It's a bit worrying that standards were set, but after they were violated we hear that it's no big deal. You can't argue that is consistent with effective and rational regulation. Either (a) the standards were set irrationally low, or (b) the public's interests are being shortchanged here.
It is quite possible for both to be true. Allowing silly, unenforceable regulations means that you don't have any rationally defensible ones when you need them.
You can't look at a nation that has chosen a social democracy model for their society and criticize individuals living there for not spending as much on charity as we do. *We* have chosen a system which allows us to keep more of the money we earn, but at the expense of accepting the existence of charitable needs that don't exist in other countries.
You can't say we are more generous than the Swedes, because they *could*, if they wanted to, elect a government that would implement US style economic policies. They'd then have more disposable income to spend on things like charities giving medical care to the indigent. Instead they have chosen to have less disposable income and in return to have the need not exist at all. In effect, they accept a narrower range of extremes in material wealth than we would.
I understand that there are legitimate philosophical differences here, and you can argue from a certain philosophical stance that the Swedish system is morally wrong. But it's disingenuous to pat ourselves on the back for being so "charitable", when many of our charities address needs that other nations have chosen to address in a different way.
Fixing the litigation problem is a good idea, but it won't make a significant difference to the fact we are heading toward spending 20% of our GDP on health care.
So far as our health care being the best in the world, it depends on how you define and measure that. If you look at customer satisfaction of people who have the means to buy good insurance, that's probably true. For example if you want a particular procedure and have the insurance to cover it, you're probably happier about that procedure.
If you define health care quality by outcomes (e.g. infant mortality, cancer survival, life expectancy) the situation becomes a lot more complex, and it is not at all clear that the US has the same lead in outcomes as it does in spending as percent of GDP. I don't want to oversimplify the case, because there's all together too much of that sort of thing going on. We might pick one measure, such as cancer mortality after initial diagnosis, and we might see some advantage to the US. In other cases, such as life expectancy, there are confounding factors such as the obesity epidemic and the resulting prevalence of metabolic syndrome.
What you can't do is take one person's experience, or even the experience of a class of (privileged) individuals, and make that stand for the whole.
That said, I think it is fair to say that the financial efficiency of the US health care system is low relative to other advanced nations. We clearly spend a lot more for outcomes that aren't clearly better. It's also true that if we imagined doing a perfect job on tort reform (which we should), this situation would not change. It would reduce costs by a few percent, not the 30-50% it would take to put is in line with other advanced nations.
I think the reason we don't have efficient health care as measured by outcomes is because our health care system is not designed around outcomes, it is designed around patient satisfaction for the most profitable segment of patients. This not only excludes unprofitable patients, patient satisfaction is not a perfect proxy for outcomes.
Recently I had elective surgery. I only had to wait about a month. In some countries I might have to wait three or four months for that surgery. So I'm very satisfied with our health care system with regard to this one procedure. If I lose my job and health insurance, and I can't get insurance at my new job because of preexisting conditions, then I'd be very dissatisfied with our health care system.
If it could be clearly demonstrated that we'd get the same healthcare as we're getting now for a lower price on government-run healthcare, I doubt you could find more than a handful of people in this country who'd oppose it.
When you say "this country", what country are you referring to? I happen to live in America and there are plenty of people who hare happy to cut off their own noses to spite their faces. Just about everybody agrees that is true, too. They just differ on who the people advocating that are.
Well, I see nothing a priori wrong with a "texting health plan" so long as we don't intend it to be the only way people can get health information.
Railing against this seems to me to be like railing against a web site with health information on it because people should be getting this kind of information from their primary care physician. That's absolutely true. It's also true that many people don't have a PCP and many family's don't have a pediatrician, and *nobody* has a plan on the table to fix this. Not the Democrats, and certainly not the Republicans.
It seems to me if we have a system that is financially predicated on many people who need health care information not having a physician or family pediatrician, it is not unreasonable to look at other, cheaper ways of getting that information to those people. Ridiculously inadequate? Sure. Better than nothing? Maybe a little, but you'd have to ask an expert in pediatric public health whether it has any useful impact.
I understand that some people have a philosophical position that says that government should not help people who need things like prenatal and postnatal health care information. That's fine, but you ought not sail under false colors, saying "This is obviously an inadequate program." Of course it is! But you can't really pretend to make common cause with people who think *more effective* action ought to be taken.
Then would you say that "theft" is necessarily morally indefensible?
If so, then anything that the government does must also be morally indefensible. That includes enforcing criminal laws and providing redress in case of breach of contract.
If *anything* the government does is morally defensible, AND if theft is necessarily morally indefensible, then "government is theft" is necessarily wrong in a literal sense. But it could still be right in a poetic sense.
The term for a political statement that is wrong in literal sense but right in a poetic sense is "political slogan".
Of course it was a stupid thing to do. (Duh). But that's the kind of decision making you get when you have people who are in a hurry and thinking about something else.
And of course laptop batteries have multiple redundant safety measures. Except in the rare cases where they don't.
But what about batteries that look like laptop batteries but are not?
Is it reasonable to ask the luggage inspectors to look at a battery and see that it is a laptop battery and not some other kind of multi-cell battery pack? That it is properly designed to be thrown into a brief case with the keys and loose change (a use case for laptop battery packs but not, say, instrument batteries)? Do we want our inspection lines to be held up by debates about whether this particular battery has an adequate design for this method of storage?
I don't think so.
We're talking about the law of large numbers here, which is my point. If we take a low probability event and repeat enough trials, it becomes a high probability event. Take counterfeit batteries. They are (so far as we know) very, very rare. But they do exist. Even though they are rare there's probably a number of them in the air right now. The existence of knock-offs negates any kind of probability calculations you do based on a genuine battery with its redundant safety features. That's why defense in depth is key. The counterfeit battery when stored in a laptop is probably safe enough. Loose in the luggage maybe not safe enough.
We don't cover all our citizens with health care, and private charity does not by any stretch of the imagination come even close to making up that gap. If we include taking care of our own people European social democracies fare better than if we exclude that.
Now with the exception of anarchists, who have an internally consistent position, nobody literally believes that "government is theft." What people mean is that "government taxation to support programs that are morally indefensible is theft." That's a position a Republican stalwart can share with a socialist pacifist who can't abide Democrats because they are too right wing. The only difference is in the details of which programs are considered morally indefensible.
"Government is theft" is the kind of emotional political slogan I can't abide from either side ("TAX WEALTH - NOT WORK"). Such slogans are nearly always in code. There is an underlying paradigm people have in mind when they say them, usually an irrefutable one (the meddling, officious government bureaucrat, the ruthless, well connected crony capitalist who games the system) that by process of synecdoche they stretch to cover a broader class (all government workers, all wealthy people).
It's not possible to have a rational discussion on this kind of basis.
Well, most libertarians I know aren't that bad at logical reasoning.
If having a political ideology means accepting any sloppy thinking that comes up with a conclusion your particular herd likes, then what does it mean to have a political ideology? It becomes a kind of irrational brand loyalty. We might as well duke it out in the streets as debate our positions.
Flight baggage are written with the convenience of the rules enforcer. Not the passenger.
If you think that through, it makes sense to do it that way.
The laptop battery installed in a laptop is properly stored. The laptop battery kicking around in somebody's suitcase is not necessarily so. Most accidents are a compound of events people thought unlikely: it is unlikely that a laptop battery will explode due to redundant safety features (unless it is a cheap knock-off, which are sometimes produced in the same Chinese factories as the real thing). It is unlikely that something stored properly could cause a problem. We count on that redundancy in case one of the assumptions fails. Don't forget that the ValuJet crash way back in the 90s was due to shipping the same oxygen generators that sit over every passenger's seat. In that storage setup, a faulty detonation results in the mask dropping in front of the passenger. In a crate of oxygen generators down in the old, it was fatal to everyone.
Here is a cautionary tale about storing batteries properly. Just recently I took three dead button batteries and put them in my pants pockets rather than get up and put them in the trash. I forgot I had them there and the next day I was sitting at the table and was surprised by an explosion in my pocket. It was small explosion by normal standards, but there is no such thing as a small explosion when it happens in your pants. (Gee that sounds like an aphorism.) I felt the electrolyte leaking onto my leg and immediately pulled my pants down. Good thing this wasn't at work. Now I knew I shouldn't have put those batteries in my pocket, but you could walk around with button batteries in your pocket every day of your life and never have something like that happen. I counted on it not happening in the fifteen minutes I expected to have them there. Everybody does things like that they know they shouldn't do. Now multiply that by thousands of times, and put tens of thousands of lives at risk.
Anyhow, the point is that we could train TSA guys to be able determine whether a laptop battery was safely stored. It wouldn't be hard. But that's one of hundreds, maybe thousands of cases. What you *really* need to do is to hire people who've gone through the equivalent of an associate's degree program on engineering and safety, put them through stringent application tests and continually retrain and restest them. Then you'd get much better security and much less hassle.
But guess what? We as a people would rather put up with the hassle than pay for safety AND convenience. That's not an entirely irrational point of view either. You've got to draw the line somewhere, and no matter where you draw that line, somebody will be inconvenienced unnecessarily. Take model rocket enthusiasts. They *should* in an ideal world, be able to take most of their stuff aboard a plane if it is properly stowed. But a ruleset that encompassed all such cases would be so large that the people enforcing them couldn't know them by heart. They'd be sifting through the rulebook on every passenger.
Naturally, the rules *could* be made better. But it's not easy to come up with rules that (a) inconvenience nobody unnecessarily and (b) can be implemented everywhere with affordable personnel and (c) don't cause traffic jams at security gates. Oh, yes and (d) which keep people safe. It takes years. It's been almost a decade since 9/11, and even if rules hadn't been side tracked by security theater, you wouldn't expect the rules to be perfect.
By definition, every scientific debate is a political one as well.
That you define "scientific debate" as "political debate" probably explains why you can't take part in a "scientific debate" as defined by others (notably scientists).
When you say "deal with it" you mean that anybody who wants to have a scientific debate has to do it on your terms. I have no idea where you got that notion.
The scientific consensus amounts to this: (1) climate is changing (2) human activities contribute to it, (3) nobody can say for sure what fraction of (1) is accounted for by (2), or how much impact we can have by altering human activities.
Are some of the reports and studies contributing to this consensus faulty. Yep. That's always the case.
What we are having though is a political debate disguised as a scientific one. The biggest determinant of position taken outside the scientific community is determined by the following factors;
A. How much you believe climate change will affect you (negative mostly or if you are Russian perhaps positive).
B. How much you believe measures to curb human contributions to climate change will help you or hurt you.
Once you've done the hedonic calculus for this, you either accept the scientific consensus and exaggerate it, or you go shopping for dissidents in the scientific community.
Personally, I suspect that even if we are the lion's share of the cause of climate change we'll never, ever manage to do anything constructive about that until we've run out of fossil fuels, because this is how people with a dog in the fight think.
This thread is starting to sound like an infomercial.
Throw away that bulky refrigeration equipment!
Say goodbye to those messy liquid nitrogen dewars!
No more trekking down to crowded laboratories!
You can enjoy wide-bandwidth germanium laser technology in the privacy of your own home!
(Cut to testimonial): I really enjoy having my own home germanium laser set-up. I used to schlep down to the lab five times a week, and as often as not all the equipment was in use. Now I keep my room temperature germanium laser next to the couch and use it while I'm watching TV. After just three weeks I had more definition than I'd ever had before.
Although I agree that hereditary aristocracy is not democratic, neither is plutocracy.
Given the normal mathematical regression to the mean, the great families of, say, the Restoration aren't necessarily so economically high and mighty today. In an era where you have far more constituents than you can possibly meet, money rules. Hereditary nobility might be the only chance for a person of modest means to hold office.
It's hard to say for sure about something like that, without having a control universe to test your hypothesis. However, while cheap wireless might have given these products more legs, I don't think it was either necessary or sufficient.
The huge win with the original Palm Pilot was they got the form factor and price point right. It (1) did something identifiably useful well enough, (2) with sufficient convenience, and (3) at a price that was seen as reasonable.
The Newton, while vastly more sophisticated, had two of these three things wrong. It's form factor was too big and it was too expensive. It did useful things -- in fact it did way more than it needed to to justify its existence as a mobile platform. It began to infringe on laptop levels of features and price while not being quite as useful. If laptops didn't exist, it would have been a killer product.
Now sending messages from a plain old cell phone is awkard to be sure, but it also turns out to be in an important sense *convenient*. You always have your phone with you, so getting a phone with texting capability means you're always in touch (for asynchronous communication like text/email, not just synchronous like a phone call). That solves the form factor problem right there -- you're going to be carrying the sucker, so there's zero marginal footprint as far as you're concerned.
Some of the early converged Windows CE/phone devices were really very impressive for their day (I believe I'm thinking of a certain Samsung device), But *they* didn't catch on, even though they had all the functional bits you needed, because they were approaching Newtonesque dimensions. Take a phone like the Droid and make it the size of a Newton, and suddenly you have a dud, even though it would be vastly superior for certain tasks. If all that was missing was wireless, this should have taken off. Converged phones took off a few years later at the same air time prices, but they were more phone sized.
Now what I think what killed the PDA was that laptops became cheap. I developed for PocketPC, so I always had access to bucket's of 'em for free, but I almost never carried one except when I wanted to do something with GPS. Why? Because I also had a laptop. Once I had a laptop, I didn't need a featureful handheld platform. I might use a convenient one -- one that did basic PIM type functions without firing up the laptop. But then I got a smartphone, which wasn't a great PDA, but it was good enough.
I'm still personally mystified why tablets didn't take off, since they were pretty much replacements for laptops, even functioned as laptops. They should have been, in effect, better, more flexible laptops. I can only guess that the software experience wasn't good enough. Maybe somebody else (Apple) will get it right.
These days, the iPhone and Android phones are *very* good PDAs while hitting the "zero footprint" and "instantly available" desiderata.
Speaking of the Newton form factor as the kiss of death, the iPad is certainly an interesting development. One thing I've seen is timing is important in creating a new product niche. The iPod touch and iPhone have become platforms that can feed the development of apps to the iPad; the Kindle has established a market niche for devices of this approximate size and Apple has the Kindle squarely in its sights.
There have been bacteria recovered from deep rock cores that survive under high pressure, low energy environment by carrying out their biological processes very, very slowly. Other bacteria have been found that can survive the near boiling temperatures of thermal springs.
In fact, bacteria that are adapted to live in the supercritical water of deep ocean thermal vents would be a great start. We're talking 400 degrees C, but still liquid because of the immense pressure. Right there you're in the ballpark.
Bacteria recovered from the Mariana Trench grow fine at pressures of 75 MPa.
The real problem is the lack of hydrogen for biological reactions. That's a limiting factor.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit worrying that standards were set, but after they were violated we hear that it's no big deal. You can't argue that is consistent with effective and rational regulation. Either (a) the standards were set irrationally low, or (b) the public's interests are being shortchanged here.
It is quite possible for both to be true. Allowing silly, unenforceable regulations means that you don't have any rationally defensible ones when you need them.
I don't think distributor necessarily have zero value. They just can't demand a cut without *adding* value.
How is a pallet of Li-ion battery different from a pallet of oxygen generators?
Voluntary by *whom*?
You can't look at a nation that has chosen a social democracy model for their society and criticize individuals living there for not spending as much on charity as we do. *We* have chosen a system which allows us to keep more of the money we earn, but at the expense of accepting the existence of charitable needs that don't exist in other countries.
You can't say we are more generous than the Swedes, because they *could*, if they wanted to, elect a government that would implement US style economic policies. They'd then have more disposable income to spend on things like charities giving medical care to the indigent. Instead they have chosen to have less disposable income and in return to have the need not exist at all. In effect, they accept a narrower range of extremes in material wealth than we would.
I understand that there are legitimate philosophical differences here, and you can argue from a certain philosophical stance that the Swedish system is morally wrong. But it's disingenuous to pat ourselves on the back for being so "charitable", when many of our charities address needs that other nations have chosen to address in a different way.
Fixing the litigation problem is a good idea, but it won't make a significant difference to the fact we are heading toward spending 20% of our GDP on health care.
So far as our health care being the best in the world, it depends on how you define and measure that. If you look at customer satisfaction of people who have the means to buy good insurance, that's probably true. For example if you want a particular procedure and have the insurance to cover it, you're probably happier about that procedure.
If you define health care quality by outcomes (e.g. infant mortality, cancer survival, life expectancy) the situation becomes a lot more complex, and it is not at all clear that the US has the same lead in outcomes as it does in spending as percent of GDP. I don't want to oversimplify the case, because there's all together too much of that sort of thing going on. We might pick one measure, such as cancer mortality after initial diagnosis, and we might see some advantage to the US. In other cases, such as life expectancy, there are confounding factors such as the obesity epidemic and the resulting prevalence of metabolic syndrome.
What you can't do is take one person's experience, or even the experience of a class of (privileged) individuals, and make that stand for the whole.
That said, I think it is fair to say that the financial efficiency of the US health care system is low relative to other advanced nations. We clearly spend a lot more for outcomes that aren't clearly better. It's also true that if we imagined doing a perfect job on tort reform (which we should), this situation would not change. It would reduce costs by a few percent, not the 30-50% it would take to put is in line with other advanced nations.
I think the reason we don't have efficient health care as measured by outcomes is because our health care system is not designed around outcomes, it is designed around patient satisfaction for the most profitable segment of patients. This not only excludes unprofitable patients, patient satisfaction is not a perfect proxy for outcomes.
Recently I had elective surgery. I only had to wait about a month. In some countries I might have to wait three or four months for that surgery. So I'm very satisfied with our health care system with regard to this one procedure. If I lose my job and health insurance, and I can't get insurance at my new job because of preexisting conditions, then I'd be very dissatisfied with our health care system.
The implication is that the government is going to take away our private health insurance and make us *all* make do with text messages.
Of course everyone knows that's not true, but it doesn't stop some of us feeling like that is true.
If it could be clearly demonstrated that we'd get the same healthcare as we're getting now for a lower price on government-run healthcare, I doubt you could find more than a handful of people in this country who'd oppose it.
When you say "this country", what country are you referring to? I happen to live in America and there are plenty of people who hare happy to cut off their own noses to spite their faces. Just about everybody agrees that is true, too. They just differ on who the people advocating that are.
Well, I see nothing a priori wrong with a "texting health plan" so long as we don't intend it to be the only way people can get health information.
Railing against this seems to me to be like railing against a web site with health information on it because people should be getting this kind of information from their primary care physician. That's absolutely true. It's also true that many people don't have a PCP and many family's don't have a pediatrician, and *nobody* has a plan on the table to fix this. Not the Democrats, and certainly not the Republicans.
It seems to me if we have a system that is financially predicated on many people who need health care information not having a physician or family pediatrician, it is not unreasonable to look at other, cheaper ways of getting that information to those people. Ridiculously inadequate? Sure. Better than nothing? Maybe a little, but you'd have to ask an expert in pediatric public health whether it has any useful impact.
I understand that some people have a philosophical position that says that government should not help people who need things like prenatal and postnatal health care information. That's fine, but you ought not sail under false colors, saying "This is obviously an inadequate program." Of course it is! But you can't really pretend to make common cause with people who think *more effective* action ought to be taken.
Then would you say that "theft" is necessarily morally indefensible?
If so, then anything that the government does must also be morally indefensible. That includes enforcing criminal laws and providing redress in case of breach of contract.
If *anything* the government does is morally defensible, AND if theft is necessarily morally indefensible, then "government is theft" is necessarily wrong in a literal sense. But it could still be right in a poetic sense.
The term for a political statement that is wrong in literal sense but right in a poetic sense is "political slogan".
Of course it was a stupid thing to do. (Duh). But that's the kind of decision making you get when you have people who are in a hurry and thinking about something else.
And of course laptop batteries have multiple redundant safety measures. Except in the rare cases where they don't.
But what about batteries that look like laptop batteries but are not?
Is it reasonable to ask the luggage inspectors to look at a battery and see that it is a laptop battery and not some other kind of multi-cell battery pack? That it is properly designed to be thrown into a brief case with the keys and loose change (a use case for laptop battery packs but not, say, instrument batteries)? Do we want our inspection lines to be held up by debates about whether this particular battery has an adequate design for this method of storage?
I don't think so.
We're talking about the law of large numbers here, which is my point. If we take a low probability event and repeat enough trials, it becomes a high probability event. Take counterfeit batteries. They are (so far as we know) very, very rare. But they do exist. Even though they are rare there's probably a number of them in the air right now. The existence of knock-offs negates any kind of probability calculations you do based on a genuine battery with its redundant safety features. That's why defense in depth is key. The counterfeit battery when stored in a laptop is probably safe enough. Loose in the luggage maybe not safe enough.
Depends on how you define and measure "charity".
We don't cover all our citizens with health care, and private charity does not by any stretch of the imagination come even close to making up that gap. If we include taking care of our own people European social democracies fare better than if we exclude that.
Now with the exception of anarchists, who have an internally consistent position, nobody literally believes that "government is theft." What people mean is that "government taxation to support programs that are morally indefensible is theft." That's a position a Republican stalwart can share with a socialist pacifist who can't abide Democrats because they are too right wing. The only difference is in the details of which programs are considered morally indefensible.
"Government is theft" is the kind of emotional political slogan I can't abide from either side ("TAX WEALTH - NOT WORK"). Such slogans are nearly always in code. There is an underlying paradigm people have in mind when they say them, usually an irrefutable one (the meddling, officious government bureaucrat, the ruthless, well connected crony capitalist who games the system) that by process of synecdoche they stretch to cover a broader class (all government workers, all wealthy people).
It's not possible to have a rational discussion on this kind of basis.
Well, most libertarians I know aren't that bad at logical reasoning.
If having a political ideology means accepting any sloppy thinking that comes up with a conclusion your particular herd likes, then what does it mean to have a political ideology? It becomes a kind of irrational brand loyalty. We might as well duke it out in the streets as debate our positions.
Flight baggage are written with the convenience of the rules enforcer. Not the passenger.
If you think that through, it makes sense to do it that way.
The laptop battery installed in a laptop is properly stored. The laptop battery kicking around in somebody's suitcase is not necessarily so. Most accidents are a compound of events people thought unlikely: it is unlikely that a laptop battery will explode due to redundant safety features (unless it is a cheap knock-off, which are sometimes produced in the same Chinese factories as the real thing). It is unlikely that something stored properly could cause a problem. We count on that redundancy in case one of the assumptions fails. Don't forget that the ValuJet crash way back in the 90s was due to shipping the same oxygen generators that sit over every passenger's seat. In that storage setup, a faulty detonation results in the mask dropping in front of the passenger. In a crate of oxygen generators down in the old, it was fatal to everyone.
Here is a cautionary tale about storing batteries properly. Just recently I took three dead button batteries and put them in my pants pockets rather than get up and put them in the trash. I forgot I had them there and the next day I was sitting at the table and was surprised by an explosion in my pocket. It was small explosion by normal standards, but there is no such thing as a small explosion when it happens in your pants. (Gee that sounds like an aphorism.) I felt the electrolyte leaking onto my leg and immediately pulled my pants down. Good thing this wasn't at work. Now I knew I shouldn't have put those batteries in my pocket, but you could walk around with button batteries in your pocket every day of your life and never have something like that happen. I counted on it not happening in the fifteen minutes I expected to have them there. Everybody does things like that they know they shouldn't do. Now multiply that by thousands of times, and put tens of thousands of lives at risk.
Anyhow, the point is that we could train TSA guys to be able determine whether a laptop battery was safely stored. It wouldn't be hard. But that's one of hundreds, maybe thousands of cases. What you *really* need to do is to hire people who've gone through the equivalent of an associate's degree program on engineering and safety, put them through stringent application tests and continually retrain and restest them. Then you'd get much better security and much less hassle.
But guess what? We as a people would rather put up with the hassle than pay for safety AND convenience. That's not an entirely irrational point of view either. You've got to draw the line somewhere, and no matter where you draw that line, somebody will be inconvenienced unnecessarily. Take model rocket enthusiasts. They *should* in an ideal world, be able to take most of their stuff aboard a plane if it is properly stowed. But a ruleset that encompassed all such cases would be so large that the people enforcing them couldn't know them by heart. They'd be sifting through the rulebook on every passenger.
Naturally, the rules *could* be made better. But it's not easy to come up with rules that (a) inconvenience nobody unnecessarily and (b) can be implemented everywhere with affordable personnel and (c) don't cause traffic jams at security gates. Oh, yes and (d) which keep people safe. It takes years. It's been almost a decade since 9/11, and even if rules hadn't been side tracked by security theater, you wouldn't expect the rules to be perfect.
So you don't like health care reform. Fair enough.
And you don't like this program. Fair enough.
Therefore this program equals health care reform?
WTF?
By definition, every scientific debate is a political one as well.
That you define "scientific debate" as "political debate" probably explains why you can't take part in a "scientific debate" as defined by others (notably scientists).
When you say "deal with it" you mean that anybody who wants to have a scientific debate has to do it on your terms. I have no idea where you got that notion.
The scientific consensus amounts to this: (1) climate is changing (2) human activities contribute to it, (3) nobody can say for sure what fraction of (1) is accounted for by (2), or how much impact we can have by altering human activities.
Are some of the reports and studies contributing to this consensus faulty. Yep. That's always the case.
What we are having though is a political debate disguised as a scientific one. The biggest determinant of position taken outside the scientific community is determined by the following factors;
A. How much you believe climate change will affect you (negative mostly or if you are Russian perhaps positive).
B. How much you believe measures to curb human contributions to climate change will help you or hurt you.
Once you've done the hedonic calculus for this, you either accept the scientific consensus and exaggerate it, or you go shopping for dissidents in the scientific community.
Personally, I suspect that even if we are the lion's share of the cause of climate change we'll never, ever manage to do anything constructive about that until we've run out of fossil fuels, because this is how people with a dog in the fight think.
This thread is starting to sound like an infomercial.
Throw away that bulky refrigeration equipment!
Say goodbye to those messy liquid nitrogen dewars!
No more trekking down to crowded laboratories!
You can enjoy wide-bandwidth germanium laser technology in the privacy of your own home!
(Cut to testimonial): I really enjoy having my own home germanium laser set-up. I used to schlep down to the lab five times a week, and as often as not all the equipment was in use. Now I keep my room temperature germanium laser next to the couch and use it while I'm watching TV. After just three weeks I had more definition than I'd ever had before.
Well, except we ain't talkin' "Bumpits" here. Books aren't just another product. They are the foundation of our civilization.
Although I agree that hereditary aristocracy is not democratic, neither is plutocracy.
Given the normal mathematical regression to the mean, the great families of, say, the Restoration aren't necessarily so economically high and mighty today. In an era where you have far more constituents than you can possibly meet, money rules. Hereditary nobility might be the only chance for a person of modest means to hold office.
I'll be impressed because they'll need coherent geraniums. (er... geranii?)
You miss the point.
At last, we can lase about in a comfortable, shirtsleeves environment.
And it sucks to be Cambridge. There is no such thing as Englandium.
I know. And the atomic symbol "Uk" is available too.
It's hard to say for sure about something like that, without having a control universe to test your hypothesis. However, while cheap wireless might have given these products more legs, I don't think it was either necessary or sufficient.
The huge win with the original Palm Pilot was they got the form factor and price point right. It (1) did something identifiably useful well enough, (2) with sufficient convenience, and (3) at a price that was seen as reasonable.
The Newton, while vastly more sophisticated, had two of these three things wrong. It's form factor was too big and it was too expensive. It did useful things -- in fact it did way more than it needed to to justify its existence as a mobile platform. It began to infringe on laptop levels of features and price while not being quite as useful. If laptops didn't exist, it would have been a killer product.
Now sending messages from a plain old cell phone is awkard to be sure, but it also turns out to be in an important sense *convenient*. You always have your phone with you, so getting a phone with texting capability means you're always in touch (for asynchronous communication like text/email, not just synchronous like a phone call). That solves the form factor problem right there -- you're going to be carrying the sucker, so there's zero marginal footprint as far as you're concerned.
Some of the early converged Windows CE/phone devices were really very impressive for their day (I believe I'm thinking of a certain Samsung device), But *they* didn't catch on, even though they had all the functional bits you needed, because they were approaching Newtonesque dimensions. Take a phone like the Droid and make it the size of a Newton, and suddenly you have a dud, even though it would be vastly superior for certain tasks. If all that was missing was wireless, this should have taken off. Converged phones took off a few years later at the same air time prices, but they were more phone sized.
Now what I think what killed the PDA was that laptops became cheap. I developed for PocketPC, so I always had access to bucket's of 'em for free, but I almost never carried one except when I wanted to do something with GPS. Why? Because I also had a laptop. Once I had a laptop, I didn't need a featureful handheld platform. I might use a convenient one -- one that did basic PIM type functions without firing up the laptop. But then I got a smartphone, which wasn't a great PDA, but it was good enough.
I'm still personally mystified why tablets didn't take off, since they were pretty much replacements for laptops, even functioned as laptops. They should have been, in effect, better, more flexible laptops. I can only guess that the software experience wasn't good enough. Maybe somebody else (Apple) will get it right.
These days, the iPhone and Android phones are *very* good PDAs while hitting the "zero footprint" and "instantly available" desiderata.
Speaking of the Newton form factor as the kiss of death, the iPad is certainly an interesting development. One thing I've seen is timing is important in creating a new product niche. The iPod touch and iPhone have become platforms that can feed the development of apps to the iPad; the Kindle has established a market niche for devices of this approximate size and Apple has the Kindle squarely in its sights.
"It's not the first man to draw who wins. It's the first man to hit his target."
I shouldn't think that too difficult.
There have been bacteria recovered from deep rock cores that survive under high pressure, low energy environment by carrying out their biological processes very, very slowly. Other bacteria have been found that can survive the near boiling temperatures of thermal springs.
In fact, bacteria that are adapted to live in the supercritical water of deep ocean thermal vents would be a great start. We're talking 400 degrees C, but still liquid because of the immense pressure. Right there you're in the ballpark.
Bacteria recovered from the Mariana Trench grow fine at pressures of 75 MPa.
The real problem is the lack of hydrogen for biological reactions. That's a limiting factor.