If you can believe the pictures. They included in-air shots, from a more conventional plane (Cesna, I believe) that flew along with it.
As I said, the only problem was that most people don't WANT flying cars, especially at more than the price of a Cesna, which is designed as a flying *flying machine* instead of a flying ground-based car, and thus is better at flying. You could buy the base car, and the Cesna, and have 2 purpose-built vehicles working magnificantly in their particular environments, or have a racing camel of a carplane.
Read Popular Mechanics from the late 1960s or 1970s. There was a flying car on the cover of one issue (the car was red, and looked like a Peuguot). The flying components folded up on a trailer that the car would then pull to its next takeoff site. It only cost about $75,000 in Nixon-era dollars.
Now what you really want is a VC-22 that you can drive on the highway, so if you get into a traffic jam, you can just pass people in the "upper lane" . And, of course, it has to cost no more than a VW Bug yet be so cool that you can get supermodels to have your children just be driving by them, like the refrigerator commercial with one of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models and the (claimed) Nanotechnology Professor.
> if you want to throttle me, I'll switch providers.
To which Comcast would say, "Please!"
You are probably one of the 5% who pay the same as everybody else, but use 50% of the bandwidth. It is to their interest to dump you on to a competitor, unless you also specify who your business or school uses. Even then, it could make sense to drive you away, but the payoff would need to be better modelled than it probably is, to be certain of that statement.
If there was a sliding fee based on "semi-real-time" peak bandwidth use, so that your P2P traffic would only flow when there is no other, then they would be willing to keep you, but this sort of complicated "use pricing" model hasn't been implemented anywhere, yet, because it is almost impossible to predict when the peaks are (after everyone calls after midnight, midnight to 1 AM becomes a peak period, too). Doubly so, because then ISPs would adopt this model between themselves, and your YouTube video watching would have to generate scores of Advise Of Charge requests for each file. Triply so, because you would demand that they give you that info to let you do the same, then demand that your P2P software writer include this self-throttling feature in their next update. Quadrupally so, because the software would have to support EVERY protocol defined by each ISP.
> So soon those penis enlargement ads won't be just a scam? > > Not that I need anything like that...
Unless you are a pure lesbian (as opposed to a Lesbian, like Michael Dukakis) you will. Either because every other male is now hung like an equine porn star and you need to keep up (pun not originally intended, but it does work nicely), or as a gift to your significant other who hasn't had his (Hurumph! That is enough, now. Move along.).
Accidents will get you, eventually. Someone (I forget who) calculated a few years ago that perfect long-term medical care and a total absence of disease just raises the Average Life Expectancy to about 400 years. Less if cancer cannot be cured, just treated (especially brain cancers).
Anyway, you could always refuse extraordinary measures, even when they have become as ordinary as hydration and intravenous feeding is now.
Only if the soldier already regrows his own tissue so fast that losing all his bone marrow doesn't slow him down. I.e., Wolverine was Wolverine even before they gave him real claws.
Calling all Indo-Europeans one race is a very recent phenomenom
Fine, but I didn't live in the 19th century but I do live in the 21st. "Irish" isn't a race, whether or not it was considered one a hundred fifty years ago.
Tell it to Jack London, the inventor of the term "Yellow Peril" to describe the Chinese, who also called them a "race" rather than just one nationality, less than 100 years ago. I expect that the idea at least lasted through Robtert E. Howard's life, from various of his short stories.
Anyway, calling the Han one nationality is like calling the British Islanders one nation in 1905, just because there was one Parliament who controlled them and one King to whom they were legally required to be loyal. The only reason that they are viewed as one people is that they have one system of writing, equally unsuited to any of the Chinese languages as they are spoken.
> An immediate & desirable consequence is that the olympics are a "flop", ala Montreal
I watched them, at the time. They were far from a flop. What flopped was what the Canadians did (or didn't do) with the site, after they were over. In fact, I visited the site about a decade after the Olympics, and the attempt at an ongoing World's Fair style of attraction was still working, at least to the tourists. Just not making enough to pay the debts.
Of course, Woodstock (the *REAL* Woodstock, in Bethel, NY on Max Yasgar's farm -- ignore the attempts to reuse the name) took over twenty years to turn a profit, so it isn't easy, no matter the success of the original event.
> and fail to make Bejing a desirable tourist destination.
They would have to bulldose the Forbidden City and bury the Great Wall to manage that. It was desirable in the early 1970s, during and just after Nixon's trip.
> For many chinese, it's very bad taste to ruin the > Olympic games which bring honor and prestige to China.
Just remember how it helped the country that hosted it in 1936. Or the Sarajevo (sp?) Winter Games.
Sorry to Godwin things, but hosting the Olympics doesn't bring any honor that isn't there already. At best, it exposes what is there, and makes the locals buff it up, some. Likewise, it would show the dishonor that is there, too.
Let's face it. The Chinese Government wanted it, despite knowing just how much of a problem it could be for them.
> One more point is that the current Dalai Lama was > appointed by the central government of Republic of China.
Nonsense. They accepted the claim of the Lhasa monks, supported by the Panchen Lama of the time, that he was the current incarnation of the only Dalai Lama that ever was or will be. Then they made some nonsense about recognizing him, with as much sense of appointment to it as Blair appointing G.W.Bush because he eventually called and congratulated him, rather than Kerry or Gore.
> Bit both are Asian countries populated by orientals, > to say that the Chinese are a race is like saying > the Irish are a race.
And the Irish *were* considered a different race than Englishmen, who were a different race from the French, who were a different race from the Spanish (except for the royals, who are a cadet branch of the French royals, who are as out of their job in France, itself, as the Irish High King would be, today), who were a different race than Germans.
Calling all Indo-Europeans one race is a very recent phenomenom (and disputed by some who want to be separate victims, like the actual Aryans in Iran and Northern India:-) Obviously, the Chinese are using the old definition, and ignoring the difference between South Chinese and North Chinese, which is quite real in itself.
So yes, the *word* race implies a political or social definition, but so does "red" vs. "orange" (just ask an interior decorator or graphics artist). There is a real difference behind it, but the difference surface is expanding outwards.
I would be really curious to see how aspects of proto Indo-European would sound as pronounced by Neanderthals. The last fossils come from France and Spain some 35,000 years ago and it's not unrealistic to suppose that some version of the language would have been spoken by them.
Quite unrealistic, given that Indo-European seems to have arisen only 5000 years ago, in the mountains north of Sumer (thousands of miles away). If any trace of Neanderthal survived the incoming Cro-Magnards, then the Indo-European culture wave, then the Romans, then the Germans as Rome fell in the West, one would never realize it (unless one was the Tolkein character who figured out Sindarin and Quenya from bits in Celtic and Finnish, turned into an elf, and went off on The Straight Way to Valinar).
I agree that the Neanderthal had speech, and I would be quite surprised if it had the problems attributed to it, because they would have avoided the places where they could not be clear, among themselves. It might well have sounded like R2-D2, full of whistles, clicks, and razzberries, since these should be uneffected by their vocal tract. OTOH, the Kalahari bushmen still preserve those, so it might be that humans meeting neanders would have sounded fairly similar, to us.
> but that they were avoiding a tax that pre-Internet applied almost universally to retailers.
The tax is on the purchasers. The business is merely required to act as their collection agent (I assume without compensation), and send collected taxes to the state at fixed intervals (often quarterly).
If people buy on the Internet across state lines, they are usually responsible for paying another tax that usually equal to the sales tax, unless the business claims to do that for them (perhaps even then, but I have never heard of a successful prosecution based on failure to pay when the retailer doesn't). Oddly, most people forget to send that payment in (can't imagine why:-). This is why the state governments want the online retailers to collect the tax for them, just as the local retailer must.
OTOH, I view legitimate taxes as User Fees for the services of government; how does PA help me when I am defrauded by a CA retailer with no PA presence? This ignores the matter that it is interstate commerce, which the states are forbidden to tax or unreasonably interfere with, by the US Constitution, but IANACS (I Am Not A Constitutional Scholar).
The Democrats have been increasingly using the tactic of busing in homeless people and illegal aliens to vote, sometimes across multiple districts, over the last 20 to 30 years.
What? They stopped doing that before 1980? That is the classical behavior of Tammany Hall and the Chicago Machine (bums used to grow their hair before Election Day, so that they could shave part off before revisiting the election site, impersonating another dead man).
Of course, before we Republicans get all self righteous, it should be remembered that our political machines did much of the same, in the rural areas and the cities that we controlled. The joke was that the Illinois election results were absolutely fair, because the fraud that the Daley Machine perpetrated was exacty balanced by the fraud in Southern Illinois (the Republican stronghold, since the founding of the party). Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (of Little Round Top fame) lost his governorship by opposing such fraud by our party.
If the states were required to furnish free IDs for non-drivers, with the same original security as for licenses, that could cut most of the legs from under the Democrats arguments. Then they are left with their partisans uniquely distrust government interest, or are too stupid to keep their ID, or some such nonsense.
Yeah, it sounds bad. But then you find "he's the open source to Stark's closed source oppressiveness. [...] He's a tru ghost in the machine; completely off the grid, flexible and mobile." Makes you almost like the guy already.
I think that the goal of this Fraction fellow is that Zeke Stain is a New Model Ted Kaczynsky, without Ted's obvious insanity and whiny reasons (thus, more like another Ted, Ted Bundy). Rather like the villian/hero from V For Vendetta, or the Norse God/Anti-God Loki.
Thus, you are supposed to like Stane, even as your higher morality/long-term view realizes that he is out to wipe out everybody who doesn't join in whole-heartedly with his crusade. As an example, if Linus Torvalds had as his real and public goal the reduction of every current and former MS shareholder to poverty as abject as the Ik, rather than just replace the MS product with a better choice, cutting down their future income.
That is, assuming that I am right in my reading of the original article. My only personal familiarity with Iron Man comes from 1960s/70s TV cartoons, and reading bits related to Captain America's death (sorry, I was a DC brat), so I am writing from moderate ignorance.
Even work as apparently-revolutionary as Einstein's early stuff was more a synthesis of current ideas than anything truly new.
Please define "early stuff", as he did almost all his real work early in his career (not uncommon in theoretical physics). While the Photoelectric Effect was a synthesis, Special Relativity took the interesting view that absolute time was an illusion, and simplified the Fitzgerald Contraction equations and made it easy to handle. That change in viewpoint was quite new.
Further, from what I have been told, General Relativity was completely new (hence the comments in the 1930s that only 5 people really understood it).
> > Just look at the literacy rates of people who > > listen to Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith: It's next to zero.
I know many people who listen to Country Music, even if I don't particularly like much of it. None over 8 years old are unable to read well (I haven't checked the youngsters.
Do you somehow honestly think that black people living in Alabama have the same "overall traditions, customs, and apparently gaming habits" as black people living in New York City, and them the same as black people living in Chicago?
Why not? Most blacks living in the north are just two or three generations from their cousins in the Deep South. Enough moved north in the 1940s and 50s that almost every northern black family is also a southern black family.
It would also be glossing over the important historical fact that many blacks in the north in generations past were never slaves.
Many in the South, too; slavery ended in the 1860s, after all. As far as having NO slave ancestors, this is fairly rare. The reason that New Englanders were first against slavery was that God clearly disapproved as slaves transported there rarely survived the first winter; thus they had fairly few until escaping slaves started arriving.
You also ignore the existance of large numbers of free and even slave-owning blacks in Louisiana in 1860, some of whom enlisted (possibly even were commissioned; I would have to check that) and served in their state regiments during the Civil War.
You can't just take a label like "African American" and slap it on all black people in the US. It is and should be degrading to many.
Actually, they chose it and used it, IIRC, because "Black" was considered offensively excluding those who
were light enough to pass the old paper bag test (in the 1930s, light skinned blacks considered themselves the elite, and only accepted those lighter than the bags).
"National Alert:
An attack is being carried out in Washington. The White House has been bombed.
This week only, half price survival gear at Mitchell's Disposals. Compasses, water bottles, camp stoves and outdoor gear as well as army surplus equipment. Get it while it's hot!"
This message is complete nonsense. It exceeds GSM's 160 7bit char limit.
> The three types of cones are generally referred to as L, M and S cones
But there are four types of cones. Ask any bird, lizard, or frog. Mammals lost two of them (the middle two), presumably because they became nocturnal to survive the dinosaurs, at the end of the Triassic (who needs accurate colors when it is too dark to see any colors?). When primates appeared, they re-evolved one cone for the central range (the M cone, in your terms) where there had originally been two.
I would reference the Scientific American article, except that I do not have it with me.
Also what competitive disadvantage does that create for Californians against other countries not using such a system?... As they will then be leaking money away in more taxes, which other countries don't need to pay for the same information.
Last that I heard, California is not a country, at all. This may create a competitive disadvantage for Californians vs. other states in the USA. So what? It's not like this is the first time. There are reasons that their gasoline is $4 per gallon and around $3 per gallon in NJ (to pick the opposite extremes), and it is NOT just corporate greed, or the rest of the country would be paying as much as CA.
This cold hard reality will continue to exist so long as we insist on flat rate Internet. Sounds nice but all users are not equal. So long as we Slashdot readers, especially the P2P users among us all pay the same the only way for the telcos to win is to find ever more clever ways to chase off those of us who cost the telcos more money than they pay without running afoul of regulators and class action suits.
Slashdot Mirror
> Did it actually work, though?
If you can believe the pictures. They included in-air shots, from a more conventional plane (Cesna, I believe) that flew along with it.
As I said, the only problem was that most people don't WANT flying cars, especially at more than the price of a Cesna, which is designed as a flying *flying machine* instead of a flying ground-based car, and thus is better at flying. You could buy the base car, and the Cesna, and have 2 purpose-built vehicles working magnificantly in their particular environments, or have a racing camel of a carplane.
> ...Where?
Read Popular Mechanics from the late 1960s or 1970s. There was a flying car on the cover of one issue (the car was red, and looked like a Peuguot). The flying components folded up on a trailer that the car would then pull to its next takeoff site. It only cost about $75,000 in Nixon-era dollars.
Now what you really want is a VC-22 that you can drive on the highway, so if you get into a traffic jam, you can just pass people in the "upper lane" . And, of course, it has to cost no more than a VW Bug yet be so cool that you can get supermodels to have your children just be driving by them, like the refrigerator commercial with one of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models and the (claimed) Nanotechnology Professor.
Good luck on that.
> if you want to throttle me, I'll switch providers.
To which Comcast would say, "Please!"
You are probably one of the 5% who pay the same as everybody else, but use 50% of the bandwidth. It is to their interest to dump you on to a competitor, unless you also specify who your business or school uses. Even then, it could make sense to drive you away, but the payoff would need to be better modelled than it probably is, to be certain of that statement.
If there was a sliding fee based on "semi-real-time" peak bandwidth use, so that your P2P traffic would only flow when there is no other, then they would be willing to keep you, but this sort of complicated "use pricing" model hasn't been implemented anywhere, yet, because it is almost impossible to predict when the peaks are (after everyone calls after midnight, midnight to 1 AM becomes a peak period, too). Doubly so, because then ISPs would adopt this model between themselves, and your YouTube video watching would have to generate scores of Advise Of Charge requests for each file. Triply so, because you would demand that they give you that info to let you do the same, then demand that your P2P software writer include this self-throttling feature in their next update. Quadrupally so, because the software would have to support EVERY protocol defined by each ISP.
> So soon those penis enlargement ads won't be just a scam?
>
> Not that I need anything like that...
Unless you are a pure lesbian (as opposed to a Lesbian, like Michael Dukakis) you will. Either because every other male is now hung like an equine porn star and you need to keep up (pun not originally intended, but it does work nicely), or as a gift to your significant other who hasn't had his (Hurumph! That is enough, now. Move along.).
> Who would want to live forever?
Accidents will get you, eventually. Someone (I forget who) calculated a few years ago that perfect long-term medical care and a total absence of disease just raises the Average Life Expectancy to about 400 years. Less if cancer cannot be cured, just treated (especially brain cancers).
Anyway, you could always refuse extraordinary measures, even when they have become as ordinary as hydration and intravenous feeding is now.
> Adamantium skeletons?
Only if the soldier already regrows his own tissue so fast that losing all his bone marrow doesn't slow him down. I.e., Wolverine was Wolverine even before they gave him real claws.
Tell it to Jack London, the inventor of the term "Yellow Peril" to describe the Chinese, who also called them a "race" rather than just one nationality, less than 100 years ago. I expect that the idea at least lasted through Robtert E. Howard's life, from various of his short stories.
Anyway, calling the Han one nationality is like calling the British Islanders one nation in 1905, just because there was one Parliament who controlled them and one King to whom they were legally required to be loyal. The only reason that they are viewed as one people is that they have one system of writing, equally unsuited to any of the Chinese languages as they are spoken.
> Yes, but why would google want to compete with themselves? Don't they have a space program yet?
Only on April Fools Days.
> I'm guessing that PETA supporters would have similar taste to grass fed beef.
No, free-range pork. Humans taste like pork, or spam. Ask any (hopefully ex-)cannibal, or read Heminway (supposedly - I don't know which story).
> An immediate & desirable consequence is that the olympics are a "flop", ala Montreal
I watched them, at the time. They were far from a flop. What flopped was what the Canadians did (or didn't do) with the site, after they were over. In fact, I visited the site about a decade after the Olympics, and the attempt at an ongoing World's Fair style of attraction was still working, at least to the tourists. Just not making enough to pay the debts.
Of course, Woodstock (the *REAL* Woodstock, in Bethel, NY on Max Yasgar's farm -- ignore the attempts to reuse the name) took over twenty years to turn a profit, so it isn't easy, no matter the success of the original event.
> and fail to make Bejing a desirable tourist destination.
They would have to bulldose the Forbidden City and bury the Great Wall to manage that. It was desirable in the early 1970s, during and just after Nixon's trip.
> For many chinese, it's very bad taste to ruin the
> Olympic games which bring honor and prestige to China.
Just remember how it helped the country that hosted it in 1936. Or the Sarajevo (sp?) Winter Games.
Sorry to Godwin things, but hosting the Olympics doesn't bring any honor that isn't there already. At best, it exposes what is there, and makes the locals buff it up, some. Likewise, it would show the dishonor that is there, too.
Let's face it. The Chinese Government wanted it, despite knowing just how much of a problem it could be for them.
> One more point is that the current Dalai Lama was
> appointed by the central government of Republic of China.
Nonsense. They accepted the claim of the Lhasa monks, supported by the Panchen Lama of the time, that he was the current incarnation of the only Dalai Lama that ever was or will be. Then they made some nonsense about recognizing him, with as much sense of appointment to it as Blair appointing G.W.Bush because he eventually called and congratulated him, rather than Kerry or Gore.
> Bit both are Asian countries populated by orientals,
:-) Obviously, the Chinese are using the old definition, and ignoring the difference between South Chinese and North Chinese, which is quite real in itself.
> to say that the Chinese are a race is like saying
> the Irish are a race.
And the Irish *were* considered a different race than Englishmen, who were a different race from the French, who were a different race from the Spanish (except for the royals, who are a cadet branch of the French royals, who are as out of their job in France, itself, as the Irish High King would be, today), who were a different race than Germans.
Calling all Indo-Europeans one race is a very recent phenomenom (and disputed by some who want to be separate victims, like the actual Aryans in Iran and Northern India
So yes, the *word* race implies a political or social definition, but so does "red" vs. "orange" (just ask an interior decorator or graphics artist). There is a real difference behind it, but the difference surface is expanding outwards.
Quite unrealistic, given that Indo-European seems to have arisen only 5000 years ago, in the mountains north of Sumer (thousands of miles away). If any trace of Neanderthal survived the incoming Cro-Magnards, then the Indo-European culture wave, then the Romans, then the Germans as Rome fell in the West, one would never realize it (unless one was the Tolkein character who figured out Sindarin and Quenya from bits in Celtic and Finnish, turned into an elf, and went off on The Straight Way to Valinar).
I agree that the Neanderthal had speech, and I would be quite surprised if it had the problems attributed to it, because they would have avoided the places where they could not be clear, among themselves. It might well have sounded like R2-D2, full of whistles, clicks, and razzberries, since these should be uneffected by their vocal tract. OTOH, the Kalahari bushmen still preserve those, so it might be that humans meeting neanders would have sounded fairly similar, to us.
> but that they were avoiding a tax that pre-Internet applied almost universally to retailers.
:-). This is why the state governments want the online retailers to collect the tax for them, just as the local retailer must.
The tax is on the purchasers. The business is merely required to act as their collection agent (I assume without compensation), and send collected taxes to the state at fixed intervals (often quarterly).
If people buy on the Internet across state lines, they are usually responsible for paying another tax that usually equal to the sales tax, unless the business claims to do that for them (perhaps even then, but I have never heard of a successful prosecution based on failure to pay when the retailer doesn't). Oddly, most people forget to send that payment in (can't imagine why
OTOH, I view legitimate taxes as User Fees for the services of government; how does PA help me when I am defrauded by a CA retailer with no PA presence? This ignores the matter that it is interstate commerce, which the states are forbidden to tax or unreasonably interfere with, by the US Constitution, but IANACS (I Am Not A Constitutional Scholar).
What? They stopped doing that before 1980? That is the classical behavior of Tammany Hall and the Chicago Machine (bums used to grow their hair before Election Day, so that they could shave part off before revisiting the election site, impersonating another dead man).
Of course, before we Republicans get all self righteous, it should be remembered that our political machines did much of the same, in the rural areas and the cities that we controlled. The joke was that the Illinois election results were absolutely fair, because the fraud that the Daley Machine perpetrated was exacty balanced by the fraud in Southern Illinois (the Republican stronghold, since the founding of the party). Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (of Little Round Top fame) lost his governorship by opposing such fraud by our party.
If the states were required to furnish free IDs for non-drivers, with the same original security as for licenses, that could cut most of the legs from under the Democrats arguments. Then they are left with their partisans uniquely distrust government interest, or are too stupid to keep their ID, or some such nonsense.
I think that the goal of this Fraction fellow is that Zeke Stain is a New Model Ted Kaczynsky, without Ted's obvious insanity and whiny reasons (thus, more like another Ted, Ted Bundy). Rather like the villian/hero from V For Vendetta, or the Norse God/Anti-God Loki.
Thus, you are supposed to like Stane, even as your higher morality/long-term view realizes that he is out to wipe out everybody who doesn't join in whole-heartedly with his crusade. As an example, if Linus Torvalds had as his real and public goal the reduction of every current and former MS shareholder to poverty as abject as the Ik, rather than just replace the MS product with a better choice, cutting down their future income.
That is, assuming that I am right in my reading of the original article. My only personal familiarity with Iron Man comes from 1960s/70s TV cartoons, and reading bits related to Captain America's death (sorry, I was a DC brat), so I am writing from moderate ignorance.
Please define "early stuff", as he did almost all his real work early in his career (not uncommon in theoretical physics). While the Photoelectric Effect was a synthesis, Special Relativity took the interesting view that absolute time was an illusion, and simplified the Fitzgerald Contraction equations and made it easy to handle. That change in viewpoint was quite new.
Further, from what I have been told, General Relativity was completely new (hence the comments in the 1930s that only 5 people really understood it).
> *note/trivia* Geddy sings "still HAVE made a
> choice" but Neil wrote "still haven't made a choice"
Changing the lyrics, thus exercizing his free will.
Unless that was deterministically required because Geddy's version of the line makes more sense. And scans better. And can be sung better, in concert.
> Why is parent modded troll?
> > Just look at the literacy rates of people who
> > listen to Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith: It's next to zero.
I know many people who listen to Country Music, even if I don't particularly like much of it. None over 8 years old are unable to read well (I haven't checked the youngsters.
Next stupid question.
Why not? Most blacks living in the north are just two or three generations from their cousins in the Deep South. Enough moved north in the 1940s and 50s that almost every northern black family is also a southern black family.
Many in the South, too; slavery ended in the 1860s, after all. As far as having NO slave ancestors, this is fairly rare. The reason that New Englanders were first against slavery was that God clearly disapproved as slaves transported there rarely survived the first winter; thus they had fairly few until escaping slaves started arriving.
You also ignore the existance of large numbers of free and even slave-owning blacks in Louisiana in 1860, some of whom enlisted (possibly even were commissioned; I would have to check that) and served in their state regiments during the Civil War.
Actually, they chose it and used it, IIRC, because "Black" was considered offensively excluding those who were light enough to pass the old paper bag test (in the 1930s, light skinned blacks considered themselves the elite, and only accepted those lighter than the bags).
This message is complete nonsense. It exceeds GSM's 160 7bit char limit.
Perhaps if they sent it as multiple pages?
> The three types of cones are generally referred to as L, M and S cones
But there are four types of cones. Ask any bird, lizard, or frog. Mammals lost two of them (the middle two), presumably because they became nocturnal to survive the dinosaurs, at the end of the Triassic (who needs accurate colors when it is too dark to see any colors?). When primates appeared, they re-evolved one cone for the central range (the M cone, in your terms) where there had originally been two.
I would reference the Scientific American article, except that I do not have it with me.
Last that I heard, California is not a country, at all. This may create a competitive disadvantage for Californians vs. other states in the USA. So what? It's not like this is the first time. There are reasons that their gasoline is $4 per gallon and around $3 per gallon in NJ (to pick the opposite extremes), and it is NOT just corporate greed, or the rest of the country would be paying as much as CA.
There. Fixed that last paragraph for you.