I read the speech yesterday, seemed rather tame compared to the hate US politicians regularly spout. His main point was that Ukraine must negotiate a ceasefire directly with the rebels. Russia has the upper hand, yet it is the Russians who are pressing for a diplomatic solution, Ukraine (and presumably their western sponsors) are refusing to negotiate with "terrorists". The bit about nukes was not a threat it was a defiant warning to the west, "don't fuck with Russia", it was made in the context of a plea to the west to help solve the dispute in a "modern way", ie: through diplomacy.

Putin has demonstrated he has a stronger influence over the rebels than the west has over Ukraine, a few days ago he averted a potential slaughter by calling on the rebels to open a corridor so that surrounded and outnumbered Ukrainian troops could withdraw, sadly I haven't seen any reports of efforts to defuse the situation by the Ukrainian government or the west. The consistent response of Ukraine to military defeats in various towns and cities has been to shell the people they are trying to "liberate" with heavy artillery. Such actions do nothing but kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and ultimately swell the ranks of the rebels.

I was born in 1959 at the height of the cold war, the enthusiasm of the western media to label Putin as a modern day Hitler is troubling, the fact that a large chunk of western society believes it, is frightening. The village idiot who's running things down here in Oz has been thrusting his chin in the air and sprouting macho bullshit, he's threatened to stop Putin attending the G20 meeting in Brisbane. He does not represent my views, my view is that our government should be supporting the call Putin made in the speech for a "modern" solution to what is essentially a proxy war between the nuclear heavyweights.

It's said that all people with blue eyes are descendant from one person who lived near the black sea some 10-12ky ago. Since you need two parents with the blue gene to have blue eyes this means the person who first obtained the mutation did not have blue eyes, nor could his children have them. His grandchildren are the first possible blue eyed people if they bred with a sibling, more likely the first blue eyes were several generations removed from the person who got the original mutation.

As for TFA, the picture clearly demonstrates Neandertals invented tic-tac-toe.

Renewables can and will eventually replace coal, that is a GoodThing(TM), sure they have an ecological footprint but (like nuclear power) it's virtually zero compared to coal. The question isn't nukes vs solar, the question is what combination of current technologies will replace coal's market dominance, current nuclear technologies cannot do this alone for several reasons, expense, limited fuel reserves, plain old fear. Solar is now significantly cheaper and certainly much cleaner than imported brown coal, which is why India has embarked on a solar project to supply power to 400M people (40% of the population).

Replacing coal sounds like a massive task but consider that every coal plant on the planet was built during my lifetime, some were even built and rebuilt. The economics is such that I'm now confident they will be replaced with solar/wind farms in the next 50yrs. The hydro dams are already in place and there aren't many suitable sites left for new ones. All forms of power generation must match supply to demand on the grid, ie: they need a buffer to be able to match the "wavy" demand curve of a typical city. Coal produces a flat supply curve (so called "base load"), it already uses the existing dams as giant batteries by pumping water uphill during off-peak times and pulling it back onto the grid during peak times. As renewables start replacing coal why would they not also use the existing hydro infrastructure to similar effect?

The radiation is harmful to wildlife but no where near as harmful as plain old human habitation. Wildlife thrives in the Chernobyl exclusion zone not because the radiation is harmless but because there are no people. The DMZ on the korean peninsula is the same, no people, plenty of land mines and wildlife.

BTW: Coulter is a troll and Greenpeace did not kill nuclear power, Chernobyl did that, yes there were exceptional circumstances as there was with the BP oil spill but Joe Average doesn't give a shit about excuses when the inevitable mega-fuck-up occurs.

"W" is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, W = 23 = 2 X 3 = 6 : WWW = 666. Isaac Newton wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666, in fact he wrote a lot more about theology than science. Thing is nobody remembers him for his prolific "contributions" to theology.

Believe what I say or I will hurt you

The incentive is of course to get a better map. I'm happy to report bugs in software I use, as long as it isn't too inconvenient.

Reporting errors in Google Maps used to be fairly simple, if you knew how, but the constant changes in the UI makes it difficult. When they first introduced bicycle maps, there were quite a few grave errors initially (up/down a stairway, along a motorway where bicycling is prohibited). They were fixed pretty soon after I reported them.

After messing around in Maps for a while (web version), I see that it's still easy enough to report errors. Just click the speech bubble.

Is there any chance that you can spot the nonsense there?

I am starting to detect a whiff of nonsense, now that you mention it. Maybe it's the fact that you're conflating "not doing exactly what cold fjord would do" with "taking no action" or just total bullshit like this:

Refusing to capture and interrogate terrorists provides just as much information as capturing and interrogating them.

I must have missed the announcement that President Obama had decided to stop all capture and interrogation of terrorists. Or wait, did you really mean that there was a case when you disagreed with him on a particular policy about capturing and interrogating a certain set of people under certain circumstances? Because that would sound a lot more like a rational argument and a lot less like ridiculous hyperbole and demonization of people who don't agree with your policy preferences. But we can't have that.

Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels

OK, so since this is what you posted in response to my "what should we be doing" question, I assume that you think that the best use of resources to fight small groups of well-hidden off-the-grid terrorists is to increase the size of our standing army (measured in "number of troops" and not some other metric), build more amphibious assault vehicles, keep the A-10, upgrade the F-18, buy an extra 20 littoral combat ships, etc. The implication being that without those sorts of tools, we're going to have a hard time fighting these guys. This is what I mean by "stupid policy reaction" to scary bad guys. Buying a bunch of big iron weapons and building up the size of the standing army to root out terrorists seems like one of the least efficient and most knee-jerk ways of spending money to stop terrorists.

A giant ass military is great if your goal is to destroy the war fighting infrastructure of an enemy nation or to convince the median citizen of that country that waging war against us is a bad idea. But a giant ass military has historically proved to be not a particularly great tool at convincing the tail members of the political distribution to stop fighting a guerrilla war. In fact, it also seems like it has historically not been a great tool even for fighting those remaining stragglers. Unless you're going to do it Roman style and starting exterminating citizens and sowing their fields with salt until the terrorists stop, I don't think that more combat ships and armored fighting vehicles are going to do us much good on this one.

DOD is great for the 1% of Americans involved with the military. Unfortunately that doesn't do much for the other 99%.

So your position is that even though we've known about plague as a weapon for centuries, and even though we saw it used in World War II by the Japanese, and even though we put tons of R&D money into germ warfare scenarios throughout the Cold War, the government never bothered to come up with any sort of mitigation plan for a bio attack on the US that did anything other than take care of the military? And now that we know about this Laptop of Doom, Obama is derelict in not correcting that colossal oversight? That's a multi-generational failure of epic proportions. Surely the only thing that will fix this is more boots on the ground.

There are plenty of groups associated with al Qaida and ISIS. The fact that one is doing that says nothing about what another has been able to do.

Indeed. And if only we had the budget to build a few more submarines and armored fighting vehicles, we might know so much more. Damn you Obama!

Is the public reaction generally panic? I don't think so.

You're right. I should rephrase. The median member of the public doesn't panic but enough of the public is swayed to allow stupid panic responses and bad public policy from people in government.

We should continue to secure all sorts of nuclear related materials, as we have been, to prevent dirty bomb attacks, or the theft or illegal sale of fissionable material.

Yup. That sounds like a very reasonable set of policies that we're already doing and should continue to do. I don't think many people would argue with you on that. But the tenor of the discussion I'm hearing here implies that this laptop is some sort of a revelation and that we should really do something different.

When people say we're "doing nothing" what they really seem to mean is that we're doing nothing that we weren't already doing. That may be true (the "doing nothing" claim certainly isn't), but that may or may not be a bad thing. Maybe what we're already doing puts us roughly in the sweet spot for cost/benefit. I haven't seen a lot of evidence that we're way off base as it is.

Requiring emergency shelters in new construction of various type of buildings as some countries do wouldn't add much to the cost and could pay off in many different disaster or attack scenarios.

That's an interesting thought. What are other countries doing, and what are the costs and benefits? Israel is the only one I can think of, but I'm not very familiar with their measures, and their needs are rather specialized.

Just 9-11 resulted in $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy.

And many, many times that in public response (wars, additional public safety spending, etc.). So as bad as 9-11 was, we're easily able to do a lot of harm to ourselves if we don't prioritize our use of resources. If we're thinking about ways to save literally thousands of lives per decade and we have a few hundred billion dollars to play with make that happen, there are a lot of options.

Those documents are on science, physics, chemistry, and engineering. They aren't bomb making instructions, they're the science behind the instructions - and thus it doesn't matter what the bomb making experience of the writers are. It's a critical difference and one you seem determined to remain blind to.

Have you ever actually tried to do a serious engineering project from scratch based only on what's in the published literature in any field without consulting somebody who had actually done it? It's actually really hard. The devil is always in the details, and there's usually a shitton of details, a lot of which get you killed when you're fiddling around and finding them when the project is a bomb, a poison, or a disease. I'm not denying the existence of the theoretical basis for those weapons or even that there's lots of useful theory available. I'm denying that most people, even the ones who study the theoretical framework pretty deeply, would do a halfway competent job at making them. Rockets for getting into space are a really good example. The fundamental principles are straightforward and the engineering concepts are well documented and easy to grasp, but every new design is really hard and requires a lot of testing because there are a million important technical decisions to be made along the way that can't easily be derived from first principles.

In a field like weapons, it's also difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff because there aren't nearly as many sources that are clearly reliable. You often have to choose from one technical document of dubious origin from the web versus another similarly shady document and evaluate them from first principles, which requires a pretty good grounding in the field and often a lot of luck. If you know the field, it's often easy to spot when somebody makes a conceptual mistake. But what about experimental results? When one paper says that material X works really well and another says that it failed dangerously and the only way to know is to build a prototype and do the test, which one do you believe? It's usually nice to have somebody around who can say, "Yeah, we tried that and it didn't work. Cost us $3M and now Joe is missing a hand. Do it the other way."

I'm not saying it's impossible, but these guys have a long slog ahead of them. They're doing this stuff from first principles and they don't have the advantage of big budgets and rooms full of really smart people. They have sporadic budgets and rooms with a smart person or two surrounded by a bunch of overeager morons, which isn't exactly the team I'd want to assemble for something like this. The idea that they're on the brink of a devastating weapon that nobody in the DoD thought to prepare for during the Cold War when we had the entire Soviet weapons program working on it seems like a stretch. For me, the "revalation" that these guys want bio weapons and they have freely available information on biology and chemistry is more of a, "Yeah, I kind of figured," than an, "Oh shit! Really? This changes everything!"

Not sure if it was opportunity or its twin, but one of them required a modem reset not long after landing.

I don't care if your bleeding from the eyeballs, leave my cigarettes alone!

You ask and answer your own question - the important steps to deal with this sort of threat should have been taken long ago.

I'm not sure I read an answer in either of our posts. What, specifically, are we not doing that we should be doing based on this new information? We've known about bubonic plague as a biological agent for centuries, we had a world war when it was used as a weapon, and we had a whole cold war during which both sides looked at bubonic plague as a weapon, so it would be kind of surprising if the DOD ignored the whole thing for all those years and should start scrambling now that some guys playing solider in homebrew camps are thinking about it. It doesn't make sense unless your theory is that Evil President Obama is intentionally dismantling any programs we may have had in order to make terrorist domination of the world easy, twirling his mustache all the way.

Well, that's assuming they didn't make off with any of the biological weapons developed by Saddam (and there were some) or by Syria where ISIS controls considerable territory...

I suspect not, given that they appear to be trying to get it from dead animals at the moment. That would be bad, but again, what should we be doing differently assuming it's true?

And the general public isn't really vaccinated against many of those agents, are they?

The wouldn't be vaccinated at all against bubonic plague. My understanding is that it's a "treat with antibiotics after exposure" type of thing. And we have and produce lots of antibiotics, many of which I remember us ramping up production on post 9/11.

You seem to be speculating that Obama is doing things to actively undermine any defenses we have based on... I'm not sure what exactly. This seems to be part of the "bizarro world" theory that people have about political opponents. They think, "I'm against policy X and they're for policy X" means that the other guy is their exact mirror image and end up with, "I'm for fighting terrorism, so he must be for enabling it." No actual evidence of policy disagreement or bad policy is necessary. It's just reasonable to assume that the other guy is making a hash of it because he's your opposite and you'd be doing everything right.

So those documents are based on first hand knowledge and tested results and people who read them are likely to succeed at building the bombs, right? That's why the countries that have done it recently just pulled those docs off of the Internet instead of hiring experts and spending tons of cash on expensive R&D programs which often failed the first few times anyway, right? Or are these documents written up by people with physics and engineering expertise who pieced the knowhow together and have never actually built a working bomb?

Because my point is that there's a ton of "howto" stuff out there about all sorts of weapons / drugs / how to be a badass hitman and never get caught / whatever else the kids are into these days that's probably only 80% correct, is written by people who have never actually tried the stuff themselves, and will more likely than not get you killed if you try it as written. And I'm reasonably willing to bet that the "how to make yourself a bubonic plague weapon" documents are just like that. Good educated guesses by reasonably smart people who have done some reading but want stupid people to do things that they're too smart to try themselves.

I'd be a lot more concerned if somebody had written, "XX engineer from North Korea's weapons lab is known to be working with them," instead of, "They have the Anarchist's Cookbook! We're all doomed!"