Of course, we have no idea if that's true or not, or if branes actually exist either. But even if the source of the universe is 2d, that doesn't mean the earth is "flat" in our perception of the universe.
More to the point, even if the earth is a flat projection, anybody who still believes it isn't spherical in the context of our dimension probably qualifies as a p-brane.:-)
Photons with energies in the range 3-10 eV can cause damage to DNA, but can't cause ionisation. Ultraviolet photons have energies in the range 3-1000 eV, so not quite all of them are ionising, but all of them can damage DNA (thus causing cancer).
And even that is only true because the government's definition of "non-ionizing" (10 eV) is arbitrary and wrong, as it is based on the minimum energy needed to ionize Hydrogen or Oxygen. However, other elements ionize at a much lower energy. At the low end, Cesium atoms ionize at only 3.89 eV, which makes the portion of UV that is not ionizing almost nonexistent. In fact, a whopping 86 elements ionize below 10 eV (source: Lenntech), making that limit not just wrong, but alarmingly wrong.
Of those 86, to my knowledge, about sixteen are biologically significant:
Potassium: 4.34 eV
Sodium: 5.14 eV
Lithium: 5.39
Aluminum (debated): 5.99
Calcium: 6.11
Chromium: 6.77
Titanium (debated): 6.83
Magnesium: 7.65
Copper: 7.73
Cobalt: 7.88
Iron: 7.9
Boron: 8.30
Cadmium (in microscopic sea life): 8.99
Zinc: 9.39
Selenium: 9.75
Arsenic: 9.79
Notice that some of those are pretty critical biologically, like Iron (0.006% of body mass according to Live Science), Calcium (1.5%), Sodium (.15%), and Potassium (.25%). So the so-called "non-ionizing" radiation still has the potential to create ions in materials that are fairly common and fairly important inside your body. And some of the trace minerals like Zinc (0.0032%) and Cobalt (0.0000021%) play a role in gene regulation, so ionizing those elements is probably not a good idea, either.
Yes, it is. Saying "UV light is non-ionizing" is incorrect, because UV is not a single frequency, but rather a broad frequency spectrum from about 10 nm to 400 nm, of which the higher-frequency part of that range (from 10 nm to 124 nanometers) is decidedly not non-ionizing.
To use a food analogy, saying UV light is non-ionizing would be like saying that mushrooms aren't poisonous. If you grabbed one randomly and fed it to somebody based on that statement, most of the time, you'd be right, but the times you weren't, you would probably kill someone (or at least make that person see dead people).
That sixth-largest thing is misleading because it doesn't take into account taxes, fees, and cost of living. Once all that is accounted for, California winds up 12th, just behind Mexico.
That's misleading, too, because the cost of living is high precisely because the economy is so strong. And the cost of living is high only in the cities. If you're willing to live in the middle of nowhere, California isn't that crazy a place to live, cost-wise.
Also, those taxes are high largely because the federal government takes more than it gives in benefits, so California isn't just supporting itself; it's also bailing out a decent percentage of the remaining states that can't support themselves. Were it its own country, total taxes could probably get cut in half before you'd have to cut services.
Worse. It isn't just services run by the ISPs. Without NN, there's nothing preventing your ISP from partnering with (for example) Netflix and offering that content unmetered (in exchange for a kickback from the partner service), while treating Hulu (for example) as metered data. Without those rules, the ISP can skew the competitive landscape arbitrarily, and it is entirely legal.
That's quite possible; the people I know who have had the procedure with only short-term success did have it a decade or so back. Then again, at any given point in time, you can look at it and say that it is working for the recent patients... until it no longer is... hence my cynical skepticism.:-)
8 business hours. [ecfr.gov] But if the medical office doesn't exist (e.g. you get the voicemail greeting of some guy named Steve), then that doesn't count as an attempt.
My doctor's name is Steve, you insensitive clod.:-D
Fine by me, so long as you then sign a document stating you won't be going to any publicly-funded hospital as a result of fucking-up your eyes.
The only way that would realistically happen would be if you did something really stupid, like driving while being unable to see. And you could do that with a blindfold just as easily... or by closing your eyes. Maybe we should require a prescription for blindfolds, and a doctor's note saying it's okay to close your eyes.
We're not talking about contacts that are medically unsafe (contaminated, sharp edges, etc.). The worst-case scenario from getting contacts without a prescription is that you're unable to see as well as you should and you get headaches from eyestrain. And nobody is going to continue using contacts when that happens, so wrong prescriptions just aren't going to put anybody in the hospital.
This. I mean, there are good reasons to get a regular eye exam, like determining what your prescription should be, watching for signs of cataracts and glaucoma, etc., but it's absolutely baffling that if I have been more than a year since getting an eye exam and accidentally drop my glasses and break them, I can't get replacements for those glasses that were obviously still working fine up to that point (or else I would have gone for an eye exam to get a new prescription).
There's absolutely no sane reason why a current, valid prescription should be required when getting glasses or contacts manufactured. None. The worst-case scenario is you waste a lot of money and buy something that doesn't work or causes eyestrain, and you stop using them.
Worse, the prescription-required policy isn't even consistently applied. I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick up a set of pre-made glasses that have various levels of farsightedness correction (positive values) for reading, but correction for nearsightedness requires a prescription, as does correction for astigmatism. I understand the reluctance to have arbitrary formulations available off the shelf, because there are a near-infinite possible number of them, but when it comes to refusing to fabricate them on demand, that distinction seems completely arbitrary, and expecting a lens manufacturer to investigate every optometrist to make sure they're legitimate... well, that's just absurd.
Unfortunately, the last sentence hints that this was a short-term study. I'm a little skeptical that a long-term study will be nearly as positive.
Cardiac ablation techniques have been used for treating atrial fibrillation for many years now. The problem is that after a few years, the heart finds new ways to route those bad signals through itself, and the fibrillation comes right back. I kind of expect the same thing to happen with ablation for v-tach.
I'm shocked by OPs statements... only because Apple's Podcast app has sucked for much longer than 6 months! Injecting ads into the middle of the podcast, failing to update if the app isn't running in the background (killing the app by swiping up means you won't know you have a new podcast until the app is restarted)...
I hate to tell you this, but that second part is very much by design. Swiping to kill an app disables all background downloads for that app, period. It's not supposed to be *possible* for an app to work around that and download in the background after getting killed in iOS, because when a user kills an app, it is assumed that the user doesn't want that app to be doing anything on his/her behalf.
The problems with that are twofold: 1. Nobody wants a hundred companies digging up their yard. 2. Even if they did, most areas are not dense enough to viably support more than one infrastructure provider.
So the "market-based" approach basically translates to, "Screw poor areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw rural areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw everybody in suburbia. You don't get fast Internet. But if you live in dense housing in one of about twenty or thirty major cities, you'll get three or four choices." You cannot create competition in a natural monopoly market. It can't be done no matter how much you deregulate, because the incumbent will always be able to cut costs to nothing until the newcomer goes out of business, then raise rates to make up that money and more. I've watched this happen in smaller markets.
The only viable semi-market-based approach is one in which the government builds the infrastructure and leases access to ISPs in a nondiscriminatory fashion. But the Republicans don't like that approach because it doesn't produce monopolies for their cronies, so appealing to their desire for competition won't help.
Baloney. Quite the opposite. Netflix has partnered with Comcast for example. Their app is now built into their cable boxes. You can make damn sure they will make sure the Netflix traffic is higher priority than any competitor they don't partner with. This will eliminate any competitors that don't pay Comcast. You guys are completely delusional.
Pretty much true. And also true for Google and Facebook for different reasons. They're too big to block. It's the small companies that can't afford to pay for preferential treatment who will suffer without Net Neutrality — the *next* Facebook or Google or Netflix or YouTube. Those big companies don't support NN because it protects them from Comcast extortion; they're too big to really care about a few bucks here and a few bucks there. Rather, they support NN because it's the right thing to do, and because they recognize the role that de facto NN played in getting them to that point.
If a house in the middle of an affected neighborhood had reinforced concrete walls & roof, plus Miami-grade impact-glass windows, would the heat of the fire as it burned down the neighbors' houses cause the concrete house's interior to combust anyway (like food debris in a self-cleaning oven)? Would ICF construction plus roll-down steel shutters keep the interior cooler, or would the intense heat just cause the ICF styrofoam itself to melt or combust?
That depends on how thick the material is and how far the next house is from you. The more important difference is that a house built with a non-combustible exterior will not randomly catch on fire from embers flying from far away, thus significantly reducing the risk of causing the neighbors' houses to catch fire in the first place.
What remains is for someone to analyze the data about which houses burned and which ones didn't, and verify that the building code is working as intended. If any homes built in the past ten years burned, we have a problem.
We'd have unicorns at the zoo and elves at the North Pole.
It isn't that the study is wrong, so much as that it conflates correlation with causation. Making those bad decisions in isolation doesn't cause people to become poor. In theory, someone can do all of those things and still not end up poor if he/she otherwise makes good decisions, but most people who do all three of those things also make bad decisions in other aspects of their lives, and would still do relatively poorly even if they didn't make those decisions.
For example, a girl who accidentally becomes pregnant in high school, but has a good relationship with her family can rely on them to help take care of the kid so that she can continue in school. Or she can give the kid up for adoption by a family member. Those choices have a more profound impact on eventual success than the actions leading to the pregnancy itself. Similarly, when it comes to dropping out of school, what matters is why. Someone who drops out of school to take care of a sick parent or younger siblings is likely to go back and get a GED and then go to college. Someone who made bad decisions and was already failing before dropping out probably won't.
The biggest flaw in modern education, IMO, is the lack of properly teaching kids how to make good decisions, and not making them fully aware of the consequences of bad decisions. For example, at no point in my education did anyone teach money management skills. I learned them from my parents. Other kids whose parents lacked those skills never learned them. And this is one of the big reasons why poverty runs in families.
What can parents do to better equip their kids for life? Say "no" more often. Teach kids to accept that sometimes they have to wait for the things that they want, and that buying things you can't afford on credit should be a rare exception for critical utilitarian things that will last you for many years (cars, houses), not just for things that you want (PlayStations, iPhones). And teach kids to exercise self-restraint. Instead of buying them expensive toys, give them an allowance and make them save up to buy the toys. When they blow it all on candy and ask for more, say, "No. You should have thought about what you really wanted and not spent your money on candy." And so on.
This is, of course, an overgeneralization. I know plenty of people who have bad money management skills, but who, through choosing a career that pays well, have managed to not be poor (though they probably will be when they retire). And there are presumably some people who have good money management skills but are still poor (though from what I've seen, people with good money management skills tend not to remain poor for an extended period of time unless there's some unusual factor at work, such as ongoing medical bills).
The point is that there are very important skills that kids are missing, which leads them to make other bad decisions arising from the same deficiencies in self-restraint, which leads to more bad decisions, and it snowballs. Fixing the problem has to happen in early childhood, by teaching kids to be less impulsive, think before they act, save money for the things they really want, and generally behave responsibly. Once kids get to that point, those three things on your list will take care of themselves.
It's also completely uncountable. There's a reason "data" is used as a singular collective noun by most people.
The question that needs to be asked of people who come up with crazy schemes like this should always be, "How would you measure this?" Most crazy schemes fall apart when you actually try to apply measurements to various parts of the problem. In this case, the problem is that you can't measure how much data people give to companies like Google or Facebook in any useful fashion.
The closest you could get would be a tax on disk/flash storage, but the collective impact on individuals would be greater than the impact on the companies you're trying to tax.
It's also not clear to me why a universal service fund should be paid for by a tax on something completely unrelated. The FUSF for telephone made sense, because the companies providing phone service charged a small tax on a large number of people in dense urban areas to pay for service to the smaller number of people in rural areas who grow their food. And along with the FUSF came rules that said that companies had to provide service somehow. That's simple and measurable, and it doesn't involve collecting money from one set of huge companies (content providers) and giving it to another (ISPs), hoping that the latter will do what you want with it.
No, there should be an FUSF for Internet service, but it should be for ISPs, not companies that do business over the Internet. Everyone who uses the Internet should pay fees based on their bandwidth. Those big companies will pay their fair share of it because of their high bandwidth use, and it will cover the cost of providing service to people in the middle of nowhere. And it must come with the same sorts of non-discrimination laws that the telephone FUSF came with — no more ISPs choosing which neighborhoods to upgrade to high-speed service based on how much money they spend. Universal means universal.
As soon as I saw the name "Tarantino", I found myself imagining the impetuous Kirk reimagined as a psycho, beating Spock to a bloody pulp for no reason other than because he looked at Uhura the wrong way. Then, three of Spock's Vulcan buddies beat Kirk up and lock him in the hold of a ship in orbit around a dead moon. The rest of the crew go to save him and get killed horribly one by one, leaving only Sulu, angry and hating the entire universe, barely even alive, left for dead. Yet somehow, he manages to get to his feet, pick up a metal chain with a big steel lock attached, and use it to pulverize the remaining Vulcans before dying himself, with Kirk still chained up, left to die a slow, agonizing death of starvation, because no one looking for him is still alive.
I think it's more accurate to say that not all plastic products can be economically recycled. It isn't, for example, economical to recycle single-use plastic bags because they contain so little plastic that transporting them is likely to use more oil than you recover from the bags. And polystyrene is mostly air, which has the same problem. But that's really an issue with the way the plastics are used rather than something fundamental to the material. The only one I'm aware of that would truly be uneconomical because of the nature of the material is PVC, and even that is improving, I think.
Not necessarily. In my experience, it's windy when there are storms. When it is stormy, it is usually cooler than normal. But when it is stormy and hot... well, that's tornado season.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
... unless it's treated lumber. Then your wood outgasses a cocktail of cancer-causing (chromated copper arsenate) and endocrine-disrupting (methyl bromide) vapors, too. Yay, progress.
Is the plastic really 'one use'? Landfills are storage areas, not disposal areas. 100 years from now they will be cursing the fuckers who have insisted on incinerators replacing landfills.
This. Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point, even if the earth is a flat projection, anybody who still believes it isn't spherical in the context of our dimension probably qualifies as a p-brane. :-)
Sorry, science pun. Carry on.
Sounds like typical fanfic to me. Maybe we really have achieved artificial intelligence.
And even that is only true because the government's definition of "non-ionizing" (10 eV) is arbitrary and wrong, as it is based on the minimum energy needed to ionize Hydrogen or Oxygen. However, other elements ionize at a much lower energy. At the low end, Cesium atoms ionize at only 3.89 eV, which makes the portion of UV that is not ionizing almost nonexistent. In fact, a whopping 86 elements ionize below 10 eV (source: Lenntech), making that limit not just wrong, but alarmingly wrong.
Of those 86, to my knowledge, about sixteen are biologically significant:
Notice that some of those are pretty critical biologically, like Iron (0.006% of body mass according to Live Science), Calcium (1.5%), Sodium (.15%), and Potassium (.25%). So the so-called "non-ionizing" radiation still has the potential to create ions in materials that are fairly common and fairly important inside your body. And some of the trace minerals like Zinc (0.0032%) and Cobalt (0.0000021%) play a role in gene regulation, so ionizing those elements is probably not a good idea, either.
Firstly while lower energy UV are non ionizing
Then it's not incorrect, is it ?
Yes, it is. Saying "UV light is non-ionizing" is incorrect, because UV is not a single frequency, but rather a broad frequency spectrum from about 10 nm to 400 nm, of which the higher-frequency part of that range (from 10 nm to 124 nanometers) is decidedly not non-ionizing.
To use a food analogy, saying UV light is non-ionizing would be like saying that mushrooms aren't poisonous. If you grabbed one randomly and fed it to somebody based on that statement, most of the time, you'd be right, but the times you weren't, you would probably kill someone (or at least make that person see dead people).
That's misleading, too, because the cost of living is high precisely because the economy is so strong. And the cost of living is high only in the cities. If you're willing to live in the middle of nowhere, California isn't that crazy a place to live, cost-wise.
Also, those taxes are high largely because the federal government takes more than it gives in benefits, so California isn't just supporting itself; it's also bailing out a decent percentage of the remaining states that can't support themselves. Were it its own country, total taxes could probably get cut in half before you'd have to cut services.
Worse. It isn't just services run by the ISPs. Without NN, there's nothing preventing your ISP from partnering with (for example) Netflix and offering that content unmetered (in exchange for a kickback from the partner service), while treating Hulu (for example) as metered data. Without those rules, the ISP can skew the competitive landscape arbitrarily, and it is entirely legal.
That's quite possible; the people I know who have had the procedure with only short-term success did have it a decade or so back. Then again, at any given point in time, you can look at it and say that it is working for the recent patients... until it no longer is... hence my cynical skepticism. :-)
Maybe not by law (I haven't checked), but most glasses shops won't cut a set without it.
My doctor's name is Steve, you insensitive clod. :-D
(Also, my dentist's name is CowboyNeal.)
The only way that would realistically happen would be if you did something really stupid, like driving while being unable to see. And you could do that with a blindfold just as easily... or by closing your eyes. Maybe we should require a prescription for blindfolds, and a doctor's note saying it's okay to close your eyes.
We're not talking about contacts that are medically unsafe (contaminated, sharp edges, etc.). The worst-case scenario from getting contacts without a prescription is that you're unable to see as well as you should and you get headaches from eyestrain. And nobody is going to continue using contacts when that happens, so wrong prescriptions just aren't going to put anybody in the hospital.
This. I mean, there are good reasons to get a regular eye exam, like determining what your prescription should be, watching for signs of cataracts and glaucoma, etc., but it's absolutely baffling that if I have been more than a year since getting an eye exam and accidentally drop my glasses and break them, I can't get replacements for those glasses that were obviously still working fine up to that point (or else I would have gone for an eye exam to get a new prescription).
There's absolutely no sane reason why a current, valid prescription should be required when getting glasses or contacts manufactured. None. The worst-case scenario is you waste a lot of money and buy something that doesn't work or causes eyestrain, and you stop using them.
Worse, the prescription-required policy isn't even consistently applied. I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick up a set of pre-made glasses that have various levels of farsightedness correction (positive values) for reading, but correction for nearsightedness requires a prescription, as does correction for astigmatism. I understand the reluctance to have arbitrary formulations available off the shelf, because there are a near-infinite possible number of them, but when it comes to refusing to fabricate them on demand, that distinction seems completely arbitrary, and expecting a lens manufacturer to investigate every optometrist to make sure they're legitimate... well, that's just absurd.
Unfortunately, the last sentence hints that this was a short-term study. I'm a little skeptical that a long-term study will be nearly as positive.
Cardiac ablation techniques have been used for treating atrial fibrillation for many years now. The problem is that after a few years, the heart finds new ways to route those bad signals through itself, and the fibrillation comes right back. I kind of expect the same thing to happen with ablation for v-tach.
Or eugenics. It's not like our government hasn't tried it before.
I hate to tell you this, but that second part is very much by design. Swiping to kill an app disables all background downloads for that app, period. It's not supposed to be *possible* for an app to work around that and download in the background after getting killed in iOS, because when a user kills an app, it is assumed that the user doesn't want that app to be doing anything on his/her behalf.
The problems with that are twofold: 1. Nobody wants a hundred companies digging up their yard. 2. Even if they did, most areas are not dense enough to viably support more than one infrastructure provider.
So the "market-based" approach basically translates to, "Screw poor areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw rural areas. You don't get fast Internet. Screw everybody in suburbia. You don't get fast Internet. But if you live in dense housing in one of about twenty or thirty major cities, you'll get three or four choices." You cannot create competition in a natural monopoly market. It can't be done no matter how much you deregulate, because the incumbent will always be able to cut costs to nothing until the newcomer goes out of business, then raise rates to make up that money and more. I've watched this happen in smaller markets.
The only viable semi-market-based approach is one in which the government builds the infrastructure and leases access to ISPs in a nondiscriminatory fashion. But the Republicans don't like that approach because it doesn't produce monopolies for their cronies, so appealing to their desire for competition won't help.
Pretty much true. And also true for Google and Facebook for different reasons. They're too big to block. It's the small companies that can't afford to pay for preferential treatment who will suffer without Net Neutrality — the *next* Facebook or Google or Netflix or YouTube. Those big companies don't support NN because it protects them from Comcast extortion; they're too big to really care about a few bucks here and a few bucks there. Rather, they support NN because it's the right thing to do, and because they recognize the role that de facto NN played in getting them to that point.
The Earth is definitely not a sphere. It is, however, a spheroid. As for whether the Earth moves, it depends on your frame of reference. :-D
That depends on how thick the material is and how far the next house is from you. The more important difference is that a house built with a non-combustible exterior will not randomly catch on fire from embers flying from far away, thus significantly reducing the risk of causing the neighbors' houses to catch fire in the first place.
What remains is for someone to analyze the data about which houses burned and which ones didn't, and verify that the building code is working as intended. If any homes built in the past ten years burned, we have a problem.
We'd have unicorns at the zoo and elves at the North Pole.
It isn't that the study is wrong, so much as that it conflates correlation with causation. Making those bad decisions in isolation doesn't cause people to become poor. In theory, someone can do all of those things and still not end up poor if he/she otherwise makes good decisions, but most people who do all three of those things also make bad decisions in other aspects of their lives, and would still do relatively poorly even if they didn't make those decisions.
For example, a girl who accidentally becomes pregnant in high school, but has a good relationship with her family can rely on them to help take care of the kid so that she can continue in school. Or she can give the kid up for adoption by a family member. Those choices have a more profound impact on eventual success than the actions leading to the pregnancy itself. Similarly, when it comes to dropping out of school, what matters is why. Someone who drops out of school to take care of a sick parent or younger siblings is likely to go back and get a GED and then go to college. Someone who made bad decisions and was already failing before dropping out probably won't.
The biggest flaw in modern education, IMO, is the lack of properly teaching kids how to make good decisions, and not making them fully aware of the consequences of bad decisions. For example, at no point in my education did anyone teach money management skills. I learned them from my parents. Other kids whose parents lacked those skills never learned them. And this is one of the big reasons why poverty runs in families.
What can parents do to better equip their kids for life? Say "no" more often. Teach kids to accept that sometimes they have to wait for the things that they want, and that buying things you can't afford on credit should be a rare exception for critical utilitarian things that will last you for many years (cars, houses), not just for things that you want (PlayStations, iPhones). And teach kids to exercise self-restraint. Instead of buying them expensive toys, give them an allowance and make them save up to buy the toys. When they blow it all on candy and ask for more, say, "No. You should have thought about what you really wanted and not spent your money on candy." And so on.
This is, of course, an overgeneralization. I know plenty of people who have bad money management skills, but who, through choosing a career that pays well, have managed to not be poor (though they probably will be when they retire). And there are presumably some people who have good money management skills but are still poor (though from what I've seen, people with good money management skills tend not to remain poor for an extended period of time unless there's some unusual factor at work, such as ongoing medical bills).
The point is that there are very important skills that kids are missing, which leads them to make other bad decisions arising from the same deficiencies in self-restraint, which leads to more bad decisions, and it snowballs. Fixing the problem has to happen in early childhood, by teaching kids to be less impulsive, think before they act, save money for the things they really want, and generally behave responsibly. Once kids get to that point, those three things on your list will take care of themselves.
It's also completely uncountable. There's a reason "data" is used as a singular collective noun by most people.
The question that needs to be asked of people who come up with crazy schemes like this should always be, "How would you measure this?" Most crazy schemes fall apart when you actually try to apply measurements to various parts of the problem. In this case, the problem is that you can't measure how much data people give to companies like Google or Facebook in any useful fashion.
The closest you could get would be a tax on disk/flash storage, but the collective impact on individuals would be greater than the impact on the companies you're trying to tax.
It's also not clear to me why a universal service fund should be paid for by a tax on something completely unrelated. The FUSF for telephone made sense, because the companies providing phone service charged a small tax on a large number of people in dense urban areas to pay for service to the smaller number of people in rural areas who grow their food. And along with the FUSF came rules that said that companies had to provide service somehow. That's simple and measurable, and it doesn't involve collecting money from one set of huge companies (content providers) and giving it to another (ISPs), hoping that the latter will do what you want with it.
No, there should be an FUSF for Internet service, but it should be for ISPs, not companies that do business over the Internet. Everyone who uses the Internet should pay fees based on their bandwidth. Those big companies will pay their fair share of it because of their high bandwidth use, and it will cover the cost of providing service to people in the middle of nowhere. And it must come with the same sorts of non-discrimination laws that the telephone FUSF came with — no more ISPs choosing which neighborhoods to upgrade to high-speed service based on how much money they spend. Universal means universal.
As soon as I saw the name "Tarantino", I found myself imagining the impetuous Kirk reimagined as a psycho, beating Spock to a bloody pulp for no reason other than because he looked at Uhura the wrong way. Then, three of Spock's Vulcan buddies beat Kirk up and lock him in the hold of a ship in orbit around a dead moon. The rest of the crew go to save him and get killed horribly one by one, leaving only Sulu, angry and hating the entire universe, barely even alive, left for dead. Yet somehow, he manages to get to his feet, pick up a metal chain with a big steel lock attached, and use it to pulverize the remaining Vulcans before dying himself, with Kirk still chained up, left to die a slow, agonizing death of starvation, because no one looking for him is still alive.
Yikes.
I think it's more accurate to say that not all plastic products can be economically recycled. It isn't, for example, economical to recycle single-use plastic bags because they contain so little plastic that transporting them is likely to use more oil than you recover from the bags. And polystyrene is mostly air, which has the same problem. But that's really an issue with the way the plastics are used rather than something fundamental to the material. The only one I'm aware of that would truly be uneconomical because of the nature of the material is PVC, and even that is improving, I think.
Not necessarily. In my experience, it's windy when there are storms. When it is stormy, it is usually cooler than normal. But when it is stormy and hot... well, that's tornado season.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
... unless it's treated lumber. Then your wood outgasses a cocktail of cancer-causing (chromated copper arsenate) and endocrine-disrupting (methyl bromide) vapors, too. Yay, progress.
Is the plastic really 'one use'? Landfills are storage areas, not disposal areas. 100 years from now they will be cursing the fuckers who have insisted on incinerators replacing landfills.
This. Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.