If the Liberal opposition party would just grow some cajones and call an election, we could dump Harper and his cryptofascist dickwad buddies. I know people - even in Texas^H^H^H^H^HAlberta who are totally sick of these assholes. Yeah, the liberals fucked up, but the PC are so stupid and have such a nasty case of cranio-rectal inversion, they make the NDP look competent. (note: I support NDP and Greens - their time will come when the PC disappears and the Liberals become the conservatives, like in Oz.)
We have all the oil and all the water. I'm looking forward to rescinding NAFTA.
So like, FUCK YOU. Evolution whatever... Where are my glasses? I can't see shit here. Motherfuckers. YEAH!!! MOTHERFUCKERS!!! I want some food. I like money. FUCK YOU!!! It's like all I wanna do is sit in front of the TV and have some bitch suck my cock all day. Yeah yeah - that would fuckin' ROCK! And all that work shit - who cares? Work is for like stupid mexicans and shit. I've more important stuff to do, like watch tonight's episode of "OW MY BALLS!" Yeah. I like Ow My Balls. It's really funny. I think we have opposable thumbs so we can like hold the remote better and open beer cans and stuff.
I grew up in a fuckin trailer 'cuz my parents were fuckin stupid as shit. I used to play with kids like Ricky and Julian. But they went to jail for shoplifting meat and shit like that, and sellin' dope and stuff. Julian's cool - he can like drive a car and drink rum and cokes and shit all day. Ricky's a dick - he's always like going on about how he's smarter than me and shit and that bullshit just fuckin pisses me off. So I moved to the city where life is easier and all I have to do is show up at work and move stuff around on a desk, and I get paid and so I can go home and watch OW MY BALLS and get some chick to suck my cock all day.
And the best part about all this? I get to vote! Not like losers like Julian and Ricky. fuckin jailbirds. HA! losers. HA! Stupid fuckwits! HA! Can't fool me! I got work and I vote! And I watch TV! They say my ancestors like lived in caves and shit - stupid fuckers. Chasing deer and cows and shit all over the place for food. What a bunch of stupids. It's better to like sit at home and watch TV and order pizza. Some fuckin mexican delivers it in less than 30 minutes. HA! Stupid fucker. Workin like that. It's better to do bullshit at some office and make money so I can go home and order pizza and watch OW MY BALLS! Did you see it last week? Man, that was some funny shit.
You don't need nuclear. You just need solar and wind power coupled with vanadium redox batteries. Vanadium is VERY common - almost as common as carbon. You set up huge warehouse sized batteries and charge 'em up. At night or when the wind is low or both, you let the batteries run.
That'll work for a good long while. But in Total Reality we are simply going to have to make OTHER PLANS. We live in a high energy society thanks to fossil fuels. This level of energy consumption is not sustainable, and I would argue, not desirable. We need to adjust our direction of civilisation away from more toys and gadgets to higher quality human interactions and more meaningful labour.
Sorry all you PR saps and admin assistants at hedge funds and nail salon operators. I would recommend you learn something useful, like FARMING. Or dismantling Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Until we slide down that far, though, I would recommend Vanadium redox/solar/wind combo. And DO IT NOW. WHILE WE HAVE THE ENERGY TO SPARE.
People use iPods like hard drives and vice versa. An 80 gig drive costs what - $50 these days? Plenty big for lots of tunes. You bring a drive over to a friend's dorm room and look it over and copy what you want and vice versa. USB2 and / or firewire 800 blow internet connectivity to bits. Why spend hours DLing stuff, especially at school - their routers get saturated and everything slows down anyway. It's faster and easier to find out who has what you want or has interesting tastes and interests, and then just copy from drive to drive.
Silly MAFIAA - trix are for kids!
And the kidz will always be three steps ahead of you. Face it. Your business model is done. Go figure out some other way to make a living.
Here kitty kitty - wanna play a game? No? You want to snooze? OK. So do I, but we have this experiment to do, and oh. I see you're not interested in my experiment. Am I that boring you're just going to sit there and lick your butt? don't you understand THIS IS SCIENCE??? PAY ATTENTION! Oh. FINE! Be that way! Wander off to the kitchen - see if I CARE!!! Oh, and now you want some food. OK. Fine, you furry pest. Here. Eat. but after this, you have to do the experiment, OK??? Fine you're done? OK - hey come back here you! No no no - you're not going to loll about looking cute and stuff at me like that. OK - I'll give you some scritches behind the ear, and on your tummy, but only if you do the experiment. OK - is that good enough? Enough scritches? Now - hey - you can't go to sleep on me! We have work to do!!! OK, fine. I'll just get the dog to do it. He's stupid enough to go along with anything I say...
Dogs think they are stupid little people. Cats think people are big stupid cats.
Back in Spring 2005, my Ti PowerBook's motherboard fried up. I pulled the drive and RAM, and sold the carcass (kbd, screen, etc.) for cheap. I was marginally employed (like, basically, NOT employed) and didn't have enough to buy another Mac, so I decided I'd get a Windoze box until I could afford a Mac.
So, I go to the chain stores, CompUSA included, and was singularly unimpressed with what the had to offer. Also, the staff were a bunch of assholes. Everywhere. The worst were the fuckheads at BestBuy. Good god, what a bunch of contemptuous morons.
dispirited, I decided to go for a drive to the beach (this was in San Francisco). So, I'm cruising along when I drive past this little Mom&Pop type of place that sells computers, and I figured - they can't POSSIBLEY beat the Big Chains on price, but let's see - just for the hell of it.
I left 20 minutes later $900 poorer. Why? Because he said that for $900 he would build me:
3.0 GhZ Intel Pentium4
1 gig RAM
120 gig HD
128 meg ATI video card
1 - DVD +/-R
1 - CDR
Firewire & USB
for $900. In 2005.
After that experience, I never set foot in another computer store for the purpose of purchasing a computer.
I sold the computer in 2006 for $750, and bought a used iBook. I really needed the mobility.
I agree - buy local. Better deals, better service.
They also feel that the authorities need the authority to seize any computers used for infringement and to send copyright cops abroad to help other countries enforce US laws.
Uuuuh, right Wally.
So, let's see, some multibillionaire shitbag in Hollywood wants the US.gov to send agents overseas to persecute people in other countries for dealing with objects according to their own local laws and customs.
And this isn't imperialist fascism?
JH Kunstler noted that when local architecture of the commons is reduced to cartoon houses in the burbs and megamalls, you no longer have places worth caring about. Who ever wept at the demolition of a WalMart? Ad when you get enough places in one country that are not worth caring about, you end up with a nation not worth defending.
There's another kind of architecture, and its the architecture of the mind, and it's called "Media". And when enough of it is such crap that no one cares about it, and it is seen as more of a utility than a creation, then it ceases to be a culture worth defending.
With preposterous laws like this, the USA is working very hard at becoming a nation no longer worth defending. People will simply "Walk Away" from this catastrophe of a country, or, as William S Burroughs put it:
"(Thank you America) for being the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."
RS
If you have ANY SENSE at all, you will get out of the USA as soon as possible. The second wave of mortgage failures will come in March. Once the USA sinks, things will get tough, and legislation like the above will become commonplace, even under a Democratic Administration.
Run. Now. And when you get out, you will see what the rest of the world sees: Those people are fucking crazy.
Even in CA, it's not all that it's cracked up to be.
I used to live in San Francisco, right in the middle, on the west side of Twin Peaks. Moved in in 1998. It took 3 years to get DSL to my house. I moved out in June (got tired of the Empire and moved to Canada) and when I left the FASTEST I could get out of my DSL was 384k. !!!! 384k !!!!
A friend of mine in the Haight only 2 km away had DSL and was getting 1.5m.
There I was: literally in the middle of The High Tech City of America, and I couldn't get better than 384k DSL.
The internet infrastructure in the USA seems as haphazard as the electrical system. FWIW, here in Toronto I get 1.5m and it works pretty well. The modem they gave me is flaky as shit - it needs to be repaired or replaced - but when it works (which is 90% of the time) it works fine.
No, I didn't rush to sarcasm, I simply looked at the facts - like: including Mars Rover team members, and similar people are being expected to adhere to this nonsense. I've dealt with intense security at a job site - heck - at one job (building nuclear missile bases) I had to get the keys to my desk from my boss! So I know about compartmentalisation and similar security issues, so don't give me this "up-close-and-personal" crap.
It's fascism. Pure and simple, ideologically driven fascism. And if you can't see it, then you're just the frog sitting in the boiling water thinking everything's fine, or, more likely, just another dupe, another tool.
Heck, you wouldn't believe the background checks I went through for the FBI. In the end, while maybe not ideal for the potential employee, I find nothing significantly reprehensible about the process.
Hmmmm.
Let's see - Federal Bureau of Investigation. Investigates, what? Oh, CRIME, TERRORISM, stuff like that.
And who? NASA? What are they doing? Just exploring the universe.
Sorry - NASA and the FBI are completely different. What we are seeing is just another aspect of the creeping fascism in American life, and yet another example of why I left the Empire.
And your offhand "Oh, this is no big deal" IDIOCY is just the exact kind of blithe ignorance that enables these fascist creeps in their unending grasp for power.
And it is just that kind of blithe ignorance that forms Yet Another reason why I left the Empire.
There, you will find the source of a bellicose foreign policy. The Clinton Administration had been commiting genocide upon the Iraqi people under the guise of "sanctions". The results were catastrophic. They were also expected, given the disaster that was the first Iraq War. Pres Bush (senior) didn't want to gt rid of Saddam - he knew it would be a quagmire and even wrote an article in TIME magazine saying as much. during the invasion of Iraq 4 years ago, that article was sent to the memoryhole and is no longer available. However, recently, video footage from 1994 surfaced, where (now) VP (then) SecDef Cheney said invading Iraq would be a quagmire. Note: the first gulf war was based on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. However, there is considerable evidience to indicate that he was sucker punched in 1990.
So, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the culmination of a long period of war that had been going on for quite some time. The fundamental reason for ANY concern with Iraq is the fact it is sitting on top of 112 billion barrels of oil. If they had nothing but sandstone under them, no one would give a shit.
RS
please stop with the Ocean Uranium Crap
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First issue is that there is plenty of uranium on this planet to power the world using current tech for a long time. The reason is that even in the oceans there is uranium.
OK - fine. How many parts per million of uranium is there in sea water, eh? Now, take the number of parts of Uranium you will need to run a reactor. Multiple those two numbers, and you will get the volume of water you will need to boil off to get the uranium you need for ONE reactor. Now, take that number and multiply it by the thousands and you will see that the the "Uranium from the Ocean" meme is just a load of impractical bullshit that just makes the pronuclear side come off like a bunch of stupid moonbats. You'd have to process the volume of water the Rhine dumps in a year to get the Uranium for one reactor. Where will all that water vapour go? In the air? And the left over salts? Hmmm? Billions of tons of sea salts, some of it rather toxic? And the results of dumping that much water vapour in the air? Think about that much?
I DO agree that nuclear power should be (actually MUST be) pursued and with great alacrity and precision. I would love to see a plethora of IFR reactors spread all over the place, if we could figure out a way to make thousands of gallons of liquid sodium safe... But please Please PLEASE quit with the "Uranium from Salt Water" crap. It's REALLY embarrassing. With the depletion of petroleum on the imminent horzon, industrial civilisation is going to have a hard enough time survivng the 21st century. We need concrete solutions NOW. I agree that breeders can help, especially in areas that are cold or don't get much sun (like Canada and Russia and the soon to be livable Antarctic) but they will be part and ONLY a part of a more conprehensive energy solution that includes Wind, Solar PV, Thermal Solar, Tides, geothermal, and Hydro.
All of those need to be built up and built up NOW. For the $500B the USA has pissed away in Iraq (and for the $2T it will likely spend there) the USA could have solarised and insulated huge swathes of its urban infrastructure. Instead, they went to go steal oil to drive their Escalades back and forth between their McMansions, WalMart, Work, Church, and School. Brilliant move, tards. Iraq has 112B bbls of oil. If it follows standard extraction trends, and given the competition for it, (i.e., a big chunk of it will go to Europe, Japan, and China) the USA will be LUCKY to get 25% of that oil shipped to the USA. Divide that into the $2T they'll likely spend ruining Iraq, and you're looking at about $97 a barrel surcharge to the American economy for every fucking barrel of Iraqi crude. Good move, Ace.
For the $500B the USA pissed away and the $2T it is likely to piss away, the USA could have funded the plans to build turnkey breeder reactors that run on fucking THORIUM which is an order of magnitude more common than Uranium. But, no. God ferbid the USA ever spend money where it's really needed. If you take $2T and divide it up to every man woman and child in the USA, you get about $6700. A family of 4 would come out to about $26,800 which would be enough to put a pile of PV on the roof of their house in a grid tie to power themselves and much of society with solar power. But, no - it's more important to spend it on destroying Iraq so we can drive our SUVs, and leave the incandescent lights on, and eat salads i nFebruary that were grown in Mexico or Bolivia, and wear clothing made by slave labour in China, and live in houses made out of chipboard, and fly off to winter vacations in ecological nightmares like Las Vegas.
So, yes, we need breeder reactors, desperately. We don't need Las Vegas. We don't need Phoenix. We don't need LA or Bakersfield. And we don't need to hold on to that embarrassing meme about Uranium in sea water.
Why would I spend $3,200 on a Sony Saddled with Vista, when I can get an Asus EeePC for $350 running Linux?
What could POSSIBLY be worth that much more money that a more conventional machine couldn't handle at a fraction of the price? so you get a little extra battery time. Woopty freakin' doo.
It's not like it has some giamungus drive for video editing, or the Special Magic Powers of the MacOS. I don't get who they think they're selling to.
I'm willing to say "I don't get it", but seriously - I don't see a market for this thing. When it's $1200, I suppose, but not $3200.
i know where you're coming from, and I don't necessarily disagree.
The only PRESCRIPTIVE thing I wrote was this:
One can argue that humans are not responsible for the warming - it doesn't matter - the point is we ARE contributing to it, and that must stop ASAP. It's the right and reasonable thing to do.
The facts are essentially simple and utterly irrefutable. CO2 is a Green House Gas (GHG). So is methane. Insofar as people contribute to the production of these gasses, they are contributing to global warming. Simple, period, end of story.
Now: there is mounting (but not conclusive) evidence that industrialism is a significant (note: not sole) cause of the recent warm up of the 20th and now 21st century. This then proceeds under risk assessment and forecasting. To that end, the world has developed The Precautionary Principle, embodied in a variety of international laws. An example would be the UN Earth Summit of 1992, wherein Principle 15 stipulates:
"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their abilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent global environmental degradation."
(emphasis mine)
This really is a crucial and important principle. The reason is fairly straight forward: a reduction in profits or convenience is of little consequence when the repercussions for being wrong are so cataclysmic.
The sad part is, even IF we stopped burning all fossil fuel tomorrow, there is no guarantee that global warming will subside or reverse. This comes under the "Serenity Prayer": God grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to tell the difference. We *can* change our production of GHGs, and given the rapid increases in temperature, it is fairly clear that we're not helping matters. So, GHG production is something we CAN change, and should (given the precautionary principle). If it is ineffective, then we will need a great deal of serenity (and innovation to somehow absorb the clathrates - even just burning them off into CO2 and H2O would be better than raw methane) to deal with the mess to follow.
The Wisdom to know the difference? Comes from a careful judgment of the facts and a distinct set of principles that are weighted to safety.
The record of solar radiation is, I agree, under represented, but that doesn't absolve dumping billions of tons of GHG into the atmosphere, and getting "up in the face" of clathrates. Because, just as you and I would agree that The Sun Is Bigger Than Us, Clathrates are also WAY bigger than us, and they will kill us off.
Look at the Permian DieOff. One of the present leading theories is that the Permian ice ages (which lasted MUCH longer than the Holocene ones we presently live in) locked up a massive amount of clathrates, and it was their melt down that basically killed off 90% of everything.
Again, the precautionary principle is vastly more important than pizza in 30 minutes or less. IT has nothing to do with whether or not global warming is anthrogenic. IT has EVERYTHING to do with not being an idiot.
As for the methane being trapped in tundra, yeah, I can see that happening. But temperatures have been warmer than today even in historic times (going back 10,000 years). Greenland has a triving and growing community before 1000 A.D., but died off because of Global cooling. It seems as though this is merely a return to that climate which existed during the time of Leif Erikson. Please explain to me what is different today than in 800 A.D. in terms of overall temperatures and ground conditions... and why a methane-induced runaway global warming didn't occur then? Were we (or our ancestors from 1000 years ago) simply lucky?
Well... sort of...
The warming during the medieval period was not as hot as it is today. This is a chart that comports with what I have seen elsewhere from reputable sources.
And if you look at THIS you will see that right now we are very close to the highest inter-glacial temperatures. Basically, beyond our present temperature is something that is pre-Holocene. Unfortunately, the tundra and ocean floor, due to the consistently lower temps for the past few million years (punctuated by short periods of warmth) have been storing up the methane like crazy. If present temperature increases continue, and there is presently no reason for them not too, and a lot of research showing that it will, and will increase at a faster rate than ever, it puts the entire biosphere at risk.
One can argue that humans are not responsible for the warming - it doesn't matter - the point is we ARE contributing to it, and that must stop ASAP. It's the right and reasonable thing to do.
Basically Global Warming is a fact. Pure and simple. I don't care who or what you want to blame, but it's happening, so deal.
The problem isn't the cows - although they do fart an enormous amount of methane into the air.
The problem are the clathrates - methane hydrates - that are locked up in the tundra and under the sea. In a nutshell: the tundra has been acting like a giant methane sink for the past several jillion years. If it melts down, and goes quickly, it will release its methane and basically slowly destroy the biosphere. We're talking Permian level extinction event fuck up. The other problem is: the clathrates can't be effectively mined for their methane as a fuel - we're talking millions of km^2 - huge swathes of Siberia and Canada and Alaska, and the methane isn't dense enough to collect. Furthermore, the stuff at the bottom of the ocean is nearly impossible to get at. So, if it goes into the air, the pooch is screwed. From wikipedia:
Methane clathrates are restricted to the shallow lithosphere (i.e.
Now, if this organism can be genetically altered to get happy with low temps and low acidity, then it might be able to spread through the clathrates - but given the depth of the deposits, the low temps, etc. It's Not A Good Thing.
I go to my friend's house with a hard drive and in an hour I have more music than I could download in months of a few hours each evening. Downloading music is so five-minutes-ago. LAN parties are where it's at.
There are so many truly craptacular movies out there, were there any that were truly excremential but MST3K just didn't get to?
I can think of a bunch that would have been killer... Last Year At Marienbad, Tarkovsky's Solaris (heck the remake was even more unwatchable...) the list is long. but what ones were "left on the table"?
Had you read my post, you would not have said all that.
I wrote:
IM is useful in some contexts with some teams,
Note: CONTEXT. Note: SPECIFIC TEAMS.
I'm not completely against IM at work - I've used it plenty for professional reasons - but the notion that email is for "old people" is utterly retarded. As I said: CONTEXT and TEAM makes all the difference.
Reading down, it seems I'll be copying and pasting this multiple times, because it seems the reading skillz here at/. are decreasing by the day.
MOST URL's are pretty short, and if they're not, then they're often mnemonic in some sense. And we can be faced with really long URLs. Example: let's say I'm emailing a friend in a conversation about a song by New Order called Confusion, and I want to email him the google URL, but I don't remember the title offhand, but I remember some of the lyrics.
Frankly, the tiny URL is fine. I'm not worried about the tiny URL going to a page that no longer exists - heck - the web is a very mercurial thing, and pages come and go at the drop of a hat.
Slashdot Mirror
We have all the oil and all the water. I'm looking forward to rescinding NAFTA.
RS
I grew up in a fuckin trailer 'cuz my parents were fuckin stupid as shit. I used to play with kids like Ricky and Julian. But they went to jail for shoplifting meat and shit like that, and sellin' dope and stuff. Julian's cool - he can like drive a car and drink rum and cokes and shit all day. Ricky's a dick - he's always like going on about how he's smarter than me and shit and that bullshit just fuckin pisses me off. So I moved to the city where life is easier and all I have to do is show up at work and move stuff around on a desk, and I get paid and so I can go home and watch OW MY BALLS and get some chick to suck my cock all day.
And the best part about all this? I get to vote! Not like losers like Julian and Ricky. fuckin jailbirds. HA! losers. HA! Stupid fuckwits! HA! Can't fool me! I got work and I vote! And I watch TV! They say my ancestors like lived in caves and shit - stupid fuckers. Chasing deer and cows and shit all over the place for food. What a bunch of stupids. It's better to like sit at home and watch TV and order pizza. Some fuckin mexican delivers it in less than 30 minutes. HA! Stupid fucker. Workin like that. It's better to do bullshit at some office and make money so I can go home and order pizza and watch OW MY BALLS! Did you see it last week? Man, that was some funny shit.
RS
That'll work for a good long while. But in Total Reality we are simply going to have to make OTHER PLANS. We live in a high energy society thanks to fossil fuels. This level of energy consumption is not sustainable, and I would argue, not desirable. We need to adjust our direction of civilisation away from more toys and gadgets to higher quality human interactions and more meaningful labour.
Sorry all you PR saps and admin assistants at hedge funds and nail salon operators. I would recommend you learn something useful, like FARMING. Or dismantling Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Until we slide down that far, though, I would recommend Vanadium redox/solar/wind combo. And DO IT NOW. WHILE WE HAVE THE ENERGY TO SPARE.
RS
Silly MAFIAA - trix are for kids!
And the kidz will always be three steps ahead of you. Face it. Your business model is done. Go figure out some other way to make a living.
RS
Dogs think they are stupid little people. Cats think people are big stupid cats.
Dogs have Masters. Cats have Staff...
RS
So, I go to the chain stores, CompUSA included, and was singularly unimpressed with what the had to offer. Also, the staff were a bunch of assholes. Everywhere. The worst were the fuckheads at BestBuy. Good god, what a bunch of contemptuous morons.
dispirited, I decided to go for a drive to the beach (this was in San Francisco). So, I'm cruising along when I drive past this little Mom&Pop type of place that sells computers, and I figured - they can't POSSIBLEY beat the Big Chains on price, but let's see - just for the hell of it.
I left 20 minutes later $900 poorer. Why? Because he said that for $900 he would build me:
3.0 GhZ Intel Pentium4
1 gig RAM
120 gig HD
128 meg ATI video card
1 - DVD +/-R
1 - CDR
Firewire & USB
for $900. In 2005.
After that experience, I never set foot in another computer store for the purpose of purchasing a computer.
I sold the computer in 2006 for $750, and bought a used iBook. I really needed the mobility.
I agree - buy local. Better deals, better service.
RS
Uuuuh, right Wally.
So, let's see, some multibillionaire shitbag in Hollywood wants the US .gov to send agents overseas to persecute people in other countries for dealing with objects according to their own local laws and customs.
And this isn't imperialist fascism?
JH Kunstler noted that when local architecture of the commons is reduced to cartoon houses in the burbs and megamalls, you no longer have places worth caring about. Who ever wept at the demolition of a WalMart? Ad when you get enough places in one country that are not worth caring about, you end up with a nation not worth defending.
There's another kind of architecture, and its the architecture of the mind, and it's called "Media". And when enough of it is such crap that no one cares about it, and it is seen as more of a utility than a creation, then it ceases to be a culture worth defending.
With preposterous laws like this, the USA is working very hard at becoming a nation no longer worth defending. People will simply "Walk Away" from this catastrophe of a country, or, as William S Burroughs put it:
"(Thank you America) for being the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."
RS
If you have ANY SENSE at all, you will get out of the USA as soon as possible. The second wave of mortgage failures will come in March. Once the USA sinks, things will get tough, and legislation like the above will become commonplace, even under a Democratic Administration.
Run. Now. And when you get out, you will see what the rest of the world sees: Those people are fucking crazy.
HW
RS
I used to live in San Francisco, right in the middle, on the west side of Twin Peaks. Moved in in 1998. It took 3 years to get DSL to my house. I moved out in June (got tired of the Empire and moved to Canada) and when I left the FASTEST I could get out of my DSL was 384k. !!!! 384k !!!!
A friend of mine in the Haight only 2 km away had DSL and was getting 1.5m.
There I was: literally in the middle of The High Tech City of America, and I couldn't get better than 384k DSL.
The internet infrastructure in the USA seems as haphazard as the electrical system. FWIW, here in Toronto I get 1.5m and it works pretty well. The modem they gave me is flaky as shit - it needs to be repaired or replaced - but when it works (which is 90% of the time) it works fine.
RS
It's fascism. Pure and simple, ideologically driven fascism. And if you can't see it, then you're just the frog sitting in the boiling water thinking everything's fine, or, more likely, just another dupe, another tool.
Moron.
RS
Hmmmm.
Let's see - Federal Bureau of Investigation. Investigates, what? Oh, CRIME, TERRORISM, stuff like that.
And who? NASA? What are they doing? Just exploring the universe.
Sorry - NASA and the FBI are completely different. What we are seeing is just another aspect of the creeping fascism in American life, and yet another example of why I left the Empire.
And your offhand "Oh, this is no big deal" IDIOCY is just the exact kind of blithe ignorance that enables these fascist creeps in their unending grasp for power.
And it is just that kind of blithe ignorance that forms Yet Another reason why I left the Empire.
RS
You need to read this document:
There, you will find the source of a bellicose foreign policy. The Clinton Administration had been commiting genocide upon the Iraqi people under the guise of "sanctions". The results were catastrophic. They were also expected, given the disaster that was the first Iraq War. Pres Bush (senior) didn't want to gt rid of Saddam - he knew it would be a quagmire and even wrote an article in TIME magazine saying as much. during the invasion of Iraq 4 years ago, that article was sent to the memoryhole and is no longer available. However, recently, video footage from 1994 surfaced, where (now) VP (then) SecDef Cheney said invading Iraq would be a quagmire. Note: the first gulf war was based on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. However, there is considerable evidience to indicate that he was sucker punched in 1990.
So, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the culmination of a long period of war that had been going on for quite some time. The fundamental reason for ANY concern with Iraq is the fact it is sitting on top of 112 billion barrels of oil. If they had nothing but sandstone under them, no one would give a shit.
RS
OK - fine. How many parts per million of uranium is there in sea water, eh? Now, take the number of parts of Uranium you will need to run a reactor. Multiple those two numbers, and you will get the volume of water you will need to boil off to get the uranium you need for ONE reactor. Now, take that number and multiply it by the thousands and you will see that the the "Uranium from the Ocean" meme is just a load of impractical bullshit that just makes the pronuclear side come off like a bunch of stupid moonbats. You'd have to process the volume of water the Rhine dumps in a year to get the Uranium for one reactor. Where will all that water vapour go? In the air? And the left over salts? Hmmm? Billions of tons of sea salts, some of it rather toxic? And the results of dumping that much water vapour in the air? Think about that much?
I DO agree that nuclear power should be (actually MUST be) pursued and with great alacrity and precision. I would love to see a plethora of IFR reactors spread all over the place, if we could figure out a way to make thousands of gallons of liquid sodium safe... But please Please PLEASE quit with the "Uranium from Salt Water" crap. It's REALLY embarrassing. With the depletion of petroleum on the imminent horzon, industrial civilisation is going to have a hard enough time survivng the 21st century. We need concrete solutions NOW. I agree that breeders can help, especially in areas that are cold or don't get much sun (like Canada and Russia and the soon to be livable Antarctic) but they will be part and ONLY a part of a more conprehensive energy solution that includes Wind, Solar PV, Thermal Solar, Tides, geothermal, and Hydro.
All of those need to be built up and built up NOW. For the $500B the USA has pissed away in Iraq (and for the $2T it will likely spend there) the USA could have solarised and insulated huge swathes of its urban infrastructure. Instead, they went to go steal oil to drive their Escalades back and forth between their McMansions, WalMart, Work, Church, and School. Brilliant move, tards. Iraq has 112B bbls of oil. If it follows standard extraction trends, and given the competition for it, (i.e., a big chunk of it will go to Europe, Japan, and China) the USA will be LUCKY to get 25% of that oil shipped to the USA. Divide that into the $2T they'll likely spend ruining Iraq, and you're looking at about $97 a barrel surcharge to the American economy for every fucking barrel of Iraqi crude. Good move, Ace.
For the $500B the USA pissed away and the $2T it is likely to piss away, the USA could have funded the plans to build turnkey breeder reactors that run on fucking THORIUM which is an order of magnitude more common than Uranium. But, no. God ferbid the USA ever spend money where it's really needed. If you take $2T and divide it up to every man woman and child in the USA, you get about $6700. A family of 4 would come out to about $26,800 which would be enough to put a pile of PV on the roof of their house in a grid tie to power themselves and much of society with solar power. But, no - it's more important to spend it on destroying Iraq so we can drive our SUVs, and leave the incandescent lights on, and eat salads i nFebruary that were grown in Mexico or Bolivia, and wear clothing made by slave labour in China, and live in houses made out of chipboard, and fly off to winter vacations in ecological nightmares like Las Vegas.
So, yes, we need breeder reactors, desperately. We don't need Las Vegas. We don't need Phoenix. We don't need LA or Bakersfield. And we don't need to hold on to that embarrassing meme about Uranium in sea water.
RS
RS
What could POSSIBLY be worth that much more money that a more conventional machine couldn't handle at a fraction of the price? so you get a little extra battery time. Woopty freakin' doo.
It's not like it has some giamungus drive for video editing, or the Special Magic Powers of the MacOS. I don't get who they think they're selling to.
I'm willing to say "I don't get it", but seriously - I don't see a market for this thing. When it's $1200, I suppose, but not $3200.
Now, the Asus is another story...
RS
The only PRESCRIPTIVE thing I wrote was this:
One can argue that humans are not responsible for the warming - it doesn't matter - the point is we ARE contributing to it, and that must stop ASAP. It's the right and reasonable thing to do.
The facts are essentially simple and utterly irrefutable. CO2 is a Green House Gas (GHG). So is methane. Insofar as people contribute to the production of these gasses, they are contributing to global warming. Simple, period, end of story.
Now: there is mounting (but not conclusive) evidence that industrialism is a significant (note: not sole) cause of the recent warm up of the 20th and now 21st century. This then proceeds under risk assessment and forecasting. To that end, the world has developed The Precautionary Principle, embodied in a variety of international laws. An example would be the UN Earth Summit of 1992, wherein Principle 15 stipulates:
"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their abilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent global environmental degradation."
(emphasis mine)
This really is a crucial and important principle. The reason is fairly straight forward: a reduction in profits or convenience is of little consequence when the repercussions for being wrong are so cataclysmic.
The sad part is, even IF we stopped burning all fossil fuel tomorrow, there is no guarantee that global warming will subside or reverse. This comes under the "Serenity Prayer": God grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to tell the difference. We *can* change our production of GHGs, and given the rapid increases in temperature, it is fairly clear that we're not helping matters. So, GHG production is something we CAN change, and should (given the precautionary principle). If it is ineffective, then we will need a great deal of serenity (and innovation to somehow absorb the clathrates - even just burning them off into CO2 and H2O would be better than raw methane) to deal with the mess to follow.
The Wisdom to know the difference? Comes from a careful judgment of the facts and a distinct set of principles that are weighted to safety.
The record of solar radiation is, I agree, under represented, but that doesn't absolve dumping billions of tons of GHG into the atmosphere, and getting "up in the face" of clathrates. Because, just as you and I would agree that The Sun Is Bigger Than Us, Clathrates are also WAY bigger than us, and they will kill us off.
Look at the Permian DieOff. One of the present leading theories is that the Permian ice ages (which lasted MUCH longer than the Holocene ones we presently live in) locked up a massive amount of clathrates, and it was their melt down that basically killed off 90% of everything.
Again, the precautionary principle is vastly more important than pizza in 30 minutes or less. IT has nothing to do with whether or not global warming is anthrogenic. IT has EVERYTHING to do with not being an idiot.
RS
Well... sort of...
The warming during the medieval period was not as hot as it is today. This is a chart that comports with what I have seen elsewhere from reputable sources.
And if you look at THIS you will see that right now we are very close to the highest inter-glacial temperatures. Basically, beyond our present temperature is something that is pre-Holocene. Unfortunately, the tundra and ocean floor, due to the consistently lower temps for the past few million years (punctuated by short periods of warmth) have been storing up the methane like crazy. If present temperature increases continue, and there is presently no reason for them not too, and a lot of research showing that it will, and will increase at a faster rate than ever, it puts the entire biosphere at risk.
One can argue that humans are not responsible for the warming - it doesn't matter - the point is we ARE contributing to it, and that must stop ASAP. It's the right and reasonable thing to do.
RS
The problem isn't the cows - although they do fart an enormous amount of methane into the air.
The problem are the clathrates - methane hydrates - that are locked up in the tundra and under the sea. In a nutshell: the tundra has been acting like a giant methane sink for the past several jillion years. If it melts down, and goes quickly, it will release its methane and basically slowly destroy the biosphere. We're talking Permian level extinction event fuck up. The other problem is: the clathrates can't be effectively mined for their methane as a fuel - we're talking millions of km^2 - huge swathes of Siberia and Canada and Alaska, and the methane isn't dense enough to collect. Furthermore, the stuff at the bottom of the ocean is nearly impossible to get at. So, if it goes into the air, the pooch is screwed. From wikipedia:
Methane clathrates are restricted to the shallow lithosphere (i.e.
Now, if this organism can be genetically altered to get happy with low temps and low acidity, then it might be able to spread through the clathrates - but given the depth of the deposits, the low temps, etc. It's Not A Good Thing.
So we need to keep that genie in its bottle....
RS
RS
I can think of a bunch that would have been killer... Last Year At Marienbad, Tarkovsky's Solaris (heck the remake was even more unwatchable...) the list is long. but what ones were "left on the table"?
RS
She took it and we moved to Canada.
We're happy up here. It's a bit chilly, but nice.
RS
RS
America: stick a fork in her - she's done.
RS
I wrote:
IM is useful in some contexts with some teams,
Note: CONTEXT. Note: SPECIFIC TEAMS.
I'm not completely against IM at work - I've used it plenty for professional reasons - but the notion that email is for "old people" is utterly retarded. As I said: CONTEXT and TEAM makes all the difference.
Reading down, it seems I'll be copying and pasting this multiple times, because it seems the reading skillz here at /. are decreasing by the day.
RS
So instead of emailing him this:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&r ls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=C1m&q=you+just+ can%27t+believe+me+when+I+show+you+what+you+cannot+see&b tnG=Search&meta=
I just dump it into tinyURL with this as the result:
http://tinyurl.com/2sr7kh
Frankly, the tiny URL is fine. I'm not worried about the tiny URL going to a page that no longer exists - heck - the web is a very mercurial thing, and pages come and go at the drop of a hat.
I think TFA is henny penny garbage.
RS