I don't see any important distinction between not knowing how to read and not being able to read (even though, in some abstract sense, the process is understood).
I still fail to understand why you would participate in a transaction that you did not think was fair.
(there is room to argue that it wasn't clear exactly how far Amazon would go in utilizing the DRM on the ebooks they sell, but you were pretty inclusive in your phrasing (so I commented as if you were talking about all media with DRM), and 'it might not work in the future' is a risk that comes with any DRMed media, it isn't wildly insane to expect people to understand that, especially at this point where there have been several instances of license servers getting shut down)
What? If you don't use petroleum derived fertilizer or power and pull your CO2 out of the atmosphere, burning the fuel and putting CO2 back in the atmosphere is pretty much carbon neutral.
Perhaps that is what you meant, but you went off on this tangent about hydrogen.
It isn't that loony, the amount of energy that can be gathered in a day varies with latitude, season and weather, stating the average energy that can be utilized at a location is a lot more interesting than stating some instantaneous power figure for a sunny day during the summer.
O.k., so that just picks petroleum derived gasoline as the loser.
I don't really see any need to do that. I am comfortable with the notion that alternative fuels that can be produced at sufficient scale will be developed regardless of government intervention.
Yeah so? It doesn't screw up engines with suitable parts; if I had a $25,000 boat (I think that is probably cheap for something deserving the description 'nautical'), I'd probably pay attention to what was in the fuel I was putting into it.
There are tunable non-biological processes that can produce a wide range of fuels from cellulose, including gasoline, I would guess that much of the industrialization will focus on producing gasoline instead of ethanol (or maybe something like butanol, which is a simpler molecule than gasoline, but a much better gasoline replacement than ethanol), unless there is some major difference in efficiency or whatever.
As long as non-sugar feedstocks are used, there is plenty of land.
If you are talking about building bioreactors for algae, you can do it wherever you can get suitable water, you don't need to worry about the quality of the soil.
I'm not really that worried about it, there appear to be multiple technologies that will be quite viable at the equivalent of $100 per barrel (which isn't fantastic as a consumer, but it is plenty manageable for me). Given the way corn ethanol went last year (and I'm talking about the huge over-investment in infrastructure, not the apparent impact on food prices), I'm not real excited about the government picking winners.
Three Mile Island demonstrated that the safety systems in place were effective. That doesn't rule out learning from the incident, but it was not a catastrophe, it was a successful containment.
And it would be uneconomic with the $25 oil that we had at the beginning of this year.
Any technology that can put a significant amount of fuel onto the market (say 5 or 10 percent of the current market) needs to be able to compete with prices below what oil is currently trading at before it will attract significant capital.
It depends a lot on how strong an influence genetics has on looks and intelligence.
Nutrition and culture could be much more important (alcohol and whatnot during pregnancy can affect both looks and intelligence for the baby, and the consumption of such things during pregnancy is pretty cultural (i.e., less and less people look past it)).
I wouldn't be terribly shocked if people had a strong tendency to breed near their own IQ (or whatever, I'm pretty sure there is variation in intelligence and don't feel like arguing about whether it is measurable), so I would imagine that whatever influence genetics have on intelligence would tend to concentrate over time. The genetic factors playing into intelligence could be quite small, we don't really know, and it could be that the genetic effect is much smaller than cultural effects, and is thus very hard to measure (someone who believes in the infectious model of disease is going to do better than someone who believes in possession by evil spirits, and so forth).
That doesn't exclude genetic factors from having an influence (the 'standard' can easily have parts that are stable and parts that are unstable; things like symmetrical features and not going bald are probably pretty stable).
I think he would argue that the government should ignore a pharmaceutical company that refuses to release its data into the public domain. The FDA can require such a step during the approval process for a new drug.
That doesn't help with the compounds that the company tests and decides are crap, but it helps with compounds that they want people to use as medicines.
So the point isn't that the government should using its power to crush copyright, but that scientists should be ostracizing people and institutions who insist on keeping the basis of their results private.
Canvas will probably see more use for interactive stuff, but I don't think vector graphics programs are going to start storing images as a series of javascript instructions.
I can't write cursive, I probably forgot sometime in high school (10+ years ago), but I can still write half a page of text by printing, with no discomfort, and reasonable speed (It might be better to say I abandoned trying to have muscle memory of cursive, I can still force it out if I concentrate).
Do you really mean to imply that (rapidly...) hand writing several pages of text is a valuable basic skill?
There are several different energy gathering systems that we know how to operate in an energy positive manner (i.e., the energy output could be used to create an identical system+energy). This makes the complete consumption scenario rather unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any important distinction between not knowing how to read and not being able to read (even though, in some abstract sense, the process is understood).
I still fail to understand why you would participate in a transaction that you did not think was fair.
(there is room to argue that it wasn't clear exactly how far Amazon would go in utilizing the DRM on the ebooks they sell, but you were pretty inclusive in your phrasing (so I commented as if you were talking about all media with DRM), and 'it might not work in the future' is a risk that comes with any DRMed media, it isn't wildly insane to expect people to understand that, especially at this point where there have been several instances of license servers getting shut down)
Well, illiteracy is hilarious.
Or something.
What? If you don't use petroleum derived fertilizer or power and pull your CO2 out of the atmosphere, burning the fuel and putting CO2 back in the atmosphere is pretty much carbon neutral.
Perhaps that is what you meant, but you went off on this tangent about hydrogen.
The U.S. government makes more in taxes on each gallon of gasoline than any of the oil companies do.
It isn't that loony, the amount of energy that can be gathered in a day varies with latitude, season and weather, stating the average energy that can be utilized at a location is a lot more interesting than stating some instantaneous power figure for a sunny day during the summer.
Well, I'm sure it would make for an interesting chair.
O.k., so that just picks petroleum derived gasoline as the loser.
I don't really see any need to do that. I am comfortable with the notion that alternative fuels that can be produced at sufficient scale will be developed regardless of government intervention.
Yeah so? It doesn't screw up engines with suitable parts; if I had a $25,000 boat (I think that is probably cheap for something deserving the description 'nautical'), I'd probably pay attention to what was in the fuel I was putting into it.
There are tunable non-biological processes that can produce a wide range of fuels from cellulose, including gasoline, I would guess that much of the industrialization will focus on producing gasoline instead of ethanol (or maybe something like butanol, which is a simpler molecule than gasoline, but a much better gasoline replacement than ethanol), unless there is some major difference in efficiency or whatever.
As long as non-sugar feedstocks are used, there is plenty of land.
If you are talking about building bioreactors for algae, you can do it wherever you can get suitable water, you don't need to worry about the quality of the soil.
I'm not really that worried about it, there appear to be multiple technologies that will be quite viable at the equivalent of $100 per barrel (which isn't fantastic as a consumer, but it is plenty manageable for me). Given the way corn ethanol went last year (and I'm talking about the huge over-investment in infrastructure, not the apparent impact on food prices), I'm not real excited about the government picking winners.
Size of Arizona = 72 million acres.
There is an article in Scientific American that estimates cellulose feedstocks could provide up to half of the liquid fuels used in the United States:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grassoline-biofuels-beyond-corn
And that is without building millions of acres of bioreactors.
Three Mile Island demonstrated that the safety systems in place were effective. That doesn't rule out learning from the incident, but it was not a catastrophe, it was a successful containment.
And it would be uneconomic with the $25 oil that we had at the beginning of this year.
Any technology that can put a significant amount of fuel onto the market (say 5 or 10 percent of the current market) needs to be able to compete with prices below what oil is currently trading at before it will attract significant capital.
It depends a lot on how strong an influence genetics has on looks and intelligence.
Nutrition and culture could be much more important (alcohol and whatnot during pregnancy can affect both looks and intelligence for the baby, and the consumption of such things during pregnancy is pretty cultural (i.e., less and less people look past it)).
Something odd is going on, most of the early comments got modded troll.
Anyone else notice that the first 10 or 15 comments to this story all got 'troll' mods, regardless of content? Weird.
I wouldn't be terribly shocked if people had a strong tendency to breed near their own IQ (or whatever, I'm pretty sure there is variation in intelligence and don't feel like arguing about whether it is measurable), so I would imagine that whatever influence genetics have on intelligence would tend to concentrate over time. The genetic factors playing into intelligence could be quite small, we don't really know, and it could be that the genetic effect is much smaller than cultural effects, and is thus very hard to measure (someone who believes in the infectious model of disease is going to do better than someone who believes in possession by evil spirits, and so forth).
That doesn't exclude genetic factors from having an influence (the 'standard' can easily have parts that are stable and parts that are unstable; things like symmetrical features and not going bald are probably pretty stable).
If you didn't think it was fair, you should have kept your wallet closed.
'market value' is set by transactions, full stop.
I think he would argue that the government should ignore a pharmaceutical company that refuses to release its data into the public domain. The FDA can require such a step during the approval process for a new drug.
That doesn't help with the compounds that the company tests and decides are crap, but it helps with compounds that they want people to use as medicines.
So the point isn't that the government should using its power to crush copyright, but that scientists should be ostracizing people and institutions who insist on keeping the basis of their results private.
Most people would like to ignore moral codes that they don't agree with.
Just sayin'.
Canvas will probably see more use for interactive stuff, but I don't think vector graphics programs are going to start storing images as a series of javascript instructions.
I can't write cursive, I probably forgot sometime in high school (10+ years ago), but I can still write half a page of text by printing, with no discomfort, and reasonable speed (It might be better to say I abandoned trying to have muscle memory of cursive, I can still force it out if I concentrate).
Do you really mean to imply that (rapidly...) hand writing several pages of text is a valuable basic skill?
There are several different energy gathering systems that we know how to operate in an energy positive manner (i.e., the energy output could be used to create an identical system+energy). This makes the complete consumption scenario rather unlikely.