Or more realistically, do what we already know they are researching, release a nanomachine (admittedly different from a nanomaterial) that eats a particular kind of plastic. You want to be around when that problem gets out of control?
To quote from TFA: Typical of the research was a report earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found when nano-sized particles were given with chemotherapy, doses of the anticancer drug could be cut by about 95 per cent, without any reduction in therapeutic effect.
But the new report recommended that, given that the impact of nanomaterials on living things is "poorly understood,"...
I don't know about you but if my biochemistry teacher hammered anything into us it was two interrelated concepts:
- Just about everything in the human body runs off fewer than twenty mechanisms and these same mechanisms are used over and over to do many different things.
- All of these mechanisms are interconnected. You change how one is working and you'll affect at least two or three.
Let me add a third: when you massively change the strength of a reagent, you change what it does. Dilute hydrogen peroxide is a useful and safe antiseptic. Increase the concentration twenty times and you have a rocket fuel that melts your flesh.
If any approach makes some approach twenty times as powerful then it is doing other things, too. Count on it. We've seen this over and over, from birth control pills to heart medication.
You are presently two extremes as if they were the only options.
EITHER "plow ahead" OR "move as slowly as possible". This is a false set of choices. When you're walking down the street are your only choices to either run as fast as you can or move as slowly as possible?
To say that greater oversight makes sense is very different from "as slowly as possible". At this point we know that GM crops are interbreeding with non-GM crops. At the very least this is being used as yet another front in the We-own-your-life-through-controlling-your-IP war. Farmers who not only didn't want GM crops but actively tried to avoid them are being sued because seeds have blown across the plains and corporations are demanding payment for the resulting plants. Does this seem like grounds for investigation to you? It sure does to me.
There are dozens of these issues, if not many more. And, on top of everything else, after a quarter century of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush, our regulators themselves are long overdue for more transparency. After all, Tyson Chicken was one of Bill Clinton's biggest campaign supporters and if you think that didn't affect the way his people dealt with this kind of thing then you haven't been paying attention. Not to mention the waves of junk science that the EPA and other government agencies have been subjected to from their own politically-appointed bosses since Dubya took office.
Should we huddle in a corner and live on raw twigs? No. Should we let anybody do anything anywhere anytime? Also no. But there is a middle ground and that is where we should be.
Things like "grey goo" could never really happen.
Hey, man, don't tell me how much dangerous I've thought nanomaterials are. This doesn't surprise me in the least.
Heh. I'm resisting the temptation to link to all the streetcar-related stuff on my blog yet again.
Actually, we did streetcars first. They copied us. The first European streetcars were in London and they depended on having experts come over from New York to get it done. I just dropped by the London Transport Museum last year and was surprised how much American expertise their stuff pointed to. That having been said, most streetcars are waaay louder and less optimized than they could be. Here in Portland ours are very quiet. I doubt that you would have a problem with them. But even those certainly have room for improvement. Rather than suggesting that we use buses, which are inherently less energy efficient, howsabout we take one tenth of the money currently poured into designing new cars and put it into better streetcar designs? As demand is heating up, this is happening already, actually, so we can look to see better designs ahead of us.
Why are streetcars inherently more efficient than buses? Two points: First of all, remember all the things you've heard about increasing your energy efficiency by increasing the pressure in your tires? By, basically, making them harder? Well, care to guess how much harder a steel wheel is than a rubber one? Secondly, streetcars don't carry their fuel with them. Instead of carrying not only all that fuel but also typically a combustion engine and all its associated doodads to burn it with as most buses do, a streetcar has little, lightweight electric motors. And, of course, just by not having to bear the weight of the motors and fuel, the electric drives have that much less mass to move around. I see your point about electric buses but those range and maintenance issues you pointed to are very big deals and batteries are HEAVY.
As for "our power, phone and cable still run from overground wooden poles" I couldn't agree more that this is a problem. Maybe we should do something about that while we're addressing all the rest, hmmm?
We've got a fundamental issue with cross-vehicle efficiency here that I think deserves a bit more attention. Whatever our reasons for doing so, the U.S. decided to blow off most rail technologies years before WWII. Ever since, the combustion engine and vehicles that run on them have been at the center of our lives and those of everybody around the world in our orbit. Because of that, astounding amounts of money and brains have gone into making them better for over sixty years now. I think that it's important to remember that when we compare streetcars to buses, let alone cars, we're comparing the results of billions of dollars worth of investment and attention, most of it, let us note, not by the car companies, against a vehicle that has been sitting around getting comparatively no attention since the days when horses handled many deliveries and television was still a laboratory curiosity. That having been said, of course most streetcars will be louder. In term of technological investment, you're comparing a 286 to a brand new Macintosh, right down to the fancy case design and huge marketing campaign. But there is no reason that we need to keep spending our R&D resources that way. Quite the contrary.
So whenever you sit down to think about good approaches from here on out, just remember, mass transit in particular and many sustainable technologies overall have been pissed on and pushed aside for generations. If you want to understand what they can do in coming years, you're going to need to cut them some slack.
Yeah. I actually first wrote "decades", just for electric uses and was tempted to put in "centuries" but I decided to define things as narrowly as possible, just to remove any possible wiggle room. But, yes, deep in my heart I agree with you completely.
You've got an excellent point. Mass transit in many places would gain less from more lines or more sophisticated vehicles than they would from simply running more frequently and more hours. Here in Portland, we're fighting hard to get back (yep, "back") buses that run after midnight. The big push right now is to have them run until after "beer-thirty", a.k.a 2:30 am when public places are required to stop serving alcohol. The reduced costs from fewer drunk driving accidents alone would pay for much of it.
I'm certainly in favor of better rolling stock, rights of way, etc. but if the system is too infrequent or runs too few hours, people simply won't ride it. Maybe we should require that legislative staffs take public transit. If we did, they would get the changes made PDQ.
Looking back at this after a couple of minutes, I stand by the conclusions but regret the tone. Sorry, I really didn't need to get so snarky. Time for me to head to bed. See y'all tomorrow.
Of course. Earthberming a building could cause the end of all life on earth and requires at least six years of specialized training. Yeah, right.
I wrote as long a list as I did precisely because people's skills and resources vary. Are you telling me that "most people" have neither the skills not the money to buy a solar powered battery charger? I mean, hey, twenty-five bucks is serious money and it's hard work getting those little suction cups to stick to the window. Converting a car to biodiesel? If something that low on risk wasn't viable, half the projects posted on this site would be even less so.
solar panels . ..burn buildings down and electrocute people to death.
Unlike, say, using a backyard barbeque grill? C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less. You're seriously pushing it here. I gave a bit of thought to the things that I suggested before I posted and not a one is limited to people with any more money or skill than is required to build a nice gaming-optimized PC. In fact, you could start with a little unit from thinkgeek, about as/.-friendly a site as there could possibly be.
I'm not claiming that the average American should put up a dozen terawatts of photovoltaics on their garage. I'm saying that most people, certainly most/.ers, are capable of taking at least small steps to reduce the need for megaprojects in the first place.
Looking again, I should have put more emphasis on small starts, on things like battery chargers. As it happens, I just finished writing a blog post in which I did just that. But as for your concern about "the masses" not being able to handle something as simple as a wind turbine, dude, you're on the wrong site. What do you think "free as in speech" is all about? I posted on a site that's all about taking control of the technology around us, about not just curling up and waiting for some huge corporation, whether Microsoft or General Motors or General Electric, to tell us how they are going to run our lives.
We stop paying attention, stop keeping involved in "the means of production", and we're all screwed.
Ya see, I *thought* that might have been it but since wind turbines have been working and turning profits for years now, utterly unlike cold fusion, I thought perhaps you had something a bit more reasonable in mind. By what standard has wind power "failed to deliver"?
One of the moments that I truly became a radical happened in freshman year of college, in 1984. As it happens, I had been very aware of Carter pushing for more freight rail all through his term, a thing that the GOP fought tooth and nail. Well, he got some funding through anyway. Come '84, the results were starting to appear and, lo and behold, there was a big fat editorial in the Wall Street Journal trumpeting how much better off we were under Reagan because U.S. businesses were helped so much by this new freight rail capacity cutting costs and increasing flexibility. That was what taught me that you can't address environmental issues effectively without addressing the lies these sorts of people spread about them.
I couldn't agree more. Impeachment hearings and every other kind of fight to create accountability is key if we're to prevent even more of the same.
I'm getting really damn tired of this crap about "all the greens" being opposed to all of the various renewable power sources. Let's see you back this up. Not with something from Fox "News", but with links to pages on the sites of major environmental organizations saying the sorts of things you claim. I deal with actual policy makers from people like the Sierra Club and Audubon on a regular basis, not to mention attending things like the AWMA convention, a senior official of which crashed at my place, and the line of blather you're pushing is pretty damn far off the mark.
Show us some facts. If you can.
America has been DESIGNED for the automobile...
Um, actually, not always. A lot of our older suburbs and cities (Pasadena comes to mind) were designed for streetcars. America is filled with moderately intact streetcar suburbs. They were designed for mass-transit and would work even better now that fifty years of technology could make streetcars that would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to maintain. What is keeping cheap, small, streetcars like this from being brought back? Well, among other things, there are now thousands of expensive regulations about how a mass-transit rail vehicle can be made. The doors alone cost thousands of dollars because, for example, they need to be able to be opened manually if the power goes out while simultaneously not being easy to open while the vehicle is in transit while ALSO needing to be controllable electrically from at least two points, and on and on and on.
I've been looking into this for a few years now and the tech is ludicrously easy. I did a little thought experiment and I would say that it should cost about thirty thousand bucks for a bunch of techies to build a light-duty streetcar these days. But making it legal for use? Good luck with that.
No, the truth is, America, other than the winding suburban streets of the sort that are being phased out anyway, could actually implement mass transit and related technologies pretty fast and cheaper than you would think. IF, that is, the people in the various legislatures get off their asses and make it possible.
Again, RTFA, or in this case, watch the frackin' video. There are already over two million LNG vehicles out there, most of them in fleet use as things like city buses.
Get. A. Clue. Or just get the hell out of the way.
That's how capitalism works, my friend. In fact, by encouraging the switch from gasoline to electric (which you can generate yourself with equipment from Home Depot) and natural gas (which is basically methane, which you can generate from a pile of garbage, among other things) he is creating a more "rational" marketplace, one in which monopoly power is reduced and anydamnbody with the time and a few thousand dollars can get into the game.
Will a dozen kinds of regulators, many of them paid for by guys like him, come in and make it more expensive and complex to become a vendor? Duh; of course. But worst case scenario, nothing keeps you from "rolling your own", a thing that you can't say about gasoline.
Gotta disagree with you there, cobber. Funny how folks have just gotten used to assuming that power generation has to be some multibillion dollar centralized facility. Dude, we've got intertie now. It's the law.
Seems to me that Firefox, for example, is a pretty ambitious project, as is SETI@home. Or, for that matter, the content aggregation that takes place at any big BitTorrent site.
To assume that "somebody big" needs to carry out the work of giving this country more power generation is like asking "who's in charge of this 'internet' thing?"
You want to see us have more power? Superinsulate a frackin' building with some friends. Earthberm one. Go on Craigslist for a few weeks, accumulate some surplus foam and other materials, and build a greenroof. Or put in your own solar panels. Or buy a surplus Whisper, put it on a tall post (height is good), and get more watts per dollar than PV. Plenty of biodiesel coops out there, both for refining fuel and converting vehicles. Join one.
We don't need no stickin' megacorps. We really don't. Most forms of renewable power just don't have that serious a set of economies of scale. Think about it. Me? I'm workin' on a few fronts, most notably getting local zoning codes changed to better accomodate this sort of thing and helping to optimize a 26,000 square foot building that's been converted into workspaces for things like bikemaking, vehicle conversions, and people like me who run small manufacturing businesses and such. Hopefully we'll have our first PV up this year. We've already got a guy making hydrogen and a project to build a pretty serious wind turbine.
Don't bitch. Build. Or, as a bumper sticker I sell says, Don't fight the system; replace it.
I always wonder about those of y'all who talk about constant drive failures. Maybe I've just been very very very lucky but I haven't had a drive failure in almost ten years and I've subjected my drives to being thrown in a messenger bag and being carried around, use in places with quite a lot of dust, and, in one case, having to survive a fire severe enough to have cracked the plaster off the ceiling for about a hundred square feet. Admittedly I only buy things like La Cie Porche externals (got four at the moment) but that just makes me suspect all the more that y'all are getting what you're paying for.
Dude, you're delusional. Walk into Fry's or Safeway, for that matter, look at the dozens of flash drives for sale and the speed with which people are grabbing them and them tell me again that this technology "won't get any popularity". "Adopted at a snail's pace"? On what planet?
The 700 line is a 9" screen form factor with a dinky little screen sitting in it like a VW Bug parked at a truck stop. My concern is device size, not screen size, so afaic, the 700 is the worst of both worlds. Not to mention the point made by the AC below that the 700 Linux boxen are out of stock left, right and center.
I couldn't agree more. I was initially very excited by the prospect of a "$200 laptop", though about $350 is probably my sweet spot. And since I want something that I can throw in my bag and not worry about weight at all, I was really hoping for something like a 7" device. But not only are the prices going up, the size is, too. Looks to me like the executives have drunk the same Koolaid as everybody else in the business.
I guess that I'll have to buy a Nokia N800 to get me by (if the keyboard on the 810 weren't so resistant, I would buy one of those) and maybe get a used Asus in a year or so and hope for better someday.
Heh. Clearly, you don't know the same chess players that I have. Some would crash to the ground after a punch. Some have been martial arts instructors, ex-military, and all kinds of people I seriously wouldn't want to mess with.
In my experience, I would say that a disproportionate percentage of the people I've known who played chess avidly were bright guys from less educated backgrounds who simply weren't aware of as wide a range of intellectually stimulating activities as the average person I've known with their level of smarts. This has led them *both* to the military *and* chess. In my experience the two are positively correlated, especially in the people I met through working in corporate IT. The same tendency to turn to authority for answers has given them a motivation to take both of them on.
Chess is something that every kid in America has not only heard of but has been told is "one of those things that smart people do". And it's competitive as hell, has clear, unambiguous rules, and an equally clear, unambiguous winner at the end. It appeals to somebody who wants to do things where you work hard, focus, do what you've been trained to do, and WIN. Just like what they've been told military service is like. Not only that, it's cheap to learn and do and is replete with rituals that appeal to those seeking that sort of identity of clearly measurable "excellence".
Of course, there are also the artifacts based on things like, say, being from Russia. But those are fading over time.
So, no, I counter your snark and raise you demographics. May the best player win.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more realistically, do what we already know they are researching, release a nanomachine (admittedly different from a nanomaterial) that eats a particular kind of plastic. You want to be around when that problem gets out of control?
To quote from TFA:
Typical of the research was a report earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found when nano-sized particles were given with chemotherapy, doses of the anticancer drug could be cut by about 95 per cent, without any reduction in therapeutic effect.
But the new report recommended that, given that the impact of nanomaterials on living things is "poorly understood,"...
I don't know about you but if my biochemistry teacher hammered anything into us it was two interrelated concepts:
- Just about everything in the human body runs off fewer than twenty mechanisms and these same mechanisms are used over and over to do many different things.
- All of these mechanisms are interconnected. You change how one is working and you'll affect at least two or three.
Let me add a third: when you massively change the strength of a reagent, you change what it does. Dilute hydrogen peroxide is a useful and safe antiseptic. Increase the concentration twenty times and you have a rocket fuel that melts your flesh.
If any approach makes some approach twenty times as powerful then it is doing other things, too. Count on it. We've seen this over and over, from birth control pills to heart medication.
You are presently two extremes as if they were the only options.
EITHER "plow ahead" OR "move as slowly as possible". This is a false set of choices. When you're walking down the street are your only choices to either run as fast as you can or move as slowly as possible?
To say that greater oversight makes sense is very different from "as slowly as possible". At this point we know that GM crops are interbreeding with non-GM crops. At the very least this is being used as yet another front in the We-own-your-life-through-controlling-your-IP war. Farmers who not only didn't want GM crops but actively tried to avoid them are being sued because seeds have blown across the plains and corporations are demanding payment for the resulting plants. Does this seem like grounds for investigation to you? It sure does to me.
There are dozens of these issues, if not many more. And, on top of everything else, after a quarter century of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush, our regulators themselves are long overdue for more transparency. After all, Tyson Chicken was one of Bill Clinton's biggest campaign supporters and if you think that didn't affect the way his people dealt with this kind of thing then you haven't been paying attention. Not to mention the waves of junk science that the EPA and other government agencies have been subjected to from their own politically-appointed bosses since Dubya took office.
Should we huddle in a corner and live on raw twigs? No. Should we let anybody do anything anywhere anytime? Also no. But there is a middle ground and that is where we should be.
Things like "grey goo" could never really happen.
Hey, man, don't tell me how much dangerous I've thought nanomaterials are. This doesn't surprise me in the least.
Heh. I'm resisting the temptation to link to all the streetcar-related stuff on my blog yet again.
Actually, we did streetcars first. They copied us. The first European streetcars were in London and they depended on having experts come over from New York to get it done. I just dropped by the London Transport Museum last year and was surprised how much American expertise their stuff pointed to. That having been said, most streetcars are waaay louder and less optimized than they could be. Here in Portland ours are very quiet. I doubt that you would have a problem with them. But even those certainly have room for improvement. Rather than suggesting that we use buses, which are inherently less energy efficient, howsabout we take one tenth of the money currently poured into designing new cars and put it into better streetcar designs? As demand is heating up, this is happening already, actually, so we can look to see better designs ahead of us.
Why are streetcars inherently more efficient than buses? Two points: First of all, remember all the things you've heard about increasing your energy efficiency by increasing the pressure in your tires? By, basically, making them harder? Well, care to guess how much harder a steel wheel is than a rubber one? Secondly, streetcars don't carry their fuel with them. Instead of carrying not only all that fuel but also typically a combustion engine and all its associated doodads to burn it with as most buses do, a streetcar has little, lightweight electric motors. And, of course, just by not having to bear the weight of the motors and fuel, the electric drives have that much less mass to move around. I see your point about electric buses but those range and maintenance issues you pointed to are very big deals and batteries are HEAVY.
As for "our power, phone and cable still run from overground wooden poles" I couldn't agree more that this is a problem. Maybe we should do something about that while we're addressing all the rest, hmmm?
We've got a fundamental issue with cross-vehicle efficiency here that I think deserves a bit more attention. Whatever our reasons for doing so, the U.S. decided to blow off most rail technologies years before WWII. Ever since, the combustion engine and vehicles that run on them have been at the center of our lives and those of everybody around the world in our orbit. Because of that, astounding amounts of money and brains have gone into making them better for over sixty years now. I think that it's important to remember that when we compare streetcars to buses, let alone cars, we're comparing the results of billions of dollars worth of investment and attention, most of it, let us note, not by the car companies, against a vehicle that has been sitting around getting comparatively no attention since the days when horses handled many deliveries and television was still a laboratory curiosity.
That having been said, of course most streetcars will be louder. In term of technological investment, you're comparing a 286 to a brand new Macintosh, right down to the fancy case design and huge marketing campaign. But there is no reason that we need to keep spending our R&D resources that way. Quite the contrary.
So whenever you sit down to think about good approaches from here on out, just remember, mass transit in particular and many sustainable technologies overall have been pissed on and pushed aside for generations. If you want to understand what they can do in coming years, you're going to need to cut them some slack.
Yeah. I actually first wrote "decades", just for electric uses and was tempted to put in "centuries" but I decided to define things as narrowly as possible, just to remove any possible wiggle room. But, yes, deep in my heart I agree with you completely.
I clicked on your link and got a dead page. You might want to try again.
You've got an excellent point. Mass transit in many places would gain less from more lines or more sophisticated vehicles than they would from simply running more frequently and more hours. Here in Portland, we're fighting hard to get back (yep, "back") buses that run after midnight. The big push right now is to have them run until after "beer-thirty", a.k.a 2:30 am when public places are required to stop serving alcohol. The reduced costs from fewer drunk driving accidents alone would pay for much of it.
I'm certainly in favor of better rolling stock, rights of way, etc. but if the system is too infrequent or runs too few hours, people simply won't ride it. Maybe we should require that legislative staffs take public transit. If we did, they would get the changes made PDQ.
Looking back at this after a couple of minutes, I stand by the conclusions but regret the tone. Sorry, I really didn't need to get so snarky. Time for me to head to bed. See y'all tomorrow.
Of course. Earthberming a building could cause the end of all life on earth and requires at least six years of specialized training. Yeah, right.
.burn buildings down and electrocute people to death. /.-friendly a site as there could possibly be. /.ers, are capable of taking at least small steps to reduce the need for megaprojects in the first place.
I wrote as long a list as I did precisely because people's skills and resources vary. Are you telling me that "most people" have neither the skills not the money to buy a solar powered battery charger? I mean, hey, twenty-five bucks is serious money and it's hard work getting those little suction cups to stick to the window. Converting a car to biodiesel? If something that low on risk wasn't viable, half the projects posted on this site would be even less so.
solar panels . .
Unlike, say, using a backyard barbeque grill? C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less. You're seriously pushing it here. I gave a bit of thought to the things that I suggested before I posted and not a one is limited to people with any more money or skill than is required to build a nice gaming-optimized PC. In fact, you could start with a little unit from thinkgeek, about as
I'm not claiming that the average American should put up a dozen terawatts of photovoltaics on their garage. I'm saying that most people, certainly most
Looking again, I should have put more emphasis on small starts, on things like battery chargers. As it happens, I just finished writing a blog post in which I did just that. But as for your concern about "the masses" not being able to handle something as simple as a wind turbine, dude, you're on the wrong site. What do you think "free as in speech" is all about? I posted on a site that's all about taking control of the technology around us, about not just curling up and waiting for some huge corporation, whether Microsoft or General Motors or General Electric, to tell us how they are going to run our lives.
We stop paying attention, stop keeping involved in "the means of production", and we're all screwed.
Ya see, I *thought* that might have been it but since wind turbines have been working and turning profits for years now, utterly unlike cold fusion, I thought perhaps you had something a bit more reasonable in mind. By what standard has wind power "failed to deliver"?
One of the moments that I truly became a radical happened in freshman year of college, in 1984. As it happens, I had been very aware of Carter pushing for more freight rail all through his term, a thing that the GOP fought tooth and nail. Well, he got some funding through anyway. Come '84, the results were starting to appear and, lo and behold, there was a big fat editorial in the Wall Street Journal trumpeting how much better off we were under Reagan because U.S. businesses were helped so much by this new freight rail capacity cutting costs and increasing flexibility. That was what taught me that you can't address environmental issues effectively without addressing the lies these sorts of people spread about them.
I couldn't agree more. Impeachment hearings and every other kind of fight to create accountability is key if we're to prevent even more of the same.
I'm getting really damn tired of this crap about "all the greens" being opposed to all of the various renewable power sources. Let's see you back this up. Not with something from Fox "News", but with links to pages on the sites of major environmental organizations saying the sorts of things you claim. I deal with actual policy makers from people like the Sierra Club and Audubon on a regular basis, not to mention attending things like the AWMA convention, a senior official of which crashed at my place, and the line of blather you're pushing is pretty damn far off the mark.
Show us some facts. If you can.
America has been DESIGNED for the automobile...
Um, actually, not always. A lot of our older suburbs and cities (Pasadena comes to mind) were designed for streetcars. America is filled with moderately intact streetcar suburbs. They were designed for mass-transit and would work even better now that fifty years of technology could make streetcars that would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to maintain.
What is keeping cheap, small, streetcars like this from being brought back? Well, among other things, there are now thousands of expensive regulations about how a mass-transit rail vehicle can be made. The doors alone cost thousands of dollars because, for example, they need to be able to be opened manually if the power goes out while simultaneously not being easy to open while the vehicle is in transit while ALSO needing to be controllable electrically from at least two points, and on and on and on.
I've been looking into this for a few years now and the tech is ludicrously easy. I did a little thought experiment and I would say that it should cost about thirty thousand bucks for a bunch of techies to build a light-duty streetcar these days. But making it legal for use? Good luck with that.
No, the truth is, America, other than the winding suburban streets of the sort that are being phased out anyway, could actually implement mass transit and related technologies pretty fast and cheaper than you would think. IF, that is, the people in the various legislatures get off their asses and make it possible.
Again, RTFA, or in this case, watch the frackin' video. There are already over two million LNG vehicles out there, most of them in fleet use as things like city buses.
Get. A. Clue. Or just get the hell out of the way.
That's how capitalism works, my friend. In fact, by encouraging the switch from gasoline to electric (which you can generate yourself with equipment from Home Depot) and natural gas (which is basically methane, which you can generate from a pile of garbage, among other things) he is creating a more "rational" marketplace, one in which monopoly power is reduced and anydamnbody with the time and a few thousand dollars can get into the game.
Will a dozen kinds of regulators, many of them paid for by guys like him, come in and make it more expensive and complex to become a vendor? Duh; of course. But worst case scenario, nothing keeps you from "rolling your own", a thing that you can't say about gasoline.
All looks good to me, I've gotta say.
Gotta disagree with you there, cobber. Funny how folks have just gotten used to assuming that power generation has to be some multibillion dollar centralized facility. Dude, we've got intertie now. It's the law.
Seems to me that Firefox, for example, is a pretty ambitious project, as is SETI@home. Or, for that matter, the content aggregation that takes place at any big BitTorrent site.
To assume that "somebody big" needs to carry out the work of giving this country more power generation is like asking "who's in charge of this 'internet' thing?"
You want to see us have more power? Superinsulate a frackin' building with some friends. Earthberm one. Go on Craigslist for a few weeks, accumulate some surplus foam and other materials, and build a greenroof. Or put in your own solar panels. Or buy a surplus Whisper, put it on a tall post (height is good), and get more watts per dollar than PV. Plenty of biodiesel coops out there, both for refining fuel and converting vehicles. Join one.
We don't need no stickin' megacorps. We really don't. Most forms of renewable power just don't have that serious a set of economies of scale. Think about it. Me? I'm workin' on a few fronts, most notably getting local zoning codes changed to better accomodate this sort of thing and helping to optimize a 26,000 square foot building that's been converted into workspaces for things like bikemaking, vehicle conversions, and people like me who run small manufacturing businesses and such. Hopefully we'll have our first PV up this year. We've already got a guy making hydrogen and a project to build a pretty serious wind turbine.
Don't bitch. Build. Or, as a bumper sticker I sell says, Don't fight the system; replace it.
Care to explain that statement?
You can buy 16GB flash drives today. But you're right; the prices need work.
I call 'em "flash drives". Or, for the itty ones, "USB keys" or "keydrives".
I always wonder about those of y'all who talk about constant drive failures. Maybe I've just been very very very lucky but I haven't had a drive failure in almost ten years and I've subjected my drives to being thrown in a messenger bag and being carried around, use in places with quite a lot of dust, and, in one case, having to survive a fire severe enough to have cracked the plaster off the ceiling for about a hundred square feet. Admittedly I only buy things like La Cie Porche externals (got four at the moment) but that just makes me suspect all the more that y'all are getting what you're paying for.
Dude, you're delusional. Walk into Fry's or Safeway, for that matter, look at the dozens of flash drives for sale and the speed with which people are grabbing them and them tell me again that this technology "won't get any popularity". "Adopted at a snail's pace"? On what planet?
The 700 line is a 9" screen form factor with a dinky little screen sitting in it like a VW Bug parked at a truck stop. My concern is device size, not screen size, so afaic, the 700 is the worst of both worlds. Not to mention the point made by the AC below that the 700 Linux boxen are out of stock left, right and center.
I couldn't agree more. I was initially very excited by the prospect of a "$200 laptop", though about $350 is probably my sweet spot. And since I want something that I can throw in my bag and not worry about weight at all, I was really hoping for something like a 7" device. But not only are the prices going up, the size is, too. Looks to me like the executives have drunk the same Koolaid as everybody else in the business.
;-(
I guess that I'll have to buy a Nokia N800 to get me by (if the keyboard on the 810 weren't so resistant, I would buy one of those) and maybe get a used Asus in a year or so and hope for better someday.
Because that's worked so well so far
In my experience, I would say that a disproportionate percentage of the people I've known who played chess avidly were bright guys from less educated backgrounds who simply weren't aware of as wide a range of intellectually stimulating activities as the average person I've known with their level of smarts. This has led them *both* to the military *and* chess. In my experience the two are positively correlated, especially in the people I met through working in corporate IT. The same tendency to turn to authority for answers has given them a motivation to take both of them on.
Chess is something that every kid in America has not only heard of but has been told is "one of those things that smart people do". And it's competitive as hell, has clear, unambiguous rules, and an equally clear, unambiguous winner at the end. It appeals to somebody who wants to do things where you work hard, focus, do what you've been trained to do, and WIN. Just like what they've been told military service is like. Not only that, it's cheap to learn and do and is replete with rituals that appeal to those seeking that sort of identity of clearly measurable "excellence".
Of course, there are also the artifacts based on things like, say, being from Russia. But those are fading over time.
So, no, I counter your snark and raise you demographics. May the best player win.