As I understand it, they're only stable due to a combination of low temperature and high pressure, and it's not until recently that we've been able to bring samples of underwater methane hydrates to the surface at all.
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth. When you can't question beliefs, you can't hold believers accountable and corruption sets in.
This isn't even limited solely to religion; from what I can tell pretty much exactly the same thing happened within radical feminism, except with the unquestionable beliefs coming from within rather than without, rooted in some kind of "universal" experience of womanhood and consciousness raising sessions. Then they encountered women whose experiences and outlooks didn't match their ideology and the nastiness and violence started. Of course because the radfems believed that all women must share their experiences and viewpoints, and that if they didn't they must either be deluded by the Patriarchy or deliberately lying, there was literally no way to reason with them. There still isn't. (It's really quite bizarre and sadly there doesn't seem to be any good critical work dealing with it. An ex-radfem by the name of Trinity who'd also studied cults academically had some interesting thoughts, but I'm not sure she ever properly wrote them up.)
I think it may be a design flaw of some sort in humanity.
Exactly. Apparently, some foods are just plain impossible to get a decent photograph of; for example, lasagna is often rebuilt with styrofoam in place of the pasta sheets because otherwise it just looks like a structureless blob in which you can't see the meat at all.
In the case of the food, I am paying cash in advance at window 1 for what's in the picture on the glass. That's what I should be reasonably able to expect to receive at window 2.
It is - same ingredients, the picture on the glass has just been manipulated to make it easier to see what's actually in the burger.
As far as I know, compatibility mode didn't used to support anything older than IE7. (Yes, there was enough stuff broken between IE7 and IE8 that they needed this feature.) Did they change that at some point?
These drones was designed by defense contractors who cut a lot of corners, though. I wouldn't be surprised if they used an off-the-shelf commercial GPS unit. (Besides, apparently key management for the encrypted military GPS is a pain.)
This isn't actually true. OPEN makes it harder to transfer money to sites that have been ruled "infringing" by a court. It doesn't include capabilities for takedowns, blocks from searches, etc. SOPA, on the other hand, could possibly require deep packet inspection to keep people off infringing sites. Basically, OPEN only goes after commercial infringement, and only does so in a commercial way. I'm OK with that.
That doesn't follow. For example, YouTube is obviously a commercial website, but the people sharing their home videos on it aren't doing anything commercial. In fact, pretty much any non-commercial sharing of content has a commercial step in it somewhere that can be attacked - someone's got to pay for the hosting, the infrastructure required to transfer the data, etc.
Because of course interfering with a murder investigation of a missing schoolgirl in order to get some cheap headlines is exactly the same as reporting on whistleblower claims of dubious conduct by a political party. Right.
It's not a talking point if it killed hundreds of thousands of people.
It's a talking point because the lack of it killed people as a result of flooding, they needed a flood control system of some kind anyway, and it would've been fairly effective as such if they hadn't cut corners on the engineering, had worse flooding than it was designed to protect against, and failed to operate it correctly in the face of that flooding. They also apparently didn't actually manage to evacuate the areas that were meant to be evacuated.
China's handling of natural disasters is... well, you remember the 2008 earthquake, complete with collapsing schools?
The UK nuclear industry has been rather careless at times, especially the military parts of it and especially with nuclear waste. Still, I guess we taught the rest of the world important lessons like "never build an air-cooled nuclear reactor, especially not with a graphite moderator", "don't dump radioactive waste in the sea", and "it's a lot cheaper to track what's going into your nuclear waste storage than to have to figure it out later, unless you're not the one paying the bill"
But doesn't that just give any prostitute the incentive to claim she was being kept as a slave?
Yes it does. The Swedish police managed to prove that 100% of sex workers in the country illegally were victims of sex slavery through pretty much this method. (While proponents of the "Swedish model" claim that being a sex worker there isn't illegal and that only frequenting sex workers is, this is only true for women that have the legal right to work in the country. Women that don't get to look forward to time in prison, followed by being kicked back home with a note to their home government telling them exactly why, and often get their passports cancelled as a result. Alternatively, they can point to their "pimp" and carry on working until the trial concludes, at which point they can quietly go back home without their government being told and try again elsewhere.)
a lot of criminal gangs infiltrated the 'well regulated' prostitution industry in holland.
Which is why sex worker activists generally want decriminalization, not legalization and regulation of the kind that's happened in most countries. The big difference is that decriminalization involves the removal of the criminal offences that stop sex workers from plying their trade, allowing them to do so as they wish. Pretty much of the regulation-based approaches have involved sex workers being forced to work for intermediaries who are meant to keep the industry well-regulated (except the Government only really cares about whether it affects normal people, not about how they treat their employees), have left important subgroups stuck working illegally, or more commonly both.
Sure it's nothing compared to what's needed, but if others company would follow Google's lead it wouldn't be just 11 million in the anti-slavery pot. In South-America the so called modern day slavery is so prevalent in rural areas specially in sugar cane farms and the governments of those countries are pretty much looking the other way.
If I'm reading the announcement correctly, not a penny of Google's money will go to stopping that kind of slavery. It's just not politically popular enough and never has been. Instead, it'll go to stopping sex slavery. There's the small problem of it not actually existing on anything close to the scale claimed, but that's not going to stop the groups they're funding from "rescuing" sex workers that aren't actually slaves by forcibly imprisoning them (at which point a fair few of them will be raped by the police, based on past history). I've no doubt that Furry Girl will have something interesting to say about this soon.
That's nowhere near as fashionable as fighting sex slavery. Of course, I expect a lot of the money is being used to imprison non-slave sex workers, some of whom will inevitably be raped by police officers as a result. That's because the war on sex trafficking has never been about actually stopping sex slavery; it's always really been about the immorality of sex work with the trafficking part used as an excuse, and they don't care if the women involved get hurt. IIRC the anti-trafficking movement has roots in the equally questionable feminist anti-porn movement
Let's reverse the genders. Say it was an woman who wrote a blog about how her ex-boyfriend had a tiny penis, never got her off during sex, and was super into dressing up like a fat goat during sex. Now say she sent a link to all of that to the man's parents, brother, friends, co-workers...
Then we probably wouldn't have had a court ruling stopping her, because women aren't seen as dangerous by the courts in the same way as men...
And to add my own personal experience with restraining orders; once, years and years back, I went with my then girlfriend while she was babysitting a friend's children. It turned out that her friend and her husband were having relationship difficulty and she had a restraining order against him forbidding him from being within some particular distance of her. So, naturally, her big plans for the evening were to go to where she knew he would be and force him to leave and then follow him around the whole night.
Yeah, the way restraining orders on exs are granted and interpreted seems to be absolutely nuts, based more on ludicrous gender roles than on any real danger. I wouldn't be surprised to see violently abusive women getting restraining orders against their exs, stalking and violently attacking them, and then getting them arrested for breaching the restraining order.
Nuclear power is the only industry that is not permitted to improve, it must be perfect from day one. FYI, hydro has killed more people than multiples of all other power generation methods combined. It's not even close. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
That's a popular nuclear industry talking point, but it's not really accurate because Banqiao Dam was constructed in part as a flood defense mechanism. They actually ended up essentially rebuilding it a few years later due to catastrophic flooding downstream that couldn't be prevented without it.
It used to be wildly positive (4.7), which allowed running unenriched uranium on a non-heavy-water reactor. Now it's around 0.7, which gives you a lot more room for error.
More precisely, it should be around 0.7 if the reactor is operating correctly. The IAEA's experts seem to be rather nervous about their ability to reliably keep the void coefficient low enough due to a combination of dubious models, limited monitoring and control systems, and poorly trained employees.
It seems that one of the problems with the Russian reactors is similar to that which did MAPLE in - we don't have an accurate way of modelling their behaviour, and in the case of the Russian ones we don't have the ability to monitor them in enough detail to spot divergence from the model even in normal operation. Then there's the problem of whether failure modes will be more dangerous than anticipated by the model...
Three Mile Island had a containment building and a generally less hair-raising design than the RBMK reactors, lacking such misfeatures as a highly positive void coefficient of re-activity. This was probably fortunate; I'm not sure quite how serious a Three Mile Island-style incident would've been in an RBMK, but it's unlikely to have been pretty.
The original estimates failed to factor in Chernobyl and a whole bunch of other safety problems waiting to happen. They needed major safety improvements in order to make the reactors even close to safe to run for their intended lifespan, and it appears that even then it was probably a bit questionable as to whether they should have continued to operate them.
As I understand it, the RBMK reactors are already a long way from meeting modern safety standards. They have no containment building, they still have a positive void coefficient, the monitoring and control systems are quite limited despite being upgraded and this can't really be fixed, there appear to be a bunch of single points of failure that can't be fixed either, and so on.
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As I understand it, they're only stable due to a combination of low temperature and high pressure, and it's not until recently that we've been able to bring samples of underwater methane hydrates to the surface at all.
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth. When you can't question beliefs, you can't hold believers accountable and corruption sets in.
This isn't even limited solely to religion; from what I can tell pretty much exactly the same thing happened within radical feminism, except with the unquestionable beliefs coming from within rather than without, rooted in some kind of "universal" experience of womanhood and consciousness raising sessions. Then they encountered women whose experiences and outlooks didn't match their ideology and the nastiness and violence started. Of course because the radfems believed that all women must share their experiences and viewpoints, and that if they didn't they must either be deluded by the Patriarchy or deliberately lying, there was literally no way to reason with them. There still isn't. (It's really quite bizarre and sadly there doesn't seem to be any good critical work dealing with it. An ex-radfem by the name of Trinity who'd also studied cults academically had some interesting thoughts, but I'm not sure she ever properly wrote them up.)
I think it may be a design flaw of some sort in humanity.
To be fair, the British government managed to mess up quite spectacularly too...
Exactly. Apparently, some foods are just plain impossible to get a decent photograph of; for example, lasagna is often rebuilt with styrofoam in place of the pasta sheets because otherwise it just looks like a structureless blob in which you can't see the meat at all.
In the case of the food, I am paying cash in advance at window 1 for what's in the picture on the glass. That's what I should be reasonably able to expect to receive at window 2.
It is - same ingredients, the picture on the glass has just been manipulated to make it easier to see what's actually in the burger.
As far as I know, compatibility mode didn't used to support anything older than IE7. (Yes, there was enough stuff broken between IE7 and IE8 that they needed this feature.) Did they change that at some point?
These drones was designed by defense contractors who cut a lot of corners, though. I wouldn't be surprised if they used an off-the-shelf commercial GPS unit. (Besides, apparently key management for the encrypted military GPS is a pain.)
This isn't actually true. OPEN makes it harder to transfer money to sites that have been ruled "infringing" by a court. It doesn't include capabilities for takedowns, blocks from searches, etc. SOPA, on the other hand, could possibly require deep packet inspection to keep people off infringing sites.
Basically, OPEN only goes after commercial infringement, and only does so in a commercial way. I'm OK with that.
That doesn't follow. For example, YouTube is obviously a commercial website, but the people sharing their home videos on it aren't doing anything commercial. In fact, pretty much any non-commercial sharing of content has a commercial step in it somewhere that can be attacked - someone's got to pay for the hosting, the infrastructure required to transfer the data, etc.
Because of course interfering with a murder investigation of a missing schoolgirl in order to get some cheap headlines is exactly the same as reporting on whistleblower claims of dubious conduct by a political party. Right.
It's not a talking point if it killed hundreds of thousands of people.
It's a talking point because the lack of it killed people as a result of flooding, they needed a flood control system of some kind anyway, and it would've been fairly effective as such if they hadn't cut corners on the engineering, had worse flooding than it was designed to protect against, and failed to operate it correctly in the face of that flooding. They also apparently didn't actually manage to evacuate the areas that were meant to be evacuated.
China's handling of natural disasters is... well, you remember the 2008 earthquake, complete with collapsing schools?
The UK nuclear industry has been rather careless at times, especially the military parts of it and especially with nuclear waste. Still, I guess we taught the rest of the world important lessons like "never build an air-cooled nuclear reactor, especially not with a graphite moderator", "don't dump radioactive waste in the sea", and "it's a lot cheaper to track what's going into your nuclear waste storage than to have to figure it out later, unless you're not the one paying the bill"
But doesn't that just give any prostitute the incentive to claim she was being kept as a slave?
Yes it does. The Swedish police managed to prove that 100% of sex workers in the country illegally were victims of sex slavery through pretty much this method. (While proponents of the "Swedish model" claim that being a sex worker there isn't illegal and that only frequenting sex workers is, this is only true for women that have the legal right to work in the country. Women that don't get to look forward to time in prison, followed by being kicked back home with a note to their home government telling them exactly why, and often get their passports cancelled as a result. Alternatively, they can point to their "pimp" and carry on working until the trial concludes, at which point they can quietly go back home without their government being told and try again elsewhere.)
a lot of criminal gangs infiltrated the 'well regulated' prostitution industry in holland.
Which is why sex worker activists generally want decriminalization, not legalization and regulation of the kind that's happened in most countries. The big difference is that decriminalization involves the removal of the criminal offences that stop sex workers from plying their trade, allowing them to do so as they wish. Pretty much of the regulation-based approaches have involved sex workers being forced to work for intermediaries who are meant to keep the industry well-regulated (except the Government only really cares about whether it affects normal people, not about how they treat their employees), have left important subgroups stuck working illegally, or more commonly both.
Sure it's nothing compared to what's needed, but if others company would follow Google's lead it wouldn't be just 11 million in the anti-slavery pot. In South-America the so called modern day slavery is so prevalent in rural areas specially in sugar cane farms and the governments of those countries are pretty much looking the other way.
If I'm reading the announcement correctly, not a penny of Google's money will go to stopping that kind of slavery. It's just not politically popular enough and never has been. Instead, it'll go to stopping sex slavery. There's the small problem of it not actually existing on anything close to the scale claimed, but that's not going to stop the groups they're funding from "rescuing" sex workers that aren't actually slaves by forcibly imprisoning them (at which point a fair few of them will be raped by the police, based on past history). I've no doubt that Furry Girl will have something interesting to say about this soon.
That's nowhere near as fashionable as fighting sex slavery. Of course, I expect a lot of the money is being used to imprison non-slave sex workers, some of whom will inevitably be raped by police officers as a result. That's because the war on sex trafficking has never been about actually stopping sex slavery; it's always really been about the immorality of sex work with the trafficking part used as an excuse, and they don't care if the women involved get hurt. IIRC the anti-trafficking movement has roots in the equally questionable feminist anti-porn movement
Let's reverse the genders. Say it was an woman who wrote a blog about how her ex-boyfriend had a tiny penis, never got her off during sex, and was super into dressing up like a fat goat during sex. Now say she sent a link to all of that to the man's parents, brother, friends, co-workers...
Then we probably wouldn't have had a court ruling stopping her, because women aren't seen as dangerous by the courts in the same way as men...
And to add my own personal experience with restraining orders; once, years and years back, I went with my then girlfriend while she was babysitting a friend's children. It turned out that her friend and her husband were having relationship difficulty and she had a restraining order against him forbidding him from being within some particular distance of her. So, naturally, her big plans for the evening were to go to where she knew he would be and force him to leave and then follow him around the whole night.
Yeah, the way restraining orders on exs are granted and interpreted seems to be absolutely nuts, based more on ludicrous gender roles than on any real danger. I wouldn't be surprised to see violently abusive women getting restraining orders against their exs, stalking and violently attacking them, and then getting them arrested for breaching the restraining order.
Nuclear power is the only industry that is not permitted to improve, it must be perfect from day one. FYI, hydro has killed more people than multiples of all other power generation methods combined. It's not even close. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
That's a popular nuclear industry talking point, but it's not really accurate because Banqiao Dam was constructed in part as a flood defense mechanism. They actually ended up essentially rebuilding it a few years later due to catastrophic flooding downstream that couldn't be prevented without it.
You offload the core, remove the vessel internals
See, there's your problem. The RBMK reactors are filled with tons of graphite that was not designed to be removable.
It used to be wildly positive (4.7), which allowed running unenriched uranium on a non-heavy-water reactor. Now it's around 0.7, which gives you a lot more room for error.
More precisely, it should be around 0.7 if the reactor is operating correctly. The IAEA's experts seem to be rather nervous about their ability to reliably keep the void coefficient low enough due to a combination of dubious models, limited monitoring and control systems, and poorly trained employees.
The RBMK reactor vessels are full of graphite blocks that can't be removed. As in, carbon.
It seems that one of the problems with the Russian reactors is similar to that which did MAPLE in - we don't have an accurate way of modelling their behaviour, and in the case of the Russian ones we don't have the ability to monitor them in enough detail to spot divergence from the model even in normal operation. Then there's the problem of whether failure modes will be more dangerous than anticipated by the model...
Three Mile Island had a containment building and a generally less hair-raising design than the RBMK reactors, lacking such misfeatures as a highly positive void coefficient of re-activity. This was probably fortunate; I'm not sure quite how serious a Three Mile Island-style incident would've been in an RBMK, but it's unlikely to have been pretty.
The original estimates failed to factor in Chernobyl and a whole bunch of other safety problems waiting to happen. They needed major safety improvements in order to make the reactors even close to safe to run for their intended lifespan, and it appears that even then it was probably a bit questionable as to whether they should have continued to operate them.
As I understand it, the RBMK reactors are already a long way from meeting modern safety standards. They have no containment building, they still have a positive void coefficient, the monitoring and control systems are quite limited despite being upgraded and this can't really be fixed, there appear to be a bunch of single points of failure that can't be fixed either, and so on.