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Comment Just use sea water. (Score 3, Interesting) 26

In Portugal we have a $10 billion datacenter being built by Microsoft where a large thermal power plant used to be... it uses sea water for cooling just like the power plant used to. Beachgoers love the warm water. Sea water is not exactly scarce and there's no shortage of shoreline in Malaysia...

Comment Irrationality was used to designate the dot-coms (Score 2) 56

Irrationality. I remember it well. Quoting Wikipedia: "Irrational exuberance" is the phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a December 1996 speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

Comment Re:C'mon, Saudi (Score 5, Informative) 92

Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity. It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.

Comment When I was 15 I went on IRC and USENET. (Score 1) 44

What's the difference? We also posted web articles and had lengthy, sometimes heated discussions about it. People were a lot nastier back in the days, angry RTFM nerds were abindant. On IRC people would crash your computer for fun. We had cybersex and warez and all the good things that are technically inappropriate for a 15 year old.
Now we have censorship all over the place. Nobody stopped you from posting porn on USENET, we had specific newsgroups just for that. Try posting porn on social media nowadays. Nobody cared what you had on your F-Serve on IRC.

Comment Re:Earth is in no obligation to support human life (Score 1) 49

Advocating that society should be engineered towards resilience is not a new thing, it's what keeps us safe from earthquakes, for example.
You have no guarantee that we can stop global warming. I happen to think we will not. Too many politics, laziness and complacency.
It is not an unreasonable demand, what we try to build better insulated houses, further away from the sea. Just in case.

Comment Earth is in no obligation to support human life (Score 1) 49

We should spend more time getting ready for the fact that, even though we created global warming, Earth has warmed and cooled of its own volition in the past and is not contractually obliged to hold a comfortable temperature range or a certain sea level. Species adapt or die. Stop building in floodplains maybe?
Now that we know the ice caps can melt and raise sea levels to a certain height, maybe we should go live in a high place.
What are you going to do if the sun suddenly warms up in an unexpected way, are you going to try cooling down the sun?
Shouldn't we at least have a plan B in case we can't immediately fix this?

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