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Comment Re:For a country so good at engineering... (Score 1) 212

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?

Comment Re:Reall problem: German radiation phobia (Score 2) 212

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.

Comment Re:If the Grand Ayatollah's against it.... (Score 1) 542

"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.

Comment Super-8 home movies (Score 1) 635

My family treasure is box full of super-8 home movies from the early 80's and a projector that still works. There's about 3hrs worth of 3min films spliced together on 20min reels, the grandkids get a buzz seeing their parents as toddlers. The other bit of tech memorabilia I won't part with is my dad's 1976 HP21C calculator, still in it's original leather case, perfect working order but no manual, can't even find a copy on the internet. Most people I've shown it to have never heard of reverse polish notation, grandkids are unimpressed by it. :)

Comment Re:why the focus on gender balance? (Score 1) 579

"misogyny, racism, and homophobia" were all considered pollitically correct in their day, and that's exacty what was wrong with them. Political correctness in the opposite direction is no better because it's also predicated on an ideologically driven notion of "balance". Telling women they should be on WP is no different to telling them they belong in the kitchen.

Comment Re:Discrimination (Score 1) 579

Also why is it that WP should do more to appeal to females but FB doesn't need to do more to appeal to males? An individual or organisation that tries too hard to appeal to everybody, ends up appealing to nobody. Self exclusion is not discrimination, it plain old "personal taste".

Comment Re:Sarcasm Detector (Score 1) 28

90% of the "natural language" data on the internet is sarcasm and/or trolls

The Jepordy stunt demonstrated Watson can filter out trolls better than humans and it does that by assigning credibility rankings to sources of data. Most of the work on Watson is directed at medical research, it's sources are things like the pubmed database, not slashdot comments.

IBM are sitting on a revolutionary advance in software engineering, they're not interested in selling it, they want to rent it and claim slice of whetever their "partner" organisations find. It will revolutionise research in the same way CAD/CAM and physics engines have revolutionised engineering over the last 3-4 decades and IBM look set to reap the enoumous potential of their billion dollar investment in basic research.

Comment Re:Angry mob is a no show (Score 1) 1262

This shouldn't be part of being a "public figure"....Why would you think it's acceptable? Whether in jest or not?

I was replying to my own post since I had gained the erroneous impression that menacing "vigilantes" were hanging around her home. What is it about my post that makes you (and the mods) believe I think the abusive and threatening trolls are acceptable? I can assure you I don't, I don't like wars of aggression either but they are both a fact of life, which is why I put "sadly" in the words.

Having said that, all but one of these threats was at the low end of seriousness. This woman is a professional victim and is milking the trolls bad behaviour for sympathy. You don't defeat trolls by re-posting their trolls, you defeat them by denying them their oxygen. She's a marketing major, she knows a lot more about manipulating audiences than either of us. Having watched this woman and her critics for some time now I believe TFA is a cynical attempt on her behalf to link real world violent misogyny to people who play video games, it confirms everything she has been saying about gamers - but when you peel back the marketing hype, it doesn't.

Comment Re:Apparently the trolls are out here, too (Score 1) 1262

I think you ought to consider not clicking on such articles. By that, I mean surely you've been around long enough to realise that it's the number of clicks that count when selling eyeballs. If you know upfront the content will burn your eyeballs, why click?

It's a new twist on and old journalistic trick they pull out on a "slow news day" where they advertise and run a human interest story about the people who determine TV ratings, turns out those people like watching stories about themselves and consequently the shows ratings go through the roof. Of course the trick is not to do it every week, just pull it out occasionally when they are really desperate for advertising dollars.

I've watched some of her videos and watched some of her consistently angry but peaceful YT critics. The critics win hands down, as for violent critics TFA says she received one serious death threat in a YT post with her address attached. That happens to anyone in public life, just ask John Lennon or better still, the slashdot editors, I'm fairly confident they could come up with a whole page full of threats with phone numbers and addresses that have been censored on slashdot for obvious reasons.

Aside from that, slashdot anonymity is really just decent psuedo-anonymity, making such threats on the internet and backing them up with an address is possibly one of the dumbest things a potential rapist or murder could do, they may as well just nail their drivers license to the victims forehead.

Comment Angry mob is a no show (Score 1, Troll) 1262

Damn I feel foolish now I've RTFA, she's complaining about YT trolls, there's no actual violence. One person posted a death threat with her address attached. Everyone from climate scientists to Exxon executives get that sort of shit continuously, it's (sadly) part of being a public figure.

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