Re: a quadrillion
Heh, best two-numbers-not-equivalent-by-orders-of-magnitude-comparison-today goes to me.
Should have been "about $243,000 per human on the planet"
1205 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2008
> They were specifically authorised and ordered to do what they did.
Well said. Given the info they had, they had no choice and would certainly do it again. I can't criticise them, indeed I feel sorry for them. One guy killed an innocent man and he has to live with that, and the others know they helped. That they were the people who have to do the dirty work doesn't necessarily make them monsters or pschos.
The problem was the info, and I'm not clear what went wrong. Probably it was an avoidable mistake but you know, just occasionally shit happens and knees get bruised and sometimes people get killed. There's no guaranteed safety in this world, live with it.
> Strangely, the many times I've been in the States I've seen nothing more "insular" on their news than in ANY European country
Was it almost too quiet to hear and the picture very dark? Next time turn the television on (hint: press soft, grass-stained nose to the bit next to the red or blue glow).
> 1) Needs to be voluntary. You might be willing to spend $32 on this. Many others would not be. Like, for example, that poor woman in Tanzania who is using a $10 feature phone. So, it must indeed be voluntary
Agreed, it would be unfair to ask such a poor lady to pay extra. You have a good point. How about a westerner who happens to be a scandium dealer? Would it be fair to ask such a person to pay extra? Forsooth, that very question was asked but not answered, I notice.
> 2) It must be efficient.
Easiest way of efficiently solving this problem is letting the war go on, letting people die, be raped, mutilated, enslaved, etc. A human life is as cheap as you want it to be, Tim. It *must indeed* be voluntary or it interferes with trade.
> One was the number used to sell us the program. The other is the real cost.
Not in comparable bloody units it isn't. Either, together, a) overall or b) per unit, the cost, please????? Pref with references to back up your figures. Thank you.
Every article of yours I read manages to put my back up, either by sounding indifferent to the suffering of others or seemingly presenting one side of an argument. And avoiding difficult questions. Or maybe it's just me.
> Great, you do so. Others might not share your views [that one should pay an extra $32 per phone] so why should they have to pay the price premium you are willing to pay?
Yep, there's that indifference again.
Let's try to address that differently. Granted that's an individual choice of whether to care or not just because someone's existence is out of their immediate sphere of detection but is there any harm in trying to move, be it so slightly, the bell curve of decency just a touch to the better? If you say otherwise, may I ask, isn't your article an equal attempt to do the same but for the status quo?
Out of interest, would you pay the extra?
Also out of interest, "electronics industry does have a scheme that does exactly this" would you care to cite? I believe you have mentioned it before but a ref is handy.
As for not answering questions, the first in the forum asks for a ref to the 100,000 suppliers, you didn't reply.
As for presenting one side to an argument, here's your article's tagline: "How much should an ethical phone cost? An extra penny? Or $4bn". The comparison is, if you accept your figures at face value which these days I don't, is that the the nominal extra penny was per phone but the mooted $4B is overall cost, so the comparison is meaningless. But emotive, can't deny that.
Ed was necessary and perhaps perfect for the original unix system. Remember, this was before crts were universal. You had a paper printing terminal (a teleprinter I think they're call, here's one I <http://www.ringbell.co.uk/ukwmo/img/Puma.jpg>). You don't know how neolithic this was until you try using one. *that* sucked, not ed.
TBH I'd rather use ed than learn vi, and I am fond of emacs.
> With all due respect but whatever happened to starting something new by actually taking a little effort yourself?
What about making a little effort at checking out some facts first.
RMS wrote the original emacs and I belive was involved till quite recently <http://developers.slashdot.org/story/08/02/23/1313229/rms-steps-down-as-emacs-maintainer>.
> Stop whining and admit ...
MBZCC
> Obviously very little going...
MBZCC
Oh dear, you're still insisting ...
MBZCC again! Hattrick from plumps, he does it again!
Smashed me into the ground again plumpo, I haven't got such a kicking since last time you ground my face into the grass. Truly you are a sheep with the heart of a lion. Overstating it a bit, perhaps a dog? Well, maybe a goat. Maybe not a goat but something clearly dangerous in skilled hands, like a sharp tool. Hmm, that could so easily and incorrectly interpreted as a cheap double entendre, perhaps more like a grape on the supermarket floor that you step on and so nearly go over? Less a grape, something more dried out, reduced... - a raisin? I think so. More sheep-dropping-ish.
Plumpy, you are the raisin of death. I lift my glass to you.
> Translation = large pile of steaming brown stuff, generated whilst desperately trying to puff up his rep with the sheeple.
Hey ewe, I know you're going to struggle with this due to your inability to comprehend that other people are any more than text in your browser and might even have their own existence with views that (deep breath lambchop, this is going to hurt) aren't the same as yours but you are really pissing people off.
Keep calling people sheeple and I'll take an interest, and I have the time and you are entertainment enough for me to make the effort again.
Now, just to get things going here's my arse and doubtless you can find a plate to present back to me the one upon the other. You know, just like you do every time I pushed you into a corner and had you denying the colour of your own socks just so you could pretend you didn't get it wrong (lovely bit, that, about reading text through envelopes at high speed via the carbon in the ink via x-ray fluorescence. Even the paper you quoted showed you up).
Reminder: you are the biggest, fattest, bleatiest sheep here. And on linkedin, which you aren't a member of because yours is a nom-de-plum.
You partly misunderstand. Yeah, frequency of updates but it's also a *protest* that likely will make the moz devs give a toss if enough people switch.
But if people can't care enough to reduce the frequency of updates by installing a different version of the same browser family, I don't care either.
I feel everyone's pain.
Wait a minute, I don't. I use firefox esr <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/>. This is due for it's annual update soon, though, then will be stable for >1 year.
Ur moaning hurts my ears. Vote with your feet, install esr and be happy, it's really, really not difficult.
> I suspect that in many cases the techniques involved have been lost.
Don't be dumb. These are well documented techniques in dozens of books on amazon et al. 'Lost' my arse. <http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.5.0/gcc/Optimize-Options.html> and look for "strip mining" for a start. Or here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler_optimisation> for a whole Dan Brown temple-worth of lost techniques preserved in the web equivalent of the vatican archives, known to a sacred few who can google. FFS good thing you posted anon.
Your "performance experts" clearly aren't if you know more than them, and wow, a whole gig of data - my works db is approaching 100X that and others here will manage much larger.
> And does anyone actually teach efficient software development anymore?
Not that I'm aware of,nor feel the need for. I believe that past a certain point (beyond apprentice level), it's the individual developer's responsibility to educate themselves further. There are plenty of good books out there, mix that in with a little hand-dirtying and you're doing fine.
> If chip design was handled by 'computer scientists' we'd all be sitting reading this on the worlds shittiest computer,
if you'd replaced 'computer scientists' with 'average programmer' I'd agree. It's the computer scientists who pursue rigour and make the systematic improvements, it's they who design the formal frameworks that are ignored by crappy programmer types. I should say this is partly also a management thing, said managment being 90% crap themselves, and the minority that aren't realise that the 90% of the public is totally willing to accept crap, so guess what's produced.
Like turtles; it's crap all the way down.
or you could politely save them the effort and put up your evidence, showing the 'craft', somewhere public where they and we could review them.
(was going to sign off calling you a nutter, but who knows, I prefer to leave an open mind)
> cost of wind power is something in excess of 30p/unit
ref please?
> but that's OK, [significant additional costs to the rest of the network] doesn't appear anywhere in a way you can directly pin it on the renewables.
Completely unlike the costs (of possible climate change, pollution (see china), very finite supplies of fossil fuels and all that implies) of the alternatives which you and so many others like you fail to pin on fossil.
Come on, do you think the use of fossil fuels don't have consequences, side effects?
(There's nothing wrong with fossil fuels if we used them wisely, but we've pissed away an incredible resource).
Hi plumpo,
> I stated I looked at THE RESULTS
No, what you actually said was "I do not need to know the exact sums used by the Treasury to calculate...". Had you said "I do not need to know anything about the sums used by the Treasury to calculate..." your case might have been stronger.
It happens I foresaw the recent crash (that occurred in 2008) and was warning people somehting economically rough was going to happen - did you? Sometimes the results come long after the initial unwise decision.
> I can see the results [of mass covert electronic interception] in the lack of attacks in the UK compared to other countries.
Maybe. Or maybe not. That one follows another is your assumption, not a proof.
> Please do explain what exactly you think it is that makes us so much more "clean" than those other countries so that no-one would be thinking to attack us?
Actually, I have long had my concerns about terrorism and bio- and nuclear terrorism (bio is more likely). I don't dispute the rather ugly role some branches of islam are performing or the danger they can be. My question, which you don't understand, is, is bugging everyone's e-transactions the most efficacious way of dealing with it? You choose to trust government that it is, and they'll do it right. I and others want the right to decide for ourselves. And you call us sheep...
Incidentally, roll back a couple of hundred years and what what catholics and protestants did to each other. There's nothing special about what islam is currently going through, just that it's happening now. And to repeat, mass covert interception does not strike me as necessarily the most effective thing to counter it.
> I know exactly what your idea of "substantial transparency" would be
Oh? Go on then smarty pants.
> Nope, I'm saying people like you
entire para of MBZCC
> are you suggesting their child doesn't deserve the surgeon's efforts?
Wow, you confuse life-saving surgery surgery and torture. Niiiiiiice one plumpy. At least you answered the question, albeit 2nd time round.
Just a small point, you talk about human nature but you have little understanding of it and seemingly no insight into your own.
@Plump & Bleaty
Remarkably long post, plumps, derailed by your misrepresentation of my clearly stated position, and failure to address my question.
So,
> A simple example is Treasury spending - I do not need to know the exact sums used by the Treasury to calculate
Your words: "the exact sums". Indeed, exact is unnecessary, an approximation is necessary as you tacitly admit (by using the word 'exact'). So you do need information.
> I do not need to know exactly what the SAS, MI5, MI6 or the GCHQ (and by extension, the CIA and NSA) are doing
Again, the word 'exact', implying that you do need enough information to know.
> because we are not seeing the daily bombings and other attacks rampant across many other areas of the World where the terrorists can act more freely.
Prove that without such tapping these events would be daily, and that they are being prevented by mass undeclared surveillance. Oh you can't? Because you don't have the necessary info? So you take it on trust Farmer is doing a good job!
Extra salt lick for Bryant tonight! You've earned it plumps.
> You are attempting to insist that democracy cannot be real democracy unless there is complete transparency, which is obvious horse manure.
Oh, agreed about the horse manure! because I never claimed complete transparency was desirous. You even quoted my exact words. Let me quote your exact quote of my words back at you: "....but my point is that without the relevant information (deriving from substantial transparency, not necessarily total transparency but a good in-principle idea of what's occurring), we tautologically cannot know how they are governing and therefore cannot cast an informed vote.....
Read it again pillock.
I said
> suppose the government withheld all information except what it wanted us to know, would that be acceptable to you?
It would appear that your answer is yes, because they already do ("Except that is exactly what they do."), so you admit that we are not being given the information we need and you're happy with that. OK.
Right, now the question you dodged, the one about whether if you endorsed torture you'd be willing to do it yourself. I'll repeat it, broken down into two for ease of comprehension:
* Do you agree that if a person is willing to sanction an action that they (if they are physically capable of it) should be morally willing to perform that action personally?
* If the above is true do you therefore accept that you would be willing to personally torture another person?
It's a simple and important question, please answer it directly without spewing clouds of chaff and attempted misdirection.
@plump 'n bleaty
> Should the idea of how they are governing, be it their foreign or economic policies or lack of transparency...
mmm, but my point is that without the relevant information (deriving from substantial transparency, not necessarily total transparency but a good in-principle idea of what's occurring), we tautologically cannot know how they are governing and therefore cannot cast an informed vote. Your idea of democracy is not something I recognise nor find attractive.
Let's turn it around, plumps, suppose the government withheld all information except what it wanted us to know, would that be acceptable to you? Where is the line drawn, between total transparency and total control of info released to us?
> ".....You endorse torture as well?....." Most definitely. No, seriously [...]
Christ.
Ok, I always feel that if one endorses an action then one should be morally willing to perform that action. Do you agree, if so do you accept that you would personally pull a person's fingernails out and subject them to electrocution designed to cause intolerable pain?
> please do realise that the hysterical, ego-stroking lecture you have in mind ...
More interested in comprehending how far down this path you've gone. I don't expect to change your mind.
Oh we agree here plumps, Farmer has all the power so us sheeple had best suck it up, yes? And you're all behind him.
Strange but plumps just said in another post
"Capitalism and democracy are pretty poor systems but they allow advancement and development and at least attempt at equal opportunities, BECAUSE it takes into account human nature, making them the best compromise yet."
So, plumpywumpy, are you in favour of democracy where we the people hold the government to account with the prerequisite that we know what they're actually doing at all, or not?
> Yeah, but decryption by waterboarding works in minutes!
You endorse torture as well?
> the vast majority of you sheeple
Awww, plumpy, we both agree that you're the biggest, plumpest, bleatiest, obsequious-est sheep around here.
@corestore, @Oliver Jones
It's not a major problem given the number of c compilers out there. Or write your own (in jscript/haskell/lua/pascal/elisp whatever) and bootstrap from that. If supposed professionals can't deal with that, they aren't professionals. Jeez.
> This is the point so many open source nuts simply don't get
We don't get it because we're stupid but you're clever enough to point it out to us. Thanks...
> I reckon it's too involved for the average user to fathom out
Yep. A few years ago I started using GPG in thunderbird to a mate in german, out of principle and because he had enough tech understanding to do it (plus germans are security conscious and rather distrustful of governments, traits us brits sadly lack).
Frankly I found it confusing and hard to understand what's going on and I'm not yer average guy in the street.
The crapness of thunderbird didn't help (and I've long ago given up on that capricious buggy POS).
It has to be really easy and my experience at the time was that it wasn't, and I soon stopped using GPG.
Same thought here. It seemed obvious to me that we were going to be facing this soon, and it seemed equally obvious that the two ways to go were probabilistic algorithms on reliable hardware, or bit the bullet and go proper analog where feasible. Both of these have potential major power savings. This third option never occurred to me and it does seem a little weird but I'm sure MIT aren't just pretty faces.
I take it that by 'nobody' he means 'dwellers of the USA' exclusively. This "rest of the world" concept ... so tricky.
"What we are trying to do is, in a random way, find ways of trying to learn if in fact there is a threat that we need to respond to."
And you randomly pissed how much cash and credibility up the wall trying that? Try wandering around the streets randomly punching people in the face. Same effect. You'll deck a terrorist, eventually, 100% guaranteed.
Glad you mentioned squeakNOS, I had a play (download the iso and boot off it, it boots fine in VMware). It's really bloody weird, and strangely powerful though very confusing. Do give it a try (and see if you can find the control to rotate the windows to any angle with a drag - yep, windows don't have to be at right angles in sqeakNOS).
Another to perhaps try is house <http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/>. It's written in haskell. I've not tried it as it wouldn't boot in a VM.
@Tom 13
Full quote is
> And yes, they are tuned to match the past because (drum roll) we can't tuned in to match the future *because it hasn't happened yet*.
Please don't selectively quote sentence parts. I was making the point that we can't tune it using known future parameters because we don't have them, and if we did it would be redundant because (drumroll) the future wouldn't be the future any more!
> If it can only accurately predict the past, not the future it isn't Science.
Agreed, however if you feed a model past information and watch it evolve in a way that matches observed history then you can feel more confident that it has a useful degree of accuracy, and thus you can feed it current results and reasonably expect it to predict the future.That's called science.
I guess modelling isn't your strong point either.
> but leave science to people who understand what it is about
Ok, you're a scientist?
> Aye but it's odd how in other disiplines things can be modeled and tested with representative models.
And the second time, what kind of 'representative' model do you suggest we use for the entire earth? I need to point this out again because you seem to have missed it -- the earth is biggish and we only have one of them.
> They don't need to knock a whole bridge down to show how strong it is or knock a building down to show it will withstand (or not) an earthquake.
Really? That's odd, I thought they do exactly that. Knocking down a house (this took one Google to find) <http://gizmodo.com/giant-shake-table-helps-design-quake-proof-california-h-1139617755>
"Because there is no roof over the shake table, we will be able to use tall cranes and heavy equipment to construct and test full-scale buildings and structures, something that has not been possible before"
and for a bridge, which also took exactly 1 Google to find <http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/4212806>:
"Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno will be conducting tests that simulate a magnitude 8.0 earthquake on a 110-ft. suspension bridge today. Resting on three giant shake tables and hydraulic platforms, the four-span bridge is the largest in the world to be tested at such seismic intensity."
of course, you might argue the bridge is not full-sized (unlike the house), in which case this may give you a small clue to why we do not have a representative model of the earth to test on: it's big. I think I mentioned that before. Twice.
> No, they're tuned to match the _past_
Correct. They are tuned by modifying the parameters, something I don't think you understood. And yes, they are tuned to match the past because (drum roll) we can't tuned in to match the future because it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps you can suggest a way around this?
> This doesn't mean they have _any_ predictive worth (as demonstrated by the inability to predict the halt in warming over the last 15 years).
Another unverified assertion pulled out of your capacious and ever-productive arse. Please do provide a link to this claim.
> If you had the 'evidence' that this is the case would you not release your workings so that they could be reviewed and debated?
Haven't they? Here's a handy link where they discuss the distribution of their raw simulation data <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/02/ipcc-archive/>. Extract: "All of this output [of simulations] is publicly available in the PCMDI IPCC AR4 archive".
That took a couple of minutes of googling, tough isn't it.
> Point me to a single climate model that's been released for general review?
Well here you go: <http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/>. This mentions several and points out the 3 easiest to obtain.
So there's a bunch of rebuttals for you. I guess you're going to ignore them and raise some other objections instead, right?
Not facing unpleasant possibilities is what is going to cause them to happen, you don't like this so the shutters come down hard.
I really have no time for being trolled by creationist level prats incapable of using a search engine so I will finish this thread here. Enjoy your future; you've earned it.
> Evidence that is well documented, repeatable, reviewable and which hopefully includes some real world experiments
if you can find me a large number of Earths, all exactly in the same state, that we can tweak individual variables upon and allow them to diverge to see what the outcome is, I'm more than happy. As I pointed out above, we don't have this luxury. Same way that you only have one life so one tends not to go round swallowing random substances to find out what happens.
So, I may be wrong then maybe there's another way -- is there some other way to perform experiments relevant to the earth's entire surface without having a spare earth or nine?
> why has nobody tried to experimentally show the AGW effect in a physical model that emulates real world
I could facetiously say that you haven't noticed the earth is quite large but perhaps you're getting a something else. What kind of physical model would be able to replicate in any meaningful sense half a billion square kilometres of surface, 360 million square kilometres of that being ocean, and having an atmosphere that stretches several score miles upwards? (Figures from wiki <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth>)
> All_ the 'evidence' that CO2 was the driving force for the small amount of warming between 1970 and 2000 is based on changing parameters in models that are based on the way they think they climate system works
how the bloody hell else do you think models are tuned to match reality? By sacrificing a score of virgin hamsters? Seriously wtf do you think these 'parameter' thingies are for?... the only question is whether these climate models are good enough to be useful, not how they are derived. The IPCC suggests they're good enough to be concerned about the real world. Call me a heretic but I'm getting a strong impression that they know more than you.
> It is said that 'the models are based on simple physics'... (your quotes)
well, I've never heard of that quote before, so lets Google it:<https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="the+models+are+based+on+simple+physics"&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8>.
Well! Exactly 1 hit! <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-hoax_b_3072401.html> by a certain Senator Bernie Sanders. Permit me to quote a paragraph or two:
"
It [Senate confirmation hearing] was about global warming. It was about whether or not we are going to listen to the leading scientists of this country who tell us we're facing a planetary crisis.
"
-and-
"
So that is the issue. Do we agree with Senator Inhofe that global warming is a "hoax" and that we do not want the EPA, the Department of Energy or any other agency of the federal government to address that issue? Or do we agree with the overwhelming majority of scientists who tell us that that we must act boldly and aggressively to protect the future of this planet?
"
-and-
"
Ronald Prinn, director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, concluded that what we have heard recently from scientists is that their earlier projections regarding global warming were wrong. That in fact they underestimated the problem and that the conditions that they were worried about will likely be worse than what they had originally thought. "There is significantly more risk than we previously estimated ... [which] increases the urgency for significant policy action."
"
-and-
"
Global warming is real. It is not a hoax. It is a planetary crisis but one that we have the knowledge and technology to address.
"
and just for your interest, the exact phrase you quote appears in the comments section below that article by a guy called j l mcdonald and says (extract):
"
The models are based on simple physics and merely elaborate the details of something you can calculate on a napkin. .../... And, despite your naysaying, the models are rather accurate...
"
you haven't a clue
@Tridac
> there's so much virulent controversy ...It suggests that the issue is far from resolved in scientific terms.
It may, it may also suggest there are a lot of people not willing to face things head-on, for example, by answering questions. For example, my question in my previous post, as an engineer, what kind of hard evidence do you want. I notice this has gone unanswered.
Ditto Destroy All Monsters hasn't replied. Odd.
> I'm all for renewable energy and even started a project for a small heat and power plant (chp) over 15 years ago, but the tco and general economics didn't make sense then and doubt that they would now.
Indeed. Now as I said, if you included all externalities, what with the TCO be?
> with still no conclusive evidence that: we are on the edge of some kind of environmental disaster
FFS, what's wrong with you? Seriously, you *want* conclusive evidence that you are on the edge of some kind of environmental disaster *before* you do anything? What kind of thing do you engineer, I'm only curious for my own safety, you know.
> All the stiudies and controversy seem to suggest that even if there is warming, the signal is so far down in the noise that in engineering terms, it's unrecoverable
funny, but I thought that wasn't the case at all. For example on the IPCC's website they have "Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis" -- Summary for Policymakers. Apparently this is "A total of 209 Lead Authors and 50 Review Editors from 39 countries and more than 600 Contributing Authors from 32 countries contributed to the preparation of Working Group I AR5."
And this bunch say quite a bit in the PDF linked on same page. Since you are unlikely to read the report (despite expecting other people to immerse themselves) let me quote in bullet points:
Page three: "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice had diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased (see figures...)"
Page 4: "ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0-700) warmed from 1971 to 2010 (see figure...), and it is likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971."
Page 5: "over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet had been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence)..."
Page 6: "the rate of sealevel rise since the mid 19th century has been larger than the mean rate during the previous two millennia (high confidence). Over the period 1901-2010, the global mean sealevel rose by 0.19 [0.1720.21] meters"
Page 7: "the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since preindustrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted antigenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification..."
Page 8: "total radiative forcing is positive, and has led to an uptake of energy by the climate system the largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since 1750..."
Page 10: "human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system."
Et bloody cetera. What will you accept as adequately strong evidence that *something* needs to be taken seriously, or is it just "scientists" with their "agendas" as usual.
> I wouldn't take New Scientist too seriously either,
I might agree with you on this. I used to subscribe, let it lapse and don't wish to start again. Nonetheless it's not all degenerate crap and I was suggesting you read the article (browse it in Smiths) and make up your own mind, not subscribe. It was an FYI.
> Science is about questioning everything, especially the things you respect and trust the most
at some point you've got to accept things and work upon them. Questioning everything forever gets you nowhere.
BTW the bit about "especially the things you respect and trust the most" sounds like someone trying to undermine the basis of science. Science is not about distrusting everything, just keeping an open mind.
> Sorry, but the costs of decomissioning and cleanup *have* been included in the costs for the new nuclear station, recently announced
okay, please provide a reference because I am unaware of this.
@Tridac
> rather than strict calls for hard evidence that we are to blame
OK, as an engineer what kind of hard evidence do you want? Bear in mind that we have no multiple earths to experiment on, where does your desired evidence come from?
(small question: do you ever use computer modelling in your work? Just wondering)
> when the truth may be quite different
Indeed it might. Or not.
> You really have to read all the arguments and evidence, deniers and supporters, to get the big picture...
and have a dozen degrees and a ton of scientists to help sift the data. That's what the IPCC is, to save you all that aggro.
BTW New Scientist has an article this very week about the Gaia hypothesis; apparently it doesn't stand up too well <http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029400.400-my-verdict-on-gaia-hypothesis-beautiful-but-flawed.html>.
@DAM
> Unfortunately, economics is the only heuristic you have
And that would be fine with me if it wasn't skewed - did you miss my post pointing this out? And other people's posts about subsidies to non-green energy? Broken heuristic is broken.
> Paying "more" now might well make the difference between ...
... having energy Now, and having energy Now and Later. Perhaps. Maybe. Who cares, eh?
@Thoguht
> And what exactly isn't green about nuclear power?
Depends. I'd be happy with nuclear except I don't believe humans have the capacity for long-term thought and risk evaluation (see my post above about ignoring externalities) that's needed to manage such hugely concentrated and somewhat dangerous energy source.
> all nuclear power does it put it away somewhere we can keep a much closer eye on it.
Either you don't know some facts or do know them and choose to ignore them. Either way you & DAM make my head-in-sand point perfectly.
Extract from my prior post at <http://forums.theregister.co.uk/user/23101/6> replying to DAM (which DAM didn't reply to for some puzzling reason):
"
NII asserts that fire and explosion pose no threat to the HLW tanks. However, reprocessing plants around the world have suffered large and small explosions. A HLW tank exploded in the USSR in 1957. A particular concern at Sellafield is the potential for organic material to be inadvertently transferred from THORP or B205 to B215 via a HLW pipeline. Experience and analysis indicate that this material could enter into an explosive reaction, with an energy yield equivalent to that from 1 tonne of TNT. Such an explosion in an evaporator or tank at B215 could lead to a release from the HLW tanks.
"
and
"
Building B30, colloquially known as dirty thirty, is a pond which was used to store spent fuel from MAGNOX power stations [...] It is impossible to determine exactly how much radioactive waste is stored in B30 [...] There are expected to be about 1.3 tons of plutonium, 400 kg of which are in mud sediments [...] Radiation around the pool can get so high that a person is not allowed to stay more than 2 minutes, seriously affecting decommissioning. The pool is not watertight, time and weather have created cracks in the concrete, letting contaminated water leak.
"
Read the rest at the link.
If only the people who could be injured and killed from stupidity were the ones responsible.
> No, green power is expensive because of something called "physics".
No, green power "is expensive" because of skewed economics: fossil power is relatively cheaper to buy because it
a) is extracted in a way that doesn't reflect it's non-renewable nature (ie. we don't treat it as a very finite resource), and
b) ignores the cost of dumping its waste products (CO2 etc.) in the environment. Just because that's extremely hard to quantify doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I work in a field close to fossil fuels and what I see makes me very worried indeed but not as worried as dumb people who expect the universe to bend to their whim because, by god, they are entitled to cheap energy and will downvote you if you suggest reality doesn't have a warm & comfy niche just for them.
> LOL, just look at The Faithful trying to justify e-crimes by their fellow sheeple by trying to drag the NSA into the thread.
Oh noes, Plump & Bleaty accusing others of being sheeples. Again!
And attempting to trash another thread. Again.
Perhaps the reg can plant a lawn to keep you busy, let the bipeds have their discussions with their silly oversized brains.
Grass coloured icon. Maybe confuse you for a while, get you gnawing at the screen and forget the keyboard.
Actually they can block ad rubbish right now <http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm>. Download the hosts file, unzip it into the right directory and I don't think you even have to restart. Very easy. Will suffice until a proper centralised implementation in the form of squid or other proxy gets done.
Do it on one machine, check it works then apply to others when happy.
"On the technical side, given the probability someone will want to grab violent pr0n"
Or other dodgy stuff, yeah, some controls may be necessary... Anomalous Cowturd's suggestion will work here; Squid has a *very* comprehensive URL/IP whitelist/blacklist management in the form of ACLs (I use them myself as an advert blocklist). However it is not trivial to set up. Perhaps we can provide a weekly update until they grow an admin over there. I might be able to help but squid is not something I mess with daily. Thoughts?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security>. Wouldn't it be nice to just build that directly into the OS and isolate the processes using existing, well-tested, well-understood been-around-for-half-a-century virtual memory.
This would also be lots faster than kicking off a new VM with a 5ms overhead (ie 200 a second - that's got to be much slower than just starting up a new process).
Reminds me of qmail's security model <http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html>. From what I've read, qmail starts an unprivileged per-email processes so if anything gets corrupted, it lives and dies within that process; it can't escape.
If anyone can help, where are the locations of the oxbowing river in the red sandstone, and even more so, the cultivated land with what I'm guessing are long extinct volcanos upon. I'm guessing that countrywise they're in the USA and china (or nearby) respectively but more precision appreciated.
A suggestion to the reg: why not have a reader gallery for photos made personally by them. Not competition, just a showcase. Doesn't have to be restricted by geography, location, scale or subject. Just for the pretty, really.
One of these because it's friday, and I've already started.
@ Russell Clarke
> my reply to the original post was carefully reasoned - I am fairly knowledgeable about history ...
Don't bother mate. careful reasoning and knowledgeability is worth sweet FA to someone to whom reason and knowledge are simply chips in a game of ego that can - MUST! - have only one winner. Honestly, take it somewhere that homo mattbryantus does not dwell, where sentience lives, cos you're not going to find it in the slow-flowing cloaca of certain minds (apologies to noel harrison).