The post you replied to was referring to the ability of water to moderate (reduce the energy of) neutron radiation, which can potentially increase the rate of a fission reaction (by increasing the effective cross-section).

It's a valid concern, but such an obvious one that it is hard to imagine that it would not have been considered.

France has a long maritime coastline. If push comes to shove, it has access to as much uranium as it wants or needs.

True, seawater extraction will never be the preferred option while cheaper methods are available, but it's very reassuring to have this available as a backstop.

Coming from a regular politician or diplomat that would (sadly) be fair comment. Coming from an organisation with a scientific or medical mission is rather different.

Partly for ethical reasons (although I'm unsure whether the WHO really do the concept of ethics: these are the people who tried to appoint Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador).

Mostly, though, because it is very difficult to achieve a mission of that nature if people don't trust what you say. That's important enough at the best of times, but these are not the best of times, and what the WHO have done here is an absolute gift to the conspiracy theorists and antivaxxers because of how clearly it shows them to be untrustworthy.

One very minor correction: Alpha refers to the B.1.1.7 (Kent) variant, not the original Wuhan variant.

Sacrifices to Ba'al are therapeutically unproven, however it is well known that Goa'uld symbiotes mount a strong immune response against all forms of disease. Source: https://stargate.fandom.com/wi...

That's all well and good, right up to the point where the same mechanism is used to quieten dissenting voices who are actually onto something, like that tobacco smoke causes cancer.

(A good analogy, by the way, not only because smoking causes more deaths than pandemics and dictators combined, but also because much of the early research was privately funded, and not disclosed until the manufacturers were forced to do so by the courts. Not quite the same as what you are proposing, I know, but it is the sort of thing that would happen whether it was the intended outcome or not.)

It was a rhetorical question. For what it's worth, in my mind I was including Spanish Flu (because picking the last 100 years would have been a tad unfair), but also the large numbers who killed by Mao, Stalin and others through starvation, or other methods short of deliberate execution. It doesn't really matter which number is larger, the point is that it's a horrifying large number on both sides.

I also think it is unlikely we would now have RNA vaccines, or many other forms of advanced medicine, if free debate of scientific ideas was not allowed. In short, I'm trying to make the point that while freedom is messy, and life under a benevolent dictator would be better in some ways in theory, but in practice it tends not to work out that way.

Finally, don't imagine for one moment that controlling discussion would serve the interests of scientific truth. It would serve the interests of money, and of power. Of course the same is true for a lot of what is published today, but at least we have a diversity of viewpoints where everyone can compete for a slice of attention. What you are proposing risks extinguishing the search for truth, not protecting it.

My answer to who should be having these discussions is anyone who wants to (as a matter of principle). That doesn't mean that you or I should be obliged to listen to them, but if others choose to then that's their decision.

However, since you clearly don't place the same value on freedom of speech that I do, consider this: which has tended to kill more historically, pandemic disease, or the types of government that you enable by this sort of suppression of knowledge and accountability?

I don't know the answer to this (and the numbers would be very sensitive to definition), but I suspect it would be close. I do know which I would be more afraid of.

You've illustrated the problem perfectly. We're discussing whether the paper, and discussions about it, should be suppressed. That should be a high bar to meet. The extent to which we should believe the conclusions of the study is a different matter entirely, and the points you make might be reasonable ones in that context. They are not at all relevant to the question of whether censorship is warranted.

I have some bad news for you: C has strict aliasing rules too, they are very similar to the rules in C++, and using a cast to access an int as if it was a float is undefined behaviour just as it would be in C++. See the introduction to section 6.5 (Expressions) in the C language specification. (Unless you're counting some very early versions like K&R, and I'm unsure offhand about C89, but the above is certainly true from C99 onwards.)

For remote use, there is not a lot of difference between biometrics and passwords, except that:

-- you can't change the biometrics if they are compromised

-- there is little scope for using different credentials for different sites

Can't see any advantages to them, and I really don't want to be authenticating to my bank with the same credentials I use for Slashdot.

Actually it's not that simple. If GCC were covered entirely by the standard GPL, and if you were to distribute binaries compiled by it, then it might do exactly that. The reason why it doesn't is because of something called the GCC Runtime Library Exception (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html).

At the time a large majority of Windows Phone sales came from Nokia, but Nokia was incurring large losses as a result of this and it is doubtful as to whether they could have continued for much longer. Market share for Windows Phone was languishing around the 3% mark, which wasn't good, but at least kept Microsoft in the fight. Buying the smartphone division of Nokia was arguably just delaying the inevitable, but if Microsoft had not done that then Windows Phone would have failed sooner, more abruptly, and much more visibly.

By that definition you would have to say that Helmholz resonance is not a form of resonance.

As others have said, it all depends on what you define as the forcing function. The wind was applying a periodic force to the bridge due to the varying profile that it presented to the wind. It would not have been periodic in the absence of the bridge, but that's irrelevant because then there would have been no force at all (no area to act on).

If you believe in the linear no-threshold model then it makes no difference whether the dose is received in a single hit or an extended time period.

Those who doubt LNT usually suspect a dose-response curve that goes in the opposite direction to what you are suggesting.

Particulate exposure could conceivably be worse for you due to the exposure being localised to one part of the body, but that has nothing to do with the timescale over which the dose is spread.

The main issue with the concept of a "banana equivalent dose" is homeostasis of potassium levels, which again has nothing to do with any of the points above.