Comparing the stories is very useful, though - the breathless "we found X in Y!" idea is pretty much the same - and is generally harmless in both cases. No, plastics aren't a mysterious thing that's going to kill us, or make us sick, or anything like that. So far, alarmism of this type tends to end up being The Boy Who Cried Wolf, all over again.
They found "microplastics" in about three out of four fish. Okay.
How much? It couldn't be a lot, because they were worried about contaminating the samples with microplastics from the air itself.
That means that the amounts they were looking for were literally microscopic, and very, very low in volume.
It's more a testament to the ability to find incredibly small amounts of the stuff than any indication that the amount they found was large.
This is a lot like the "we found Fukushima radiation in the ocean off the US coast" story - where the amount of cesium was unimaginably small - three ATOMS of the stuff per cubic meter...
By impeding everyone else's "bandwidth" on his bicycle, he made the point that someone should have the power to move him out of the higher-speed lanes and into a lower-priority one.
When I was a kid, I used to go to the library every week, checking out a book a day. By age 35, I had a library of over 4000 books. I read all of them. That's about 2.5 books a week, just for the ones I owned. I've slowed down a lot in my later years, only finishing two to three novels a week on the average. I've read at least 6,000 books in my lifetime, probably closer to 8,000.
I'm nowhere near the most obsessive reader I know of. I've had middle-aged friends who had libraries that literally filled houses, and they read all of those books. Forty or fifty years of reading a book (or two!) per day adds up: Fifteen thousand? Twenty?. Some of them either worked at or owned used books stores just to feed their reading habit.
Ummm... the "court order" that allowed throttling of BitTorrent was because some BitTorrent users were consuming massive amounts of bandwidth, and Comcast (rightly) argued that they had to manage their network for the 90%+ of users who weren't abusing the system. In 2008 (seven years before the Net Neutrality regulations), they had already come to a compromise with BitTorrent on that. All of the other concerns people bring up were dealt with in 2010, when the transparency rules were in place.
All of the other situations you mention were resolved pre-NN, and were either incredibly rare or very short-lived. Generally, it's usually some mid-level tech guy who comes up with a "great idea," that gets shot down as a bad one once people find out about it.
"Selling on secondary websites for $1000 a pop" is pretty misleading.
A lot of those bot-sellers are automated, and look at similar items on various websites for pricing.
So one bot sees another bot selling a $15 item for $20, and ups the price by 10% to $22. Which triggers Bot #3 to sell for $24. They get into high-speed feedback loops that push the prices up until they hit arbitrary caps (in this case, $1000). You see this with low-end electronics on Amazon from time to time: a no-name, nothing fancy cable that lists for hundreds of dollars, along with a few others that list for slightly lower prices, all because nobody from the companies involved actually looked at their active list prices.
The item doesn't actually "sell" at this price, of course... the current going rate for Fingerlings seems to be about $50. Which is the price the manufacturer charges on Amazon.
Just ship me a nice sturdy box that I can anchor to the ground or to my driveway, and the Amazon delivery person can use their code to drop the packages off in that.
The thing is, the botanists already know that despite the rainforest removal in some areas, the plants around the rest of the world have been taking up the slack.
If you want to sequester a crapload of CO2 for the long term for practically no energy investment, just plant a lot of long-lived trees and replace them as necessary.
The predictions FAILED. Read that word again. FAILED.
No, you don't get to predict something, get it wrong for a couple of decades, then pretend you got it right when a couple of big storms finally pop up in one season.
This isn't about "scatter" or "statistical flukes." This is year after year after year of failed predictions, which are not made correct by one year of slightly-worse tropical weather.
Yeah, but when the prediction in the late 1990s was "we're going to have several large, Category 4, landfalling hurricanes hit the East Coast each year due to global warming," the relative drought in them for the last decade or so is pretty embarrassing for the people trying to pretend otherwise.
There isn't an upward trend, overall. If anything, we've been seeing fewer such nasty storms than there were during the first half of the 20th century.
Slashdot Mirror
"Profit" means after expenses, not before.
They're getting somewhere between $18 and $20 an hour before expenses.
It's a hook to hang your headphone so it doesn't take up desk space.
Actually looks liker a nice product, I think I'll buy one.
Comparing the stories is very useful, though - the breathless "we found X in Y!" idea is pretty much the same - and is generally harmless in both cases. No, plastics aren't a mysterious thing that's going to kill us, or make us sick, or anything like that. So far, alarmism of this type tends to end up being The Boy Who Cried Wolf, all over again.
They examined the stomach contents of fish. Okay.
They found "microplastics" in about three out of four fish. Okay.
How much? It couldn't be a lot, because they were worried about contaminating the samples with microplastics from the air itself.
That means that the amounts they were looking for were literally microscopic, and very, very low in volume.
It's more a testament to the ability to find incredibly small amounts of the stuff than any indication that the amount they found was large.
This is a lot like the "we found Fukushima radiation in the ocean off the US coast" story - where the amount of cesium was unimaginably small - three ATOMS of the stuff per cubic meter...
He inadvertently supported the other side.
By impeding everyone else's "bandwidth" on his bicycle, he made the point that someone should have the power to move him out of the higher-speed lanes and into a lower-priority one.
Oops.
Of those three, none were invented by governments, and only two are required by law.
More to the point, the two were required for safety reasons, not for convenience.
"Global Warming Causes Sea Turtle Population Explosion"
The lesson keeps happening, but people keep failing to learn from it.
Better yet, don't make bomb threats.
He's a MIDI and electronic music guy who hand-builds his own tone sources.
He probably has several noise generators of his own already.
...and that makes them decide to charge less?
Kinda got that backwards.
If you have financial problems, you don't charge less money for something when you're already losing money on it.
"People aren't buying as many satellite dishes as we'd planned."
...a new category above "super."
When I was a kid, I used to go to the library every week, checking out a book a day. By age 35, I had a library of over 4000 books. I read all of them. That's about 2.5 books a week, just for the ones I owned. I've slowed down a lot in my later years, only finishing two to three novels a week on the average. I've read at least 6,000 books in my lifetime, probably closer to 8,000.
I'm nowhere near the most obsessive reader I know of. I've had middle-aged friends who had libraries that literally filled houses, and they read all of those books. Forty or fifty years of reading a book (or two!) per day adds up: Fifteen thousand? Twenty?. Some of them either worked at or owned used books stores just to feed their reading habit.
Ummm... the "court order" that allowed throttling of BitTorrent was because some BitTorrent users were consuming massive amounts of bandwidth, and Comcast (rightly) argued that they had to manage their network for the 90%+ of users who weren't abusing the system. In 2008 (seven years before the Net Neutrality regulations), they had already come to a compromise with BitTorrent on that. All of the other concerns people bring up were dealt with in 2010, when the transparency rules were in place.
All of the other situations you mention were resolved pre-NN, and were either incredibly rare or very short-lived. Generally, it's usually some mid-level tech guy who comes up with a "great idea," that gets shot down as a bad one once people find out about it.
We're going back to the primitive and closed Internet... ...of 2015.
Remember how horrible that was?
Apple has sold something like 25 million AppleTVs.
Odds are pretty good that a lot of those people have Amazon Prime, too.
"Selling on secondary websites for $1000 a pop" is pretty misleading.
A lot of those bot-sellers are automated, and look at similar items on various websites for pricing.
So one bot sees another bot selling a $15 item for $20, and ups the price by 10% to $22. Which triggers Bot #3 to sell for $24. They get into high-speed feedback loops that push the prices up until they hit arbitrary caps (in this case, $1000). You see this with low-end electronics on Amazon from time to time: a no-name, nothing fancy cable that lists for hundreds of dollars, along with a few others that list for slightly lower prices, all because nobody from the companies involved actually looked at their active list prices.
The item doesn't actually "sell" at this price, of course... the current going rate for Fingerlings seems to be about $50. Which is the price the manufacturer charges on Amazon.
Just ship me a nice sturdy box that I can anchor to the ground or to my driveway, and the Amazon delivery person can use their code to drop the packages off in that.
The thing is, the botanists already know that despite the rainforest removal in some areas, the plants around the rest of the world have been taking up the slack.
If you want to sequester a crapload of CO2 for the long term for practically no energy investment, just plant a lot of long-lived trees and replace them as necessary.
THREE species!
One is brown with black and red spots, while the other is brown with red and black spots.
Totally different!
The Google purchase is for the unprofitable phone part only - HTC is looking to keep the Vive part of the company, from what we've been hearing.
Wrong.
The predictions FAILED. Read that word again. FAILED.
No, you don't get to predict something, get it wrong for a couple of decades, then pretend you got it right when a couple of big storms finally pop up in one season.
This isn't about "scatter" or "statistical flukes." This is year after year after year of failed predictions, which are not made correct by one year of slightly-worse tropical weather.
Yeah, but when the prediction in the late 1990s was "we're going to have several large, Category 4, landfalling hurricanes hit the East Coast each year due to global warming," the relative drought in them for the last decade or so is pretty embarrassing for the people trying to pretend otherwise.
There isn't an upward trend, overall. If anything, we've been seeing fewer such nasty storms than there were during the first half of the 20th century.
...probably reached 200 MPH, but the instruments at Keesler AFB were blown away when Camille hit Biloxi, so they can't count "sustained wind speed."