gns24

UK border security. On Eurostar journeys all border checks are done at the departure station, and only Paris, Brussels and Lille have the facilities for that. That said, it should be coming this year.

Or maybe the areas where most Christians live were less affected by the war?

Personally I don't see that it's that important.

We know already that CO2 and other gases cause climate change and we understand the mechanism. I think that most of us would probably also agree that the earth is a sufficiently complex system that predicting accurately what effects we will see when is impossible. We expect to see more droughts, bigger storms and rising sea levels - but we can't really predict very accurately how big those things will be when. By the time we have accurate models it will be too late.

We know that we need to act now. Understanding climate change is not the most important research out there; what's important is developing technologies and industries to reduce our emissions. That research would be what I fear losing.

Yup. A lot of people are complaining about a lack of exciting updates, but I'd rather start by seeing hardware updates that keep up with the industry. Whereas Apple were once releasing products based on Intel chips before they were even widely available, we're now looking at products which are generations behind. Low-power Kaby Lake chips have been available for six months; why is there no Kaby Lake Macbook yet?

Okay, my question could be interpreted that way. My intended question was "Other Americans don't make the same good choices; why do you think that is?"

Why do you think other people don't make the same good choices?

Subsidising other people's unhealthy choices is clearly going to be a controversial topic, but I've come to the conclusion that the only sensible approach is to ignore the choices and threat the condition.

Firstly, it's pretty hard to measure the choices people have made. Any attempt at measurement is going to add extra costs for little or no benefit.

Secondly, we're judging people on things where we don't know the complete story. If a single parent is eating unhealthily and not exercising because they are short on both money and time, that's hardly something to make them pay for. If someone's been addicted to cigarettes for 20 years, they have probably tried and failed to give them up. To me treating wealthy people's skiing injuries should be at least as controversial as treating poor people's smoking-related problems. Personally I like to run to keep fit, but I view that as good fortune - I'm lucky that I'm healthy enough to run and that I enjoy it, and that I have time to do it.

Finally if someone gets diabetes after drinking 20 cokes a day, they're definitely paying for that decision even without a financial penalty.

In summary I guess that I feel that good health is a very fortunate thing to have, and I certainly don't feel entitled to extra cash for my good luck.

The question here is as to whether this $1000 bonus/penalty changes behaviour or just rewards those who are naturally healthy/enjoy sport/like healthy food.

I found this article on how jail in the Netherlands is focused on giving prisoners whatever they need to go back into society and not reoffend interesting. They claim that under 10% of prisoners reoffend, compared to about 50% in England and the US:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37904263

Solar and wind are so different that comparing them doesn't really make any sense. Generally a combination is optimal. The news in this article though is that solar prices have tumbled in the last few years - whereas wind prices have declined at a more expected rate.

Comparing the photo-voltaic capacity installed in 2016 with wind capacity is a bit misleading, as wind typically has a much higher capacity factor than solar - so the 59GW of wind will almost certainly produce more electricity than the 70GW of solar.

Trump doesn't necessarily need to believe in climate change; renewables are becoming competitive and make sense from an energy security standpoint. Trump just needs to be convinced that subsidising coal makes no sense. Elon may be able to convince him that the jobs that the renewable energy industry can provide are better than those the coal industry can offer.

China's power consumption has plateaued and it currently has massive over-capacity - so much so that it's halted the construction of some new coal plants.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-to-halt-con...

This very thorough analysis of the potential for wind energy in the US concludes that the great plains have massive potential for fantastically cheap wind power generation, with some sites having potential capacity factors well over 65%.

http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/30/how-steady-can-the-wind-blow...

The point at which energy storage becomes an issue is a long way off if you connect the country with HVDC lines. Building such lines would be a great achievement for this fund. However, I guess the political question will get hit at that point: will the government be as keen to let private investors build new power infrastructure as it is for them to build new oil pipelines?

If they slightly re-branded as a for-profit renewable energy fund would that go down better than apparent altruism? Tesla would be a good model.

And yet the Chinese are installing new wind capacity far faster than the US. How does that work?

Isn't asking people where they would like a new subway line a case of asking people what they think the solution is rather than what problem they would like to have solved? Wouldn't a survey of what journeys people want to make be better? Sure, processing the results is hard, but in the grand scheme of building new transportation in SF it's trivial.

A zero sum game would be a huge improvement on the status quo.

Similarly, OSX can be configured so that a triple click does a dictionary look-up, which I find extremely useful for reading material online in German.

Norway and Switzerland have both signed up to free movement of people in order to access the single market. If the UK votes to leave I think that, given the nature of the campaign, that has to be considered a vote against free movement of people, which almost certainly will leave it outside the single market, which is a very different place.

I think this hits the most interesting point. Personally I agree with the article that the best way to develop efficiently is to continually take small steps in the right direction and reevaluate where you are after each one - you save a lot of time by not planning things you don't need that way and it's much easier to maintain focus. But against that, people need estimates for how long projects will take and how much they will cost, and that demands a plan.

I wouldn't mind a small amount of the money that goes into fusion research heading to liquid fluoride thorium reactors instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

Amongst the many attractive properties of LFTRs is the ability to burn spent fuel from existing nuclear plants.

There's clearly a middle position to be had here. By saying NO if you're not completely confident you can do something, you miss out on the best learning opportunities. That said, if you suspect something cannot work, or isn't the right way of doing something for another possibly non-technical reason, being prepared to say NO is critical for delivering.

So possibly: If you always say NO, you never learn anything. If you always say YES, you never deliver anything.

The animation here irritates me. If you change the date by five years the graph points should scroll vertically (and adjust horizontally as necessary), otherwise it just makes it harder to see how the pyramid changes over time.

That's useful to know. Is that daily data? Have you found it to be reliable? When I started testing moving-average based strategies, my blog post about it ended up being largely about data issues, from both Google and Yahoo finance: http://grahamstratton.org/straightornamental/entries/movinga... An extreme example was an opening value off by a factor of 100 on one day.

I think this might be an advantage of pair programming that isn't generally talked about.

The time to find a bug with a debugger has a much tighter distribution than the time to find one by thinking about the code. There are some problems that you just can't get to the bottom of by thinking.

By having one person take each path, you get the advantages of both. It might seem that a single programmer should be able to achieve the same by switching between the two approaches, but the cost of context switching is so great that it will be more like starting again each time. So it's really hard to know when to stop thinking about it and to get the debugger out.

The advice that once you find the bug you should work out what the problem really is definitely holds solid, though.

I've found the set of short articles on memory here to be excellent:

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/page-cache-the-affair-b...

I have done this successfully in the past; Ubuntu boots very slowly when limited to 5% CPU, but once up it's very usable. Look at vboxmanage --cpuexecutioncap