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@NostalgiaForInfinity: "misguided views like these are responsible for the long periods of stagnation and weakness that China has experienced."

The Economic Importance of Indian Opium and Trade with China on Britain's Economy

The First Opium War

Sugar, opium and cotton

Call it "Privacy At Home". Run a daemon on millions of devices that feeds the NSA line eater via Google queries. See the spook function

>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...

Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.

No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this (usually in the realm of kickbacks to teachers/schools to "encourage" them to cycle out the editions on command).

$225 list price for a goddamned math book? Apparently selling textbooks allows for some really high quality drugs.

Having said that, note that the article submitter's name first comes up on Google as a Math Professor in Washington State who teaches Calculus 3. Even more amusing is the fact that Whitman's Math Department uses Lulu to sell their own line of College math books.

Let me interject real quick with the statement that I do not intend to suggest any shenanigans -- I just thought it was really unusual. In a good way. I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks -- and at vastly better prices ($9 instead of $225) to boot! And that's assuming you don't just want to download the PDF for your iPad or whatnot.

>>>we have what amounts to a protest over the cost of the original book...

Bullshit. It's theft of another person's labor. Equivalent to if you spend a year of your life as an engineer, but you only get half the pay. The other half gets distributed among thieves claiming credit for your work, even though they didn't do a damn thing. They are parasites... nothing more.

No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this (usually in the realm of kickbacks to teachers/schools to "encourage" them to cycle out the editions on command).

$225 list price for a goddamned math book? Apparently selling textbooks allows for some really high quality drugs.

Having said that, note that the article submitter's name first comes up on Google as a Math Professor in Washington State who teaches Calculus 3. Even more amusing is the fact that Whitman's Math Department uses Lulu to sell their own line of College math books.

Let me interject real quick with the statement that I do not intend to suggest any shenanigans -- I just thought it was really unusual. In a good way. I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks -- and at vastly better prices ($9 instead of $225) to boot! And that's assuming you don't just want to download the PDF for your iPad or whatnot.

Warming, for all its predicted deleterious effects, would potentially thaw out land that is currently unproductive for food crops.

Warming would also take land out of agricultural production. Some land that's now used for growing crops will become deserts. Other areas will become flooded. Especially with saltwater. As it is now, Southern California is a major source of produce. However all those crops get their water from the Colorado River, which is drying up. As another /.er has posted a number of tymes, people in Colorado can't even use cisterns to capture and store rainwater without a license or permit as people downstream already have "rights" to that water. Farmers in a desert have more "rights" to rainwater than those who live where it rains?

I can see your economic education has been dismally incomplete.

And yours is compleat? The book "Natural Capitalism", called by Frances Cairncross, a writer for the Economist and others as breaming with ideas to bridge the gulf between business and the environment. Some have said it's the followup to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations". In it a number of studies are cited whereby businesses have reduced their ecological footprint and saved money at the same tyme. Environmental responsibility can even be traced back to Adam Smith the father of capitalism.

You're making the assumption that this climate change -- if it even exists

Even skeptics of human induced global warming admit the world is warming. Heck even President Bush said it was real.

I bet even the day after you won't get 100% agreement, being afterwards, on the cause.

And I'm sure you're right. There are still people who believe the Earth is flat. Those people are a decided minority.

Just as those who deny Global Warming is false is a decided minority. To me there's little difference, both discount or ignore facts. Yes, there are facts showing cooling in some places, but the world as a whole is warming.

Falcon

This article is worthless without pictures.

No, the main effect the higher prices really have isn't that people drive less or buy less cars (Germany even has more cars per capita than the US), but that consumers buy more efficient cars. Germans drive more than they used to, but use less fuel -- the average new car is down to 30mpg (link in German, sorry).
I just read somewhere that 47% of new cars bought in western Europe have diesel engines, they use roughly 40% less fuel for the same power. Modern diesel engines don't have the disadvantages you might associate with them, i.e. they're not noisy, they accelerate quickly and so on. There are filters for particles.

So, my conclusion is that instead of whining about high fuel prices (which aren't that high at all, compared to what it costs elsewhere), Americans should simply buy more efficient cars. I can understand that some people need cars to get around for their job, that they're needed for travel and all that, no problem. It's just that, personally, I'd buy an efficient car if I was in that situation, no matter what fuel costs. You don't even have to buy an expensive hybrid, modern diesels come pretty close.

In college, and a good one at that, many of my professors were amazed that more than half of students still didn't understand the differences between "its" and "it's", "their," "they're" and "there," or "your" and "you're". I even ran across the occasional student in grad school who had this problem. It's a sad day when students at some of the top schools in the country don't even understand their own language.

We admit to having both, and we're in the process of destroying them (such as at the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (couldn't find an offical military link).

(posting anonymously because I already moderated here.)

So what's after yottabyte?

Considering that the earth 90% water and how little we have catalouged the deep sea, its going to be interestig to see what we find...

The deep sea pages at Whitman College have some cool pictures of wierd deep sea creatures.

The Beastiary at NOVA also has a decent rundown of whats down there.