I seldom comment in the stories any more, I just come to read journals. Too much noise, too little signal. I've been posting on Soylent News more lately, it's a little like slashdot used to be.

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

What about how the computers store information for their own use (example: evercookies)? I know it's not the "mind" of the computer doing what it wants but it's certainly not the user either.

Duh, it's the mind of the programmer who had the script drop the cookie. But your comment tells me you know that already.

First, I agree completely with your comment. Secondly, I don't even have to RTFA to see that TFA rides the short bus.

As a cyborg, I find this entire topic offensive. A cyborg is part animal and part machine, and guess what? There are a hell of a lot of us. I have a CrystaLens implant in my left eye, making glasses unnecessary for me (I see better than you do). It is a device that uses the eye's muscles to focus. I'm 62 and need no corrective lenses whatever.

Do you know someone with a cochlear implant? Artificial hip or knee? Heart pacemaker? They, like me, are all cyborgs by dictionary definition.

The former vice president of the US was a cyborg, now he's a chimera.

The question "should cyborgs have rights" is stupid and insulting. Shame on the article's author.

*Happy spices!* We *happy bubbles* second Star Control II; only *silly cows* do not enjoy *smelling* *pretty colors*!

It's probably in Today's Illinois Times, they run it in their print edition. I always enjoy that cartoon.

It's not a "non-need", but it's not the end of the world, for several reasons.

First off, everything comes down to time. If one had, say a decade, they could build a full, brand new gas production infrastructure from scratch, designed to produce in different parts of the world and export straight to the EU.

Great, except EU gas reserves aren't that big. They have a max capacity of about 6 months, usually filled to about half that at this time of year, though higher than average now. Russia makes up 30% of EU imports. Basically, reserves provides something like 9-12 months of Russian cutoff.

Next we have instant displacement. Much of the EU has been working to shut down coal power plants, and ones that are in operation are often run at lower and lower capacity factors. In the event of a full Russian gas cutoff, these would be all fired up and used heavily, while NG plants would instead be mostly shut down.

Then we have slower displacement, which can take anywhere from a month or so to a couple years. NG power plants can be converted to other thermal sources. Industrial consumers of NG for heat can switch to other heat sources. Etc.

On the home and commercial perspective, the higher cost of gas will lead to more investment in efficiency on its own. Government efficiency programs can improve this even further.

On the production side, the spike in gas prices will instantly make higher-cost, formerly unecomomical European fields economical. Some of these will be available right away, some will require weeks, some months, some years to bring online. But it does put a lot of new gas into the picture.

On the non-European side, there's LNG. The US is really a read herring on this front, at least for the time being, as Sabine Pass won't come online until the winter after next, and others even later. The Middle East is the primary LNG exporter here, particularly Qatar, whose LNG capacity alone is more than all the gas Russia sells Europe. Thankully, the EU is loaded with largely idle LNG import terminals (nearly enough to replace all of Russian gas as-is), and LNG tanker rates are very low right now, there's a glut. Now, Europe would have to pay a very high price for it. LNG is expensive to begin with, and they'll be competing with the gas's current customers, primarily Asia. Europe, of course, would pay more, leading to all of the aforementioned things - increased production, increased displacement, etc - to occur in Asia to offset their reduced LNG imports. Interestingly, the US actually *can* help there - the US does have a Pacific LNG export terminal that was recently brought back into operation at Kenai, Alaska.

The net combination of these factors is that, no, Europe will not just "run out of gas and freeze to death" or any of those other doomsday scenarios that people throw around. But there's no question that Europe will have to pay more for gas, probably at least 50% more. And nobody's going to like the resumed usage of coal power - but in the short term, they're not going to have a choice.

On the other hand... for the EU, the extra energy costs for gas and oil may represent something like a 5-10% GDP hit. But for Russia, losing all of their oil and gas exports would be like dropping a nuclear bomb onto their economy.

They don't. If they did, they'd have already threatened Russia with them to make them stop. That's the point of having nuclear weapons, after all.

Ukraine foolishly believed that the US and Europe would protect them when they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons after the end of the Cold War. They're paying for that mistake now. If Ukraine survives but doesn't get to become a member of NATO, expect a full force nuclear weapons program on their part (which shouldn't be too hard, they have lots of nuclear power plants, lots of spent waste full of plutonium, and are the world's #9 uranium producer).

Hey, don't call him a dictator. He was legitimately elected! People in the country love him to death. For example, he got 99.89% of the vote with a 99.59% turnout in Chechnya, which is obviously totally legit! In some parts of Grozny, as many as 107% of voters turned out to vote for the "Butcher of Grozny".

Totally legit!

My favorite was when he "found ancient pottery" right by the shore of a heavily trafficked beach. That even beats when he "singlehandedly saved a TV crew from a tiger attack" ;)

The Jim Jong Un/Il stuff is a serious comparison. He doesn't take it as extreme, and Russia is only "way, way down" on the list of global press freedom rather than "at the very bottom". But it's along the same "Great Leader" lines.

I think some people way overestimate him and others way underestimate him. I think he's a human which in some ways has been very strategic and very short sighted. He's a hardcore nationalist and idealist, and is willing to take huge risks toward those goals. But he's also playing a very high stakes game that he could well lose. And I see little evidence that his actions in Ukraine have been anything more than winging it; Russia seems to have been repeatedly caught off guard by many of the events on the ground, including the low local collaboration rate, the willingness of the Ukrainian military to engage in military ops in populated areas, the inabilitity of the small Russian forces and local collaborators to hold ground, the amount of resources needed to successfully resist Ukraine, and whether the EU and US would dare risk Russian anger in terms of punishing Russia or helping Ukraine. In each case, Russia has had to hastily assemble counteraction.

When Yanukovitch fled, Ukraine's military was by all standards broken, the public had no stomach for fighting in their own territory, Russia was still more thought of as a partner than an enemy, joining NATO was a minority position in Ukraine, the EU and US were afraid of doing anything that could antagonize Russia, and so forth. Now Ukraine has been shifting their economy into a war economy, their forces are now veterans (still underarmed, but that could change rapidly), the public by and large fully supports the military action, Russia is by and large hated, joining NATO is a strong majority position, the EU and US have taken direct action against Russia and look ready to accelerate it, and so forth.

So let's say that - as it looks increasingly likely to happen - the US and EU arm Ukraine. Not just a little but, but fully commit to it - tanks, warplanes, antiaircraft, ships, subs, tactical missiles, the works, plus full realtime intelligence data sharing. What's Russia's next play? Ukraine, given enough modern US and EU equipment, could most likely defeat anything but total war with Russia. It's extremely doubtful the Russian public would have the stomach to do what would be necessary to take on and defeat a western-armed Ukraine using conventional weapons. So... nuclear weapons? They could, of course. But they'd instantly become a global paraiah, there'd be so much pressure against them that I don't think even China would leave their doors open to Russian trade anymore. Most Europeans would rather burn trash to heat their homes than pay for a wisp of gas from a nation that's actively using nuclear weapons on an aligned state (and realistically the loss of Russian gas wouldn't actually be that devastating, but it'd take too long to go into why). Not to mention what would happen in terms of internal terrorism/guerilla warfare within Russia, which is already a huge problem among Russia's many ticked off populations, and you can add tens of millions of recently-nuked Ukranians to that list, with pretty much unlimited funding for their actions provided by the US and EU. And Russia is a petroeconomy. Its manufacturing sector is grossly undersized compared to its population, even worse than during Soviet times. There's every reason to think that a fully embargoed Russia would collapse even worse than the USSR.

Putin doesn't want to use nukes, of course. He wants to threaten to use nukes. He wants Ukraine to think that he's actually crazy enough to do it so that they'll drop all future claims on Crimea and turn the eastern portion of their country to be a "federated" (Russian puppet) zone. And you know.... it is a possibility. Raise the fear level enough and people might just give in to the unthinkable.

It's an incredibly high stakes game he's playing, however, with a far from certain outcome.