A coal plant, working absolutely perfectly according to its design parameters, will cause much more environmental and health damage than even a "catastrophic" nuclear failure. So no, it's not a technical issue. It's an emotional issue. We have all but cut off access to the cheapest, most abundant "green" energy source we have. It's like God handed us a big chunk of nearly-free magical energy and said, "Here, use this." Then Jane Fonda said, "But it's scary!" She's done more harm to the planet over the past 35 years than BP ever did.

Well, if we paid off making a new AI with a massive, hyper-euphoric, temporary endorphine rush, they might want to do quite a bit of it.

C-sharp was already taken in the late 80's, as was "D-flat", both were windowing libraries for DOS. Can't remember if it was Dr Dobb's or Byte magazine that published them.

If you had ever been to the UK you would know it has a lot of empty space. For example, the coast road on the West of Scotland is a lot less populated than the great ocean road here in Oz.

To school?

Agree, way too many people who should know better still conflate consciousness with intelligence. An ant's nest exhibits intelligent behaviour but it can't contemplate it's own existence, Watson displays the same kind of "mindless" intelligence and consistently outperforms the best human trivia buffs.

I noticed that too, did anti-science spammers get a pay rise recently?

Burning coal is "doing something" and it is negatively impacting everyone..

Heres the deal :
Youre going to get the following advice :
1. Hire a professional to run/manage/accountant/payroll etc and you can never do anything properly.
2. Youre an idiot - stop dreaming!
Both pieces of advice are flat out wrong.
To start an actual business you dont need professionals, funding or being extra smart. What you do need to do is not listen to idiots and learn. thats it.

Heres what you do :
1. Start your business. That is - go out into the world and find someone willing to pay you CASH MONEY in large chunks for doing something. Thats at least $2000 cash on delivery of x product.
2. Put that $2000 towards your business expenses. Now go find a lawyer who incorporates businesses federally with $2000 AND make sure you have enough of it left over for a mailboxes etc address, domain name, google apps subscription for mail, web address, business cellphone and rental meeting room in a office rental place. This is your "Start up capital" or "Seed round".
3. Now go develop that product yourself. Send it to your client. be prepared to gain $0 from this transaction since your client will likely dump you after seeing that first product.
4. Develop the product some more while looking for other clients.
5. If you find any, congratulations ! You have a business!

This is how I started several years ago. Bottom line is in 2 weeks you must be break even and in the first month you must have enough to meet payroll. If you do youre fine.

Deep sea vents were discovered when I was in my 20's before that we used to think abiogenesis had something to do with lightning hitting a mud puddle. The evidence that life formed around such vets on Earth is strong but inconclusive. Fatty acids from clay in the vent spontaneously form primitive cell membranes (in vents and mud puddles). Sulphur provides chemical energy, porous rock around the vent provides a sponge like scaffold for life to take root and extract passing nutrients. Most importantly the vents are predictable, the deep, still water stabilizes the temperature gradient. Convection currents cycle the fatty cells through the gradient allowing different chemical reactions within the membrane to synchronize themselves to the thermal cycle (much the same as plants match the cycle of night and day). If that really is how life got started then it's likely that primitive cells are still being spontaneously created near these vents today, the practical problem for scientists researching this idea is finding them before evolved life such as shrimp eat them.

Europa has all these conditions and like Earth it's ocean is also oxygenated at the top. Oxygen is vital for multicellular life on Earth, collagen (the stuff that holds individual cells together as multicellular critters) cannot form in an oxygen poor environment. Oxygen in Europa's ocean is replenished differently than it is on Earth. On Europa's surface strong radiation from Jupiter knocks the H2 off the ice and out into space, the free oxygen is returned to the ocean via plate tectonics. Personally I would think it very odd if we didn't find single celled life in Europa's ocean, at the very least it would force Science to radically rethink the conditions that lead to abiogenesis on Earth. What I'm interested to find out is whether life on Europa uses the same self-replicating molecules used by life on Earth, but I doubt I will be around to hear the answer..

Are you sure about that? Here's New York State's law:

S 130.05 Sex offenses; lack of consent.
[snip]
2. Lack of consent results from:
(c) Where the offense charged is sexual abuse or forcible touching, any circumstances, in addition to forcible compulsion or incapacity to consent, in which the victim does not expressly or impliedly acquiesce in the actor's conduct; or

S 130.55 Sexual abuse in the third degree.
A person is guilty of sexual abuse in the third degree when he or she subjects another person to sexual contact without the latter`s consent;

Seriously? Nobody is holding a gun to your head and the EU member states are free to leave any time they wish.

Really? All of Europe you say? Even Great Britain? Finland?

Are you an American? If you are I wish you'd STFU; you're making the rest of us look bad. WW2 was a team effort. Could the Allies have beaten the Germans without the Russians? Possibly; we did in WW1 after the Russians quit. The butcher's bill would have been a lot higher though. The west (particularly the United States and Canada) got off pretty easy. As far as "Europe would have been under the Soviets", that's debatable. The example of Finland suggests there are limits to how far Stalin was willing to go to gain strategic depth. Germany certainly would have gotten a much rawer deal without American involvement, though ironically enough it was the United States that originally proposed turning Germany into a pastoral state after the conflict.

Yeah, well, the same problem is brewing in the United States and I haven't heard a single mainstream politician from either party come up with a proactive way of dealing with it. And guess what? There's no provision for a State to file bankruptcy like Detroit did. What happens when one of the 50 can't meet its obligations? Nobody knows but we're apt to find out in the coming decades....

That's because the EU is really an economic concern trying to masquerade as a country. It originally started as the European Coal and Steel Community. It has always been about economics. A handful of rich and powerful countries benefit from a common market and currency. Countries that would probably be better off outside of the Eurozone won't leave it because the rich and powerful therein benefit. Well monied interests calling the shots is hardly a uniquely American phenomenon.

Europe won't truly unite absent some sort of external and existential threat. It took such a threat to unify the United States back in the day and the American colonies had a shared culture, language, and no history of going to war with one another. Even at that there was a rather bloody Civil War and regional tensions that still simmer to this day...

The grandparent, in the stupid pissing contest EU vs. US thread. I really hate these threads; sure, we have quarrels, but we've also got a shared history, culture, and commitment to freedom. People would do well to remember that. They might also wish to remember that countries that share our values are most definitely in the minority on planet Earth; it's really fucking stupid to root for the EU to drag the US down or vice versa.

These idiots should get a bloody passport and go visit the "other side"; you'll find we're/they're not that much different from you.

Devil's advocate, how do you stop Google from operating in the EU? Google does have a physical presence in the EU, data-centers and all that, but strictly speaking they could run the whole operation from outside the EU. What do you do then? Block them at the network edge? Hardly seems compatible with free speech.