none of the actual predictions made over these years by the "alarmists" have ever materialized.

I don't know about none, there's probably one or two somewhere that have come true but essentially, yes, you're right. None of the claims made by the alarmist have come true.

On the other hand, scientists tend to be conservative and like to make predictions that are backed by a good understanding of what is happening. This is resulting in things typically being worse than the predictions that scientists were making.

In the 80s when I first became aware of the problem of CO2 in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect, scientists were talking about hundreds of years for the Arctic to become ice free in summer. By 2000 they were talking about 2050. 2015 and 2035ish seems to be a point where the money is going. (My guess from extrapolating what the reasoned voices are saying is that the first exceptional melt year after 2020 will do it after which it will rebound for a few years and then we'll have ice free summers theafter)

I've not really followed Antarctica. However, back in the 80s I'm pretty sure it was "tens of millenia to melt all of Antarctica if it's possible at all". More recently I've seen comments along the lines of "It can't happen in less than 5-10 thousand years" with the assumption that it will happen eventually if we continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Roads without semis aren't designed for semi loading - so those roads do get damaged by cars. Noone surfaces their driveway (the private bit of road up to your house - sorry don't know what the US calls this) to the standard of interstate highway. Likewise, local residential roads are not built to that standard either (although typically to a higher standard than a driveway).

Additionally, weather and vegetation will eventually damage a road even if it has no traffic at all. For metalled roads that only have foot traffic and bicycles, this is, to all intents and purposes, the only source of damage.

Assuming a reasonable pressure (no trains with flanged wheels trying to drive down the highway) then the damage comes from axle load and not pressure for standard road building materials.

It's the (hopefully elastic) deforming of the roadbed that leads to the damage - typically due to surface cracking that then lets weather in - and so below a certain axle weight (which will depend on the design load of the road in question) the damage is essentially zero.

No metalled road designed for cars (or even just foot traffic) will be damaged by bicycles at anything like the rate that weather (and vegetation) will damage it anyway. No road designed for significant truck traffic will be damaged by cars[1]

It would, of course, be possible to design a road that a 90psi bicycle tyre would damage more quickly than a 40psi car tyre but, in practice, it would be more expensive than one that a bicycle wouldn't damage if a car wouldn't.

[1] Cars under hard acceleration can damage the top surface of a metalled road independent of any flexing of the road bed - I've seen this on a steep uphill after a slow bend - every driver hits the throttle at the same point at the bottom of the hill. Once there is unevenness to the surface, whether from the weather or trucks, dynamic loading from cars can rapidly accelerate the ongoing damage.

Because, as I'm sure you're aware, Mr. Assange is not on British soil.

He is on British soil. Britain, like most (all?) countries in the world, doesn't consider embassy buildings to be the soil of the embassy's sending country.

For countries that have their embassy in the UK, them asserting that the embassy is their own soil doesn't have any effect. Sweden still needs to deport Assange from the UK as that is where he is as far as the UK is concerned. The Swedes could start extradition proceedings with Ecuador if they wanted but the UK would arrest him when he left the embassy and the extradition from Equador would have no effect. The UK doesn't need to extradite him from Equador either. They just need Equador to give him up to UK authorities.

The slightly more interesting case might be a UK embassy on the soil of a country who does say that embassies are the soil of the sending country. Because there are probably a few cases where it could matter - e.g. accident insurance that applies only in the UK - i.e. not for travel. If you fell and broke your leg in a UK embassy somewhere else in the world could you claim? The UK courts would probably say no even if the foreign country said "actually that building is in the UK".

As long as a company is obeying the law and not hurting anyone, they are legally and morally in the right.

I would argue that in a vertically integrated company, charging "costs" to parent companies over and above what an open market would bear might be legal but isn't morally right.

The problem for the law is how to determine what these open market costs should be. When a patent is licenced to a (true) independent company it would (presumably) be a fair cost for internal use too at the same price. But when a patent isn't available for licence?

Perhaps that's what the law could do - IP (or other internal costs that cannot be priced on the open market) must be made available to all at the same price being billed internally. If others take them up at that price then it's a fair price, otherwise the price is deemed to be zero for internal costs/profit movement.

If you stick to tabs only for indenting at the block level and spaces for any further alignment then it works perfectly.

[tab]for(int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) [...........]//Shouldn't have a magic 10
[tab][tab]sumx2+=data[i]*data[i];[...........]//sum of squares.

will only format "perfectly" when ts=5

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!!

Undoubtedly. By default I use spaces always. In my book, tabs are for tabulating. You set your tab stops. Input your data with tab separators and have it format correctly - a la latex.

Ironically, were I to want to use a mixture of tabs and spaces, I'd use spaces for indent and tabs for alignment - for example a single tabstop at column 55 would make sense for comments along the RH side of the code.

If you avoid spaces and use only tabs, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.

So how many tabs should you use here so that it lines up with the commands below?

cat *.c
cat -n *.c
grep int *.c

struct S {
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] x;[tab][tab]/* x coord */
[tab]int [tab][tab][tab][tab] y;[tab][tab]/* y coord */
[tab]unsigned long long [tab] hash; [tab] /* hash of object stored at x,y */
};

Unfortunately, the US does exactly the same thing when people passing through the country did things legally in their home country that the US doesn't like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

I presume you mean 183.

The paper is paywalled but assuming they are using 220-age as MHR:

183 is 105% of MHR at 45.
Running on a treadmill has MET of 7-8 (Wikipedia)

105+8*12-4*45=21. i.e. your score is positive which puts you in the 3% chance of dying in the next decade group.

I don't use windows much at all. However, any of those beyond the win95 I couldn't use at all because they're out of focus. (Perhaps this can be turned off?)

The win7 one in particular is so painful for me to look at that even in a few seconds my eyes start feeling uncomfortable and I can feel the strain of trying to correct the focus.

Ironically, Greece had a balanced budget in 2014. Germany did not. Yes, this is true if you compare apples to oranges.

Greece had a small budget surplus if you exclude debt repayments and one off payments such as bank bailouts. Overall it's budget deficit was around 13% (which meant that Greece was no longer in last place with Slovenia something around 15%)

18 European countries kept their deficit within the 3% threshold. Luxembourg posted a small surplus while Germany[1] was balanced.

https://euobserver.com/news/12...

To Greece's credit, balancing the budget excluding debt repayments and one off items was achieved around a year ahead of the agreed austerity plan.

[1] To reconcile this with your claim I can only assume that Germany was very slightly negative. Small enough that most people call it balanced.

There is no error correction on audio CD.

Yes there is. It uses a dual interleave Reed-Solomon code together with 8-14 modulation and three joining bits.

192 data bits are encoded in 588 bits on the CD.

Those 588 bits comprise:
24 bits sync word plus 3 merge bits. (27 bits)
33 EFM words of data of 14 bits plus 3 merge bits per word (561 bits)

The 33 bytes of data are:
24 bytes of audio (12x16 bit samples)
8 bytes of parity.
1 byte (8 bits) of subcode information.

The merge bits allow the min/max separation of 1s to be maintained between EFM codewords and also allow the data to be DC free

why would providers go from IPv4 to IPv6 when soon there will be a shortage of numbers

They'll drag their feet but, eventually, there will be services that people want to use that are only available via IPv6 and then there will be little choice. (Although they'll try to proxy[1] popular IPv6 sites first)

[1] fake 10.x.x.x dns records that they serve to their customers and then forward the traffic over IPv6

It's very hard to explain "this shit" to people when there's someone else equally knowledgeable as you determined to explain why your explanation is wrong.

Asymmetric encryption. Do you explain P vs NP, why NP-Complete is almost certainly not in P but the problems that asymmetric encryption are built on aren't known to be either NP-Complete or P.

NP is a decision problem - but encryption isn't a yes/no problem. How can problems that only have yes/no answers be used to encrypt?

Muddy the water some more - PRIMES is in P. Do you really want to have to explain the difference between constructive and existential proofs while someone is interrupting every time you say anything that isn't 100% accurate.

You've only got to look at the climate change "debate" to see this effect in force. Climate scientists are playing a game of whack-a-mole and the general public cannot tell which side to believe. There are always questions and doubts that can be raised - the mark of a good scientist is asking the questions for which the answer is interesting. The mark of a good defense attorney is raising questions for which cast doubt on the reliability of the witness. The role of the judge is to make sure that the questions that the lawyer asks is relevant to the case - and that's where it gets hard when you've got two experts in their field debating something and one (or both) has an agenda.