I replied too hastily and forgot what is more important: it is urgent to begin getting rid of the natural gas dependence. Currently Europe uses mostly gas for cooking and heating. Can your solar cells supply enough electricity to heat your home on a cold day, to give you hot water and a hot stove? Say, on a cloudy day in the autumn?
if the same amount of subsidies spent in nuclear is spent on solar and wind , there would be no economic contest from any other source,
This can be true for some very sparsely populated, very windy and very sunny country. For a normal European country, neither solar nor wind nor tidal energy will do. Do you have any idea how much energy you need to melt down a ton of steel or to make a ton of cement? Consider the fact that France which is fiercely independent produces more than 70% (for the correct numbers use google, I know it is more than 70%) of its electricity by nuclear power plants. Just in order to minimise their dependence on foreign countries. If they could do it with solar and wind and tidal, they would, believe me.
Well done! Nuclear energy has little alternative at this moment and the near future. I hope more people will start realising that as the energy crisis becomes more severe.
Maybe one day we will have thermonuclear power plants, the nuclear reactors will be obsolete, and we will have abundant energy. I dunno. Right now, however, there is a shortage of energy. We rely too much on natural gas and petroleum. The exporters of those feel their power and twist the arms of the importers. The money made from gas and oil are insane and they are the foundation of too many of the world's tyrants and lunatics-in-power. Cut their revenue streams and they will suffocate.
It seems that making abundant electricity can alleviate that problem at least as far as natural gas is concerned, so we can get rid of the natural gas racketeers (mainly Russia). If we go to hydrogen economy we can liberate ourselves from the petroleum racketeers as well. To have hydrogen-based economy we need a lot of energy. People get excited by the progress in fuel cell technology but rarely ask themselves how hydrogen is to be produced in gigantic quantities.
True, there are risks in nuclear energy production that can't just vanish. But, dammit, nuclear energy has no alternative for the moment.
I would be extremely surprised if that was not the case. Just as I would be surprised if, for instance, the "revitalising" shampoos work, i.e., re-vitalise the hair. Does anyone take advertising seriously?
The deterents posed by the Shield could never, ever stop the amount of weapons Russia has.
True. Even if the shield has, say, 99.7% efficiency, so that only 3 warheads in 1000 pass through it and reach their targets, those 3 in 1000 warheads are sufficient to act as deterrent. And the shield will never have such a high efficiency.
The argument for the shields "They are only for defense", echoes the Iranian defence of their Nuclear Weapons program.
No. The (future) Iranian nuclear weapons are far more versatile. The shield missiles are build very specifically to target other missiles or warheads.
This is all about influence, rather than actual defense
What is all about influence? If you mean Putin's tough talking, yes, he wants to boost his tough-guy image and to create even stronger anti-Western sentiments among the Russians. He is a KGB officer in his heart and Western liberalism and individualism are obnoxious to him.
Putin won't be around forever
Hopefully. However, his successor will most likely be not very different from him.
wrong. The castle moat (nice word, I've never come upon it, thanks) is around your house. Your neighbour considers it a threat -- so the most logical explanation is that he is considering the possibility of breaking into your castle and your attempts to make it more secure frustrates him. This sounds even more likely considering that Eastern Europe was invaded, occupied, and colonised until less than 20 years ago by the former USSR, and the current Russian dictator Putin considers the disintegration of the USSR (and the Soviet colonial system) "the worst disaster of the XX century". The latter is a direct quotation, modulo the wording of the translation.
Decent people intend to place safer locks on their front doors. The thieve is furious and shouts: I'll improve my tools for breaking in so that your newer locks doesn't make you any safer!"
The very fact that the issue is being discussed seriously is shocking.
I dunno if the article is 01.April joke or not, but apparently many people
hold the opinion that an animal species can have human-like rights. Which
is ridiculous, perplexing, and sad at the same time; a tell-tale sign of
decadence.
As many pointed out, rights go together with responsibilities. Can you
hold a chimp responsible for a crime, then? Apparently not. FYI, occasionally chimps kill other
apes (bonobos) and eat them. Do you seriously propose that chimps are
tried and sent to jail for premeditated murder/bonobo-slaughter/cannibalism-of-some-sort ?
Trying to extend what is now human rights to not only apes but all animals
(I can see efforts in that direction) leads automatically to paradoxes: animals
kill each other all the time, that's the way life is. Believing in so called
"animal right to life" implies (in case the person believing in it is consistent
and smart, which is seldom the case) automatically that all the predators and
omnivores are criminals. Furthermore, many (most?) carnivores cannot possibly
survive without eating other animals; so, if the spider kills a fly, it is a criminal,
but if you deny the spider its prey it (the spider) will die, so indirectly you
become a criminal.
Some common sense is needed to stop the non-sense...
1. The missile hitting Gorna Bania was flying from WSW which places it more or less on the right trajectory to hit the Gematronic main antenna at Sofia North.
1. Define WSW
2. It's not about the airport and the house being on the same line, it's about the 10+ km distance between the alleged target (the airport) and the actual target (the house). If they wanted to hit an object at the airport, they'd hit it. And I mean it, not the house in Gorna Banya.
2. After the incident the radar was programmed with an exclusion zones to the west till the end of the war including scheduled "do not scan" periods towards the west. If the reason for the incident was not this, why the f*** was this done?
Assuming the alleged is true, it does not imply they'd tried to hit the radar first. At that time Bulgaria was in one of those rare periods of non-Communist, not pro-Russian (implying pro-Serbian) government. If the allies wanted the radar's modus operandi altered for a good reason, it would have been altered. No need to try to blast or to try to intimidate BG's government. Furthermore, it is clear to anyone with average or above intelligence that the missile in question had an extremely negative propaganda effect. That is, negative w.r.t. NATO's point of view.
3. Besides the Gorna Bania missile there was at least one more HARM firing I know about which did not hit a populated area (somewhere on the South slope of Vitosha AFAIK) and was once again from WSW in the general direction of Sofia Airport. Probably more. Only the Gorna Bania HARM made the news.
Can you give any justification of that claim? Given the powerful anti-NATO, pro-Russian sentiments in Bulgaria's power structures (that was even stronger in 1999) and the vocal media outlets of those scumbags (Trud newspaper, the former 24h/168h newspapers, etc), it is extremely unlikely that one or more missiles, besides the G. Banya one, landed on Bulgarian soil and that propaganda opportunity was missed by the "chengeta". Furthermore, the probability that all those alleged missiles malfunctioned and failed to reach the alleged target at Sofia airport is insignificant. Can you give any explanation why all of them went off-target, two of them with 10+ km each?
Both incidents when missiles hit buildings near Sofia (70km+ outside the Yugoslavian border) were actually firings at the Sofia Airport Gematronic radar system (the same kind some NATO country use).
Bullshit. That was one missile, not two. Furthermore, the missile hit a house in Gorna Banya, which is a suburb of Sofia diametrically opposite of the airport. They were clearly not aiming for the airport. Furthermore, the missile did not explode; it damaged the building only with its mass & velocity. It had found its target, it would have exploded.
The missile in question was type HARM, most probably fired at a Serbian radar installation near the border (the air distance between Sofia and thew border is less than 70km, BTW), the radar probably switched off, the HARM lost its target, deactivated the detonator and continued more-or-less in a straight line into the Gorna Banya house.
Bulgarians consider their country as the original inventor and genuine producer of sour milk, which is called "yogurt" in English. I dunno if that is true or not but in my humble experience, Bulgarian genuine yogurt is much tastier than any alternative I have tasted; those include several North American brands of yogurt that I tried in Canada and a brand of Greek yogurt sold in Canadian Oriental food stores.
Saying that yogurt has live bacteria in it is like saying water has H_2 O molecules: of course it does! Here is a wiki link that describes pretty accurately, to the best of my knowledge, the bacteria species that makes yogurt out of fresh milk.
Dannon's products should be avoided. The worst brand-name yogurt in Bulgaria is theirs. It has the most artificial taste of all the surrogates that are sold as yogurt. If you have tasted the real thing, you will recognise their product as junk food (as long as you are not a junk-food addict:-) ).
As a European, I was very surprised to find out that most houses in Canada and the States are made of woode. Actually, I should have noticed that before, having seen numerous American films. It is so obvious in them the houses are wooden once you pay attention. To me, a house is something made of concrete and bricks.
I am not trying to annoy anyone here with this comment, just sharing an opinion. A house made of wood feels somehow un-solid (and unsafe, given the strictly positive probability of a fire that is always present). Plus, immediately after arriving in Canada (my first encounter with N. America), I was struck by the fact that all houses I visited (I was looking for a room to rent in Victoria, BC, Canada, and visited quite a few houses in my first several days there) had a strong, pungent, "chemical" smell. First I thought it has to be some commonly used cleaning substance. Later I decided that it has to be some chemicals that the wood had been treated with, probably to repel wood-eating insects or to prevent the wood from decaying. Interestingly, after having lived there for months I stopped feeling the smell -- but going back to my homeland for a vacation and then back to Canada, I would be struck by the peculiar smell again.
I realise wooden houses are cheaper and faster to build, but, IMHO, they are a poor substitute for brick-and-concrete ones.
:)
I remember the first time I tried vi, back in 1995. I was being introduced to UNIX (to AIX, in fact) by a friend. Once he told me that THE EDITOR is vi, although, he said, there is something called pico. Soon I did "vi sometextfile" and tried to do some editing to see how vi works, without asking him for help or reading man pages. Then I tried to quit. For a while I was struggling with vi. All of sudden, my friend who was sitting far away from me facing the opposite direction, said "I hear you are using vi".
The other factor is called "dynamic range". Each bit represents around 6 decibels, a unit used with a logarithmic scale to define "loudness".
Why does each bit represent 6 decibels? Is that a
result one can derive somehow, or it was found
experimentally to be the best?
A joke from the past
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 4, Funny
During communism (Bulgaria), we had this joke.
An American and a Soviet athlete competed in
an official event of importance. The American
won. Next day, the newspapers wrote: "The Soviet athlete took the second place, while the American
only got the penultimate one".:)
India was denied cryogenic engine technology(for the heavy satellites it launches(which is currently done by Ariane x) in 1992/3 by Russia because of the dual use potential.
Interesting. Do you have any reference that is
web-accessible?
Further examination of the evidence used to support the word shape model has demonstrated that the case for the word shape model was not as strong as it seemed. The word superiority effect is caused by familiar letter sequences and not word shapes.
Uppercase is faster than lowercase because of practice. Letter shape similarities rather than word shape similarities drive mistakes in the proofreading task. And pseudowords also suffer from decreased reading speed with alternating case text. All of these findings make more sense with the parallel letter recognition model of reading than the word shape model.
Shouldn't that read, "Lowercase is faster than uppercase because of practice"?
Slashdot Mirror
I replied too hastily and forgot what is more important: it is urgent to begin getting rid of the natural gas dependence. Currently Europe uses mostly gas for cooking and heating. Can your solar cells supply enough electricity to heat your home on a cold day, to give you hot water and a hot stove? Say, on a cloudy day in the autumn?
Can you run Belgian industry on solar cells? No? I knew it... :)
sorry, I messed the blockquot tag, the first sentence is to be a quote from the parent
if the same amount of subsidies spent in nuclear is spent on solar and wind , there would be no economic contest from any other source, This can be true for some very sparsely populated, very windy and very sunny country. For a normal European country, neither solar nor wind nor tidal energy will do. Do you have any idea how much energy you need to melt down a ton of steel or to make a ton of cement? Consider the fact that France which is fiercely independent produces more than 70% (for the correct numbers use google, I know it is more than 70%) of its electricity by nuclear power plants. Just in order to minimise their dependence on foreign countries. If they could do it with solar and wind and tidal, they would, believe me.
Maybe one day we will have thermonuclear power plants, the nuclear reactors will be obsolete, and we will have abundant energy. I dunno. Right now, however, there is a shortage of energy. We rely too much on natural gas and petroleum. The exporters of those feel their power and twist the arms of the importers. The money made from gas and oil are insane and they are the foundation of too many of the world's tyrants and lunatics-in-power. Cut their revenue streams and they will suffocate.
It seems that making abundant electricity can alleviate that problem at least as far as natural gas is concerned, so we can get rid of the natural gas racketeers (mainly Russia). If we go to hydrogen economy we can liberate ourselves from the petroleum racketeers as well. To have hydrogen-based economy we need a lot of energy. People get excited by the progress in fuel cell technology but rarely ask themselves how hydrogen is to be produced in gigantic quantities.
True, there are risks in nuclear energy production that can't just vanish. But, dammit, nuclear energy has no alternative for the moment.
I would be extremely surprised if that was not the case. Just as I would be surprised if, for instance, the "revitalising" shampoos work, i.e., re-vitalise the hair. Does anyone take advertising seriously?
wrong. The castle moat (nice word, I've never come upon it, thanks) is around your house. Your neighbour considers it a threat -- so the most logical explanation is that he is considering the possibility of breaking into your castle and your attempts to make it more secure frustrates him. This sounds even more likely considering that Eastern Europe was invaded, occupied, and colonised until less than 20 years ago by the former USSR, and the current Russian dictator Putin considers the disintegration of the USSR (and the Soviet colonial system) "the worst disaster of the XX century". The latter is a direct quotation, modulo the wording of the translation.
Decent people intend to place safer locks on their front doors. The thieve is furious and shouts: I'll improve my tools for breaking in so that your newer locks doesn't make you any safer!"
As many pointed out, rights go together with responsibilities. Can you hold a chimp responsible for a crime, then? Apparently not. FYI, occasionally chimps kill other apes (bonobos) and eat them. Do you seriously propose that chimps are tried and sent to jail for premeditated murder/bonobo-slaughter/cannibalism-of-some-sort ? Trying to extend what is now human rights to not only apes but all animals (I can see efforts in that direction) leads automatically to paradoxes: animals kill each other all the time, that's the way life is. Believing in so called "animal right to life" implies (in case the person believing in it is consistent and smart, which is seldom the case) automatically that all the predators and omnivores are criminals. Furthermore, many (most?) carnivores cannot possibly survive without eating other animals; so, if the spider kills a fly, it is a criminal, but if you deny the spider its prey it (the spider) will die, so indirectly you become a criminal.
Some common sense is needed to stop the non-sense...
2. It's not about the airport and the house being on the same line, it's about the 10+ km distance between the alleged target (the airport) and the actual target (the house). If they wanted to hit an object at the airport, they'd hit it. And I mean it, not the house in Gorna Banya.
Assuming the alleged is true, it does not imply they'd tried to hit the radar first. At that time Bulgaria was in one of those rare periods of non-Communist, not pro-Russian (implying pro-Serbian) government. If the allies wanted the radar's modus operandi altered for a good reason, it would have been altered. No need to try to blast or to try to intimidate BG's government. Furthermore, it is clear to anyone with average or above intelligence that the missile in question had an extremely negative propaganda effect. That is, negative w.r.t. NATO's point of view. Can you give any justification of that claim? Given the powerful anti-NATO, pro-Russian sentiments in Bulgaria's power structures (that was even stronger in 1999) and the vocal media outlets of those scumbags (Trud newspaper, the former 24h/168h newspapers, etc), it is extremely unlikely that one or more missiles, besides the G. Banya one, landed on Bulgarian soil and that propaganda opportunity was missed by the "chengeta". Furthermore, the probability that all those alleged missiles malfunctioned and failed to reach the alleged target at Sofia airport is insignificant. Can you give any explanation why all of them went off-target, two of them with 10+ km each?The missile in question was type HARM, most probably fired at a Serbian radar installation near the border (the air distance between Sofia and thew border is less than 70km, BTW), the radar probably switched off, the HARM lost its target, deactivated the detonator and continued more-or-less in a straight line into the Gorna Banya house.
Saying that yogurt has live bacteria in it is like saying water has H_2 O molecules: of course it does! Here is a wiki link that describes pretty accurately, to the best of my knowledge, the bacteria species that makes yogurt out of fresh milk.
Dannon's products should be avoided. The worst brand-name yogurt in Bulgaria is theirs. It has the most artificial taste of all the surrogates that are sold as yogurt. If you have tasted the real thing, you will recognise their product as junk food (as long as you are not a junk-food addict :-) ).
I am not trying to annoy anyone here with this comment, just sharing an opinion. A house made of wood feels somehow un-solid (and unsafe, given the strictly positive probability of a fire that is always present). Plus, immediately after arriving in Canada (my first encounter with N. America), I was struck by the fact that all houses I visited (I was looking for a room to rent in Victoria, BC, Canada, and visited quite a few houses in my first several days there) had a strong, pungent, "chemical" smell. First I thought it has to be some commonly used cleaning substance. Later I decided that it has to be some chemicals that the wood had been treated with, probably to repel wood-eating insects or to prevent the wood from decaying. Interestingly, after having lived there for months I stopped feeling the smell -- but going back to my homeland for a vacation and then back to Canada, I would be struck by the peculiar smell again.
I realise wooden houses are cheaper and faster to build, but, IMHO, they are a poor substitute for brick-and-concrete ones.
:) I remember the first time I tried vi, back in 1995. I was being introduced to UNIX (to AIX, in fact) by a friend. Once he told me that THE EDITOR is vi, although, he said, there is something called pico. Soon I did "vi sometextfile" and tried to do some editing to see how vi works, without asking him for help or reading man pages. Then I tried to quit. For a while I was struggling with vi. All of sudden, my friend who was sitting far away from me facing the opposite direction, said "I hear you are using vi".
The launch of ST5 happened at last on Wednesday after being postponed several times.
It refused to be installed on Red Hat 9 (qt 3.1) :)
Time to change to Fedora Core 3, I guess
During communism (Bulgaria), we had this joke. An American and a Soviet athlete competed in an official event of importance. The American won. Next day, the newspapers wrote: "The Soviet athlete took the second place, while the American only got the penultimate one". :)
Agreed!
i sme nay-dobri, i sme nay-krasivi! :)
that's sarcasm, of course
H_2O_2 is monopropellant... interesting. It's never late to learn something new.