Let me see if I understand this.

You're saying that, as we shift from reliable power sources (coal, nuclear) to unreliable ones (wind, solar), we should shift that unreliability penalty to the end user, who just has to live with the fact that his power is unreliable?

Where I come from, the system designer's first job is to ensure reliability: when the user throws that switch, the machine is supposed to work. Every time.

Seriously: In the name of energy efficiency, would you consider incorporating a random "Walk to work today" module into your car, such that, every so often, it would refuse to start? With no recourse whatsoever for emergencies? That is what you are proposing for unreliable energy.

I invite you to observe that the quantity of nuclear waste per kilowatt-hour generated is very very small, compared to the quantity of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, including radioactives, emitted per kilowatt-hour by a coal-burning plant.

You COULD figure this out by noticing that a coal-fired plant takes many, many freight trains of coal per year to haul the fuel in, while a nuclear plant takes on semi-trailer I think every two years or so.

It is also worth noticing that the United States is the only country doing nuclear power generation that does not recycle (reprocess) the spent fuel rods, so that more energy may be extracted, leaving less total waste.

With all due respect, you appear to fail to understand the distinction between base load plants and topping plants.

Base load plants supply the huge amount of power that MUST BE THERE 24x7. Topping plants supply the variable amount that is or is not needed depending on seasons, weather, uncharacteristic heat waves, sudden cold snaps, Pink Floyd concert light shows...

MOST of the power demand is base load demand. Heating and cooling don't stop. Water pumping doesn't stop. Hospitals run 24x7. Ditto traffic lights.

For topping plants, there are lots of choices, natural gas being a popular one. For base load plants, there are at the moment exactly three viable choices: hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear (to be precise, negative void coefficient pressurized water reactors). We are maxed out on hydroelectric power: every dammable river in the country has already been dammed. Coal is about the dirtiest power generation technology known to man, as well as one of the most dangerous (Google "black lung disease" someday). That leaves nuclear as Hobson's Choice, if you actually care about environmental and safety issues. (Hint: Of the three, only one emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide.) (For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.)

*ANY* base load plant costs a lot of money and takes a long time to build, because, by their very nature, they are BIG.

Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.

I wish it was that good an answer.

I RTFA. It wasn't.

This was a hearing on a motion objecting to a procedural point. The previous proceeding, in front of a Federal magistrate (not a judge: key point, although obscure) at which the order to decrypt the drives was issued, was attended only by the prosecutors and the magistrate. Defense counsel was not present and was not able to argue against the order. According to TFA, the judge agreed with this part of the motion, set the order aside, and ordered both parties to submit additional briefs on the matter.

It isn't over.

At this point, as I read the tea leaves, even if he wins the 5th Amendment case, Feldman is toast. They found kiddie porn on the one piece they were able to crack. They also found financial data on the drive that ties it to Feldman. Even if the prosecutors are forced to go to trial with just what they have today, they almost certainly have enough to convict him for possession of kiddie porn and put him in prison.

I worked for Texas Instruments Defense Systems and Electronics Group from early 1988 through about mid-1999.

TI DSEG had LOTS of R&D money available, and MANY different internal programs for handing it out. The most important one was called IDEA (I don't know if it was an acronym or not, or what it may have stood for). IDEA was designed to hand out small chunks of first-round funding, enough to keep one engineer with a crazy idea that just might work fed and working for a couple of months, while he threw together a detailed study proposal, saying how to do a pilot project to see if there might be something to the idea. IDEA money was EASY to get, and there were multiple paths to it. If you for whatever reason didn't want to go through your management, that was no problem at all: *ANY* IDEA coordinator ANYWHERE IN THE COMPANY could listen to an IDEA pitch from ANYONE, and, if it sounded AT ALL plausible, throw some funding at him.

The whole idea behind IDEA was that most IDEA projects were EXPECTED to fail, but they'd generally fail quickly and cheaply. The ones that didn't fail got more funding, and more detailed investigation. Wash, rinse, and repeat, and every so often something REALLY good would pop up, that would make TI a huge chunk of money, enough to justify all those little failed efforts, and some not-so-little failures as well.

Sorry, that should be Doug Casey. The URL for his piece is http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/lessons-argentine, the table is near the end.

I got it from http://howardleeharkness.com/2013/01/how-did-we-get-in-this-mess/. He's an old friend. Note that he corrected one of Casey's numbers, where Casey slipped a decimal point.

From a David Casey online newsletter, courtesy of a friend's blog:

Lesson #1

US Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cuts: $38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $385

There's something else about Iron Dome.

As long as the Bad Guys are throwing unguided rockets, they're basically just a nuisance.

The moment they start throwing guided missiles, they cease being a nuisance and graduate to being an actual threat. Israel historically has taken swift, decisive, and violent action against actual threats. (Recall the Six Days War.)

For all their rhetoric, Iran really doesn't want to get into a hot shooting war with Israel.

However, the average person most certainly DOES need to understand Rolle's Theorem, since it is the theoretical underpinning of the Laffer Curve. (Laffer himself has observed that the curve bearing his name is a trivial application of Rolle's Theorem.)

Rolle's Theorem says that given a differentiable function f(x) and two points a and b such that f(a) = f(b) = 0, there exists at least one point c such that the derivative f''(c) = 0. To get the Laffer Curve, f(x) is tax revenue as a function of tax rate, a = 0% tax, and b = 100% tax. (Hint: It is generally safe to assume that nobody will work for free. Then somewhere between 0% tax and 100% tax there is a point beyond which tax revenue goes DOWN instead of up when tax rate is increased.

To me, "The Cobra Event" reads and feels like it started out to be another nonfiction book, similar to "The Hot Zone". I got the distinct feeling that someone said something to the author that gave him the screaming willies and he decided it would be safer all around to make it look like fiction.

In the afterword, he points out that every item he described in the book was real, although some of them had different names.

I wore a full beard for many years. I shaved it off several years ago, on medical advice (concern about allergens trapped in the beard possibly aggravating severe chronic bronchial asthma). It didn't help the asthma, but the informal poll of adult females of my acquaintance, who'd seen both versions, ran about 30-1 or 30-2 that I looked better without it.

I'm not completely stupid.

I initially kept the mustache, and that was OK with them. I shaved it off when the doctors cleared me to return to SCUBA diving and my mask wouldn't seal properly over it.

Consider a simple physical experiment. A ball is suspended 16 ft (4.9 m) above the ground. It is released at time t=0 s. We know from countless high school science demonstations and countless college freshman physics labs that the ball will impact the ground at about time t=1 s, and it will be moving at about 32 ft/sec (9.8 m/sec) when it hits. Using a stroboscope and a camera, we can determine its position with reasonable accuracy and precision at, say, 0.1 s intervals.

To be considered valid, a simulation model of that system must produce similar results. If it does not, the model is invalid.

That's the acid test.

I may just be uninformed, but, so far, I have not heard of a single case where someone started a climate model with known data from 1960, let it run for fifty simulated years, and arrived at the known climate of 2010.

Perhaps you'd like to improve my education and provide cites of such validation studies written up in the peer-reviewed literature?

First, what you do not seem to realize is that astronomers DO conduct experiments. They gather data, crunch it down, and see if the results compare with their hypotheses.

Second, there have in fact been a very large number of detailed physical experiments in astronomy. Apollo 8 was one such: no one knew for certain that the figure-8 "free return" trajectory family would really work, until they tried it in real life with a real spacecraft.

As for your comment about digital computers modeling the theories of the climate scientists, THAT EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN TRIED. REPEATEDLY. Every single climate model out there, when started with available historical data and allowed to run, FAILS to predict today's climate. A model which provably does not match reality is, by definition, an invalid model, no matter how cheap or how fancy a computer you ran it on.

The basis of the scientific method is:

1. Formulate hypothesis.
2. Formulate experiment to test hypothesis.
3. Perform experiment.
4. Evaluate results against hypothesis.
5. If results don't match, start over from step 1, using what you learned from the experiment to refine the hypothesis or make a new one.

How do you conduct the experiment to validate a climate hypothesis, such as the one that is the subject of this article?

Remark: The gold standard for validation of a simulation model is to run it on historical data and see how well it predicts what actually happened. To date, NONE of the "anthropogenic global warming/climate change" simulations have passed this test.

Dun & Bradstreet got their start as a collections agency. (This is where the term "dun" and "dunning letter", for debt collector and collections notice, came from. They were persistent.)

They still do that as part of their everyday business.

Corporations live and die based on their Dun & Bradstreet rating. If there is ONE collections agency a large US/multinational corporation is NOT going to ignore, it is Dun & Bradstreet.

Give them a call.

See https://creditreports.dnb.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/SmbSubCategoryDisplay?storeId=11151&catalogId=71151&categoryId=40020

You might want to consider sending a "final warning" letter, CC: to both US and EU branches, advising them that you will place the debt for collection if they don't pay up within 30 calendar days, before you actually sic the Duns on them.