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Comment Who do you price those costs? (Score 1) 4

The report demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy, period.

Just how do you do the emphasized part? Are we supposed to trust someone to make an honest, unbiased, and also correct estimate of those costs?

Comment There is no "Right to be forgotten" (Score 0) 144

The right "to be forgotten" does not exist — you have no right to affect the contents of other people's brains, notebooks, and databases.

Sure, Google is a "KKKorporation", but you have no more right to demand, they forget about you, than you can you force your ex to forget the good times you've once had together. And, yes, wiping out individual's memories — selectively — is already possible.

Submission + - Keystone Be D-mned: Canada Finds Oil Route To Atlantic

HughPickens.com writes: Bloomberg reports that Canadians have come up with an all-Canadian route to get crude oil sands from Alberta to a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, that would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. The pipeline, built by Energy East, will cost $10.7 billion and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. "It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude," writes Bloomberg. "And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it." So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal. “With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” says Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”

The pipeline will also prove a blow to environmentalists who have made central to the anti-Keystone arguments the concept that if Keystone can be stopped, most of that polluting heavy crude will stay in the ground. With 168 billion proven barrels of oil, though, Canada’s oil sands represent the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and that oil is likely to find its way to shore one way or another. “It’s always been clear that denying it or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” says Michael Levi. What Energy East means for the Keystone XL pipeline remains to be seen. “Maybe this will be a wake up call to President Obama and U.S. policymakers to say ‘Hmmm we’re going to get shut out of not just the energy, but all those jobs that are going to go into building that pipeline. Now they are all going to go into Canada," says Aaron Task. “This is all about ‘You snooze, you lose.’”

Comment Re:DOJ Oaths (Score 1) 112

the prohibition on using the same dish for meat and dairy

The point was, there is no such prohibition.

The only thing the scripture actually proscribes is what I quoted: "cooking lamb in the milk of its mother". That's all — all other rules are derived from that. That they have been expanded to cover all dairy and all meat — even those derived from different species — is the phenomenon I used as an illustration.

Comment Re:To paraphrase (Score 1) 112

What part of "well fucking regulated" don't you understand?

Which part of "petitioning the government for redress of grievances" don't you understand, citizen?

By your own logic, you don't have a right to any other speech — not to advertise anything, not to produce pornography, not to organize boycotts. Not even political campaign speeches are a right under your reading of the Bill of Rights — unless they are addressed to the sitting government as a form of a petition. If, of course, your thinking is self-consistent, and you are reading the First Amendment with the same literal strictness you are applying to the Second.

And by the logic of others of your kind, your Constitutionally-protected speech is limited to the means available in the 18th century too — even if you are merely petitioning the government, you don't have a right to do that via the Internet, TV, or radio.

Comment Poe's Law (promoting "Greenpeace"?) (Score 1) 252

Wow, I don't often explicitly admit to being sarcastic, but this particular post had attracted so much sincere hate from both responders and moderators, that I had to come clean... I would've thought, the term "KKKorporation" was a give-away, but no...

But then, of course, I have no proof, all of the hatred observed is really sincere either. Oh, well...

Comment Re:Am I the only one? (Score 1) 478

Ah, but it is spread through casual contact. Someone cough near you? Droplets are evil little creatures. Handshake with someone who coughed on their hands?

If you've not had the flu ever in your life, then you can feel safe. Ebola spreads at least as easily as the flu, likely much easier.

What I really worry about is the non-human vectors. Imagine one dog (1) in the park, finding the vomit of an infected human (2), and this becoming a new, very hard to track infection source. "Our family isn't feeling so good - can you watch Fido while we go to the doctor?" Repeat.

(1) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
(2) - http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...

Comment Re:What will it take to run a 2-hour marathon? (Score 1) 254

About 2 hours

FTFWIKI

... Philippides, the one who acted as courier, is said to have used it first in our sense when he brought the news of victory from Marathon and addressed the magistrates in session when they were anxious how the battle had ended ; "Joy to you, we've won" he said, and there and then he died, breathing his last breath with the words "Joy to you". – Lucian translated by K.Kilburn.

so since it killed him, naturally, the first thing we do is try the same thing!
no wonder marathoners look like cancer survivors...

Comment Driverless on the deep level tube is pointless (Score 1) 127

Why?

2 main reasons:

- On the really old lines there is only about 6 inches between the train and the tunnel wall , there is NO escape walkway. So in an emergency a member of staff WILL be needed to evacuate passengers from the front or rear of the train and walk them along the track.

- When the tube gets really busy its virtually impossible for anyone to walk the length of the train inside so any staff might as well be in front driving it , or at least monitoring it in a cab.

Comment Re:DONATE (Score 1, Insightful) 112

Who are talking to? The people, who donated all their lunch monies to help Obama get reelected — so his Administration can defend this law from the EFF, and demand backdoors in personal electronics?

Like they haven't been warned by the Clinton Administration demanding the even worse kind of backdoor — they have...

Comment Re:DOJ Oaths (Score 2, Insightful) 112

Nobody except moronic, hyper-partisan fuckwads (on "both[1]" "sides[2]") ever argued that the First and Second Amendments were mutually-exclusive, you know!

Personally, even the few hyperpartisan fuckwards I know have never stated anything of the kind. Strawman much?

The problem, that leads many people to contrast the First and the Second Amendments, is not that they contradict each other — no one thinks so — but that we are reading them differently.

The First Amendment is read as liberally and all-encompassing, as the Jews read the prohibition to "cook lamb in the milk of its mother" — combining goat cheese with beef is Treif even though neither are sheep, and a goat can not possibly be the bull's mother. Read like this, the Amendment's right to "petition the government for redress of grievances" is understood as the right to any and all speech — including even production of pornography.

If instead we read the First Amendment the way we are told to interpret the Second, however, only the speech addressed to the government — and only for a redress of grievances — would be a right. Oh, and you'd have to go through a wait-period before opening your mouth. And you'll need a license to exercise that right too.

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