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Comment Re:Cause an Elected Dictatorship ? (Score 1) 465

The UK/ca/AU/nz Prime Ministers are effectively elected dictators

Bwah ha ha ha ha! You clearly have not been paying attention to Australian politics since 2007. The "dictator" was toppled several times by revolt from within and ended up running a minority Government until the election in Sep 2013. A "dictator" dependent on the support of minor parties to govern is hardly the description of one with unrestricted control. The current "dictator" is having trouble quelling the open discontent from within his own coalition in several policy areas and cannot get important policy initiatives through the parliament. Unfettered power? I don't think so.

Comment Re:Why is this so difficult? (Score 1) 1198

Your vet will typically use high dose pentobarbital or sodium thiopental in euthanasia of cats and dogs. Pentobarbital is the drug that the Danish manufacturer is withholding from the US penal system because they use it in executions. Sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the US and cannot legally be exported from the EU for use in executions.

Comment Why should we find this surprising? (Score 3, Insightful) 288

'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it.

Of course it takes longer to decommission than to build. When it was built all the materials were essentially safe, non-toxic materials where handling is easy, well-understood, and well supported by standard systems, factories and the like. When it is torn down much of the material is unsafe or toxic to some degree, some is extremely unsafe and toxic, and all of it must be dealt with in situ using systems that are not commonly used elsewhere. Handling toxic material safely takes more time than handling safe materials. The extended time leads naturally to extended cost. As wise people have observed, time is money.

Comment Re:Don't take the job (Score 1) 108

Please do not fly commercially, you clearly will not respect the authority of the pilots or the safety that zero blood alcohol/drug levels add to (http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/120.109). Don't consume anything that is mined in my part of the world, most (all) mining companies have zero tolerance for drink/drugs and random testing for same... even for office staff.

Comment Re:Ted Unangst's article (Score 1) 304

My favourite bit: "There are probably many ways to shave this yak; here’s one." I always love a new (to me) take on classic clichés.

It strikes me that, even if you accept a need for internal memory management like this, you would expect the security sensitive software to assume that every freed block of memory contained something sensitive and zero it immediately. Had it been doing that this bug would also have appeared many moons ago.

Comment Re:I'm trying (Score 1) 99

Or perhaps you are looking from a point to the northeast of a mirror reversed far north Queensland coast. The large notch is the Gulf of Carpentaria with Cape York Peninsula to the right, Arnhem Land/Northern Territory to its left, and the Kimberley coast trailing off around the back. As usual, Tasmania has just been dropped. It is as much Australia as the face on Mars is facial.

Comment Re:PR Guys (Score 1) 491

Thanks for the links. I don't think D1 is a variable, they describe D2 as the Aircraft-Satellite Doppler shift, and you need two objects to measure a shift.

As the southbound aircraft passed the equator (satellite) you would indeed expect the aircraft's radial velocity component to drop to a minimum (something the north path would not see I expect). At the edge of the satellite coverage the aircraft will be close to the edge of the planet as seen from the satellite, so much of its velocity would be in the plane tangential to the Earth passing through aircraft and satellite (though not, one would expect, directly toward the satellite). The satellite has time variable velocity components that may be as high as 100 knots rel. to ground that also come into play. Its a continuum in between and a very interesting geometrical puzzle. Certainly the aircraft airspeed limits and norms would put a maximum limit on the Doppler shift due to aircraft motion.

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