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Comment Re:Is this an achievement? (Score 1) 47

Well, you are unlikely to be the *only* one who doesn't think this is all that impressive, because you're unlikely to be the only one who didn't read the article or looking up the device on the company's website.

The robot in question is designed to capture energy from surface waves for propulsion. So it is not a deep submersible, it waddles along a six meters below the surface, tethered to a streamlined surface buoy that it drags along and uses to capture wave energy. Making it through a major storm is a significant proof-of-concept for such a system.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Mars, Ho! Chapter Thirty Four

Engine
An alarm woke me up at quarter to seven and for once I didn't mind a bit, and in fact I was glad it woke me up. I was in the middle of a really weird dream. A herd of cows was stampeding towards me, only they were running on their hind legs and somehow carrying big butcher knives in their front hooves, all singing a Chartov song while coming at me. Too many westerns, I guess.
It was engine seventeen, somethin

Comment Re:this is news? (Score 1) 217

Sorry I didn't reply sooner for some reason this reply from slasdot was in the spam folder...strange never happened before.. That's said

Im 56 I've been around. There is 1 country I would consider moving too IF I had too and that is Canada. There are NO European country's I would like to move to or live or even visit. That's my personal choice based on 56 years of life. The first 5 I have no recollection of lol

Comment Re:a question.... (Score 1) 64

Trees suck up water that otherwise causes slides.

Unless it rains a lot. You can increase the threshold a bit before a slide occurs, but big, unstable areas will slide sooner or later.

There's really only two ways to deal with landslide issues this big - disposable land use or get rid of the hillside.

Comment Re:Make-work Project? (Score 1) 219

A true Democracy would be a terrible system indeed, with the rich even more firmly in control. People give away their password for chocolate bars (70%) or even nothing (34%!), so voting for some obscure law, probably a chocolate bar would do just fine, or at least a threat of getting fired.

Things change when you toss in the second or the third rich person. They will need to offer more than a candy bar.

Comment Re:Cost Seems Low (Score 2) 219

The tunnel's gonna need a whole lot of concrete, steel, etc. - global commodities whose cost doesn't vary that much by geography.

And don't actually cost that much.

The LHC is packed to the gills with custom components: everything from the the superconducting magnets to the RF generators to the detectors to the massive computing systems to sift through all the subatomic debris. Even assuming China has the technical expertise to create that custom componentry (a question I can't answer - I simply don't know)...

I doubt they do. And I doubt that lack of technical expertise is actually an obstacle. After all, prior to constructing the LHC, Europe didn't have that expertise either and yet all those devices got built just the same.

does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?

I bet the EU could do that too. But it'd require changing how they build such things.

Comment Re:a question.... (Score 1) 64

Also, I think any sort of root system would become less effective as the size of the anchored volume increases. For example, doubling the spatial scale of the volume to be anchored means that you have have four times the surface area to anchor to bedrock, but eight times the mass that needs to be anchored.

Suppose your landslipe was exactly a twentieth the mass and volume of the Oso one. Then your slide area would have about 2.7 less mass per surface area for roots to anchor. Get a large enough unstable area and nothing can anchor it. That's why Earth is an oblate spheroid in the first place.

Comment Re:This a wheeze to get Office 2013/ 365 cheaper (Score 2) 164

Short term it may cost more, long term it should save a lot... As someone who fully expects to still be paying taxes in 10 years time, i welcome long term savings.

As for interoperability, they are the government... You either want their business (eg suppliers), or you have no choice (eg taxpayers)... If they require that you submit documents in ODF then that's what you do, or they will find other suppliers who will.

Comment Re:Here we go... (Score 1) 454

Great, you want to judge both sides impartially by international law, let's judge them by international law.

If you want to go that way you should be prepared for the possibility that international law won't be on your side. (Which I'm not sure you are.)

Are the Settlements Illegal?

Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.

"Movement for Greater Israel"? They kind of shot that to hell when they returned Sinai to Egypt, didn't they? (How much land was that compared to the territory of Israel proper?)

2. Killing non-combatants

From the Goldstone Report:

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...

The "Goldsone Report"?

Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander

Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. ......

For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”

All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime.

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