So you want someone to create brand new technology for "the most outdated cellphones" to plug in USB and bluetooth? You want them to make the software for those outdated cellphones to communicate with that hardware also?
It would have to be pretty outdated, indeed. I have a circa-2005 Windows phone that came standard with USB, bluetooth, 802.11b, and infrared ports. I used a Bluetooth keyboard on it, and the IR could be used as a TV remote control.
Ironically, the cellphone radio blew out, so I had to buy a new phone (which does NOT have IR capabilities. And a more limited Bluetooth stack that won't talk to the keyboard). But the rest of that old phone works just fine, including the WiFi part.
"I've been looking into getting a Raspberry Pi, but I end up needing a case, a display, and some way to power it, and wanting some degree of portability. It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features (screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), battery etc) in a much better form factor. The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins? I've been looking for this and can't find any, but does anyone know of any in the corners of the internet? I don't care what phone platform."
I think this might be adaptable. Although its original intent was as an XBee interface, the catalog explicitly states it can be used for USB-to-TTL. Presumably by tapping the points where the ZBee's GPIO pins break out:
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
Who was it that said "scientific progress advances one death at a time"? A scientist, no?
I can see 5 possibilities just off the top of my head:
1. High-powered server, thin clients. Advantage: in power-unstable environments, a single UPS can handle the server and the overall power requirements might be lower. Disadvantage: single point of failure. Thin clients aren't always as cheap as they might be.
2. Cast-offs. Advantage: it's better than scrapping them. Disadvantage: depending on where they come from, you may end up with a mish-mash of unique hardware, and they probably won't be as power-efficient as newer hardware.
3. Raspberry Pi's. Advantage: Cheap, small, powerful. Disadvantage: the monitors will cost more and pull more power than the computers do. And you can't recycle old VGA monitors, you have to either have HDMI or composite video inputs.
4. OLPCs. Advantage: Designed for this sort of thing from the get-go. Disadvantage: I'm not sure how well this platform is actually faring. Unlike the Raspberry Pi, it doesn't share much of a community with the developed world.
5. Tablets. Advantage: low power, easy to store and deploy, with take-home ability. Small tablets are relatively inexpensive. Disadvantage: tablets usually work better with canned solutions than as general-purpose computers.
Galileo: I believe we should be able to examine how things work and not just depend on what systems have already been created and taught to us.
Pope: Who gives a toss what you believe! I have told you how everything works! The world is flat! I will criticise and do everything to stop you from accomplishing any of this!
Nice cartoon version. In reality, the Catholic Church back then was more willing to accept new cosmological theories than a lot of Protestant fundamentalists are in the 21st Century USA. The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
But subtleties like that are hard to make into quick cartoon history segments for the kiddies. And the end effect is still the same, so we opt for the cartoon explanation.
If internet retailers are going to be required to collect state sales tax for foreign states, it will necessarily be by federal law. California law only applies to people and businesses in California (for example). If I have a shop in Alabama and a server in Florida, California law cannot compel me to do anything at all.
So, the feds will necessarily be involved and since this is interstate commerce it actually does have a Constitutional mandate for it. If they're going to stick their noses into it, let them deal with the pain of squabbling states with crazy sales tax codes that change with the phase of the moon. Or, just stay all the way out of it and tell the states that use taxes are between them and their residents.
I see your point, but as I said, I prefer the federal meddling to be kept at a minimum myself. The feds decree that the playing field should be level, and that it's all or none as far as what states can collect taxes on non-residents. But we are the United STATES of America, and this is one of those cases where I'd be happier if we acted as such: a Union, where all States work in an equal and reciprocal basis, with neither external (federal) power nor arbitrary local (state) power being involved more than is necessary to do the job.
Read the article! It's all right there. "Cyber cafes" here are nothing more than unregulated casinos. They answer to no one, have no obligation to any sort of transparency. There places are scum that hide behind an innocent name and try to pass off taking money as charitable donations. Actual cyber cafes are unaffected.
Don't be silly, it's not proper behavior to RTFA on SlashDot before commenting!
Seriously, however, I hate sloppy-slanty reporting. If they're painting all cybercafes with the same tar brush regardless of whether they are casino cafes or not, the headline should have gone whole hog and simply claimed "Florida Legislature outlaws Cafes".
So their logic is that because something could be 'abused' (laws against Internet gambling are idiotic as well), we should ban it entirely? I guess we should ban... everything in existence!
Let's see. A STATE GOVERNMENT official is involved in a criminal operation that involves cyber-cafes. So the STATE's response is to ban the cyber-cafe's!. Yup. Makes perfect sense.
So why not have the feds collect it and deal with the 50 squabbling states? It's the only way a small internet retailer will ever be able to be certain they have collected the correct amount and submitted it to the correct place.
A latent streak of Libertarianism????
Seriously, there are lots of things that ONLY the feds can do, but this isn't one of them, and I don't see any virtue in getting them involved. Not but what they'll probably shove in a federal tax on top of the state taxes anyway.
Neither the feds nor the states actually "collect" the taxes. The merchant has to do that. The funds then have to be forwarded on to whatever authority is next in line. A clearinghouse could handle that function without the necessity of making it an essential government function.
It would be different if we simply had a national sales tax, but if the taxes are destined to go to individual states instead of the federal treasury you have to calculate a per-state rate on sales, because some states have no income tax, and use sales tax to offset that fact, whereas others have both, but the final destination of taxes collected depends on which type of tax is paid. So a national rate wouldn't be equitable either between states or even within states, compared to non-Internet sales.
Simple is Good. Too simple, however, isn't good. I'll take a reasonable compromise. One rate per state, with no exemptions would be simple to handle. I can't think of anything that truly needs to be exempt that I wouldn't buy locally. Maybe I missed something, but if so, it should be important enough to exempt nationally.
You'll need a big honkin server to fit it all, especially if you want a comprehensive list of what exactly Georgia (and several other states) considers a school supply for tax purposes and what days those special rates apply this year.
That's just the technological downside. Big honkin servers are cheap. Consider the pain of sending off tax payments to thousands, perhaps 10s of thousands of independent taxing authorities at different, changing addresses. Along with appropriate paperwork. No thanks.
If I can get by with shipping fewer, bulk payments to state tax agencies and let THEM squabble with the municipalities, that's a whole lot better.
Making merchants deal with 50 different tax codes is onerous.
I dare say that's exactly the point. Why do you think brick-and-mortars are so happy about it?
Fifty codes is nothing. I can keep 50 codes taped to the side of my server. It's all those city/county/Enterprise Zone/speciality business/foo-nonfood/tax holiday/special assessment rules that's onerous.
Followup. Got the unit in today. UPS had it hostage at the local warehouse all day yesterday or it would have arrived sooner.
One thing they don't tell you is that the Raspberry has no "bios screen". If you don't have an SD card with something executable on it, all you'll see is a power LED and a black screen.
I forgot I don't have any USB keyboards hanging around, though. Dang it.
Gates is not Darth Vader, Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. He has done - and doubtless will continue to do many very admirable things.
However, he has also done some really slimy things, both personally and via his minions at Microsoft. Hopefully no one died, but definitely some things that I don't respect him for.
In short, he's a human being. Not all saint, not all sinner. Most of us won't be able to do things on as grand a scale as he has, but we're not all that different.
That's the correct answer to any headline that ends in a question mark.
My impression at the time was that Bush and company was hellbent on railroading the country into war, and they knew how to get what they wanted, mostly by running roughshod over the concept of checks and balances. They didn't even really try very hard to convince people, it was just "he might have chemical weapons!" and "ooh, look at this render of a mobile chemical lab that he could have maybe built". It's a shame Breaking Bad had not aired yet at the time, people would have had a lot of fun with the RV comparisons. There was also the fact that we were still neck deep in Afghanistan at the time. The war with Afghanistan at least made sense, the country had been taken over by guys who were very happily sheltering the guys who had just perpetrated the biggest acts of terrorism in modern US history. They were also being huge jerks to their own people (destroying the countries heritage, oppressing women and minorities (ok, that is part of the heretic they kept), and running the place like their own private piggybank) and nobody else in the world liked them. We even had UN buy in and some (mostly token, with a couple of exceptions) NATO support. Saddam had been keeping a reasonably low profile for a long time too, it seemed really unprovoked for Bush to suddenly single him out and call for his head.
The truly sad thing here is that for some time before 9/11, even before Bush took office, Saddam Hussein had been steadily pushing at his limitations, repeatedly violating the "no-fly" zones and doing other provocative things. I consider it very likely that given enough time, Saddam would have done something sufficiently egregious that the entire world would have said "enough", formed a "Coalition of the willing" that wasn't a mere joke and ended up more or less where we are today except that the USA would have had a decent excuse for invasion and not have lost one more reason to be considered one of the Good Guys.
9/11 wasn't even the remotest excuse. Saddam hated al-quaeda as much or more as we did, but almost from the day Bush moved into the White House, they'd been muttering about going back into Iraq. 9/11 was merely the trigger that set off the stampede. It was a long, long time before you could buck the White House without being accused of hating America and being on the side of the Terrorists.
And what would you bet that a Nielsen family 'just happens' to develop more sophisticated tastes now that someone is watching...
Neilsen attempted to use me as a "Nielsen family" once. I watch TV maybe once a week, don't have cable, am more likely to view a DVD than a broadcast program, and get most of my radio off the Internet.
You REALLY don't want my opinions shaping what shows get killed.
Human-directed selection in plants, particularly decorative flowers, has lead to new types that are reproductively incompatible with their forebears, and also new types that are sterile.
To a lesser degree of separation, go to a grocery and look for pluots, plumcots, and apriums. Hybridized from plums and apricots, they aren't plums and they are obviously not apricots.
All of the preceding are members of genus prunus, if not directly inter-fertile. It would be harder to cross-breed citrus with them, because, while citrus and prunus are both rosids, their genetics are less similar. Cross-breeding them with dachsunds would require an assistant named Igor.
Sterile hybrids are an excellent example of how sometimes Survival of the Fittest doesn't merely mean not killing everything else in sight, but actually not even being able to breed on your own. As long as these species maintain their pet humans, they're likely to continue to propagate. Some of them have already outlived species who didn't require artificial propagation. Dodos, for example.
Has anyone seen mutations arise that weren't in the gene pool of an organism and seen the mutated form "take over" a population because the mutation conferred a survival advantage
I saw a documentary recently that said there are nurse sharks near the bikini atoll that are believed to have developed a mutation (missing second dorsal fin) due to exposure to radiation from nuclear testing in the late 40's, early 50's. Normally that type of mutation only affects one or two generations, but the mutation has persisted to this day. I don't think anyone has theorized an advantage yet. They didn't detect any abnormal radiation levels in the water at this time.
Not all mutations are an advantage or disadvantage. Mutations, if bound to procreative genes, can potentially persist forever. It's not like they wear out and fade away. Whether the fin gene is was originally atomically-induced, chemically triggered or set off by a passing cosmic ray doesn't matter. As long as it doesn't materially interfere with the ability of the bearer and its descendants (if any) to reproduce, it won't make any difference how many fins the shark has. That's what evolutionary "survival" is.
On the other hand, listen to a lot of people's concept of "survival of the fittest" and you'd think that the real signs of evolution would be when swallows develop ramming beaks for shattering oncoming windshields and built-in grenade launchers.
LEDs have effectively none. Then again, quite a few of my LED lights are solar-charged, so turning them off would be pure symbolism.
And bad symbolism at that. Within the symbolic context of this Earth Hour, a solar powered solution to our CO2 woes should shine the brightest.
Sometimes you have to just put up with bad symbols.
Intelligent people are more likely to understand the gesture, empty as it is. Out of the rest, some wouldn't have the wit to see the solar panels just that the lights were on, others would run around screaming that the amount of energy required to produce the solar lighting outweighs the savings. Etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
So you want someone to create brand new technology for "the most outdated cellphones" to plug in USB and bluetooth? You want them to make the software for those outdated cellphones to communicate with that hardware also?
It would have to be pretty outdated, indeed. I have a circa-2005 Windows phone that came standard with USB, bluetooth, 802.11b, and infrared ports. I used a Bluetooth keyboard on it, and the IR could be used as a TV remote control.
Ironically, the cellphone radio blew out, so I had to buy a new phone (which does NOT have IR capabilities. And a more limited Bluetooth stack that won't talk to the keyboard). But the rest of that old phone works just fine, including the WiFi part.
"I've been looking into getting a Raspberry Pi, but I end up needing a case, a display, and some way to power it, and wanting some degree of portability. It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features (screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), battery etc) in a much better form factor. The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins? I've been looking for this and can't find any, but does anyone know of any in the corners of the internet? I don't care what phone platform."
I think this might be adaptable. Although its original intent was as an XBee interface, the catalog explicitly states it can be used for USB-to-TTL. Presumably by tapping the points where the ZBee's GPIO pins break out:
http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10001_10001_2159285_-1
Your cell phone does not have an interface bus that you can use to control devices.
Mine does. Three of them. Bluetooth, WiFi, and USB.
The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
Then I submit that they were not really so willing to accept new cosmological theories.
The correct way is according to the evidence. The correct schedule is according to when advancements are made and new evidence is discovered. Anything else is unwillingness and refusal.
Who was it that said "scientific progress advances one death at a time"? A scientist, no?
I can see 5 possibilities just off the top of my head:
1. High-powered server, thin clients. Advantage: in power-unstable environments, a single UPS can handle the server and the overall power requirements might be lower. Disadvantage: single point of failure. Thin clients aren't always as cheap as they might be.
2. Cast-offs. Advantage: it's better than scrapping them. Disadvantage: depending on where they come from, you may end up with a mish-mash of unique hardware, and they probably won't be as power-efficient as newer hardware.
3. Raspberry Pi's. Advantage: Cheap, small, powerful. Disadvantage: the monitors will cost more and pull more power than the computers do. And you can't recycle old VGA monitors, you have to either have HDMI or composite video inputs.
4. OLPCs. Advantage: Designed for this sort of thing from the get-go. Disadvantage: I'm not sure how well this platform is actually faring. Unlike the Raspberry Pi, it doesn't share much of a community with the developed world.
5. Tablets. Advantage: low power, easy to store and deploy, with take-home ability. Small tablets are relatively inexpensive. Disadvantage: tablets usually work better with canned solutions than as general-purpose computers.
Galileo: I believe we should be able to examine how things work and not just depend on what systems have already been created and taught to us.
Pope: Who gives a toss what you believe! I have told you how everything works! The world is flat! I will criticise and do everything to stop you from accomplishing any of this!
Nice cartoon version. In reality, the Catholic Church back then was more willing to accept new cosmological theories than a lot of Protestant fundamentalists are in the 21st Century USA. The problem was, they wanted to accept them in their own way on their own schedule.
But subtleties like that are hard to make into quick cartoon history segments for the kiddies. And the end effect is still the same, so we opt for the cartoon explanation.
If internet retailers are going to be required to collect state sales tax for foreign states, it will necessarily be by federal law. California law only applies to people and businesses in California (for example). If I have a shop in Alabama and a server in Florida, California law cannot compel me to do anything at all.
So, the feds will necessarily be involved and since this is interstate commerce it actually does have a Constitutional mandate for it. If they're going to stick their noses into it, let them deal with the pain of squabbling states with crazy sales tax codes that change with the phase of the moon. Or, just stay all the way out of it and tell the states that use taxes are between them and their residents.
I see your point, but as I said, I prefer the federal meddling to be kept at a minimum myself. The feds decree that the playing field should be level, and that it's all or none as far as what states can collect taxes on non-residents. But we are the United STATES of America, and this is one of those cases where I'd be happier if we acted as such: a Union, where all States work in an equal and reciprocal basis, with neither external (federal) power nor arbitrary local (state) power being involved more than is necessary to do the job.
Read the article! It's all right there. "Cyber cafes" here are nothing more than unregulated casinos. They answer to no one, have no obligation to any sort of transparency. There places are scum that hide behind an innocent name and try to pass off taking money as charitable donations. Actual cyber cafes are unaffected.
Don't be silly, it's not proper behavior to RTFA on SlashDot before commenting!
Seriously, however, I hate sloppy-slanty reporting. If they're painting all cybercafes with the same tar brush regardless of whether they are casino cafes or not, the headline should have gone whole hog and simply claimed "Florida Legislature outlaws Cafes".
So their logic is that because something could be 'abused' (laws against Internet gambling are idiotic as well), we should ban it entirely? I guess we should ban... everything in existence!
Let's see. A STATE GOVERNMENT official is involved in a criminal operation that involves cyber-cafes. So the STATE's response is to ban the cyber-cafe's!. Yup. Makes perfect sense.
So why not have the feds collect it and deal with the 50 squabbling states? It's the only way a small internet retailer will ever be able to be certain they have collected the correct amount and submitted it to the correct place.
A latent streak of Libertarianism????
Seriously, there are lots of things that ONLY the feds can do, but this isn't one of them, and I don't see any virtue in getting them involved. Not but what they'll probably shove in a federal tax on top of the state taxes anyway.
Neither the feds nor the states actually "collect" the taxes. The merchant has to do that. The funds then have to be forwarded on to whatever authority is next in line. A clearinghouse could handle that function without the necessity of making it an essential government function.
It would be different if we simply had a national sales tax, but if the taxes are destined to go to individual states instead of the federal treasury you have to calculate a per-state rate on sales, because some states have no income tax, and use sales tax to offset that fact, whereas others have both, but the final destination of taxes collected depends on which type of tax is paid. So a national rate wouldn't be equitable either between states or even within states, compared to non-Internet sales.
Simple is Good. Too simple, however, isn't good. I'll take a reasonable compromise. One rate per state, with no exemptions would be simple to handle. I can't think of anything that truly needs to be exempt that I wouldn't buy locally. Maybe I missed something, but if so, it should be important enough to exempt nationally.
You'll need a big honkin server to fit it all, especially if you want a comprehensive list of what exactly Georgia (and several other states) considers a school supply for tax purposes and what days those special rates apply this year.
That's just the technological downside. Big honkin servers are cheap. Consider the pain of sending off tax payments to thousands, perhaps 10s of thousands of independent taxing authorities at different, changing addresses. Along with appropriate paperwork. No thanks.
If I can get by with shipping fewer, bulk payments to state tax agencies and let THEM squabble with the municipalities, that's a whole lot better.
The library called, you really need to return that copy of Atlas Shrugged.
WTF is an objectivist doing borrowing books from a library? Don't they realize that public libraries are SOCIALISM????
Making merchants deal with 50 different tax codes is onerous.
I dare say that's exactly the point. Why do you think brick-and-mortars are so happy about it?
Fifty codes is nothing. I can keep 50 codes taped to the side of my server. It's all those city/county/Enterprise Zone/speciality business/foo-nonfood/tax holiday/special assessment rules that's onerous.
Give me 50 codes, and I'm happy.
If you'll check a history book, you'll find the rallying cry was not "No Taxation" but rather "No Taxation Without Representation". Huge difference.
"Taxation without Representation is Tyranny" was the cry. Freedom, not freeloading.
Followup. Got the unit in today. UPS had it hostage at the local warehouse all day yesterday or it would have arrived sooner.
One thing they don't tell you is that the Raspberry has no "bios screen". If you don't have an SD card with something executable on it, all you'll see is a power LED and a black screen.
I forgot I don't have any USB keyboards hanging around, though. Dang it.
Gates is not Darth Vader, Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. He has done - and doubtless will continue to do many very admirable things.
However, he has also done some really slimy things, both personally and via his minions at Microsoft. Hopefully no one died, but definitely some things that I don't respect him for.
In short, he's a human being. Not all saint, not all sinner. Most of us won't be able to do things on as grand a scale as he has, but we're not all that different.
That's the correct answer to any headline that ends in a question mark.
My impression at the time was that Bush and company was hellbent on railroading the country into war, and they knew how to get what they wanted, mostly by running roughshod over the concept of checks and balances. They didn't even really try very hard to convince people, it was just "he might have chemical weapons!" and "ooh, look at this render of a mobile chemical lab that he could have maybe built". It's a shame Breaking Bad had not aired yet at the time, people would have had a lot of fun with the RV comparisons. There was also the fact that we were still neck deep in Afghanistan at the time. The war with Afghanistan at least made sense, the country had been taken over by guys who were very happily sheltering the guys who had just perpetrated the biggest acts of terrorism in modern US history. They were also being huge jerks to their own people (destroying the countries heritage, oppressing women and minorities (ok, that is part of the heretic they kept), and running the place like their own private piggybank) and nobody else in the world liked them. We even had UN buy in and some (mostly token, with a couple of exceptions) NATO support. Saddam had been keeping a reasonably low profile for a long time too, it seemed really unprovoked for Bush to suddenly single him out and call for his head.
The truly sad thing here is that for some time before 9/11, even before Bush took office, Saddam Hussein had been steadily pushing at his limitations, repeatedly violating the "no-fly" zones and doing other provocative things. I consider it very likely that given enough time, Saddam would have done something sufficiently egregious that the entire world would have said "enough", formed a "Coalition of the willing" that wasn't a mere joke and ended up more or less where we are today except that the USA would have had a decent excuse for invasion and not have lost one more reason to be considered one of the Good Guys.
9/11 wasn't even the remotest excuse. Saddam hated al-quaeda as much or more as we did, but almost from the day Bush moved into the White House, they'd been muttering about going back into Iraq. 9/11 was merely the trigger that set off the stampede. It was a long, long time before you could buck the White House without being accused of hating America and being on the side of the Terrorists.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
In the Red-Blue bipolar imaginary Fun World, perhaps.
In the real world, you can be both, either, or neither. Nothing requires that one be dependent on the other.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
No, señor, it's Carlos.
Mexican drug lords are often viewed as heroes because of how they bestow largess on the poor.
... the KJV Bible ... it used to take the scribes a year to make a single copy. It would also cost a centurion's annual salary.
Eh? Wasn't the KJV Bible published in 1611? There were still Roman Centurion's then? Or are ye refering to the Byzantine (East Roman Empire)?
Obligatory local fundy quote:
If the King James Bible was good enough for Moses, it's good enough for me!
And what would you bet that a Nielsen family 'just happens' to develop more sophisticated tastes now that someone is watching...
Neilsen attempted to use me as a "Nielsen family" once. I watch TV maybe once a week, don't have cable, am more likely to view a DVD than a broadcast program, and get most of my radio off the Internet.
You REALLY don't want my opinions shaping what shows get killed.
Human-directed selection in plants, particularly decorative flowers, has lead to new types that are reproductively incompatible with their forebears, and also new types that are sterile.
To a lesser degree of separation, go to a grocery and look for pluots, plumcots, and apriums. Hybridized from plums and apricots, they aren't plums and they are obviously not apricots.
All of the preceding are members of genus prunus, if not directly inter-fertile. It would be harder to cross-breed citrus with them, because, while citrus and prunus are both rosids, their genetics are less similar. Cross-breeding them with dachsunds would require an assistant named Igor.
Sterile hybrids are an excellent example of how sometimes Survival of the Fittest doesn't merely mean not killing everything else in sight, but actually not even being able to breed on your own. As long as these species maintain their pet humans, they're likely to continue to propagate. Some of them have already outlived species who didn't require artificial propagation. Dodos, for example.
Has anyone seen mutations arise that weren't in the gene pool of an organism and seen the mutated form "take over" a population because the mutation conferred a survival advantage
I saw a documentary recently that said there are nurse sharks near the bikini atoll that are believed to have developed a mutation (missing second dorsal fin) due to exposure to radiation from nuclear testing in the late 40's, early 50's. Normally that type of mutation only affects one or two generations, but the mutation has persisted to this day. I don't think anyone has theorized an advantage yet. They didn't detect any abnormal radiation levels in the water at this time.
Not all mutations are an advantage or disadvantage. Mutations, if bound to procreative genes, can potentially persist forever. It's not like they wear out and fade away. Whether the fin gene is was originally atomically-induced, chemically triggered or set off by a passing cosmic ray doesn't matter. As long as it doesn't materially interfere with the ability of the bearer and its descendants (if any) to reproduce, it won't make any difference how many fins the shark has. That's what evolutionary "survival" is.
On the other hand, listen to a lot of people's concept of "survival of the fittest" and you'd think that the real signs of evolution would be when swallows develop ramming beaks for shattering oncoming windshields and built-in grenade launchers.
Oh, and
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
Which is why you won't be offered the job.
Demand DOUBLE the price, and they'll come running.
Corporate compensation doesn't run on the same math system as the rest of us.
And bad symbolism at that. Within the symbolic context of this Earth Hour, a solar powered solution to our CO2 woes should shine the brightest.
Sometimes you have to just put up with bad symbols.
Intelligent people are more likely to understand the gesture, empty as it is. Out of the rest, some wouldn't have the wit to see the solar panels just that the lights were on, others would run around screaming that the amount of energy required to produce the solar lighting outweighs the savings. Etc. etc.