Really, freedom of speech does not mean anyone has to listen to what you say! And if you go out of your way to make your ads obnoxious, I have every right to block them. Because just as you have the right to speak, I have the right to ignore you.
Believe it or not, many words in English have multiple definitions. That even includes ones with precise technical definitions. Like "induction", which has a precise definition in physics, a completely different precise definition in mathematics, and still a different one in biology. Or "vector". Or "set". It's a living language, and meanings change all the time.
"Broadband internet" is a widely used term that refers to speed, not to a method of transmission. The FCC has even set a precise legal definition of it. Not that they invented the term. They just formalized a meaning that lots of people were already using. And that's what this article is about.
That certainly would suggest BS somewhere, but you need to look carefully to decide where. Suppose someone is pushing the narrative, "Scientists are faking the data for political reasons." What do you think that person will do? Whenever a correction causes the amount of warming to increase, they'll make a big deal about it and say, "See? There's another example of them faking the data!" And whenever a correction causes the amount of warming to decrease, they won't say a word about it because it doesn't fit with their narrative.
So if you want to apply that rule, you need to make sure you actually know every correction that's been applied, not just the ones someone with an agenda told you about.
You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed".
There's a pen sitting on my desk. I'm going to make a prediction: if I pick it up, then release it, it will fall back down again. But remember, I don't know. Predicting the future is not science. I just have a model based on past data and making certain assumptions. Such models can be used, but they should never be believed.
Ok, let's try it and see. Here goes...
Oh look! It fell! What a surprise! Isn't it amazing I got that right, even though my prediction was not based on science and there was no reason to believe it?
No, they've actually done that 0 times. What they've often done, and continue to do, is try to find ways to remove sources of error from the data. That's called "calibration", and is an essential part of any measurement technology.
Ars Technica just published a very thorough article about this, describing all the different types of corrections and why they're needed. See http://arstechnica.com/science.... If you truly want to understand the subject, I highly recommend it. On the other hand, if you're just being a troll and don't care about the facts (I don't know whether you are or not--that's for you to decide), you obviously should ignore it.
Ummm... what?? We are in an inter-glacial period. That is true. Which means temperatures are currently higher than they were during the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. On geological time scales, temperatures have been both higher and lower than they are now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... If you scroll down to the "overall view" section, they give a nice graph showing how things have varied on many different time scales. In the last half billion years, they've been as much as 6 degrees colder and 14 degrees warmer than right now.
You are sending 100-200 advertising emails a day with the expectation that 90% of the recipients will have no interest in them and never reply. That totally counts as spam. It may be a small scale spam operation, but that doesn't change its essential character.
I receive tons of spam from people I suspect are very similar to you. Here's an example of one I got yesterday:
Dear [my name],
I hope everything goes well with you!
I had contacted you regarding the peptide synthesis several months ago, your paper: [name of a paper I wrote] indicated that you may need synthetic peptides, so I am writing to you again to enquire if you need any new peptide recently?
Needless to say, I have never used synthetic peptides in my life. The paper in question had nothing whatsoever to do with synthetic peptides. Had the person read even the abstract, that would have been obvious to them. But when you're emailing 100-200 people per day, you can't take the time to actually research each person. You just grab the address of every person who's published in a list of journals, and automatically fill in the names of their papers as a hook to make it look like your email was from a real person who actually read their paper.
I get tons of emails like this, and I constantly curse the people who send them. And yes, I always hit the "unsubscribe" links, but I can't see that it's had much effect on the amount of spam I get. CAN-SPAM was nothing but a giveaway to the marketing industry. There are 30 million companies in the U.S., with thousands of new ones created every day. The idea that I should have to opt out of receiving spam from every one of them individually is a joke.
Furthermore, 20 years ago there was just one company (Microsoft) that was totally dominating the industry. It was hard to see how they could ever fall, or any other company could rise to challenge them. Yet look how much things have changed! Now they're only one of five, and probably not even the most powerful of the five.
Things do change, and sometimes much faster than we expect. What if Apple loses their shine and people start saying, "This iPhone is just an overpriced Android lookalike?" They could fall very quickly. What if Microsoft continues to have minimal success in mobile, and PCs continue to decline? They could quickly become less and less relevant. What if Google loses their dominant position in advertising, which pays the bills for everything else? And so on.
As tempting as it is to blame Democrats for all the evils in the world, I think Trump is one evil we have to acknowledge is entirely due to Republicans. The problem isn't that he's running: anyone can run. The problem is that tons of people are supporting him, and those people are almost entirely Republicans. Maybe Clinton could have come up with a brilliant, devious strategy to get him to run, but she couldn't have turned him into the front runner for the nomination. That's entirely the fault of the people who listen to what he says and then, knowing what he is and what he stands for, choose to support him.
Rule 1 (good to a first approximation): All benchmarks are meaningless.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Every benchmark measures something very specific. A benchmark is only meaningful if you know exactly what it is measuring, and the thing it measures is something you actually care about.
Civilian and military work have been tightly linked since the very start of the space age. Half the purpose of launching Sputnik was to test a new rocket that had been developed for use as an ICBM. And even today, in the new age of the commercial space industry, they're still tightly linked. Notice that United Launch Alliance, one of the three companies that's been awarded a launch contract by NASA, is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing--both major defense contractors.
So if China is developing a civilian space program, it's a pretty good bet they also have a military space program. Because so does everyone else.
Anyway, if they want to study the far side of the moon, I think that's awesome. If we have to have military space programs, I'm glad something useful is coming out of it too.
I've got no problem with that. These companies are in business to make money. They aren't charities, and I wouldn't expect them to give away the software that provides most of their income. If they did, they'd go out of business.
But consider what you said. Just because it costs them nothing to open source something, and there's no benefit to keeping it closed, that still isn't a reason to open source it. They could just as easily keep it closed anyway. And in the old Microsoft, which saw open source as evil and did everything they could to discredit it, that's exactly what they would have done. Their new attitude seems to be, "If it doesn't hurt us to open source something, then sure, let's go ahead and do it." That's a big change.
It is believed that modern society in the West developed by the upper-middle and upper classes' excess kids effectively outbreeding the lower classes over hundreds of years, resulting in gains in health, IQ and longer time preferences.
[citation needed]
The rich always want to believe they're rich because they're genetically superior to everyone else. I've never seen a shred of evidence it's actually true.
There's a really easy way to turn all those low paying jobs into middle class jobs: just pay more! But we don't, because we can get away with paying less, and we never want to pay more for anything than we absolutely have to.
Technology is shifting what jobs there's demand for, but it doesn't determine how much we pay for those jobs. That's determined by economics, and politics, and social institutions. We can fix the problem, but only if we focus on the real causes. Technology won't fix it, because technology isn't the real cause.
Personally, I want a white light during the daytime, but a yellower light in the evening. It does less to mess with my circadian rhythm that way. So I want white lights at work, but my lights at home should be warmer (in the color sense, meaning lower color temperature).
It would be better to build new nuclear or fossil fuel power plants and just import the fuel
Perhaps for some very narrow definition of "better". If you use fossil fuels, then you're using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for your pollution. If you use nuclear, you produce radioactive waste that's dangerous for centuries, not to mention all the weapons proliferation issues it creates. And in any case, nuclear isn't anywhere close to cost competitive with renewables anymore.
Also remember that chemical fuels don't have to be fossil fuels. You can produce hydrogen, butanol, etc. from renewable energy, which you can then import just like any other chemical fuel. The eventual carbon-neutral economy will probably include a good amount of that. It's the easiest way to store energy for long times (lots of methods work to store it for hours or days, but chemical storage is the best if you want to store it for months), and it can be used in situations where batteries don't have enough density (like airplanes).
If you live very far north, solar probably isn't the best choice there. Other types of renewable energy like wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. will be better. Renewable energy isn't one size fits all. For example, take a look at http://thesolutionsproject.org.... They've worked out plans for every state in the US to convert to 100% renewable energy, but the mix is different for each one. Alaska (even further north than you) would get only 6% from solar while Florida would get almost 70%.
My comment about solar panels on a house was just an illustration. I didn't mean every house should be independent and self supporting, complete with its own batteries. Also remember that energy production doesn't have to be local. It's nice if it is, because that cuts the transmission losses, but we routinely transmit electricity over long distances. Maybe yours will come from a solar plant that's 1000 km further south.
Microsoft did not make a deal to kill BASIC on Macs. They made a deal to kill Apple's implementation of BASIC, because it competed with their own implementation. They sold it for a decade before discontinuing it in 1995.
Not only is this story a troll, it's an incoherent, factually incorrect troll. Somehow the author is trying to assert a connection between MS not bundling BASIC with their computers and girls being less interested than boys in programming. No clue what he thinks that connection is, but I suppose if he insinuates it with enough sarcasm it must exist.
Fortunately, wind and solar complement each other nicely. The wind tends to pick up around sunrise and sunset, two times when solar is far from its peak. Storms also tend to bring increased wind at the same time they block the sun. As a result, wind and solar are anticorrelated, and the sum of the two is much more consistent than either one alone.
But in any case, all this means is that we need to incorporate storage into the grid. That's a big project, but it doesn't require any new technology. Existing, mature technologies (batteries, thermal storage, hydrogen, etc.) are well up to the task (though undoubtedly they'll continue to advance with time). In contrast, most proposals for nuclear rely on cutting edge, very immature technologies (breeder reactors, thorium, etc.).
> Sure you can cover the surface of the Earth in solar panels I suppose, but that seems to be a bit of a maintenance headache (not to mention the energy cost of creating the panels in the first place).
Ok, you just managed to make three totally false claims in the space of one sentence:
1. You would need to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels to supply all our energy needs. No. Not even close. Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house. You can find lots of details at http://www.techinsider.io/map-.... "If solar is 20% efficient (as it has been in lab tests) at turning solar energy into power, we'd only need to cover a land area about the size of Spain to power the entire Earth renewably in 2030." In fact, solar compares quite favorably to other energy sources in terms of land area required, if you take into account things like the land needed to mine coal or the area of the reservoirs needed for hydroelectric. And for solar, much of that "land area" can just be on top of roofs that are already there.
2. Solar panels require more maintenance than nuclear power plants. Seriously? Is that a joke? Once installed, solar panels take almost no maintenance at all. Operating a nuclear power plant is a very complicated, very expensive business. There's no comparison at all.
3. Creating solar panels takes more energy (or almost as much energy) as they produce. This is a myth that's been floating around for years, but has never been true. From http://solarcraft.com/solar-en...: "A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conclusively demonstrates that the manufacturing energy cost versus the energy production payback for solar modules is generally less than 4 years." And you think it takes no energy to build and operate nuclear power plants, not to mention mining uranium?
Let's consider smoking bans, then, since they illustrate a lot of the issues that come up in real situations. One of their main goals is to protect restaurant employees from second hand smoke. Sure, the owner can say, "I want to allow smoking on my property." But can they also say, "If you want to work here, you have to subject yourself to dangerous chemicals. If you don't like that, go work somewhere else?" And where do you draw the line? Can they refuse to put in sprinklers, thus putting their employees and customers at risk, because they don't want to spend the money on it? Is there a point where the government can say, "You must provide a safe environment for your employees?" If so, what is that point? Is it different for a restaurant than other types of businesses?
Then there's the question of protecting the customers. In a city you can reasonably say, "If you don't like smoke filled restaurants, go eat somewhere else." But suppose it's a small town and this is the only restaurant around. Ok, I suppose you could say, "Eating in a restaurant is a luxury." But what if the only grocery in town also wants to allow smoking? Buying food isn't a luxury.
I suppose a libertarian would say, "The market will solve everything. If there are enough people who don't want to get cancer from eating out, someone will start a non-smoking restaurant." But that's getting into the realm of fantasy. There are all sorts of reasons that might not happen: too small a town to support another restaurant, no one in town who wants to start one, etc.
Take a more extreme example: can you sell yourself into slavery? You could say, "It's your choice and the government shouldn't prevent you from doing it." But in practice, people would almost never do it unless they weren't given any other realistic options. In theory it would be your choice, but in practice slave dealers would get very good at manipulating people into situations where they didn't have any real choice. (I know, this is actually a controversial question in libertarian circles. Many people say it's over the line. But you said you support prostitution, which in practice is often just slavery under a different name. It's something people do because they don't have any choice about doing it.)
Much of the conflict comes from the fact that "freedom" and "liberty" mean different things to different people. From some people, it's being able to carry a gun. For some, it's not having to worry that a loony will buy a gun and shoot them. Unfortunately, these sometimes conflict! For some people, freedom means being able to walk down the street without the police stopping them and asking what they're doing there. Or being able to see a doctor when they get sick. Or send a private email without the government monitoring what they say in it. For some people, liberty means doing drugs. For others, it's not having to worry that someone will give drugs to their kids.
We could say, "Libertarians want to maximize liberty," but it's an empty statement. Almost everyone thinks liberty is a good thing, but there are many kinds of liberty, and different people prioritize them differently. At least in the U.S., "libertarianism" is strongly associated with a specific set of priorities: gun ownership, recreational drug use, low (or no) taxes, and an explicit rejection of any role for the government in promoting liberty. If you use the word "libertarianism" to mean something different from that, just be aware that your definition is different from the most widely used definition, and that you're using the word to mean something different from what most other people mean by it.
Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.
If you believe that was ever the goal of turning it over to a private company, I've got a bridge to sell you. It was strictly about giving a valuable contract to a big company, done by an administration that Believed(TM) in the divinity of private industry.
I don't have inside information about Los Alamos, but I did know someone at a different national lab that got privatized at the same time. I heard a lot of horror stories from him. Their policies had nothing to do with running an effective research organization, and everything to do with squeezing as much money out of it as they could get.
I haven't used it, just read a lot of the documentation, but it looks like a pretty nicely designed language. It has a very modern feel: concise syntax, static typing with type inference, closures, everything is an object, etc. Certainly looks much nicer to work in than C++.
For any question about, "Can you do...", the answer is almost certainly yes. It's the recommended language for nearly all new development on iOS and Mac OS, so it's being used for all those things.
The only way I could see this working is if it were the only option for financing college. We would have to completely eliminate conventional student loans. Otherwise, the results will be very predictable. People planning on high paying careers in engineering or finance will choose conventional loans, since that's a better deal for them. These agreements will be used mainly by people who don't expect to make much money for a long time. The companies financing them will take that into account, and find that to earn a reasonable payback, they have to set the repayment percentage really high. High enough that most people will end up worse off, not better.
Remember, risk has negative value. You have to pay people to accept risk. Under these deals, the companies take on more risk. They won't do that unless they get something in return, that is, unless their projected profit is greater. So on average, graduates have to end up paying more, not less. And unless you force the wealthier graduates to bear that whole burden, it will end up falling on the poorer graduates.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1357
Really, freedom of speech does not mean anyone has to listen to what you say! And if you go out of your way to make your ads obnoxious, I have every right to block them. Because just as you have the right to speak, I have the right to ignore you.
Believe it or not, many words in English have multiple definitions. That even includes ones with precise technical definitions. Like "induction", which has a precise definition in physics, a completely different precise definition in mathematics, and still a different one in biology. Or "vector". Or "set". It's a living language, and meanings change all the time.
"Broadband internet" is a widely used term that refers to speed, not to a method of transmission. The FCC has even set a precise legal definition of it. Not that they invented the term. They just formalized a meaning that lots of people were already using. And that's what this article is about.
That certainly would suggest BS somewhere, but you need to look carefully to decide where. Suppose someone is pushing the narrative, "Scientists are faking the data for political reasons." What do you think that person will do? Whenever a correction causes the amount of warming to increase, they'll make a big deal about it and say, "See? There's another example of them faking the data!" And whenever a correction causes the amount of warming to decrease, they won't say a word about it because it doesn't fit with their narrative.
So if you want to apply that rule, you need to make sure you actually know every correction that's been applied, not just the ones someone with an agenda told you about.
You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed".
There's a pen sitting on my desk. I'm going to make a prediction: if I pick it up, then release it, it will fall back down again. But remember, I don't know. Predicting the future is not science. I just have a model based on past data and making certain assumptions. Such models can be used, but they should never be believed.
Ok, let's try it and see. Here goes...
Oh look! It fell! What a surprise! Isn't it amazing I got that right, even though my prediction was not based on science and there was no reason to believe it?
No, they've actually done that 0 times. What they've often done, and continue to do, is try to find ways to remove sources of error from the data. That's called "calibration", and is an essential part of any measurement technology.
Ars Technica just published a very thorough article about this, describing all the different types of corrections and why they're needed. See http://arstechnica.com/science.... If you truly want to understand the subject, I highly recommend it. On the other hand, if you're just being a troll and don't care about the facts (I don't know whether you are or not--that's for you to decide), you obviously should ignore it.
Ummm... what?? We are in an inter-glacial period. That is true. Which means temperatures are currently higher than they were during the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. On geological time scales, temperatures have been both higher and lower than they are now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... If you scroll down to the "overall view" section, they give a nice graph showing how things have varied on many different time scales. In the last half billion years, they've been as much as 6 degrees colder and 14 degrees warmer than right now.
You are sending 100-200 advertising emails a day with the expectation that 90% of the recipients will have no interest in them and never reply. That totally counts as spam. It may be a small scale spam operation, but that doesn't change its essential character.
I receive tons of spam from people I suspect are very similar to you. Here's an example of one I got yesterday:
Dear [my name],
I hope everything goes well with you!
I had contacted you regarding the peptide synthesis several months ago, your paper: [name of a paper I wrote] indicated that you may need synthetic peptides, so I am writing to you again to enquire if you need any new peptide recently?
Needless to say, I have never used synthetic peptides in my life. The paper in question had nothing whatsoever to do with synthetic peptides. Had the person read even the abstract, that would have been obvious to them. But when you're emailing 100-200 people per day, you can't take the time to actually research each person. You just grab the address of every person who's published in a list of journals, and automatically fill in the names of their papers as a hook to make it look like your email was from a real person who actually read their paper.
I get tons of emails like this, and I constantly curse the people who send them. And yes, I always hit the "unsubscribe" links, but I can't see that it's had much effect on the amount of spam I get. CAN-SPAM was nothing but a giveaway to the marketing industry. There are 30 million companies in the U.S., with thousands of new ones created every day. The idea that I should have to opt out of receiving spam from every one of them individually is a joke.
Furthermore, 20 years ago there was just one company (Microsoft) that was totally dominating the industry. It was hard to see how they could ever fall, or any other company could rise to challenge them. Yet look how much things have changed! Now they're only one of five, and probably not even the most powerful of the five.
Things do change, and sometimes much faster than we expect. What if Apple loses their shine and people start saying, "This iPhone is just an overpriced Android lookalike?" They could fall very quickly. What if Microsoft continues to have minimal success in mobile, and PCs continue to decline? They could quickly become less and less relevant. What if Google loses their dominant position in advertising, which pays the bills for everything else? And so on.
As tempting as it is to blame Democrats for all the evils in the world, I think Trump is one evil we have to acknowledge is entirely due to Republicans. The problem isn't that he's running: anyone can run. The problem is that tons of people are supporting him, and those people are almost entirely Republicans. Maybe Clinton could have come up with a brilliant, devious strategy to get him to run, but she couldn't have turned him into the front runner for the nomination. That's entirely the fault of the people who listen to what he says and then, knowing what he is and what he stands for, choose to support him.
Rule 1 (good to a first approximation): All benchmarks are meaningless.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Every benchmark measures something very specific. A benchmark is only meaningful if you know exactly what it is measuring, and the thing it measures is something you actually care about.
Civilian and military work have been tightly linked since the very start of the space age. Half the purpose of launching Sputnik was to test a new rocket that had been developed for use as an ICBM. And even today, in the new age of the commercial space industry, they're still tightly linked. Notice that United Launch Alliance, one of the three companies that's been awarded a launch contract by NASA, is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing--both major defense contractors.
So if China is developing a civilian space program, it's a pretty good bet they also have a military space program. Because so does everyone else.
Anyway, if they want to study the far side of the moon, I think that's awesome. If we have to have military space programs, I'm glad something useful is coming out of it too.
I've got no problem with that. These companies are in business to make money. They aren't charities, and I wouldn't expect them to give away the software that provides most of their income. If they did, they'd go out of business.
But consider what you said. Just because it costs them nothing to open source something, and there's no benefit to keeping it closed, that still isn't a reason to open source it. They could just as easily keep it closed anyway. And in the old Microsoft, which saw open source as evil and did everything they could to discredit it, that's exactly what they would have done. Their new attitude seems to be, "If it doesn't hurt us to open source something, then sure, let's go ahead and do it." That's a big change.
It is believed that modern society in the West developed by the upper-middle and upper classes' excess kids effectively outbreeding the lower classes over hundreds of years, resulting in gains in health, IQ and longer time preferences.
[citation needed]
The rich always want to believe they're rich because they're genetically superior to everyone else. I've never seen a shred of evidence it's actually true.
There's a really easy way to turn all those low paying jobs into middle class jobs: just pay more! But we don't, because we can get away with paying less, and we never want to pay more for anything than we absolutely have to.
Technology is shifting what jobs there's demand for, but it doesn't determine how much we pay for those jobs. That's determined by economics, and politics, and social institutions. We can fix the problem, but only if we focus on the real causes. Technology won't fix it, because technology isn't the real cause.
Personally, I want a white light during the daytime, but a yellower light in the evening. It does less to mess with my circadian rhythm that way. So I want white lights at work, but my lights at home should be warmer (in the color sense, meaning lower color temperature).
It would be better to build new nuclear or fossil fuel power plants and just import the fuel
Perhaps for some very narrow definition of "better". If you use fossil fuels, then you're using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for your pollution. If you use nuclear, you produce radioactive waste that's dangerous for centuries, not to mention all the weapons proliferation issues it creates. And in any case, nuclear isn't anywhere close to cost competitive with renewables anymore.
Also remember that chemical fuels don't have to be fossil fuels. You can produce hydrogen, butanol, etc. from renewable energy, which you can then import just like any other chemical fuel. The eventual carbon-neutral economy will probably include a good amount of that. It's the easiest way to store energy for long times (lots of methods work to store it for hours or days, but chemical storage is the best if you want to store it for months), and it can be used in situations where batteries don't have enough density (like airplanes).
If you live very far north, solar probably isn't the best choice there. Other types of renewable energy like wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. will be better. Renewable energy isn't one size fits all. For example, take a look at http://thesolutionsproject.org.... They've worked out plans for every state in the US to convert to 100% renewable energy, but the mix is different for each one. Alaska (even further north than you) would get only 6% from solar while Florida would get almost 70%.
My comment about solar panels on a house was just an illustration. I didn't mean every house should be independent and self supporting, complete with its own batteries. Also remember that energy production doesn't have to be local. It's nice if it is, because that cuts the transmission losses, but we routinely transmit electricity over long distances. Maybe yours will come from a solar plant that's 1000 km further south.
Microsoft did not make a deal to kill BASIC on Macs. They made a deal to kill Apple's implementation of BASIC, because it competed with their own implementation. They sold it for a decade before discontinuing it in 1995.
Not only is this story a troll, it's an incoherent, factually incorrect troll. Somehow the author is trying to assert a connection between MS not bundling BASIC with their computers and girls being less interested than boys in programming. No clue what he thinks that connection is, but I suppose if he insinuates it with enough sarcasm it must exist.
Fortunately, wind and solar complement each other nicely. The wind tends to pick up around sunrise and sunset, two times when solar is far from its peak. Storms also tend to bring increased wind at the same time they block the sun. As a result, wind and solar are anticorrelated, and the sum of the two is much more consistent than either one alone.
But in any case, all this means is that we need to incorporate storage into the grid. That's a big project, but it doesn't require any new technology. Existing, mature technologies (batteries, thermal storage, hydrogen, etc.) are well up to the task (though undoubtedly they'll continue to advance with time). In contrast, most proposals for nuclear rely on cutting edge, very immature technologies (breeder reactors, thorium, etc.).
> Sure you can cover the surface of the Earth in solar panels I suppose, but that seems to be a bit of a maintenance headache (not to mention the energy cost of creating the panels in the first place).
Ok, you just managed to make three totally false claims in the space of one sentence:
1. You would need to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels to supply all our energy needs. No. Not even close. Consider that if you cover the roof of a typical house in solar panels, they will generate more energy than what is used by that house. You can find lots of details at http://www.techinsider.io/map-.... "If solar is 20% efficient (as it has been in lab tests) at turning solar energy into power, we'd only need to cover a land area about the size of Spain to power the entire Earth renewably in 2030." In fact, solar compares quite favorably to other energy sources in terms of land area required, if you take into account things like the land needed to mine coal or the area of the reservoirs needed for hydroelectric. And for solar, much of that "land area" can just be on top of roofs that are already there.
2. Solar panels require more maintenance than nuclear power plants. Seriously? Is that a joke? Once installed, solar panels take almost no maintenance at all. Operating a nuclear power plant is a very complicated, very expensive business. There's no comparison at all.
3. Creating solar panels takes more energy (or almost as much energy) as they produce. This is a myth that's been floating around for years, but has never been true. From http://solarcraft.com/solar-en...: "A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conclusively demonstrates that the manufacturing energy cost versus the energy production payback for solar modules is generally less than 4 years." And you think it takes no energy to build and operate nuclear power plants, not to mention mining uranium?
Let's consider smoking bans, then, since they illustrate a lot of the issues that come up in real situations. One of their main goals is to protect restaurant employees from second hand smoke. Sure, the owner can say, "I want to allow smoking on my property." But can they also say, "If you want to work here, you have to subject yourself to dangerous chemicals. If you don't like that, go work somewhere else?" And where do you draw the line? Can they refuse to put in sprinklers, thus putting their employees and customers at risk, because they don't want to spend the money on it? Is there a point where the government can say, "You must provide a safe environment for your employees?" If so, what is that point? Is it different for a restaurant than other types of businesses?
Then there's the question of protecting the customers. In a city you can reasonably say, "If you don't like smoke filled restaurants, go eat somewhere else." But suppose it's a small town and this is the only restaurant around. Ok, I suppose you could say, "Eating in a restaurant is a luxury." But what if the only grocery in town also wants to allow smoking? Buying food isn't a luxury.
I suppose a libertarian would say, "The market will solve everything. If there are enough people who don't want to get cancer from eating out, someone will start a non-smoking restaurant." But that's getting into the realm of fantasy. There are all sorts of reasons that might not happen: too small a town to support another restaurant, no one in town who wants to start one, etc.
Take a more extreme example: can you sell yourself into slavery? You could say, "It's your choice and the government shouldn't prevent you from doing it." But in practice, people would almost never do it unless they weren't given any other realistic options. In theory it would be your choice, but in practice slave dealers would get very good at manipulating people into situations where they didn't have any real choice. (I know, this is actually a controversial question in libertarian circles. Many people say it's over the line. But you said you support prostitution, which in practice is often just slavery under a different name. It's something people do because they don't have any choice about doing it.)
Much of the conflict comes from the fact that "freedom" and "liberty" mean different things to different people. From some people, it's being able to carry a gun. For some, it's not having to worry that a loony will buy a gun and shoot them. Unfortunately, these sometimes conflict! For some people, freedom means being able to walk down the street without the police stopping them and asking what they're doing there. Or being able to see a doctor when they get sick. Or send a private email without the government monitoring what they say in it. For some people, liberty means doing drugs. For others, it's not having to worry that someone will give drugs to their kids.
We could say, "Libertarians want to maximize liberty," but it's an empty statement. Almost everyone thinks liberty is a good thing, but there are many kinds of liberty, and different people prioritize them differently. At least in the U.S., "libertarianism" is strongly associated with a specific set of priorities: gun ownership, recreational drug use, low (or no) taxes, and an explicit rejection of any role for the government in promoting liberty. If you use the word "libertarianism" to mean something different from that, just be aware that your definition is different from the most widely used definition, and that you're using the word to mean something different from what most other people mean by it.
Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.
If you believe that was ever the goal of turning it over to a private company, I've got a bridge to sell you. It was strictly about giving a valuable contract to a big company, done by an administration that Believed(TM) in the divinity of private industry.
I don't have inside information about Los Alamos, but I did know someone at a different national lab that got privatized at the same time. I heard a lot of horror stories from him. Their policies had nothing to do with running an effective research organization, and everything to do with squeezing as much money out of it as they could get.
I haven't used it, just read a lot of the documentation, but it looks like a pretty nicely designed language. It has a very modern feel: concise syntax, static typing with type inference, closures, everything is an object, etc. Certainly looks much nicer to work in than C++.
For any question about, "Can you do...", the answer is almost certainly yes. It's the recommended language for nearly all new development on iOS and Mac OS, so it's being used for all those things.
The only way I could see this working is if it were the only option for financing college. We would have to completely eliminate conventional student loans. Otherwise, the results will be very predictable. People planning on high paying careers in engineering or finance will choose conventional loans, since that's a better deal for them. These agreements will be used mainly by people who don't expect to make much money for a long time. The companies financing them will take that into account, and find that to earn a reasonable payback, they have to set the repayment percentage really high. High enough that most people will end up worse off, not better.
Remember, risk has negative value. You have to pay people to accept risk. Under these deals, the companies take on more risk. They won't do that unless they get something in return, that is, unless their projected profit is greater. So on average, graduates have to end up paying more, not less. And unless you force the wealthier graduates to bear that whole burden, it will end up falling on the poorer graduates.