In the last 150 years, the sunsets have become redder, likely reflecting increased man-made pollution.
It's also possible that red pigments break down, decompose, fade, and become less brilliant as decades and centuries go by; especially red pigments that were manufactured before colorfastness and other chemical properties were well understood.
While a plant is growing, it takes carbon out of the atmosphere. After it dies, it decays and releases exactly the same amount back into the atmosphere. That's carbon-neutral.
Only human intervention can make plants carbon-negative. If you harvest wood, and make lumber or pianos out of it, then put a roof over that wood so it doesn't decay, you have taken carbon out of the atmosphere on a somewhat permanent basis. However, looking at the many old buildings that have been allowed to fall into ruin suggests that a few hundred years is the best you can hope for from that carbon sequestration strategy.
Read this, and you'll see that the conservative Washington Times has a big problem with the Administration's decimation of NASA's planetary science problem.
Twat:You are posting a comment on the WWW, which was invented by a Briton whilst working at CERN - an EU funded org, whilst using a DARPA (US) funded protocol (I think) Anyway, my point is that it's a bit rubbish to suggest that the US tax payer fronts the cost of development of t'internet as a whole.
Jon, that would indeed be rubbish. That's why I was careful not to do so. I specifically limited my comment to "the technologies and protocols of the internet," and made no mention of the WWW, or the privately-owned hardware that carries data. Why are you so bent out of shape over rubbish that nobody suggested?
Developing the technologies and protocols of the internet was done at the expense of U.S. taxpayers by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Similarly, the Panama Canal was built at the expense of U.S. taxpayers for its great strategic value.
In 1977, President Carter signed a treaty giving up U.S. control, and today China has a great deal of control over this asset: http://themengesproject.blogsp...
What strategic asset will the U.S. give up control over next... the Global Positioning System, perhaps?
Size (as of mountains) is not the issue. Complexity is.
Non-biological processes have been observed to death. What is the most complex system ever created by a non-biological natural process? Saturn's braided rings, perhaps. And that system is orders-of-magnitude less complex than what humans can build, which in turn is orders-of-magnitude less complex than the simplest living organism. Sorry, scientific evidence just doesn't support the idea that a non-biological natural process could have assembled the first living organism.
It doesn't rule them out, but holy cow, a nine-order-of-magnitude sensitivity leap is huge. This must be a devastating wake-up call to the theorists who were predicting amplitudes that LIGO-style detectors have a snowball's chance of finding.
The extreme sensitivity of this approach means that nobody will invest in another LIGO-style detector, correct?
I don't have an explanation for the universe, or its meaning.
However, please study microbiology a bit; you'll learn that even the simplest living organism is orders-of-magnitude more complex than any system humans ever created. It depends on correct interactions between hundreds of proteins, and the instructions for synthesizing those proteins are very cleverly encoded in its DNA.
Therefore REASON (not faith) tells us that the first living organism could not have simply assembled itself out of chemicals dissolved in the primordial soup, as some people desperately want to believe (probably due to a kneejerk backlash against religion).
No, some entity whose intelligence was vastly superior to ours must have assembled that first organism.
is it even moral for the government to set tax rates that maximize its revenue?
A great question. And think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
If the load is constant, that's a really bad place to build a power station that relies on an inconstant wind, or on Antarctic sunshine (which is very scarce during the winter, when the sun never gets above the horizon).
The fact that I need to eat in no way diminishes the voluntary nature of my transaction with Burger King. Unlike the IRS, Burger King makes no threats of fines, penalties, or imprisonment if I choose not to spend money there. How wacky for you to make a leap from this to "living off the grid."
Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly every country in the world competes for taxpayer's money.
To spell out the obvious for you, pottymouth, in any given jurisdiction within the U.S., there is only one federal government, only one state government, only one county government, and (at most) only one municipal government skimming off the top of the transactions that take place in that jurisdiction, or levying taxes on the properties in that jurisdiction. A starkly different situation from, say, buying a laptop, where 20 local retailers and a thousand online retailers are competing for my money.
TFA says "one problem is the continuity of power. The wind speed at the pole averages between 4 and 8 metres per second, depending on the height above the ground. That’s just enough to turn the blades on the wind turbines but it also raises the prospect of periods when the wind is too weak to generate power."
Sounds like a good place to employ a reliable, load-following small modular reactor.
It is fair for the companies to raise prices as high as possible without scaring off their customer base. It is fair for government to raise taxes as high as possible without scaring off their tax base.
When goods or services are sold, the transaction is completely voluntary for both buyer and seller. Furthermore, multiple sellers typically compete for the buyer's business on the basis of price and/or quality.
When government collects taxes, the transaction is completely compulsory and coercive. (Can you name one person or business who, if they got a letter from the IRS stating this year's tax payment was waived, would voluntarily send in the money anyway?) There are never multiple governments competing for the taxpayer's money, on any basis.
Do you really fail to see how the completely different nature of these transactions completely invalidates your analogy?
You know what else is fair? Taxes and regulations.
Not always. For example, airline deregulation was a good thing. "In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268." -- Stephen Breyer, who worked with Ted Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s
With tax rates, like with prices charged to consumers, there's a sweet spot that maximizes long-term government revenue. A government that goes above that rate is being worse than unfair; it's shooting itself in the foot because even as it's imposing very burdensome tax rates on the people whose economic liberty it should be protecting, it's not generating as much revenue as it could.
they're not beholden to a multinational which says they can't keep seeds to grow their own crops next year
Except nobody says that. While the large agribusinesses would prefer that everyone used their high-end seeds, which come with biotech licensing restrictions, every grower is free to use traditional seeds instead.
Do you have as much disdain for the licensing restrictions on open-source software as you do for biotech licensing restrictions?
I see those people as a willing tax-base to subsidize my friend's medical bills.
Very similar to how people who buy lottery tickets are a willing tax base for whatever-the-state-chooses-to-do-with-lottery-proceeds. The fact remains, however, that the lottery is
"a tax on people who are bad at math” Ambrose Bierce
and the cumulative negative effects on its willing victims outweigh its benefits.
homeopathy secret is the placebo effect, and that is real science.When french drug agency allowed homeopathy a long time ago, they wrote that it helped though the placebo effect
By that reasoning, atheists should allow that religion provides genuine benefits through the placebo effect. That's real science!
companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth
There's definitely a price/profit curve, the apex of which is the price that maximizes the seller's profit.
If you were the owner of a struggling small business, wouldn't you try to find the sweet spot that maximizes your profit?
If your honest answer is "no," then what price would you target --
the price that gets you 50% of your potential profit?
the price that gets you 10% of your potential profit?
-- and why would you choose to "leave money on the table" like that, to the detriment of the family you provide for?
If your honest answer is "yes," why should a large company act any differently than you would? In many cases the owners (shareholders) of a large company are just as needy as the owner of a struggling small business. Think a senior citizen who's very dependent on a pension, and the pension fund owns shares of Verizon. Should Verizon be "charitable" to its customers (many of whom are wealthy), to the detriment of its shareholders (some of whom are financially struggling)?
Often the audience gets the slides to read on their own later, as reference.
That would be an acceptable reason for cramming lots of text onto a slide. But in the 20 or so times that I've had the misfortune to be in a PowerPoint audience, and we didn't have time to read all the text, we never got a copy of the slides.
The audience should, in a good presentation, be listening and not reading.
Agreed -- which is a reason to keep the amount of text in your slides to a minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
In the last 150 years, the sunsets have become redder, likely reflecting increased man-made pollution.
It's also possible that red pigments break down, decompose, fade, and become less brilliant as decades and centuries go by; especially red pigments that were manufactured before colorfastness and other chemical properties were well understood.
While a plant is growing, it takes carbon out of the atmosphere. After it dies, it decays and releases exactly the same amount back into the atmosphere. That's carbon-neutral.
Only human intervention can make plants carbon-negative. If you harvest wood, and make lumber or pianos out of it, then put a roof over that wood so it doesn't decay, you have taken carbon out of the atmosphere on a somewhat permanent basis. However, looking at the many old buildings that have been allowed to fall into ruin suggests that a few hundred years is the best you can hope for from that carbon sequestration strategy.
Here's a very interesting account of the launch disaster at Xichang: http://www.airspacemag.com/his...
Read this, and you'll see that the conservative Washington Times has a big problem with the Administration's decimation of NASA's planetary science problem.
If something like LibreOffice is the solution, that means we already have something like the solution. Does it not?
Twat:You are posting a comment on the WWW, which was invented by a Briton whilst working at CERN - an EU funded org, whilst using a DARPA (US) funded protocol (I think) Anyway, my point is that it's a bit rubbish to suggest that the US tax payer fronts the cost of development of t'internet as a whole.
Jon, that would indeed be rubbish. That's why I was careful not to do so. I specifically limited my comment to "the technologies and protocols of the internet," and made no mention of the WWW, or the privately-owned hardware that carries data. Why are you so bent out of shape over rubbish that nobody suggested?
Developing the technologies and protocols of the internet was done at the expense of U.S. taxpayers by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Similarly, the Panama Canal was built at the expense of U.S. taxpayers for its great strategic value.
In 1977, President Carter signed a treaty giving up U.S. control, and today China has a great deal of control over this asset:
http://themengesproject.blogsp...
What strategic asset will the U.S. give up control over next... the Global Positioning System, perhaps?
Size (as of mountains) is not the issue. Complexity is.
Non-biological processes have been observed to death. What is the most complex system ever created by a non-biological natural process? Saturn's braided rings, perhaps. And that system is orders-of-magnitude less complex than what humans can build, which in turn is orders-of-magnitude less complex than the simplest living organism. Sorry, scientific evidence just doesn't support the idea that a non-biological natural process could have assembled the first living organism.
There are lots of "snowflake babies" in need of adoption: http://www.washingtontimes.com...
If you have fertility issues, consider adopting one, so he or she can get out of the freezer and start living, like Hannah Strege did!
A mammoth is much smaller than the missing Boeing 777.
It doesn't rule them out, but holy cow, a nine-order-of-magnitude sensitivity leap is huge. This must be a devastating wake-up call to the theorists who were predicting amplitudes that LIGO-style detectors have a snowball's chance of finding.
The extreme sensitivity of this approach means that nobody will invest in another LIGO-style detector, correct?
I don't have an explanation for the universe, or its meaning.
However, please study microbiology a bit; you'll learn that even the simplest living organism is orders-of-magnitude more complex than any system humans ever created. It depends on correct interactions between hundreds of proteins, and the instructions for synthesizing those proteins are very cleverly encoded in its DNA.
Therefore REASON (not faith) tells us that the first living organism could not have simply assembled itself out of chemicals dissolved in the primordial soup, as some people desperately want to believe (probably due to a kneejerk backlash against religion).
No, some entity whose intelligence was vastly superior to ours must have assembled that first organism.
is it even moral for the government to set tax rates that maximize its revenue?
A great question. And think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
If the load is constant, that's a really bad place to build a power station that relies on an inconstant wind, or on Antarctic sunshine (which is very scarce during the winter, when the sun never gets above the horizon).
The fact that I need to eat in no way diminishes the voluntary nature of my transaction with Burger King. Unlike the IRS, Burger King makes no threats of fines, penalties, or imprisonment if I choose not to spend money there. How wacky for you to make a leap from this to "living off the grid."
Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly every country in the world competes for taxpayer's money.
To spell out the obvious for you, pottymouth, in any given jurisdiction within the U.S., there is only one federal government, only one state government, only one county government, and (at most) only one municipal government skimming off the top of the transactions that take place in that jurisdiction, or levying taxes on the properties in that jurisdiction. A starkly different situation from, say, buying a laptop, where 20 local retailers and a thousand online retailers are competing for my money.
TFA says "one problem is the continuity of power. The wind speed at the pole averages between 4 and 8 metres per second, depending on the height above the ground. That’s just enough to turn the blades on the wind turbines but it also raises the prospect of periods when the wind is too weak to generate power."
Sounds like a good place to employ a reliable, load-following small modular reactor.
It is fair for the companies to raise prices as high as possible without scaring off their customer base. It is fair for government to raise taxes as high as possible without scaring off their tax base.
When goods or services are sold, the transaction is completely voluntary for both buyer and seller. Furthermore, multiple sellers typically compete for the buyer's business on the basis of price and/or quality.
When government collects taxes, the transaction is completely compulsory and coercive. (Can you name one person or business who, if they got a letter from the IRS stating this year's tax payment was waived, would voluntarily send in the money anyway?) There are never multiple governments competing for the taxpayer's money, on any basis.
Do you really fail to see how the completely different nature of these transactions completely invalidates your analogy?
You know what else is fair? Taxes and regulations.
Not always. For example, airline deregulation was a good thing. "In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268." -- Stephen Breyer, who worked with Ted Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s
With tax rates, like with prices charged to consumers, there's a sweet spot that maximizes long-term government revenue. A government that goes above that rate is being worse than unfair; it's shooting itself in the foot because even as it's imposing very burdensome tax rates on the people whose economic liberty it should be protecting, it's not generating as much revenue as it could.
they're not beholden to a multinational which says they can't keep seeds to grow their own crops next year
Except nobody says that. While the large agribusinesses would prefer that everyone used their high-end seeds, which come with biotech licensing restrictions, every grower is free to use traditional seeds instead.
Do you have as much disdain for the licensing restrictions on open-source software as you do for biotech licensing restrictions?
I see those people as a willing tax-base to subsidize my friend's medical bills.
Very similar to how people who buy lottery tickets are a willing tax base for whatever-the-state-chooses-to-do-with-lottery-proceeds. The fact remains, however, that the lottery is
"a tax on people who are bad at math” Ambrose Bierce
and the cumulative negative effects on its willing victims outweigh its benefits.
homeopathy secret is the placebo effect, and that is real science.When french drug agency allowed homeopathy a long time ago, they wrote that it helped though the placebo effect
By that reasoning, atheists should allow that religion provides genuine benefits through the placebo effect. That's real science!
"At Whole Foods I overheard a ponytail blaming Bush because the baba ghanoush was lumpy." -- Dennis Miller
It's an amazing place. They have a large wall covered with dire wolf skulls, just to show off how many dire wolf skeletons have been dug up.
companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth
There's definitely a price/profit curve, the apex of which is the price that maximizes the seller's profit.
If you were the owner of a struggling small business, wouldn't you try to find the sweet spot that maximizes your profit?
If your honest answer is "no," then what price would you target --
the price that gets you 50% of your potential profit?
the price that gets you 10% of your potential profit?
-- and why would you choose to "leave money on the table" like that, to the detriment of the family you provide for?
If your honest answer is "yes," why should a large company act any differently than you would? In many cases the owners (shareholders) of a large company are just as needy as the owner of a struggling small business. Think a senior citizen who's very dependent on a pension, and the pension fund owns shares of Verizon. Should Verizon be "charitable" to its customers (many of whom are wealthy), to the detriment of its shareholders (some of whom are financially struggling)?
Often the audience gets the slides to read on their own later, as reference.
That would be an acceptable reason for cramming lots of text onto a slide. But in the 20 or so times that I've had the misfortune to be in a PowerPoint audience, and we didn't have time to read all the text, we never got a copy of the slides.
The audience should, in a good presentation, be listening and not reading.
Agreed -- which is a reason to keep the amount of text in your slides to a minimum.