Strange, by this time I would think they would have come up with something for all the hype made over them.
It's possible the results would have been impressive if research had continued with more than 21 stem cell lines "approved" in 2001. Or maybe not. We'll never know. But I'm guessing the fact that the majority of the research has been limited to a very small line of cells is a major contributing factor. 21 individual lines is nowhere near a useful sample of genetic material to study the effects of much of anything, and I'm sure there's been some degradation in the material in the intervening decade.
Scientists only managed to separate human embryonic stem cells in November 1998. That gave scientists two years and three months to develop stem cell lines before a hold was put on funding in February 2001. In that time, scientists had managed to separate out 21 lines. In August of 2001, the rules were set that the existing lines were OK to use, but no more could be derived.
There is one very easy way to work around it. Don't accept NIH money or resources for your research using embryonic cell lines, or use non-embryonic stem cells.
Or do like a lot of smart companies do and simply do the research overseas. First-world status is overrated anyway, someone else will take up the mantle if the US doesn't want to carry it.
Wait a minute. You're concerned about tracking and you use Google Desktop to look up your shopping and browsing history? "Methinks the poster doth protest too much!"
I looked at TheNerds.net at a few, and I eventually bought the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve at Target. Every ad for TheNerds I've seen since has the PowerJolt on it. OK already, it's good, I just didn't buy it from you!
So, now I know someone found a portable charger they liked for their iPhone, at both Target (which I have heard of) and TheNerds.net (which I have not). In your complaining about targeted advertising, you've just made it more effective by offering a testimonial on a product I've never heard of and a random mention of a company I've never heard of.
Your post is a "jackpot" indeed, at least from the point of view of Google, Griffin, Target, and even TheNerds.:)
Though, to be fair, the post does come from a self-admitted Yankees fan, so I'll take it with a grain of salt up here in Maine. (KIDDING!!!!)
In this case, chiark posted that he booked a ferry passage, and specifically posted a complaint about something that has nothing to do with the actual passage. He didn't complain about the trip or the prices, only the fact that the company has used a web bug to track him and is trying to get him to book another passage or to keep their company in mind the next time he visits France.
First, many people aren't going to have a problem with them advertising for a rebook. If they enjoyed the original trip, or found it affordable and tolerable, they'll probably be happy enough doing business with the company again. So this specific complaint is unlikely to be a big enough issue to make someone pay more or take a risk on another company.
But, more crucially, what is not said is as important as what is said. People who want to complain about a company usually complain about everything if they are going to go to the trouble. The fact that the quality of the trip was not mentioned in the context of other complaint implies to me that he was satisfied with the actual services I'd care about if I ever booked ferry passage. "Will I get there in reasonable comfort at a reasonable price?" Someone who has reason to badmouth the company hasn't said otherwise. Not exactly a glowing compliment, but it means that it's highly unlikely he had a horrible trip or felt cheated by the prices.
Were I to book a journey to France, I might then consider checking their prices against their competitors, because, hey, someone appears to have actually used them and didn't drown or get robbed or complain about their cabins or pricing, so I know ever-so-slightly-more about them than many of their competitors, none of whom I'm aware of at all. I just know they'll bug me with ads for a while after my passage, but if I can save some coin on the passage and have a decent trip, no harm no foul, right?
So, technically, this is the perfect example of where the rarely-true adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is actually true. The name of this firm is now associated in your mind with "someone complained about them, but the only complaint was something irrelevant to the actual journey or pricing, and I've heard their name now."
Plus, the adage often holds true over time. Some errors stick to a company for a very long time (Nestle and the infant formula boycott, Exxon Valdez, Ford Pinto, BP will probably be another one). Other errors sometimes get erased over time but the actual name sticks in people's minds. Ironically, gross exaggerations of the story can actually lead to a loyalty backlash where people come to the company's defense, if the company can successfully repaint themselves as a victim.
You can turn negative publicity into positive publicity with the right expenditures and the right influence in the right places, and some smart people who are very good at spin.
If BP plays their cards right, stays silent on the matter in public, and continues working their spin quietly over a few decades, in 30 years our kids will remember the oil spill as the fault of the government because the government was pushing so hard for offshore drilling that they forced the oil companies to take risky chances. BP will be remembered as the knight in shining armor who was the victim of government-forced risk and invented a solution to the problem and, despite the EPA's constant interference about the dispersant they tried to use, mitigated the spill, engineered a fix, and contained it, then were held responsible for the risk forced on them.
Stories like this are recast all the time. Our own history books are sufficient proof of that.
Interesting, thanks. I didn't realize they had worked out the issues, and thought the project had been canceled.
Still, trying to make something like that work on the ground, and add armor, and you'll make the problems the Osprey had worse by an order of magnitude or more.
If this could be done, and I'm not saying it could, the argument would probably be as follows:
If you're crossing large distances with personnel or cargo, there are vast tracts of land that you control and can declare "safe". Transporting stuff and people on the ground is cheaper and safer.
If you have to cover 400 miles, 350 of which are "safe" and 50 of which are "dangerous", a single vehicle that can do both at the maximum efficiency for each circumstance (ground for 350 miles, air for 50) would obviously seem like a great idea.
Except it isn't, because to make it light enough to fly, especially if you want to talk about STOL or VTOL, you'd have to make its armor useless, and to have all the crap you'd need to get it airborne you'd have to make it less efficient as a ground vehicle. Plus, to armor it at all, you'd need to make it about as maneuverable as a drunk cow and as agile as a slug, thus making it an easy target for anyone carrying more than a 9mm.
I'm sure the military could build this, but it would have an effective range of about 50 miles, the armor wouldn't stand up to thrown rocks, and if you ever needed the air capacity you'd be vulnerable to passing flyswatters.
They can't, and therein lies the big problem. Things that work well on the ground don't tend to work well in the air, and vice versa.
The military already had a vehicle that worked fairly well in VTOL and could still fly at acceptable speeds, while not being a jet-based fuel gobbler. It was called the "Osprey". And that was eventually grounded because even a vehicle built to do those two jobs (slow flight and efficiency) turned out to be not particularly great at either and complex enough to be a tad on the crashy side.
Now take that same basic concept, add a few tons of armor, and put it in a direct combat situation.
I honestly wish the military luck in developing a practical solution to what is obviously a severe problem, but I don't think this will be it.
We need to take perfectly good cars and figure out ways to intentionally crash them under test conditions, so manufacturers know what works and what doesn't under controlled conditions and have the opportunity to determine points of failure and how to work around them.
I, for one, would avoid using the terms ".NET" and "safe" in the same paragraph. I realize they are talking about safe from patent trollage, but it implies that someone would actually want to, you know, actually USE.net or Mono by choice.
Well, true. But I didn't use the term "renewable" in terms of solar (a power source), only in terms of one of the fuels (a power storage mechanism) it creates.
In the end, no power sources are actually renewable. In fact, no power sources are actually truly sustainable given heat death and entropy over the next few trillion years.;)
But for our purposes, "sustainable" can mean "for the practical future", and should include some discussion of the consequences of using the energy source and its resulting fuels as well.
You're confusing the fuel with its method of consumption. Hydrogen, itself, as a fuel, is renewable. I burn Hydrogen, it makes water. I take the water and apply electricity, it makes hydrogen and oxygen. I repeat the process 10 trillion times, and it works.
An automobile that burns hydrogen or otherwise consumes it will have parts that break down. I agree that those issues have to be taken into account, and could make the fuel non-sustainable. The more complex an engine you need to consume a fuel, the more it will cost (fiscally and environmentally) in the end to consume it.
That's why electricity is such a great fuel overall. The engines are as simple and reliable as it gets. Unfortunately, our current methods of storing it are pretty poor, have relatively short lifespans, and very low energy densities.
"Renewable" is important for a fuel. We need to be able to create more of the fuel as needed so we don't have a supply crunch of a specific fuel (or means of storing portable energy for use - for this purpose "fuel" and "battery" are pretty much the same thing).
But, to your point, the process by which it is renewed needs to be something we can do for a very long time. If we can renew a fuel but we don't have a sustainable energy supply to feed it, renewability is sorta useless.
Similarly, if the use of a fuel causes really nasty pollution or some other severe effect, it's not a fuel we want even if it is renewable.
I can only say that my experience within my household outweighs your opinion from my point of view. I'm not saying you're wrong, it depends on the person. I tried introducing Linux initially with KDE, and Mint with Gnome went over a lot easier.
Now that the transition is done and my wife was able to ease into Linux with a minimum of "what do I do now? What does that mean?", she's experimented with several distros on her netbook and even a few desktops, and is OK with it and has a lot of fun customizing it and even insisted I rip Seven "Starter" off her netbook and install Mint when we first bought it.
But making that initial transition is important, and not at all easy in some cases. First impressions are important. If you're only avoiding Linux because it looks too different, skinning it to look like Windows can get over that initial hurdle fairly quickly, then you can ease into learning the details.
Precisely. Only the vapors (gasses) burn, and that's basically true of any fuel (even wood, which is why wood is so hard to start). Solids need to be vaporized before they can mix with oxygen and burn.
Hydrogen is a gas at standard pressures and temperatures, similar to propane and natural gas. No vaporization required, it's ready to go. These fuels are the hardest to store safely because of this, and because they all pretty much need to be stored under pressure (liquified, usually) to have a sufficient quantity to be useful. Give it an environment where it can mix with air, and it will do so EXTREMELY rapidly, and spread really fast, and expose it to a spark and the whole lot goes at once.
Gasoline is (especially in warmer temperatures) a liquid that is very prone to vaporization. So it's not quite as likely to burn as hydrogen (but it's pretty damned close, since it vaporizes so readily), but there tends to be less initial "boom" and more sustained burn as the liquid vaporizes. Vaporize gasoline quickly and thoroughly enough, though, and it's got nearly the explosive potential of hydrogen.
Diesel (and Bio-Diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, home heating oil, lamp oil, cooking oil, animal fat, etc) are much less prone to vaporization at standard temperatures, and require more heat to vaporize, but they are more energy dense. So these fuels are relatively safe to handle compared to the other two (a single spark is highly unlikely to set them off - they require more sustained pre-heating to start the combustion), but once you manage to light it up it's a lot harder to put out, and it burns a lot hotter, and burns for a very long time.
Fossil fuels themselves are a form of solar energy, from sunshine that hit the Earth over millions of years and got stored in a process involving plants growing, being eaten, and the plants and the critters that ate them both dying and decomposing into oil and coal. The only real problem with fossil fuels is that there is a limited amount of this conveniently pre-stored solar power lying about, and using it the way we do releases pollutants and many of the things like carbon dioxide that were sequestered by the processes that created it.
It's only our short worldview that makes us see these as different sources of energy. The Earth has conveniently stored millions of years' worth of solar energy in very energy-dense, easy-to-use forms. Given how long ago they were created, many of us don't think of those as originally created by solar energy.
This term, "renewable", you keep using it, I do no think it means what I think you think it means.
A "renewable" fuel is a fuel that we can make more of when we need it. It doesn't mean it's something we have to find in a ready state in nature. Hydrogen IS renewable. 100% renewable. We can make shitloads more of it, and you can't differentiate manufactured hydrogen from the stuff you'd find if we ever found it.
Unfortunately, renewable does not mean readily-available. It just means we can make more. All we need is an energy source. And that is the problem with hydrogen.
Hydrogen is, in essence, a battery with infinite recharges. You can separate it from water all day long, then burn it and re-integrate it with oxygen and have water again. It just takes shitloads of energy to separate it.
Hydrogen is not a freely-available fuel in any quantities that make a difference, but it is a completely renewable one. It is not, has never been, and will never be an energy source, but no renewable fuels are energy sources. They are ways to store energy in such a way that it can be practically used for fuel. You still need the energy.
For the absolute and utter basic user, there's no difference at all. Even if they've been using Windows for years, all you have to do is give them three icons and spend 5 minutes telling them which is the email and which is the web browser and which one plays music, and they're good. Their experience has almost nothing to do with the launching of programs and everything to do with finding programs that work similarly enough that they can operate the new software.
For the geek, there's lots of difference, but it doesn't matter - they have some comprehension of what is going on behind the scenes and are willing to invest time in learning the new way of doing things.
It's the "semi-experienced" user that this is shooting for. The ones who do a lot with their computing appliances. My wife maintains a couple of websites, does newsletters, edits graphics, etc. For her, the transition to XFCE would probably have been too much while at the same time transitioning her FTP software, her web page maintenance software, her music player, etc all to new things that worked "just a little differently" from what she used in XP. So I installed most of the tools she was going to transition to in XP (where a Windows version was available), picked similar tools where it wasn't, got her used to those, then when I switched the main house computer to Linux I picked Mint because it was very XP-like. That prevented any one moment where everything changed all at once.
Now that she's used to Mint and all the software she uses, she could probably accept XFCE or KDE or pretty much any windows manager, though there's not really all that much point to doing so now.
Because if you want to ask someone to try out Linux, you are better off showing them something like what they are used to. And, increasingly, that's Windows Seven.
Ubuntu (and its variant, Mint) were what got Linux in my household, and I suspect that is true of many people. Ubuntu made an experience that is similar enough to Windows XP that my wife could easily switch to it. It has a start-ish sort of button, a notification-ish sort of tray, a favorite-ish sort of quicklaunchy area, boxes that show what windows you have open that allow you to click on them to go to them, and even a clock in approximately the right place and (up until recently), an underscore, minimize/restore, and "Big X" in the right places. It made it a lot easier to transition my wife to Linux when I could just install Mint and have her do very basic operations pretty much the same way she used to in XP. Later, I showed her the package manager so she could "add/remove programs", etc.
The layout, while by no means identical to Windows XP, is similar enough that people won't have their brains go boom. Try them out in KDE, IceWM, or XFCE, and their brains asplode. And I don't blame them. You can also easily configure Gnome to be all but unrecognizable to a Windows XP user, and for advanced users who want things to work a certain way, that's marvelous. But for someone who has used Windows for years, it's good to minimize the changes they'll need to go through to accept Linux as a substitute.
When I show Mint to people running Windows Seven, especially those for whom Seven is most of their Windows exposure, they get confused. Probably about as confused as I get trying to figure out how to help people do things in Windows Seven, since I use Windows XP when I use Windows. It takes me a bit longer to do things in Seven. Not that Seven is bad, it's just not what I use daily, and I'm not used to it.
I, for one, welcome a "Windows Seven"-ish variant of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is "training wheels for Linux", even though it's still a serious and solid distro that is well-supported. It's arguably the one that most people will tend to recommend to a newbie at the moment. If there's an easy way to make it look like what your newbie has already used, I'm all for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange, by this time I would think they would have come up with something for all the hype made over them.
It's possible the results would have been impressive if research had continued with more than 21 stem cell lines "approved" in 2001. Or maybe not. We'll never know. But I'm guessing the fact that the majority of the research has been limited to a very small line of cells is a major contributing factor. 21 individual lines is nowhere near a useful sample of genetic material to study the effects of much of anything, and I'm sure there's been some degradation in the material in the intervening decade.
Scientists only managed to separate human embryonic stem cells in November 1998. That gave scientists two years and three months to develop stem cell lines before a hold was put on funding in February 2001. In that time, scientists had managed to separate out 21 lines. In August of 2001, the rules were set that the existing lines were OK to use, but no more could be derived.
There is one very easy way to work around it. Don't accept NIH money or resources for your research using embryonic cell lines, or use non-embryonic stem cells.
Or do like a lot of smart companies do and simply do the research overseas. First-world status is overrated anyway, someone else will take up the mantle if the US doesn't want to carry it.
My Google Desktop shows me
Wait a minute. You're concerned about tracking and you use Google Desktop to look up your shopping and browsing history? "Methinks the poster doth protest too much!"
I looked at TheNerds.net at a few, and I eventually bought the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve at Target. Every ad for TheNerds I've seen since has the PowerJolt on it. OK already, it's good, I just didn't buy it from you!
So, now I know someone found a portable charger they liked for their iPhone, at both Target (which I have heard of) and TheNerds.net (which I have not). In your complaining about targeted advertising, you've just made it more effective by offering a testimonial on a product I've never heard of and a random mention of a company I've never heard of.
Your post is a "jackpot" indeed, at least from the point of view of Google, Griffin, Target, and even TheNerds. :)
Though, to be fair, the post does come from a self-admitted Yankees fan, so I'll take it with a grain of salt up here in Maine. (KIDDING!!!!)
No. It counts as "neutral publicity" at worst.
In this case, chiark posted that he booked a ferry passage, and specifically posted a complaint about something that has nothing to do with the actual passage. He didn't complain about the trip or the prices, only the fact that the company has used a web bug to track him and is trying to get him to book another passage or to keep their company in mind the next time he visits France.
First, many people aren't going to have a problem with them advertising for a rebook. If they enjoyed the original trip, or found it affordable and tolerable, they'll probably be happy enough doing business with the company again. So this specific complaint is unlikely to be a big enough issue to make someone pay more or take a risk on another company.
But, more crucially, what is not said is as important as what is said. People who want to complain about a company usually complain about everything if they are going to go to the trouble. The fact that the quality of the trip was not mentioned in the context of other complaint implies to me that he was satisfied with the actual services I'd care about if I ever booked ferry passage. "Will I get there in reasonable comfort at a reasonable price?" Someone who has reason to badmouth the company hasn't said otherwise. Not exactly a glowing compliment, but it means that it's highly unlikely he had a horrible trip or felt cheated by the prices.
Were I to book a journey to France, I might then consider checking their prices against their competitors, because, hey, someone appears to have actually used them and didn't drown or get robbed or complain about their cabins or pricing, so I know ever-so-slightly-more about them than many of their competitors, none of whom I'm aware of at all. I just know they'll bug me with ads for a while after my passage, but if I can save some coin on the passage and have a decent trip, no harm no foul, right?
So, technically, this is the perfect example of where the rarely-true adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is actually true. The name of this firm is now associated in your mind with "someone complained about them, but the only complaint was something irrelevant to the actual journey or pricing, and I've heard their name now."
Plus, the adage often holds true over time. Some errors stick to a company for a very long time (Nestle and the infant formula boycott, Exxon Valdez, Ford Pinto, BP will probably be another one). Other errors sometimes get erased over time but the actual name sticks in people's minds. Ironically, gross exaggerations of the story can actually lead to a loyalty backlash where people come to the company's defense, if the company can successfully repaint themselves as a victim.
You can turn negative publicity into positive publicity with the right expenditures and the right influence in the right places, and some smart people who are very good at spin.
If BP plays their cards right, stays silent on the matter in public, and continues working their spin quietly over a few decades, in 30 years our kids will remember the oil spill as the fault of the government because the government was pushing so hard for offshore drilling that they forced the oil companies to take risky chances. BP will be remembered as the knight in shining armor who was the victim of government-forced risk and invented a solution to the problem and, despite the EPA's constant interference about the dispersant they tried to use, mitigated the spill, engineered a fix, and contained it, then were held responsible for the risk forced on them.
Stories like this are recast all the time. Our own history books are sufficient proof of that.
Yes, but humor that good is often misunderstood and you end up with a -1 Flamebait, or a -1 Troll.
My goal in life is to get a +5 Troll posting. It's not much of a goal, but it's not much of a life.
Interesting, thanks. I didn't realize they had worked out the issues, and thought the project had been canceled.
Still, trying to make something like that work on the ground, and add armor, and you'll make the problems the Osprey had worse by an order of magnitude or more.
Very true. One good example: DARPANET. :)
If this could be done, and I'm not saying it could, the argument would probably be as follows:
If you're crossing large distances with personnel or cargo, there are vast tracts of land that you control and can declare "safe". Transporting stuff and people on the ground is cheaper and safer.
If you have to cover 400 miles, 350 of which are "safe" and 50 of which are "dangerous", a single vehicle that can do both at the maximum efficiency for each circumstance (ground for 350 miles, air for 50) would obviously seem like a great idea.
Except it isn't, because to make it light enough to fly, especially if you want to talk about STOL or VTOL, you'd have to make its armor useless, and to have all the crap you'd need to get it airborne you'd have to make it less efficient as a ground vehicle. Plus, to armor it at all, you'd need to make it about as maneuverable as a drunk cow and as agile as a slug, thus making it an easy target for anyone carrying more than a 9mm.
I'm sure the military could build this, but it would have an effective range of about 50 miles, the armor wouldn't stand up to thrown rocks, and if you ever needed the air capacity you'd be vulnerable to passing flyswatters.
They can't, and therein lies the big problem. Things that work well on the ground don't tend to work well in the air, and vice versa.
The military already had a vehicle that worked fairly well in VTOL and could still fly at acceptable speeds, while not being a jet-based fuel gobbler. It was called the "Osprey". And that was eventually grounded because even a vehicle built to do those two jobs (slow flight and efficiency) turned out to be not particularly great at either and complex enough to be a tad on the crashy side.
Now take that same basic concept, add a few tons of armor, and put it in a direct combat situation.
I honestly wish the military luck in developing a practical solution to what is obviously a severe problem, but I don't think this will be it.
In other words, they should just take an Osprey and add a ground engine.
We need to take perfectly good cars and figure out ways to intentionally crash them under test conditions, so manufacturers know what works and what doesn't under controlled conditions and have the opportunity to determine points of failure and how to work around them.
I, for one, would avoid using the terms ".NET" and "safe" in the same paragraph. I realize they are talking about safe from patent trollage, but it implies that someone would actually want to, you know, actually USE .net or Mono by choice.
Well, true. But I didn't use the term "renewable" in terms of solar (a power source), only in terms of one of the fuels (a power storage mechanism) it creates.
In the end, no power sources are actually renewable. In fact, no power sources are actually truly sustainable given heat death and entropy over the next few trillion years. ;)
But for our purposes, "sustainable" can mean "for the practical future", and should include some discussion of the consequences of using the energy source and its resulting fuels as well.
You're confusing the fuel with its method of consumption. Hydrogen, itself, as a fuel, is renewable. I burn Hydrogen, it makes water. I take the water and apply electricity, it makes hydrogen and oxygen. I repeat the process 10 trillion times, and it works.
An automobile that burns hydrogen or otherwise consumes it will have parts that break down. I agree that those issues have to be taken into account, and could make the fuel non-sustainable. The more complex an engine you need to consume a fuel, the more it will cost (fiscally and environmentally) in the end to consume it.
That's why electricity is such a great fuel overall. The engines are as simple and reliable as it gets. Unfortunately, our current methods of storing it are pretty poor, have relatively short lifespans, and very low energy densities.
"Sustainable" is a more useful term, true.
"Renewable" is important for a fuel. We need to be able to create more of the fuel as needed so we don't have a supply crunch of a specific fuel (or means of storing portable energy for use - for this purpose "fuel" and "battery" are pretty much the same thing).
But, to your point, the process by which it is renewed needs to be something we can do for a very long time. If we can renew a fuel but we don't have a sustainable energy supply to feed it, renewability is sorta useless.
Similarly, if the use of a fuel causes really nasty pollution or some other severe effect, it's not a fuel we want even if it is renewable.
I can only say that my experience within my household outweighs your opinion from my point of view. I'm not saying you're wrong, it depends on the person. I tried introducing Linux initially with KDE, and Mint with Gnome went over a lot easier.
Now that the transition is done and my wife was able to ease into Linux with a minimum of "what do I do now? What does that mean?", she's experimented with several distros on her netbook and even a few desktops, and is OK with it and has a lot of fun customizing it and even insisted I rip Seven "Starter" off her netbook and install Mint when we first bought it.
But making that initial transition is important, and not at all easy in some cases. First impressions are important. If you're only avoiding Linux because it looks too different, skinning it to look like Windows can get over that initial hurdle fairly quickly, then you can ease into learning the details.
Precisely. Only the vapors (gasses) burn, and that's basically true of any fuel (even wood, which is why wood is so hard to start). Solids need to be vaporized before they can mix with oxygen and burn.
Hydrogen is a gas at standard pressures and temperatures, similar to propane and natural gas. No vaporization required, it's ready to go. These fuels are the hardest to store safely because of this, and because they all pretty much need to be stored under pressure (liquified, usually) to have a sufficient quantity to be useful. Give it an environment where it can mix with air, and it will do so EXTREMELY rapidly, and spread really fast, and expose it to a spark and the whole lot goes at once.
Gasoline is (especially in warmer temperatures) a liquid that is very prone to vaporization. So it's not quite as likely to burn as hydrogen (but it's pretty damned close, since it vaporizes so readily), but there tends to be less initial "boom" and more sustained burn as the liquid vaporizes. Vaporize gasoline quickly and thoroughly enough, though, and it's got nearly the explosive potential of hydrogen.
Diesel (and Bio-Diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, home heating oil, lamp oil, cooking oil, animal fat, etc) are much less prone to vaporization at standard temperatures, and require more heat to vaporize, but they are more energy dense. So these fuels are relatively safe to handle compared to the other two (a single spark is highly unlikely to set them off - they require more sustained pre-heating to start the combustion), but once you manage to light it up it's a lot harder to put out, and it burns a lot hotter, and burns for a very long time.
Fossil fuels themselves are a form of solar energy, from sunshine that hit the Earth over millions of years and got stored in a process involving plants growing, being eaten, and the plants and the critters that ate them both dying and decomposing into oil and coal. The only real problem with fossil fuels is that there is a limited amount of this conveniently pre-stored solar power lying about, and using it the way we do releases pollutants and many of the things like carbon dioxide that were sequestered by the processes that created it.
It's only our short worldview that makes us see these as different sources of energy. The Earth has conveniently stored millions of years' worth of solar energy in very energy-dense, easy-to-use forms. Given how long ago they were created, many of us don't think of those as originally created by solar energy.
This term, "renewable", you keep using it, I do no think it means what I think you think it means.
A "renewable" fuel is a fuel that we can make more of when we need it. It doesn't mean it's something we have to find in a ready state in nature. Hydrogen IS renewable. 100% renewable. We can make shitloads more of it, and you can't differentiate manufactured hydrogen from the stuff you'd find if we ever found it.
Unfortunately, renewable does not mean readily-available. It just means we can make more. All we need is an energy source. And that is the problem with hydrogen.
Hydrogen is, in essence, a battery with infinite recharges. You can separate it from water all day long, then burn it and re-integrate it with oxygen and have water again. It just takes shitloads of energy to separate it.
Hydrogen is not a freely-available fuel in any quantities that make a difference, but it is a completely renewable one. It is not, has never been, and will never be an energy source, but no renewable fuels are energy sources. They are ways to store energy in such a way that it can be practically used for fuel. You still need the energy.
Right.
For the absolute and utter basic user, there's no difference at all. Even if they've been using Windows for years, all you have to do is give them three icons and spend 5 minutes telling them which is the email and which is the web browser and which one plays music, and they're good. Their experience has almost nothing to do with the launching of programs and everything to do with finding programs that work similarly enough that they can operate the new software.
For the geek, there's lots of difference, but it doesn't matter - they have some comprehension of what is going on behind the scenes and are willing to invest time in learning the new way of doing things.
It's the "semi-experienced" user that this is shooting for. The ones who do a lot with their computing appliances. My wife maintains a couple of websites, does newsletters, edits graphics, etc. For her, the transition to XFCE would probably have been too much while at the same time transitioning her FTP software, her web page maintenance software, her music player, etc all to new things that worked "just a little differently" from what she used in XP. So I installed most of the tools she was going to transition to in XP (where a Windows version was available), picked similar tools where it wasn't, got her used to those, then when I switched the main house computer to Linux I picked Mint because it was very XP-like. That prevented any one moment where everything changed all at once.
Now that she's used to Mint and all the software she uses, she could probably accept XFCE or KDE or pretty much any windows manager, though there's not really all that much point to doing so now.
Because if you want to ask someone to try out Linux, you are better off showing them something like what they are used to. And, increasingly, that's Windows Seven.
Ubuntu (and its variant, Mint) were what got Linux in my household, and I suspect that is true of many people. Ubuntu made an experience that is similar enough to Windows XP that my wife could easily switch to it. It has a start-ish sort of button, a notification-ish sort of tray, a favorite-ish sort of quicklaunchy area, boxes that show what windows you have open that allow you to click on them to go to them, and even a clock in approximately the right place and (up until recently), an underscore, minimize/restore, and "Big X" in the right places. It made it a lot easier to transition my wife to Linux when I could just install Mint and have her do very basic operations pretty much the same way she used to in XP. Later, I showed her the package manager so she could "add/remove programs", etc.
The layout, while by no means identical to Windows XP, is similar enough that people won't have their brains go boom. Try them out in KDE, IceWM, or XFCE, and their brains asplode. And I don't blame them. You can also easily configure Gnome to be all but unrecognizable to a Windows XP user, and for advanced users who want things to work a certain way, that's marvelous. But for someone who has used Windows for years, it's good to minimize the changes they'll need to go through to accept Linux as a substitute.
When I show Mint to people running Windows Seven, especially those for whom Seven is most of their Windows exposure, they get confused. Probably about as confused as I get trying to figure out how to help people do things in Windows Seven, since I use Windows XP when I use Windows. It takes me a bit longer to do things in Seven. Not that Seven is bad, it's just not what I use daily, and I'm not used to it.
I, for one, welcome a "Windows Seven"-ish variant of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is "training wheels for Linux", even though it's still a serious and solid distro that is well-supported. It's arguably the one that most people will tend to recommend to a newbie at the moment. If there's an easy way to make it look like what your newbie has already used, I'm all for it.
Star Wars is more like future fantasy
That certainly explains the opening scroll for every movie, which all start "A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away" :)
I dunno, looked kinda meatball-shaped to me... I'm going to go to Church in full pirate regalia, just in case. Cover all my bases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device
Think "digital photography", hence the comparison with photographic plates.
One Sun to rule them all, One Sun to find them,
One Sun to bring them all and with its gravity bind them
In the Solar System where the asteroids fly.