During WW2, about 3,000 ships, complete with fuel, cargo, and usually sailors, were sunk in the Atlantic by German U-boats.
Obviously nobody stripped them of anything.
What environmental effect have these had? It seems absurd to complain about one, albeit large, ship, when thousands are rotting on the bottom of the ocean.
The proposed plant is intended to remote 36,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
This is, possibly deliberately, one millionth of the world annual total of about 36 billion tonnes.
It's going to take an awful lot of these plants!
"Acting in the shareholders interest"
It doesn't say "short term interest", does it?
They were clearly warned, by their own scientists of causing potentially catastrophic damage to the world, and therefore being exposed to the subsequent legal risks. They clearly ignored this warning and went on with "business as usual" - and even set up special fake groups to lie about it, ie attempting to cover up their knowledge.
This looks to me to be conspiracy to cover up a potential risk.
This is, of course, ignoring any vestige of actual morality, as that doesn't seem to apply.
I am rather surprised that Wikipedia actually needed any staff in Saudi Arabia.
I thought the whole idea of the internet was to render location irrelevant!
Why were they there?
The site concerned are all privately owned. It is their choice what they accept. "Free speech" is not an issue.
The UK government is within its rights to insist they remove illegal content.
It is also possible for the UK government to "request" them to remove what they consider dangerous content. The sites might refuse, but then
It is further possible for the UK government to make whatever rules it pleases - it makes the laws, after all.
This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time - a long time ago, in the 1970s, my (Essex, UK) university paid for an upgrade to their IBM (?) line printer to a faster speed.
An IBM (?) employee turned up and changed a single belt. And that was it.
Cleary the printer was capable of the higher speed from the outset.
This is pretty common - it's more efficient to built everything to the same spec, but sell downgraded version for lower prices. It becomes a little obvious when a simple over-the-air software tweak improves performance.
Obviously the manufacturer could sell all equipment with full speed enabled - but how to price it? Either raise the price of the unit - which would deny them the lower price, but still profitable (or at least break even), sales, or give up on the extra profit for the faster units. What would you do?
It's a bit like licensing software - obviously the same software is equally capable of running on a thousand machines just as easily as on one. But you need to pay for the development somehow - and selling one version is not enough.
The basic concept of a "social credit score" is fairly appealing.
You lose points for missing a doctors appointment, or being late to school.
You earn points for helping with a street clean-up, or donating to charity.
And presumably you get bonuses for a high positive score, like free swimming pool entry, or tickets to a sports event.
It all sounds ok until you think about who is in control. And that is the issue.
It basically enforces the morals of the people controlling the system - or the morals they want, which might not be the same.
China is notably very touchy about criticism, whereas most western democracies ignore minor slights. So from the point of view of a western democratic citizen (which includes me, despite Australia not being notably west of much) this is potentially very oppressive.
With a light hand, and sensible rules, it would work well.
But who will control the controllers?
I was born in 1955. There were 3.5 billion people.
Now we have 8 billion.
I think we have a problem. Just like smart folk have been saying since, oh, a long time.
Come back Thomas Malthus, all is forgiven.
The only country with the, um, balls, to tackle the problem has been China. And it's not gone especially well there.
It appears population growth slows, and even reverses, as countries become rich. The currently population boom is in Africa, eg Nigeria (HDI 0.51).
There is a small correlation between low HDI and high population growth, and the reverse, but it's weak. Religion and economic factors probably have significant effect.
Trying to move to Mars is not going to help, despite Elon's best efforts (though we must commend him for attempting to make a "backup" civilisation).
So what to do?
* We need to solve the carbon problem before large areas with large populations go underwater or become untenable (eg Bangladesh), or we are going to get even more chaos
* we need to work on empowering women in poor countries to control their own birth rates (education!)
* we need effective and cheap contraception to be readily available (for men and women)
* we need better pre and post natal care to increase the survival rate and health of children (and thus reduce the need for "spares")
* we need better old age care to reduce the desire for "children to look after us in our old age"
* we need to get fast breeding religions (cough, Catholicism) to stop it, just stop it (education)
* the massive numbers of single parents (mainly women) is contributing to poor breeding practices (arguable)
So which of these do you want to contribute to?
(Disclaimer - I have 2 children. On the other hand, my [only] sister has none)
Create a new . txt file and at the very top of the first line, insert: . LOG.
Now, whenever you open the file in Notepad.exe, Notepad will automatically insert a timestamp on the next line.
Enough, surely?
Plenty of people live in quite small apartments, where there are not spare rooms for working. If you live in a one bed apartment or a studio, shared with your partner, it's not going to be practical for both of you to work from home. Especially if one is, say, software designer, and the other a guitarist, or worse, a chatty sales person.
Some years ago, I built a chat system for a major Australian bank (which bank? Don't ask). Anyway, they sent an official list of words they deemed unacceptable. This was an actual piece of paper (it was a while ago) with a list of rude words on bank headed paper. Hilarious.
The filtering wasn't so hard, except that oddly "Dick Smith" - an electronics company, was acceptable, but "Dick" was not. Made for slightly interesting programming. I think I just **** the offending word.
Sadly, I no longer have this piece of paper. I should have framed it.
As a non-American, it staggers me that every American movie I see seems to invariably star some sort of antiestablishment figure, a lone wolf (sometime a small group for a little variety). There will be car chases, or some other sort of chase, and, obviously, lots of gunfights.
There's no problem an American movie character cannot cure with a bigger gun.
Now perhaps these are just the movies I choose to see, and surely there are others, but the constant diet of "government is always bad" does get a bit tedious.
I have seen a couple of French movies recently, and guns did not appear, which was nice.
Very empty move theatres, though - I've yet to see a cinema with more than, say, 10 seats occupied since before the pandemic.
It seems astonishing to most of the democratic world quite how widespread legalised corruption - known as "lobbying" - is in the USA. The mere idea that any company would spend tens of millions on such things seems incredible.
Whilst other countries, including my own (Australia), have their challenges (the favourite being "vote for what I want and I'll give you an amazing well paid cushy job when you retire" - cough, fossil fuel companies, cough), the USA has rendered bribery both legal and incredibly powerful - to the considerable detriment of its populace.
Maybe floppy discs aren't the only problem.
Japan is (I'm told) awash with fax machines.
Due to the intricacies of their writing (Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana), it's hard to type things. So everyone uses faxes.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
