How about you simply do the sociopath thing for yourself ? Report them, collect the reward. If you want to be able to honestly say you didn't do it, have your wife report them and collect the reward.
You should not allow criminals to dictate the rules, which will obviously immunize them from responsibility for anything. You'll get fired, frustrated, and nothing will be solved. Instead, you should use the rules they set for themselves : report them (which makes you feel better), and don't tell them (which they don't do either). You should not feel guilty about this.
Oh and, needless to say, once you reported them, you've done your duty. Keep your mouth shut after that. Don't report them from inside the office either. Plan ahead to mention the unfairness of stealing software 2 more times (but plan the dates you do this well in advance, and don't deviate from them, no matter what).
These days I always ask a democrat to pay a medical bill whenever I get one. None of them ever did it, no matter how much "moral urgency" and "fairness" they thought such acts were graced with. And no, they didn't think that not paying my bill justified anyone calling them rich, selfish stealing capitalists. When I took one democrat's wallet, and took out the money, just like he wants the government to do, he got aggressive. They did not, in fact, thought that not doing so even made them selfish. You should use people's own rulebook against them. Some actually got it.
And yes Americans will fight in hand-to-hand combat using their hunting rifles if that's what it takes. As Churchill said in the last war: "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
Funny thing, Churchill said that in Europe. You should visit a major European city and see how well they're defending, both their own (I mean physically) and their own values. Even Churchill's own London. But France, and specifically Paris. Some days you would say it's under siege (you see the flames burning every night in a whole lot of cities).
I hope you're right, that in the US it's not happening everywhere like in Europe.
I seriously doubt Obama will *let* Americans fight though, he'll set the army on the people defending themselves, not on the enemy. At least if the choice is between pretending nothing's wrong while people die and being politically incorrect.
Anyone spotted him at Fort Hood yet ? No ? Oh but at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall then ? No again ? At the remembrance of the ardens offensive then ? No ?
And if you think it's unfair that shooting is caused by islam, blame the shooter. He FIRST shouted "allahu akbar", then started killing randomly.
Not that there's any doubt all "progressives" will punish me for saying this. It's funny how people who are supposedly comitted to destroying dogma do that. You know, when it violates their dogma.
Our president loves political correctness more than he loves life. Too many Americans "secretly" (ahem) hate our military and in fact support the killing.
-- "muslims love death more than you love life, and that's why we will win" Major Nidal Hasan - 2007, Walter Reed Hospital. He was making a presentation about how muslim soldiers in the American military must not be forced to fight other muslims. He included the reason : if they didn't "adverse events would happen" (his words, not mine)
Salient detail : this is a quote that was originally made by the (paedophilic thief and massmurderer) muslim prophet muhammad, in a letter to the emperor of the eastern roman empire. Whatever your beliefs are, in this specific comment, history would prove him right.
Why don't you read some history of China. For example the parts pertaining to Japan, which did exactly what you state would prevent an invasion. It didn't. China did the same, arm it's populace, before WWII, and got fucked badly until the US saved their ass.
But in the long-term game, the Chinese are winning. In fact they are somewhat like the Borg, if they were to state "we've heard this before, from many peoples across vast pieces of land since long before the US existed. And now, they're all China", they'd be telling the truth. Even if they were to say "since before Jesus walked the earth", they'd still be telling the truth.
In addition to China itself, vast regions of Asia are de-facto Chinese colonies.
(and the parent post was anonymous coward by mistake : I'm using the browser in the installer of kubuntu karmic koala, which does not have my password sync)
The real "factory of life" that needs to be created abiogenically is the ribosome. And uracil is to a ribosome what a matchbox car is to the USS enterprise. It's a necessary step, yes, but the "life forms" that could be created, even using all 5 bases (4 for DNA, 1 extra for RNA) would not be considered to be alive.
Anything considered alive has 7 basic properties : -> homeostasis : able to maintain a constant internal environment under differing external circumstances (e.g. constant water pressure independant of temperature) -> organisation -> metabolism : it must "eat", make parts of the external environment into a functional part of itself -> growth : it must (be capable of) increasing in size. -> adaptation : it must evolve -> response to stimuli -> reproduction
All 5 bases would (just barely) cover "reproduction" in the above definition. They wouldn't even be as advanced as viruses (and we can artificially create viruses).
So as I said, nice discovery. But we're trying to build the USS enterprise and this "great news" is that we've finally succeeded in finding a possible procedure to construct a tiny matchbox car.
Thanks for the answer. But if that's the answer, I have another question : why in the name of all that is good and holy are we paying tax money to people/companies/utilities for installing this equipment ? Just propaganda ?
Unless I'm mistaken the number -3.3 ±3.63kg (Pgained weight "due to" the exercise ("due to", perhaps "during" should be better).
And then the article goes "but you should still do exercise, even if it fattens you" for a few paragraphs and starts looking at all sorts of justifications to still stating that exercise was the correct advise for weight loss even if, you know, it didn't actually lead to weight loss...
They sound like politicians explaining how they fulfilled their campaign promises...
Don't forget the constant accusations of getting paid. Either you're anti-AGW and you're paid by oil companies. Or you're pro-AGW and you're paid by government.
The sad thing is, academics are mostly paid by government AND mostly pro-AGW. And yes, the government is massively pro-AGW. Then again, the oil companies have been caught several times with their hands in the cookie jar. Academics have made idiotic mistakes, and so has industry.
So what does a rational person do ? I'd love to put the arguing kids in a locked room and throw away the key, to be honest. Then again, I don't think America (or any other country) is even capable of doing 1/10th of what the pro-AGW crowd is "demanding", so I fear the point is moot : we're not going to do enough, because we can't. The pro-AGW crowd is asking for so much money they might as well ask for a bridge to the moon.
What I most wonder about, from the pro-AGW crowd, is why the benefactors of global warming are never asked for a single dollarcent. The single country that's getting paid the most obscene amounts of money to cause AGW (if... etc) is Saudi Arabia. Yet nobody asks them for a dime. Hello ? Same goes, obviously, for other oil producers.
Consider this. Harnessing renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures. With coal, you have to pay for the fuel. With renewables, you do not.
Any questions?
Yes, does any solar panel or wind turbine exist that, if installed on a normal house (ie. at at least 40 degrees north) has an EROI > 0 ? Actually I live at 60 degrees, and my calculations tell me that even with the tax breaks solar panels are still net-negative money generators, and seriously net-negative power generators. I'm talking about the standard stuff (not following the sun).
Since I believe a power engineer told me that the absolute minimum EROI (energy wise) for a power generator to be useful is 10 on a yearly basis (meaning it's got to create 10 times more power than it costs to build/install it in the first year of operation), and renewable energy is at, well, -1.2 or so at 20 years perfect operation (at least standard solar panels are). Meaning it actually costs about double the amount of oil to power a house using solar panels than it would cost to just power it directly on oil. Actually solar panels are defeated by that oldest of joke of a power generator : we have more efficient research fusion generators than solar panels (EROI 0.0 average, 1.01 peak performance vs -1.0).
And this is being generous : those panels are not exactly produced locally, and I don't even count transporting, connecting, installing and servicing them, none of which are free.
By my calculations, btw, solar panel will never be able to deliver enough power to heat a normal house, even if the entire lot were covered in solar panels. Meaning a 100% efficient panel that was dropped by God himself from heaven (ie. free) would not be able to heat a normal house. What, exactly, is your suggestion we do to heat about 20-story appartment buildings ? Please don't say "isolate them well", please keep into account that existing buildings need to be heated too.
Right now we don't use any significant amount of either solar irradiation or wind. I wonder, if we were to use, say 1% of solar power, that would obviously mean the biosphere would not be able to use that same energy. What will be the ramifications of stealing energy from nature ? If we do what needs to be done to power america with solar power, covering 2 "average" states entirely in solar panels, can anything grow in those 2 states ? Or will that be 4% of the united states that contains less life than the surface of the moon ?
Right now we're using so very, very little it obviously doesn't matter. The same goes for wind. Right now we barely use wind power at all, but a lot of natural processes (e.g. moisture collection in dry climates, just to name something) depend on wind. Obviously they will fail to work if we use a significant percentage of wind power in an area. What will be the environmental impact ?
Yes I have doubts about renewable power, and it's supposed "zero" environmental impact. But you could answer these questions in a reasonable manner (something that never seems to be done in any of the publications I read)... perhaps it would help.
The microsoft version is using Israeli military technology, it's not just a webcam. Or it is a webcam, but it's also something else.
A small time before the camera sends another frame downstream a small led in front of the camera flashes. That flash has a specific color, that's rarely seen in nature. Then it resets one layer of the CMOS camera. Then, a short while later the frame is sent downstream... with 4 color components.
You have your superstandard red, green and blue channels. And you get a depth channel. The last channel indicates how long a time passed between the flashing of the led and that pixel seeing the color emanated by the led.
In all but the most extreme situations (there are a few extreme angles that don't work as expected, a few materials that are not opaque to the sent-out color, and there's a minimum and maximum distance, which aren't stellar, as well as limitations on how many such camera's can be active at once, as they have to timeshare), that would be the distance between the eye of the camera and whatever object the pixel was on.
Natal does not give you a 2d image, it gives you a 2.5d image (meaning x,y + height, not truly independent x,y,z coordinates), but still. The difference between normal pictures and natal pictures is like the difference between mario bros and duke nukem 3d.
Natal is the combination of a camera + a (relatively short-range) 3d range scanner. That equipment doesn't really exist yet, and while camera's are cheap, I seriously doubt you can find a 2d range scanner running at 60 Hz for less than 50.000$.
Whether he had any left ? Are you serious ? He had factories producing nothing but WMD's. That's confirmed too. Obviously at least some of these rockets did indeed work... are you seriously claiming 5 factories made only 5 rockets ?
Perhaps to Syria ? He had a serious beef with Israel, which foiled his nuclear weapons program.... which leads to the conclusion that he either sold them, gave them away, or somehow managed to hide them away from America's soldiers.
Those weapons exist. They killed, and masses of people died from them. Only an idiot would doubt their existence, or their numbers (meaning at least a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand rockets with nerve gas). Hopefully they've spoiled, but do you really want to take that chance ?
And yes it's a nice anti-Bush slogan. It's also pathetic.
The issue with the banking/loan fiasco was more like having regulations on the plugs but at the same time encouraging the production of sub-standard, ungrounded ones for the poor to buy because "everyone has the right to enjoy electricity". Then blaming everyone but the State(TM) for the widespread fires afterwards and using this as a pretext to impose more regulations that will make the plugs even less affordable than before.
You know, the story doesn't end there. We've already restarting the "everyone has the right to electricity" stuff, and it's more obnoxious variation "blacks too".
Now if you will excuse me there's this little fire that the fire dept. seems to have trouble with... what ? a hundred ? Well thank God the president said these ones will remain small... if they grew we'd be in real trouble...
Just about every last sector of the economy, with the exception of "resource extraction" (ie. mining and oil, not the most popular on slashdot either), has lost lots of jobs. Total joblosses in the US, bad as they are, are very mild compared to the rest of the world.
There was exactly one sector that increased in size in the last years world-wide. You guessed it... the entertainment sector. Movies. Music. Obviously they've gained in power and politicians are asking them how they can hire even more people to reduce unemployment.
Their answer seems to be, worldwide, copyright enforcement.
Since the EU member states have stopped being democracies yesterday with the signing of the treaty of lissabon, that gives the only law-giving power in the EU to non-elected officials (the "comission"), I doubt you can count on the EU to go against this. If the comission accepts this (and it does, and will do so in the future) there is no option, no recourse for any EU member citizen, and no "local" parliament has the power to oppose this.
Maybe the trade-off is that their brain simply needs more energy, which isn't great when food availability is the main fact
Let's hope so. I doubt it though : it could be brain cooling if it's energy related. Not one of the strong points of mammals. After all, brain cooling is the reason we have a head in the first place.
After all, if more memory were that simple, surely evolution would have changed that gene by itself. If it were a tradeoff, that would be much more logical.
So what did these rats lose ? Do they have gaps in long term memory ?
I'd watch out for the "no free lunch" idea holding true here too.
By the way, it's called science. The idea is to have an open mind, and look for explanations. For example it's been established that there's oil on Titan, a moon of saturn, as well as other gaseous hydrocarbons.
Any bets on how much of those are buried plants ?
Also these days plankton is "digested" even at the bottom of the ocean by so-called extremophile organisms. Plankton sinking to the bottom today will never become oil for that reason. And no-one knows how long plankton-eating bacteria have existed at the bottom when obviously the biogenic theory depends on that being a rather short time. Lots of things remain to be cleared up.
Yes plants CAN be made into petroleum. You're quite correct that that is proven. The question is, is that indeed what happened ? Not much research is going into it as there are no clear angles of attack.
Btw : even in evolution corrections are still made to the theory. Just recently it's been proven that the gene combining mechanism in sexual reproduction is not just a basepair-by-basepair, but there is in fact a rather extensive (and currently unknown) algorithm at work, which is, just to name one thing, able to tell the length of genes and "re-link" our DNA into a working program in ways that no direct copying algorithm would be.
Likewise even proponents of biogenic oil do not discount that abiogenic oil exists, the theory states that it's contribution is not significant.
You see, actually that's an open question. There are several other alternatives that might have lead to the creation of oil, the most promising being underground bacteria that live from geothermal and radioactive food sources (yes there are bacteria that "eat" radioactivity).
I doubt you're entirely correct about coal either. After all, coal is pretty much pure carbon, it does not have to be biological in origin.
The problem is, if you're right, oil would be found where the ground first went down at least several miles and then came back up again, over the course of at most a few 100 million years (and less than a billion years). However in reality oil (and coal) is found where the ground has been rising slowly since long before the advent of plants. So there are lots of large oilfields and coal mines that just couldn't possibly ever have been plants.
The only research that we have found that it is possible to create oil from plants. That does not mean that that has to be what happened. It is the accepted "explanation" for oil in popular scientific journals, but it is most likely not correct.
And btw, the largest storehouse of carbon is not the ground, but the ocean. In reality > 95% of the co2 increase in the athmosphere originated in the ocean, and not in some factory or car. The AGW theory is that the co2 release from factories triggered a tiny increase in temperature, resulting in much co2 release from the ocean, which resulted in tiny increase,... The theory behind AGW is not that humans are themselves responsible for co2 rise, they only claim that's a tiny part of it, the theory is that 19th century factories tripped a feedback loop resulting in warming. That feedback loop was already feeding back on itself, even before those factories, but at a slower rate. Reducing human co2 output, even by 100%, will therefore not result in cooling, merely in slower warming. Until we get to a point where co2 increase will not further warm the earth and the feedback loop will reverse direction, resulting in a 16 degree drop in average temperature in less than 1000 years, resulting in permanent ice sheets reaching the outskirts of paris and New York. The point where the balance tips seems to be (given historical data) about 2-3 degrees warmer than today.
And it also means that if anything, we or some volcano or weather pattern, somehow succeed in creating a short term cooling, even a single degree, that will reverse the long term temperature gradient (even if we keep pumping co2 in the athmosphere, because we'll never beat the re-absorption of the oceans). That means removing a massive amount of energy from the athmosphere, but there have been eruptions and events that came close.
Or, of course, it could have been God. I doubt anyone outside of the madhouses ("mosques") of saudi arabia believes that, though. Of course, in that country, stating that it probably wasn't allah can get you your head chopped off. You see, if it wasn't allah, that would mean they have some 10-20 years to get a working economy going, one that can survive without oil. And... progress in that regard has been... less than stellar.
If normal people actually accepted ideas like this Europe would be Nazi today, for one thing. I also seriously doubt America would still be a democracy.
If you knew more about the Middle Ages, maybe you'd understand that the population did not move so much as changed religion over the centuries.
No offence, but you really should read a bit about Arab history, and pay attention to just how much ethnic cleansings these people comitted. The population of Europe, you are correct, did indeed merely change religion ("mostly", as there was certainly no shortage of armed conflicts, though they declined over time. Slowly). The population of the middle east was eradicated, several times in fact. Everywhere, muslims have always created conflicts along ethnic lines, even with "fellow muslims" (google "Sudan" or "Darfur", and note just how racist any brotherhood islam supposedly provides really is. And to tell the truth, just walk into a European city and look for a few Turks and a few Moroccans, and note how much they like eachother. See for yourself).
After researching arab/islamic history, any reasonable person would seriously ask himself what exactly is so terribly remarkable about this German guy from WWII (and don't google "aymin al-husseini", it will not improve your view of these people).
Great to hear your idea of justice being retreating from conquered lands. When do you leave for Iran ? (that's were indo europeans come from)
One thing's for sure : you won't be posting anything from there, so I guess we'll know.
And of course, if you're not willing to do this, how can you expect others to ??? Perhaps indians should start firing rockets at your family. That seems to be the way to acquire "justice". Would you find that acceptable ? Indians attempting to eradicate you ? Would you leave ?
The "kingdom of Egypt" (the state of the Farao's) ? (exterminated to the last man by muslims) The Hittite Emptre ? (exterminated by the Greeks, Romans, Persians) The kingdom of Israel ? The Assyrian Empire ?
Which of these do we restore ? (note that the palestinians, or to be more exact, the arabs only come into play about 4500 years after the Assyrian Empire)
Which do we restore ? And why do they have more rights than all the others who conquered that piece of land ?
Note the obvious truth : the Jews controlled Israel about 4300 years before the arabs even left their tiny province...
What if some Greek starts firing rockets at the Arabs ? Will you tell them to leave ? He has at least as much right to Israel as they do ? What if the Jews start firing rockets into Jordan (territory that was part of the kingdom of Israel) ?
And of course, you shouldn't count out yourself. You're an Indo-European living in America. It seems hypocritical in the extreme to tell others to leave conquered lands. Your province of origin is northwestern Iran, every other place on this earth indoeuropeans live (including Europe), is obviously conquered from someone else.
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How about you simply do the sociopath thing for yourself ? Report them, collect the reward. If you want to be able to honestly say you didn't do it, have your wife report them and collect the reward.
You should not allow criminals to dictate the rules, which will obviously immunize them from responsibility for anything. You'll get fired, frustrated, and nothing will be solved. Instead, you should use the rules they set for themselves : report them (which makes you feel better), and don't tell them (which they don't do either). You should not feel guilty about this.
Oh and, needless to say, once you reported them, you've done your duty. Keep your mouth shut after that. Don't report them from inside the office either. Plan ahead to mention the unfairness of stealing software 2 more times (but plan the dates you do this well in advance, and don't deviate from them, no matter what).
These days I always ask a democrat to pay a medical bill whenever I get one. None of them ever did it, no matter how much "moral urgency" and "fairness" they thought such acts were graced with. And no, they didn't think that not paying my bill justified anyone calling them rich, selfish stealing capitalists. When I took one democrat's wallet, and took out the money, just like he wants the government to do, he got aggressive. They did not, in fact, thought that not doing so even made them selfish. You should use people's own rulebook against them. Some actually got it.
And yes Americans will fight in hand-to-hand combat using their hunting rifles if that's what it takes. As Churchill said in the last war: "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
Funny thing, Churchill said that in Europe. You should visit a major European city and see how well they're defending, both their own (I mean physically) and their own values. Even Churchill's own London. But France, and specifically Paris. Some days you would say it's under siege (you see the flames burning every night in a whole lot of cities).
I hope you're right, that in the US it's not happening everywhere like in Europe.
I seriously doubt Obama will *let* Americans fight though, he'll set the army on the people defending themselves, not on the enemy. At least if the choice is between pretending nothing's wrong while people die and being politically incorrect.
Anyone spotted him at Fort Hood yet ? No ? Oh but at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall then ? No again ? At the remembrance of the ardens offensive then ? No ?
He did, of course, defend, even praise, the "tolerant" lack of judgement and general idiocy that made the army ignore all warning signs for the Fort Hood massacre though. But don't worry, Obama's made sure that we'll see more of that tolerance. You know that tolerance that lead to at least 13 corpses.
And if you think it's unfair that shooting is caused by islam, blame the shooter. He FIRST shouted "allahu akbar", then started killing randomly.
Not that there's any doubt all "progressives" will punish me for saying this. It's funny how people who are supposedly comitted to destroying dogma do that. You know, when it violates their dogma.
Our president loves political correctness more than he loves life. Too many Americans "secretly" (ahem) hate our military and in fact support the killing.
--
"muslims love death more than you love life, and that's why we will win"
Major Nidal Hasan - 2007, Walter Reed Hospital. He was making a presentation about how muslim soldiers in the American military must not be forced to fight other muslims. He included the reason : if they didn't "adverse events would happen" (his words, not mine)
Salient detail : this is a quote that was originally made by the (paedophilic thief and massmurderer) muslim prophet muhammad, in a letter to the emperor of the eastern roman empire. Whatever your beliefs are, in this specific comment, history would prove him right.
Why don't you read some history of China. For example the parts pertaining to Japan, which did exactly what you state would prevent an invasion. It didn't. China did the same, arm it's populace, before WWII, and got fucked badly until the US saved their ass.
But in the long-term game, the Chinese are winning. In fact they are somewhat like the Borg, if they were to state "we've heard this before, from many peoples across vast pieces of land since long before the US existed. And now, they're all China", they'd be telling the truth. Even if they were to say "since before Jesus walked the earth", they'd still be telling the truth.
In addition to China itself, vast regions of Asia are de-facto Chinese colonies.
(forgot the link)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1341419&cid=29123745
(and the parent post was anonymous coward by mistake : I'm using the browser in the installer of kubuntu karmic koala, which does not have my password sync)
Off to reset my pc.
No reason to call home.
The real "factory of life" that needs to be created abiogenically is the ribosome. And uracil is to a ribosome what a matchbox car is to the USS enterprise. It's a necessary step, yes, but the "life forms" that could be created, even using all 5 bases (4 for DNA, 1 extra for RNA) would not be considered to be alive.
Anything considered alive has 7 basic properties :
-> homeostasis : able to maintain a constant internal environment under differing external circumstances (e.g. constant water pressure independant of temperature)
-> organisation
-> metabolism : it must "eat", make parts of the external environment into a functional part of itself
-> growth : it must (be capable of) increasing in size.
-> adaptation : it must evolve
-> response to stimuli
-> reproduction
All 5 bases would (just barely) cover "reproduction" in the above definition. They wouldn't even be as advanced as viruses (and we can artificially create viruses).
So as I said, nice discovery. But we're trying to build the USS enterprise and this "great news" is that we've finally succeeded in finding a possible procedure to construct a tiny matchbox car.
Thanks for the answer. But if that's the answer, I have another question : why in the name of all that is good and holy are we paying tax money to people/companies/utilities for installing this equipment ? Just propaganda ?
Are we totally insane ?
Do you really need a source stating that nature is dependant on solar power ?
"chlorophyll" - google it.
Unless I'm mistaken the number -3.3 ±3.63kg (Pgained weight "due to" the exercise ("due to", perhaps "during" should be better).
And then the article goes "but you should still do exercise, even if it fattens you" for a few paragraphs and starts looking at all sorts of justifications to still stating that exercise was the correct advise for weight loss even if, you know, it didn't actually lead to weight loss ...
They sound like politicians explaining how they fulfilled their campaign promises ...
So, what you're saying is that using solar/wind will massively change the climate by changing the absorption characteristics ...
What, pray tell, were we trying to prevent again ?
(just wondering)
Don't forget the constant accusations of getting paid. Either you're anti-AGW and you're paid by oil companies. Or you're pro-AGW and you're paid by government.
The sad thing is, academics are mostly paid by government AND mostly pro-AGW. And yes, the government is massively pro-AGW. Then again, the oil companies have been caught several times with their hands in the cookie jar. Academics have made idiotic mistakes, and so has industry.
So what does a rational person do ? I'd love to put the arguing kids in a locked room and throw away the key, to be honest. Then again, I don't think America (or any other country) is even capable of doing 1/10th of what the pro-AGW crowd is "demanding", so I fear the point is moot : we're not going to do enough, because we can't. The pro-AGW crowd is asking for so much money they might as well ask for a bridge to the moon.
What I most wonder about, from the pro-AGW crowd, is why the benefactors of global warming are never asked for a single dollarcent. The single country that's getting paid the most obscene amounts of money to cause AGW (if ... etc) is Saudi Arabia. Yet nobody asks them for a dime. Hello ? Same goes, obviously, for other oil producers.
Consider this. Harnessing renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures. With coal, you have to pay for the fuel. With renewables, you do not.
Any questions?
Yes, does any solar panel or wind turbine exist that, if installed on a normal house (ie. at at least 40 degrees north) has an EROI > 0 ? Actually I live at 60 degrees, and my calculations tell me that even with the tax breaks solar panels are still net-negative money generators, and seriously net-negative power generators. I'm talking about the standard stuff (not following the sun).
Since I believe a power engineer told me that the absolute minimum EROI (energy wise) for a power generator to be useful is 10 on a yearly basis (meaning it's got to create 10 times more power than it costs to build/install it in the first year of operation), and renewable energy is at, well, -1.2 or so at 20 years perfect operation (at least standard solar panels are). Meaning it actually costs about double the amount of oil to power a house using solar panels than it would cost to just power it directly on oil. Actually solar panels are defeated by that oldest of joke of a power generator : we have more efficient research fusion generators than solar panels (EROI 0.0 average, 1.01 peak performance vs -1.0).
And this is being generous : those panels are not exactly produced locally, and I don't even count transporting, connecting, installing and servicing them, none of which are free.
By my calculations, btw, solar panel will never be able to deliver enough power to heat a normal house, even if the entire lot were covered in solar panels. Meaning a 100% efficient panel that was dropped by God himself from heaven (ie. free) would not be able to heat a normal house. What, exactly, is your suggestion we do to heat about 20-story appartment buildings ? Please don't say "isolate them well", please keep into account that existing buildings need to be heated too.
Right now we don't use any significant amount of either solar irradiation or wind. I wonder, if we were to use, say 1% of solar power, that would obviously mean the biosphere would not be able to use that same energy. What will be the ramifications of stealing energy from nature ? If we do what needs to be done to power america with solar power, covering 2 "average" states entirely in solar panels, can anything grow in those 2 states ? Or will that be 4% of the united states that contains less life than the surface of the moon ?
Right now we're using so very, very little it obviously doesn't matter. The same goes for wind. Right now we barely use wind power at all, but a lot of natural processes (e.g. moisture collection in dry climates, just to name something) depend on wind. Obviously they will fail to work if we use a significant percentage of wind power in an area. What will be the environmental impact ?
Yes I have doubts about renewable power, and it's supposed "zero" environmental impact. But you could answer these questions in a reasonable manner (something that never seems to be done in any of the publications I read) ... perhaps it would help.
Long live solaris and freebsd. Wonder how the linux tracing stuff is coming ?
The microsoft version is using Israeli military technology, it's not just a webcam. Or it is a webcam, but it's also something else.
A small time before the camera sends another frame downstream a small led in front of the camera flashes. That flash has a specific color, that's rarely seen in nature. Then it resets one layer of the CMOS camera. Then, a short while later the frame is sent downstream ... with 4 color components.
You have your superstandard red, green and blue channels. And you get a depth channel. The last channel indicates how long a time passed between the flashing of the led and that pixel seeing the color emanated by the led.
In all but the most extreme situations (there are a few extreme angles that don't work as expected, a few materials that are not opaque to the sent-out color, and there's a minimum and maximum distance, which aren't stellar, as well as limitations on how many such camera's can be active at once, as they have to timeshare), that would be the distance between the eye of the camera and whatever object the pixel was on.
Natal does not give you a 2d image, it gives you a 2.5d image (meaning x,y + height, not truly independent x,y,z coordinates), but still. The difference between normal pictures and natal pictures is like the difference between mario bros and duke nukem 3d.
Natal is the combination of a camera + a (relatively short-range) 3d range scanner. That equipment doesn't really exist yet, and while camera's are cheap, I seriously doubt you can find a 2d range scanner running at 60 Hz for less than 50.000$.
Whether he had any left ? Are you serious ? He had factories producing nothing but WMD's. That's confirmed too. Obviously at least some of these rockets did indeed work ... are you seriously claiming 5 factories made only 5 rockets ?
Perhaps to Syria ? He had a serious beef with Israel, which foiled his nuclear weapons program. ... which leads to the conclusion that he either sold them, gave them away, or somehow managed to hide them away from America's soldiers.
Those weapons exist. They killed, and masses of people died from them. Only an idiot would doubt their existence, or their numbers (meaning at least a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand rockets with nerve gas). Hopefully they've spoiled, but do you really want to take that chance ?
And yes it's a nice anti-Bush slogan. It's also pathetic.
After all We found bodies, lots, lots of bodies, established they were killed by Saddam's WMD, and then we failed to find WMD.
The conclusion of democrats : "there are no WMDs". I don't know what to say.
Perhaps you'd like to buy a few bomb detectors ? They're not cheap but very accurate.
The issue with the banking/loan fiasco was more like having regulations on the plugs but at the same time encouraging the production of sub-standard, ungrounded ones for the poor to buy because "everyone has the right to enjoy electricity". Then blaming everyone but the State(TM) for the widespread fires afterwards and using this as a pretext to impose more regulations that will make the plugs even less affordable than before.
You know, the story doesn't end there. We've already restarting the "everyone has the right to electricity" stuff, and it's more obnoxious variation "blacks too".
Now if you will excuse me there's this little fire that the fire dept. seems to have trouble with ... what ? a hundred ? Well thank God the president said these ones will remain small ... if they grew we'd be in real trouble ...
Just about every last sector of the economy, with the exception of "resource extraction" (ie. mining and oil, not the most popular on slashdot either), has lost lots of jobs. Total joblosses in the US, bad as they are, are very mild compared to the rest of the world.
There was exactly one sector that increased in size in the last years world-wide. You guessed it ... the entertainment sector. Movies. Music. Obviously they've gained in power and politicians are asking them how they can hire even more people to reduce unemployment.
Their answer seems to be, worldwide, copyright enforcement.
Since the EU member states have stopped being democracies yesterday with the signing of the treaty of lissabon, that gives the only law-giving power in the EU to non-elected officials (the "comission"), I doubt you can count on the EU to go against this. If the comission accepts this (and it does, and will do so in the future) there is no option, no recourse for any EU member citizen, and no "local" parliament has the power to oppose this.
Maybe the trade-off is that their brain simply needs more energy, which isn't great when food availability is the main fact
Let's hope so. I doubt it though : it could be brain cooling if it's energy related. Not one of the strong points of mammals. After all, brain cooling is the reason we have a head in the first place.
After all, if more memory were that simple, surely evolution would have changed that gene by itself. If it were a tradeoff, that would be much more logical.
So what did these rats lose ? Do they have gaps in long term memory ?
I'd watch out for the "no free lunch" idea holding true here too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
By the way, it's called science. The idea is to have an open mind, and look for explanations. For example it's been established that there's oil on Titan, a moon of saturn, as well as other gaseous hydrocarbons.
Any bets on how much of those are buried plants ?
Also these days plankton is "digested" even at the bottom of the ocean by so-called extremophile organisms. Plankton sinking to the bottom today will never become oil for that reason. And no-one knows how long plankton-eating bacteria have existed at the bottom when obviously the biogenic theory depends on that being a rather short time. Lots of things remain to be cleared up.
Yes plants CAN be made into petroleum. You're quite correct that that is proven. The question is, is that indeed what happened ? Not much research is going into it as there are no clear angles of attack.
Btw : even in evolution corrections are still made to the theory. Just recently it's been proven that the gene combining mechanism in sexual reproduction is not just a basepair-by-basepair, but there is in fact a rather extensive (and currently unknown) algorithm at work, which is, just to name one thing, able to tell the length of genes and "re-link" our DNA into a working program in ways that no direct copying algorithm would be.
Likewise even proponents of biogenic oil do not discount that abiogenic oil exists, the theory states that it's contribution is not significant.
You see, actually that's an open question. There are several other alternatives that might have lead to the creation of oil, the most promising being underground bacteria that live from geothermal and radioactive food sources (yes there are bacteria that "eat" radioactivity).
I doubt you're entirely correct about coal either. After all, coal is pretty much pure carbon, it does not have to be biological in origin.
The problem is, if you're right, oil would be found where the ground first went down at least several miles and then came back up again, over the course of at most a few 100 million years (and less than a billion years). However in reality oil (and coal) is found where the ground has been rising slowly since long before the advent of plants. So there are lots of large oilfields and coal mines that just couldn't possibly ever have been plants.
The only research that we have found that it is possible to create oil from plants. That does not mean that that has to be what happened. It is the accepted "explanation" for oil in popular scientific journals, but it is most likely not correct.
And btw, the largest storehouse of carbon is not the ground, but the ocean. In reality > 95% of the co2 increase in the athmosphere originated in the ocean, and not in some factory or car. The AGW theory is that the co2 release from factories triggered a tiny increase in temperature, resulting in much co2 release from the ocean, which resulted in tiny increase, ... The theory behind AGW is not that humans are themselves responsible for co2 rise, they only claim that's a tiny part of it, the theory is that 19th century factories tripped a feedback loop resulting in warming. That feedback loop was already feeding back on itself, even before those factories, but at a slower rate. Reducing human co2 output, even by 100%, will therefore not result in cooling, merely in slower warming. Until we get to a point where co2 increase will not further warm the earth and the feedback loop will reverse direction, resulting in a 16 degree drop in average temperature in less than 1000 years, resulting in permanent ice sheets reaching the outskirts of paris and New York. The point where the balance tips seems to be (given historical data) about 2-3 degrees warmer than today.
And it also means that if anything, we or some volcano or weather pattern, somehow succeed in creating a short term cooling, even a single degree, that will reverse the long term temperature gradient (even if we keep pumping co2 in the athmosphere, because we'll never beat the re-absorption of the oceans). That means removing a massive amount of energy from the athmosphere, but there have been eruptions and events that came close.
Or, of course, it could have been God. I doubt anyone outside of the madhouses ("mosques") of saudi arabia believes that, though. Of course, in that country, stating that it probably wasn't allah can get you your head chopped off. You see, if it wasn't allah, that would mean they have some 10-20 years to get a working economy going, one that can survive without oil. And ... progress in that regard has been ... less than stellar.
Question : do you people honestly believe this ?
If normal people actually accepted ideas like this Europe would be Nazi today, for one thing. I also seriously doubt America would still be a democracy.
If you knew more about the Middle Ages, maybe you'd understand that the population did not move so much as changed religion over the centuries.
No offence, but you really should read a bit about Arab history, and pay attention to just how much ethnic cleansings these people comitted. The population of Europe, you are correct, did indeed merely change religion ("mostly", as there was certainly no shortage of armed conflicts, though they declined over time. Slowly). The population of the middle east was eradicated, several times in fact. Everywhere, muslims have always created conflicts along ethnic lines, even with "fellow muslims" (google "Sudan" or "Darfur", and note just how racist any brotherhood islam supposedly provides really is. And to tell the truth, just walk into a European city and look for a few Turks and a few Moroccans, and note how much they like eachother. See for yourself).
After researching arab/islamic history, any reasonable person would seriously ask himself what exactly is so terribly remarkable about this German guy from WWII (and don't google "aymin al-husseini", it will not improve your view of these people).
Great to hear your idea of justice being retreating from conquered lands. When do you leave for Iran ? (that's were indo europeans come from)
One thing's for sure : you won't be posting anything from there, so I guess we'll know.
And of course, if you're not willing to do this, how can you expect others to ??? Perhaps indians should start firing rockets at your family. That seems to be the way to acquire "justice". Would you find that acceptable ? Indians attempting to eradicate you ? Would you leave ?
You missed the third option, which is for the motivation behind the firing of rockets to be removed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNrCMdFoZqQ
So who do we allow to settle there ?
The "kingdom of Egypt" (the state of the Farao's) ? (exterminated to the last man by muslims)
The Hittite Emptre ? (exterminated by the Greeks, Romans, Persians)
The kingdom of Israel ?
The Assyrian Empire ?
Which of these do we restore ? (note that the palestinians, or to be more exact, the arabs only come into play about 4500 years after the Assyrian Empire)
Which do we restore ? And why do they have more rights than all the others who conquered that piece of land ?
Note the obvious truth : the Jews controlled Israel about 4300 years before the arabs even left their tiny province ...
What if some Greek starts firing rockets at the Arabs ? Will you tell them to leave ? He has at least as much right to Israel as they do ? What if the Jews start firing rockets into Jordan (territory that was part of the kingdom of Israel) ?
And of course, you shouldn't count out yourself. You're an Indo-European living in America. It seems hypocritical in the extreme to tell others to leave conquered lands. Your province of origin is northwestern Iran, every other place on this earth indoeuropeans live (including Europe), is obviously conquered from someone else.
So when will you give the good example ?