Microsoft got most of its growth and monopoly before the common use of software patents. If you had chosen Intel and patents, or Microsoft and copyrights, you might have had a point. But without copyrights the software industry and its products would look very different indeed, and only in some cases for the better. It's very doubtful that software usability (and therefore adoption) would have been as advanced.
Usability works against a support-funded model, which would probably be the only alternative for-profit business model in a copyright-less software world. While usability would still be a concern for custom projects developed internally by large companies, those would have been a fraction of our contemporary packaged-software market, Usability therefore wouldn't have had as much investment and development as it has had under current copyright-based business models.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When you remove power from an elected government over the economy, you transfer it to the next largest players, large corporations or enterprises. This effectively places it in the hands of board of directors and executives (or a handful of owners/partners if privately owned) representing a much smaller proportion of the population (investors, if they're lucky, and the hired executives themselves if the investors are duped), and which are even more subject to cronyism than any government, with no recourse to general elections as a remedy. This is not an improvement.
Or maybe those people are more intellectually honest in examining historical evidence of what are the end results of "classical libertarian" philosophy.
Well, that all may be true, but those Randian approaches and assumptions do seem to be the ones that are most often espoused by Libertarian Party candidates, and most self-styled libertarians I've ever talked to or read from. So while you may be right about the greater diversity of liberterian voters, if you vote for the Libertarian Party expecting to get anything other than a Randian dystopia, you are deluding yourself.
That would form a large barrier to entry, on top of capital costs for prisons, limiting entry into the market. In such a market, I would expect to see merging of large players, and collusion. Because once you are down to a small number of players, if all the players collude to decrease service regardless of recidivism, then there comes a point where they all say together, we can't make a profit so we are shutting down, and the government will have to change the rules to accomodate them or face the wholesale release of hardened criminals into the population. Well, they could try to go with the Reagan air traffic controller approach: fire everyone and have the army guard the prisons while they try to find investors willing to spin up new companies to take over despite the barriers to entry and risks and knowledge that the government could pull the same move again if they can't figure out to be profitable in time. That experiment would likely be an abject failure (soldiers don't make for very good police, and even worse rehabilitators - their training isn't geared for that) and attempts to find/create replacement guarding companies would be challenging.
An interesting follow up question would be, assuming you already have the bacteria well installed in your gut, are there any things in a modern diet besides fat that causes them to be less successful (than the other gut bacteria) or even die out? How do they respond to long-term trace levels of Roundup or neonicotinoid pesticides? HFCS? Ammonia or cyanide from processed meat products? Substantial sodium levels? How about any number of preservatives or other additives found in typical modern Western processed foods? Heck, even ice-cold water?
While there are no more pedophiles in the church as there are in the general population, the media coverage might give the impression that the Church is extremely dangerous.
True, the percentage of pedophiles in the church indeed appears to be about the same as the general population. What the media coverage made clear is that the church hierarchy covered up the abuse to protect its own reputation, allowing abusers to continue abusing for decades by using what influence it had available to forestall and obstruct police investigations into abuse. In essence the church was a willing accomplice to those crimes both after the fact and (in the case of repeat offenders) before the fact. In some cases of abuse, such as happened in Native residential schools in Canada, the abuse and the church's complicity go back over a century. The sin of pride led the church that was chest-beating about homosexuality to hypocritically cover up and abet sexual and physical abuse of its youngest charges, and that cover-up tainted the highest and supposedly most sacrosanct levels. That's where the revulsion comes from.
The real problem is that the NSA has assured the USA populace that, while the NSA does vacuum up huge amounts of personal information, that information is kept safe and confidential. Snowden's actions show that in fact any such assurances by the NSA are not worth using as toilet paper. Because if Ed Snowden can uncover all that he has, you can bet that any cell phone records for the last 10 years are relatively easily available to half the law enforcement personnel in the country, including that worryingly over-controlling police officer who is dating your daughter.
Not likely. Truckers that fall asleep at the wheel often cause nasty collateral damage and innocent deaths, provoking voter ire and hence legislative action. If these guys were carrying pounds of explosives that exploded when it fell with them, then you might see some political movement. But these poor slobs are the only ones who die so the Republican "Live and Let Die" attitude wins the day.
Yep. You zone out thinking about something else for 20-30 secs while waiting for the light to change. You look up to see if the light's changed yet, but look at the wrong light (because your brain is still partially occupied with what it was thinking about) and start going when you shouldn't. This is even more likely if you're at a complex intersection with multiple signals (i.e. for left advance turns).
Well, I think that if Jesus actually took over the situation, which I interpret to be a second coming, presumably performing miracles left and right while bringing the kingdom of heaven to Earth, it would be pretty difficult to claim it was the result of science. But perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by the statement praying for "Jesus to take over the situation".
So you're not currently praying its reproducible (only proposing it as an experiment) but actually are frequently praying for Jesus to take over the situation? Good, since He presumably is more likely to listen to your more frequent and fervent prayer, I'll be happy to ignore you going forward until you can reproduce your results with the latter prayer. Cheers!
Hilariously, geothermal and solar may raise global temperatures by decreasing reflectance (the energy is absorbed as heat and must be radiated rather than reflected--you'd be surprised at how reflective the earth is, so much so that black roofs and highways may be large contributors to global warming);
Yes and no. The earth does have a very high albedo. However major contributions to that albedo come from cloud cover and polar ice caps, neither of which will be affected by solar panels on your roof.
When it comes to geothermal, yeah you're right. The extracted heat usually doesn't reach the density of hydrocarbon-thermal plants, leading to lower conversion efficiency (discussed further below). So you need more heat to produce the same amount of energy. On the other hand, some of that heat would be slowly propagating through the layers of planetary crust and radiating out anyways, so it may not be quite as bad as it seems at first glance although I don't care enough to try to work through the math.
Now there's a couple of primary ways of capturing solar power in current use: the smaller scale EV cells, and using mirror arrays to concentrate incoming light into a solar furnace to drive a heat engine. So in the first case really what you're comparing is the black solar panels against whatever you're replacing/covering. In North America your roof has a good chance of being some kind of asphalt shingle (or slate in northern Europe), with a fairly low albedo to begin with. As you head south you do have increasing chances of fired clay tiles, which admittedly provide a higher base reflectance (especially if they are glazed). Nevertheless I was surprised at how much asphalt tile you can find on roofs in Phoenix, AZ or Austin, TX, and I'll assume they aren't that unusual for the southern USA. You also have to remember that while the efficiency of EVs at converting radiation into electricity is fairly low, the conversion of heat into power by thermal plants is also limited by the efficiency of the thermodynamic cycle. So since the albedo differential is what counts, if your rooftop already has low albedo then, by reducing the need for heat production during thermal power generation, you could reduce the overall instantaneous heat production without even taking the longer term effects from the reduction of greenhouse gases like CO2.
Now in the case of a solar farm, you're going to be using a thermodynamic cycle with an efficiency that's about the same as a conventional thermal plant, so you'll be having a big net loss of heat production as long as you're substituting (and not just increasing power production and consumption). In fact your solar furnace could probably reach higher temperatures than a hydrocarbon plant, so your theoretical maximum efficiency should be higher (since the optimum efficiency bounded by the Carnot cycle is governed by the temperature differential) although you might need to use something more exotic than a steam engine to achieve that. If you can point me at a peer-reviewed paper that takes all this into account, then I'll take these claims about solar more seriously, but most of the claims of solar being worse than thermal power that I've come across so far appeared to come from the sort of industry mouthpieces and insufficiently informed "skeptics" who just a decade ago were denying industrial CO2 production was having an effect on the climate.
wind [power] may alter the climate dramatically;
Maybe and maybe not. Generally the energy extracted is a small fraction of the dynamic energy in wind systems and placement is generally chosen where there is significant, frequent wind activity. Part of the claims from climate models is that higher temperatures and temperature differentials lead to more powerful storm systems, so well chosen placement of wind farms could help mitigate that. Of course if the
Don't worry, If the current melting of the arctic ice cap is any indication, we're going to get plenty of evidence and impact in the next 5 decades. It's a journey and there will be lots to see on the trip, however people just prefer to talk about the destination because it has more emotional impact for motivation.
When the change is gradual, people ignore the warning signs until their house and land is flooded and they wail "Why didn't you warn me?". So the scientists are warning of what the eventual outcome is, and people are saying "yeah, pull the other one".
Thanks for the informative response. Then it could affect the factors in the Drake equation. If the Sun is somehow more stable than most other stars, that could have an impact on the stability of the habitable zone and the ability of life to develop to sufficient complexity to develop intelligence.
Except bacon, like many processed meats, contains inorganic phosphates to enhance taste and texture, and those phosphates are probably causingbowel cancer. So excuse me if I take your advice with a grain of salt, not that sodium is that good for you either.
Maybe he remembers that before cigarettes became popular there used to be these two things called pipes and snuff. Neither of them were exempt from abuse, although snuff admittedly didn't cause lung cancer, just other nasty conditions.
So if they did develop a treatment based on this set of proteins, it probably wouldn't be safe for pregnant mothers. And it might even be usable off label as an abortifacient, so that would probably have the US religious right wing trying to ban it or at least make it heavily restricted?
The only reason it wasn't 100% successful is that stars are apparently noisier than our sun
Hmm. I do wonder how stars are "noisier". Is it at the source or due to interference from interstellar gas and the Oort Cloud? If the former, then does it have implications for the Drake equation?
It depends on whether you have a textbook that covers the same material, or only what is presented in the course. I had a number of courses where there was no textbook. To effectively transfer the information to long-term memory, you need to review, and to review it you need the material stored in some form outside your brain.
I think that we now understand enough about neuroplasticity, memorization, and learning that there should now be a mandatory first year course on optimal note taking and study patterns, with perhaps some testing available where there is some variation in learning style. In fact the latter should probably be systematically done in the first year or two of high school so that you don't have to have every high school teacher re-building that wheel with every new student they get.
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Microsoft got most of its growth and monopoly before the common use of software patents. If you had chosen Intel and patents, or Microsoft and copyrights, you might have had a point. But without copyrights the software industry and its products would look very different indeed, and only in some cases for the better. It's very doubtful that software usability (and therefore adoption) would have been as advanced.
Usability works against a support-funded model, which would probably be the only alternative for-profit business model in a copyright-less software world. While usability would still be a concern for custom projects developed internally by large companies, those would have been a fraction of our contemporary packaged-software market, Usability therefore wouldn't have had as much investment and development as it has had under current copyright-based business models.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When you remove power from an elected government over the economy, you transfer it to the next largest players, large corporations or enterprises. This effectively places it in the hands of board of directors and executives (or a handful of owners/partners if privately owned) representing a much smaller proportion of the population (investors, if they're lucky, and the hired executives themselves if the investors are duped), and which are even more subject to cronyism than any government, with no recourse to general elections as a remedy. This is not an improvement.
Or maybe those people are more intellectually honest in examining historical evidence of what are the end results of "classical libertarian" philosophy.
Well, that all may be true, but those Randian approaches and assumptions do seem to be the ones that are most often espoused by Libertarian Party candidates, and most self-styled libertarians I've ever talked to or read from. So while you may be right about the greater diversity of liberterian voters, if you vote for the Libertarian Party expecting to get anything other than a Randian dystopia, you are deluding yourself.
That would form a large barrier to entry, on top of capital costs for prisons, limiting entry into the market. In such a market, I would expect to see merging of large players, and collusion. Because once you are down to a small number of players, if all the players collude to decrease service regardless of recidivism, then there comes a point where they all say together, we can't make a profit so we are shutting down, and the government will have to change the rules to accomodate them or face the wholesale release of hardened criminals into the population. Well, they could try to go with the Reagan air traffic controller approach: fire everyone and have the army guard the prisons while they try to find investors willing to spin up new companies to take over despite the barriers to entry and risks and knowledge that the government could pull the same move again if they can't figure out to be profitable in time. That experiment would likely be an abject failure (soldiers don't make for very good police, and even worse rehabilitators - their training isn't geared for that) and attempts to find/create replacement guarding companies would be challenging.
True, the percentage of pedophiles in the church indeed appears to be about the same as the general population. What the media coverage made clear is that the church hierarchy covered up the abuse to protect its own reputation, allowing abusers to continue abusing for decades by using what influence it had available to forestall and obstruct police investigations into abuse. In essence the church was a willing accomplice to those crimes both after the fact and (in the case of repeat offenders) before the fact. In some cases of abuse, such as happened in Native residential schools in Canada, the abuse and the church's complicity go back over a century. The sin of pride led the church that was chest-beating about homosexuality to hypocritically cover up and abet sexual and physical abuse of its youngest charges, and that cover-up tainted the highest and supposedly most sacrosanct levels. That's where the revulsion comes from.
The real problem is that the NSA has assured the USA populace that, while the NSA does vacuum up huge amounts of personal information, that information is kept safe and confidential. Snowden's actions show that in fact any such assurances by the NSA are not worth using as toilet paper. Because if Ed Snowden can uncover all that he has, you can bet that any cell phone records for the last 10 years are relatively easily available to half the law enforcement personnel in the country, including that worryingly over-controlling police officer who is dating your daughter.
Nope. It's a regression to Windows 2.0 - Windows 3.11 had overlapping windows.
And yet despite those precautions and hook checks, hang glider pilots and sometimes their passengers still die.
Not likely. Truckers that fall asleep at the wheel often cause nasty collateral damage and innocent deaths, provoking voter ire and hence legislative action. If these guys were carrying pounds of explosives that exploded when it fell with them, then you might see some political movement. But these poor slobs are the only ones who die so the Republican "Live and Let Die" attitude wins the day.
Yep. You zone out thinking about something else for 20-30 secs while waiting for the light to change. You look up to see if the light's changed yet, but look at the wrong light (because your brain is still partially occupied with what it was thinking about) and start going when you shouldn't. This is even more likely if you're at a complex intersection with multiple signals (i.e. for left advance turns).
Well, I think that if Jesus actually took over the situation, which I interpret to be a second coming, presumably performing miracles left and right while bringing the kingdom of heaven to Earth, it would be pretty difficult to claim it was the result of science. But perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by the statement praying for "Jesus to take over the situation".
So you're not currently praying its reproducible (only proposing it as an experiment) but actually are frequently praying for Jesus to take over the situation? Good, since He presumably is more likely to listen to your more frequent and fervent prayer, I'll be happy to ignore you going forward until you can reproduce your results with the latter prayer. Cheers!
Yes and no. The earth does have a very high albedo. However major contributions to that albedo come from cloud cover and polar ice caps, neither of which will be affected by solar panels on your roof.
When it comes to geothermal, yeah you're right. The extracted heat usually doesn't reach the density of hydrocarbon-thermal plants, leading to lower conversion efficiency (discussed further below). So you need more heat to produce the same amount of energy. On the other hand, some of that heat would be slowly propagating through the layers of planetary crust and radiating out anyways, so it may not be quite as bad as it seems at first glance although I don't care enough to try to work through the math.
Now there's a couple of primary ways of capturing solar power in current use: the smaller scale EV cells, and using mirror arrays to concentrate incoming light into a solar furnace to drive a heat engine. So in the first case really what you're comparing is the black solar panels against whatever you're replacing/covering. In North America your roof has a good chance of being some kind of asphalt shingle (or slate in northern Europe), with a fairly low albedo to begin with. As you head south you do have increasing chances of fired clay tiles, which admittedly provide a higher base reflectance (especially if they are glazed). Nevertheless I was surprised at how much asphalt tile you can find on roofs in Phoenix, AZ or Austin, TX, and I'll assume they aren't that unusual for the southern USA. You also have to remember that while the efficiency of EVs at converting radiation into electricity is fairly low, the conversion of heat into power by thermal plants is also limited by the efficiency of the thermodynamic cycle. So since the albedo differential is what counts, if your rooftop already has low albedo then, by reducing the need for heat production during thermal power generation, you could reduce the overall instantaneous heat production without even taking the longer term effects from the reduction of greenhouse gases like CO2.
Now in the case of a solar farm, you're going to be using a thermodynamic cycle with an efficiency that's about the same as a conventional thermal plant, so you'll be having a big net loss of heat production as long as you're substituting (and not just increasing power production and consumption). In fact your solar furnace could probably reach higher temperatures than a hydrocarbon plant, so your theoretical maximum efficiency should be higher (since the optimum efficiency bounded by the Carnot cycle is governed by the temperature differential) although you might need to use something more exotic than a steam engine to achieve that. If you can point me at a peer-reviewed paper that takes all this into account, then I'll take these claims about solar more seriously, but most of the claims of solar being worse than thermal power that I've come across so far appeared to come from the sort of industry mouthpieces and insufficiently informed "skeptics" who just a decade ago were denying industrial CO2 production was having an effect on the climate.
Maybe and maybe not. Generally the energy extracted is a small fraction of the dynamic energy in wind systems and placement is generally chosen where there is significant, frequent wind activity. Part of the claims from climate models is that higher temperatures and temperature differentials lead to more powerful storm systems, so well chosen placement of wind farms could help mitigate that. Of course if the
Don't worry, If the current melting of the arctic ice cap is any indication, we're going to get plenty of evidence and impact in the next 5 decades. It's a journey and there will be lots to see on the trip, however people just prefer to talk about the destination because it has more emotional impact for motivation.
When the change is gradual, people ignore the warning signs until their house and land is flooded and they wail "Why didn't you warn me?". So the scientists are warning of what the eventual outcome is, and people are saying "yeah, pull the other one".
Thanks for the informative response. Then it could affect the factors in the Drake equation. If the Sun is somehow more stable than most other stars, that could have an impact on the stability of the habitable zone and the ability of life to develop to sufficient complexity to develop intelligence.
Except bacon, like many processed meats, contains inorganic phosphates to enhance taste and texture, and those phosphates are probably causingbowel cancer. So excuse me if I take your advice with a grain of salt, not that sodium is that good for you either.
He doesn't have to. All he has to do is to ask you to prove its reproducible. What are you praying for now?
Maybe he remembers that before cigarettes became popular there used to be these two things called pipes and snuff. Neither of them were exempt from abuse, although snuff admittedly didn't cause lung cancer, just other nasty conditions.
Yeah! Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Oh wait...
So if they did develop a treatment based on this set of proteins, it probably wouldn't be safe for pregnant mothers. And it might even be usable off label as an abortifacient, so that would probably have the US religious right wing trying to ban it or at least make it heavily restricted?
Hmm. I do wonder how stars are "noisier". Is it at the source or due to interference from interstellar gas and the Oort Cloud? If the former, then does it have implications for the Drake equation?
and that is a sterling example of why "common sense" is sometimes so superficial as to be wrong.
It depends on whether you have a textbook that covers the same material, or only what is presented in the course. I had a number of courses where there was no textbook. To effectively transfer the information to long-term memory, you need to review, and to review it you need the material stored in some form outside your brain.
I think that we now understand enough about neuroplasticity, memorization, and learning that there should now be a mandatory first year course on optimal note taking and study patterns, with perhaps some testing available where there is some variation in learning style. In fact the latter should probably be systematically done in the first year or two of high school so that you don't have to have every high school teacher re-building that wheel with every new student they get.