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Comment Re:"proud maga" (Score 1) 198

I've seen what happens when atheists take power in a country. Anyone care to relate what the usual outcome is?

Yes, they become an economic superpower and they slowly take the place of the USA on the world stage.

A very nice country, with very nice, hard-working but still fun-loving (take that, calvinists!) people, thank to them not having religious hangups and neuroses.

Comment Re:Survivable crashes are now rare (Score 2) 63

Crashes are now rare in general. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a major air crash in the US almost annually. I may be wrong, but I don't remember a full-sized airliner (bigger than a regional jet) having a catastrophic crash in the US since shortly after 9/11 when that Airbus lost its tail and crashed in NYC. (Being a natural pessimist, I find this outcome hard to believe and would have lost a good deal of money if I had bet on it.)

However, there still continue to be a large number of hard landings, runway slideoffs, engine fires, cabin fires and other emergency situations where the passengers still need to evacuate quickly because their lives are at risk. (Not to mention the "Miracle on the Hudson".) The safety briefings are still relevant in all those situations.

Comment Re:Worthless fucking statistic. (Score 1) 226

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.

Comment Re:Worthless fucking statistic. (Score 4, Informative) 226

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Comment Re:Zero day already in the wild? (Score 4, Informative) 77

The summary says: "Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild. "

(scratches head) How can a flaw be called zero-day and already be exploited in the wild?

Because a zero-day is any flaw made public before the developer knows about it. One of the main ways this happens is by noticing that hackers are breaking into systems using a heretofore unknown exploit.

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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurence of the improbable. - H. L. Mencken

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