Because they're nowhere near it, the curves on the graphing paper don't point their way, and it gets harder the longer you go. Not easier. (You always pick the lowers hanging fruits first.)

Current projections on when Germany will rid itself of coal, is "so far into the future that we might as well say never". I.e. 20 years or so.

In 1980 Sweden had a referendum that lead to the decision that nuclear power would be shut down in Sweden in 2010. In 2010 we had relatively more nuclear power than in 1980. We had about the same nuclear mix as we always had. Not one iota of difference in all those years.

It's easy to make a political decision that you won't have to answer for. But deciding that things should be shut down here and now, that's not so easy. Shutting down coal in Germany will cost money. No-one will want to pay it when it's about to happen.

So, I'm willing to bet good money the German electricity future will depend on coal for the foreseeable future. And that's bad. Really bad. They could have slashed their CO2 emissions if they'd kept nuclear and banned coal instead.

Smug?? Where on earth did you get smug?

Yes, we're lucky we've got a bit of hydro electric, but we don't have enough! That's the point. We still need nuclear. However, with the current political climate, we're going to shut them down, and then see our electricity prices soar, and our industry tank with it.

And you don't need hydro electricity if you like France have your head screwed on straight... (Well, when it comes to electricity generation...)

P.S. And hydro electricity isn't necessarily "environmentally friendly". Quite the contrary. Those rivers you damm, basically die. That's why we saved our last ones in favour of nuclear, way back when.

Well, seeing is believing, and from across the water, I'm not seeing it. The German electrical grid only works because they're neighbours (France) are ready, willing, and able to take up the slack. (I.e. exporting to Germany when they have a shortfall, and accepting the overruns).

The same is true of Denmark. They wouldn't "work" if they didn't have us for a neighbour.

And that true even though in both countries they don't use electricity unless it's absolutely necessary. Electricity to the consumer is about 3-4 times as expensive in Germany/Denmark so the consumers act smart, and avoid it as much as possible. The German releases twice as much CO2 per capita as us Swedes, and that's with similar standard of living and similar industrial mix. And yet, they're the green example to emulate, while we're the "backward ones".

Because of course, we have 40% nuclear and the rest hydro electric. Not for long though, the green stupidity have reached our shores and is alive and well. Well, at least we'll still have the hydro electric, and I'm sure the Norwegians (98% hydro electric) will be willing to shore up our swaying network. For a price...

So, the Germans clearly screwed the pooch from an environmental standpoint. They're producing CO2 as if there's no tomorrow, and that's going to continue for a long, long time. And they do that burning lignite, which is a pretty horrible fuel, even as fossil fuels go (yes, there's a reduction in use, it's a pittance). And this in a time where we're looking to electrify our transports. We should be gearing up for cheaper and more plentiful electricity, with a lower CO2 load, not trying our level best to go the opposite route.

Exactly! For those who want to dig deeper, the keyword is "typeful programming". I.e. where one uses a sophisticated type system with type checking, to encode and reason about many of the properties/requirements of ones programme.

For those programmers who haven't been exposed to it, explaining what it is, is a little like trying to explain the ocean to someone who grew up in the desert. It's a mistake to dismiss it with a: "Sounds like just a lot of water to me". Instead, I encourage getting ones feet wet. Exposure to functional programming techniques will make one a better programmer, no matter what technology one uses.

Nope. Like matter in space, you USians are all clumped together. You don't need to roll out fibre to the middle of nowhere, since no-one lives there.

You have three times as many people in California as we do here in Sweden (we're roughly the size and shape of CA). And yet we have much better and cheaper fibre than you do. It's got nothing to do with average population density as you have us solidly beat on that measure (Sweden: 24/sq km, CA: 97/sq km...)

Yes, I described that effect in an earlier post. It's the main (i.e. what you're aiming for) effect behind the effectiveness of torpedoes or mines.

But it takes a much larger bubble for that effect to dominate over simple concussive effects. We're talking warheads with hundreds of kilos of explosive here, not 2 kg... For a small pop like a contact mine, it does have to be in contact.

Also, note the buoyancy of the bubble mentioned in the wikipedia article. You need the bubble to form under the target, not at its side for any real effect, which is were we're attaching these limpets. (Just look at the water spouts from missing artillery shells, they go up, not sideways :-)). C.f. Barnes Wallis bouncing bomb. Even though it was substantial in size, it had to be made to hug the dam wall, for it to have maximum effectiveness. You couldn't just drop it in the middle of the dam and be done with it.

Well, I think you'll find a submarine or two with just the one hole in the engine room (a notoriously large and difficult area to work in when it came to damage control), but sure. When we talk of larger vessels they're difficult to sink. That's kind of the point.

Well, of course ultimately what sinks a ship is water inside the hull, aka not being able to keep it on the outside. But the story is more complicated than that, the main point being that ships have pumps and watertight compartments, so just making a hole in the ships hull isn't always successful. You have to make a large hole, preferably into a large compartment and one that's difficult to get at from the inside (to frustrate efforts to plug it). Or many smaller holes in different places, hence the practice of attaching many limpets when time and resources permitted.

Modern weapons actually use the physics of water to make that hole. A modern torpedo will detonate well below the keel of the ship to make a large cavity from the blast bubble. This makes the ship "sag" into the hole, breaking its back if your lucky, and when water rushes in to fill the cavity a spout will form that can cut the ship in two. All without trying to hole the ship as such, like older weapons did. (This takes a lot more explosive though...)

Yeah, but you'd have to "fly" them under water somehow. And you have to get the explosive right up against the hull. A surprisingly small amount of water between the explosive and hull and it won't work nearly as well.

Yes, 2kg was the weight of explosives in the classic British limpet mine. So well below the waterline it could and did sink a ship, but in order to reliably take town a such a large vessel, and especially a man of war at that, with more and better damage control, you'd probably need a lot more than one limpet.

When the Norwegians sank the SS Donau (a 10000 ton ship, much smaller than Queen Elizabeth) they attached ten mines, and even that gave the captain the time to beach the ship.

So 2kg of explosives applied on the outside of the ship can do some damage in the ideal case, but probably not catastrophic when the ship is manned and ready.

Yes, but in Sweden during the same time we've had a sea change in medicin (both human and veterinary), law, and journalism.

All these areas are now gender imbalanced, but with women being in the majority (sometimes very clear majority; 57% of judges overall, more in younger cohort, about 2/3 of younger doctors. etc. etc.). Even if the imbalance isn't as great as it was in favour of men in the eighties we're getting there.

But while these changed drastically, engineering OTOH is about the same as it always was. No great change.

So, the only conclusion then is that we have a society that "forced" women to take down the male bastions of medicin, media and law, but left engineering untouched? It's OK to decided about life and death in law and medicin, but for the love of God don't design a bridge? (Well, that's a poor example as there were always more women in civil engineering than comp. sci.) It doesn't sound like a realistic argument.

Look, we have our fair share of screwed up policies and notions, but we're not that inconsistent... It's pretty clear to me that the answer has to lie elsewhere.

But that's taking the argument one step too far already. If the question was why the situation at Google is 80-20 one needs only to look at the graduation statistics from US Comp Sci PhD programmes (if Google hasn't changed their hiring practices recently), where the figures are indeed in that range (and that's counting mostly foreign women, without them I seem to remember that the figure would be closer to 90-10).

Now you're already addressing the question of why women have opted out much earlier in the chain, and while that is interesting, it's not really something that Google can fix with their hiring practices, they can only hire from the candidate pool that is there after all. It takes something else. In another part of society (of which admittedly Google is a part, so they can do something, of course).

Now, I know from first hand experience in the academic teaching field how unpopular it is to (as I've had to do) point out that our targets and goals of increasing comp. sci. female undergraduate admissions were completely unrealistic as we would have to attract (in that case) all qualified girls from high school, not a single one would be left for medicin, law, etc. which we know already attracts a majority of the qualified female students. But like the aspie idiot I am I feel it still needs to be pointed out. (And I have tenure, so I'm harder to fire... :-))

Our answers in both acceptance and hiring to the "WHY DON'T YOU X MORE WOMEN" (where X is hire/accept) is and continues to be, "because they aren't there and they don't apply". We can't fix that at the end of the pipeline. (And I've been exposed to that in both industry and academia for more than twenty years, no come to think of it, it's closer to thirty...)

And being in Scandinavia I'm not sure I buy the "there are too many men there" argument. Thirty years ago that was very much true of medicin, veterinary medicine, and law to mention just a few highly sought after careers, difficult to get into and more importantly almost 100% male. And today Swedish universities have been e.g. fined for instituting "affirmative action" programmes for boys so that the veterinary programme (or was it law?) wouldn't be completely female. (But that's against the law, so no boys in that field...)

For example, in 1992 (Sweden), medical doctors 55-62 were 93% male 7% female. In 2010 in the youngest cohort it's the other way around, with 39% men and 69% women. If the "(old) men scare away women" hypothesis would be true, then this change of affairs is a very clear (data) point against. At the very least it didn't work on doctors.

Or lawyers, 57% of all judges in Sweden are women now. 55% of all judges in criminal matters are women, and that's set to change even more, as their dominance in the younger cohorts are ever more marked. If not even the grumpy old judges managed to scare the dainty young women away, well, that's another pretty hard blow against that hypothesis. (That doctors are wishy washy and can't put their collective foot down is after all somewhat believable, but scary and scarred judges, well they were kind of our last hope! :-))

But of course in comp. sci. the figures are pretty much identical to what they were in the eighties. There are a few more now, but we haven't nearly have the sea change that we've had in medicin (both veterinary and human) and law.

That said, the reason that we don't have the necessary skill set readily available today is because NIMBY-ism and regulatory hoops (esp. laws regarding public purchasing - cheapest bidder wins) means that nuclear is a more or less dead industry. When everything you ever build is a once-in-a-lifetime one-off, of course you're not going to reap any benefits from economy of scale, a mature subcontractor market, industry tradition and knowledge etc. etc.

So, the politics mentioned above did manage to kill nuclear, but indirectly, by making it such an uncertain (huge political risk) and unattractive field that the economy to support is isn't there. It's not inherent in the technology itself, we managed to do this (including welding) well enough in the sixties and seventies; as a species we're better at it now...

That's the problem. They're satellite phones, so there's no "easily" in changing the endpoint software. Your solution amounts to "change the cipher to a more secure one". Well, yes, indeed, that's what we need to do.

That you can always run your own crypto on top of the one provided by the carrier is kind of trivially always true, but most often not a realistic option.

That said, smaller installations, like in a house, aren't that efficient, even though they've become much more advanced (with fans, lambda sensors and whatnot) in the last couple of decades.

Instead, what is typically meant is CO2. A wood fired boiler will of course have much lower net CO2 emissions as they don't burn fossil fuel.

When it comes to particulate matter and a few other nasties, smaller wood installations are actually pretty bad. Esp. in our cities.