Animals do not have "rights", at least not in the sense humans do. A human has right to live. A pigeon does not have that right -- if one believes otherwise, one has to prevent pigeons from being killed by predators. The "animal rights" activists agree (I think; I have met a few of those) that it is OK animals to kill each other (which they do all the time anyway) and no "rights violation" happens when a hawk kills a pigeon. However, for some strange reason, animals rights are violated when people kill them -- at least, according to the "animal rights" activists. Go figure...
I am Bulgarian living in Bulgaria right now. I am as happy as any of you about the ditching of ACTA by our government. But! They change their minds twice a day. The position of the other European governments against ACTA, I think, is based (to a certain extent at least) on principles and integrity. Our government is silly, uninformed, clueless and it may easily jump back on the ACTA bandwagon if put under pressure. They were clearly ready to force the ratification of ACTA on the Parliament. What changed their minds was the protest wave -- the government are populist and easily bend before protests. However, they bend easily before anything. So, let's wait and see...
I imagine that animals that can see UV perceive the UV colour as distinct from the other colours. And I suppose that is a function of the brain. Those people that can see UV -- what colour do they perceive, actually?
Nonsense. The so called "revolution" was in fact the coming to power of the red monsters -- the most efficient mass murderers of the XX century. This mad cult had VERY LITTLE popular support at the moment and got the power for two reasons only: 1) they were ruthless fanatics, well disciplined and devoid of human doubts and compassion 2) they were well supported by Germany (try searching online for "Parvus" to find out who organized the transport of Lenin and the other madmen to St Petersburg; without the German assistance, those madmen would have achieved nothing).
The Western powers were quite right in the attempt to remove the madmen from power and restore civilization. Regrettably, they acted without firm determination and let the red monsters establish their empire of evil.
During the Cold War, every single failure of the USSR was due to some external enemy (or internal enemy, being an agent of some external enemy).
Regrettably, the russians have gone back to that silly Cold War mentality. Their own propaganda tells them constantly that they are unique, superior to the others, and surrounded by vile enemies that miss no chance to do harm to russia. Recall that when their submarine Kursk exploded and sank, the first instinctive reaction of the regime and its propaganda was to blame a US sub for colliding with, and thus sinking, Kursk.
The last time I checked, the real cost of solar electricity was several times bigger than the cost of electricity as we pay it. If that is true, this whole industry survives only because it is subsidised, i.e. we all pay for it.
It is hard to estimate the amount of money that is being poured into climatology DUE to the current alarmist hysteria. All sorts of projects from within universities of from NGOs depend crucially on maintaining the alarmist spirit.
Side note: back in the 80ies, the current alarm was not global warming but global cooling. Though I lived at the wrong side of the Iron Curtain some info from the West still managed to leak through the curtain and, yes, the scare of the day was global cooling. End of side note.
Nuclear power is unavoidable if we want to free ourselves from the oil&gas economy (because it makes us dependent on the Arabs, Iran, and Russia, and that is not a good thing). The windmills and solar panels are not an option. The controlled nuclear synthesis is far far away in time. For the near and not so near future, the nuclear fission is the way.
Shoal gas from the America reduces Europe's dependence on Russia and Iran. That is vital for us. It seems that the North Sea gas deposits are getting depleted and Norway is far from able to satisfy Europe's need for gas. Russia is using natural gas as a tool for achieving her political goals. For obvious reasons, Iran is an even less trustworthy supplier.
For the foreseeable future, America's LNG seems to be the way to free ourselves from the energy racketeering, exercised by hostile Asian countries. I hear that Gasprom is already suffering financially largely due to the diversification of Europe's gas import. The USA's LNG hurts them. And that is wonderful.
W.r.t. the whole wikileaks affair, there is one crucial thing I fail to understand. How? How did this these guys (Assange and company) become possessors of that information? What is the mechanism of the leaks? The only explanation I have is that many people at key positions at the Pentagon, CIA, etc. are traitors and leak deliberately info to the so called whistle blowers. Under that premise, it seems to me the most natural course of action for the American authorities is hunt down the traitors, not to whine to Assange not to publish. It should not be too difficult! After all, the info is sent to Assange and company over some physical medium, not by telepathy! How come that after more than an year high profile leaks there are no convictions and trials for treason?
I am not an American and from my perspective the actions of wikileaks are obviously onesided. Even if such leaks were performed against every government in the world it would still be not a fair game since many governments don't give **** about exposure and cannot be embarassed (North Korea, Sudan, etc.). And the current situation is that these leaks are targeted exclusively against the US. I doubt that Assange would have the guts to publish something very damaging against Russia or Iran, in both cases ha can get murdered (think Litvinenko w.r.t. Russia or S. Rushdie w.r.t. Iran; Rushdie did not get murdered but it was close).
Doesn't anybody recall the huge deal about "global cooling" about 20 years ago or so?
I do. Unfortunately, it seems some people desperately need a cause to fight for; the concrete cause is irrelevant, it is the fight that intoxicates them. Global warming, global winter, whatever...
They love to present the EU as the creator of "loony rules" and regulations.
The EU ARE creators of loony rules and regulations. This whole fight-the-global-warming craziness is just that, craziness.
Most likely, there is no human-caused global warming at all, and the EU is fighting windmills here. Europe is facing huge energy hunger, that is evident, but the way out is to build more power stations (preferably, nuclear), not to limit the power of the light bulbs of the diagonal of the plasma TVs.
semi-totalitarian state, i.e. Russia, was a huge mistake. The sooner the West realises the conceptual difference, the better. Losing the ISS is not the biggest possible tragedy - losing the new Cold War is.
The other day I read the specs for Sony Ericsson C702. It claimed having GPS but it turned out the C702 has "GPS capabilities" which means that with the addition of certain software (you pay extra for it) it can---in case you are covered by at least 3 cells---tell you your position by triangulation. That is far from a true GPS. Do you think the Nokia unit has a true GPS or it simply triangulates using the cell transmitters?
Last year I tried Ubuntu and the reason I ditched it and went back to RedHat/Fedora was Gnome. I can't stand Gnome, it is ugly, intrusive and non-configurable. Then I tried Kubuntu but gave up almost immediately on it -- it seems those who say that Kubuntu is Ubuntu's poor cousin have a point.
So, now it's good old Fedora again. Sure, the update system is more primitive than Ubuntu but it has WORKING KDE, which far outweighs all its perceived disadvantages. I wish KDE was the primary environment of Fedora, of course:)
The characters are not displayed in the same way, I cannot paste cyrillic in slashdot, but the difference between the y and the russian u is visible, the tail of the y is rounder.
As someone said, that depends on the font you use. In the fonts I use most of the glyphs are the same pixel for pixel with their visual counterparts. Though they maybe treated differently by the displaying system. I mean the spaces between them may be (very slightly) different.
No, the characters only look the same to a human eye. To a computer they would look quite different:
This is precisely why Cyrillic symbols are not used in DNS. It is possible to have two URLs, one having latin letters only, the other one latin and cyrillic, that look exactly the same in most fonts but are completely different as strings, so if they are resolved by DNS they'd resolve to distinct IP addresses. This is just perfect for phishing attacks: you can't tell whether www.mybank.com is the URL of your bank "MyBank", or it has a Cyrillic "a" and is registered by the attacker, by simply lookong at it. To tell if the URL is genuine one must examine it with hex editor ro something...
They ARE the same. Trust me, I am Bulgarian and we also use the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet was created in the 9th century by Constantine, a Byzantine friar (I dunno if this is the correct term) serving the emperor in Constantinopol. The church name of Constatine was Cyrill, that is where the name of the alphabet came from. At that time, both Rome and Constantinopol were trying to convert the Slavic states to Christianity. The Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. Byzantia, was more flexible than the Catholics: she offered Christianity in the native Slavic languages, while the Catholics insisted on using Latin. The Cyrillic alphabet was introduced precisely for that purpose. It was modified Greek alphabet (Greek was, of course, was the language of the East Roman Empire) with symbols added for those Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalent. Intially it was adopted in Bulgaria and after about a century or two it was adopted by the Russian proto-state -- in contrast to the Russian myths that the Cyrillic alphabet was first introduced in Russia and even invented in Russia.
The initial Cyrillic alphabet looked quite different from what is used today in Russia and Bulgaria; the appearance of the modern Cyrillic alphabet is due to a reform by Tzar Peter I of Russia. Peter I imposed visual style similar to the one of the Roman font.
BTW, the Cyrillic alphabet was not the only creation of Constantine-Cyrill. He had invented another alphabet to be used by the Slavs which was called "glagolitsa" and visually was totally different from the Cyrillic one. This radical design was not very successful, although I've heard it had been used in Croatia until 2-3 centuries ago.
Here is a four-column table of the original Cyrillic alphabet and the Glagolic one ("glagolitsa"). The first column is the name of each letter (yes, each one had a name; if the names are read sequentially they form a saying, quite deep and meaningful at that), the second is the cyrillic glyph, the third is the glagolic glyph, the fourth is the numeric value.
I agree completely. I listened casually to part of the podcast and heard the guy saying that exercises do not contribute to losing weight since exercises make one hungrier.
This is the most stupid and un-true statement I've heard recently. Speaking about myself for instance, several months ago I did some massive renovation of my home which was physically very demanding on me. Did it make me hungrier? Oh, yes. Did I lose weight? Yes, in spite of eating more, I still lost weight. I mean, come on, everyone knows that vigorous exercises contribute to losing weight, as opposed to sedate lifestyle.
All of Americas power needs could be supplied by (for example) covering 100x100 km of the Nevada Desert with PV cells. Why not just bite the bullet and do it?
A quick check at wikipedia tells me that
At present, photovoltaic panels typically convert about 15% of incident sunlight into electricity; therefore, a solar panel in the contiguous United States on average delivers 19 to 56 W/m or 0.45 - 1.35 kWh/m/day Let us say the figure is 2 KWh daily per m^2. Your 100x100 km piece of desert has 10,000,000,000 m^2, thus it makes 2*10^10 GWh daily.
Another quick check with wikipedia tells me that annually the USA consumes 29000 TWh. The figure is for 2005. 29000 TWh is 29,000,000 GWh. The gap between 29,000,000 and 20*365 is substantial. You will need a bigger solar farm by several magnitudes. And you will never build it, it is a pipe dream.
Re: Chenrnobyl and TMI. I dunno about the TMI reactor but I know with certainty that Chernobyl's reactor was type RBMK. RBMK is powerful, runs with uranium that is not very pure (read, cheap) and produces plutonium for the Soviet nuclear weapons. The downside is that RBMK has a positive feedback loop. Google for it if you don't know what it means. No modern reactor has positive feedback loop thus a Chernobyl-type accident is impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Animals do not have "rights", at least not in the sense humans do. A human has right to live. A pigeon does not have that right -- if one believes otherwise, one has to prevent pigeons from being killed by predators. The "animal rights" activists agree (I think; I have met a few of those) that it is OK animals to kill each other (which they do all the time anyway) and no "rights violation" happens when a hawk kills a pigeon. However, for some strange reason, animals rights are violated when people kill them -- at least, according to the "animal rights" activists. Go figure...
I am Bulgarian living in Bulgaria right now. I am as happy as any of you about the ditching of ACTA by our government. But! They change their minds twice a day. The position of the other European governments against ACTA, I think, is based (to a certain extent at least) on principles and integrity. Our government is silly, uninformed, clueless and it may easily jump back on the ACTA bandwagon if put under pressure. They were clearly ready to force the ratification of ACTA on the Parliament. What changed their minds was the protest wave -- the government are populist and easily bend before protests. However, they bend easily before anything. So, let's wait and see...
I imagine that animals that can see UV perceive the UV colour as distinct from the other colours. And I suppose that is a function of the brain. Those people that can see UV -- what colour do they perceive, actually?
The Western powers were quite right in the attempt to remove the madmen from power and restore civilization. Regrettably, they acted without firm determination and let the red monsters establish their empire of evil.
Regrettably, the russians have gone back to that silly Cold War mentality. Their own propaganda tells them constantly that they are unique, superior to the others, and surrounded by vile enemies that miss no chance to do harm to russia. Recall that when their submarine Kursk exploded and sank, the first instinctive reaction of the regime and its propaganda was to blame a US sub for colliding with, and thus sinking, Kursk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon
Given the fact in the article, shouldn't we conclude the Australian aboriginals are, for instance, neanderthals by origin?
The last time I checked, the real cost of solar electricity was several times bigger than the cost of electricity as we pay it. If that is true, this whole industry survives only because it is subsidised, i.e. we all pay for it.
of starvation is not on?
No. This not a body count. This is about a civilisation war we are currently in.
It is hard to estimate the amount of money that is being poured into climatology DUE to the current alarmist hysteria. All sorts of projects from within universities of from NGOs depend crucially on maintaining the alarmist spirit.
Side note: back in the 80ies, the current alarm was not global warming but global cooling. Though I lived at the wrong side of the Iron Curtain some info from the West still managed to leak through the curtain and, yes, the scare of the day was global cooling. End of side note.
Nuclear power is unavoidable if we want to free ourselves from the oil&gas economy (because it makes us dependent on the Arabs, Iran, and Russia, and that is not a good thing). The windmills and solar panels are not an option. The controlled nuclear synthesis is far far away in time. For the near and not so near future, the nuclear fission is the way.
For the foreseeable future, America's LNG seems to be the way to free ourselves from the energy racketeering, exercised by hostile Asian countries. I hear that Gasprom is already suffering financially largely due to the diversification of Europe's gas import. The USA's LNG hurts them. And that is wonderful.
W.r.t. the whole wikileaks affair, there is one crucial thing I fail to understand. How? How did this these guys (Assange and company) become possessors of that information? What is the mechanism of the leaks? The only explanation I have is that many people at key positions at the Pentagon, CIA, etc. are traitors and leak deliberately info to the so called whistle blowers. Under that premise, it seems to me the most natural course of action for the American authorities is hunt down the traitors, not to whine to Assange not to publish. It should not be too difficult! After all, the info is sent to Assange and company over some physical medium, not by telepathy! How come that after more than an year high profile leaks there are no convictions and trials for treason? I am not an American and from my perspective the actions of wikileaks are obviously onesided. Even if such leaks were performed against every government in the world it would still be not a fair game since many governments don't give **** about exposure and cannot be embarassed (North Korea, Sudan, etc.). And the current situation is that these leaks are targeted exclusively against the US. I doubt that Assange would have the guts to publish something very damaging against Russia or Iran, in both cases ha can get murdered (think Litvinenko w.r.t. Russia or S. Rushdie w.r.t. Iran; Rushdie did not get murdered but it was close).
This new environmentalist religion is going too far!
I do. Unfortunately, it seems some people desperately need a cause to fight for; the concrete cause is irrelevant, it is the fight that intoxicates them. Global warming, global winter, whatever...
The EU ARE creators of loony rules and regulations. This whole fight-the-global-warming craziness is just that, craziness. Most likely, there is no human-caused global warming at all, and the EU is fighting windmills here. Europe is facing huge energy hunger, that is evident, but the way out is to build more power stations (preferably, nuclear), not to limit the power of the light bulbs of the diagonal of the plasma TVs.
semi-totalitarian state, i.e. Russia, was a huge mistake. The sooner the West realises the conceptual difference, the better. Losing the ISS is not the biggest possible tragedy - losing the new Cold War is.
Yet another reason to support McCain.
The other day I read the specs for Sony Ericsson C702. It claimed having GPS but it turned out the C702 has "GPS capabilities" which means that with the addition of certain software (you pay extra for it) it can---in case you are covered by at least 3 cells---tell you your position by triangulation. That is far from a true GPS. Do you think the Nokia unit has a true GPS or it simply triangulates using the cell transmitters?
Last year I tried Ubuntu and the reason I ditched it and went back to RedHat/Fedora was Gnome. I can't stand Gnome, it is ugly, intrusive and non-configurable. Then I tried Kubuntu but gave up almost immediately on it -- it seems those who say that Kubuntu is Ubuntu's poor cousin have a point. So, now it's good old Fedora again. Sure, the update system is more primitive than Ubuntu but it has WORKING KDE, which far outweighs all its perceived disadvantages. I wish KDE was the primary environment of Fedora, of course :)
That is not true.
The initial Cyrillic alphabet looked quite different from what is used today in Russia and Bulgaria; the appearance of the modern Cyrillic alphabet is due to a reform by Tzar Peter I of Russia. Peter I imposed visual style similar to the one of the Roman font.
BTW, the Cyrillic alphabet was not the only creation of Constantine-Cyrill. He had invented another alphabet to be used by the Slavs which was called "glagolitsa" and visually was totally different from the Cyrillic one. This radical design was not very successful, although I've heard it had been used in Croatia until 2-3 centuries ago.
Here is a four-column table of the original Cyrillic alphabet and the Glagolic one ("glagolitsa"). The first column is the name of each letter (yes, each one had a name; if the names are read sequentially they form a saying, quite deep and meaningful at that), the second is the cyrillic glyph, the third is the glagolic glyph, the fourth is the numeric value.
This is the most stupid and un-true statement I've heard recently. Speaking about myself for instance, several months ago I did some massive renovation of my home which was physically very demanding on me. Did it make me hungrier? Oh, yes. Did I lose weight? Yes, in spite of eating more, I still lost weight. I mean, come on, everyone knows that vigorous exercises contribute to losing weight, as opposed to sedate lifestyle.
Another quick check with wikipedia tells me that annually the USA consumes 29000 TWh. The figure is for 2005. 29000 TWh is 29,000,000 GWh. The gap between 29,000,000 and 20*365 is substantial. You will need a bigger solar farm by several magnitudes. And you will never build it, it is a pipe dream.
Re: Chenrnobyl and TMI. I dunno about the TMI reactor but I know with certainty that Chernobyl's reactor was type RBMK. RBMK is powerful, runs with uranium that is not very pure (read, cheap) and produces plutonium for the Soviet nuclear weapons. The downside is that RBMK has a positive feedback loop. Google for it if you don't know what it means. No modern reactor has positive feedback loop thus a Chernobyl-type accident is impossible.