we're talking about nuclear

nuclear is great until something bad happens. and then the possibilities are so exceedingly horrendous that there's nothing insurance can effectively do to offset the damage. what's the going insurance rate on giving cancer to people for decades and rendering large swaths of land unlivable for generations?

insurance is only effective when the premiums paid cover the probability of damages possible. but the damages possible with nuclear are so stupefyingly huge that the insurance company would quickly go bankrupt instead of paying out

if enigma was such a great system, it would have protected from or gracefully readjusted after such an obvious and easily foreseeable failure. that no one foresaw such an obvious failure or didn't have any contingency for the fucking obvious simply means that enigma was extremely brittle and therefore a weak system

and even though it was broken, the breaking remained classified *exactly because* the brittle weak system could be sold to countries that uk, usa wanted to spy on easily. so yes: you need to re-learn your history, moron

who gives a fuck about netanyahu? if israel said russia is bullying ukraine would you automatically believe russia is being heroic? you base your opinion on the opposite of what netanyahu says? do you think?

and iraq 2003 is exactly what i am talking about: bush said they had nukes and american morons didn't think to look at actual facts and just trusted the lies. iran says they are not building nukes when they obviously have an advanced nuclear program. they're building it for energy? you believe that?

your braindead insistence on rejecting the fucking obvious about iran's pursuit of a bomb is EXACTLY the same as some moron braindead trusting gw bush about iraq in 2003. exactly the same moronic prejudice over actual facts. that's you. you blatantly disregarding obvious facts because of a prejudice. that's you on this topic 100%

it is not remotely possible to accept the very obvious basics of iran's nuclear program and conclude that they're not building a bomb. you're not a serious person. you are guided by gross prejudice, in spite of obvious facts, exactly like morons who wanted war with iraq in 2003

I am GM of a nuclear power plan

And I am Jack's liver.

you can't claim a system is excellent while at the same time enumerating its major failures. of course an inside man or inside knowledge can do major damage to any system, but a truly robust system would safeguard against user carelessness and there would be ways to identify sabotage or major breaches and adjust around the damage. enigma was a brittle system where all of the failures you list were inevitable and foreseeable. and no plans, or weak late plans, were made for the inevitable and foreseeable

And there are more people who believe (terrestrial) solar energy will become economically viable but think castles in the skies of Venus are just that. Castles in the air.

To be fair, we have solar energy, getting more economical by leaps and bounds, while our rockets are still blowing up at launch.

you're not a serious person on this topic worthy of interaction if you don't think iran is building a bomb. they know exactly what they are doing and the "who me? this is just for energy" is part of the game. it's not meant to be taken seriously. oh sure some suburban sheltered doofus like yourself whose mental model of geopolitics is derived from disney movies might actually think iran's intent is innocent, but this merely serves to mark how naive and clueless you are, and that your "understanding" of the topic is zero

japan goes whaling just for research, right?

russia intervenes in ukraine just to defend russian minorities right?

what kind of gullible moron believes shallow lies about the fucking obvious?

High enough, the climate is nice.

This is the only reason people live in Canada. Because if you're high enough, you don't really care about the climate.

I always get a kick out of the fact that some of the same people who think solar energy will never be viable will embrace the idea of human colonies in the clouds over Venus or on Mars.

I love stories like this one, which are proven conclusively in the comments section under them.

Could not one of average intelligence yet above-average perseverance perform an experiment building on another's experiment and be called a "successful" scientist.

Maybe, but they still have to write it up and get it published, and that's where the above-average intelligence comes in. There are drones in science, like in every field, but they don't get "successful" without publishing. And often that means working with others, and working with others requires above-average intelligence.

Intelligence is of little concern and to be honest I'd like to know what defines intelligence.

If only there was some sort of reference that we could use to find such a definition...

"noun
1.
the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

or...

" A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.""

No matter how you define, it is most definitely not the same as "education". I'm not sure if you've ever gotten a PhD or been on PhD committees or been an adviser to PhD candidates, but "education" only gets you partway there (and not that big a part).

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a try, but at her advanced age, my dog's favorite toy is a bed on which to take a nap. I could probably interest her in a tennis ball or treat, though.

Unless I'm drastically misinterpreting your quote, you are requiring them to do that:

No, my point was that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars is not the only way to get a medallion here. There's a lottery every year when they put new medallions into circulation. The winners get the medallions for just a nominal fee.

Now, regarding the special medallions, those are not the ones that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're much more readily available for the cost of a license, and after a certain period of serving the underserved locations of the city, there are ways to get the regular medallion. All of these new rules were put in place long after I was a weekend warrior cabdriver during grad school, so I don't know the exact details, just what I've had hacks tell me when I was in their cabs.

Not everyone has a brand-new computer; The manuscript of the book I'm about to publish is in Open Office Word, about 400 pages and full of large images, and autosave is a real pain because it takes minutes to save the file.

Like another commenter said, I wouldn't make it the most important thing, overall efficiency is. But software speed is important to anyone with an older computer, especially a Windows computer, because the computer slows as the registry grows, and the registry never gets smaller, only bigger.