The argument that one would do away with power supplies is foolish: simply provide a network of DC power instead for all required voltages. FCs produce DC power, but their output voltage is unsteady and needs to be converted to the right voltage; and there are several voltages that a server requires anyway.
So, if FCs have to be, they need to be placed outside the data centre, and function as their power stations. At this point, one wonders, why should we ever consider to install FCs in power stations? Simply build a FC power station and export to the grid.
The main driver for FCs in power generation in the US is the low price of natural gas due to high shale gas production.
I am soon going to New Orleans for a conference, and the hotel charges $14.95 per day for WiFi. Knowing that hot water is not metered, that's what I plan to do:
Therefore, I will let hot water flow free for about 10 hours (every night, closing it at breakfast) and offset the profit they make on WiFi.
My favourite author, Jared Diamond, had an entire chapter on the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse. They are remarkable because many factors impacted them at the same time, and their demise was due to climate, international politics, and their own stupidity.
Climate did get colder, but the Norse also lost their most important export, walrus tusks, because the Muslims started trading elephant tusks again with the Christians after several centuries of embargo: no one wanted walrus tusks anymore. Also, the Norse had apparently a phobia for fish, which for some reason they were unwilling to eat (or were unable to catch). They were also horrible diplomats and could not have friendly relations with the Inuit (who arrived in Greenland after the Norse), who eventually displaced them. Also, they were a very religious and conservative society, using relatively enormous resources to build a cathedral that could rival that of Nidaros in Norway.
That's a way too bold statement. Latitude is not the only predictor of temperature. I live at the same latitude as Anchorage, AK, but out temperature average is 5-10 degrees Celsius higher because we are exposed to the Gulf stream. Climate change does not have the same uniform effects in every spot.
Uh, no. Have you ever heard of fringe benefits? The firm (that you incidentally own) gives you a car, a house, a myriad of services whose exact quantification is to a degree arbitrary. For example, a luxury car or a private jet may be appropriate for representation in a large oil company; but who is going to check exactly the private and work-related usage quota? The IRS is not the NSA and does not have the resources to monitor everyone.
As soon as you remove corporate tax, there will be a rush among small enterprises to buy their owner's house, car etc. If anything, corporate taxation should be levied on income, not net result as it is done today, since it is all too easy to set up a fake company in the Cayman island, sell them a bead for $1, buy it back for $1,000,001, and presto! you have $1,000,000 less net income and thereby taxable dollars.
I also honestly believe that English (and French) should reform their horrible spelling. But how would you react to:
(Used sx and cx for s and c with accents, Slashcode can't digest UTF8 yet)
This will look ridiculous to most people, because they are not used to it, even if it is a superior way of writing. There is even a famous quotation by Mark Twain on the subject. Note that the irregularity of English spelling is not without real-world consequences, since irregular spelling causes the effects of dyslexia (note: dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its effects manifest only when dealing with an irregular orthography. Same person who is dyslexic in English may not be in Spanish or Japanese).
And yes, English spelling is just as difficult as Chinese characters or the Japanese mixture of Kanji and Kana. Only, Chinese characters do not cause dyslexia (not to the same extent as English at least).
More than teaching the locals their language, what they did was either exterminate the locals and repopulate with their own people (as Spain did in Latin America and the UK with Australia), or put together an administrative region so diverse that they have to use the colonial language to talk to each other (e.g. India, Nigeria, most African states...), since choosing one local language may be considered a violation of other ethnic groups' status. Pakistan tried to force East Pakistan to speak Urdu instead of Bengali, so East Pakistan seceded and changed name to Bangladesh. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all colonies of European powers at some point, and none uses the colonial language anymore, because they have a strongly predominant local language.
And English cannot distinguish between "light" the radiation, "light" as not heavy, "light" as not dark. Seems people manage fine anyway.
You may have hoped for a massive TL;DR response, but I read some of it. Several other lines were untrue: Al-Qaida in Iraq (it came during the war to support the insurgents, was not there to begin with), the fact that 9/11, I quote, "underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations" (a few knives are hardly a WMD; if anything, 9/11 underscored how easy it is to pull off a terrorist plot with simple tools and some out-of-the-box thinking), the possibility that Iraq would use WMDs in a surprise attack against the US or pass them to terrorists.
I asked myself, and I answered myself that the sheeple would not care if no WMDs were not found after the war was started. Who started the war needed an excuse to get it started, not to justify himself afterwards. No WMDs were found, yet I don't see Bush, Rumsfeld and all other war criminals (because that's what they technically are) being brought to court and sentenced to death by hanging (which is what was normally dished out for the crime of war of aggression at Nuremberg).
Personally I do not believe Assad used chemical weapons, and this looks like a charade pulled off to start a war.
The rebels have degenerated as they were infiltrated from so many radical groups with different agendas. At this point, if they win they will be just as bad as Assad, only less predictable. Who is the US intending to install in Syria? How are they going to control the nation? Has anyone learnt anything at all from Iraq?
In several countries, especially in Europe, this would make you subject to a TV licence, which can be quite hefty. In Norway that is $400–500 a year, other countries vary. In South Korea, instead, it is only $30, so I guess people do not care as much. Sometimes TV licences are on a per-user or per-household basis instead of per-device, so maybe Koreans already pay for this at home.
Also, there are additional charges when playing music or video in public. I had a Nokia 5230 in Germany that actually had a radio receiver, but it would work only with the earphones plugged in. In Italy, the SIAE (the local branch of the MAFIAA) routinely raids weddings to levy fines to anyone playing recorded music (most people hire live musicians instead nowadays, given how expensive the licence is).
Norway here. There are minor antisemitic far-right groupings (Vigrid, Norgespatriotene), though modern far-right ideology is much more anti-immigrant that anti-Jewish. Muslims in their observant clothing in Oslo are far more common than in NY (yes, I have been there), some middle-easterners I know joked that parts of Oslo look like Lahore (and thank the flying spaghetti monster for that, at least there is some decent food around!). Norway has a murder rate 8 times lower than the US, and in one place where you need to defend yourself (Svalbard, from polar bears) you are handed a shotgun after getting off the plane.
I also lived in Germany, and while neo-Nazis are ostensibly banned they do have their stores (Thor Steinar chain) and their not-so-well-disguised party (NPD), plus some others. Also there, muslims wear what they want, and the murder rate is 6 times lower than the US.
I am quite tired of this, but... Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.
With all due respect, you are applying 20th-century reasoning to 21st-century problems. Base load is a concept gradually on the way out, because as wind and solar are introduced to the energy mix, flexibility needs to be shifted to the consumer side, since as you say yourself wind and solar are intermittent. Flexibility on the consumer side is implemented as hydroelectric dams pumping water up to store the energy, water boilers storing heat when there is available electricity, or in the future hydrogen stations revving up and producing and storing more hydrogen for vehicles. This was not easily done before the age of IT and smart grids, now it's being introduced.
Can we let this silly myth die already? Radiation from a coal plant is heavily diluted. Radiation is a problem of concentration, i.e. it is harmful when it passes a certain threshold. If you dilute it enough, radiation is not harmful, not any more than cosmic rays or a smoke detector.
If you are, why do you spell it wrong? Either Luleå, or Luleaa if you are on a non-Nordic keyboard.
I refer to the meeting of the Great Risks Commission in L'Aquila. Granted, no scientist actually stood on a podium and proclaimed absolute certainty there would be no earthquake, but they knew very well that the meeting was just a media event to pass that message, message that was broadcast nationwide the same evening on all TV networks.
They knew very well what was going on, they manipulated the meeting minutes after the earthquake, and they should be held responsible for the deaths that resulted directly as a consequence of their actions.
And please note that the "parents' association" MOIGE is a nutjob organisation of Catholic fundamentalists, in the same basket as the Westboro Baptist Church. They are doing this only to acquire visibility in the bigot arena.
It seems you are referring to those seismologists who were sentenced for "not having predicted the L'Aquila earthquake". This is not correct: they were sentenced, and rightly so, for having misled the public that there was a certainty that no earthquake was going to happen. That's different from saying that there was no certainty it was going to happen. Their (very public) statements convinced many to return to their homes, and die there when the earthquake happened.
It seems you are referring to the fact that in Italy prosecutors can appeal an acquittal. This is a possibility in any European country I know of. If anything, the US is special in that new information cannot be used to reopen a case after the defendant has been pronounced innocent only one time.
Why actually there is one. He has dodged a lot but he was sentenced for tax evasion (same as Al Capone, guess what) and already lost an appeal. There is a very real chance he will be convicted in the last degree of appeal this year and will be automatically thrown out of the Parliament. While of course he should have gone to jail long ago, and flaws in the Italian system allowed him to get off scot-free on many an occasion, but prosecutors in the Italian system have not given him preferential treatment for being a powerful politicial.
On the other hand, I have not heard about a single US prosecutor indicting G. W. Bush for starting a war of aggression. That's way worse than tax evasion, corruption, rape or murder. That's the same crime of Nuremberg. Same goes for indicting Dick Cheney for aiding and abetting torture, international kidnapping ring (known as "extraordinary renditions"), or Obama for international terrorism (because that's what drone strikes are).
The US system still practices death penalty, and is based on Common Law (just a notch above tribal law). The Italian system, for all its shortcomings, is not going to get you killed. Also, in lawsuits, the losing part can be and often is sentenced to pay for the other part's legal costs, so frivolous lawsuits are much less common than in the US. Thank you very much, we will keep our Roman-Napoleonic code.
I think both "space" and "ship" are words from long before 100 years ago...
There is already today an excess of food production. People do not starve because there is not enough food, they starve because they are not given the food, usually because they are too poor to afford it, or because their supply lines have been cut by wars or embargoes. There is no need to increase world food production, only to get the food to those needing it.
I read the headline like some anonymous oligarch pledged the money out of its own pocket...
Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:
It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.
That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.
Amen to that. My mom used to have a Kubuntu PC I set up. It ran fine most of the time, but sometimes there were problems with Pulseaudio and Skype would not work properly. Getting my mom to install Team Viewer was not an option (she is almost completely computer illiterate, despite using a Linux machine for over 5 years now. Not the learning type), it was difficult enough to teach her to switch windows from the task bar.
For Christmas I gave her an Android tablet (Samsung GT2), and amazingly (after I configured it) I still haven't heard of any problems, even though it is a new machine, new environment, new paradigm and new control method. She even showed initiative at installing some apps to learn English.
Ahem, he was trying to stop the US and the UK from stealing Iranian oil. That's a good thing. The US and the UK wanted to continue stealing, so they put a figurehead in place that would allow them to continue sacking the country.
Far from me to defend the regime of the regime of the ahund, but you are painting a way exaggerated picture. I know several Iranians at my university (and speak some Persian to boot), and I can say that:
Just like the driver with seatbelts who gets stuck in a burning car, the man who finds out at the wrong time he is allergic to latex in condoms, or the patient who gets a vaccine develops the disease because the virus in the vaccine batch was not really dead after all.
Not owning a gun makes you safer . You may feel safer with a gun because you think you are in control, just like people feel safer in their cars but not in aeroplanes (even though last year only over 30,000 people died on cars in the US, none in airliners AFAIK).
The whole picture includes you having a gun during a serious depression and killing yourself over a moment of desperation, your children finding the gun the one time you left it loaded, you discovering you are a sleepwalker the day you shoot your wife in your dreams, and that angry dumb person with a gun (who might have been satisfied by robbing you) that turns out to be a faster shot than you are, and leaves you in a pool of blood.
Are you always less safe with a gun? No, in some limited cases it makes sense, such as when going in areas with aggressive wildlife (e.g. polar bears). In some occasions even in normal, civilian life it might be advantageous to have a gun to scare a casual would-be thief. But on average, all things considered, statistics shows that it is a safer decision not to have a gun around.