You are assuming that the only party interested in following or harassing the human rights activists are the Chinese government. It's not hard to think up *other* persons or groups that might be interested. Judging from the ultra nationalist kooks we have, we can imagine private nutcases who think of themselves as more patriotic than the government, who think the Party is much too wishy washy on the issues of class traitors and much too interested in appeasing the West.
That's just the second most likely scenario. Other, more exotic scenarios are possible as well. In a world with so many people connected to the Internet, virtually every kind of crackpot you can imagine is out there. All it takes is one with an Internet feed.
I think we have a preponderance of evidence situation here. On the whole, the most likely culprit is the Chinese government. But it's not quite to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" stage. You look at the whole web of evidence: the motivations, track record of past behavior, known propensities to industrial espionage, methods used, means and opportunity. Virtually every single datum is likely to have an innocuous explanation. It's the overall picture that convicts.
Plus, a new model for corrections. Nasty, violent gang members go in, pasty, doughy geeks come out.
Our "reformed" prisoners formerly spent their evenings breaking into people's houses or lurking in shadows waiting to pounce on some victim to commit some heinous act. Now that time is devoted to the innocuous activities of stuffing their faces with pizza, arguing over spell definitions, and painting little figurines.
But that's how you would justify the decision. It's not how the warden justified the decision. It is that justification that matters, not whether it happens to fit your ideal of what incarceration should be. In fact, the warden's ideals of what incarceration should be are of limited importance as well.
What matters are the laws and regulations that empower him to make this decision, and whether that decision is within what is authorized by those laws. Apparently it is in the opinion of the court (barely) although his justification so badly mischaracterizes the game it's almost certainly invalid in my opinion. It's not possible to base a rational and reasonable policy on blatantly wrong information. That it happens to make certain people feel good is not a justification.
Remember that the warden is an agent of the law enforcement system. It's an honorable vocation, but that doesn't mean people who enforce the law get to make up their own law to suit themselves. A warden can't do anything he pleases with the prisoners just because it tickles his fancy, any more than a cop can put the boot in because it feels like the right thing to do. Agents of the law should be scrupulous in following the law.
If you want to advocate a law which forbids any activity prisoners might draw enjoyment from, be my guest. Personally, I'm not convinced it is in the best interest of society. But don't advocate law enforcement officers making shit up. If we let that happen, it calls into question whether our system of laws is rational at all.
Not to take issue with anything you said, but somehow I think that Aristotle's students probably had an impressive grounding in mathematics by modern standards. Of course that obviously doesn't apply to things like Analytic Geometry that hadn't been invented yet. Still, I'd bet that anybody who made it through five books of Euclid has a pretty good foundation for understanding Special Relativity, once the relevant axioms have been set out for them.
As engineers, we ought to know that sometimes we want things that are contradictory. We'd like this airplane to be strong, but it also must be light. You can't have unlimited quantities of both.
The same goes with creativity. We say we want originality, but that's not really what we are looking for most of the time. What we want is something derivative enough to be certain to work but original enough to be an improvement. Any idiot can be "original". Just take whatever is being done and do it a different way. The problem is that most different ways aren't better.
That's why "creativity" can't be treated as a "core organizational value". It's not something you can pursue in any meaningful way. What really distinguishes "creative" organizations is that they have greater insight into their problem domains.
Apple's most admired products each embody an insight about what the users they are after want to do. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player, nor has it ever been the best going by specs. The user interfaces on the iPods have been well designed and have featured innovations like multi-touch, but the killer feature isn't a feature at all. It's how the iPod, iTunes and iTunes store work together to make managing your media convenient.
That said, nobody can be all things to all people. I hate the iTunes search interface to the iTunes store, because I don't use it the way Apple's target users do. I don't watch TV and don't care about being part of popular culture. I'm more interested in finding oddball, eccentric stuff. If Google ever opened a music store, that'd be for me; YouTube is more what I'm looking for. The iTunes store wants to steer me to the latest episode of whatever TV show is the rage, and discourages me from finding what I want.
But it doesn't matter because catering to the oddball whims of very eccentric people isn't the business model for iTunes.
I disagree. I think you'd see the same correlations in some species, but not necessarily all.
Let's posit some kind of catastrophic event that puts pressure on early hominids. It does not follow that every species is put under evolutionary pressure, only those that rely on the certain ecological resources to survive. So it doesn't have to be an event like nuclear winter.
Furthermore we might not see these effects in other species because most of the species that survived found the changes brought on by the event favorable to them. The ones that didn't for the most part may not have survived, or may have only survived in certain niches.
Hominids are a special case. Except in a few circumstances migration is not part of their lifestyle, but they have a tremendous latent capacity to migrate, probably greater and certainly more flexible than any land animal. So our posited "disaster" happens, but it doesn't look like a disaster to most of the species that survived. As for those for whom it was a disaster, many perish and a few manage to hold on in isolated geographic niches. These are almost certain to include hominids, with their adaptability and latent capacity to migrate great distances. Most of the hominids either don't get moving quickly enough or don't find a place to survive in, but enough of them do to maintain a breeding population.
Of course, this scenario isn't a scientific one. It's more of a counterscenario demonstrating that we wouldn't necessarily expect to see the same genetic phenomena everywhere we looked.
The "peripatetics" we so named because Aristotle taught his students by strolling around and chatting.
The "stoics" were named for the *stoa* or marketplace, bucause that's where they used to shoot the shit.
The "cynics" used to lurk under bridges, from whence they could hop out and intellectually ambush the unwary traveler (making them the first *trolls*).
The one thing you'd never see in ancient Greece is a group of students sitting in a rectangular grid of seats all doing identical work in parallel. That would have been seen as very strange indeed. Now we can't lay this entirely at Bismarck's feet, because it goes back further, to the need to impart Latin grammar to large number of aspiring but not too wealthy students (thus the "grammar school"). You wouldn't teach a gentleman that way, he'd have a tutor.
This class distinction remains in education today. Look at a top tier "prep" school that cater to the economic elite of this country, and you'll see a model which (unlike the standard classroom) would have made sense to the Greeks: a small number of students, maybe half a dozen, sitting around a table and having a discussion with a professor. That's because the results really matter; the aim is to produce an elite class. The method used to train our elite could be done walking around, or hanging around the marketplace, although lurking under bridges. They're supposed to be able think for themselves, but only within certain confines (i.e. not questioning the existence of an elite).
As somebody who's just finished a draft of a fantasy novel, I agree with you 100%. It's is absolutely critical that as sci-fi character's view of the world grows *into* the world. At the end of the story, the character must have learned the secret to liberating the power of element X (bah), or to break through those assumptions foisted on him by a corrupt sociopolitical system that enslave him in subtle ways. Whatever rings your bell.
Fantasy goes the other way. Fantasy is about the character learning about what is inside him from the start. Either the latent powers which he can wield when he accepts his destiny to defeat the Dark Lord (ugh), or that he cripples himself by trying to have his cake and eat it too (e.g. to enjoy safety while leaving the hero's journey to somebody else; to be respected as a wizard without having to pluck out you own eye first). Whatever rings your bell.
A sci-fi story that doesn't make you think about how the universe works isn't likely to be a very good one. A fantasy that doesn't take you on a journey of self-discovery is probably going to be unsatisfying. But of course the very best stories do *both* in either genre, because the mind is part of the universe, albeit in a different sense if we are talking fantasy and sci-fi.
In order to do this, you have to get people to self-identify their religious thoughts (or what you would consider their religious thoughts) as "religious thoughts". Likewise with "political thought".
I have to agree. The LCARS mockups are an outstanding sci-fi user interface.
Although they doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny, they look like something that has been designed for a recognizable task according to design and user interface principles that are familiar, although extrapolated to an astonishing degree. LCARS seems to *guide* its users to information they are seeking, using negative space and alignment to cluster information into logical groupings which the users evidently find easy to navigate.
Like all interesting sci-fi, it has something of a contrarian spirit to it. It's a very *text heavy* interface, although perhaps we should understand this in context. It is an information display for a system that has perfect natural language input and output, and in some cases understands gestural input.
Still, the facility with which the users navigate this very text-centric interface is remarkable, suggesting that there is more going on here than meets the eye. Perhaps the data is arranged in some subtle way into larger semantic chunks that users parse by some kind of visual pattern recognition. This (and the facility with which users adapt to even alien systems) probably means that users are highly systems literate; that they've been rigorously trained in the use of information technology and the theories behind it...
Nah, I just convinced myself that LCARS is fantasy.
To outsource successfully, you have to do two things:
(1) understand the requirements of the thing to be done and write an RFP that reflects that precisely without adding extraneous requirements.
(2) select a vendor whose proposal meets the requirements and which is capable of delivering on the proposal.
If the government can't do anything right, it can't do these things either.
The truth is there are lots of government organizations that do a very competent job at what the do. USGS, for example. NWS is another. the Centers for Disease Control. These are highly technical organizations that are attractive to qualified people and offer them opportunities they can't pursue many other places. They also tend to be places that carry on in relatively benign neglect from politics because they're too geeky for most politicians to take much interest in. Comapre that to NASA, which is supposed to carry the burden of national prestige. When politicians get interested in something these outfits are doing, the result is every bit as bad as an anti-government zealot looking for a poster child mess could wish for.
Of course, what that really means is that we the people are a bunch of idiots for electing politicians who screw up anything they get too deeply involved with.
What I'm saying is that long exposures aren't necessary to make impressive pictures, if you're not taking pictures of nebulae. I've seen very nice pictures of asterisms, planets, and of course lunar pictures that were taken on alt-az mounts. I've even seem some fairly nice pictures taken where the astrophotographer hand guided an alt-az mount, although obviously that's only possible to do for a minute or so.
Easy: paying somebody to hide the problems, firing them when the problems can't be ignored, then hiring another contractor who does exactly the same thing.
By definition a Dobsonian is a cheap alt-az mount that provides steady and smooth operation by hand, so yes they are useless for any kind of photography that requires long exposures.
It doesn't follow that you need an equatorial mount to do anything. I've seen some very nice photos made by stacking short exposures of bright objects that were hand tracked using an alt-az mount. And of course professional instruments these days use computer controlled alt-az mounts, but that's a different story. Possibly an amateur with a fixed observatory might be able to build a good enough alt-az setup to do long exposures, but there's no reason to. An equatorial mount is bound to be a better investment of time given the size instrument he's likely to have. The big advantage of the alt-az mount is that it is simple, stable, and lightweight for those observers who want to haul the scope out of the garage to do some visual observations.
Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed.
As remarkable an accomplishment as these photos are, it would have been even more remarkable if he'd managed to take pictures of something other than the universe.
Well, this is a good opportunity to invite your neighbors into your radio shack to listen to the ham traffic out of Haiti. Explain how you use that ugly antenna to help people around the world, and how it could might save the lives of their family if something like a terrorist attack or natural disaster disrupted normal communication systems in your neighborhood.
Then maybe they'd feel differently about whether it is "unsightly" or not.
Google is a very good search engine. In order to carve out a market position Bing does two things:
(1) makes itself hard to avoid by cutting deals with third parties.
(2) adds some features of marginal value.
Getting in bed with the Chinese authorities after Google has just gotten out might change consumer perceptions of these things.
Most people don't care to choose things, as long as they work. They don't have any strong feelings about Microsoft, but almost nobody likes the Chinese regime. Associate Bing with the Chinese government in their minds, and they might see their cell provider forcing Bing on them in the same way geek do.
Likewise, with the right marketing by activists, user can be persuaded to have negative feelings about Bing because of its association with the regime. That could offset any marginal value Bing provides.
That's the problem with simplistic cost analyses; they ignore the fact that if a lot of something is produced, it tends to get cheaper. On the other hand the demand for algae for biodiesel would tend to drive costs up.
The secret is that competition tends to drive costs down to "normal profit" levels. If you could sell algae cheap enough to replace diesel, sooner or later somebody will undercut the algae as feed prices, unless one company has the exclusive rights to the magic process that makes cheap algae possible.
Sure, I'm all for it, provided that (a) we don't treat this as a miracle cure for our petroleum dependency (because then we'll be dealing with nuclear fuel dependency) and (b) the costs of decommissioning the plant and handling spent fuel are factored into the construction and operation costs.
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Let me play devil's advocate here for one second.
You are assuming that the only party interested in following or harassing the human rights activists are the Chinese government. It's not hard to think up *other* persons or groups that might be interested. Judging from the ultra nationalist kooks we have, we can imagine private nutcases who think of themselves as more patriotic than the government, who think the Party is much too wishy washy on the issues of class traitors and much too interested in appeasing the West.
That's just the second most likely scenario. Other, more exotic scenarios are possible as well. In a world with so many people connected to the Internet, virtually every kind of crackpot you can imagine is out there. All it takes is one with an Internet feed.
I think we have a preponderance of evidence situation here. On the whole, the most likely culprit is the Chinese government. But it's not quite to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" stage. You look at the whole web of evidence: the motivations, track record of past behavior, known propensities to industrial espionage, methods used, means and opportunity. Virtually every single datum is likely to have an innocuous explanation. It's the overall picture that convicts.
Plus, a new model for corrections. Nasty, violent gang members go in, pasty, doughy geeks come out.
Our "reformed" prisoners formerly spent their evenings breaking into people's houses or lurking in shadows waiting to pounce on some victim to commit some heinous act. Now that time is devoted to the innocuous activities of stuffing their faces with pizza, arguing over spell definitions, and painting little figurines.
But that's how you would justify the decision. It's not how the warden justified the decision. It is that justification that matters, not whether it happens to fit your ideal of what incarceration should be. In fact, the warden's ideals of what incarceration should be are of limited importance as well.
What matters are the laws and regulations that empower him to make this decision, and whether that decision is within what is authorized by those laws. Apparently it is in the opinion of the court (barely) although his justification so badly mischaracterizes the game it's almost certainly invalid in my opinion. It's not possible to base a rational and reasonable policy on blatantly wrong information. That it happens to make certain people feel good is not a justification.
Remember that the warden is an agent of the law enforcement system. It's an honorable vocation, but that doesn't mean people who enforce the law get to make up their own law to suit themselves. A warden can't do anything he pleases with the prisoners just because it tickles his fancy, any more than a cop can put the boot in because it feels like the right thing to do. Agents of the law should be scrupulous in following the law.
If you want to advocate a law which forbids any activity prisoners might draw enjoyment from, be my guest. Personally, I'm not convinced it is in the best interest of society. But don't advocate law enforcement officers making shit up. If we let that happen, it calls into question whether our system of laws is rational at all.
It's a good thing the people we are trying to keep our are evil then, because they won't be inconvenienced by that...
Wait a minute, my head is spinning. Does that mean I'm evil?
Not to take issue with anything you said, but somehow I think that Aristotle's students probably had an impressive grounding in mathematics by modern standards. Of course that obviously doesn't apply to things like Analytic Geometry that hadn't been invented yet. Still, I'd bet that anybody who made it through five books of Euclid has a pretty good foundation for understanding Special Relativity, once the relevant axioms have been set out for them.
I misspoke.
I meant to say questioning *the identity of the current elite*.
of your standard cell phone triggered terrorist bomb. Nothing new here.
As engineers, we ought to know that sometimes we want things that are contradictory. We'd like this airplane to be strong, but it also must be light. You can't have unlimited quantities of both.
The same goes with creativity. We say we want originality, but that's not really what we are looking for most of the time. What we want is something derivative enough to be certain to work but original enough to be an improvement. Any idiot can be "original". Just take whatever is being done and do it a different way. The problem is that most different ways aren't better.
That's why "creativity" can't be treated as a "core organizational value". It's not something you can pursue in any meaningful way. What really distinguishes "creative" organizations is that they have greater insight into their problem domains.
Apple's most admired products each embody an insight about what the users they are after want to do. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player, nor has it ever been the best going by specs. The user interfaces on the iPods have been well designed and have featured innovations like multi-touch, but the killer feature isn't a feature at all. It's how the iPod, iTunes and iTunes store work together to make managing your media convenient.
That said, nobody can be all things to all people. I hate the iTunes search interface to the iTunes store, because I don't use it the way Apple's target users do. I don't watch TV and don't care about being part of popular culture. I'm more interested in finding oddball, eccentric stuff. If Google ever opened a music store, that'd be for me; YouTube is more what I'm looking for. The iTunes store wants to steer me to the latest episode of whatever TV show is the rage, and discourages me from finding what I want.
But it doesn't matter because catering to the oddball whims of very eccentric people isn't the business model for iTunes.
I disagree. I think you'd see the same correlations in some species, but not necessarily all.
Let's posit some kind of catastrophic event that puts pressure on early hominids. It does not follow that every species is put under evolutionary pressure, only those that rely on the certain ecological resources to survive. So it doesn't have to be an event like nuclear winter.
Furthermore we might not see these effects in other species because most of the species that survived found the changes brought on by the event favorable to them. The ones that didn't for the most part may not have survived, or may have only survived in certain niches.
Hominids are a special case. Except in a few circumstances migration is not part of their lifestyle, but they have a tremendous latent capacity to migrate, probably greater and certainly more flexible than any land animal. So our posited "disaster" happens, but it doesn't look like a disaster to most of the species that survived. As for those for whom it was a disaster, many perish and a few manage to hold on in isolated geographic niches. These are almost certain to include hominids, with their adaptability and latent capacity to migrate great distances. Most of the hominids either don't get moving quickly enough or don't find a place to survive in, but enough of them do to maintain a breeding population.
Of course, this scenario isn't a scientific one. It's more of a counterscenario demonstrating that we wouldn't necessarily expect to see the same genetic phenomena everywhere we looked.
Weird huh?
A private company taxing *the government*.
Really?
The "peripatetics" we so named because Aristotle taught his students by strolling around and chatting.
The "stoics" were named for the *stoa* or marketplace, bucause that's where they used to shoot the shit.
The "cynics" used to lurk under bridges, from whence they could hop out and intellectually ambush the unwary traveler (making them the first *trolls*).
The one thing you'd never see in ancient Greece is a group of students sitting in a rectangular grid of seats all doing identical work in parallel. That would have been seen as very strange indeed. Now we can't lay this entirely at Bismarck's feet, because it goes back further, to the need to impart Latin grammar to large number of aspiring but not too wealthy students (thus the "grammar school"). You wouldn't teach a gentleman that way, he'd have a tutor.
This class distinction remains in education today. Look at a top tier "prep" school that cater to the economic elite of this country, and you'll see a model which (unlike the standard classroom) would have made sense to the Greeks: a small number of students, maybe half a dozen, sitting around a table and having a discussion with a professor. That's because the results really matter; the aim is to produce an elite class. The method used to train our elite could be done walking around, or hanging around the marketplace, although lurking under bridges. They're supposed to be able think for themselves, but only within certain confines (i.e. not questioning the existence of an elite).
I'll go back under my bridge now.
As somebody who's just finished a draft of a fantasy novel, I agree with you 100%. It's is absolutely critical that as sci-fi character's view of the world grows *into* the world. At the end of the story, the character must have learned the secret to liberating the power of element X (bah), or to break through those assumptions foisted on him by a corrupt sociopolitical system that enslave him in subtle ways. Whatever rings your bell.
Fantasy goes the other way. Fantasy is about the character learning about what is inside him from the start. Either the latent powers which he can wield when he accepts his destiny to defeat the Dark Lord (ugh), or that he cripples himself by trying to have his cake and eat it too (e.g. to enjoy safety while leaving the hero's journey to somebody else; to be respected as a wizard without having to pluck out you own eye first). Whatever rings your bell.
A sci-fi story that doesn't make you think about how the universe works isn't likely to be a very good one. A fantasy that doesn't take you on a journey of self-discovery is probably going to be unsatisfying. But of course the very best stories do *both* in either genre, because the mind is part of the universe, albeit in a different sense if we are talking fantasy and sci-fi.
In order to do this, you have to get people to self-identify their religious thoughts (or what you would consider their religious thoughts) as "religious thoughts". Likewise with "political thought".
Good luck doing that.
I have to agree. The LCARS mockups are an outstanding sci-fi user interface.
Although they doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny, they look like something that has been designed for a recognizable task according to design and user interface principles that are familiar, although extrapolated to an astonishing degree. LCARS seems to *guide* its users to information they are seeking, using negative space and alignment to cluster information into logical groupings which the users evidently find easy to navigate.
Like all interesting sci-fi, it has something of a contrarian spirit to it. It's a very *text heavy* interface, although perhaps we should understand this in context. It is an information display for a system that has perfect natural language input and output, and in some cases understands gestural input.
Still, the facility with which the users navigate this very text-centric interface is remarkable, suggesting that there is more going on here than meets the eye. Perhaps the data is arranged in some subtle way into larger semantic chunks that users parse by some kind of visual pattern recognition. This (and the facility with which users adapt to even alien systems) probably means that users are highly systems literate; that they've been rigorously trained in the use of information technology and the theories behind it...
Nah, I just convinced myself that LCARS is fantasy.
Then it's a good chance for you to use that joke second head you picked up for halloween a few years back.
To outsource successfully, you have to do two things:
(1) understand the requirements of the thing to be done and write an RFP that reflects that precisely without adding extraneous requirements.
(2) select a vendor whose proposal meets the requirements and which is capable of delivering on the proposal.
If the government can't do anything right, it can't do these things either.
The truth is there are lots of government organizations that do a very competent job at what the do. USGS, for example. NWS is another. the Centers for Disease Control. These are highly technical organizations that are attractive to qualified people and offer them opportunities they can't pursue many other places. They also tend to be places that carry on in relatively benign neglect from politics because they're too geeky for most politicians to take much interest in. Comapre that to NASA, which is supposed to carry the burden of national prestige. When politicians get interested in something these outfits are doing, the result is every bit as bad as an anti-government zealot looking for a poster child mess could wish for.
Of course, what that really means is that we the people are a bunch of idiots for electing politicians who screw up anything they get too deeply involved with.
What I'm saying is that long exposures aren't necessary to make impressive pictures, if you're not taking pictures of nebulae. I've seen very nice pictures of asterisms, planets, and of course lunar pictures that were taken on alt-az mounts. I've even seem some fairly nice pictures taken where the astrophotographer hand guided an alt-az mount, although obviously that's only possible to do for a minute or so.
You can't argue with results.
Hard: building a top notch IT organization.
Easy: paying somebody to hide the problems, firing them when the problems can't be ignored, then hiring another contractor who does exactly the same thing.
By definition a Dobsonian is a cheap alt-az mount that provides steady and smooth operation by hand, so yes they are useless for any kind of photography that requires long exposures.
It doesn't follow that you need an equatorial mount to do anything. I've seen some very nice photos made by stacking short exposures of bright objects that were hand tracked using an alt-az mount. And of course professional instruments these days use computer controlled alt-az mounts, but that's a different story. Possibly an amateur with a fixed observatory might be able to build a good enough alt-az setup to do long exposures, but there's no reason to. An equatorial mount is bound to be a better investment of time given the size instrument he's likely to have. The big advantage of the alt-az mount is that it is simple, stable, and lightweight for those observers who want to haul the scope out of the garage to do some visual observations.
Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed.
As remarkable an accomplishment as these photos are, it would have been even more remarkable if he'd managed to take pictures of something other than the universe.
Well, this is a good opportunity to invite your neighbors into your radio shack to listen to the ham traffic out of Haiti. Explain how you use that ugly antenna to help people around the world, and how it could might save the lives of their family if something like a terrorist attack or natural disaster disrupted normal communication systems in your neighborhood.
Then maybe they'd feel differently about whether it is "unsightly" or not.
That could get very interesting.
Google is a very good search engine. In order to carve out a market position Bing does two things:
(1) makes itself hard to avoid by cutting deals with third parties.
(2) adds some features of marginal value.
Getting in bed with the Chinese authorities after Google has just gotten out might change consumer perceptions of these things.
Most people don't care to choose things, as long as they work. They don't have any strong feelings about Microsoft, but almost nobody likes the Chinese regime. Associate Bing with the Chinese government in their minds, and they might see their cell provider forcing Bing on them in the same way geek do.
Likewise, with the right marketing by activists, user can be persuaded to have negative feelings about Bing because of its association with the regime. That could offset any marginal value Bing provides.
Sure they did. Not *as* humanity of course, but certain segments of humanity.
At the current production level.
That's the problem with simplistic cost analyses; they ignore the fact that if a lot of something is produced, it tends to get cheaper. On the other hand the demand for algae for biodiesel would tend to drive costs up.
The secret is that competition tends to drive costs down to "normal profit" levels. If you could sell algae cheap enough to replace diesel, sooner or later somebody will undercut the algae as feed prices, unless one company has the exclusive rights to the magic process that makes cheap algae possible.
Sure, I'm all for it, provided that (a) we don't treat this as a miracle cure for our petroleum dependency (because then we'll be dealing with nuclear fuel dependency) and (b) the costs of decommissioning the plant and handling spent fuel are factored into the construction and operation costs.