Posts by Psyx 2549 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2010
"....None of this would have been a problem if the lady in question had used a 'handle' that wouldn't have aroused any suspicion."
So, to avoid harassment, women should have to pretend to be men, and if they let slip that they're a women, it's all their fault?
Fucking pathetic, aren't you?
"But illegal."
Nice rant, but that was not the point that was being discussed.
"If you knowingly exceed the speed limit and get caught, you only have yourself to blame. "
If you unknowing do, it's your own fault too. Should have paid attention to the big numbers two feet from your face, or got the speedo fixed.
"Man up and take it on the chin rather than crying like a baby. Oh? You already have 9 points on your licence?"
Great assumptions and mud slinging there. Mine's clean. Partly because I keep an eye out for sodding great bright yellow boxes stuck on poles on the roadside. Anyone caught by one of them deserves the fine for inattentiveness behind the wheel as much as their velocity. However I have zero personal issues as regards putting my foot down when appropriate to conditions, rather than obeying an arbitrary legal limit.
Anyway, you are statistically likely to be no angel yourself, having perhaps broken equivalent laws: Parking on curbs, dropping people off on double yellows, driving or drinking when driving, using a phone while driving, driving with faults that would cause an MOT failure which had slipped your notice, cutting up the curb on a bike. Each one of those is in the same ballpark as putting a toe down on an empty stretch of road.
"Exactly Psyx, sometimes the weather conditions mean that driving at a speed anywhere near approaching the speed limit would be dangerous."
Quite. 70mph in fog is an insane speed to drive at.
And likewise sometimes travelling in excess of it is perfectly safe as well. After all: Most were established when cars lacked disc brakes, independent suspension and ABS.
"Being able to control the speed of the vehi..........you know what, forget it.......just keep moaning about the cameras."
Travelling at the velocity of a speed limit in no way has a bearing on one's control of the vehicle. There is no relation between the two.
"Unless all you scandalised commentards spend EVERY SINGLE SECOND at work ON work, then perhaps you should STFU."
Hello pot. Have you met my water-boiling friend?
Firstly, we're discussing politics, not engaged in being hypnotised by bright colours.
Secondly, most of our jobds are pretty mundane and pointless compared to... y'know: Running the fscking country.
"When did puzzle games become moron fodder?"
When you spend weeks doing essentially the same puzzle, making it a pattern recognition exercise, rather than a puzzle. and one with no use in the real world, to boot.
Let's not pretend Candy Crush is an intellectual exercise: Judging from the requests to play I get sent on FB and who they come from, it's really not.
Let me get this right:
They're making a thing, but they have absolutely nothing to put on it.
and they're hoping a few suckers will hand over rights to old game gratis on the promise that *some* of the profits will go to charity.
hey: If you give me a tenner, I'll give a quid to charity! Aren't I nice?
"So the Bible didn't get it quite right, then? Adam didn't eat a special apple"
No, he didn't. Because Genesis doesn't say that. It's never said that. It says 'fruit'*. The idea it's an apple is about as accurate as the bible saying there were three wise men.
*And also "I am a lawnmower, you can tell by the way I walk", but that's another story.
" It's not an exotic skill not to point a gun at somebody, and not to put your finger on the trigger."
On the bright side, I'm personally quite glad that I live in a nation where our police do not have to be intimately - or even passingly - familiar with firearms.
[I've had an officer ask for a rifle to be safely 'broken' when handed to him, and he refused to accept it until it was. Which was awkward, because he was being passed the bolt and the firearm separately...]
"I had forgotten that you Brits had given up your right to protect your home and your family decades ago. "
Pig-Ignorant trolling. We're quite entitled to use reasonable and indeed deadly force to protect ourselves and families. It's just that it has to be reasonable for the circumstance: Someone stealing a lawn ornament is not grounds for taking a human life, and shooting someone in the back who has your TV isn't, either.
If you're mocking us for not being able to blow the back of the head off someone straying on our lawns without warning, then it's not us who are the primitive and unenlightened.
"Who generally tend to be people like the landed gentry and others who are far better-off than most of us."
I'll give credit for the first sentence of your comment, but the one quoted is laughable. Most firearms are owned by people who shoot pieces of paper or clay and people who shoot vermin.
"After all, most guns are used for no better purpose than blasting birds out of the sky."
Citation required. Because you're talking cr4p.
I can't help but wonder if the compensation makes the companies legally vulnerable to their clients.
Handing over data because GCHQ come knocking could be justified in a Court, but accepting payment to breach DPA and sell data without permission would be illegal in any other case.
"Put a bullet in the little traitor."
For what exactly? Letting us plebs know just how routinely we are spied upon?
Or do you genuinely have the lack of wit to believe that the nation's enemies did not consider that any communication infrastructure wasn't secure and should never be treated as such prior to Snowdow's leaks?
"So tell me: What exactly is it that keeps desperate little states from repeating the mistake of employing outdated first generation nuclear reactor designs _today_?"
The threat of the US dry-gulching them financially, with the potential for being bombed if that doesn't curtail them.
"And how does this situation change as the western world turn to gen IV designs?"
It doesn't. Other factors come into play there, such as convincing the majority of people [voters] in the Western world that Gen IV designs are safe.
We see prior disasters. We see that our governments can't even manage to run a bus service and that people who sit on the boards of things like banks willingly break the rules to take more profit and are never held criminally responsible.
Can you blame people for not wanting to live 20km from a fission plant in the Western world?
"And thats the problem. So much public "knowledge" of the problem is nothing more than faith."
I've worked in the energy sector, have a mate who is a nuclear engineer, and another who 'buys' energy for the nation as a day job. Just because I'm not agreeing, it's not grounds for saying that I don't understand the maths. What are your qualifications in the field, if I may ask?
"Fission reactors are mostly horrifically expensive to construct because of the red tape"
Damn all those safety regulations and public opinion, eh?
The answer is not to trample public opinion and make them jump through less safety inspections and other red tape though really, is it?
Ultimately, public opinion does matter; hence my comment that building them in a centralised manner a long way from anywhere is the way to make fission viable to the majority.
"we would not need to be "scattering our nations" with them, as we would need less than the number of coal or gas plants"
I know. But still more than one or two for a piece of land the size of the UK. That's 'scattering our nations', to my mind.
"they are less difficult to remove (and leave the environment radioactive in the surrounding area www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)"
Wow, really? Not convinced.
And ash is indeed unpleasant. Burning black rocks is not the answer to the problem; we can agree on that.
"and the waste produced is actually only deemed unsafe because of the paranoia of people."
Depends what flavour. Plenty of it is VERY nasty. And it's often not the fission waste but the equipment it's been in contact with that's the problem. Ultimately though, if the majority of the public disapprove then it's not viable, because we are lucky and live in a democracy. yeah, it sucks. And I'm not saying that fission is an out-and-out bad idea because 'radiation is bad, innit'; I'm saying that it's not viable for us to build a dozen plants in a nation as densely populated as the UK because there are some issues with it historically which have ensured that the majority of the voting public won't accept it.
"Nuclear "waste" is mostly less radioactive than the soil of Devon or any other area on granite bedrock."
Yes, but 'mostly' doesn't really cut it in such cases, unfortunately. Would you fly in a plane which was only 5% lethal?
" The reactors are far less of a danger than coal, oil or gas overall, but people are not interested in the hundreds of thousands of deaths from these every year, as they are not sensational."
True. but -historically - people have a damn good reason not to want to live next to a fission plant.
"ONLY 20km from geothermal energy?"
Much less than that, obviously. Been down a mine recently? It's hot. Real hot. We wouldn't need anything like 20km in reality: Just some clever thinking.
"drilling deep isnt as simple as you are...."
At least I can use an apostrophe and discuss energy consumption without going straight for the personal insults. Hope you're proud of your intellectual capacity.
"the wattage per square meter from solar radiation is next to nothing"
100W+ is nothing? We suck at converting it, but that's an engineering issue, not physics. And again: It's a stop-gap, not a solution. Our own Fusion is the real solution, rather than the sun's.
You're not thinking big enough either. It's not like we need the Sahara for anything much, for example. Big power production needs to be a global project, not national ones. Scattering fission plants all over the place is a bad idea when we can centralise to large areas of sand that nobody uses, to my mind.
"beyond retarded"
Twat.
" you did not even read this article, or didn't understand it....the only sensible stopgap to fusion is called nuclear energy, "
Lol. No, I read and understood it. But that does not mean that I was instantly converted to Lewis' solution. Did you have an open mind before reading, or were you already pro-Lewis? If the later then I suggest you look up confirmation bias. Or are you suggesting that I should be utterly swayed by Lewis' article ?
"you are absolutely clueless"
Twat.
".the only sensible stopgap to fusion is called nuclear energy"
It's not black and white. Having worked in the energy industry, I know just how crap we are at making them on-budget and shutting them down on-budget. they cost a lot, too. And y'know: People hate them. I don't have such issues, but the majority do, and we live in a democracy, not a technocracy. Fission is not something that human beings are willing to accept living next to, so as a solution it's not as good as it is on paper (A bit like Communism, which is rendered utterly unworkable by basic human nature).
"STOP lobbyen for us to get stuck with nuclear waste forever"
I don't recall 'lobbyen' for anything, and certainly not that.
"and mainly stop participation in discussion on subject you are 100% clueless about..."
So, you want people who do not agree with you to butt out of the discussion. Not really a discussion, is it? I don't think you understand the word 'discussion'.
"Just because you don't like their conclusions doesn't mean they're wrong."
/facepalm. smiley face + pint glass = joke, trite comment.
It doesn't mean they're right, either. Or indeed that I don't think they are.
We have two people here saying it won't work, and that's good enough a sample for Lewis to churn an article out.
"Like the article said, anyone with a decent understanding of physics knows that "renewable energy" isn't the answer."
That's not true at all. Quite the reverse: I'm fully aware of just how much energy pours down on our heads. Given the size of that number it's more likely people who DON'T understand physics who see it as insufficient. Anything like a decent conversion rate and we should be harnessing that free stuff. We can't because we're not good enough and need something else, but in theory that's an insane amount of energy.
"Those of us with degrees in engineering figured it out right away."
Never been down a hot, sweaty mine, either then?
Playing the 'I've got an engineering degree and you'd have to know nothing about physics to see that renewables don't work" is essentially your argument, and one based on smugly demeaning others, rather than facts. Your engineering degree does not make renewable enrgy your field of expertise, which you know more about than anyone else, so don't pretend that it does.
"And the people that claim that "we need to make new discoveries" are people that don't understand basic physics."
We need better engineering solutions. Those are new discoveries.
"If you want to have fun with someone who keeps making claims about renewable energy and climate changes"
wow: Seriously: For all your intellect you're still in the tiny minority of educated minds who don't swallow the climate change thing, despite the...y'know...tons of evidence?
"Or perhaps we need to relocate the server farms somewhere it is cold all year round, making more passive A/C possible? "
I believe Google are also doing that.
They also use propriety kit which reduces energy consumption. They tell us that this is done because they care. (but obviously not enough to let everyone else use the same kit!)
"Maybe the elephant in the room is that we need less internet capacity sucking up all the megawatts?"
Apparently Google searches use a crap-load of energy.
So too does bitcoin mining.
I read something the other day that said 5% of our energy consumption is spent crushing and grinding up rocks. I'd be interested to know if that's true.
"And Chernobyl was caused by: an antique flawed reactor design that no-one but a Stalinist state would ever have thought of building."
If we're talking about using nuclear in the future, then plenty of desperate little states will repeat the mistake.
"and an approach to operational safety that can only be described as bordering on lunacy. "
And which wasn't even living under the capitalist pressure of a continuous desire to reduce costs, in a nation where senior figures are never held adequately criminally accountable for their actions. Imagine how much worse it could have been.
C'mon: Let's not be dishonest with ourselves: we build a thousand reactors to solve the problem in the places and manner that we have built them in the past and there is going to be trouble: Corners will get cut for political reasons *somewhere*, *somewhere* natural disasters will cause mayhem, and *somewhere* conflict will overspill. It'd be asking for it.
Not that it completely writes off the fission option, of course. Personally, I'd build a massive 'reactor farm' in the middle of a few of our deserts and put them under UN guard the moment the local situation started looking fishy, and have them controlled in a way that maximised safety and never cut corners to save a few bucks. Of course, that'll never happen because it's far too sensible a way to deal with the issues.
"Fukushima was NOT a nuclear "disaster" it was a severe natural disaster which impacted an otherwise safe nuclear power plant."
So if - during bad weather - a tree falls on a train and kills 50 people, it's a natural disaster, not a train wreck?
C'mon: Stop playing semantics. It was ultimately an engineering failure: we weren't smart enough and didn't plan for something that happened.
"Some depth" - I wouldn't call a one-sentence statement any kind of depth at all. Call me a cynic but it was rather brushed past in a hurry to get across a message which coincidentally completely agrees with that of the piece's author.
"It is a good approach, but not many places are suited to using it (i.e. close to the magma's heat). Iceland is a good example, but few others I can think of."
Chap, we're all only 20 km from geothermal energy!
The whole thing defies basic rational common sense to me. We have a massive fusion reactor in the sky that pours down an impressive Wattage per square meter and a bunch of heat only a few tens of km straight down. If we can't figure out how to harness that, then we're not as smart a species as we think.
Ultimately, renewables should be a stop-gap until we figure out how to make fusion work. However, I do believe them to be a more viable and sensible stop-gap than scattering our nations with piddly little fission reactors, which are horrifically expensive to construct, just as expensive to take down, create waste that we don't want to face up to and deal with properly, and occasionally go wrong in ways that we don't like things built near population centres to go wrong.
"People is starting to forget what this is all about..."
Crying wolf to avoid prosecution.
"Next thing you'll be talking about 9/11 as an example of a terrotist act orchestrated by some guy in a cave in the middle east..."
Pass me the tin foil, I desire new headwear!
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