Both you and the masses are wrong. A modem is not "the device that gets you online". Neither is it "a way of transmitting digital data to analog data over a telephone connection". (But you are getting closer). Defining modem as "a modular emulator" is bollocks. Try google, wikipedia, whatever...
The correct term that the word "modem" stems from, is "MODulator DEModulator". It MODulates signals from digital to analog, and DEModulates them back from analog to digital. There is nothing that states it has to use a phone line. It could just as well use cable-tv wires, radio, infrared, speakers and microphones, or just about anything else. Thus a "cable modem" is correct usage of the word (of course, you can insist on calling it "cable-tv land-line modem", but for most people, that wouldn't increase understanding of the concept.
As a european, I'm very surprised to find out that another european doesn't think wood is a great building material. Obviously building techniques differ with climate. I've noticed that some africans believe walls are overrated, and that a roof is sufficient. In Norway we obviously don't agree with that. Wood is a better insulator than stone, and that's the end of story as far as we are concerned. Of course, wood has other advantages too, it's easier to manufacture into suitable building materials (all you need is a saw), it's easier to transport, and it pretty much grows everywhere. The main disadvantage is that it needs some maintenance if the house is supposed to outlast it's current owner. In the old days, they used tar, today we use paint.
Stone, on the other hand, is a poor insulator. It's more difficult to work with, you can't simply use a saw (or axe). It's heavier to carry, and it gets damaged by water in subzero temperatures. Also, building walls of stone is easy, but building roofs require special engineering techniques (look at e.g. the Sistine Chapel).
And most importantly, if you loose a glass of beer on a stone floor it's going to break, but on a wooden floor, there's a high probability the glass survives. In either case, the beer is lost, but if you have a wooden floor, at least you can now put some more beer into the glass.
Someone tries to patent sending email over a wireless connection... that would have been innovative BEFORE we had wireless routers with tcp/ip.
No. Once you have internetworking (e.g. tcp/ip, xns, etc), which by definition mean that you can combine different kinds of networks, regardless of wire-level protocol, it's completely obvious that you also can replace an electrical wire with other kinds of communication media, such as radio signals, infrared signals, fiber-optic cables, audio signals, mechanical transfer through rods and gears, manual transfer through a keyboard, magnetic disks carried by a courier, or small paper strips carried by carrier pigeons. Of the examples mentioned, I believe the only one that I haven't heard about done in one way or another is the mechanical transfer (and the last three were probably done only to prove a point)
If paying the hours of Joe the nail driving roof guy is a major cost factor when building a house, the house is probably too cheap and won't stand a hurricane anyway. Joe can probably use fewer screws further apart and still get a better result than this alleged super-nail at roughly the same price, only increasing costs of wages.
According to TFA the cost of nails in a new house is $50-$60. The additional cost if you decide to use HurriQuake, is $15. You can argue all you want, but with a minimum wage salary of $5.15 pr hour, which should cost you as a consumer at least $10 pr hour, I think I would prefer Joe to use HurryQuake, rather than screws. Using screws for an entire house is going to take a lot more time than just one hour. And Joe probably isn't working for minimum wage either.
Oh, and apart from the cost of labour (and the land lot), a house isn't that expensive. The wood and stones you need can mostly be found for free somewhere out in nature. From these you can manufacture things like cement, bricks, stone wool, wood studs, planks, etc... The great thing about the industrialized world, is that through new inventions we are able to reduce the amount of manual labour in getting things done. Time is money. Even if you worked your entire lifetime, you probably wouldn't be able to build a modern house from stuff you found in the nature. Yet, most people can afford one easily.
At 1440dpi, 8 bit color, even assuming perfect readability, you cannot record more than 1.4GB of information, no matter what "shapes" you arrange for the dots to make.
How about if I had a really large piece of paper?
(And seriously, your math is more than a little way off. With 1440dpi (odd number by the way, haven't heard about a printer with that resolution yet), and 8 bit color, assuming perfect readability), you could store 0.0019 GB per inch. A normal "letter"-sized sheet of paper is about 93 square inches, giving you a storage capacity of 0.18 GB. Surprisingly, there is a standard papersize that gives you about 1.4 GB storage, it's A1, which is as large as 8 A4 pages. On the other hand, if you intended to use two-sided printing, you could do with the A2 format).
You mean that this isn't another conspiracy to strengthen their monopoly situation in software, or increase lawyers salaries, or something like that. You actually believe that all Microsoft wants out of this is more money? You must be posting on the wrong site.
The investment and results are the same in either case, the only difference is that we're talking about something physical instead of software.
The "only" difference? You make that sound like it is of minor importance. It is not. Software is intellectual property. You don't go around patenting the plot of a book or a movie, the chord-progression in a song, the concept of "self-help" audiotapes, or the new mathematical theorems discovered by some genius mathematician (or algorithms, business methods, or sequences of base-pairs for that matter, although sadly the US has started doing just that)
Patents are a very specific right that is granted specifically to give the inventor of new inventions a fair chance of recouping his investments. Unlike music or software, which is protected by copyright, once someone invents e.g. the four-stroke combustion engine, anyone is free to produce it. Patents are designed to help the inventor here, it's not a general purpose mechanism of protecting all kinds of "ideas". The "default" position is to have no patents at all. Arguing that since patents protect one kind of idea, it should protect other kinds of ideas, is completely silly. And patenting software, business processes, or genes is also silly.
If we remove all software patents, we also remove part of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software. There needs to be some protections, they just need to be smart
Exactly. We remove some of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software. At the same time, most of the incentives remains, such as having some new software "that takes existing geological maps and analyzes it in a novel way". This software can be used internally for finding oil, it can be licensed to other companies, or used in lots of other ways to generate profit.
Also, it should be made clear that even if software patents benefits large companies (which I believe was true at some point, although I'm starting to doubt it still is), it does not benefit small companies. Taking away software patents makes it easier for small companies to invest in software. I'm not particularly in favour of laws that only benefits large companies.
Thank you. You are the first to give a plausible explanation as to why anyone would be interested in another superconductor, when it needs such a low temperature. However, if people are interested in doing low-temperature nanoscale physics experiments, I'm all for that!
Who the fuck cares about some superconductor that will only work below 0.35 kelvin? The expense of any machinery capable of cooling something to 0.35 kelvin far outweighs the neatness of being able to do it with silicone too.
Re:If the review is accurate, the book is revision
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OS/2 died when Windows 3.0 started getting bundled with new computers. Whatever happened after that was completely irrelevant, and everybody that was involved with computers back then knew it!
I agree that between the releases of Windows 3.1x and Windows 95, IBM tried a number of desperate marketing campaigns to regain some of their lost mindshare. I don't think they even dared to hope to become "the next windows" anymore, but maybe at least a sizeable alternative. But it was all futile. It didn't matter how much money they spent on advertising, or how many free CDs with full versions of OS/2 they gave out to students and (I guess) other influential computer persons (I got a couple myself). The market had already decided Microsoft was the winner, and that was that.
(I remember I tried the free CDs I got as a student. There was no doubt, OS/2 was clearly superior. It was more stable, it ran windows programs better than windows, and it ran OS/2 programs even better. The only thing that was wrong about OS/2 was that it was doomed to failure in the market. Everybody knew that. It didn't matter that it was better. It wasn't windows.)
At the launch date of Windows 95, Microsoft spent so much money it's unbelievable. Untill then, operating system upgrades rarely made important news items, but at august 24, 1995, every fucking TV news show in the world would show pictures from various launch parties around the globe, all paid for by Microsoft corporation. Extremely extravagant, but also extremely succesful. Even though everybody knew OS/2 was doomed long before this gigantic launch, after the launch it became set in stone. People who had never used or even seen a computer would confidently claim that Microsoft was the best operating system producer in the world. You can't argue with facts against such people, and they were the new buyers of computer systems. Even if they had stopped bundling windows with new computers at that time, windows would still had won!
Apart from the fact that the heading makes you believe it violates the laws of thermodynamics, I agree. Obviously, what the chip does is exploit a temperature gradient to create energy, not heat per se. And that is neither a new or foreign idea. A coal or atomic power plant also generates electricity by exploiting differences in temperature. And lots of piezoelectric devices exist that do pretty much the same thing. So I guess the reason the investors were interested has something to do with cost-efficiency, which the article failed completely to convey.
Look. If he wants his domain name in chinese, he is going to write his fucking website in chinese. And if he is selling something, he won't fucking care about one fucking american customer who believes he is the center of the world, and can't be bothered to learn chinese first.
Ask yourself: How would an american company react to someone sending in an order for some cheap electronic toy, if the order was written in chinese?
If you absolutely want to buy electronic toys from a chinese company, serving chinese customers, selling chinese goods, shipping to chinese addresses, and accepting payment in chinese yuan, then get yourself a chinese buddy to order for you, and ask him to send it to you.
And if you are still in doubt about this, I can find plenty of american shopping websites, who simply refuse to ship orders to Europe (even if the europeans ordering stuff from them probably knows american-english better then their average customers). And even for a small country like Norway (where I'm from), you'll find plenty of shopping websites that refuse to ship outside of Norway too.
If you can't be bothered to be as specific as that, I guess you can't be bothered to specify whether you want potato or rice for dinner either, as they both count as vegetables.
How do I type in a character for a domain name that isn't supported on my keyboard?
Why do you need to type in a character for a domain name written in a language you don't even understand the alphabet of, and certainly can't read or write?
No matter what you do, I'm still limited to the keys on my keyboard. I think that's ~104 by last count. But I certainly don't use that many characters.
And how do you think a chinese keyboard looks? Do you think they have hundreds of thousands of keys? There are three reasons why you can't enter chinese characters into your keyboard, and none of them has to do with hardware:
You don't know chinese
Your computer software may lack an input method for chinese text
Even if you knew chinese, and your computer had an input method for chinese text, you still need to learn to type with it
I admit that there are some people who are going to bitch about the internet being english.
Yes, you are one of them. The people who want non-latin characters are not wanting them because they want to communicate with other english-speaking people on the Internet. They want them because they want to communicate between themselves, in their own native language. Imagine that you only had hebrew letters available for domain names in the US. The hebraic alphabet is relatively easy to learn, and most english words can be written in it. But it's cumbersome for english-speaking people to communicate with the hebrew alphabet. And that's why people speaking different languages than english, want to be able to write their domain names in different alphabets than english.
But does that give me a right to bitch about classical music being defined in French and Italian terms like a fugue, sonata, adiago, allegro... I think not. In the past 400 years we've all managed very nicely to adopt to these terms in order to converse with each other an a common basis.
Perhaps there are some terms that these anglicans can adopt from the middle east besides Jihad?
If it didn't work, we would already feel the effects of global warming much better. The golf-stream would have changed direction. And the oceans would boil. Just because you haven't noticed any effect, doesn't mean that those helium-balloons are worthless now...
blockquote>Exactly. And have said plants managed to convert the earth into "grey goo" yet? They've had quite a while to get really good at being efficient at using energy and matter to make themselves.
Pretty much, yes. You won't find many places on the planet, where plant-life can grow, but there is no plant-life there.
The point is that simply making alarming statements about "grey goo" and runaway reactions without understanding the limiting components is silly. Any organism requires the raw materials required to build it (which atoms do you need), and the energy required to do it. If you need a bunch of iron atoms, sodium atoms, or whatever and you run out, well the replication thing is going to die out.
This doesn't mean that it won't cause problems. It may end up killing all life on the planet, or something like that, before it stops.
Then again, I thought that biological/chemical warfare was one of those big nonos that we all sorta agreed on....
If it was, there'd be no reason for your government to invest money into defending itself from the stuff, no?
I'd say most people/organisations/government/etc are only against ABC warfare untill the opponent uses it against you, and there are reasonable chances that a similar attack by you will harm your opponent enough to at least temporarily stop the attacks against you. I.e people are against ABC weapons in the same way they are against violence. Only untill someone punches you in the nose.
Just because someone has an agenda doesn't mean what they are saying is false, nor does a lack of agenda (as if there were such a thing) provide any greater liklihood of discovering truth. It is, as the GP said, mostly irrelevant. Determining an agenda might explain WHY they want you to know something, but it lends no value to the argument's valididity, or lack thereof.
Here's where I get skeptical:
Researchers are getting funded by (or are in other way associated with) big multinational corporations
The field of research is mainly political/public, instead of the more typical case of being related to *production*
The research is presented to the public as a press-release, not as an obscure article in a scientific journal.
The research doesn't discover anything new or surprising, but merely settles a hotly debated political issue
The research supports the multinational corporations viewpoint of above-mentioned issue, or is in other ways favourable to the corporations.
The researchers does not discuss their own objectivity with regards to their funding or association with multinational corporations
The issue being tackled by the research is finally settled, the otherwise ever-present phrase "more research is needed" is lacking, and no new fields of study suggest itself
Now, you are free to insist that all of these points are irrelevant. I happen to disagree. And I was not trying to judge an arguments validity, I was trying to judge the likelyhood of objectivity of someone presenting an argument. Checking the validity of every argument is beyond human capacity. There are 5 billion people on this planet. My brain is not efficient enough to understand everything each and every one of them are thinking.
And to get back to this specific case. "Peak Oil" theory is not "blasted" by this argument. It's actually confirmed. They just happened to change the date, and the curve shape, and maybe a few other details they found important, but I don't. Unless they somehow show that oil is a renewable energy source, then they can start talking about a "plateu" in full seriousness. I agree they have a point, but the way the present it is highly political, and actually distorts their argument. This isn't tobacco science, but it isn't exactly apolitical either.
Well, instead of just saying "tough shit", and giving up, some of us have come up with better metrics to judge what "experts" say. (And given the nature of experthood, we can't evaluate their arguments independently without becoming experts ourselves).
One of the methods people use to evaluate the statements of experts (without becoming experts themselves) is to try to find out if they have an agenda beyond educating people about stuff. If they are paid by some organization, such as the catholic church (the earth is the center of the universe), the tobacco industry (smoking is healthy and makes you look good), the oil industry (burning fossil fuels is a long-term environmentally sustainable practice), or someone else with big money and questionable motives, many people rightfully become skeptical to the statements, even without having become experts enough to evaluate the science behind it themselves.
You're not contributing. No matter what your mom or your school teacher told you.
I'm sorry. The people who are not contributing, are the people who are getting paid to spread misinformation (i.e. lie). The people who try to find out if misinformation is spread, are meta-contributing. You and I are meta-meta-contributing.
Look, there's no way you are going to get commercials that are targetted enough for you to be happy. Either you are shopping, in which case, you want to see and compare ads from several producers (or more likely, you want to see and compare independent reviews from several different sources about several different products that may cover your need). Or you are not shopping, in which case any advertisement you see is an intrusion, and takes away from your time. Either way, the ads are not targeted enough. And even if you've bought the new gizmo 2000, if the ads were really targeted, they would most likely continue to advertice you the gizmo 2000, as you certainly fits the demographic of someone who would buy one.
No. You can't easily boil water with a few steel mirrors. It's possible, but it's not easy.
The "few volatile organic molecules" may contain such things as insect pesticide, oil and gasoline spill, etc...
In addition to the cost of electricity, you must also include the cost of water. To produce one liter distilled water, requires several liters of water (I've seen 5 liters claimed, although I haven't seen much justification for this number).
And finally, distilled water is not healthy. It's acidic and lacks minerals. Unless you really need to remove all inorganic pollutants, it would be better to just boil it.
Slashdot Mirror
Both you and the masses are wrong. A modem is not "the device that gets you online". Neither is it "a way of transmitting digital data to analog data over a telephone connection". (But you are getting closer). Defining modem as "a modular emulator" is bollocks. Try google, wikipedia, whatever...
The correct term that the word "modem" stems from, is "MODulator DEModulator". It MODulates signals from digital to analog, and DEModulates them back from analog to digital. There is nothing that states it has to use a phone line. It could just as well use cable-tv wires, radio, infrared, speakers and microphones, or just about anything else. Thus a "cable modem" is correct usage of the word (of course, you can insist on calling it "cable-tv land-line modem", but for most people, that wouldn't increase understanding of the concept.
I seriously doubt that. (But it might be true in a legal sense)
Uhmm, no.
And in the case of Cliff Richard or the members of Jethro Tull, I'm quite sure the children get to inherit something anyway.
In that case, go ahead, remove all the nails from your current house, and see if it survives a slight summer breeze.
As a european, I'm very surprised to find out that another european doesn't think wood is a great building material. Obviously building techniques differ with climate. I've noticed that some africans believe walls are overrated, and that a roof is sufficient. In Norway we obviously don't agree with that. Wood is a better insulator than stone, and that's the end of story as far as we are concerned. Of course, wood has other advantages too, it's easier to manufacture into suitable building materials (all you need is a saw), it's easier to transport, and it pretty much grows everywhere. The main disadvantage is that it needs some maintenance if the house is supposed to outlast it's current owner. In the old days, they used tar, today we use paint.
Stone, on the other hand, is a poor insulator. It's more difficult to work with, you can't simply use a saw (or axe). It's heavier to carry, and it gets damaged by water in subzero temperatures. Also, building walls of stone is easy, but building roofs require special engineering techniques (look at e.g. the Sistine Chapel).
And most importantly, if you loose a glass of beer on a stone floor it's going to break, but on a wooden floor, there's a high probability the glass survives. In either case, the beer is lost, but if you have a wooden floor, at least you can now put some more beer into the glass.
No. Once you have internetworking (e.g. tcp/ip, xns, etc), which by definition mean that you can combine different kinds of networks, regardless of wire-level protocol, it's completely obvious that you also can replace an electrical wire with other kinds of communication media, such as radio signals, infrared signals, fiber-optic cables, audio signals, mechanical transfer through rods and gears, manual transfer through a keyboard, magnetic disks carried by a courier, or small paper strips carried by carrier pigeons. Of the examples mentioned, I believe the only one that I haven't heard about done in one way or another is the mechanical transfer (and the last three were probably done only to prove a point)
According to TFA the cost of nails in a new house is $50-$60. The additional cost if you decide to use HurriQuake, is $15. You can argue all you want, but with a minimum wage salary of $5.15 pr hour, which should cost you as a consumer at least $10 pr hour, I think I would prefer Joe to use HurryQuake, rather than screws. Using screws for an entire house is going to take a lot more time than just one hour. And Joe probably isn't working for minimum wage either.
Oh, and apart from the cost of labour (and the land lot), a house isn't that expensive. The wood and stones you need can mostly be found for free somewhere out in nature. From these you can manufacture things like cement, bricks, stone wool, wood studs, planks, etc... The great thing about the industrialized world, is that through new inventions we are able to reduce the amount of manual labour in getting things done. Time is money. Even if you worked your entire lifetime, you probably wouldn't be able to build a modern house from stuff you found in the nature. Yet, most people can afford one easily.
How about if I had a really large piece of paper?
(And seriously, your math is more than a little way off. With 1440dpi (odd number by the way, haven't heard about a printer with that resolution yet), and 8 bit color, assuming perfect readability), you could store 0.0019 GB per inch. A normal "letter"-sized sheet of paper is about 93 square inches, giving you a storage capacity of 0.18 GB. Surprisingly, there is a standard papersize that gives you about 1.4 GB storage, it's A1, which is as large as 8 A4 pages. On the other hand, if you intended to use two-sided printing, you could do with the A2 format).
You mean that this isn't another conspiracy to strengthen their monopoly situation in software, or increase lawyers salaries, or something like that. You actually believe that all Microsoft wants out of this is more money? You must be posting on the wrong site.
The "only" difference? You make that sound like it is of minor importance. It is not. Software is intellectual property. You don't go around patenting the plot of a book or a movie, the chord-progression in a song, the concept of "self-help" audiotapes, or the new mathematical theorems discovered by some genius mathematician (or algorithms, business methods, or sequences of base-pairs for that matter, although sadly the US has started doing just that)
Patents are a very specific right that is granted specifically to give the inventor of new inventions a fair chance of recouping his investments. Unlike music or software, which is protected by copyright, once someone invents e.g. the four-stroke combustion engine, anyone is free to produce it. Patents are designed to help the inventor here, it's not a general purpose mechanism of protecting all kinds of "ideas". The "default" position is to have no patents at all. Arguing that since patents protect one kind of idea, it should protect other kinds of ideas, is completely silly. And patenting software, business processes, or genes is also silly.
Exactly. We remove some of the incentive for large corporations to invest in software. At the same time, most of the incentives remains, such as having some new software "that takes existing geological maps and analyzes it in a novel way". This software can be used internally for finding oil, it can be licensed to other companies, or used in lots of other ways to generate profit.
Also, it should be made clear that even if software patents benefits large companies (which I believe was true at some point, although I'm starting to doubt it still is), it does not benefit small companies. Taking away software patents makes it easier for small companies to invest in software. I'm not particularly in favour of laws that only benefits large companies.
Thank you. You are the first to give a plausible explanation as to why anyone would be interested in another superconductor, when it needs such a low temperature. However, if people are interested in doing low-temperature nanoscale physics experiments, I'm all for that!
Who the fuck cares about some superconductor that will only work below 0.35 kelvin? The expense of any machinery capable of cooling something to 0.35 kelvin far outweighs the neatness of being able to do it with silicone too.
OS/2 died when Windows 3.0 started getting bundled with new computers. Whatever happened after that was completely irrelevant, and everybody that was involved with computers back then knew it!
I agree that between the releases of Windows 3.1x and Windows 95, IBM tried a number of desperate marketing campaigns to regain some of their lost mindshare. I don't think they even dared to hope to become "the next windows" anymore, but maybe at least a sizeable alternative. But it was all futile. It didn't matter how much money they spent on advertising, or how many free CDs with full versions of OS/2 they gave out to students and (I guess) other influential computer persons (I got a couple myself). The market had already decided Microsoft was the winner, and that was that.
(I remember I tried the free CDs I got as a student. There was no doubt, OS/2 was clearly superior. It was more stable, it ran windows programs better than windows, and it ran OS/2 programs even better. The only thing that was wrong about OS/2 was that it was doomed to failure in the market. Everybody knew that. It didn't matter that it was better. It wasn't windows.)
At the launch date of Windows 95, Microsoft spent so much money it's unbelievable. Untill then, operating system upgrades rarely made important news items, but at august 24, 1995, every fucking TV news show in the world would show pictures from various launch parties around the globe, all paid for by Microsoft corporation. Extremely extravagant, but also extremely succesful. Even though everybody knew OS/2 was doomed long before this gigantic launch, after the launch it became set in stone. People who had never used or even seen a computer would confidently claim that Microsoft was the best operating system producer in the world. You can't argue with facts against such people, and they were the new buyers of computer systems. Even if they had stopped bundling windows with new computers at that time, windows would still had won!
Apart from the fact that the heading makes you believe it violates the laws of thermodynamics, I agree. Obviously, what the chip does is exploit a temperature gradient to create energy, not heat per se. And that is neither a new or foreign idea. A coal or atomic power plant also generates electricity by exploiting differences in temperature. And lots of piezoelectric devices exist that do pretty much the same thing. So I guess the reason the investors were interested has something to do with cost-efficiency, which the article failed completely to convey.
Look. If he wants his domain name in chinese, he is going to write his fucking website in chinese. And if he is selling something, he won't fucking care about one fucking american customer who believes he is the center of the world, and can't be bothered to learn chinese first.
Ask yourself: How would an american company react to someone sending in an order for some cheap electronic toy, if the order was written in chinese?
If you absolutely want to buy electronic toys from a chinese company, serving chinese customers, selling chinese goods, shipping to chinese addresses, and accepting payment in chinese yuan, then get yourself a chinese buddy to order for you, and ask him to send it to you.
And if you are still in doubt about this, I can find plenty of american shopping websites, who simply refuse to ship orders to Europe (even if the europeans ordering stuff from them probably knows american-english better then their average customers). And even for a small country like Norway (where I'm from), you'll find plenty of shopping websites that refuse to ship outside of Norway too.
No. (And neither can we agree on a single language, a single style of haircut, or a single preferred flavour of ice-cream)
If you can't be bothered to be as specific as that, I guess you can't be bothered to specify whether you want potato or rice for dinner either, as they both count as vegetables.
Why do you need to type in a character for a domain name written in a language you don't even understand the alphabet of, and certainly can't read or write?
And how do you think a chinese keyboard looks? Do you think they have hundreds of thousands of keys? There are three reasons why you can't enter chinese characters into your keyboard, and none of them has to do with hardware:
Yes, you are one of them. The people who want non-latin characters are not wanting them because they want to communicate with other english-speaking people on the Internet. They want them because they want to communicate between themselves, in their own native language. Imagine that you only had hebrew letters available for domain names in the US. The hebraic alphabet is relatively easy to learn, and most english words can be written in it. But it's cumbersome for english-speaking people to communicate with the hebrew alphabet. And that's why people speaking different languages than english, want to be able to write their domain names in different alphabets than english.
Sorry, you are not making sense.
If it didn't work, we would already feel the effects of global warming much better. The golf-stream would have changed direction. And the oceans would boil. Just because you haven't noticed any effect, doesn't mean that those helium-balloons are worthless now...
blockquote>Exactly. And have said plants managed to convert the earth into "grey goo" yet? They've had quite a while to get really good at being efficient at using energy and matter to make themselves.
Pretty much, yes. You won't find many places on the planet, where plant-life can grow, but there is no plant-life there.
This doesn't mean that it won't cause problems. It may end up killing all life on the planet, or something like that, before it stops.
If it was, there'd be no reason for your government to invest money into defending itself from the stuff, no?
I'd say most people/organisations/government/etc are only against ABC warfare untill the opponent uses it against you, and there are reasonable chances that a similar attack by you will harm your opponent enough to at least temporarily stop the attacks against you. I.e people are against ABC weapons in the same way they are against violence. Only untill someone punches you in the nose.
In other words, MSN is bigger in the search market, than firefox is in the browser market.
Here's where I get skeptical:
Now, you are free to insist that all of these points are irrelevant. I happen to disagree. And I was not trying to judge an arguments validity, I was trying to judge the likelyhood of objectivity of someone presenting an argument. Checking the validity of every argument is beyond human capacity. There are 5 billion people on this planet. My brain is not efficient enough to understand everything each and every one of them are thinking.
And to get back to this specific case. "Peak Oil" theory is not "blasted" by this argument. It's actually confirmed. They just happened to change the date, and the curve shape, and maybe a few other details they found important, but I don't. Unless they somehow show that oil is a renewable energy source, then they can start talking about a "plateu" in full seriousness. I agree they have a point, but the way the present it is highly political, and actually distorts their argument. This isn't tobacco science, but it isn't exactly apolitical either.
Well, instead of just saying "tough shit", and giving up, some of us have come up with better metrics to judge what "experts" say. (And given the nature of experthood, we can't evaluate their arguments independently without becoming experts ourselves).
One of the methods people use to evaluate the statements of experts (without becoming experts themselves) is to try to find out if they have an agenda beyond educating people about stuff. If they are paid by some organization, such as the catholic church (the earth is the center of the universe), the tobacco industry (smoking is healthy and makes you look good), the oil industry (burning fossil fuels is a long-term environmentally sustainable practice), or someone else with big money and questionable motives, many people rightfully become skeptical to the statements, even without having become experts enough to evaluate the science behind it themselves.
I'm sorry. The people who are not contributing, are the people who are getting paid to spread misinformation (i.e. lie). The people who try to find out if misinformation is spread, are meta-contributing. You and I are meta-meta-contributing.
Look, there's no way you are going to get commercials that are targetted enough for you to be happy. Either you are shopping, in which case, you want to see and compare ads from several producers (or more likely, you want to see and compare independent reviews from several different sources about several different products that may cover your need). Or you are not shopping, in which case any advertisement you see is an intrusion, and takes away from your time. Either way, the ads are not targeted enough. And even if you've bought the new gizmo 2000, if the ads were really targeted, they would most likely continue to advertice you the gizmo 2000, as you certainly fits the demographic of someone who would buy one.
No. You can't easily boil water with a few steel mirrors. It's possible, but it's not easy.
The "few volatile organic molecules" may contain such things as insect pesticide, oil and gasoline spill, etc...
In addition to the cost of electricity, you must also include the cost of water. To produce one liter distilled water, requires several liters of water (I've seen 5 liters claimed, although I haven't seen much justification for this number).
And finally, distilled water is not healthy. It's acidic and lacks minerals. Unless you really need to remove all inorganic pollutants, it would be better to just boil it.