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Comment Re: In next months news: (Score 2) 93

Actually the "moderate consumption" myth has been thoroughly debunked. For more on this look up the "j curve hypothesis". It turns out that properly conducted studies (particularly in scandinavian military cohorts) establish a near linear dose-dependent effect of alcohol. That is, any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of many illnesses (cancers included). This is now well established, but the alcohol industry continues to push for softer messaging like, 'a glass of red wine with your meal is healthy'. We now categorically know this is not true. In some case series analyses, alcohol consumption accounts for approxinately one third of attributable cancers. In many ways, it is a similar public health threat as smoking. I do believe in a person's right to make bad choices, but I also strongly believe that people should be properly informed amd that governments have an obligation to prevent misinformation (especially when it is for-profit). Some common-sense changes that will result (eventually) from the evidence are: - limit or prohibit alcohol advertising (esp. at sporting events) - include warnings about cancer, brain damage and liver damage on labelling - consider public health when licensing venues (even without longer-term consequences, there are strong correlations between alcohol-serving venue density and violent crimes) - standardise measures, prevent free-pouring and enforce responsible serving laws which hold venues liable for serving drunk individuals -maintain strong controls on drink-driving These are all common-sense methods of harm reduction. Feel free to keep drinking ), but please don't delude yourself that it is good for your health!

Comment Re: First post! Go QEMU, go! (Score 4, Interesting) 23

You're kidding right? KVM blows every other hypervisor out of the water with its performance. It may not meet your use case but for serious emulation it smokes the competition. In our business we run hundreds of VMs with not a single machine crash and get near-native speed, especially with the improvements in virtiofs. KVM also does a great job with hardware virtualisation including PCI passthrough and can handle resource changes on-the-fly (like increasing memory to the virtual machine). As far as bridged networking, set up your bridge with standard linux tools and then just attach your VMs to the bridge. We don't use a GUI for KVM because libvirt is really easy from the command line and the config files are simple to work with. For enterprise use, it's simply the best.

Comment Re: HOWTO (Score 0) 1081

Hell is just fine for me if it means not believing in your fairy god. The trap of religion is the true hell. Eventually I'm sure society will become civilized, the end of death sentences and the realization that crime is a function of a broken social order will be two signposts on the way.

Comment Re: Shrug, yawn. Have you read it? (Score 1) 224

Regarding molten salt, I assume you refer to the liquid fluorine molten salt proposals. I looked into this too but it does create a lot more complexity in separation of neutron poisons from the molten stream. I agree that in an accident the design looks better and the fact that it has self regulating qualities is good. However, the molten salt reactors don't get around the largest issue with fission power, expensive to handle waste products. Reprocessing doesn't reduce the volume of waste much (only helps to reuse the plutonium and also reduces mining to some degree). The story of the nuclear fuel cycle was of clean energy but it has left is with quite a number of very polluted sites and a huge bill in dealing with the waste sitting in casks and pools. Perhaps fast neutron burner reactors could help (molten lead looks particularly interesting) but I think that with increasing political instability and the track record of humans being poor managers of super complex systems, nuclear may just not be out friend for a couple more generations. Solar is quite capable of providing is with the energy we need (yes, base load too if we use another type of molten-salt!) and it's not prone to catastrophic failure.

Comment Re: The real disaster (Score 1) 224

workers who stepped in the water at Fukushima sustained significant radiation burns.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

There are safer ways to work around these exposed cores but in some ways Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. The workers who tunnelled under Chernobyl and laid concrete to stop further core intrusion into ground water avoided the more severe problem that now occurs at Fukushima.

The total exposed core material and the use of MOX also make the total expelled radiation greater at Fukushima, just that most of it has gone into the water rather than into the air.

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