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Comment Re:Space Drive or Global Warming? (Score 2) 315

The verification is crucial though. What happens when two scientists claim they can verify a hypothesis, and two thousand scientists say they cannot?

Either two thousand scientists have screwed up badly, or just two have. Which is more likely? Lacking the skills, time & equipment to verify it yourself, who are you going to believe?

A single person can come up with a major paradigm shift that overturns our old models - but not when their results can't be reliably verified, and certainly not when their claims require simply ignoring decades of observations to the contrary.

Comment Play Services (Score 3, Informative) 127

If you have any of Google's apps installed, you'll also have Play Services installed - and this has already been updated to detect attempts to use the specific vulnerable certificates involved. If you only get your apps from the Play Store, you're fine, as they've already all been scanned (and no exploit attempts detected). Even if you sideload, so long as you left the Verify Apps checkbox on (default setting), then Play Services will scan any sideloaded apps too (no exploit attempts have been detected that way either).

While the vulnerability is a serious one, it's not something that will concern the vast majority of Google's Android users. It's probably a lot more significant for companies like Amazon, who will have to develop their own response, and (inevitably) for all those millions of Chinese users of generic non-Google Android derivatives.

Comment Citation please (Score 3, Interesting) 342

The only people claiming the carbon tax wasn't working were Coalition politicians (and their apologists), and the companies who didn't want to have to cover the external costs of their businesses. Fact is, it was starting to work quite well, despite the damping effect of Abbott attacking it with all the FUD he could muster.

And now we have economists scratching their heads as to why a conservative government would attack a market-based climate solution while favouring a big direct-action spending program instead:

Roger Jones, a Research Fellow at the Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, called the repeal "the perfect storm of stupidity".

"It's hard to imagine a more effective combination of poor reasoning and bad policy making," he said.

"A complete disregard of the science of climate change and its impacts. Bad economics and mistrust of market forces."

Comment Re:Fanbois (Score 4, Insightful) 91

Sadly for you, the "facts" are on Amazon's side here. Apple was being legally outcompeted, and resorting to illegal collusion needs to be smacked down, regardless of how much they hated seeing their potential marketshare slipping away. Maybe they should have tried to compete by lowering prices further, rather than raising them? Would be a better outcome for consumers.

Comment Academics? (Score 1) 305

If 94% of academic economists have fudged things to make their papers look better - what about commercial economists, where they have a stronger financial incentive? What about political economists?

At first I was worried - but then I realised their trust level is already slightly below that of lawyers.

Comment Re:WUWT (Score 2) 441

While 35% is definitely possible, I think it's probably above average. I doubt that most wind farms achieve that.

It's not clear where your claim comes from either. It's not like you can just say, "I think [35% is] probably above average. I doubt that most wind farms achieve that."

Googling it, average wind farm capacity factor seem to be around 27-40%, depending on turbine, location etc. Newer model turbines like the GE 1.6-100 claim over 50% CF thanks to design improvements.

Comment Re:not a record (Score 2) 547

Nope. There are still a number of "skeptics" claiming that the earth is not warming, and most scientists believe we can still avoid the worst of the warming yet to come (though some significant warming is now inevitable). Also, most economic studies of climate impact & mitigation (e.g. the Stern Review) have concluded that it will be much cheaper to mitigate CO2 emissions ASAP and avoid the costs of adaption.

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