The first thing you should do is avoid eye contact, slowly back away, making calm reassuring noises. You should also keep your arms wide; it makes you look bigger and less like prey. Finally, you should lie on the ground, and play dead. They will quickly lose interest and move on. Do not run, as it will trigger their hunter/prey instincts.

If however they start to eat you, you should start to fight back vigorously.

Or if you are really worried about it, encrypt your phone and lock it...

You obviously have never done any real excessive drinking. It's nature's contraceptive!

Unless you are a girl... then it is probably something like 100% give or take a few percentage points (easily attributed to error). :)

It is all about the details and perspective really. It is usually really hard for people to understand what is going on behind the numbers as opposed to simply taking the values at face value. There is always the cause VS causality issue as well.

Didn't read the actual article (bc frankly I don't care that much), but I did read the abstract. My thoughts are this: So those deaths that were found to be attributable to alcohol, most of them are not "direct" but rather "attributed". So technically the alcohol didn't kill, the abrupt stopping of the car into a tree did (or the blunt trauma caused by said tree really). Not only that, but many of these "causes" are more like "contributed to" rather than attributed to. That is more like a percentage, not a whole. Not to mention how far down the cause train do you want to go... what caused the drinking, depression? What caused the depression, impotence? So on and etc... Now on all those things, car crash, liver problems, etc... that single death is counted exactly how many times? Then you take those extrapolated values and compare them to population data? Laughable. If however your went through your numbers and made decisions based on some threshold or determined tolerance, to count the one death to exactly one and only one issue, then removed those values from all other counts, and then compared it to population data, it would be somewhat meaningful. Otherwise all you are saying is booze is associated with a bunch of stuff that can kill you, which pretty much everyone knows already.

I recently had a similar issue doing analysis for a client. Where statistically values fell into more than one camp. If you add them all up, you are going to get a number much larger than your actual population. In that instance, I suggested evaluating each individual point by a set agreed upon criteria, which would put it into one particular bucket and not multiple buckets. In this manner you can produce meaningful statistics and can include in your analysis the cravat of exactly how you arrived at your values, which is verifiable, repeatable, and defensible. However doing that is a lot of work and computation, though I saw a lot of letters after the names of people doing that research, so perhaps I should assume they also looked at this.... somehow I doubt it however.

You assume they even bother with propaganda or pretense anymore...

Citizen, you will be sent indefinitely to a work camp. Cease resisting and comply with the corporate security officer's request.

Neat, had to look that one up.

That is complete BS. Yes it is proven that it cases a range of health problems. However it has been proven by several studies now, that smokers not only do not cost more than others, but in fact cost less. The issue is that most of the most costly health care is end of life care, and the bottom line is that smokers generally die earlier in life, while not smokers keep going and the longer you live later in life the more problems you have and the more expensive they are.

The tax does two things. One it is a source of revenue for the government (a large one), and two, it does the same thing as trying to ban it for our safety by making it more expensive the idea is less people will smoke. Having their cake and eating it so to speak. Personally I find it a bit disingenuous to say "this is bad you shouldn't do it", then jack the prices increasing revenue under the auspices of "public health". It could also be argued that more smokers are less well off (wealthy), so this amounts to another tax on the poor.

Either way, the money generated, is in no way earmarked for "health care" and they can put it towards any silly project or program they like...

From what I understand of the process (which is little), the easiest most cost effective way to produce hydrogen gas is to extract it from coal. However now you are using coal. While it might not be as bad as burning it, it isn't exactly green either.

That said, if you are doing not to be green, but to reduce your dependence on oil, and say countries that produce oil (middle east and Russia), then it is a pretty effective way to do so. Rapping it in a gossamer green bow that might not be entirely truthful is just marketing. Other countries like Canada and the US also produce a lot of oil themselves, so many not as a big of hurry to jump on that bandwagon. Though at the same time, they both have huge stores of coal also...

So environmentally friendly? Maybe a bit, but not really. Greater independence from oil? Yes, if it becomes popular. So success really depends what your ultimate goal is really.

Unless it means something different in Germany than it does in North America, generally speaking a "Think Tank" is code for Political Lobby Group. If you think what comes out of the mouth of such a thing is unbiased, you are crazy.

Good for them for producing what is no doubt a lot of solar energy. I doubt whatever figures they list are meaningful in anyway.

However the point is that renewable energy, on its own is not enough. If on any given day, your power needs fluctuate between 40-50GW, you NEED 50GW of CONSISTENT power from somewhere. Its fantastic that solar can produce 20GW (which I doubt anyway), however if tomorrow it produces 4GW, you now have a deficit of 16GW. Which means blackouts, or total electrical grid collapse as it all cascades into one huge fail. You have to replace that 16GW from someplace... sure you can buy it from your neighbor (which is what Germany does), but realistically what does that do, put the coal and nukes just across your border where you get almost the amount of risk plus none of the control? Renewables are great if you have storage, however that more less takes the form of huge water reservoirs which A) you have a limited supply, B) have their own environmental impact, and C) horribly inefficient.

Barring some magic electrical storage technology, you need both base power, and/or power you can spin up very quickly. Nukes are good because they are always on, constant power. Coal, gas, oil, are also always on, and also you have the ability to shut down generation, or turn it on again as need arises relatively. If the sun isn't shining, solar isn't much help, and if the wind isn't blowing neither will that. Unless your country's name rhymes with Riceland geothermal is pointlessly small potential. Biomass is too small to ever be that useful. Hydro is the only one that is a bit different. Barring some sort of huge long drought, it is pretty great. The only problem with it, is that it is a finite resource. Only certain areas have potential, and once you exploit them all there is no more to be had. Also some countries have more/less area to which to exploit. Tidal power is interesting, but so far no one has really been able to harness it effectively. Only a handful of sites exist around the world, and they are largely experimental. Same goes for current and wave type generators.

Anyway most successful systems employ a mix of generation types, including renewables. Problem is once the ratio gets out of wack, you are going to run into trouble, The only other way to do it is to massively over produce, however that is wasteful, and inefficient, and thus likely very very expensive.

...is so fat, she has a Higgs Boson field that crushed the universe.

There seems to be a nerdy joke in there someplace...

Another problem with the simply ejecting a body into space is that of collisions. It isn't something that has any kind of propellant. Explosively decompressing an airlock isn't going to give it all that much of a velocity. That icy 100kg body is going to be wiping around earth at 17,000km/h, and would do all kinds of damage to anything it comes in contact with. In addition, I would imagine that doing so might also require course corrections, equal and opposite reaction and all of that. For any kind of duration, likely you could just strap the body to the outside until you can bring it back to earth. Then again not sure how great that is for moral. Though to be honest, I would be bet there is likely parts of the space station that enclosed, but either open to vacuum or unheated, like for science experiments etc... which might be simpler to use as a makeshift morgue. Has there ever been any deaths in space? It is likely pretty rare, but I am sure there is a procedure for it, just like everything else.

I was thinking the same thing. Kind of funny. Though at the same time, makes a bit of sense. Probably one of the few places where they can afford to do projects like this. Good for them.

I live in Ontario and work in an associated field.

I do not know the actual specifics of this case, but it usually is NIMBY that causes the problems. Ontario has several large groups of "green" activists and pour money into lobbying and lawyers, when in reality they are mostly home/cottage owners associations fronting as environmental groups. Shutting down wind power due to OMG bird strikes, and the like when really they are just looking after what the value of their properties are worth in the area. A garbage processing plant? Yeah you can bet it got shut down by land owners protecting their self interest and investments.

We had a big gas plant scandal a few years ago where some were supposed to be built, NIMBY and the resulting political pressure had the government shut the project down, costing taxpayers like 2 billion dollars. These things have to go someplace. Isn't the ONE job of the state to look after the interests of the many at possibly the expense of the few? Looking after the few at the expense of the many seem a bit corrupt.

I fly through time zones usually about twice a year, but never get jet lag. Because it only ever amounts to an hour or two.

Only once did I have real jet lag and that was after a 12h flight to Italy.

Also if they find a big flaw, the reason for burning the project, announcing that it exists and what it is, opens it up for exploitation.

Knowing it is there, large enough that it is not fixable within the current state of the code or at least not easily (say without starting from scratch), might make them abandon the project, yet be quiet about the actual details as to why. If they say how it is broken, and expose peoples data to exploitation, are they going to get sued? Likely there is wording that indemnifies them, but that might not keep people from trying. Just defending yourself can cost money. Also I have seen plenty of situations, where people know they are in the right legally, but choose a non-confrontation path, as it is best to avoid it altogether if at all possible, taking the lowest possible risk as they can, and if possible I am pretty sure lawyers would suggest this course of action if it is an option..

It very well could be "code speak" (pardon pun) for; "yes our code is compromised, no we are not allowed to talk about it, end communication".

Then again it could me less complicated than that, and taken at face value they could be saying; "Our code is a mess. Fixing it would take more effort than we are willing to expend for this project so we ended it. You are welcome to try, but we would recommend you just start from scratch as it contains many fundamental problems."

It is too bad, I've always considered it the defacto standard in encryption. I am not a huge fan of the idea of MS being my provider of encryption with bitlocker, though I have heard some good things about it. Then again it isn't exactly free either.

The Slashdot tinfoil hat part of me wants to believe the NSA story, however common sense tells me it is just another open project that was led by a dedicated few with little resources that became too much to maintain over time. That said, they were rather elusive about it in the end, so who knows. Then again that could be a professional record thing, liability, or legal... plausible deniability limiting personal liability sort of thing.