A m00se once bit my sister... No realli!

A m00se? Or some other J0ng-un-gulate?

The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change.

Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that, and unlike you I know the science behind it. The problem is the next sentence of my post that you conveniently left out of your quote -- which is, if we don't actually reduce energy demand, we'll eventually run out of natural gas and have to burn the coal/oil anyway. So we just end up in the same place, just a few decades later.

Unlike you, GP is viewing the entire situation. You simply refuse to work your assumptions into both scenarios.

Also note my primary objection is to the beginning of TFS which implies we could STOP climate change by this substitution, which is in fact idiocy if anyone thought it true.

Let's imagine two scenarios:

1. Burn coal until coal becomes impractical, then switch to natural gas.

2. Burn natural gas (with declining use of coal due to current policy and economic factors) until that becomes impractical, then increase or switch back to coal.

If we don't actually "reduce energy demand," as you put it, we burn the same amount of carbon under either scenario. Yet the second scenario reduces carbon introduced into the system in the earlier years. If we do reduce "energy demand," by whatever means and at whatever time, there is a net carbon reduction.

Only your strawman is claiming that substition = solution. The rest of us are claiming that substition = mitigation. In any of the two scenarios where we dont burn until we "run out" of both resources, there is less carbon emitted by switching to natural gas. In the scenario where we do burn until we "run out" of both resources, there is a nominally greater amount of time for society and nature to adapt by using natural gas first. In the meantime we continue to develop and drive down the cost of other sources, to deploy those technologies, and to develop storage technologies to support personal and bulk transportation.

You claim that switching to natural gas is idiocy yet using natural gas is somewhere between neutral-to-improvement, is currently somewhat cheaper, and under a carbon tax would inherently be cheaper due to factors that you claim to be perfectly aware of. Yet science and economics be damned; you just want the biggest stick possible to force us to do it your way -- right now, all the way, regardless of cost, and "what storage problems?".

The idiocy is not only seeking to internalize the costs of fossil fuels, but seeking to reject any improvement in their use that is not a complete solution. The idiocy is thinking that people won't recognize that fact and call you on it. The idiocy is thinking that once the sciene is proven (which it is), everyone must automatically adopt your particular priorities and timetable because there are no value judgments involved (or only yours).

People rately cooperate with those who call them idiots. Until you have a comfortable majority -- which you do not -- you cannot afford to alienate those who are supporting relative improvements. So become perfectly aware of the sitatuion and stop engaging in equal idiocy yourself.

Good, we need more hate because we certainly need less life on this planet. Let's start with politicians and lawyers, first.

As long as you people insist upon trying to control what your neighbors do, weaseling out of paying your debts, cheating the people you do business with, and making up your own rules that totally suprisingly favor whatever side you're supporting at the moment, there will be politicians and lawyers.

The politicians are just doing what you tell them to do -- or more specifically, what the people who actually care are telling them to do. Those who sit on their ass writing meaningless missives of how it's all rigged against them without actually organizing their neighbors get what they deserve.

The lawyers are usually trying to prevent you from being screwed by the other guys. And before you retort that lawyers are encouraging the screwing, remember that our technological surveillance state is being created by the engineers and computer scientists -- not politicians using off-the-shelf parts. You're no better. Behave yourselves and lawyers won't have clients. Then there'll be less of them.

Courts should punish intentional facilitation.
If you can't be bothered to sell a $1 security dongle with the software as other software companies do, then you must be intentionally facilitating piracy.
The courts are not there to be abused in the face of intentional facilitation, especially as best practice is already known.

Or you could use software activation, as other software companies do? As Microsoft does? Because Windows 7 and Office 2010 activation were certainly put there to intentionally facilitate copying.

As for your comment that hardware dongles are a "best practice," pull the other one, mate. Nevermind that the $1 dongles don't work.

I am from Germany. Over here I spoke to someone working in the field of nuclear safety (obviously also job dependent on nuclear energy, so ...). He said that he thinks we take more than enough precaution with dangerous material in connection with nuclear energy. Especially compared to other chemicals and materials in other fields, which can also be quite hazardous, but are regulated and therefore handled with a lot less care. And thus tend to harm human health and the environment much more.

It would seem from http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/e... last week's coverage that Newlink had already violated the terms of their license.

How would it seem so, since the very article that you link says "BioProtection Systems Corporation (BPS), now a wholly owned subsidiary of NewLink Genetics Inc., has performed at or above expectations thus far." Outside critics don't get to retroactively cancel a contract signed five years ago because progress under the contract doesn't meet their post-hoc expectations.

Seems like they sat on it as long as possible, then sublicensed to Merck.

Funny, the very article that you linked to says that "[l]ast week, we announced the beginning of clinical trials of the vaccine in Canada." Do you have any direct knowledge of the typical work and time involved in setting up clinical safety trials? I doubt it. Note the following:

Preclinical Testing: A pharmaceutical company conducts certain studies before the future drug is ever given to a human being. Laboratory and animal studies must be done to demonstrate the biological activity of the drug against the targeted disease. The drug must also be evaluated for safety. These tests take on the average 3 1/2 years.

At this point though, who cares about the lousy $50M,

TFA.

[T]hey should just get on with producing the fricking stuff while testing in parallel.

Because mass producing an experimental drug that has not been shown to be safe, much less effective, in vivo goes against more than a half century's worth of applied medical knowledge and ethics, notwithstanding the losses you would suffer if you stockpiled a drug that failed clinical trials? But hey, you can assume safety since nobody has been hurt yet, right?

Amazon is a possibility for some research (and there are PIs who haven gone that route). There are a couple of problems:

1) If you use EC2 24/7 and need a ton of data storage and fast data transfer capabilities it's no longer that cheap.

2) Sending potentially sensitive data off to amazon servers isn't a great idea. Even if you have data that is supposed to be de-identified, there are PIs who will intentionally or unintentionally screw up and put sensitive data on your cluster. It's one thing if this is inside an academic lab. It's another thing entirely if it's beamed over the internet to uncontrolled machines.

3) The amount of data being collected these days is mind-bogglingly huge. Even a couple of years ago when I was more directly involved in HPC, data sets for things like genomics data where gigantic. They could collect several TB of data per day and it was rapidly increasing. Transferring all of that off to amazon takes a lot of bandwidth and time. Keeping the cluster closer to the data collectors can be a win.

It really depends what you are going to use it for. If it's your desktop PC, consumer grade drives are fine. If you are going to use the SSDs for scratch storage on a supercomputer or the journal devices for Ceph, you probably are going to want high write endurance drives.

I think the key phrase is "were accused of illegal downloading." If the robo-call can prove that they are right on whatever they accuse, the case will be thrown away due to the Clean hand doctrine... The lawyer (Pietz) is relying on and hoping that the point can't be proven...

No, the lawyer (Pietz) is relying on the fact that he is a trained lawyer and you are not.

The Clean-hands doctrine is something that a court might use if a party were requesting an equitable remedy. That means, in legal matters, that a party is seeking specific performance of an agreement, an injunction, payment of the value of services rendered when there was no specific contract with an agreed price, etc.

The clean-hands doctrine does not allow the court to deny rights and legal remedies -- like the remedy in 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(3) of $500 for each violation -- that are specified by statute enacted by the government.

If you think that simply because the other guy has "dirty hands" the only thing you need to worry about is whether a government agency decides that you've crossed a line, you are sorely mistaken. Your lawyer will eventually explain that to you. You will not like it.

Guffaw! So much overhaul it's FOUR better!

If you're launching belly laughs at a mere four since the release of Windows 8.1, have a doctor on hand for ~7/yr since the release of Chrome 3 and ~8/yr since the release of Firefox 3.6.18.

RELEASE NOTES
New major version!
      - Removed support for the blink tag
      - Upped the version number
 

So, if Google's search results are considered free speech, do they also have the same responsibilities as other forms of free speech.
What if you search for a person and the results incorrectly suggests that the person is a pedophile? Does that qualify as libel, or is that suddenly not Google's problem?

It's not-so-suddenly non Google's problem -- specifically it's not Google's problem ever since the passage of the Communications Decency Act and the section 230(c) immunity in back in 1996.

If you search for a person and the results incorrectly suggest that the person is a pedophile, you need to go after the person who wrote and posted the material, not the search service that automatically indexed the material because, truth or falsehood aside, that material is relevant to the search.

You simply wish to shoot the messenger, or the big bad corporation, rather than deal with the actual author of the libel. It's been decided that that is a poor strategy, and that the benefits of automated indexing and searching outweigh your reflexive need to strike against the most convenient target at hand.

If you read the rest of the article, you find that you can simply disable the driver loading security to have it working again.

The article paints this as a huge security issue, but why?

Because you cannot simply add your own key, but you have to disable all driver signing in order to use one non-approved driver?

Cn anyone reasonably argue that having a system highly secure for non-technical users with easy workarounds for actually technical users is a bad compromise?

Yes. See every argument ever about UEFI secure boot on PCs intended to run Windows 8.

I look forward to posts from all those who decried the "Microsoft-sponsred" secure boot UEFI feature.

After all, at least with the former you could turn it off or add your own key to boot what you like.

The latter is merely a giant F U from Tim Cook to anyone who does not purchase Apple OEM or Apple-approved hardware.

What defunct are you talking about? ;-)

We want the funct!
Give up the funct!
We need the funct!
We gotta have that funct!

Owww! Stop the hitting...

So if a person merely thinks that they're gay, they're gay.

If an overweight person doesn't think they're overweight...