Remember that an energy technology needs to be sustainable over millions of years.
Nonsense. There is no reason that we have to use the same energy source for millions of years.
Not to mention that, as the AC pointed out, this particular source would actually be sustainable over that time frame, even without doing anything to add to the Earth's hydrogen supplies... and also not to mention that even if that weren't the case, acquiring more hydrogen from off planet is very close to already being within our capabilities... and certainly would be within them if we had cheap, effective fusion.
The troll label seems appropriate to me. In fact, I consider myself to have been trolled.
You are relating a finite amount of mass (gram) to a rate of energy production (watt). This does not work. It should take a rate of mass (grams per second) to result in some rate of energy production (joule per second, aka watt). Perhaps you meant megawatt-hours?
What the article actually says is that one gram of deuterium produces 10^12 J, which is 280 MWh. Not sure where the "320" came from.
15 minutes for what range? I think you're implicitly assuming the ICEV fueling model; drive it until it's almost empty then refuel fast, expecting to get several hundred miles more before fueling again. The dynamics of fueling EVs and ICEVs are vastly different. With EVs what matters is not how long it takes you to recharge, but what rate you can recharge.
For example on the slow charger I have at home, my LEAF charges at a rate of about 5 miles per hour. That is, every hour of charging adds about five miles of range. So charging overnight for, say, 10 hours, puts 50 miles into the battery (which is full at about 80 miles). But that doesn't mean that when I go to the garage in the morning my car has 50 miles of range. No, it almost always has a completely full battery, 80 miles of range. EVs rarely get close to empty.
A 6.6 kW level 2 charger adds about 20 miles per hour, while a level 3 charger is about 80 miles per hour (with my car). Tesla's 120 kW superchargers can push 300 miles per hour.
For long-distance trips, where you have to keep up with consumption rather than being able to rely on stored charge built up over hours parked, you need high-speed charging to avoid spending too much of your trip waiting for the charger. What matters there is the ratio of charging to discharging. For example, using the Tesla supercharger, for every hour you drive (say, 70 miles), you need to spend 14 minutes charging. So you drive for three hours and charge for 45 minutes. That's almost good enough, in fact it is just fine if you like your road trips with sit-down meals at the stops. Increase it by a factor of two and it's absolutely good enough for anyone but the most dedicated we're-not-stopping-pee-in-a-cup types.
But for normal, around-town driving the dynamic is completely different. Assuming you have a battery that's large enough to get you through a day's driving (with some spare capacity), all you really need at home is a charger that's fast enough to replenish however much you drove. Say you drive 150 miles in a day. As long as your charger at home can manage 20 miles per hour, you're good.
It gets more interesting with smaller batteries. If your battery isn't big enough to get you through a day's driving, faster charging at home probably isn't going to help you. What you need then is to be able to charge wherever it is that you're going. Unless you're a delivery driver or something, your car will spend most of its time parked one place or another, so the key is to have charging infrastructure available at those places... and it doesn't have to be fast, just fast enough to not fall too far behind your consumption (the battery capacity is the buffer that allows you to fall behind and be okay, with recharging at home, as long as you don't fall too far behind).
The key observation here is that the model is completely and utterly different from how you fuel an ICEV. When I see people asking for 15-minute charge times, its generally because they don't get this.
Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?
Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.
You wouldn't need or want this sort of rapid charging capability at home. Slow charging works just fine at home, it's when you're traveling long distances or running around town for many hours that you need fast charging.
the key point that people keep missing is that corporations - which are legally obligated to maximise profits
That supposed legal obligation doesn't always exist, and far too much is made of it even where it does. Can you show me any examples of companies being prosecuted, or even investigated, for failing to maximize their profits? It doesn't happen. And you can easily spot any number of examples of companies failing to take opportunities to maximize profits.
Drop that tired meme, it's really not true in practice, even when it's true in theory -- which isn't always the case, even for for-profit corporations.
What they're really legally obligated to do is whatever is in their corporate charter, articles of incorporation and IPO statements. Those define the expectations of investors and what's what they have to meet. In nearly all cases, generating profit is a key element of those expectations, but it's not always the primary one. But regardless, you don't see anyone getting prosecuted for failing to do that, either. The real punishment for a company that doesn't meet shareholder expectations is that the share price drops, and eventually the board ousts the management and puts in someone who will.
In none of the articles could I find evidence of the 'exodus from the app store.'
Or, for that matter, significant entry into the app store. I haven't actually gone looking by my impression from looking at Mac software I was thinking about acquiring is that most developers still just download a.dmg to you from their own site.
We were ignoring seat belt puppet show long before the FAA loosened restrictions on gadgets.
Hell, I was ignoring it before we even had gadgets to fiddle with.
I still remember one flight in the late 90's, United I think it was, SFO to Hong Kong. I was chatting with my buddy and the flight attendant stopped her presentation, walked over and chastised us for not paying attention. Seriously pissed me off. I complained to the airline and got an apology plus some certificates for free drinks on my next flight.
With regard to reasoning in a vacuum, I both agree and disagree. I definitely agree that it's a good idea to take a step back and reconsider old ways in light of new understanding. For example, I've been reading a lot lately about the history of the civil rights of blacks in the United States, the progress from outright slavery, to wink-and-nod slavery that was arguably worse, to equal-but-separate which wasn't in any way equal, to equality in principle but not practice, to the current state which is near equality in practice but with significant handicaps in the form of quiet biases, unequal starting points and unproductive cultural norms. None of that would happen without re-thinking from first principles, and it's an unquestionable good. Considerable more progress in racial equality needs to be made, and will be made only with careful analysis of the whys and wherefores of current cultural norms.
However, I disagree that it's feasible or even desirable to rethink everything, for two reasons.
The first really comes from a close friend of mine. He and I had many long discussions on this topic 15 or so years ago. He had, for several years, been attempting to forge his own path, ignoring social norms and reasoning out all of his important decisions from first principles, himself. The result of that, he decided, was intellectual exhaustion, and not a great deal of happiness. He decided that it was just too much. After largely abandoning the effort for a decade or so, accepting social norms except where he had good reason to take a different route, he's much happier. I don't think his example is an isolated case -- and I think the reason is my second reason.
The second reason is that I think reasoning from first principles will often produce suboptimal results, because we as individuals lack the wisdom and experience to reason correctly. Social norms are, in many cases, the distillation of centuries, even millenia, of experience, and that knowledge, much of which is subtle and non-obvious, isn't necessarily available to us. Granted that in some cases new technology and evolving social structures change the assumptions underlying the knowledge and invalidate it, and in those cases reasoning from first principles is the best we can do. But in the case of human emotional needs, and the value and nature of lifelong human partnerships I really don't think anything has changed, or is likely to. Dramatically-increased lifespans might change it. Or maybe not.
Looking at marriage customs in particular, I think it's very telling that every long-lasting human culture includes the concept of marriage. Moreover, while there are large differences in the details of marriage ceremonies and the social activities which surround them, what is extraordinarily consistent is the fact that there is a formal ceremony of commitment and that it's performed as a community and family event. Given the vast differences between various cultures, that commonality indicates to me that there are deep and important issues that are addressed by the ceremony and the party.
After nearly 25 years of my own marriage, I think I even know what some of them are. I think a big one is to add some friction, to make getting into and out of partnerships non-trivial. I see huge value in that because (a) there is real, important and measurable value in lasting partnerships and (b) long-term partnerships are really hard. Without some friction and some social expectations that drive people to avoid lightly dissolving such partnerships, it's far too easy to simply throw in the towel when the going gets rough... and it will get rough at some point.
Ideally, people would realize that the relationship itself is important enough that they'll weather the bad spots, but in practice when you're in such a bad spot you absolutely do not see value in the relationship. In fact the relationship seems like your biggest problem, and the idea of dumping it and getting a new -- presumably better -- one seems like the perfect so
I will never again be with someone who stays pissed at me for days because of something "I did" in her dreams
Heh. My wife has done that, except for the "days" part. But she has a few times been annoyed at me for a while for something I "did" in her dream. I think that many healthy women (and some men, but more women, in my experience) have a hard time rationalizing away emotions even though they know they're invalid.
On a more serious note, having lived for a few years with a daughter suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, I hear you. After living through the damage significant mental illness causes I would never choose to live with someone suffering from it, not unless it was very well-managed, and maybe not even then. I feel for people who have mental illness, deeply, and fully recognize that however hard it is on those around them it's a thousand times worse to be them, but you have to take care of yourself. While my daughter was a minor I had a legal and moral obligation to care for her, so she lived with us (when not in residential treatment) and we dealt with it. We're still gradually recovering. Now that she's an adult, I still feel a moral obligation, but there's legally very little I can do... and I have to admit that it's something of a relief, even though I worry about her all the time.
Well, that's how it's done around here... and I suppose I'm biased, but I think it's better, if for no reason other than it is much more fiscally sensible. The weddings I'm familiar with start the couple off with a financial boost, not a handicap.
This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid).
They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity.
Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.
Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show how ludicrous the law was. (In actual fact it turned out that it was an error on the part of the reporter who wrote the story, that in fact Google had evaluated the situation correctly and acted correctly, but hadn't been able to fully explain the decision because the explanation would have violated privacy rights of people mentioned on the page in question.)
The summary quotes the article's own summary, but the headline and intro cause it to be misleading.
The article doesn't claim that "correct horse battery staple" is wrong, as in a bad way to choose a high-entropy password. It is a good way to choose a high-entropy password. The article argues (quite accurately) instead that users should not be choosing passwords at all because they will choose weak ones, even if you give them a fairly good heuristic (like the one from XKCD), or try to help them estimate the strength of their passwords, etc. Instead it suggests that we really should try to get rid of passwords entirely, and where that isn't possible we should encourage people to use truly random, non-memorable passwords and put them in password managers, essentially reducing all of their passwords to one: the password that opens their password manager.
But the rest of us like having the dirt cleaned up sometimes, even if it never gets rid of all the dirt.
The same thing applies to Forget Me requests.
The point is that it will be manipulated to throw out some heirlooms along with the dirt.
In this case they're heirlooms that someone doesn't like and wants gone, but they're also objects of value to the rest. No, the analogy doesn't work all that well, but it's your (lousy) analogy.
Note that your wedding wasn't really cheap, you just spread out your costs through expected reciprocal obligations.
Obviously. Ignoring the tithing issue (since that really isn't relevant to getting married), I have reciprocal obligations to my community and family. My brother-in-law is getting married next week, and he and his husband-to-be have asked me to be their photographer (I'm not a pro, but I don't suck). I've helped out in various ways with many other weddings, and I end up giving several wedding gifts every year. It seems to average about one a month, actually... I just looked in my financial software and I've averaged just under $1,000 per year in wedding gifts over the past several years.
I have no doubt that I have already put more into others' weddings than I got out of my own (financially speaking), and I'll give far more yet, but that's not only okay, it's fantastic, because I received when I was young and poor and needed help to set up a new house and I'm giving now that I'm old and established and have disposable income to gift.
If this thing works (and that's obviously a big if), then I'd suspect Rossi discovered this mostly by accident, and that he has no precise idea himself of how it actually produces energy.
Sure. That's possible. It's just highly unusual, and unlikely. Unlikely things do happen, though. Time will tell.
There are lots of correlated variables here, so it's difficult to pick out useful information.
The comment thread on the article includes lots of discussion about the impossibility of a wedding that is both cheap and large, but lots of people pointing out that weddings with lots of church and/or community support can be both cheap and large. But church and/or community support are also correlated with other elements of a very stable social structure.
For example, my wedding was both large (> 600 people attended our reception) and cheap (< $3000). How is that possible? We're Mormon, so the actual marriage ceremony was at the LDS temple, which is free, and allows limited attendance. Then we had a wedding breakfast for the ~50 people who attended the ceremony, but the breakfast was at the church (free) and the food was cooked and served by members of our congregation (ingredients cost: low; labor: free). The reception was at the church (free); the bridesmaids paid for their own dresses, best man rented his tux, etc.; the flowers were a wedding gift from a cousin with a flower shop; the table centerpieces and other decorations were handmade by friends and relatives, so we only paid for the materials (cheap); the cake was made by my aunt, who had a wedding business on the side, and cost us $200 for a large, beautiful and tasty cake; my aunt also provided backdrops and other decorations; and some other relatives who are professional photographers did the photos. I don't recall who did the music, but it was all free, using the church's sound equipment. Our biggest expense was the hors d'oeuvres which were actually made by my wife's sisters, so we paid only for the ingredients.
The common thread throughout that list is heavy support from friends, family and community. But I suspect that deep family and church/community support are strongly correlated with long-lasting marriages for lots of reasons which have nothing to do with the wedding day, which to me suggests that those are far more relevant and that wedding cost and attendance are mere proxies for those variables. Also related is the fact that if a lot of people attend, you also get a lot of gifts. So big/cheap weddings are financially beneficial to the couple (mine sure was; spontaneous cash gifts alone -- from the "money tree" -- were more than 2X what we spent, plus all of the gifts of housewares, etc.), while small/expensive weddings are a net drain on their finances.
Similarly, long-term dating tends to be more uncommon among those who get married very young, because it takes time to date someone for 2-3 years, and it's well-known that marriages of the very young are riskier.
Elopement is another one: Those who elope are generally people who decide to get married on the spur of the moment. Such impulsiveness doesn't bode well for future decisions if your goal is long-term stability.
It would be interesting to see a study on this done well, with lots of effort put into teasing apart the correlated variables. This one doesn't actually tell us much.
Most innovations come from people who think differently than the mass.
No, they don't. Most innovations come from people who think farther than the mass. There is an enormous difference between that and what you said.
I would say wait until it is proven to be a fraud before declaring the would be inventor guilty.
I'm not advocating throwing him in jail. I'm advocating testing his device. Really testing it, not the arms-length black box testing that has been done so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Why couldn't they have hit the sweet spot - 5", 1080p, and focused on camera quality & battery life?
Google doesn't understand what I want in hardware.
FTFY.
I've been driving a Nissan LEAF for three years.
Remember that an energy technology needs to be sustainable over millions of years.
Nonsense. There is no reason that we have to use the same energy source for millions of years.
Not to mention that, as the AC pointed out, this particular source would actually be sustainable over that time frame, even without doing anything to add to the Earth's hydrogen supplies... and also not to mention that even if that weren't the case, acquiring more hydrogen from off planet is very close to already being within our capabilities... and certainly would be within them if we had cheap, effective fusion.
The troll label seems appropriate to me. In fact, I consider myself to have been trolled.
You are relating a finite amount of mass (gram) to a rate of energy production (watt). This does not work. It should take a rate of mass (grams per second) to result in some rate of energy production (joule per second, aka watt). Perhaps you meant megawatt-hours?
What the article actually says is that one gram of deuterium produces 10^12 J, which is 280 MWh. Not sure where the "320" came from.
15 minutes for what range? I think you're implicitly assuming the ICEV fueling model; drive it until it's almost empty then refuel fast, expecting to get several hundred miles more before fueling again. The dynamics of fueling EVs and ICEVs are vastly different. With EVs what matters is not how long it takes you to recharge, but what rate you can recharge.
For example on the slow charger I have at home, my LEAF charges at a rate of about 5 miles per hour. That is, every hour of charging adds about five miles of range. So charging overnight for, say, 10 hours, puts 50 miles into the battery (which is full at about 80 miles). But that doesn't mean that when I go to the garage in the morning my car has 50 miles of range. No, it almost always has a completely full battery, 80 miles of range. EVs rarely get close to empty.
A 6.6 kW level 2 charger adds about 20 miles per hour, while a level 3 charger is about 80 miles per hour (with my car). Tesla's 120 kW superchargers can push 300 miles per hour.
For long-distance trips, where you have to keep up with consumption rather than being able to rely on stored charge built up over hours parked, you need high-speed charging to avoid spending too much of your trip waiting for the charger. What matters there is the ratio of charging to discharging. For example, using the Tesla supercharger, for every hour you drive (say, 70 miles), you need to spend 14 minutes charging. So you drive for three hours and charge for 45 minutes. That's almost good enough, in fact it is just fine if you like your road trips with sit-down meals at the stops. Increase it by a factor of two and it's absolutely good enough for anyone but the most dedicated we're-not-stopping-pee-in-a-cup types.
But for normal, around-town driving the dynamic is completely different. Assuming you have a battery that's large enough to get you through a day's driving (with some spare capacity), all you really need at home is a charger that's fast enough to replenish however much you drove. Say you drive 150 miles in a day. As long as your charger at home can manage 20 miles per hour, you're good.
It gets more interesting with smaller batteries. If your battery isn't big enough to get you through a day's driving, faster charging at home probably isn't going to help you. What you need then is to be able to charge wherever it is that you're going. Unless you're a delivery driver or something, your car will spend most of its time parked one place or another, so the key is to have charging infrastructure available at those places... and it doesn't have to be fast, just fast enough to not fall too far behind your consumption (the battery capacity is the buffer that allows you to fall behind and be okay, with recharging at home, as long as you don't fall too far behind).
The key observation here is that the model is completely and utterly different from how you fuel an ICEV. When I see people asking for 15-minute charge times, its generally because they don't get this.
Drives hundreds of miles, stops home for a few minutes and drives hundreds of miles more?
Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?
Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.
You wouldn't need or want this sort of rapid charging capability at home. Slow charging works just fine at home, it's when you're traveling long distances or running around town for many hours that you need fast charging.
the key point that people keep missing is that corporations - which are legally obligated to maximise profits
That supposed legal obligation doesn't always exist, and far too much is made of it even where it does. Can you show me any examples of companies being prosecuted, or even investigated, for failing to maximize their profits? It doesn't happen. And you can easily spot any number of examples of companies failing to take opportunities to maximize profits.
Drop that tired meme, it's really not true in practice, even when it's true in theory -- which isn't always the case, even for for-profit corporations.
What they're really legally obligated to do is whatever is in their corporate charter, articles of incorporation and IPO statements. Those define the expectations of investors and what's what they have to meet. In nearly all cases, generating profit is a key element of those expectations, but it's not always the primary one. But regardless, you don't see anyone getting prosecuted for failing to do that, either. The real punishment for a company that doesn't meet shareholder expectations is that the share price drops, and eventually the board ousts the management and puts in someone who will.
In none of the articles could I find evidence of the 'exodus from the app store.'
Or, for that matter, significant entry into the app store. I haven't actually gone looking by my impression from looking at Mac software I was thinking about acquiring is that most developers still just download a .dmg to you from their own site.
We were ignoring seat belt puppet show long before the FAA loosened restrictions on gadgets.
Hell, I was ignoring it before we even had gadgets to fiddle with.
I still remember one flight in the late 90's, United I think it was, SFO to Hong Kong. I was chatting with my buddy and the flight attendant stopped her presentation, walked over and chastised us for not paying attention. Seriously pissed me off. I complained to the airline and got an apology plus some certificates for free drinks on my next flight.
FOSS is supposed to be an alternative to stuff put out by big companies
Cite?
With regard to reasoning in a vacuum, I both agree and disagree. I definitely agree that it's a good idea to take a step back and reconsider old ways in light of new understanding. For example, I've been reading a lot lately about the history of the civil rights of blacks in the United States, the progress from outright slavery, to wink-and-nod slavery that was arguably worse, to equal-but-separate which wasn't in any way equal, to equality in principle but not practice, to the current state which is near equality in practice but with significant handicaps in the form of quiet biases, unequal starting points and unproductive cultural norms. None of that would happen without re-thinking from first principles, and it's an unquestionable good. Considerable more progress in racial equality needs to be made, and will be made only with careful analysis of the whys and wherefores of current cultural norms.
However, I disagree that it's feasible or even desirable to rethink everything, for two reasons.
The first really comes from a close friend of mine. He and I had many long discussions on this topic 15 or so years ago. He had, for several years, been attempting to forge his own path, ignoring social norms and reasoning out all of his important decisions from first principles, himself. The result of that, he decided, was intellectual exhaustion, and not a great deal of happiness. He decided that it was just too much. After largely abandoning the effort for a decade or so, accepting social norms except where he had good reason to take a different route, he's much happier. I don't think his example is an isolated case -- and I think the reason is my second reason.
The second reason is that I think reasoning from first principles will often produce suboptimal results, because we as individuals lack the wisdom and experience to reason correctly. Social norms are, in many cases, the distillation of centuries, even millenia, of experience, and that knowledge, much of which is subtle and non-obvious, isn't necessarily available to us. Granted that in some cases new technology and evolving social structures change the assumptions underlying the knowledge and invalidate it, and in those cases reasoning from first principles is the best we can do. But in the case of human emotional needs, and the value and nature of lifelong human partnerships I really don't think anything has changed, or is likely to. Dramatically-increased lifespans might change it. Or maybe not.
Looking at marriage customs in particular, I think it's very telling that every long-lasting human culture includes the concept of marriage. Moreover, while there are large differences in the details of marriage ceremonies and the social activities which surround them, what is extraordinarily consistent is the fact that there is a formal ceremony of commitment and that it's performed as a community and family event. Given the vast differences between various cultures, that commonality indicates to me that there are deep and important issues that are addressed by the ceremony and the party.
After nearly 25 years of my own marriage, I think I even know what some of them are. I think a big one is to add some friction, to make getting into and out of partnerships non-trivial. I see huge value in that because (a) there is real, important and measurable value in lasting partnerships and (b) long-term partnerships are really hard. Without some friction and some social expectations that drive people to avoid lightly dissolving such partnerships, it's far too easy to simply throw in the towel when the going gets rough... and it will get rough at some point.
Ideally, people would realize that the relationship itself is important enough that they'll weather the bad spots, but in practice when you're in such a bad spot you absolutely do not see value in the relationship. In fact the relationship seems like your biggest problem, and the idea of dumping it and getting a new -- presumably better -- one seems like the perfect so
Yep, that's a European attitude :-)
I prefer to keep government out of such transactions.
I will never again be with someone who stays pissed at me for days because of something "I did" in her dreams
Heh. My wife has done that, except for the "days" part. But she has a few times been annoyed at me for a while for something I "did" in her dream. I think that many healthy women (and some men, but more women, in my experience) have a hard time rationalizing away emotions even though they know they're invalid.
On a more serious note, having lived for a few years with a daughter suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, I hear you. After living through the damage significant mental illness causes I would never choose to live with someone suffering from it, not unless it was very well-managed, and maybe not even then. I feel for people who have mental illness, deeply, and fully recognize that however hard it is on those around them it's a thousand times worse to be them, but you have to take care of yourself. While my daughter was a minor I had a legal and moral obligation to care for her, so she lived with us (when not in residential treatment) and we dealt with it. We're still gradually recovering. Now that she's an adult, I still feel a moral obligation, but there's legally very little I can do... and I have to admit that it's something of a relief, even though I worry about her all the time.
Choosing to take that on? Hell no.
I doubt that has anything to do with it, actually, since very little of what I post has any relationship to religion whatsoever.
Me too. Dry weddings probably create fewer problems with the groom/bride hitting on the bridesmaids/best man :-)
Well, that's how it's done around here... and I suppose I'm biased, but I think it's better, if for no reason other than it is much more fiscally sensible. The weddings I'm familiar with start the couple off with a financial boost, not a handicap.
This. If they're bound by law to remove results upon request, then they should remove them (assuming the request itself is valid). They shouldn't be deciding which requests to approve or not beyond a technical / common sense capacity.
Umm, the court ordered them to decide which requests to remove, based on the vague criteria mentioned in the summary. And they're legally obligated to get it right, too.
Did you miss the big hullabaloo shortly after this went into effect, when Google was accused of removing stuff that didn't meet the criteria defined by the court? The allegation was that Google was intentionally doing exactly what you said they should -- in violation of the order -- and removing everything requested, in an attempt to show how ludicrous the law was. (In actual fact it turned out that it was an error on the part of the reporter who wrote the story, that in fact Google had evaluated the situation correctly and acted correctly, but hadn't been able to fully explain the decision because the explanation would have violated privacy rights of people mentioned on the page in question.)
The summary quotes the article's own summary, but the headline and intro cause it to be misleading.
The article doesn't claim that "correct horse battery staple" is wrong, as in a bad way to choose a high-entropy password. It is a good way to choose a high-entropy password. The article argues (quite accurately) instead that users should not be choosing passwords at all because they will choose weak ones, even if you give them a fairly good heuristic (like the one from XKCD), or try to help them estimate the strength of their passwords, etc. Instead it suggests that we really should try to get rid of passwords entirely, and where that isn't possible we should encourage people to use truly random, non-memorable passwords and put them in password managers, essentially reducing all of their passwords to one: the password that opens their password manager.
But the rest of us like having the dirt cleaned up sometimes, even if it never gets rid of all the dirt.
The same thing applies to Forget Me requests.
The point is that it will be manipulated to throw out some heirlooms along with the dirt.
In this case they're heirlooms that someone doesn't like and wants gone, but they're also objects of value to the rest. No, the analogy doesn't work all that well, but it's your (lousy) analogy.
Note that your wedding wasn't really cheap, you just spread out your costs through expected reciprocal obligations.
Obviously. Ignoring the tithing issue (since that really isn't relevant to getting married), I have reciprocal obligations to my community and family. My brother-in-law is getting married next week, and he and his husband-to-be have asked me to be their photographer (I'm not a pro, but I don't suck). I've helped out in various ways with many other weddings, and I end up giving several wedding gifts every year. It seems to average about one a month, actually... I just looked in my financial software and I've averaged just under $1,000 per year in wedding gifts over the past several years.
I have no doubt that I have already put more into others' weddings than I got out of my own (financially speaking), and I'll give far more yet, but that's not only okay, it's fantastic, because I received when I was young and poor and needed help to set up a new house and I'm giving now that I'm old and established and have disposable income to gift.
She must have been beaming.
She wasn't the only one :-)
If this thing works (and that's obviously a big if), then I'd suspect Rossi discovered this mostly by accident, and that he has no precise idea himself of how it actually produces energy.
Sure. That's possible. It's just highly unusual, and unlikely. Unlikely things do happen, though. Time will tell.
There are lots of correlated variables here, so it's difficult to pick out useful information.
The comment thread on the article includes lots of discussion about the impossibility of a wedding that is both cheap and large, but lots of people pointing out that weddings with lots of church and/or community support can be both cheap and large. But church and/or community support are also correlated with other elements of a very stable social structure.
For example, my wedding was both large (> 600 people attended our reception) and cheap (< $3000). How is that possible? We're Mormon, so the actual marriage ceremony was at the LDS temple, which is free, and allows limited attendance. Then we had a wedding breakfast for the ~50 people who attended the ceremony, but the breakfast was at the church (free) and the food was cooked and served by members of our congregation (ingredients cost: low; labor: free). The reception was at the church (free); the bridesmaids paid for their own dresses, best man rented his tux, etc.; the flowers were a wedding gift from a cousin with a flower shop; the table centerpieces and other decorations were handmade by friends and relatives, so we only paid for the materials (cheap); the cake was made by my aunt, who had a wedding business on the side, and cost us $200 for a large, beautiful and tasty cake; my aunt also provided backdrops and other decorations; and some other relatives who are professional photographers did the photos. I don't recall who did the music, but it was all free, using the church's sound equipment. Our biggest expense was the hors d'oeuvres which were actually made by my wife's sisters, so we paid only for the ingredients.
The common thread throughout that list is heavy support from friends, family and community. But I suspect that deep family and church/community support are strongly correlated with long-lasting marriages for lots of reasons which have nothing to do with the wedding day, which to me suggests that those are far more relevant and that wedding cost and attendance are mere proxies for those variables. Also related is the fact that if a lot of people attend, you also get a lot of gifts. So big/cheap weddings are financially beneficial to the couple (mine sure was; spontaneous cash gifts alone -- from the "money tree" -- were more than 2X what we spent, plus all of the gifts of housewares, etc.), while small/expensive weddings are a net drain on their finances.
Similarly, long-term dating tends to be more uncommon among those who get married very young, because it takes time to date someone for 2-3 years, and it's well-known that marriages of the very young are riskier.
Elopement is another one: Those who elope are generally people who decide to get married on the spur of the moment. Such impulsiveness doesn't bode well for future decisions if your goal is long-term stability.
It would be interesting to see a study on this done well, with lots of effort put into teasing apart the correlated variables. This one doesn't actually tell us much.
Most innovations come from people who think differently than the mass.
No, they don't. Most innovations come from people who think farther than the mass. There is an enormous difference between that and what you said.
I would say wait until it is proven to be a fraud before declaring the would be inventor guilty.
I'm not advocating throwing him in jail. I'm advocating testing his device. Really testing it, not the arms-length black box testing that has been done so far.