Firstly the distance was almost half to Paris (lower if you count the army basis in the Ruhr), making it very easy to crush anything or send reinforcement, bombing, and the german had a very good air and tank superiority (even if they still used a lot of horse caried stuff lilke everybody) etc... Secondely the climate , the countryside, is much harsher toward the east than toward the west. There was a running joke that the best german soldier killer of the russian army was named "colonel winter". Winter on the other hand is way survivable with the quasi oceanic climate north of France. Finally the capital with 15-20% of the french was already at the mercy of an attack, with practically nothing to stop german. That made the french position untenable no matter what resistance you could offer. Russian position was more tenable because they could play with the time and meat grind people.

Secondly do you find it really good to send human to the meat grinder like the russian did ? Personally I think people like you which think sending millions of people to the meat grinder is a valid tactic disgusts me. It is neither courageous to send people to their death that way, nor is it cowardice to admit defeat when your position cannot be maintained. Hey anonymous coward, WW1 missed you !

I am ready to bet you would not be in the first wanting to be grinded in such a way, but I am also betting your FAT ASS is nice and comfy in your parents basement typing your usual "surrender joke", far away from any risk of war.

Apart for maintaining thousand of miles of cables no matter remote or even no matter the weather, and making sure they have overgeneration for when people with solar suddenly have a longer period of "cloud" or bad weather. See nothing at all.

Look we all know of those joke daily mail equation about "best" day of the week to do x,y,z , all having no causal relationship whatsoever. It is an equation, alright. The problem is that the drake equation is about as useless as it can be , and still it let people drop a lot of ink. The main problem is that many of the term cannot be estimated.... Until we visit far flung corner of the galaxy or the unvierse and find no life/life there. Ultimately int he absnece of facts too many term are simply down to whether you are "optimist" for certain term or "pessimist" on them.

If somethign depends on your opinion it might still be an equation by the virtue of having a right erm and a left term and an equal, but it is not anymore science. It is religionm fantasy, politic, fiction, but not science.

The drake equation is not science. It is a garden variety water cooler conversation about what you believe.

"New York prosecutors successfully persuaded a judge that the ancient law could be used"

The law was not sunset-ed, the law was not stricken down by another law, the law itself was not repelled on its own, the law was not stricken down by the supreme court.

So what is the problem ? Until a repell/strick down , ALL those law are still valid. Cue the shooting down welsh with a bow, but this is the basis of our judiciary process. just because a law is old does not make it invalid.

You know, people were panning germany for forbidding uber. But we do not have (as far as I can tell) a "medaillon" limit. All you need to be a legal taxi is :
* make a "taxischein" (driver license allowing you to transport people)
* Have insurance which allow commercial transportation of people
* Have a metered reader which the government checks ("geeicht")
None of which is an artificial scarcity like the medaillon mentionned.



And yet what do we see in the article here ? Artificial limitation in the country of the "free market" which are even worst than in Germany.

"I'm pretty sure for "most of our history" people have lived in the same rural communities where, not only did everyone who regularly encountered you have a pretty good running list of all your past major mistakes"

Move away start your life elsewhere was always a possibility. With a search engine you cannot. this invalidate this point. We enjoyed a natural right of being forgotten by virtue of going somewhere else where we could be anonymous and unknown. There was only an old fashioned way to find about you : physically go to the library and look for journal snippets with your name. Which was a very time consuming process, so most people would not do it. And that include your new neighbors , your new job. De facto, google is not making you more anonymous, it is making you LESS anonymous, unless you are named with a very generic "John Smith" name. Today your new neighbors, your new job can google your name. And chance is , that it will find you. And that is what we lost and the right to be forgotten is trying to set back.

This is NOT revisionism or censorship. The fact we got to be forgotten is a something we enjoyed for most of our history. Until google and search engine came along, then it went out of the window. Think about it : if you were published as having pissed on the US flag in 1970, chance is that it will be obscure and be forgotten a few weeks, month , years later. Today it will haunt you forvever. It was not censorship or revisionism it was the simple fact that people forgot, people are not machine. machine never forget unless you force them.

We enjoyed being forgotten until google came along. This is not about imposing a "new" right, this is about enjoying what we the previous generation has as a freedom. This is about reclaiming what search engine stole from us. As I already said multiple time on slashdot, a society which do not forget , helped by a seaerch engine, is a pathologic society which does not forgive, and ruins potentially lifes forever.


As for the accusation of revisionism and censorship : this is the exact reason why the search engine are asked to remove stuff, and NOT the original publication. Because then the information is still reachable by the same OLD fashioned way we did before : old fashioned research.

Nothing to add to what you said just this : "or if he smoked pot" actually it is known that there was no detectable trace of intoxicant in his blood : there was a toxicology report , I read it, and it all reads as negative (creatinine was high also, means the sample was relevant e.g. : not botched).

"as conclusive proof that the French are irredeemable snobs"

Or that French people understood a long time ago that if you do not take politic seriously, you end up with two right wing party in a two party oligarchy.

But hey don't let that disturb you. Why don't you add a "rifle not used , dropped once" joke as you are at it.

In case of taxi you need to ensure your passenger are covered in case of accident, you also need to make sure the meters are not tricked to count quicker etc.... Not all is regulatory capture. A lot often is real security, that some sees as an obstacle to their "cheapo" alternative.

I am still PO at the EU to allow using other type of fat and still letting it called chocolate. Basically they allowed replacing higher quality fat with lower quality fat, which fits my definition of "adulteration".

In fact look here : http://www.unctad.info/upload/... we are still at lower price than 1978, way lower in constant dollar, although production is increasing.

If the price of cocoa was exploding, then people would plant them. And yet the price barely went from 1500$ per tonnes in 2005, to a spike of 3000$ between 2009-2011 and now is down to 2000$ per tonnes. So if there is cocoa beans missing , why is the price going down ? I am willing to bet that there is some non-free-market shenanigan going on here. Otherwise as cocoa goes missing the producer would get better price, and more people would plant them.

I take their promise as in "we will pretend to protect your privacy while working hard with our legal department to find work around, and when we get caught, then it won't matter because we will have respected the "letter" of our promise even if we broke the spirit of it, and in the mean time we avoid laws which would force us to REALLY respect privacy."

If an industry promise self regulation, you can bet it will be in their interrest, not in the one of the customer.

You need a certain amount during the whole day, without blackout or too many brownout. The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions. Thus only conventional is at the moment doable for baseload. There are projects to have either chemical, thermal or even physical battery (think of water reservoir put in heigth, pump up when usage is low, let fall down and generate when electricity demand is high), but all of those needs an enormous amount of investiments. Basically also you would probably need a multiple of the generation you require, to be able at least to store for "bad days" and smooth over generations. Basically this also require a huige investments. Even germany found out quite quickly that beyond a certain amount of renewable you hit limits. Ask yourself why they reverted to brown coal/lignite instead of expanding the renewable generations by a factor.

So

Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having

those sneering are probably people having no fucking clue on electricity generation and usage , or even how to store energy. Probably the same groups which want to kill nuclear, while at the same time being OK with coal, despite coal releasing more radioactivity and killing an impressive number of people every year worldwide (miner as well as people suffering from various illness due to the pollutions).