It's worse than that - Microsoft dumped something like $30 billion over the course of a decade into their home entertainment division, the vast majority of it spent on the Xbox and Xbox 360. They only started showing quarterly profits a couple of years ago - mostly from software, not hardware sales - and last I checked at the rate they're going it'll take them over a decade just to recoup their initial investment assuming software sales and prices hold up (which they haven't and won't on now-obsolete hardware). In other words, their investment in the console business will never even manage to break even.
Compare and contrast with Apple, which spent far, far less developing and launching both the iPhone and iPad, products which turned a profit almost immediately.
The console business has been a disaster for Microsoft since the beginning, and it's been a world of hurt for Sony since the launch of the PS3. The problem is, both Microsoft and Sony spent massive fortunes developing and subsidizing the "bleeding edge" hardware for their latest generation of consoles. By the time manufacturing costs came down to the point where they could realize hefty profits on both hardware and software sales for their platforms, Nintendo had stolen a good chunk of the market away with the cheaper Wii. Worse, all three consoles are now effectively obsolete, and they (and their software vendors) are competing with mobile devices from Apple and the Android vendors for consumers' dollars. And the mobile devices are crushing the consoles in the race for consumer dollars.
The Xbox 360 was supposed to last Microsoft until 2015, but if the Wii U is a success later this year, it'll likely decimate both hardware and software sales of Microsoft's outdated console. While Microsoft could unload another $20 billion designing, manufacturing and subsidizing a next-gen console, I just don't see how they can hope to ever turn a profit on that business. It's a lose-lose situation for Microsoft in the console business. If they don't shell out another $20 billion, they effectively drop out and never make their investment back. If they shell out $20 billion, they'll probably still end up an also-ran and never make their money back.
Of course, they could do something less elaborate with their next gen console, but they'll have already lost prime mover advantage to Nintendo, and lackluster hardware will rapidly be eclipsed by ever-cheaper PCs and increasingly capable mobile devices. In other words, their "next gen" system would have a shelf life of about 3 years. They'd have to produce something really cheap to make those numbers pan out, and it's hard to see developers expending a lot of effort on a platform they know is gonna be dead in under 5 years.
And of course Apple could completely wreck Microsoft's console business by using the firehose of cash they're getting from their mobile business to produce their own console. Subsidize a halfway decent box and follow the iPhone's cheap software strategy - keep the price of most titles under $20 - and you'd cripple Microsoft. They'd hemorrhage billions before being forced out of the market with their tail between their legs.
I think Microsoft's even more screwed than the conventional wisdom thinks they are. Their mobile strategy is a shambles, their console business will never turn a profit (and could end up costing them another $10-$20 billion), they're an also-ran in the cloud, and their OS and office applications monopolies are increasingly threatened by Apple in the home, and by Linux and cloud-based applications in the workplace.
Their patent portfolio is formidable, but then, so was Kodak's.
I think they have about 5 years left to turn it around before they begin a rapid slide into irrelevance, and I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Ballmer could lead such a turnaround.
It really does not matter whether you would wish to fly out of those airports. They exist and they compete with the "one airport" you claim has no competition.
You listed airports in Yuma, Prescott and *Flagstaff* as being competition for Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix?
Sky Harbor Airport to Prescott's airport is a 107 mile drive into the mountains of central Arizona. Just shy of 2 hours in no traffic, and that assumes you don't live east or south of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine close to 1/3rd of the population of the Phoenix metro area do. A more realistic travel time is on the order of 3 hours.
Sky Harbor to Flagstaff's Pulliam Airport is even worse, a 145 mile drive to a city nestled in some of the tallest mountains in the state, about a mile higher than Phoenix. 2.5 hours minimum - more like 3.5-4 during commute hours. Nobody in their right mind would consider that "competition" even if Pulliam were an appreciable fraction the size of Sky Harbor, which it's not.
Sky Harbor Airport to Yuma Airport is a 189 mile drive. 3 hours, 22 minutes in no traffic, 4+ in traffic. Not as many mountains to deal with, but hot, desolate and isolated. And 4 hours assumes you don't live east or north of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine over half of the people in the Phoenix metro area do, in which case you'd have to cross over the congested downtown area, adding who knows how much time to the trip.
None of these airports would represent competition for Sky Harbor *even if they offered a similar menu of flights*, which none of them do. Being small airports, they also cost substantially more to fly into and out of than Sky Harbor, which is a hub for Southwest. And we won't even mention how much the gas for those trips would cost in the average automobile. Flights would have to be dramatically cheaper out of those distant airports in order to compete with Sky Harbor just on price, assuming flights to your desired destination were available in the first place, which they aren't.
Well and easy fix would just be to privatize it again. The accountability will be restored.
Actually, "privatizing" the TSA wouldn't do anything to fix it, because it would still be an enormous private corporation - one funded entirely by the government AND expected to turn a hefty profit. If anything, the abuses and invasive behaviors would grow worse, as the corporation spent scads of money on propaganda and lobbyists with the goal of terrifying taxpayers and Congress into forking over even more money for their abusive security theater. Ultimately all it would accomplish - apart from accelerating our descent into fascism - is to further pad the corporate executives' pockets.
Now, if you simply handed security back over to the individual airports - public, private or whatever - that might help to re-establish at least some accountability, simply because those organizations are much smaller and locally controlled.
As long as laws exist which continue to strip passengers of their constitutional rights though, you're going to continue to see abuses regardless of how you operate your security theater - public/private/Federal/local/whatever. In fact the abuses might even get worse in select locales - just think of how corrupt some local governments are, or how crooked some local businessmen are (especially in locations where the local government is weak).
I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process
Well, maybe, but a watchmaker implies a mother and a father. Watchmakers don't just spring into existence. So proposing that some watchmaker was required then begs the question, "Who made the watchmaker?"
This is yet another example of how religion does nothing to answer any of the big questions. It's just mental masturbation that ultimately serves to enrich and empower the con artists running the churches, an intellectual shell game.
I just had my machine get totally infected last month by some Java-spread garbage. MSSE was useless. I tried several programs, and Avast did by far the best job at detecting and removing the infection. It's my new AV of choice.
I also switched to Chrome and set it so that I have to click to run any Java or Flash crap. Hopefully that'll help prevent drive-by attacks in the future that exploit the gaping security holes in Java and Flash.
>On the other hand, Spirit took three years to move as far as I walked yesterday morning.
On the other hand, Spirit and Opportunity cost $820 million to build, launch and operate for the duration of their initial 90 day mission. The extended mission has cost ~$125 million in the subsequent 8 years. The rovers are 5 feet high, 7.5 feet wide and 5 feet long and weigh 400 pounds.
It would likely cost about a trillion dollars to get a single human to Mars on a one-way suicide voyage with supplies to last maybe two years, at best.
Like I said earlier, that same money could send numerous tank-sized rovers to Mars equipped with sensors, labs, the works. All stuff we couldn't hope to afford to send along with a human on a suicide mission, equipped with a shovel.
Robots can gather a lot more science than humans. They can run off solar or nuclear power, they don't need air or water or tons of radiation shielding, and they don't need to sleep. You can get them to Mars for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to send humans, and they can stay there indefinitely without resupply.
We've been sending rovers to Mars that are skateboard sized. If you look at how much mass we'd have to launch into orbit and then boost to Mars just to send one human on a one-way suicide trip, it would be cheaper to send several tank-sized robots with their own onboard nuclear power plants. A robot that size would be bristling with sensors and packed with onboard labs - all the stuff you couldn't afford to send along with a human explorer.
Sending humans into space is just stupid given the cost of getting into space. When somebody builds a successful space elevator or space fountain that could very well change, but for now it's just a stupendous waste of money. We'd get a lot more science with robots, for a lot less money.
>I just bought a 30 pack of 40 watt Incadescent bulbs for better lighting and environmental efficiency - No Mercury.
Unless coal is used to generate some - or worse most - of the electricity where you live, in which case powering those incandescent bulbs will release far more mercury into the environment than an equivalent number of CFLs would.
Worse, the mercury that comes from burning coal isn't elemental mercury, as you'd find in a CFL. Which means it's far more easily absorbed by living things like us.
Exactly! MS has spent north of $30 *BILLION* developing the Xbox and Xbox 360. They haven't come anywhere close to breakeven on that investment. They'd have made more money if they'd invested $1 in Apple stock in 2000.
I doubt they'll ever turn a profit off their videogame business. A next-gen Xbox to replace the 360 will need to be developed and produced sometime in the next 3 years or so if they want to remain in the industry, and that'll cost billions. In other words, they'll need to dig a deeper hole in an attempt to get out of the hole they're already standing in.
>They haven't been eating bugs and grass for a long time. (Actually I'm pretty certain >birds don't eat grass at all, so you might want to brush up on your livestock knowledge).
Chickens most certainly eat grass. My grandmother used to raise a few. They eat a lot of stuff. They seemed to love bugs the most. They'll eat seeds and grains too, but there's no way that's the bulk of their diet in the wild.
We evolved to eat free range meat. Agriculture to produce farmed grains for livestock is a VERY recent invention in evolutionary terms.
>Except we didn't evolve to eat animals every day in large amounts.
Oh really? So what were we eating for the million or so years the human race evolved prior to the invention of agriculture?
Of course we ate meat. It was the only thing an animal our size with a digestive system like ours could eat. Any study of primitive, hunter-gatherer societies will show that meat, eggs, fish and insects are the primary component of the diet in pre-agricultural cultures. Nuts, seasonal fruits, a few starchy tubers and select vegetables typically make up the remainder of the diet.
There are plenty of traditional societies where meat is the overwhelming component of the diet (Eskimos, for example). Invariably these people were incredibly healthy prior to the introduction of the modern western diet, with its abundance of cheap carbohydrates and processed oils. Which are garbage that humans aren't designed to eat.
>Then you die like the doctor who came-up with this "eat lots of fat" diet.
If you're referring to Atkins, he died after slipping on the ice, falling, hitting his head and going into a coma. Diet had nothing to do with that (unless he was drunk at the time!).
I dropped carbs pretty much completely out of my diet a year ago, and started eating meat with every meal after having been a vegetarian for over 20 years. I've dropped from about 215 to 165lbs, and my cholesterol has dropped from over 250 to 200. My "bad" cholesterol has plummeted, and my "good" cholesterol has skyrocketed. My triglycerides are way down. So's my blood pressure. So all of my markers correlated with heart disease have improved, dramatically. And I sleep better and have more energy.
Atkins was right. I just gotta be more careful than he was when I step on icy sidewalks!
~500 million years ago was around the time of the Cambrian explosion here on earth, after a big snowball event. Wonder if there's any evidence for increased impacts around that time...
It's been proposed that Triton is a captured satellite as well, I believe. Maybe something Neptune picked up as it migrated outward.
Wonder what the ratio of captures to collides to ejects is when these bodies encounter each other during solar system formation. Would be interesting if you could also determine how much big stuff either slammed into the gas giants or was ejected from the solar system (or spun into the sun).
Hmmm. Wonder if some of the big stuff buzzing around in the Oort Cloud was ejected by the gas giants? Could some terrestrial world be lurking out there, chucked into a wide, distant orbit 4 billion years ago?
>Hmm, how would you get a moon in a retrograde orbit without some pretty vigorous interactions already?
Doesn't Saturn have an outer moon in a retrograde orbit?
Maybe Venus captured a moon in a retrograde orbit, one that slowly degraded over billions of years until it smacked into the planet. Would explain the crazy slow rotation of Venus compared to Earth and Mars, and why it was resurfaced relatively recently.
>Such an impactor would have a relatively low impact velocity.
Which could be a good thing, otherwise both it and the Earth might have just been reduced to rubble.
And the impact velocity would vary a lot depending on what happened to the body after it fell out of the Lagrange point. It could go whizzing around for several orbits before smacking the parent, picking up a lot of relative velocity in the process.
Simulations have been run which show planets forming in the Lagrange points of other planets. Happens relatively frequently. And then they fall out. From there you get glancing blows, bodies being ejected, all sorts of relative velocities, etc.
Solar system formation looks to be a pretty chaotic process where all sorts of seemingly exotic events are in fact pretty common. Planetary migration for example, as happened to Uranus and Neptune.
I was surprised too years ago when I first learned about the young, uniform surface of Venus. There was a program I saw on television years ago though which showed that if you bake the water out of crustal rocks here on earth, they become much stronger. So if Venus lost its water fairly early on, it's possible its crust became so rigid that volcanic activity couldn't break thru until it shattered violently, unleashing a planetary-resurfacing flood of volcanic activity over a very short period of time. So I don't know if you need an external catastrophic event to explain away the surface of Venus.
One other thought I've had - what if Venus had a good-sized moon in a retrograde orbit? Could it have eventually spiraled downward, colliding with Venus and leading to its resurfacing?
Hey, question for you, and I just thought of this and don't know enough about orbital mechanics or whatever to know if this could even have been a factor, but...
When we look at exoplanets being discovered by Kepler and especially those being detected by stellar wobble, we see a lot of (apparently) stable systems (at least for the moment) containing multiple worlds in highly eccentric orbits (compared to most of the large bodies in our system).
Has anyone correlated eccentricity to the age of the systems in question? Are younger systems more likely to have worlds in these highly eccentric orbits? I'm just wondering if, over the scale of billions of years, if multi-planet systems like that remain stable or if the various bodies act upon each other to either reduce or increase the eccentricity of those orbits (say, as stellar mass slowly declines and they begin to migrate outward).
I guess what I'm getting at is, maybe Earth and the other terrestrial planets once occupied more eccentric orbits, in our case generally closer to sol, but ~2 billion years ago interactions began forcing them into more circular orbits, a process which in our case shifted us further away from the sun. Perhaps Jupiter's orbit was relatively circular from the beginning and its influence gradually pulled Mars and then Earth into more circular orbits, with Venus and Mercury then being forced along, shifting their mean distances from sol in the process until the more stable, less eccentric condition we see today prevailed.
One other thought - is it possible sol was once the distant companion to a large, luminous star, and that heat and light from that giant neighbor compensated for the young faint sun? Perhaps as that neighbor lost mass - and my understanding is large stars lose mass fairly quickly even before they go nova - sol drifted away until it finally fell out of orbit completely.
Also, wouldn't a thicker atmosphere retain more heat regardless of its composition? If the atmospheric pressure at sea level was 2-3 times what it is today, wouldn't that do a great deal to insulate the early earth? Earth days were also much shorter then, and tides were much higher. I think at early on the oceans flooded the early continents on a daily basis, thanks to the enormous tidal pull of the moon, which whirled overhead just outside the Roche limit. Could both of those phenomena had a warming effect on the early Earth, resulting in a world that, while it might have been cool overall, couldn't have developed the kind of icy surface that could lead to runaway snowball events?
Not really a miracle. The giant impactor could have formed in a Lagrange point of the early Earth. Forming in our orbit, it would be made of virtually identical stuff.
In fact, when folks run models of solar system formation, my understanding is they get planets forming in the Lagrange points of other planets. Apparently the first - and typically largest - planets to form in an accretion disc create resonances in the disc that tend to draw material together in bands elsewhere in the disc. So the odds of getting multiple bodies forming in pretty much the same orbit is much higher than you'd expect.
Usually the worlds forming from the matter clumped in these bands either collide right away or get ejected from their orbit due to interactions, but big bodies can form at Lagrange points before their orbits are finally disrupted, either spiraling off into their sun, zipping out of the system entirely, colliding with other worlds (especially those sharing their orbit) or - probably rarely - settling down into their own stable orbit (perhaps in resonance with a larger neighbor).
You forgot Atari. They were probably the biggest single user of MOS 8-bit CPUs, since they were at the center of their 2600 and 5200 game consoles, as well as Atari's 8-bit computers (and I believe several of their arcade machines as well).
>The C-64 was better than anything available at the time
Sorry, the Atari 800 easily bested it in most regards, and it had been designed in 1978. Faster CPU, vastly superior drives, better graphics, 4-channel sound, just to name a few points in its favor.
The C64 was clearly built to rival the 800, which it did thanks not to any technical superiority, but due to the incompetence of Atari management.
I won't even mention the smog in Los Angeles, which was unimaginable by the late '60s. LA still has smog, but it's nothing like it was 40+ years ago, thanks to strict environmental regulations.
Tragic cases of pollution weren't the exception - in much of the country, they were the rule.
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It's worse than that - Microsoft dumped something like $30 billion over the course of a decade into their home entertainment division, the vast majority of it spent on the Xbox and Xbox 360. They only started showing quarterly profits a couple of years ago - mostly from software, not hardware sales - and last I checked at the rate they're going it'll take them over a decade just to recoup their initial investment assuming software sales and prices hold up (which they haven't and won't on now-obsolete hardware). In other words, their investment in the console business will never even manage to break even.
Compare and contrast with Apple, which spent far, far less developing and launching both the iPhone and iPad, products which turned a profit almost immediately.
The console business has been a disaster for Microsoft since the beginning, and it's been a world of hurt for Sony since the launch of the PS3. The problem is, both Microsoft and Sony spent massive fortunes developing and subsidizing the "bleeding edge" hardware for their latest generation of consoles. By the time manufacturing costs came down to the point where they could realize hefty profits on both hardware and software sales for their platforms, Nintendo had stolen a good chunk of the market away with the cheaper Wii. Worse, all three consoles are now effectively obsolete, and they (and their software vendors) are competing with mobile devices from Apple and the Android vendors for consumers' dollars. And the mobile devices are crushing the consoles in the race for consumer dollars.
The Xbox 360 was supposed to last Microsoft until 2015, but if the Wii U is a success later this year, it'll likely decimate both hardware and software sales of Microsoft's outdated console. While Microsoft could unload another $20 billion designing, manufacturing and subsidizing a next-gen console, I just don't see how they can hope to ever turn a profit on that business. It's a lose-lose situation for Microsoft in the console business. If they don't shell out another $20 billion, they effectively drop out and never make their investment back. If they shell out $20 billion, they'll probably still end up an also-ran and never make their money back.
Of course, they could do something less elaborate with their next gen console, but they'll have already lost prime mover advantage to Nintendo, and lackluster hardware will rapidly be eclipsed by ever-cheaper PCs and increasingly capable mobile devices. In other words, their "next gen" system would have a shelf life of about 3 years. They'd have to produce something really cheap to make those numbers pan out, and it's hard to see developers expending a lot of effort on a platform they know is gonna be dead in under 5 years.
And of course Apple could completely wreck Microsoft's console business by using the firehose of cash they're getting from their mobile business to produce their own console. Subsidize a halfway decent box and follow the iPhone's cheap software strategy - keep the price of most titles under $20 - and you'd cripple Microsoft. They'd hemorrhage billions before being forced out of the market with their tail between their legs.
I think Microsoft's even more screwed than the conventional wisdom thinks they are. Their mobile strategy is a shambles, their console business will never turn a profit (and could end up costing them another $10-$20 billion), they're an also-ran in the cloud, and their OS and office applications monopolies are increasingly threatened by Apple in the home, and by Linux and cloud-based applications in the workplace.
Their patent portfolio is formidable, but then, so was Kodak's.
I think they have about 5 years left to turn it around before they begin a rapid slide into irrelevance, and I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Ballmer could lead such a turnaround.
It really does not matter whether you would wish to fly out of those airports. They exist and they compete with the "one airport" you claim has no competition.
You listed airports in Yuma, Prescott and *Flagstaff* as being competition for Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix?
Sky Harbor Airport to Prescott's airport is a 107 mile drive into the mountains of central Arizona. Just shy of 2 hours in no traffic, and that assumes you don't live east or south of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine close to 1/3rd of the population of the Phoenix metro area do. A more realistic travel time is on the order of 3 hours.
Sky Harbor to Flagstaff's Pulliam Airport is even worse, a 145 mile drive to a city nestled in some of the tallest mountains in the state, about a mile higher than Phoenix. 2.5 hours minimum - more like 3.5-4 during commute hours. Nobody in their right mind would consider that "competition" even if Pulliam were an appreciable fraction the size of Sky Harbor, which it's not.
Sky Harbor Airport to Yuma Airport is a 189 mile drive. 3 hours, 22 minutes in no traffic, 4+ in traffic. Not as many mountains to deal with, but hot, desolate and isolated. And 4 hours assumes you don't live east or north of Sky Harbor, which I'd imagine over half of the people in the Phoenix metro area do, in which case you'd have to cross over the congested downtown area, adding who knows how much time to the trip.
None of these airports would represent competition for Sky Harbor *even if they offered a similar menu of flights*, which none of them do. Being small airports, they also cost substantially more to fly into and out of than Sky Harbor, which is a hub for Southwest. And we won't even mention how much the gas for those trips would cost in the average automobile. Flights would have to be dramatically cheaper out of those distant airports in order to compete with Sky Harbor just on price, assuming flights to your desired destination were available in the first place, which they aren't.
Well and easy fix would just be to privatize it again. The accountability will be restored.
Actually, "privatizing" the TSA wouldn't do anything to fix it, because it would still be an enormous private corporation - one funded entirely by the government AND expected to turn a hefty profit. If anything, the abuses and invasive behaviors would grow worse, as the corporation spent scads of money on propaganda and lobbyists with the goal of terrifying taxpayers and Congress into forking over even more money for their abusive security theater. Ultimately all it would accomplish - apart from accelerating our descent into fascism - is to further pad the corporate executives' pockets.
Now, if you simply handed security back over to the individual airports - public, private or whatever - that might help to re-establish at least some accountability, simply because those organizations are much smaller and locally controlled.
As long as laws exist which continue to strip passengers of their constitutional rights though, you're going to continue to see abuses regardless of how you operate your security theater - public/private/Federal/local/whatever. In fact the abuses might even get worse in select locales - just think of how corrupt some local governments are, or how crooked some local businessmen are (especially in locations where the local government is weak).
I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process
Well, maybe, but a watchmaker implies a mother and a father. Watchmakers don't just spring into existence. So proposing that some watchmaker was required then begs the question, "Who made the watchmaker?"
This is yet another example of how religion does nothing to answer any of the big questions. It's just mental masturbation that ultimately serves to enrich and empower the con artists running the churches, an intellectual shell game.
I just had my machine get totally infected last month by some Java-spread garbage. MSSE was useless. I tried several programs, and Avast did by far the best job at detecting and removing the infection. It's my new AV of choice.
I also switched to Chrome and set it so that I have to click to run any Java or Flash crap. Hopefully that'll help prevent drive-by attacks in the future that exploit the gaping security holes in Java and Flash.
>On the other hand, Spirit took three years to move as far as I walked yesterday morning.
On the other hand, Spirit and Opportunity cost $820 million to build, launch and operate for the duration of their initial 90 day mission. The extended mission has cost ~$125 million in the subsequent 8 years. The rovers are 5 feet high, 7.5 feet wide and 5 feet long and weigh 400 pounds.
It would likely cost about a trillion dollars to get a single human to Mars on a one-way suicide voyage with supplies to last maybe two years, at best.
Like I said earlier, that same money could send numerous tank-sized rovers to Mars equipped with sensors, labs, the works. All stuff we couldn't hope to afford to send along with a human on a suicide mission, equipped with a shovel.
Oh, I wish I had mod points. This about nails it.
Robots can gather a lot more science than humans. They can run off solar or nuclear power, they don't need air or water or tons of radiation shielding, and they don't need to sleep. You can get them to Mars for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to send humans, and they can stay there indefinitely without resupply.
We've been sending rovers to Mars that are skateboard sized. If you look at how much mass we'd have to launch into orbit and then boost to Mars just to send one human on a one-way suicide trip, it would be cheaper to send several tank-sized robots with their own onboard nuclear power plants. A robot that size would be bristling with sensors and packed with onboard labs - all the stuff you couldn't afford to send along with a human explorer.
Sending humans into space is just stupid given the cost of getting into space. When somebody builds a successful space elevator or space fountain that could very well change, but for now it's just a stupendous waste of money. We'd get a lot more science with robots, for a lot less money.
>I've never actually been to Antarctica, but I do know it snows a LOT there in the winter
Uh, wrong. Antarctica is actually pretty dry. The whole continent is technically a desert, averaging 166mm (6.5") of precipitation a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica
>I just bought a 30 pack of 40 watt Incadescent bulbs for better lighting and environmental efficiency - No Mercury.
Unless coal is used to generate some - or worse most - of the electricity where you live, in which case powering those incandescent bulbs will release far more mercury into the environment than an equivalent number of CFLs would.
Worse, the mercury that comes from burning coal isn't elemental mercury, as you'd find in a CFL. Which means it's far more easily absorbed by living things like us.
Sauropods lived outside of swamps, too.
Junk complaint.
Climate was warmer and wetter then too, at least in many places. Presumably that would support more, faster-growing vegetation.
Exactly! MS has spent north of $30 *BILLION* developing the Xbox and Xbox 360. They haven't come anywhere close to breakeven on that investment. They'd have made more money if they'd invested $1 in Apple stock in 2000.
I doubt they'll ever turn a profit off their videogame business. A next-gen Xbox to replace the 360 will need to be developed and produced sometime in the next 3 years or so if they want to remain in the industry, and that'll cost billions. In other words, they'll need to dig a deeper hole in an attempt to get out of the hole they're already standing in.
I wish them luck...
>They haven't been eating bugs and grass for a long time. (Actually I'm pretty certain
>birds don't eat grass at all, so you might want to brush up on your livestock knowledge).
Chickens most certainly eat grass. My grandmother used to raise a few. They eat a lot of stuff. They seemed to love bugs the most. They'll eat seeds and grains too, but there's no way that's the bulk of their diet in the wild.
We evolved to eat free range meat. Agriculture to produce farmed grains for livestock is a VERY recent invention in evolutionary terms.
>Except we didn't evolve to eat animals every day in large amounts.
Oh really? So what were we eating for the million or so years the human race evolved prior to the invention of agriculture?
Of course we ate meat. It was the only thing an animal our size with a digestive system like ours could eat. Any study of primitive, hunter-gatherer societies will show that meat, eggs, fish and insects are the primary component of the diet in pre-agricultural cultures. Nuts, seasonal fruits, a few starchy tubers and select vegetables typically make up the remainder of the diet.
There are plenty of traditional societies where meat is the overwhelming component of the diet (Eskimos, for example). Invariably these people were incredibly healthy prior to the introduction of the modern western diet, with its abundance of cheap carbohydrates and processed oils. Which are garbage that humans aren't designed to eat.
>Then you die like the doctor who came-up with this "eat lots of fat" diet.
If you're referring to Atkins, he died after slipping on the ice, falling, hitting his head and going into a coma. Diet had nothing to do with that (unless he was drunk at the time!).
I dropped carbs pretty much completely out of my diet a year ago, and started eating meat with every meal after having been a vegetarian for over 20 years. I've dropped from about 215 to 165lbs, and my cholesterol has dropped from over 250 to 200. My "bad" cholesterol has plummeted, and my "good" cholesterol has skyrocketed. My triglycerides are way down. So's my blood pressure. So all of my markers correlated with heart disease have improved, dramatically. And I sleep better and have more energy.
Atkins was right. I just gotta be more careful than he was when I step on icy sidewalks!
~500 million years ago was around the time of the Cambrian explosion here on earth, after a big snowball event. Wonder if there's any evidence for increased impacts around that time...
It's been proposed that Triton is a captured satellite as well, I believe. Maybe something Neptune picked up as it migrated outward.
Wonder what the ratio of captures to collides to ejects is when these bodies encounter each other during solar system formation. Would be interesting if you could also determine how much big stuff either slammed into the gas giants or was ejected from the solar system (or spun into the sun).
Hmmm. Wonder if some of the big stuff buzzing around in the Oort Cloud was ejected by the gas giants? Could some terrestrial world be lurking out there, chucked into a wide, distant orbit 4 billion years ago?
>Hmm, how would you get a moon in a retrograde orbit without some pretty vigorous interactions already?
Doesn't Saturn have an outer moon in a retrograde orbit?
Maybe Venus captured a moon in a retrograde orbit, one that slowly degraded over billions of years until it smacked into the planet. Would explain the crazy slow rotation of Venus compared to Earth and Mars, and why it was resurfaced relatively recently.
>Such an impactor would have a relatively low impact velocity.
Which could be a good thing, otherwise both it and the Earth might have just been reduced to rubble.
And the impact velocity would vary a lot depending on what happened to the body after it fell out of the Lagrange point. It could go whizzing around for several orbits before smacking the parent, picking up a lot of relative velocity in the process.
Simulations have been run which show planets forming in the Lagrange points of other planets. Happens relatively frequently. And then they fall out. From there you get glancing blows, bodies being ejected, all sorts of relative velocities, etc.
Solar system formation looks to be a pretty chaotic process where all sorts of seemingly exotic events are in fact pretty common. Planetary migration for example, as happened to Uranus and Neptune.
I was surprised too years ago when I first learned about the young, uniform surface of Venus. There was a program I saw on television years ago though which showed that if you bake the water out of crustal rocks here on earth, they become much stronger. So if Venus lost its water fairly early on, it's possible its crust became so rigid that volcanic activity couldn't break thru until it shattered violently, unleashing a planetary-resurfacing flood of volcanic activity over a very short period of time. So I don't know if you need an external catastrophic event to explain away the surface of Venus.
One other thought I've had - what if Venus had a good-sized moon in a retrograde orbit? Could it have eventually spiraled downward, colliding with Venus and leading to its resurfacing?
Hey, question for you, and I just thought of this and don't know enough about orbital mechanics or whatever to know if this could even have been a factor, but...
When we look at exoplanets being discovered by Kepler and especially those being detected by stellar wobble, we see a lot of (apparently) stable systems (at least for the moment) containing multiple worlds in highly eccentric orbits (compared to most of the large bodies in our system).
Has anyone correlated eccentricity to the age of the systems in question? Are younger systems more likely to have worlds in these highly eccentric orbits? I'm just wondering if, over the scale of billions of years, if multi-planet systems like that remain stable or if the various bodies act upon each other to either reduce or increase the eccentricity of those orbits (say, as stellar mass slowly declines and they begin to migrate outward).
I guess what I'm getting at is, maybe Earth and the other terrestrial planets once occupied more eccentric orbits, in our case generally closer to sol, but ~2 billion years ago interactions began forcing them into more circular orbits, a process which in our case shifted us further away from the sun. Perhaps Jupiter's orbit was relatively circular from the beginning and its influence gradually pulled Mars and then Earth into more circular orbits, with Venus and Mercury then being forced along, shifting their mean distances from sol in the process until the more stable, less eccentric condition we see today prevailed.
One other thought - is it possible sol was once the distant companion to a large, luminous star, and that heat and light from that giant neighbor compensated for the young faint sun? Perhaps as that neighbor lost mass - and my understanding is large stars lose mass fairly quickly even before they go nova - sol drifted away until it finally fell out of orbit completely.
Also, wouldn't a thicker atmosphere retain more heat regardless of its composition? If the atmospheric pressure at sea level was 2-3 times what it is today, wouldn't that do a great deal to insulate the early earth? Earth days were also much shorter then, and tides were much higher. I think at early on the oceans flooded the early continents on a daily basis, thanks to the enormous tidal pull of the moon, which whirled overhead just outside the Roche limit. Could both of those phenomena had a warming effect on the early Earth, resulting in a world that, while it might have been cool overall, couldn't have developed the kind of icy surface that could lead to runaway snowball events?
Not really a miracle. The giant impactor could have formed in a Lagrange point of the early Earth. Forming in our orbit, it would be made of virtually identical stuff.
In fact, when folks run models of solar system formation, my understanding is they get planets forming in the Lagrange points of other planets. Apparently the first - and typically largest - planets to form in an accretion disc create resonances in the disc that tend to draw material together in bands elsewhere in the disc. So the odds of getting multiple bodies forming in pretty much the same orbit is much higher than you'd expect.
Usually the worlds forming from the matter clumped in these bands either collide right away or get ejected from their orbit due to interactions, but big bodies can form at Lagrange points before their orbits are finally disrupted, either spiraling off into their sun, zipping out of the system entirely, colliding with other worlds (especially those sharing their orbit) or - probably rarely - settling down into their own stable orbit (perhaps in resonance with a larger neighbor).
You forgot Atari. They were probably the biggest single user of MOS 8-bit CPUs, since they were at the center of their 2600 and 5200 game consoles, as well as Atari's 8-bit computers (and I believe several of their arcade machines as well).
>The C-64 was better than anything available at the time
Sorry, the Atari 800 easily bested it in most regards, and it had been designed in 1978. Faster CPU, vastly superior drives, better graphics, 4-channel sound, just to name a few points in its favor.
The C64 was clearly built to rival the 800, which it did thanks not to any technical superiority, but due to the incompetence of Atari management.
>BS
Uh, the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleavland, OH, caught fire in the 1950s and - famously - in 1969.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River#Environmental_concerns
I won't even mention the smog in Los Angeles, which was unimaginable by the late '60s. LA still has smog, but it's nothing like it was 40+ years ago, thanks to strict environmental regulations.
Tragic cases of pollution weren't the exception - in much of the country, they were the rule.
Butter doesn't cause diabetes. And any link to heart disease is dubious at best.