Do even Google have this kind of cash? It's a very big bet for a company to make- if this goes wrong they could sink the whole Google ship.
I imagine that RF spectrum is an asset that they could liquidate very easily if needed. It's not going to get any less valuable while they're holding onto it, and as long as they don't overpay, it very well may appreciate in value.
what took an entire universy research department, with all the pcr machines, southern blots, grad students, etc. 10 years ago, will 10 years from now be on the workbench of high school students
I don't know. Is there any huge reason FOR High School students to be practicing this stuff?
PCR is surprisingly easy to do (albeit sloppily). Looking back, my high school probably had most of the necessary equipment. However, I can't really think of the educational value of performing a PCR reaction, given that although the mechanisms may be somewhat complex, the end result is more or less analogous to a photocopier.
Practical hands-on work is important for science education, but there's no reason why things need to be kicked up a notch in this case. I did a few labs on gel electrophoresis in HS, and that did a fantastic job of explaining the mechanics of DNA matching.
The old fashioned chemistry and biology labs taught in High School are more or less going to be just as valid and applicable as they are now for the foreseeable future.
Speaking as a Navy veteran, I hardly think that the military is a good way of putting yourself through university.
Unless you're gay, or you object to participating in a war of aggression.
University loans are shackles. Look at students in countries where there isn't a tradition of taking out enormous loans. Once they graduate, they can travel the world for a few years if they want, or work limited hours at part-time jobs and spend more time entertaining at home.old and grey.
Amen. NYU costs $50,000+ per year, which should give you a pretty good idea of its demographics. If you're going to NYU, but don't have somebody else to pay for it, you're fucking insane.
State universities aren't a terribly bad value, but in the US you either need to live in a state with a good university system, or not want to leave the state you were raised in. Both applied to me -- I wanted to get the heck out of New Jersey, and none of our state universities were particularly well-suited for what I wanted to study. I don't have any firm figures, but I believe that NJ exports more college students than it retains.
If there's one thing the US needs to do with regards to education, it's to nationalize the private universities, and make them affordable for anybody who wants an education. Jimmy Carter was the last US president to have studied at a public university, which is absolutely appalling.
People can have all sorts of reasons for being moderates. Considering that elections are NOT consistently won by the same party every time around, it's fair to say that a rather significant portion of Americans are moderates.
Different times call for different strategies. The priorities of the nation change. The parties themselves change -- the Democrats are now championing many of the ideas the Republicans originally espoused regarding small government. I'd say that you'd be an outright idiot to vote for the same party year after year.
I lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I want the government to be as small as possible, but still provide adequate social services to its citizens in areas where it's necessary such as education and healthcare. Perhaps you could think of it as trimming the fat.
I'd hypothetically support a candidate like Ron Paul so that we could abolish unnecessary and outdated federal agencies. However, I'd be in support of later re-establishing similar agencies in a manner that is more efficient and suited to today's society. The IRS is a fantastic example, as the US tax code has become so convoluted and enormous that it requires a gigantic federal agency to make sense of it, not to mention the huge portion of the financial industry that's devoted to explaining this tax code to "normal people". A simplified (not necessarily flat) tax code would reduce a vast portion of the overhead associated with the IRS, would close loopholes exploited by the wealthy, and just might make people despise the government a tiny bit less.
Tangent: Now I'll note that I don't support Ron Paul, because he'd allow states to establish their own agencies in areas where the federal government would no longer have oversight under his idealistic plan. After spending the majority of my life in New Jersey, I can safely say that this would be a catastrophe at best. If there's one thing (actually 50) more corrupt and less efficient than the Federal Government, it's state government.
I could also point to the vast number of state governments that would have banned the teaching of evolution if they had their way. Many more have passed marriage amendments aimed at restricting the rights of same-sex couples, but also have a number of nasty side-effects such as also restricting the rights of single parents, or unmarried couples with children. If you want to make some conservative Virginians piping mad, explain to them how their marriage amendment encourages abortion. Then ask if they read the damn thing before voting on it. (Do not attempt above if said Virginian might be carrying a gun. This is a state where it's legal to carry a concealed firearm into a school board meeting -- no, I'm not making this up). End tangent.
What the GP poster was pointing out is that by virtually any accepted political ideology in the US, George Bush has failed on all accounts. He's accomplished none of his conservative social agenda, has vastly increased the size of the government as well as push the national debt to new highs. Free-market capitalism is out of the question, with the number of no-bid war-profiteering contracts he's handed out to his friends. Conservatives have every reason to hate his guts with a firey passion.
Liberals also have quite a few reasons of their own to hate him that I don't think I need to go into.
No matter how you look at it, there is practically no positive spin on the Bush presidency. It is a dismal failure on all accounts unless you're Halliburton.
Is it just me, or doesn't the Do Not Call List seem extremely uncharacteristic of the US Government?
It is *literally* the only bit of significant legislation I can think of in the last 15 years solely designed to protect consumers, and punish abusive corporations.
But sadly you got it wrong. The fault lies with the voter who has let media turn them into simple minded monkeys who can only vote based on the most idiotic notions.
I'm not 100% sure where you're going with your argument. Bush has run his administration in a manner that has been completely contrary to both of his campaigns. Is it really the voter's fault that we didn't get what was advertised? Don't forget our original point that Bush and Cheney have been spewing lies from the start, and that those lies didn't become quite so apparent until his second term.
Couldn't you also blame the democrats for pitching two candidates in a row that didn't have clearly defined campaigns? Although I think most will agree that Al Gore was a good candidate, he had an absolutely horrible campaign. John Kerry also had the disadvantage of not having clearly defined campaign goals, and was also the subject of a smear campaign. Such a bland candidate had absolutely no chance running against an "idealist" like Bush -- someone like Howard Dean would have fared much better in this situation.
In the business world, good products fail all of the time because of bad marketing. Any marketer who blames consumers for failing to properly appreciate the product will quickly find himself out of a job.
I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that most users don't know where their.MBOX files are, or even what they are. But they'll definitely be missed in the event of a crash.
Or another scenario that's a bit more likely (especially with email inboxes it seems), the mail database gets corrupted, and before you realize it, the automatic backup overwrites the good copy on your backup disk with the corrupt one. I know of a few people this has happened to.
Time Machine is a very good thing, and I commend Apple for it, especially since their old backup app sucked, and wasn't even included in the OS.
Now, how about getting network backups to work properly, and patching Time Machine to gracefully deal with large files?
Also, since when did banks start referring to Britain as "that part of the world"? I'd imagine that the amount of credit card fraud originating out of Britain isn't remarkably different from most US States.
For one, TFA doesn't make any mention of the system being completely autonomous -- look at the picture right up front. Likewise, the trials certainly didn't have anything like a 30 minute delay added to them.
I'd imagine that the cases where a semi-autonomous robot would require intervention would be the same cases where an inexperienced doctor would need to phone back for help.
That said, the number of medical conditions you're even remotely likely to encounter in space with a crew of astronauts who have been put through what is likely to be the most comprehensive medical examination known to man. Murphy's law aside, what are the odds that they'll ever need to do anything more than an appendectomy? In my completely unqualified opinion, if I had to pick one specialized doctor to send, it'd probably be a Cardiologist. If you're halfway to Mars, and in need of brain surgery, I'm afraid that you're pretty screwed as it is.
Other questions they'll eventually have to consider: What sort of space-accident is going to leave you maimed but not dead? What surgical techniques will even work in zero-gravity, and how will you deal with the geyser of blood that'll spout up and disperse throughout the room once you cut into somebody? What happens if one of the crew is permanently incapacitated? And then what happens if someone dies?
I don't want to be overly critical and knock you for your work -- I have a *huge* appreciation for the work that's being done to bring modern medical care to all corners of the Earth. My gripes lie mainly with "poppy" science journalism;-)
Forgive me for possibly being naive, but wouldn't it possibly be a LOT more practical to simply keep a highly-skilled physician on board the mission?
After all, ocean ships have been doing this for hundreds of years. Today, Antarctic expeditions usually have a surgeon on hand, along with a minimally stocked OR, because it's virtually impossible to get anything to or from the interior regions of the continent in the wintertime.
Given that a good portion of the research NASA does is biological in nature, I imagine that there are quite a few individuals who are already qualified for this role. Sending a trained doctor to Mars seems like a no-brainer.
On the other hand, sending a CAT Scan machine up into orbit (and then to Mars) seems hilariously over the top. On the list of big and bulky machinery, CAT Scan machines are pretty high up there. Why not send a locomotive and some track up so that we can drive around on the surface once we get to Mars? After all, they're fast and energy-efficient!
On the other hand, if they were developing a similar technology, but remained focused on keeping it cheap and portable, the applications for it would be HUGE. It'd still be fantastic on the battlefield, and could also be used in remote regions (especially in developing nations) where the local population cannot support having highly-specialized doctors in their area.
Sell it as environmentalism. "We take discarded bugs from software around the world, run them through our industrial-grade recycling plant, and turn it into pure, post-consumer recycled BUGS(r)."
+2 Interesting. Sometimes the mods around here frighten me.
Although I do commend MIT on their efforts, I can't help but think that this is another vastly impractical academic pipedream (a la those who predicted the Segway would change the world. It's a masterpiece of engineering, but let's be realistic here...).
On the other hand, tiny cars are nothing new. They don't even need to be electric... if you're getting 100MPG with a petrol engine (and in a city car at that), the expense of making the vehicle fully electric seems rather silly. You'd probably also do more damage to the environment by manufacturing the batteries as well...
Like the Segway, the MIT concept looks expensive. Impractically so. You're not going to see these things adopted at all unless they're considerably cheaper than a motorbike. In fact, if you lowered the price down to about what a plain old bicycle costs, you'd be even better.
Such a vehicle actually exists. The Peel P50 made in 1962 sold for about £200, gets 100mpg, and was (and still is) street legal in the UK.
The guys from Top Gear did a hilarious review of the car last week, and proved that you could indeed drive it TO work (in the elevator, down the corridor, and to your desk). It's even got a handle on the back to pick it up with.
Yeah, it's hideously impractical, but then again, so is MIT's proposal.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Google's privacy policy is probably a hell of a lot better than anything AT&T or Verizon have.
(AT&T taps your line for the NSA without a warrant, and Verizon will sell your personal information to marketers)
Google makes it plainly obvious that they're recording and storing what you do (and actually presents that data to you in a useful manner). A traditional ISP definitely has the capability to do the same exact thing behind your back. If the bits are passing through their tubes, they have access to it.
In my defense, Wikipedia does mention that Ultracaps aren't necessarily filled with electrolyte, and that trials were being conducted with aerogels, nanotubes, and polymers.
Capacitors can be filled with many different dielectrics to improve their capacitance.
The most common thing you see are electrolytic capacitors, which can indeed burst if they're of extremely poor quality (and cause an environmental hazard along the same lines) -- but of course, saying that is true of many many things. Take paint for instance -- we cover everything in it, and it's generally safe, with only a few exceptions like lead paint, which will make you sick, or the stuff they coated the Hindenberg with, which could also be used as rocket propellant...
Modern electrolytics are much better, although their operating characteristics aren't the greatest -- they have a high capacity, and that's about it.... they're not at all reliable or tolerant of varying operating conditions. Fortunately, many applications don't require this...
You can use all sorts of other things inside a capacitor: paper, glass, ceramic and kevlar are used to name a few, or you can forego the dielectric completely, and put a vacuum between the two plates.
Oh, and supercapacitors don't use electrolyte as the dielectric. That's not to say they won't go boom -- I have no idea how they operate, but they're not filled with the same stuff as what you're thinking of -- if they were, they'd still just be plain old unremarkable electrolytic capacitors.
Okay. Go out and buy an iPhone, and a car battery. Go to the library, read up on some electrical engineering texts, and figure out how to wire the two together. 15-hour laptop. Done.
I sincerely hope they don't confuse "clean interface" with "bare bones". Google's interface is good for what we use it for, but I kinda like the bling on modern cellphones. Cue the "I just want a cell phone that..."-people in 3, 2, 1...
You've clearly never used a Verizon phone. It takes skill to come up with such an awful interface.
I've used a few Sony Ericsson phones that I like quite a bit -- they seem to be the last major handset maker who seems to 'get it' in terms of design, by offering a pretty broad range of features with a relatively clean interface.
My phone has no UI at all. It's refreshingly simple in some respects, although in others, I do wish that it'd be taken up a notch. A functional phone book is essential, and something that could open up Google Maps or GMail in a pinch would be nice for emergencies. I could really care less about multimedia functions.
Although many of the items on the list are indeed cruel and necessary, there are some that aren't really...
Take the guy who tried to infect himself with Yellow Fever in every way imaginable to prove that it wasn't contagious. He was so sure of his hypothesis, that he was willing to risk his own life to prove it.
As long as he's inflicting it upon himself, there's nothing terribly cruel about it
And of course, doing so did provide an important contribution to the development of modern medicine.
The Milgram experiment wasn't cruel at all, and provided a horrifying view into the human psyche. It was also helpful to understand the behavior of people living under oppressive regimes (eg. the holocaust).
It's also established the notion that military atrocities are more often more the responsibility of the leadership than those doing the deed. Look at the Abu Ghraib torture incidents if you need any examples.
So, yes. I'd argue that the Milgram experiment was a very important bit of science. Nobody was actually directly harmed from the experiment (92% of the participants said they were glad to have taken part in it in a survey), and it provided very valuable results (that specifically could be applied to the betterment of society).
If you want an example of a similar psychological that was actually cruel, read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants were directly victimized.
Aren't there some rather severe psychological effects of being circumcised as an adult? (as in, "severe enough that most doctors won't do it unless there's a pressing medical need")
I'll call bullshit. Perhaps there's a reason for poor performance on flash applets that require some sort of complicated interaction with the page, but there should be no reason why FLV playback should be so abominable.
The Stage6 DiVx plugin works fine -- not quite as efficient or as stable as playing the same video within VLC, but not terrible either. The Silverlight plugin isn't even all that bad.
That said, I wouldn't doubt that a new plugin architecture is eventually developed, considering that the WebKit and Mozilla folks are reportedly friendly with each other.
It's not quite Photoshop, but it's also 1/10 the price, and does a few very cool things that Photoshop does not, and is blazing fast on my relatively modest machine. For a first version, it's pretty darned impressive.
The GIMP guys really need to take a good hard look at it, and then go cry to themselves in a dark corner.
And I completely second the notion that Adobe's completely lost its focus. Photoshop's turning into a hulking dinosaur, and the rest of their product portfolio is starting to feel quite dated as well. Lightroom's the one innovative thing they've done (and they really just purchased another application and made it their own) -- unfortunately, it's a total CPU and Memory hog that has a tendency to wreck its database about once a month.
I don't really understand why it doesn't get more attention, but the Mac OS X Adobe Flash player has to easily be one of the worst pieces of software ever written.
CPU spikes up to 100% are common if a flash banner ad loads. Youtube will suck the life out of even a recent Core Duo Intel Mac. Loading a page on MySpace can sometimes render the system useless for a few minutes.
My prediction is that BluRay will be successful as a storage medium, but not for video. If they can eventually get burners/discs down to a reasonable price, the 50GB capacity will be very attractive.
HD-DVD will quickly carve its niche out as a video medium. Sony's had an absolutely dismal track record for the past 20 years, and every single standard they pushed/forced on consumers failed miserably for both the consumer and content producers. Ironically, BetaMax was probably the most successful of them, because it was popular in the broadcasting industry as a storage medium. Simply put, the movie industry has many compelling reasons to distrust Sony, not to mention the conflict of interest arising from Sony owning a production company themselves...
I don't think Sony has fully realized that they're not Apple or Microsoft, and that their opinion in the industry isn't worth a damn these days.
I don't want to jump the gun, but the $100 HD-DVD player might very well kill Blu-Ray as a video medium.
Once both formats have occupied their niche, someone will realize the market for a dual-format HD-DVD/BluRay drive for the PC, and will create and the device that could have prevented this annoying format war in the first place.
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I imagine that RF spectrum is an asset that they could liquidate very easily if needed. It's not going to get any less valuable while they're holding onto it, and as long as they don't overpay, it very well may appreciate in value.
I don't know. Is there any huge reason FOR High School students to be practicing this stuff?
PCR is surprisingly easy to do (albeit sloppily). Looking back, my high school probably had most of the necessary equipment. However, I can't really think of the educational value of performing a PCR reaction, given that although the mechanisms may be somewhat complex, the end result is more or less analogous to a photocopier.
Practical hands-on work is important for science education, but there's no reason why things need to be kicked up a notch in this case. I did a few labs on gel electrophoresis in HS, and that did a fantastic job of explaining the mechanics of DNA matching.
The old fashioned chemistry and biology labs taught in High School are more or less going to be just as valid and applicable as they are now for the foreseeable future.
Unless you're gay, or you object to participating in a war of aggression.
Amen. NYU costs $50,000+ per year, which should give you a pretty good idea of its demographics. If you're going to NYU, but don't have somebody else to pay for it, you're fucking insane.
State universities aren't a terribly bad value, but in the US you either need to live in a state with a good university system, or not want to leave the state you were raised in. Both applied to me -- I wanted to get the heck out of New Jersey, and none of our state universities were particularly well-suited for what I wanted to study. I don't have any firm figures, but I believe that NJ exports more college students than it retains.
If there's one thing the US needs to do with regards to education, it's to nationalize the private universities, and make them affordable for anybody who wants an education. Jimmy Carter was the last US president to have studied at a public university, which is absolutely appalling.
That's a pretty baseless accusation, is it not?
People can have all sorts of reasons for being moderates. Considering that elections are NOT consistently won by the same party every time around, it's fair to say that a rather significant portion of Americans are moderates.
Different times call for different strategies. The priorities of the nation change. The parties themselves change -- the Democrats are now championing many of the ideas the Republicans originally espoused regarding small government. I'd say that you'd be an outright idiot to vote for the same party year after year.
I lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I want the government to be as small as possible, but still provide adequate social services to its citizens in areas where it's necessary such as education and healthcare. Perhaps you could think of it as trimming the fat.
I'd hypothetically support a candidate like Ron Paul so that we could abolish unnecessary and outdated federal agencies. However, I'd be in support of later re-establishing similar agencies in a manner that is more efficient and suited to today's society. The IRS is a fantastic example, as the US tax code has become so convoluted and enormous that it requires a gigantic federal agency to make sense of it, not to mention the huge portion of the financial industry that's devoted to explaining this tax code to "normal people". A simplified (not necessarily flat) tax code would reduce a vast portion of the overhead associated with the IRS, would close loopholes exploited by the wealthy, and just might make people despise the government a tiny bit less.
Tangent: Now I'll note that I don't support Ron Paul, because he'd allow states to establish their own agencies in areas where the federal government would no longer have oversight under his idealistic plan. After spending the majority of my life in New Jersey, I can safely say that this would be a catastrophe at best. If there's one thing (actually 50) more corrupt and less efficient than the Federal Government, it's state government.
I could also point to the vast number of state governments that would have banned the teaching of evolution if they had their way. Many more have passed marriage amendments aimed at restricting the rights of same-sex couples, but also have a number of nasty side-effects such as also restricting the rights of single parents, or unmarried couples with children. If you want to make some conservative Virginians piping mad, explain to them how their marriage amendment encourages abortion. Then ask if they read the damn thing before voting on it. (Do not attempt above if said Virginian might be carrying a gun. This is a state where it's legal to carry a concealed firearm into a school board meeting -- no, I'm not making this up). End tangent.
What the GP poster was pointing out is that by virtually any accepted political ideology in the US, George Bush has failed on all accounts. He's accomplished none of his conservative social agenda, has vastly increased the size of the government as well as push the national debt to new highs. Free-market capitalism is out of the question, with the number of no-bid war-profiteering contracts he's handed out to his friends. Conservatives have every reason to hate his guts with a firey passion.
Liberals also have quite a few reasons of their own to hate him that I don't think I need to go into.
No matter how you look at it, there is practically no positive spin on the Bush presidency. It is a dismal failure on all accounts unless you're Halliburton.
Is it just me, or doesn't the Do Not Call List seem extremely uncharacteristic of the US Government?
It is *literally* the only bit of significant legislation I can think of in the last 15 years solely designed to protect consumers, and punish abusive corporations.
I'm not 100% sure where you're going with your argument. Bush has run his administration in a manner that has been completely contrary to both of his campaigns. Is it really the voter's fault that we didn't get what was advertised? Don't forget our original point that Bush and Cheney have been spewing lies from the start, and that those lies didn't become quite so apparent until his second term.
Couldn't you also blame the democrats for pitching two candidates in a row that didn't have clearly defined campaigns? Although I think most will agree that Al Gore was a good candidate, he had an absolutely horrible campaign. John Kerry also had the disadvantage of not having clearly defined campaign goals, and was also the subject of a smear campaign. Such a bland candidate had absolutely no chance running against an "idealist" like Bush -- someone like Howard Dean would have fared much better in this situation.
In the business world, good products fail all of the time because of bad marketing. Any marketer who blames consumers for failing to properly appreciate the product will quickly find himself out of a job.
I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that most users don't know where their .MBOX files are, or even what they are. But they'll definitely be missed in the event of a crash.
Or another scenario that's a bit more likely (especially with email inboxes it seems), the mail database gets corrupted, and before you realize it, the automatic backup overwrites the good copy on your backup disk with the corrupt one. I know of a few people this has happened to.
Time Machine is a very good thing, and I commend Apple for it, especially since their old backup app sucked, and wasn't even included in the OS.
Now, how about getting network backups to work properly, and patching Time Machine to gracefully deal with large files?
What sort of bank does that?
Also, since when did banks start referring to Britain as "that part of the world"? I'd imagine that the amount of credit card fraud originating out of Britain isn't remarkably different from most US States.
You *seriously* need to find yourself a new bank.
Hmm... I'm not entirely convinced...
;-)
For one, TFA doesn't make any mention of the system being completely autonomous -- look at the picture right up front. Likewise, the trials certainly didn't have anything like a 30 minute delay added to them.
I'd imagine that the cases where a semi-autonomous robot would require intervention would be the same cases where an inexperienced doctor would need to phone back for help.
That said, the number of medical conditions you're even remotely likely to encounter in space with a crew of astronauts who have been put through what is likely to be the most comprehensive medical examination known to man. Murphy's law aside, what are the odds that they'll ever need to do anything more than an appendectomy? In my completely unqualified opinion, if I had to pick one specialized doctor to send, it'd probably be a Cardiologist. If you're halfway to Mars, and in need of brain surgery, I'm afraid that you're pretty screwed as it is.
Other questions they'll eventually have to consider: What sort of space-accident is going to leave you maimed but not dead? What surgical techniques will even work in zero-gravity, and how will you deal with the geyser of blood that'll spout up and disperse throughout the room once you cut into somebody? What happens if one of the crew is permanently incapacitated? And then what happens if someone dies?
I don't want to be overly critical and knock you for your work -- I have a *huge* appreciation for the work that's being done to bring modern medical care to all corners of the Earth. My gripes lie mainly with "poppy" science journalism
Forgive me for possibly being naive, but wouldn't it possibly be a LOT more practical to simply keep a highly-skilled physician on board the mission?
After all, ocean ships have been doing this for hundreds of years. Today, Antarctic expeditions usually have a surgeon on hand, along with a minimally stocked OR, because it's virtually impossible to get anything to or from the interior regions of the continent in the wintertime.
Given that a good portion of the research NASA does is biological in nature, I imagine that there are quite a few individuals who are already qualified for this role. Sending a trained doctor to Mars seems like a no-brainer.
On the other hand, sending a CAT Scan machine up into orbit (and then to Mars) seems hilariously over the top. On the list of big and bulky machinery, CAT Scan machines are pretty high up there. Why not send a locomotive and some track up so that we can drive around on the surface once we get to Mars? After all, they're fast and energy-efficient!
On the other hand, if they were developing a similar technology, but remained focused on keeping it cheap and portable, the applications for it would be HUGE. It'd still be fantastic on the battlefield, and could also be used in remote regions (especially in developing nations) where the local population cannot support having highly-specialized doctors in their area.
+2 Interesting. Sometimes the mods around here frighten me.
Although I do commend MIT on their efforts, I can't help but think that this is another vastly impractical academic pipedream (a la those who predicted the Segway would change the world. It's a masterpiece of engineering, but let's be realistic here...).
On the other hand, tiny cars are nothing new. They don't even need to be electric... if you're getting 100MPG with a petrol engine (and in a city car at that), the expense of making the vehicle fully electric seems rather silly. You'd probably also do more damage to the environment by manufacturing the batteries as well...
Like the Segway, the MIT concept looks expensive. Impractically so. You're not going to see these things adopted at all unless they're considerably cheaper than a motorbike. In fact, if you lowered the price down to about what a plain old bicycle costs, you'd be even better.
Such a vehicle actually exists. The Peel P50 made in 1962 sold for about £200, gets 100mpg, and was (and still is) street legal in the UK.
The guys from Top Gear did a hilarious review of the car last week, and proved that you could indeed drive it TO work (in the elevator, down the corridor, and to your desk). It's even got a handle on the back to pick it up with.
Yeah, it's hideously impractical, but then again, so is MIT's proposal.
Still, it's nice to dream.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Google's privacy policy is probably a hell of a lot better than anything AT&T or Verizon have.
(AT&T taps your line for the NSA without a warrant, and Verizon will sell your personal information to marketers)
Google makes it plainly obvious that they're recording and storing what you do (and actually presents that data to you in a useful manner). A traditional ISP definitely has the capability to do the same exact thing behind your back. If the bits are passing through their tubes, they have access to it.
Bugger. Should've read TFA.
In my defense, Wikipedia does mention that Ultracaps aren't necessarily filled with electrolyte, and that trials were being conducted with aerogels, nanotubes, and polymers.
Capacitors can be filled with many different dielectrics to improve their capacitance.
The most common thing you see are electrolytic capacitors, which can indeed burst if they're of extremely poor quality (and cause an environmental hazard along the same lines) -- but of course, saying that is true of many many things. Take paint for instance -- we cover everything in it, and it's generally safe, with only a few exceptions like lead paint, which will make you sick, or the stuff they coated the Hindenberg with, which could also be used as rocket propellant...
Modern electrolytics are much better, although their operating characteristics aren't the greatest -- they have a high capacity, and that's about it.... they're not at all reliable or tolerant of varying operating conditions. Fortunately, many applications don't require this...
You can use all sorts of other things inside a capacitor: paper, glass, ceramic and kevlar are used to name a few, or you can forego the dielectric completely, and put a vacuum between the two plates.
Oh, and supercapacitors don't use electrolyte as the dielectric. That's not to say they won't go boom -- I have no idea how they operate, but they're not filled with the same stuff as what you're thinking of -- if they were, they'd still just be plain old unremarkable electrolytic capacitors.
Really?
The printing on the paper cylinders is always so damn small that I always differentiate between the positive/negative leads by the long/short lead.
And of course, re-using electrolytics is almost as bad of an idea as using them in the first place... their operating characteristics are ghastly.
Okay. Go out and buy an iPhone, and a car battery. Go to the library, read up on some electrical engineering texts, and figure out how to wire the two together. 15-hour laptop. Done.
Happy?
You've clearly never used a Verizon phone. It takes skill to come up with such an awful interface.
I've used a few Sony Ericsson phones that I like quite a bit -- they seem to be the last major handset maker who seems to 'get it' in terms of design, by offering a pretty broad range of features with a relatively clean interface.
My phone has no UI at all. It's refreshingly simple in some respects, although in others, I do wish that it'd be taken up a notch. A functional phone book is essential, and something that could open up Google Maps or GMail in a pinch would be nice for emergencies. I could really care less about multimedia functions.
Although many of the items on the list are indeed cruel and necessary, there are some that aren't really...
Take the guy who tried to infect himself with Yellow Fever in every way imaginable to prove that it wasn't contagious. He was so sure of his hypothesis, that he was willing to risk his own life to prove it.
As long as he's inflicting it upon himself, there's nothing terribly cruel about it
And of course, doing so did provide an important contribution to the development of modern medicine.
Why not put the Stanford Prison Experiment on the list instead.
The Milgram experiment wasn't cruel at all, and provided a horrifying view into the human psyche. It was also helpful to understand the behavior of people living under oppressive regimes (eg. the holocaust).
It's also established the notion that military atrocities are more often more the responsibility of the leadership than those doing the deed. Look at the Abu Ghraib torture incidents if you need any examples.
So, yes. I'd argue that the Milgram experiment was a very important bit of science. Nobody was actually directly harmed from the experiment (92% of the participants said they were glad to have taken part in it in a survey), and it provided very valuable results (that specifically could be applied to the betterment of society).
If you want an example of a similar psychological that was actually cruel, read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants were directly victimized.
Aren't there some rather severe psychological effects of being circumcised as an adult? (as in, "severe enough that most doctors won't do it unless there's a pressing medical need")
I'll call bullshit. Perhaps there's a reason for poor performance on flash applets that require some sort of complicated interaction with the page, but there should be no reason why FLV playback should be so abominable.
The Stage6 DiVx plugin works fine -- not quite as efficient or as stable as playing the same video within VLC, but not terrible either. The Silverlight plugin isn't even all that bad.
That said, I wouldn't doubt that a new plugin architecture is eventually developed, considering that the WebKit and Mozilla folks are reportedly friendly with each other.
I second the recommendation for Pixelmator.
It's not quite Photoshop, but it's also 1/10 the price, and does a few very cool things that Photoshop does not, and is blazing fast on my relatively modest machine. For a first version, it's pretty darned impressive.
The GIMP guys really need to take a good hard look at it, and then go cry to themselves in a dark corner.
And I completely second the notion that Adobe's completely lost its focus. Photoshop's turning into a hulking dinosaur, and the rest of their product portfolio is starting to feel quite dated as well. Lightroom's the one innovative thing they've done (and they really just purchased another application and made it their own) -- unfortunately, it's a total CPU and Memory hog that has a tendency to wreck its database about once a month.
MOD PARENT UP
I don't really understand why it doesn't get more attention, but the Mac OS X Adobe Flash player has to easily be one of the worst pieces of software ever written.
CPU spikes up to 100% are common if a flash banner ad loads. Youtube will suck the life out of even a recent Core Duo Intel Mac. Loading a page on MySpace can sometimes render the system useless for a few minutes.
Thank God for FlashBlock.
Come to think of it, most of Adobe's codebase is very poorly supported on the Mac. Even Photoshop is starting to feel quite dated.
My prediction is that BluRay will be successful as a storage medium, but not for video. If they can eventually get burners/discs down to a reasonable price, the 50GB capacity will be very attractive.
HD-DVD will quickly carve its niche out as a video medium. Sony's had an absolutely dismal track record for the past 20 years, and every single standard they pushed/forced on consumers failed miserably for both the consumer and content producers. Ironically, BetaMax was probably the most successful of them, because it was popular in the broadcasting industry as a storage medium. Simply put, the movie industry has many compelling reasons to distrust Sony, not to mention the conflict of interest arising from Sony owning a production company themselves...
I don't think Sony has fully realized that they're not Apple or Microsoft, and that their opinion in the industry isn't worth a damn these days.
I don't want to jump the gun, but the $100 HD-DVD player might very well kill Blu-Ray as a video medium.
Once both formats have occupied their niche, someone will realize the market for a dual-format HD-DVD/BluRay drive for the PC, and will create and the device that could have prevented this annoying format war in the first place.