Oddly obligatory XKCD. To rebut your snark, with a minimal breeding pool and sufficient preservation, we could live on eating each other for millions of years. Might as well be forever with those time frames.
No, It was What If and you are misremembering it.
No, I'm saying you used a scientific organization as a puppet for a political program that hurt a lot of people and is in the process of destroying industries, communities, and ways of life.
How, specifically? Fundamentally, is the DOE doing bad research? Are the results wrong? Or is good research simply being used to support political ends that you disagree with?
If I ask an expert if X is true and then use his answer to support my position, does that make him a "puppet" that my enemies should attack?
The DoE should be focused on shit that works.
The thing about shit that works is that you don't really have to do any science or engineering to it. Because it already works.
Scientists and engineers focus on the shit that doesn't yet work for a reason.
I'm 45 and I've had presbyopia for five years, bad enough that I always need separate glasses when reading or working in front of a screen, or even using my phone. I still went ahead with surgery last winter. And I'm very happy I did.
I had pronounced astigmatism in addition to nearsightedness. When you add presbyopia it becomes almost impossible to get a pair of lenses that will correct all of it anywhere but right in the center of vision. In practice I had to movemy head instead of my eyes when reading, playing games, programming... It was frustrating and gave me increasingly common headaches.
With LASIK (a fairly new type that maps the eye and removes the stigmatism) I now have 15/15 and only need glasses for presbyopia. I have one pair for close-up work, that now lets me see in my entire field of vision; and my old favourite pair has no correction at all except at the bottom, where mild close-up power lets me see my phone, read labels and stuff like that when I'm out and about.
It may not sound like much of a difference since I still often wear glasses. But it's night and day - headaches are gone, I really see much better now (I actually see towards the sides again!) and for many activitites such as snorkeling or photography I need no eye correction at all.
The quickest numbers I could find say that at the scales of large power-plants, the generator is very efficient, but the turbine not so much, around 50%. This would put the system as a whole at around 40% efficency sunlight -> electricity. That's competitive with the best solar voltaic systems tested in the lab, and 50-100% better than practical systems on the market. Assuming their system really does scale up to power plant sizes, of course.
Everyone covers up mistakes. Everyone reveals everyone else's mistakes.
The San are pretty much where they were when humanity evolved.
Nothing is objectively known about the airliner. Everything, from Ukrainian air traffic control ordering the plane to descend to a dangerous altitude to who detected what, is all supposition and hearsay at this point.
It is my personal suspicion that the Ukrainian authorities were hoping for an accident of this sort and were intent on placing a civilian airliner in as dangerous a position as possible. Whether that was the case for this specific airliner on this specific flight is unclear.
And I'd argue that Korean Airlines 007 is a better example for this reason. The US had been using civilian airliners for spying on Russia for some time and doctored the evidence to remove Russian pilots radioing warnings to the aircraft in order to make the incident more incriminating than it was. Whether that flight was used for spying, was shadowed by such an aircraft, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all becomes incidental. The accident was inevitable and the US government of the time was guilty of ensuring civilians would someday die for the benefit of military intelligence. It was merely a matter of which plane would be blown out of the sky and when.
In this case, the Ukranian authorities deliberately downplayed the risk of missile attacks on overflying aircraft and deliberately worked to place aircraft in the most dangerous air corridors that the airlines would permit. That is indisputable. Their opponents were known to be firing on aircraft and had shot several down. When your time to respond is measured in milliseconds, the nearest aircraft identification guide is mere hours away, to paraphrase what Americans often say about cops.
An accident was inevitable. The separatists weren't interested in avoiding one, the Ukrainian authorities certainly weren't. It was merely who would die for someone else's ideals. Whether or not this aircraft was deliberately placed in the path of a SAM battery is unimportant.
Both sides are therefore guilty. Both sides deserve blame.
Bullcrap? The application developers there deserve to have every ounce of bullcrap that is lying on the field thrown at them before being given a hot jacuzzi in pig swill. Punching a hole in someone's system network firewall, then putting a steel cage and door around that hole so it can't be closed?
I have enough grief with various Linux packages that create their own VPN's, offer "built-in" ftp and email functionality as a "feature". Every time I install something, I have to check to to see whether any new servers listening on network sockets have been set up immediately, as well as see whether there are any daily or weekly crontab settings which do the same.
What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?
