I wonder how many of the people here suggesting that you need to spend more time with the kid have actually raised children themselves. That is: not having a significant other assigned to the children nearly full time. Children do need to learn to entertain themselves, and preferably not with television.
I also have a 2 year old that uses my computer. He can control avatars (both platform games and 3d) with mouse and cursor buttons and he can type a few words (and spell out anything he sees). He's not a child prodigy; I taught him that in the lots of time I spend with him.
He can unfortunately also start it up and shut it down, switch between applications, delete and move files, etc. And he uses my computer while I am not watching. Most important requirement for software for him is that it locks down the keyboard. And I need to remember to put it in sleep mode if I walk away for a moment.
He has never damaged anything physical, so I don't see a need for ruggedness sofar.
Sure, but it makes sense to assume it is a 10W panel. It doesn't have a battery.
Giving this strange rating instead of a watt rating is to make sure that people don't use advertised watt ratings to compare options, but focus on the really important features like the water-resistant, unique fold-up design. It's just consumer psychology.
Surely a court will not buy the argument that they really meant per day.
I was also looking for that. The solargorilla spec does list.5 Ah @ 5V (usb) or 20V (power socket). If I understand things correctly, this means that it delivers 10W in ideal conditions if you use the power socket. Not impressive. I'll pass.
The remarkable thing about the UK house of lords is that it is a representative body that represents something other than the general population. This is nowadays a rarity, even in Europe.
In the US however, also a lot of individual office holders, like the president, are elected. This is less common in Europe.
Here in the Netherlands we elect five representative bodies (European, national, provincial, municipal, and water county), all by proportional vote. A sixth one, the senate, is appointed by the provincial parliaments. With reference to the US system of electors, one could say the senate is indirectly elected.
All relevant individual office holders (ministers, judges, governors, mayors, etc) are appointed by "the Crown". In the end it is obviously the parliament, as the formal legislator, that decides what the procedures for nominating candidates and appointment look like, and whether the appointment is limited to a term. The monarch signs every law and decree, and in that limited sense has a veto over everything.
We recently conducted an experiment with nomination of mayors through a referendum, but this ended tragicly with voter turnout below 30% and the political party that introduced it loosing two thirds of its parliament seats. People are not interested in voting more often and don't take democratic mandates based on a tiny voter turnout seriously. Skeptics will in addition question how an individual can represent a community: the diversity in opinions is immediately lost.
In my view the length of the term (judges until retirement, mayors and governors for 6 years, ministers for 4, etc.), the position of the office in the career path, and the prospects of having one's term automatically extended (mayors and governors can often stay as long as they wish) seem to me most determinative in how "political" an office is here.
The big problem of parliamentarians is that they are ambitious and generally want to end up as either a minister, mayor, or governor, or as a board of directors member or something similar in business. This makes them generally risk averse, easy to influence by lobbyists, and overly loyal to the party. The senate (only veto) on the other hand is usually an endpoint in one's career.
Judges, small town mayors, and the senate easily steal the show with integrity and honesty because they have nothing to fear from the people, from business, and from the party.
The obvious way to make parliament more independent is to make sure it is the endpoint of one's career, but any proposals of that nature would be terribly hard to get through parliament, as parliamentarians, modest as they are, would immediately argue that if parliament were to become an unattractive career choice, it would no longer attract the best people.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with IP theft. The boy has no intellectual ownership claim over the object. He has real property rights.
The court established that the boy was robbed, which means that 1) a good was taken away from the boy, 2) with the intent to disappropriate it, which means therefore 3) the boy enjoyed certain property rights over the object and the intent of the violent act involved him no longer being able to exercise those.
These property rights are of course - as is often the case - limited. The rights can be lawfully taken away by Blizzard, and the object can for instance be lawfully taken away through a mugging inside the virtual world, but it is now established that these rights are indeed real property rights over real goods.
The discussion about illegally copying data (IP theft or theft of valuable/private information in general) is very different: the data is not taken away but duplicated. The theft analogy is often used in this case because the owner of the data can derive various kinds of joy from the fact that he has the information and others don't.
In the early 20th century many people also balked at the idea of electricity being a good that can be taken away. The simple matter of fact is that electricity is objectively valuable, objectively observable (as opposed to one's dignity or one's imaginary clothes), and can be taken away. The virtual amulet also meets these criteria.
It's always good to see courts using common sense.
A final point on the sentence (I am scanning the verdict now): The three boys involved knew eachother well and played together as a team, the victim had recently picked up some very valuable objects and didn't share them with the other two boys, leading to violence and eventually robbery. The child protection council report on the defendants showed no violence, or other reasons for worry. The defendants however failed to understand the gravity of their crime, which was held against them. The punishment is indeed relatively mild.
How much will it cost to relocate costal communities over a 50-100 year timeframe, and how much will it cost so that we won't have to do that. Those are some of the answers I want addressed.
Extrapolating from a tongue-in-cheek proposal for liquidation of our country a few years ago, here in the Netherlands moving the real estate of the two thirds of the population that lives on or below current sea level would cost about 10-15 years of GDP of the country, or six to nine trillion dollars.
That's assuming that land prices will be stable in Western Europe, and Germany doesn't mind too much about the inevitable immigration of some 5-10 million foreigners.
I certainly don't like this scenario, but just keeping increasing the size of our flood defences also comes at a big price. If the difference between land and sea level increases, salinization of the land also does, and ejecting Rhine water into the sea also becomes an expensive proposition since a long stretch of the river will be very significantly below sea level then.
And we will of course have to find out whether for instance the excellent location of Rotterdam (biggest seaport of Europe) on a flat plain in the Rhine delta directly adjacent to deep water really matters for our economic success. Will cargo ships brave the hazards of the shallow waters in front of the new Rhine delta or will they go to other ports? How will the Rhineland in Germany fare is exporting goods becomes much more expensive?
To see what I mean look at this map (from -5m to 10m), which roughly represents the situation without flood defences the Romans were familiar with. As is well known the Romans did their business mostly through ports in northern France, because the shoals in the Rhine delta were too dangerous.
The US is perhaps geographically diverse enough to offset losses of economically important coastline with gained alternative locations, but some smaller countries only lose.
Religion had a firm grip until the Black Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages.
Although kings and dukes were nominal christians since the days of Charlemagne, or earlier in some parts of Europe, the history of the christianization of commoners basically went straight from paganism to heresy. There is no period in between in which the church had a "firm grip" on society and no heresy existed.
In fact the occurrence of heresies *is* the proof of the existence of a firm grip on society. Why be a heretic if not being a christian is also an option? Only in the late 11th century openly not being a christian stopped being a viable option. Of course in other areas this sometimes happened earlier (the Mediterranean, the British Isles) or later (Scandinavia, Russia).
A short review of the early history of christianity here in the Netherlands:
1) The first sources about evangelical work here in the Netherlands details the killing of missionary bishop (and saint) Boniface in 754 by locals because he destroyed their shrine. Also in the following two centuries monks are killed, churches are burned, and pagan shrines are destroyed with regularity. The Netherlands is at that time mostly part of the (nominally christian) Frankish empire. 2) The second bishop mentioned in the Netherlands is Balderic (917-975). In the meantime no organized Christian church appears to exist, just some privately owned churches. 3) In the 11th century the first local parishes are mentioned, and the biography of saint Frederic for the first time mentions the duty to regularly visit a church. Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the so-called "Investiture Controversy" leads to 50 years of civil war in Central Europe and the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. The Papacy wins, and gains in significance, and the true conversion of the hearts and minds of commoners starts. 5) In the early 12th century a first major local heresy is reported in Utrecht: Tanchelm accuses the church of corruption and denies the right of the church to levy taxes, contrasting the clerics of his day to the lives of the apostles (a very common motive in heresies).
What these pagans, christians and heretics share is obviously that they are all "religious" from our point of view: they are not "atheists" or "agnostics". The black plague also didn't lead to the invention of atheism.
Atheism is however a fundamentally christian heresy. No anthropologist would ever seriously ask the question whether a newly discovered tribe in the Amazon rain forest actually believes in "god" or "gods" before ascribing a religion to them. Any proof of a world view that is by our standard "magical" would suffice for labeling them religious.
What matters is religious pluralism, and it is only *since* the 11th century that religious pluralism has been severely limited. Before that, no religion had a "firm grip" on anything. Historical sources about the Roman empire clearly show that religious fashions changed quite regularly, and many people in the classical world would certainly have been classifiable as atheists, if someone would have bothered introducing the concept and asking them about it. Did emperors Augustus and Caligula 1) actually believe in gods, and 2) did they actually believe they were gods? Did god in the classical sense mean the same thing as it means to us?
Going back to old methods of doing work certainly doesn't work. When the car was introduced, its major selling point was that it was so much cleaner, more hygienic, and more economic than the horse it replaced.
I don't buy your calculations though. You comparing efficiencies of a different nature.
Assuming you don'y kill them randomly but based on physical characteristics, the boars probably spend more time than you considering the question of who is next and react accordingly when they see the gun.
Something related: heat exchangers for shower sewers that preheat your water during the shower do actually exist, and are quite efficient.
In my house the involved pipes happen to run parallel vertically for some meters in an easily accessible place, so I looked into it. Catches as I see it are: - It's big copper object, and the price of copper is going up even faster than the price of energy. The earnback time is not good enough and is not getting better. - It's a major obstruction, and will surely clog eventually because of hairs.
Another option I thought about was using the shower water as input to standard castiron radiators in some hallways that have none, which would create less drag. It's a waste of hot water in any case, like heating with the windows open. This is obviously only interesting in a cold climate.
Influential anonymous political pamphets play an important positive role in the democratic history of some countries, but apparently not in Estonia where this MEP comes from. Let's hope that MEPs from countries with a tradition in this area like the UK, France, Netherlands know their history and oppose this.
Regarding the quality mark: there are generally two ways to convince people, being 1) the authority of the writer on the issue (his reputation of fairness and honesty, the knowledge we ascribe to him), and 2) the quality of the argument (proper logical structure, cited evidence). The second way is clearly the royal road, and when you publish anonymously it is the only way you will convince people of anything.
People will of course believe in bullshit argumentation, but only if it is in line with what they already want to believe. Prohibiting it only has the consequence of those people still believing the bullshit and in addition believing that there is a conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Holocaust denial in Europe is a good example: if you treat people who grossly underestimate the number of victims of the holocaust based on selective but otherwise real evidence as criminals this is going to give the impression that the correct number is a political invention that is beyond scientific critique. The belief that there is a conspiracy going on will then be a reason to discount the scientific literature that does confirm millions of victims.
That's about the same price you pay for a single tomato sometimes!
When you add "sometimes" this makes it terribly hard to compare. Here in the Netherlands tomatoes from the farmer go for about 0.70 euro/kilo, or about 0.50 dollar/pound at current exchange rates. Shops will mark them up 50 to 300% here, depending on the shop and the time of the season. Sure they are expensive sometimes, certainly if they have to be transported in from far away.
There is however nearly always at least one vegetable in abundance that goes for 1 euro/kilo or less in the supermarkets. I assume that is true everywhere where agriculture is possible. Just buy the thing that is cheap. In january and february the (traditional winter food) kale is for instance cheap here. There is a mentality change involved here: decide in the supermarket what to buy, and at home how to make a meal out of it. Things available in the same season in the same place often not-coincidentally combine to a traditional dish with a staple food added for the carbs.
Besides that, here in the Netherlands it is possible to make a healthy salad from for instance nettles, dandelion, sorrel, and chives, abundantly available in gardens, parks, along the side of roads, etc. for free a large part of the year. It is easy to get the necessary fibre, vitamin K and C, beta carotene, iron, calcium, etc from local plants, and vitamin D, fat, carbs, and proteins are cheap in the supermarket. Only if you live in the desert you are f*cked.
One could talk about the Dutch, the English, the Italian system and debate the strengths and weaknesses of each, but any system that allows another branch of government to rewrite laws in the middle of the night and to do a switchout like was done in October, 2001 is suspect. And yet in 2004 the American people voted for these people to stay in power. The system is certainly not going to change that way.
I think we in Europe are mostly saved from the worst excesses of political opportunism because most countries, certainly the relatively smaller ones, are quite sensitive to the image they project abroad. A bad reputation has a direct economic impact. The American people have the problem of being responsible for keeping the world's most powerful - and arrogant - government in check. The worst things European governments generally have done over the past decade is following the American lead where they shouldn't have.
I don't think our system (the Dutch one) is any more perfect than the US one. It is for instance formally speaking completely open to exploitation by the monarch who forms and appoints governments (generally consistent with the election outcomes and following the results of party coalition negotiations, but there is no constitutional check at all), and appoints all provincial governors, courts, mayors, civil servants, and soldiers by decree, gives and takes citizenship by decree, and can block all acts of parliament by simply refusing to sign them. And those people appointed by the monarch swear loyalty to the crown, not to the parliament.
This was actually very handy during WWII when the government and queen, but not the parliament, were in exile, and they simply ruled by royal decree. The queen even replaced the government during WWII on her own authority.
But the fact remains that the system works as long as the monarch is 1) sane and 2) feels a responsibility towards ancestors and descendants to pass on the estate undamaged, and doesn't want to provoke an abolition of the monarchy. God help us if we ever get an "after me the deluge"* type like GW Bush as monarch.
* In case you don't know it, this was supposedly once said by Louis XV of France, and it, besides being incredibly arrogant, turned out to be prophetic, as his successor was decapitated during the French revolution.
The other one is "let everyone in who gets a vote", a system Italy had for a long time, leading to dozens of minuscle parties holding a seat or two, with coalitions between so many parties that governments fall apart, on average, after a year (that's pretty much Italy's average).
The Netherlands has no voting threshold whatsoever, and has been pretty stable (even to the point of being extremely dull) over most of its history as a democracy. You need just 0.667% of the votes to get into the 150 seat parliament.
Either system is, in my opinion, doomed to be dissatisfying for the voter. The former because if the parties are too similar (as they are now, to an outsider's view), there is no real choice. The latter because you just know it doesn't matter how you vote, they won't get anything done anyway because no idea gets a majority.
One way to think of it is that compromises must always be made: in winner takes all systems the voter often votes for the lesser evil of the two big similar parties because he knows that the party he really prefers will never be big enough to change anything, in proportional systems the voter has to accept that his preferred party will be ready to make deals with the enemy to get into the coalition. In either case the resulting government never does what you want.
More than one country has a coalition today that can't get anything sensibly done because the coalition partners are unwilling or unable to agree on compromises
This kind of paralysis can obviously also occur inside a big party spanning a broad range of the electoral spectrum. No system is immune to insane voters.
It's a leftover of initial reactions in the media of Britain and the US to the shocking defeat of France in just a few weeks in 1940.
A similar thing happened in the first few days American stwith the Netherlands. While the Dutch army was being ripped apart by the Germans, newspapers in the rest of the world were wildly speculating about fifth columns and the neutral Dutch's unwillingness to really put up a fight (in other words treason).
Even though everyone already knew that the Dutch would be no match for the Germans, public opinion was simply not prepared for a war in which a country could be overrun in a matter of days. Even a lackluster performance should have been able to hold off the enemy for "just a month" in people's minds (with WWI as a frame of reference) to give the French time to deploy.
After the Germans finished off the Dutch, just a few days later the French-Belgian-British defence also started collapsing, and the newspapers shifted their attention to perceived French cowardice and incompetent leadership (treason being a lesser explanation here, since the French weren't neutral).
Since the Germans didn't KO any more formidable powers than France after that, this analysis of events got stuck in people's minds.
The events of 1940 of course clearly show the superiority of Germany over their neighbours, but comparing US performance in later years to the losers of 1940 is really apples and oranges: in the spring of 1940 the US standing army was no larger and hardly better prepared than the mobilized Dutch or Belgian one, and in 1940 all of Europe had just started producing newly designed aircraft and tanks that would have given them the edge over the Germans given a year. It is just distance and a large body of water that makes the difference.
As we are splitting hairs here: Actually only the Dutch military in the continental Netherlands surrendered. Not only was the government relocated to London, the navy and military units in the colonies (notably the Netherlands East Indies) did not surrender to the Germans.
The Dutch stopped playing a notable military role in the spring of 1942 when their navy was nearly annihilated in the Battle of the Java Sea by the Japanese and the Netherlands East Indies was occupied.
After that, the Dutch contribution to the Allied war effort only consisted of Surinamian bauxite for the US aircraft industry and the oil refineries in the Netherlands Antilles. Besides that they made a small token contribution in the form of the Princess Irene Brigade in the liberation of Western Europe.
Because the books are spoiled by all the crap they've influenced.
(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)
Good point. I read LOTR in 1984, and played D&D later. You can think of D&D as a generalization of the LOTR fellowship and the background it is set against to a "universe of fellowships". This trivializes the LOTR fellowship. In Middle Earth Gandalf is for instance a unique and for the readers of those days fundamentally new character, and in D&D he is the mold for the spellcaster in *every* little group. In 1955 an allegorical story about delivering the world from an unspeakable evil was relevant. Today you can save a virtual magical world from an unspeakable evil every weekend. Familiarity with Tolkien's universe and fellowships saving the world fundamentally changes the experience of reading LOTR.
I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.
I on the other hand find for instance the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses lacking in great valor and of little legendary significance. The story is also terribly hard to memorize, which would certainly have made it a dud in the middle ages. And it is yet another ripoff of Homer's work. This is no problem however, since it really isn't an epic story despite the fact that it is modeled on an existing one.
Tolkien was reviving a magical realm from the dawn of (written) history. This is the realm in which the epic poems -- concocted by cultures to connect their known and written history to mythical ancestors and their great deeds -- are set. Most of his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with his universe. There is no place for character development in LOTR. It's not that type of story.
Good modern fantasy very often takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's that is intimately familiar to the readers and focuses more on characters. Still a very "small" story like James Joyce's Ulysses would not work if set in Middle Earth: the story needs a mundane background, just like most of 20th century great literature. Similarly, you cannot simply move for instance WWII literature to Osgiliath without it becoming cheesy.
I wonder how much organic waste we currently just throw in the trash now, which could go for this type of ethanol generation?
Undoubtedly far too little, and collecting it takes a lot of fuel. In the small town were I live (in the Netherlands) we have been separating organic waste and paper, and some other stuff, ford decades now. Collecting the trash still costs money for the municipality, even though generates revenue from selling the waste, and the municipality still doesn't collect its own mowed grass because it would take more energy to collect it and take it to the nearest biomass power plant than it generates. Some existing biomass power plants are doing very well, but only because there is a lot of low hanging fruit around. For ethanol production the same thing applies.
The obvious thing to do with your waste is to heat your own house with it.
The reason why ancient carvings are durable is because they're macroscopic, and hence inherently have lots of built-in redundancy.
Excellent point. Even CD lasts a long time if used properly. Write them with a very low density. Use a drill and make big holes in them. Another solution is to lay out the CDs in the shape of letters and then cover them in 30 feet of sand or something to prevent disruptions.
Classifying people in such a way doesn't make sense. The only thing you can generalise about African Americans is that their skin is black. Grouping them into a sub-culture based on their ethnicity is really stupid, and a testament to the persisting prejudice that runs through the US. This is a perfect example of modern, widely practised, racism. It's also an almost inevitable consequence of centuries of social stratification that almost completely separated black and white people in the US. There are clear differences between the two subcultures, yet both black and white subcultures in the US are as American as apple pie. There is no reason whatsoever to expect that the consequences of social stratification will immediately disappear just because slavery and racism disappear. The cat is gone but the grin lingers on. More recent immigration of people who don't fit that classification, for instance true Africans, has nothing to do with that: they are not part of that history of social stratification, and understandably don't want to be part of it.
The US's situation in this respect should be compared to for instance South American countries or South Africa, not to Denmark. Europe is different. It does not have a history of blacks and whites living together for centuries: coloured people are a post-WWII phenomenon. Europe has to learn to either assimilate these newcomers or to successfully deal with their presence through some form of social stratification. Europe does of course have historical experiences with various forms of social stratification based on ethnicity, religion, and language , and with their negative consequences: The idea that most European countries are largely monocultural is also a relatively modern fiction.
For instance: The historical cause for segregation, and therefore cultural difference, between protestants and catholics here in the Netherlands was a war that ended in 1648, but relations between the two religious factions only started relaxing after WWII. Lesson: Social stratification has a habit of perpetuating itself for no apparent reason until some catastrophe happens. You don't need a constant supply of latent racism to fuel a status quo: it remains the status quo because it is the status quo.
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I wonder how many of the people here suggesting that you need to spend more time with the kid have actually raised children themselves. That is: not having a significant other assigned to the children nearly full time. Children do need to learn to entertain themselves, and preferably not with television.
I also have a 2 year old that uses my computer. He can control avatars (both platform games and 3d) with mouse and cursor buttons and he can type a few words (and spell out anything he sees). He's not a child prodigy; I taught him that in the lots of time I spend with him.
He can unfortunately also start it up and shut it down, switch between applications, delete and move files, etc. And he uses my computer while I am not watching. Most important requirement for software for him is that it locks down the keyboard. And I need to remember to put it in sleep mode if I walk away for a moment.
He has never damaged anything physical, so I don't see a need for ruggedness sofar.
Sure, but it makes sense to assume it is a 10W panel. It doesn't have a battery.
Giving this strange rating instead of a watt rating is to make sure that people don't use advertised watt ratings to compare options, but focus on the really important features like the water-resistant, unique fold-up design. It's just consumer psychology.
Surely a court will not buy the argument that they really meant per day.
I was also looking for that. The solargorilla spec does list .5 Ah @ 5V (usb) or 20V (power socket). If I understand things correctly, this means that it delivers 10W in ideal conditions if you use the power socket. Not impressive. I'll pass.
The remarkable thing about the UK house of lords is that it is a representative body that represents something other than the general population. This is nowadays a rarity, even in Europe.
In the US however, also a lot of individual office holders, like the president, are elected. This is less common in Europe.
Here in the Netherlands we elect five representative bodies (European, national, provincial, municipal, and water county), all by proportional vote. A sixth one, the senate, is appointed by the provincial parliaments. With reference to the US system of electors, one could say the senate is indirectly elected.
All relevant individual office holders (ministers, judges, governors, mayors, etc) are appointed by "the Crown". In the end it is obviously the parliament, as the formal legislator, that decides what the procedures for nominating candidates and appointment look like, and whether the appointment is limited to a term. The monarch signs every law and decree, and in that limited sense has a veto over everything.
We recently conducted an experiment with nomination of mayors through a referendum, but this ended tragicly with voter turnout below 30% and the political party that introduced it loosing two thirds of its parliament seats. People are not interested in voting more often and don't take democratic mandates based on a tiny voter turnout seriously. Skeptics will in addition question how an individual can represent a community: the diversity in opinions is immediately lost.
In my view the length of the term (judges until retirement, mayors and governors for 6 years, ministers for 4, etc.), the position of the office in the career path, and the prospects of having one's term automatically extended (mayors and governors can often stay as long as they wish) seem to me most determinative in how "political" an office is here.
The big problem of parliamentarians is that they are ambitious and generally want to end up as either a minister, mayor, or governor, or as a board of directors member or something similar in business. This makes them generally risk averse, easy to influence by lobbyists, and overly loyal to the party. The senate (only veto) on the other hand is usually an endpoint in one's career.
Judges, small town mayors, and the senate easily steal the show with integrity and honesty because they have nothing to fear from the people, from business, and from the party.
The obvious way to make parliament more independent is to make sure it is the endpoint of one's career, but any proposals of that nature would be terribly hard to get through parliament, as parliamentarians, modest as they are, would immediately argue that if parliament were to become an unattractive career choice, it would no longer attract the best people.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with IP theft. The boy has no intellectual ownership claim over the object. He has real property rights.
The court established that the boy was robbed, which means that 1) a good was taken away from the boy, 2) with the intent to disappropriate it, which means therefore 3) the boy enjoyed certain property rights over the object and the intent of the violent act involved him no longer being able to exercise those.
These property rights are of course - as is often the case - limited. The rights can be lawfully taken away by Blizzard, and the object can for instance be lawfully taken away through a mugging inside the virtual world, but it is now established that these rights are indeed real property rights over real goods.
The discussion about illegally copying data (IP theft or theft of valuable/private information in general) is very different: the data is not taken away but duplicated. The theft analogy is often used in this case because the owner of the data can derive various kinds of joy from the fact that he has the information and others don't.
In the early 20th century many people also balked at the idea of electricity being a good that can be taken away. The simple matter of fact is that electricity is objectively valuable, objectively observable (as opposed to one's dignity or one's imaginary clothes), and can be taken away. The virtual amulet also meets these criteria.
It's always good to see courts using common sense.
A final point on the sentence (I am scanning the verdict now): The three boys involved knew eachother well and played together as a team, the victim had recently picked up some very valuable objects and didn't share them with the other two boys, leading to violence and eventually robbery. The child protection council report on the defendants showed no violence, or other reasons for worry. The defendants however failed to understand the gravity of their crime, which was held against them. The punishment is indeed relatively mild.
How much will it cost to relocate costal communities over a 50-100 year timeframe, and how much will it cost so that we won't have to do that. Those are some of the answers I want addressed.
Extrapolating from a tongue-in-cheek proposal for liquidation of our country a few years ago, here in the Netherlands moving the real estate of the two thirds of the population that lives on or below current sea level would cost about 10-15 years of GDP of the country, or six to nine trillion dollars.
That's assuming that land prices will be stable in Western Europe, and Germany doesn't mind too much about the inevitable immigration of some 5-10 million foreigners.
I certainly don't like this scenario, but just keeping increasing the size of our flood defences also comes at a big price. If the difference between land and sea level increases, salinization of the land also does, and ejecting Rhine water into the sea also becomes an expensive proposition since a long stretch of the river will be very significantly below sea level then.
And we will of course have to find out whether for instance the excellent location of Rotterdam (biggest seaport of Europe) on a flat plain in the Rhine delta directly adjacent to deep water really matters for our economic success. Will cargo ships brave the hazards of the shallow waters in front of the new Rhine delta or will they go to other ports? How will the Rhineland in Germany fare is exporting goods becomes much more expensive?
To see what I mean look at this map (from -5m to 10m), which roughly represents the situation without flood defences the Romans were familiar with. As is well known the Romans did their business mostly through ports in northern France, because the shoals in the Rhine delta were too dangerous.
The US is perhaps geographically diverse enough to offset losses of economically important coastline with gained alternative locations, but some smaller countries only lose.
Religion had a firm grip until the Black Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages.
Although kings and dukes were nominal christians since the days of Charlemagne, or earlier in some parts of Europe, the history of the christianization of commoners basically went straight from paganism to heresy. There is no period in between in which the church had a "firm grip" on society and no heresy existed.
In fact the occurrence of heresies *is* the proof of the existence of a firm grip on society. Why be a heretic if not being a christian is also an option? Only in the late 11th century openly not being a christian stopped being a viable option. Of course in other areas this sometimes happened earlier (the Mediterranean, the British Isles) or later (Scandinavia, Russia).
A short review of the early history of christianity here in the Netherlands:
1) The first sources about evangelical work here in the Netherlands details the killing of missionary bishop (and saint) Boniface in 754 by locals because he destroyed their shrine. Also in the following two centuries monks are killed, churches are burned, and pagan shrines are destroyed with regularity. The Netherlands is at that time mostly part of the (nominally christian) Frankish empire.
2) The second bishop mentioned in the Netherlands is Balderic (917-975). In the meantime no organized Christian church appears to exist, just some privately owned churches.
3) In the 11th century the first local parishes are mentioned, and the biography of saint Frederic for the first time mentions the duty to regularly visit a church. Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the so-called "Investiture Controversy" leads to 50 years of civil war in Central Europe and the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. The Papacy wins, and gains in significance, and the true conversion of the hearts and minds of commoners starts.
5) In the early 12th century a first major local heresy is reported in Utrecht: Tanchelm accuses the church of corruption and denies the right of the church to levy taxes, contrasting the clerics of his day to the lives of the apostles (a very common motive in heresies).
What these pagans, christians and heretics share is obviously that they are all "religious" from our point of view: they are not "atheists" or "agnostics". The black plague also didn't lead to the invention of atheism.
Atheism is however a fundamentally christian heresy. No anthropologist would ever seriously ask the question whether a newly discovered tribe in the Amazon rain forest actually believes in "god" or "gods" before ascribing a religion to them. Any proof of a world view that is by our standard "magical" would suffice for labeling them religious.
What matters is religious pluralism, and it is only *since* the 11th century that religious pluralism has been severely limited. Before that, no religion had a "firm grip" on anything. Historical sources about the Roman empire clearly show that religious fashions changed quite regularly, and many people in the classical world would certainly have been classifiable as atheists, if someone would have bothered introducing the concept and asking them about it. Did emperors Augustus and Caligula 1) actually believe in gods, and 2) did they actually believe they were gods? Did god in the classical sense mean the same thing as it means to us?
Going back to old methods of doing work certainly doesn't work. When the car was introduced, its major selling point was that it was so much cleaner, more hygienic, and more economic than the horse it replaced.
I don't buy your calculations though. You comparing efficiencies of a different nature.
Assuming you don'y kill them randomly but based on physical characteristics, the boars probably spend more time than you considering the question of who is next and react accordingly when they see the gun.
Something related: heat exchangers for shower sewers that preheat your water during the shower do actually exist, and are quite efficient.
In my house the involved pipes happen to run parallel vertically for some meters in an easily accessible place, so I looked into it. Catches as I see it are:
- It's big copper object, and the price of copper is going up even faster than the price of energy. The earnback time is not good enough and is not getting better.
- It's a major obstruction, and will surely clog eventually because of hairs.
Another option I thought about was using the shower water as input to standard castiron radiators in some hallways that have none, which would create less drag. It's a waste of hot water in any case, like heating with the windows open. This is obviously only interesting in a cold climate.
Influential anonymous political pamphets play an important positive role in the democratic history of some countries, but apparently not in Estonia where this MEP comes from. Let's hope that MEPs from countries with a tradition in this area like the UK, France, Netherlands know their history and oppose this.
Regarding the quality mark: there are generally two ways to convince people, being 1) the authority of the writer on the issue (his reputation of fairness and honesty, the knowledge we ascribe to him), and 2) the quality of the argument (proper logical structure, cited evidence). The second way is clearly the royal road, and when you publish anonymously it is the only way you will convince people of anything.
People will of course believe in bullshit argumentation, but only if it is in line with what they already want to believe. Prohibiting it only has the consequence of those people still believing the bullshit and in addition believing that there is a conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Holocaust denial in Europe is a good example: if you treat people who grossly underestimate the number of victims of the holocaust based on selective but otherwise real evidence as criminals this is going to give the impression that the correct number is a political invention that is beyond scientific critique. The belief that there is a conspiracy going on will then be a reason to discount the scientific literature that does confirm millions of victims.
That's about the same price you pay for a single tomato sometimes!
When you add "sometimes" this makes it terribly hard to compare. Here in the Netherlands tomatoes from the farmer go for about 0.70 euro/kilo, or about 0.50 dollar/pound at current exchange rates. Shops will mark them up 50 to 300% here, depending on the shop and the time of the season. Sure they are expensive sometimes, certainly if they have to be transported in from far away.
There is however nearly always at least one vegetable in abundance that goes for 1 euro/kilo or less in the supermarkets. I assume that is true everywhere where agriculture is possible. Just buy the thing that is cheap. In january and february the (traditional winter food) kale is for instance cheap here. There is a mentality change involved here: decide in the supermarket what to buy, and at home how to make a meal out of it. Things available in the same season in the same place often not-coincidentally combine to a traditional dish with a staple food added for the carbs.
Besides that, here in the Netherlands it is possible to make a healthy salad from for instance nettles, dandelion, sorrel, and chives, abundantly available in gardens, parks, along the side of roads, etc. for free a large part of the year. It is easy to get the necessary fibre, vitamin K and C, beta carotene, iron, calcium, etc from local plants, and vitamin D, fat, carbs, and proteins are cheap in the supermarket. Only if you live in the desert you are f*cked.
I think we in Europe are mostly saved from the worst excesses of political opportunism because most countries, certainly the relatively smaller ones, are quite sensitive to the image they project abroad. A bad reputation has a direct economic impact. The American people have the problem of being responsible for keeping the world's most powerful - and arrogant - government in check. The worst things European governments generally have done over the past decade is following the American lead where they shouldn't have.
I don't think our system (the Dutch one) is any more perfect than the US one. It is for instance formally speaking completely open to exploitation by the monarch who forms and appoints governments (generally consistent with the election outcomes and following the results of party coalition negotiations, but there is no constitutional check at all), and appoints all provincial governors, courts, mayors, civil servants, and soldiers by decree, gives and takes citizenship by decree, and can block all acts of parliament by simply refusing to sign them. And those people appointed by the monarch swear loyalty to the crown, not to the parliament.
This was actually very handy during WWII when the government and queen, but not the parliament, were in exile, and they simply ruled by royal decree. The queen even replaced the government during WWII on her own authority.
But the fact remains that the system works as long as the monarch is 1) sane and 2) feels a responsibility towards ancestors and descendants to pass on the estate undamaged, and doesn't want to provoke an abolition of the monarchy. God help us if we ever get an "after me the deluge"* type like GW Bush as monarch.
* In case you don't know it, this was supposedly once said by Louis XV of France, and it, besides being incredibly arrogant, turned out to be prophetic, as his successor was decapitated during the French revolution.
Property Rights are just our backwards rationalization trying to solve complex problems and jusfify ou dominance over others in a world of scarcity,
The sad thing about intellectual property is that it is a monopoly privilege that makes something scarce that by its very nature is not scarce.
The other one is "let everyone in who gets a vote", a system Italy had for a long time, leading to dozens of minuscle parties holding a seat or two, with coalitions between so many parties that governments fall apart, on average, after a year (that's pretty much Italy's average).
The Netherlands has no voting threshold whatsoever, and has been pretty stable (even to the point of being extremely dull) over most of its history as a democracy. You need just 0.667% of the votes to get into the 150 seat parliament.
Either system is, in my opinion, doomed to be dissatisfying for the voter. The former because if the parties are too similar (as they are now, to an outsider's view), there is no real choice. The latter because you just know it doesn't matter how you vote, they won't get anything done anyway because no idea gets a majority.
One way to think of it is that compromises must always be made: in winner takes all systems the voter often votes for the lesser evil of the two big similar parties because he knows that the party he really prefers will never be big enough to change anything, in proportional systems the voter has to accept that his preferred party will be ready to make deals with the enemy to get into the coalition. In either case the resulting government never does what you want.
More than one country has a coalition today that can't get anything sensibly done because the coalition partners are unwilling or unable to agree on compromises
This kind of paralysis can obviously also occur inside a big party spanning a broad range of the electoral spectrum. No system is immune to insane voters.
It's a leftover of initial reactions in the media of Britain and the US to the shocking defeat of France in just a few weeks in 1940.
A similar thing happened in the first few days American stwith the Netherlands. While the Dutch army was being ripped apart by the Germans, newspapers in the rest of the world were wildly speculating about fifth columns and the neutral Dutch's unwillingness to really put up a fight (in other words treason).
Even though everyone already knew that the Dutch would be no match for the Germans, public opinion was simply not prepared for a war in which a country could be overrun in a matter of days. Even a lackluster performance should have been able to hold off the enemy for "just a month" in people's minds (with WWI as a frame of reference) to give the French time to deploy.
After the Germans finished off the Dutch, just a few days later the French-Belgian-British defence also started collapsing, and the newspapers shifted their attention to perceived French cowardice and incompetent leadership (treason being a lesser explanation here, since the French weren't neutral).
Since the Germans didn't KO any more formidable powers than France after that, this analysis of events got stuck in people's minds.
The events of 1940 of course clearly show the superiority of Germany over their neighbours, but comparing US performance in later years to the losers of 1940 is really apples and oranges: in the spring of 1940 the US standing army was no larger and hardly better prepared than the mobilized Dutch or Belgian one, and in 1940 all of Europe had just started producing newly designed aircraft and tanks that would have given them the edge over the Germans given a year. It is just distance and a large body of water that makes the difference.
As we are splitting hairs here: Actually only the Dutch military in the continental Netherlands surrendered. Not only was the government relocated to London, the navy and military units in the colonies (notably the Netherlands East Indies) did not surrender to the Germans.
The Dutch stopped playing a notable military role in the spring of 1942 when their navy was nearly annihilated in the Battle of the Java Sea by the Japanese and the Netherlands East Indies was occupied.
After that, the Dutch contribution to the Allied war effort only consisted of Surinamian bauxite for the US aircraft industry and the oil refineries in the Netherlands Antilles. Besides that they made a small token contribution in the form of the Princess Irene Brigade in the liberation of Western Europe.
It doesn't have to focus on Bilbo.
I am thinking Sauron vs. Predator, Alien, Godzilla, and King Kong.
Because the books are spoiled by all the crap they've influenced.
(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)
Good point. I read LOTR in 1984, and played D&D later. You can think of D&D as a generalization of the LOTR fellowship and the background it is set against to a "universe of fellowships". This trivializes the LOTR fellowship. In Middle Earth Gandalf is for instance a unique and for the readers of those days fundamentally new character, and in D&D he is the mold for the spellcaster in *every* little group. In 1955 an allegorical story about delivering the world from an unspeakable evil was relevant. Today you can save a virtual magical world from an unspeakable evil every weekend. Familiarity with Tolkien's universe and fellowships saving the world fundamentally changes the experience of reading LOTR.
I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.
I on the other hand find for instance the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses lacking in great valor and of little legendary significance. The story is also terribly hard to memorize, which would certainly have made it a dud in the middle ages. And it is yet another ripoff of Homer's work. This is no problem however, since it really isn't an epic story despite the fact that it is modeled on an existing one.
Tolkien was reviving a magical realm from the dawn of (written) history. This is the realm in which the epic poems -- concocted by cultures to connect their known and written history to mythical ancestors and their great deeds -- are set. Most of his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with his universe. There is no place for character development in LOTR. It's not that type of story.
Good modern fantasy very often takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's that is intimately familiar to the readers and focuses more on characters. Still a very "small" story like James Joyce's Ulysses would not work if set in Middle Earth: the story needs a mundane background, just like most of 20th century great literature. Similarly, you cannot simply move for instance WWII literature to Osgiliath without it becoming cheesy.
I wonder how much organic waste we currently just throw in the trash now, which could go for this type of ethanol generation?
Undoubtedly far too little, and collecting it takes a lot of fuel. In the small town were I live (in the Netherlands) we have been separating organic waste and paper, and some other stuff, ford decades now. Collecting the trash still costs money for the municipality, even though generates revenue from selling the waste, and the municipality still doesn't collect its own mowed grass because it would take more energy to collect it and take it to the nearest biomass power plant than it generates. Some existing biomass power plants are doing very well, but only because there is a lot of low hanging fruit around. For ethanol production the same thing applies.
The obvious thing to do with your waste is to heat your own house with it.
The reason why ancient carvings are durable is because they're macroscopic, and hence inherently have lots of built-in redundancy.
Excellent point. Even CD lasts a long time if used properly. Write them with a very low density. Use a drill and make big holes in them. Another solution is to lay out the CDs in the shape of letters and then cover them in 30 feet of sand or something to prevent disruptions.
What's wrong with clay tablets? A writer that etches stone tablets would create a lot of fine dust. Wet clay is easier to handle and cheaper to make.
Lasers class 3 and up are already prohibited in many countries, at least the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
The US's situation in this respect should be compared to for instance South American countries or South Africa, not to Denmark. Europe is different. It does not have a history of blacks and whites living together for centuries: coloured people are a post-WWII phenomenon. Europe has to learn to either assimilate these newcomers or to successfully deal with their presence through some form of social stratification. Europe does of course have historical experiences with various forms of social stratification based on ethnicity, religion, and language , and with their negative consequences: The idea that most European countries are largely monocultural is also a relatively modern fiction.
For instance: The historical cause for segregation, and therefore cultural difference, between protestants and catholics here in the Netherlands was a war that ended in 1648, but relations between the two religious factions only started relaxing after WWII. Lesson: Social stratification has a habit of perpetuating itself for no apparent reason until some catastrophe happens. You don't need a constant supply of latent racism to fuel a status quo: it remains the status quo because it is the status quo.