Having animals just so we cab shoot them for fun sounds somehow wrong, because that is what they are doing. Happens with a lot of other animals as well. They are often literally sitting ducks (or other animals) that are released just so they can be shot.
Now if that is your idea of fun, please so. We could discuss it at length, but do not use this as an excuse that you do it to save the animals. That is just a lucky side effect.
Personally, I think keeping animals leashed and imprisoned in cages (or aquariums) for 'fun' sounds more wrong on many levels, but that is what many people are doing to. At least killing animals eating them retain a purpose for their existence that mirror what happens in nature (where many animals kill other animals for sustenance).
FWIW, even vegetarians effectively 'kill' plants for sustenance, so it's just a matter of what line you draw for 'killing' things to keep yourself alive for your own personal morality code.
Of course if you are just shooting animals for 'fun' and if someone does not end up using the carcass for sustenance, then it is arguably worse than keeping a pet. So-called big game hunters that waste their kills in that manner are much lower on my morality stack. But then again, who am I to impose my morality on others (but I feel generally free to comment on it).
On the other hand, you do have the occasional "fossil" city like Pompeii which instead of being ground to dust, had the evidence of its existence preserved somewhat by in volcanic ash...
Just like fossils aren't "bones" that have been preserved, you might expect the evidence of a pattern of a defunct city to be preserved somewhat in the presence of some short-term event like a volcanic eruption (rather being ground to dust by weather over time).
The fact that we have not founds such evidence, doesn't preclude the existence of a mechanism for such evidence (however unlikely it is to occur) to exist.
Budget implies a consequence for spending money and money is predicated on future exchange.
1. There is no budget if there are no consequences for overspending 2. Nobody is going to accept money for work if they knew the end of the world was coming for sure.
So, I suspect the most likely outcome is to keep everything secret which makes it unlikely there will be lots of projects running in parallel because "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
Once the cat is out of the bag, throwing more money at people won't convince the holdouts to do the things required for have a shot at survival, you will likely need guns...
The "europe" situation wasn't the only genocide in WW2. In addition to the Rape of Nanking that predated the war, the so-called "The Burn to Ash Strategy" policy of the Japanese during WW2 created a nearly equivalent "holocaust" in asia. A few examples below...
You can travel billions of miles on the Earth's surface without revisiting any point.
It's even worse than that, you can divide the earth's surface into a finite number of pieces and reassemble them to be two different earths each having the same surface area as the original earth..
<NIT> anti-pasta - "anti" meaning before as in what you eat before the pasta, because if you don't actually eventually eat pasta later, there is technically no anti-pasta (just like if there was no war, there wouldn't be an antebellum).
So if you are allergic to pasta, you just eat starters (aka antipasti meaning before-the-meal), not anti-pasta, because after eating anti-pasta, you would then be doomed to eat the pasta you were trying to avoid...;^) </PICK>
The fact that there's no statistical difference between GPA and graduation rates between students that did and did not submit standardized test scores does not mean that there's no correlation between those test scores and achievement. In fact, there is such a correlation. See: https://www.vox.com/cards/sat/... [vox.com] http://files.eric.ed.gov/fullt... [ed.gov]
Just a quick point, the study these articles are pointing to reference a College Board study indicating a correlation between SAT and college achievement. College Board is the publisher of the SAT test. This is like referring to a study funded by the pasta industry that concludes pasta is good for you...
Other points in those articles highlight the same point I made before: HS GPA is a better indicator than SAT and SAT hasn't been shown by many admissions studies to have a significant statistically independent prediction of college success measurements despite what the publisher's of the SAT might want people to believe. This is why many college admissions departments are slow-walking away from the SAT. It appears to add very little value into their admissions criteria, but the alternatives aren't well vetted yet...
Here's some interesting reading for those that don't know the history the SAT and its relationship with the UC system...
Similar reports about the effectiveness of the SAT have been going on since the 80's when I was in college and working with admissions. The only thing keeping the SAT alive is pretty much the UC system requirement (UC being a big "customer" of the SAT was the main driver to convince the SAT to change to be more like the ACT). I predict by the time my kids will be college aged, the UC system will finally drop the SAT and it will be a distant memory.
With grade inflation, I find using GPA as a metric of "success" sadly suspect. What correlation is there between SAT scores* and success in life after graduation?
*Under the old model. Not to be confused with that thing they call an SAT today.
As I mentioned, before adjusted GPA is a good measure of *relative* performance. People with higher GPAs from a specific high school have better college success than those with lower GPAs, although normalizing the grade inflation between different schools is hard.
There are some studies that indicate higher SAT scores can lead to higher incomes, but this was a secondary correlation that is only significant when you corrected for different bachelor degrees (which made the most main difference in future income). The main effect in all of these studies is actually graduating from college (vs not graduating from college after 6 years).
For me, most of what that says is if you can put up with all the bullshit about studying for SATs and doing busywork assigned by professors, it correlates to how well you can get along in a corporate world so you earn a better income. Since the correlation between *wealth* and IQ is apparently much lower.
While I think that increasing opportunity for undeserved communities is laudable, I do think that you should be honest about the issues in poor communities. From TFA:
I'm 100 percent convinced that talent is distributed uniformly across society. There's no data to suggest that if you happen to be born into a less well-to-do family you are somehow less intelligent.
This is just not true. SAT scores are or were roughly an IQ test. They show a clear correlation to income, as outlined in this article:
There may be any number of causes of this, but denying the facts will likely lead to under prepared students starting and failing at college.
Interestingly, high SAT scores have not been shown to be correlated to student achievement in college. In face, many colleges are moving to test-optional admission strategies after a 2014 study involving 123,000 students at 33 colleges showed virtually no statistical difference between GPA and graduation rates between students that did and did not submit standardized test scores.
Unfortunately a different study has also concluded that it is unlikely that adoption of test-optional admission policies would will boost enrollment of underrepresented minority and low-income students. The study examined 180 selective liberal arts colleges, 32 of which had adopted test-optional policies between 1992 and 2010. It compared colleges with test-optional policies against colleges that required test scores. The 32 test optional schools did not see any statistical increase in enrollment of low-income or black, latino, or native american students compared with the larger group of 180 schools. This result was unexpected, but the report authors hypothesized that this might be due to the fact that by de-emphasizing standarized tests, more weight was put on extra-curriculars and AP/IB coursework which continue to have unequal opportunities/access across income and minority status.
Sadly, from my history of admissions work with my alma mater, the two highest correlating factors for academic success were: 1. parental income; and 2. one-or-more parents graduating from college. You might say #1 is probably highly correlated with #2 so a large driver of college success is a student fulfilling the expectations of their college educated parents, which sort of perpetuates the have vs have-not split.
Next on the list that showed correlation is adjusted (i.e., no-extra points for AP/IB classes) High-school GPA in core-curricula classes (A's in underwater basket weaving don't count). The main complication with adjusted GPA comparison between applicants is normalizing them across schools (different grade inflation factors in different schools). In a highly selective school, it doesn't matter too much (most of your applicants will have mostly A's), but it's much more difficult to normalize the middle of the grading scales between disparate high schools to compare applicants.
The SAT II (subject test) showed a reasonably correlation to college GPA, but not graduation rates.
The general SAT score correlations to college success ranked below sustained (e.g., over 2 years) extracurricular activities, and coming from a well-known "feeder" school (a HS where lots of people apply to a specific college), but both showed weak-to-no correlation that varied from year-to-year like the generic SAT. The "feeder" effect seemed to indicate that groups of students that have a history of academic success tend to do better than isolated individuals (which indicated the advantage of support groups in college leading to higher college success).
GPS works by triangulating between 4-6 satellites that are all spread out. A 3d hexagon with a person in the middle somewhere.
Since with GPS all the satellites need to be above the horizon, so they are all located on one side of you and are moving fast (so fast they need to use relativistic corrections).
Also, GPS is actually based on trilateration (knowing the time and location of the satellites), not triangulation, but nice try...
the plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft launched in 1972 and 1973 showed the Earth's position from 14 pulsars
Just because it was an old idea, doesn't mean it was a good idea...
Unfortunately, these vintage pulsar map would be nearly impossible to use for its intended purpose of allowing someone in the far distant future to locate us...
However, for a short term galactic map usable on human time scales, pulsars might prove much more useful.
Palm Pilots cost more then $100 and they wouldn't be considered worthy of being called a computer due to its limitation.
Huh? I had a lot of Palm Pilots and they were quite capable machines, especially for the price. It was a computer. You could program it. One of them had wireless built in. I had two different camera attachments, so it could even take pictures.
But back in 2005 you needed some CPU Power to render web pages,
Have you looked at what it takes to render modern pages? It takes a lot more CPU today that it did in 2005. The CPUs are faster so it doesn't look like it takes more power, but it sure does.
The failure of OLPC was their BOGO that never could deliver. Vaporware. The delivery of "my" OLPC kept getting pushed back AFTER they had pulled the money from my credit card, but they were crowing about how well production was going. It got to the point where the time limit for contesting the charge was about to run out and I cancelled. That's three months for my credit card, so yeah, they promised delivery over and over for almost three months and could never quite pull it off. But they kept telling me all about all the other people who were getting theirs as if that should make me happy.
In 2018, OLPC2018 could be a kickstarter, or other crowdfunding project... Probably with the same result. They were ahead of their time in many ways...
But in reality, OLPC was mostly a scheme to extract money from well heeled charitable foundations and deposit the money in the hands of some well-connected local electronics assembly companies.
This kind of scheme has been going on as long as charitable foundations have existed... Remember, your donation to a charity generally isn't really directly going to the beneficiaries, it's going to pay the well-connected suppliers. In the end, the suppliers probably benefit the most because there is little competition and there generally are fewer issues (e.g., recalls, returns, etc) with any cost cutting maneuvers they take, vs if they had to actually produce something for typical "paying" customers...
Why not just burn all that shit? No silly enzymes or science required.
The reason they don't just "burn all that shit" is that they are interested in a way to break down the PET back to it's polymer pre-cursors so they can repolymerize it back into plastic again to improve recycling. By recovering the original pre-cursors, they can more effectively recycle the plastic.
The current recycle flow for PET is a bit costly to produce back food-grade plastic (vs simply using virgin material) because of the use of dye, color sorting is required before melting, so often PET is open-loop recycled into lower-grade material like carpet. However, if original pre-cursors can be recovered and isolated, it might be eventually be more economical to do close-loop recycling (clear bottle back to clear bottles) which make it easier to compete with using virgin material...
Of course our recycling rates are pretty low now and virgin material is pretty cheap, so it's hard to see how this would ever work at a scale, but even today we don't "burn all that shit", we open-loop recycle...
I mean, sulfuric acid will also eat many plastics. Do you worry about sulfuric acid "getting loose" and eating your fleece jacket?
I think you might want to go back to the acid-rain days of the '70's and '80's and see how well this argument holds up.
Similar arguments today about sequestered carbon dioxide or methane clathrate "getting loose" and warming our planet.
So just how will they attack plastic pollution like the great pacific garbage patch? The patch isn't because we are deliberately dumping plastic waste (which could be broken down by this enzyme, but is being dumped into landfills), places like the garbage patch are apparently from plastic waste that isn't in the landfill cycle and is being washed away down storm drains into the ocean.
It seems like some sort of "getting loose" would be required for this to actually be of any use in anything other than the current landfill garbage cycle and even then, it's not like land-fills are totally "leakproof"...
A patent troll saying they'll help you with patents? This is rich, even for Microsoft.
Given that they say they will require you to licence-back the patents for use in their products, it might be more fair to say that they are helping themselves to your patents...
Which is more in line to what you might expecting...
If google were to stop working on all these projects for the feds, they'd be less subject to the equal employment opportunity record-keeping spotlight they are currently under.
<tinfoil>By giving up some small federal contract, they get to keep discriminating? Genius!</tinfoil>
Well, we belong to the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, the Mammalia class and Primates order, the Hominidae family, Genus homo and Species Homo Sapiens.
Except for the last one there are other animals we share this trait with. And except for the latter two, there are currently others who share the same level on the classification chart.
What makes a human human? What makes a human not an animal? What's special about us?
The only thing that make a human, human is the aggregate characteristics of the entities with whom we procreate (which are basically other humans).***
As for other "characteristics", we now know that other species have language, know how to count, make plans, etc., which is all the things we call thinking (i.e., I think therefore I am). The only thing that we are clinging to today for our humanity is the arbitrary definition of the "divine" (e.g., we somehow possess some sort un-measurable magical property called a soul or other property).
Historically, we humans used to invoke the divine explanation to justify all sorts of things like genocide, segregation, etc, so it is reasonable to assume that many of us (whether or not we feel ourselves religious), still feel compelled to think of humans as separate from animals (or others we feel superior to), when of course we humans are, by most scientifically determinable measures, basically an animal (e.g., homo-sapiens have about 23,000 genes, and a fly has about 31,000 genes, so we are far from the most complex or evolved).
***This is probably why Neanderthals (and potentially other undiscovered members of the genus homo) are probably basically human even though they have been arbitrarily categorized otherwise.
You can avoid acrylamide in cooked food by (1) eating meat or (2) eating boiled food. So... meat and potatoes! Specifically roasted meat and boiled potatoes.
FWIW, you cannot avoid acrylamide in roasted meats. Acrylamide is a byproduct of the Maillard reaction. Basically applying high heat anything that has sugars and amino acids (specifically asparagine which is found in meat, eggs, dairy, as well as potatoes, asparagus and other vegetables and most foods you eat). You would need to also "boil" both the meat and potatoes to avoid the Maillard reaction which creates this chemical.
To make things worse, there was a recent study that potentially implicates the amino-acid asparagine itself in the spread of cancer... Of course, you can't avoid asparagine because like nearly every food source, humans produce asparagine as part of their normal existence so if you avoid eating it you body will likely crank up it's own production to make up for the deficit.
Short story: we may simply all be doomed in this respect. Perhaps just eat/drink what you want?
I'm kind of curious, are doors in California required to have warnings along the lines of "Warning: outside contains sunlight, which is known to the state of California to cause cancer."?
Prop 65 is only about chemicals, but you never know where a new California proposition will take you...
Of course some sun-block lotions have been required to slap on this warning...
WARNING: This product contains benzophenone, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.
Don't we need really fat 'cancer' labels on cars then - and I mean every car, even the electric ones (tires)? No wait, they got an even fatter lobby.:-(
Putting too many warning labels has the habit of making people numb to actual dangers and warning labels.
It's not a problem with warnings themselves, but of weighing the level of risk. The labels don't give one any sense of risk degree. Perhaps we need a rating system, similar to movie ratings or Dept. of Homeland Security's "Homeland Security Advisory System" rating colors (which have since been altered in confusing ways).
By the way, the warnings are required by Proposition 65, which was voted into CA law. It's not meddling gov't, but meddling voters.
Let's make it better instead of throwing it out.
In California, a proposition (like prop65) needs to be changed by another proposition passed by the voters...
"You can request the "Hazardous Material Data Sheet" from the manufacturer." I think every online listing should be required to have a link to the Hazardous Material Data Sheet. Otherwise, it is too time-consuming to learn about the hazard.
Sometimes, things turn out to be worthwhile - emission regs among them...
Sometimes, things turn out to be like MTBE, the gasoline additive mandated by the California Air Resource Board (aka CARB which creates the emission regs for California). The CARB basically ignored information provided by the EPA about the carcinogenic nature of MTBE and mandated it in all gasoline sold in the state because of heavy lobbying by ARCO and a big political push by environmental groups blinded by reducing smog. Because of the California MTBE laws, other states (including New York), also got on the MTBE wagon...
Fortunately, MTBE was eventually banned, but not until a decade later and after basically polluting many water supplies all over the country...
“At the time that the regulation was passed, I think that we were aware that it might be carcinogenic and that it could have some other health effects,” -- Dr. Andrew Wortman, scientist @CARB
Slashdot Mirror
In case people haven't seen this yet...
https://www.prageru.com/videos...
> Perhaps it's another word for "hominids"?
Perhaps it's not a word at all?
Perhaps not, but perhaps yes ...
Or, it could simply be of homonym of hominid...
Then again it could just be typo...
We will never know...
Having animals just so we cab shoot them for fun sounds somehow wrong, because that is what they are doing. Happens with a lot of other animals as well. They are often literally sitting ducks (or other animals) that are released just so they can be shot.
Now if that is your idea of fun, please so. We could discuss it at length, but do not use this as an excuse that you do it to save the animals. That is just a lucky side effect.
Personally, I think keeping animals leashed and imprisoned in cages (or aquariums) for 'fun' sounds more wrong on many levels, but that is what many people are doing to. At least killing animals eating them retain a purpose for their existence that mirror what happens in nature (where many animals kill other animals for sustenance).
FWIW, even vegetarians effectively 'kill' plants for sustenance, so it's just a matter of what line you draw for 'killing' things to keep yourself alive for your own personal morality code.
Of course if you are just shooting animals for 'fun' and if someone does not end up using the carcass for sustenance, then it is arguably worse than keeping a pet. So-called big game hunters that waste their kills in that manner are much lower on my morality stack. But then again, who am I to impose my morality on others (but I feel generally free to comment on it).
On the other hand, you do have the occasional "fossil" city like Pompeii which instead of being ground to dust, had the evidence of its existence preserved somewhat by in volcanic ash...
Just like fossils aren't "bones" that have been preserved, you might expect the evidence of a pattern of a defunct city to be preserved somewhat in the presence of some short-term event like a volcanic eruption (rather being ground to dust by weather over time).
The fact that we have not founds such evidence, doesn't preclude the existence of a mechanism for such evidence (however unlikely it is to occur) to exist.
Budget implies a consequence for spending money and money is predicated on future exchange.
1. There is no budget if there are no consequences for overspending
2. Nobody is going to accept money for work if they knew the end of the world was coming for sure.
So, I suspect the most likely outcome is to keep everything secret which makes it unlikely there will be lots of projects running in parallel because "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
Once the cat is out of the bag, throwing more money at people won't convince the holdouts to do the things required for have a shot at survival, you will likely need guns...
The "europe" situation wasn't the only genocide in WW2. In addition to the Rape of Nanking that predated the war, the so-called "The Burn to Ash Strategy" policy of the Japanese during WW2 created a nearly equivalent "holocaust" in asia. A few examples below...
Unit 731 (Japan's Josef Mengele equivalent)
Batu Lin Tang intern camp
The Sook Ching in Singapore/Malaysia
Bataan Death March
The Manila massacre
+ many others...
You can travel billions of miles on the Earth's surface without revisiting any point.
It's even worse than that, you can divide the earth's surface into a finite number of pieces and reassemble them to be two different earths each having the same surface area as the original earth..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Then lather, rinse and repeat...
... try anti-pasta.
<NIT>
anti-pasta - "anti" meaning before as in what you eat before the pasta, because if you don't actually eventually eat pasta later, there is technically no anti-pasta (just like if there was no war, there wouldn't be an antebellum).
So if you are allergic to pasta, you just eat starters (aka antipasti meaning before-the-meal), not anti-pasta, because after eating anti-pasta, you would then be doomed to eat the pasta you were trying to avoid... ;^)
</PICK>
The fact that there's no statistical difference between GPA and graduation rates between students that did and did not submit standardized test scores does not mean that there's no correlation between those test scores and achievement. In fact, there is such a correlation. See:
https://www.vox.com/cards/sat/... [vox.com]
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fullt... [ed.gov]
Just a quick point, the study these articles are pointing to reference a College Board study indicating a correlation between SAT and college achievement. College Board is the publisher of the SAT test. This is like referring to a study funded by the pasta industry that concludes pasta is good for you...
Other points in those articles highlight the same point I made before: HS GPA is a better indicator than SAT and SAT hasn't been shown by many admissions studies to have a significant statistically independent prediction of college success measurements despite what the publisher's of the SAT might want people to believe. This is why many college admissions departments are slow-walking away from the SAT. It appears to add very little value into their admissions criteria, but the alternatives aren't well vetted yet...
Here's some interesting reading for those that don't know the history the SAT and its relationship with the UC system...
https://senate.universityofcal...
Similar reports about the effectiveness of the SAT have been going on since the 80's when I was in college and working with admissions. The only thing keeping the SAT alive is pretty much the UC system requirement (UC being a big "customer" of the SAT was the main driver to convince the SAT to change to be more like the ACT). I predict by the time my kids will be college aged, the UC system will finally drop the SAT and it will be a distant memory.
With grade inflation, I find using GPA as a metric of "success" sadly suspect. What correlation is there between SAT scores* and success in life after graduation?
*Under the old model. Not to be confused with that thing they call an SAT today.
As I mentioned, before adjusted GPA is a good measure of *relative* performance. People with higher GPAs from a specific high school have better college success than those with lower GPAs, although normalizing the grade inflation between different schools is hard.
There are some studies that indicate higher SAT scores can lead to higher incomes, but this was a secondary correlation that is only significant when you corrected for different bachelor degrees (which made the most main difference in future income). The main effect in all of these studies is actually graduating from college (vs not graduating from college after 6 years).
For me, most of what that says is if you can put up with all the bullshit about studying for SATs and doing busywork assigned by professors, it correlates to how well you can get along in a corporate world so you earn a better income. Since the correlation between *wealth* and IQ is apparently much lower.
https://thesocietypages.org/so...
While I think that increasing opportunity for undeserved communities is laudable, I do think that you should be honest about the issues in poor communities. From TFA:
I'm 100 percent convinced that talent is distributed uniformly across society. There's no data to suggest that if you happen to be born into a less well-to-do family you are somehow less intelligent.
This is just not true. SAT scores are or were roughly an IQ test. They show a clear correlation to income, as outlined in this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
There may be any number of causes of this, but denying the facts will likely lead to under prepared students starting and failing at college.
Interestingly, high SAT scores have not been shown to be correlated to student achievement in college. In face, many colleges are moving to test-optional admission strategies after a 2014 study involving 123,000 students at 33 colleges showed virtually no statistical difference between GPA and graduation rates between students that did and did not submit standardized test scores.
Unfortunately a different study has also concluded that it is unlikely that adoption of test-optional admission policies would will boost enrollment of underrepresented minority and low-income students. The study examined 180 selective liberal arts colleges, 32 of which had adopted test-optional policies between 1992 and 2010. It compared colleges with test-optional policies against colleges that required test scores. The 32 test optional schools did not see any statistical increase in enrollment of low-income or black, latino, or native american students compared with the larger group of 180 schools. This result was unexpected, but the report authors hypothesized that this might be due to the fact that by de-emphasizing standarized tests, more weight was put on extra-curriculars and AP/IB coursework which continue to have unequal opportunities/access across income and minority status.
Sadly, from my history of admissions work with my alma mater, the two highest correlating factors for academic success were: 1. parental income; and 2. one-or-more parents graduating from college. You might say #1 is probably highly correlated with #2 so a large driver of college success is a student fulfilling the expectations of their college educated parents, which sort of perpetuates the have vs have-not split.
Next on the list that showed correlation is adjusted (i.e., no-extra points for AP/IB classes) High-school GPA in core-curricula classes (A's in underwater basket weaving don't count). The main complication with adjusted GPA comparison between applicants is normalizing them across schools (different grade inflation factors in different schools). In a highly selective school, it doesn't matter too much (most of your applicants will have mostly A's), but it's much more difficult to normalize the middle of the grading scales between disparate high schools to compare applicants.
The SAT II (subject test) showed a reasonably correlation to college GPA, but not graduation rates.
The general SAT score correlations to college success ranked below sustained (e.g., over 2 years) extracurricular activities, and coming from a well-known "feeder" school (a HS where lots of people apply to a specific college), but both showed weak-to-no correlation that varied from year-to-year like the generic SAT. The "feeder" effect seemed to indicate that groups of students that have a history of academic success tend to do better than isolated individuals (which indicated the advantage of support groups in college leading to higher college success).
Your mileage may vary, though...
GPS works by triangulating between 4-6 satellites that are all spread out. A 3d hexagon with a person in the middle somewhere.
Since with GPS all the satellites need to be above the horizon, so they are all located on one side of you and are moving fast (so fast they need to use relativistic corrections).
Also, GPS is actually based on trilateration (knowing the time and location of the satellites), not triangulation, but nice try...
the plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft launched in 1972 and 1973 showed the Earth's position from 14 pulsars
Just because it was an old idea, doesn't mean it was a good idea...
Unfortunately, these vintage pulsar map would be nearly impossible to use for its intended purpose of allowing someone in the far distant future to locate us...
However, for a short term galactic map usable on human time scales, pulsars might prove much more useful.
Palm Pilots cost more then $100 and they wouldn't be considered worthy of being called a computer due to its limitation.
Huh? I had a lot of Palm Pilots and they were quite capable machines, especially for the price. It was a computer. You could program it. One of them had wireless built in. I had two different camera attachments, so it could even take pictures.
But back in 2005 you needed some CPU Power to render web pages,
Have you looked at what it takes to render modern pages? It takes a lot more CPU today that it did in 2005. The CPUs are faster so it doesn't look like it takes more power, but it sure does.
The failure of OLPC was their BOGO that never could deliver. Vaporware. The delivery of "my" OLPC kept getting pushed back AFTER they had pulled the money from my credit card, but they were crowing about how well production was going. It got to the point where the time limit for contesting the charge was about to run out and I cancelled. That's three months for my credit card, so yeah, they promised delivery over and over for almost three months and could never quite pull it off. But they kept telling me all about all the other people who were getting theirs as if that should make me happy.
In 2018, OLPC2018 could be a kickstarter, or other crowdfunding project... Probably with the same result. They were ahead of their time in many ways...
But in reality, OLPC was mostly a scheme to extract money from well heeled charitable foundations and deposit the money in the hands of some well-connected local electronics assembly companies.
This kind of scheme has been going on as long as charitable foundations have existed... Remember, your donation to a charity generally isn't really directly going to the beneficiaries, it's going to pay the well-connected suppliers. In the end, the suppliers probably benefit the most because there is little competition and there generally are fewer issues (e.g., recalls, returns, etc) with any cost cutting maneuvers they take, vs if they had to actually produce something for typical "paying" customers...
Why not just burn all that shit? No silly enzymes or science required.
The reason they don't just "burn all that shit" is that they are interested in a way to break down the PET back to it's polymer pre-cursors so they can repolymerize it back into plastic again to improve recycling. By recovering the original pre-cursors, they can more effectively recycle the plastic.
The current recycle flow for PET is a bit costly to produce back food-grade plastic (vs simply using virgin material) because of the use of dye, color sorting is required before melting, so often PET is open-loop recycled into lower-grade material like carpet. However, if original pre-cursors can be recovered and isolated, it might be eventually be more economical to do close-loop recycling (clear bottle back to clear bottles) which make it easier to compete with using virgin material...
Of course our recycling rates are pretty low now and virgin material is pretty cheap, so it's hard to see how this would ever work at a scale, but even today we don't "burn all that shit", we open-loop recycle...
I mean, sulfuric acid will also eat many plastics. Do you worry about sulfuric acid "getting loose" and eating your fleece jacket?
I think you might want to go back to the acid-rain days of the '70's and '80's and see how well this argument holds up.
Similar arguments today about sequestered carbon dioxide or methane clathrate "getting loose" and warming our planet.
So just how will they attack plastic pollution like the great pacific garbage patch? The patch isn't because we are deliberately dumping plastic waste (which could be broken down by this enzyme, but is being dumped into landfills), places like the garbage patch are apparently from plastic waste that isn't in the landfill cycle and is being washed away down storm drains into the ocean.
It seems like some sort of "getting loose" would be required for this to actually be of any use in anything other than the current landfill garbage cycle and even then, it's not like land-fills are totally "leakproof"...
A patent troll saying they'll help you with patents? This is rich, even for Microsoft.
Given that they say they will require you to licence-back the patents for use in their products, it might be more fair to say that they are helping themselves to your patents...
Which is more in line to what you might expecting...
If google were to stop working on all these projects for the feds, they'd be less subject to the equal employment opportunity record-keeping spotlight they are currently under.
<tinfoil>By giving up some small federal contract, they get to keep discriminating? Genius!</tinfoil>
Well, we belong to the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, the Mammalia class and Primates order, the Hominidae family, Genus homo and Species Homo Sapiens.
Except for the last one there are other animals we share this trait with. And except for the latter two, there are currently others who share the same level on the classification chart.
What makes a human human? What makes a human not an animal? What's special about us?
The only thing that make a human, human is the aggregate characteristics of the entities with whom we procreate (which are basically other humans).***
As for other "characteristics", we now know that other species have language, know how to count, make plans, etc., which is all the things we call thinking (i.e., I think therefore I am). The only thing that we are clinging to today for our humanity is the arbitrary definition of the "divine" (e.g., we somehow possess some sort un-measurable magical property called a soul or other property).
Historically, we humans used to invoke the divine explanation to justify all sorts of things like genocide, segregation, etc, so it is reasonable to assume that many of us (whether or not we feel ourselves religious), still feel compelled to think of humans as separate from animals (or others we feel superior to), when of course we humans are, by most scientifically determinable measures, basically an animal (e.g., homo-sapiens have about 23,000 genes, and a fly has about 31,000 genes, so we are far from the most complex or evolved).
***This is probably why Neanderthals (and potentially other undiscovered members of the genus homo) are probably basically human even though they have been arbitrarily categorized otherwise.
You can avoid acrylamide in cooked food by (1) eating meat or (2) eating boiled food. So... meat and potatoes! Specifically roasted meat and boiled potatoes.
FWIW, you cannot avoid acrylamide in roasted meats. Acrylamide is a byproduct of the Maillard reaction. Basically applying high heat anything that has sugars and amino acids (specifically asparagine which is found in meat, eggs, dairy, as well as potatoes, asparagus and other vegetables and most foods you eat). You would need to also "boil" both the meat and potatoes to avoid the Maillard reaction which creates this chemical.
To make things worse, there was a recent study that potentially implicates the amino-acid asparagine itself in the spread of cancer... Of course, you can't avoid asparagine because like nearly every food source, humans produce asparagine as part of their normal existence so if you avoid eating it you body will likely crank up it's own production to make up for the deficit.
Short story: we may simply all be doomed in this respect. Perhaps just eat/drink what you want?
I'm kind of curious, are doors in California required to have warnings along the lines of "Warning: outside contains sunlight, which is known to the state of California to cause cancer."?
Prop 65 is only about chemicals, but you never know where a new California proposition will take you...
Of course some sun-block lotions have been required to slap on this warning...
WARNING: This product contains benzophenone, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/file...
Don't we need really fat 'cancer' labels on cars then - and I mean every car, even the electric ones (tires)? :-(
No wait, they got an even fatter lobby.
You jest, but you just can't get away from this stuff in california...
https://www.p65warnings.ca.gov...
It's not a problem with warnings themselves, but of weighing the level of risk. The labels don't give one any sense of risk degree. Perhaps we need a rating system, similar to movie ratings or Dept. of Homeland Security's "Homeland Security Advisory System" rating colors (which have since been altered in confusing ways).
By the way, the warnings are required by Proposition 65, which was voted into CA law. It's not meddling gov't, but meddling voters.
Let's make it better instead of throwing it out.
In California, a proposition (like prop65) needs to be changed by another proposition passed by the voters...
Good luck with that...
"You can request the "Hazardous Material Data Sheet" from the manufacturer."
I think every online listing should be required to have a link to the Hazardous Material Data Sheet. Otherwise, it is too time-consuming to learn about the hazard.
Do you think vendors should put a link to this on every bottle of water?
http://www.sciencelab.com/msds...
Sometimes, things turn out to be worthwhile - emission regs among them...
Sometimes, things turn out to be like MTBE, the gasoline additive mandated by the California Air Resource Board (aka CARB which creates the emission regs for California). The CARB basically ignored information provided by the EPA about the carcinogenic nature of MTBE and mandated it in all gasoline sold in the state because of heavy lobbying by ARCO and a big political push by environmental groups blinded by reducing smog. Because of the California MTBE laws, other states (including New York), also got on the MTBE wagon...
Fortunately, MTBE was eventually banned, but not until a decade later and after basically polluting many water supplies all over the country...
“At the time that the regulation was passed, I think that we were aware that it might be carcinogenic and that it could have some other health effects,” -- Dr. Andrew Wortman, scientist @CARB