nah just hand-crank the hard-drive (connected to a gearing system of course:P
You make that remark in jest, but I'm suddenly wondering whether there are hand-powered generators to power/recharge all our technotools while on the go.
I did some research on this. It turns out that it depends on the firmware version. Some 3rd gen firmwares allow you access to the ipod's menu while mounted, some don't.
I've been using my ipod for that for a while now. It's remarkably handy having gigabytes of storage that can be used from most computers without installing a driver, and that will fit in your pocket.
The one annoying thing is that you can't access the music player functionality while it's mounted as a disk.
Stronger typing does not automatically solve this particular issue. Look at, for example, C. It uses == for numeric compare and strcmp() for string compare. Strong typing does not help here; ==, as in perl, means only one thing, and that one thing is "compare two numbers".
C is NOT strongly typed. Strong typing means the type of any variable once declared can not change, and the variable can only be treated as that type. C's implicit conversion rules, and concepts like unions and casting, allow you to treat any type as any other, and additionally there is no runtime enforcement of types, because compiled C code only knows bytes, and has no run-time type information whatsoever.
Besides, even at compile time C doesn't really understand the concept of string. It understands arrays of char, and comes with a library that pretends those are strings, but it all falls down when you do stuff that can't be represented in a single char/byte, which is why there have been so many attempts to upgrade C to deal with more than regular english. C was just never designed to deal with strings on anything than the most rudimentary level.
However this then brings up the question of what happens if for some reason you want to do a numeric compare between two string objects. You have to somehow do a conversion to a different object type. Perhaps this is a bit clumsy.
What is clumsy about that? If you can compare the two types in a sane way, C++ will do it, if you can't, it won't. If you want to compare types that can't really be compared, you're required to convert one. How is that a bad/clumsy thing?
Frankly, most iPod people will *never* use anything else because, like pretty much all Apple-buying people, they've paid top dollar and will never think anything less expensive has any merit.
I do not think the ipod interface is all that hot. Let me take that back - the *wheel* thing isn't. The visual interface is OK (not much you can do there) but I don't like the wheel. Tried both a regular and a 'mini' - can't use either of them very well.
Just because the wheel doesn't work for you is no reason to assume it obviously must not work for anyone and that all the people buying ipod's are elitist fashion whores.
And, yes, I do own an ipod. I like the wheel. I personally think the ipod is a superior mp3 player to anything out there. But you won't see me going around saying all neuros owners are contrarian low-budget poor-taste schmucks, because I know that isn't true and there are good reasons why someone might prefer a neuros over an ipod.
WOW - one more thing I just noticed - an iPod owner criticizing Apple!
Apparently you've never read the apple ipod support boards.
US Climate and road conditions are vastly different to Europe.
I disagree, from the far north of scandinavia to the far south of spain, you'll find just about any condition, of both weather and road, that can be found in the US.
There will be 5 persons on the trip. Try that in your EU small car.
Most EU small cars do seat 5 (including the driver), but not over long distances. But this isn't relevant. I'm too lazy to look up the studies, but you are definitely the exception. Most people in the US, as in Europe, don't drive long distances, and don't carry a lot of people in their car. The majority of traffic is relatively short home-work traffic, with one or two car occupants. Besides, you can't forget, Europe is a continent too. There are plenty of reasons to travel thousands of kilometers in Europe too. In fact, as a kid, my family would travel to the south of france every year, a trek of 1200 km.
I would also note that the EU tends to depend for its economy on the US guys buying their goods.
You're proud that the US currently has a downright huge trade deficit? Read up on how bad a trade deficit is. I don't know what your view on China is, but you are funding the economic growth of communist China, even more than you're funding EU economic growth.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make in my original post can be summed up like this (these number are pre-EU expansion):
EU: population: 379 million total energy consumption (1999): 63 quads
US: population: 278 million total energy consumption (1999): 97 quads
In Europe we live roughly the same quality of life as people in the US, in roughly the same circumstances. Why is it that even when the EU has been so slow on reducing energy use that they've been attacked over it by just about every environmental movement, they look downright frugal next to the US?
European emissions regulations are VERY week. In fact many cars that are allowed everywhere in europe are illegal anywhere in the U.S. The difference is that European regulations emphasize fuel economy and U.S. regulations emphasize human health.
The current US car emissions regulation is Tier 1. This imposes these limits (in gm/mile):
The current EU regulation is Euro III. This has these limits (in gm/km and gm/mile)
HC: 0.20 0.32 CO: for gasoline: 2.30 3.70 for diesel: 0.64 1.02 NOx: for gasoline: 0.15 0.24 for diesel: 0.50 0.80 PM: 0.05 0.08
Now, there are stricter standards both in the EU and in the US (ZEV in the US, Euro IV in the EU), but the EU emissions standards aren't lighter, as you can see. In fact, in most cases, they are stricter.
I suspect this record is likely to be broken by Shrek 2, given it's record breaking opening weekend.
I doubt that. Shrek 2 is great on the first watch, but it doesn't have much staying power. What made finding nemo so big was that even adults could watch it over and over without getting bored, meaning they would take friends who hadn't seen it back to see it another time. That creates a long-term ticket sales market, and I just don't see shrek 2 doing that.
Don't get me wrong, shrek 2 is going to rake in tons of dough, but I doubt it'll be a record breaker.
Fox News's only agenda is to serve the public. If they don't, their ratings fall. No "unknown agendas".
Fox news is a business. As a business, they do not exist to serve the public, they exist to turn a profit. The truth isn't profitable, because it's rarely a "sexy" story. Fox news has a spin portraying fox viewers as true patriots who know the real truth because they watch fox news, and who know that fox news portrays the real america, who are strongly behind George W. Bush, and who think the iraq war is a great effort in the war on terror. It creates a very loyal viewerbase who will not look for other news sources, because in their mind it would make them less patriotic. Fox profits handsomely from this spin by having a loyal audience to show ads to.
Ratings and truth are unrelated. Lies can be sweet poison, the truth bitter medicine. If a station gave you bitter medicine, you would stop watching it, which is why fox news gets such nice ratings from spreading blatant, but seductive, lies consistently.
Yes they are, and I have to question the patriotism of anyone who would accuse our vice president of using his position to make money for himself and his friends. You, sir, are disgusting.
Well, it is then also just a coincidence that halliburton pays cheney more money in "deferred payments" than the United States of America pays him for being vice president (as shown by his most recent tax statement).
This after he had publicly said that he had cut all ties to halliburton. And because of the way halliburton is structured, they don't have to give a reason for that money. It could very well be based on profit, meaning that the contracts cheney handed to halliburton came straight back to him in personal profit.
Ofcourse, we could never know the truth, because both cheney and halliburton won't tell it to you. All you can find out is that he gets more money for having ties to halliburton than for being vice president.
And that doesn't even get into his secret energy cabinet, which was staffed with energy industry executives and not a single person representing the environmental movement, and of which we know nothing at all, since cheney has consistently refused to release anything, no transcripts, no recordings, not even exactly who attended those meetings.
By the way, halliburton has gone through corporate inversion. Meaning they have off-shored a number of subsidiaries to dodge paying taxes in the US. Also, halliburton subsidiaries did illegal trade with Saddam until the late 90's, at the time Cheney was running it. Making him not just an energy-industry lapdog, but a big hypocrit.
Halliburton was chosen for providing services in iraq it had zero experience with, like food preparation. They hired someone else to do that, and then didn't pay them what they had promised to pay. So halliburton makes more profit, and the soldiers in Iraq don't get warm meals. That's true patriotism for you.
It's not always an issue of fighting to the finish...sometimes its possible to just make it so costly for your enemies to hold on to your territory that they just give up and leave.
Actually, you could argue that the vast bulk of wars are not fought to the finish, but until one side gives up. Like the Iraq war has shown, you can achieve total military victory, and still be on the losing end. War is won when the other side loses the will to fight. The iraqis' will is only getting stronger by the day. That is the lesson that vietnam should have taught: you can not win a war unless you understand your opponent, and how to make him give up. Military battles are a tool, and not even a deciding one at that.
It's curious how large military powers always stumble over the same thing, an unwilling populace. The british had it happen to them in India. The US has seen it happen in Vietnam, and now Iraq. You would think that at some point people would learn from history, but they never do.
Actually, I said that China would most likely pick a fight with the US.
Why? What's in it for China? Once a war grows beyond a certain size, it becomes an event horizon, and it controls you instead of you controlling it. China has enough worries with their conversion to a market economy. They take a rebellious stance towards the US, but I don't see the sense in actually taking that to all-out war.
Now, a cold war, that's something else. We could very well be heading towards a cold war between China and the US, despite the currently reasonably warm trade relationships.
IBM is using the old Gillete (sic) business model.
sic adv.
Thus; so. Used to indicate that a quoted passage, especially one containing an error or unconventional spelling, has been retained in its original form or written intentionally.
I've never called a number, only to find out it's blocked, and the phone company demands $50 more every month to un-block it.
But you do have to pay extra depending on which number you call, just like you have to pay extra depending on which port you connect to. Everything close to you on the network is free, everything long distance costs money. They do both have similar revenue schemes.
People thought the internet would be different. They thought it would be free and unregulated. They were wrong. It's obvious in hindsight that the internet was never meant to be free. The powers that be would never allow it.
create easy to follow instructions on a web page for Joe, or create a script or bin they could download and run
No, no, you don't understand. There are two things you must know about Joe Sixpack: he doesn't read, and he doesn't do anything technical unless you force him to (and gather the ill will associated with such an action). When Joe sees a mail with instructions, he'll glance at how long it is, decide it's too long, and delete it. If he gets an exe in his inbox, he'll feel scared of what it might do (even if it would clean up his system), and will delete it.
People don't even read the single line of text in dialog boxes. You have no idea how opposed the average user is to simple concepts like reading and running new programs. All they want is their google, their outlook, and their solitaire.
That's why linux gets such consistent bad reviews in usability. The developers make assumptions about what people are willing to do which are highly unrealistic. Apple and MS design their OS so that you can be functionally illiterate and still mostly stumble your way through it by following the pretty pictures and clicking the brightest button.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the average used is dumb, they're just incredibly lazy about anything technical. It has to "just work" for them.
Just block port 25 by default. If someone calls up and asks for it to be enabled, do it free of charge, no questions asked.
I actually read the article. They considered doing that and decided not to because since every support call of that sort would cost them $9, the total cost would be $58 million.
Although they could have just charged a $9 administration fee for enabling port 25. I highly doubt a lot of people would have objected to that.
Actually, helium may be inert, but oxygen gets transferred to your bloodstream through osmotic pressure, and the helium stops that from happening as efficiently. Basically it clogs up your lung follicles and stops the transfer of oxygen from happening. Even though it is inert, breathing helium is indeed dangerous.
I knew that when I made the joke about the funny voices, but you never should leave a joke unsaid just because it's not PC.
You can easily generate mnemonic passwords using pwgen.
It's definitely easy to remember mnemonic passwords. I've been able to not log into a machine for months, come back to it and remember the mnemonic password unique to that machine.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods.
Modern fission reactors are designed to fail safe. If something happens to them, they shut down. New reactors no longer use flawed designs like chernobyl (and chernobyl only had a meltdown because they did not follow safety regulations and did stuff that they knew was extremely dangerous). It would be difficult for a terrorist to create catastrophical disasters by attacking a modern fission plant.
A solution to the nuclear waste would be to store it until we can dump it somewhere off-planet. Getting the space elevator built would give us launch capability to throw stuff into the sun (with nanotech on the horizon, a space elevator isn't more than 50 years away).
And meanwhile it could tide us over until fusion becomes a reality. Although it really is disappointing how little effort is being invested in fusion. There's ITER, but they haven't even agreed on where to build that yet.
Yeah, that's because your tiny cars are half the size of your average car sold in the US. Heck, we can't even buy cars as small as what you have over there.
No, there is no punishment for inefficient engines in the US. Europe has vehicle taxes based on engine size, in addition to extremely strict emissions regulations, so manufacturers are encouraged to provide hi-tech engines with smaller volumes but higher performance. A one liter engine can drive a regular car just fine, a 2 liter engine can drive an suv. The US tax system however encourages heavier cars and bigger engines, as a result US cars are woefully inefficient.
That doesn't even get into the whole point that the US tax system actually encourages manufacturers to make their cars bigger and heavier.
On the other hand, apple has demonstrated you can make an operating system that works for both joe sixpack and jim geek.
Ofcourse, apple did it by innovating, redesigning the file system layout to make it more usable, building something better than X, and so on.
I think linux developers are locked too closely into the *nix mindset of "this is how you do things, and not differently" to outdesign apple. And until you outdesign apple you don't have a shot at microsoft's marketshare, because even apple doesn't have a shot at that.
There are rebuttals to that page out on the net, and they basically go "liar!" without actually citing evidence. Moore might be lying on that page, and might be lying in bowling, but there's no way to know for sure without actually interviewing the people he interviewed yourself, since no one has done a good job doing an unbiased analysis of the claims in bowling.
using Milosevic-era Serbian TV footage to shed light on the Balkan conflict is a bit like using WWII Nazi footage to shed light on the holocaust
You should know better than to disregard evidence because of the source it comes from. If it is genuine you can take facts from it, regardless of who made it.
Slashdot Mirror
nah just hand-crank the hard-drive (connected to a gearing system of course:P
You make that remark in jest, but I'm suddenly wondering whether there are hand-powered generators to power/recharge all our technotools while on the go.
I did some research on this. It turns out that it depends on the firmware version. Some 3rd gen firmwares allow you access to the ipod's menu while mounted, some don't.
What firmware version are you using? I'm on 2.2.
I've been using my ipod for that for a while now. It's remarkably handy having gigabytes of storage that can be used from most computers without installing a driver, and that will fit in your pocket.
The one annoying thing is that you can't access the music player functionality while it's mounted as a disk.
Stronger typing does not automatically solve this particular issue. Look at, for example, C. It uses == for numeric compare and strcmp() for string compare. Strong typing does not help here; ==, as in perl, means only one thing, and that one thing is "compare two numbers".
C is NOT strongly typed. Strong typing means the type of any variable once declared can not change, and the variable can only be treated as that type. C's implicit conversion rules, and concepts like unions and casting, allow you to treat any type as any other, and additionally there is no runtime enforcement of types, because compiled C code only knows bytes, and has no run-time type information whatsoever.
Besides, even at compile time C doesn't really understand the concept of string. It understands arrays of char, and comes with a library that pretends those are strings, but it all falls down when you do stuff that can't be represented in a single char/byte, which is why there have been so many attempts to upgrade C to deal with more than regular english. C was just never designed to deal with strings on anything than the most rudimentary level.
However this then brings up the question of what happens if for some reason you want to do a numeric compare between two string objects. You have to somehow do a conversion to a different object type. Perhaps this is a bit clumsy.
What is clumsy about that? If you can compare the two types in a sane way, C++ will do it, if you can't, it won't. If you want to compare types that can't really be compared, you're required to convert one. How is that a bad/clumsy thing?
Frankly, most iPod people will *never* use anything else because, like pretty much all Apple-buying people, they've paid top dollar and will never think anything less expensive has any merit.
I do not think the ipod interface is all that hot. Let me take that back - the *wheel* thing isn't. The visual interface is OK (not much you can do there) but I don't like the wheel. Tried both a regular and a 'mini' - can't use either of them very well.
Just because the wheel doesn't work for you is no reason to assume it obviously must not work for anyone and that all the people buying ipod's are elitist fashion whores.
And, yes, I do own an ipod. I like the wheel. I personally think the ipod is a superior mp3 player to anything out there. But you won't see me going around saying all neuros owners are contrarian low-budget poor-taste schmucks, because I know that isn't true and there are good reasons why someone might prefer a neuros over an ipod.
WOW - one more thing I just noticed - an iPod owner criticizing Apple!
Apparently you've never read the apple ipod support boards.
US Climate and road conditions are vastly different to Europe.
I disagree, from the far north of scandinavia to the far south of spain, you'll find just about any condition, of both weather and road, that can be found in the US.
There will be 5 persons on the trip. Try that in your EU small car.
Most EU small cars do seat 5 (including the driver), but not over long distances. But this isn't relevant. I'm too lazy to look up the studies, but you are definitely the exception. Most people in the US, as in Europe, don't drive long distances, and don't carry a lot of people in their car. The majority of traffic is relatively short home-work traffic, with one or two car occupants. Besides, you can't forget, Europe is a continent too. There are plenty of reasons to travel thousands of kilometers in Europe too. In fact, as a kid, my family would travel to the south of france every year, a trek of 1200 km.
I would also note that the EU tends to depend for its economy on the US guys buying their goods.
You're proud that the US currently has a downright huge trade deficit? Read up on how bad a trade deficit is. I don't know what your view on China is, but you are funding the economic growth of communist China, even more than you're funding EU economic growth.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make in my original post can be summed up like this (these number are pre-EU expansion):
EU:
population: 379 million
total energy consumption (1999): 63 quads
US:
population: 278 million
total energy consumption (1999): 97 quads
In Europe we live roughly the same quality of life as people in the US, in roughly the same circumstances. Why is it that even when the EU has been so slow on reducing energy use that they've been attacked over it by just about every environmental movement, they look downright frugal next to the US?
European emissions regulations are VERY week. In fact many cars that are allowed everywhere in europe are illegal anywhere in the U.S. The difference is that European regulations emphasize fuel economy and U.S. regulations emphasize human health.
The current US car emissions regulation is Tier 1. This imposes these limits (in gm/mile):
Hydrocarbons (HC) 0.31
Carbon Monoxide (CO) 4.2
Nitrous Oxides (NOx) 0.6
Particulate Matter (PM) 0.10
The current EU regulation is Euro III. This has these limits (in gm/km and gm/mile)
HC: 0.20 0.32
CO:
for gasoline: 2.30 3.70
for diesel: 0.64 1.02
NOx:
for gasoline: 0.15 0.24
for diesel: 0.50 0.80
PM: 0.05 0.08
Now, there are stricter standards both in the EU and in the US (ZEV in the US, Euro IV in the EU), but the EU emissions standards aren't lighter, as you can see. In fact, in most cases, they are stricter.
I suspect this record is likely to be broken by Shrek 2, given it's record breaking opening weekend.
I doubt that. Shrek 2 is great on the first watch, but it doesn't have much staying power. What made finding nemo so big was that even adults could watch it over and over without getting bored, meaning they would take friends who hadn't seen it back to see it another time. That creates a long-term ticket sales market, and I just don't see shrek 2 doing that.
Don't get me wrong, shrek 2 is going to rake in tons of dough, but I doubt it'll be a record breaker.
Fox News's only agenda is to serve the public. If they don't, their ratings fall. No "unknown agendas".
Fox news is a business. As a business, they do not exist to serve the public, they exist to turn a profit. The truth isn't profitable, because it's rarely a "sexy" story. Fox news has a spin portraying fox viewers as true patriots who know the real truth because they watch fox news, and who know that fox news portrays the real america, who are strongly behind George W. Bush, and who think the iraq war is a great effort in the war on terror. It creates a very loyal viewerbase who will not look for other news sources, because in their mind it would make them less patriotic. Fox profits handsomely from this spin by having a loyal audience to show ads to.
Ratings and truth are unrelated. Lies can be sweet poison, the truth bitter medicine. If a station gave you bitter medicine, you would stop watching it, which is why fox news gets such nice ratings from spreading blatant, but seductive, lies consistently.
Yes they are, and I have to question the patriotism of anyone who would accuse our vice president of using his position to make money for himself and his friends. You, sir, are disgusting.
Well, it is then also just a coincidence that halliburton pays cheney more money in "deferred payments" than the United States of America pays him for being vice president (as shown by his most recent tax statement).
This after he had publicly said that he had cut all ties to halliburton. And because of the way halliburton is structured, they don't have to give a reason for that money. It could very well be based on profit, meaning that the contracts cheney handed to halliburton came straight back to him in personal profit.
Ofcourse, we could never know the truth, because both cheney and halliburton won't tell it to you. All you can find out is that he gets more money for having ties to halliburton than for being vice president.
And that doesn't even get into his secret energy cabinet, which was staffed with energy industry executives and not a single person representing the environmental movement, and of which we know nothing at all, since cheney has consistently refused to release anything, no transcripts, no recordings, not even exactly who attended those meetings.
By the way, halliburton has gone through corporate inversion. Meaning they have off-shored a number of subsidiaries to dodge paying taxes in the US. Also, halliburton subsidiaries did illegal trade with Saddam until the late 90's, at the time Cheney was running it. Making him not just an energy-industry lapdog, but a big hypocrit.
Halliburton was chosen for providing services in iraq it had zero experience with, like food preparation. They hired someone else to do that, and then didn't pay them what they had promised to pay. So halliburton makes more profit, and the soldiers in Iraq don't get warm meals. That's true patriotism for you.
It's not always an issue of fighting to the finish...sometimes its possible to just make it so costly for your enemies to hold on to your territory that they just give up and leave.
Actually, you could argue that the vast bulk of wars are not fought to the finish, but until one side gives up. Like the Iraq war has shown, you can achieve total military victory, and still be on the losing end. War is won when the other side loses the will to fight. The iraqis' will is only getting stronger by the day. That is the lesson that vietnam should have taught: you can not win a war unless you understand your opponent, and how to make him give up. Military battles are a tool, and not even a deciding one at that.
It's curious how large military powers always stumble over the same thing, an unwilling populace. The british had it happen to them in India. The US has seen it happen in Vietnam, and now Iraq. You would think that at some point people would learn from history, but they never do.
Actually, I said that China would most likely pick a fight with the US.
Why? What's in it for China? Once a war grows beyond a certain size, it becomes an event horizon, and it controls you instead of you controlling it. China has enough worries with their conversion to a market economy. They take a rebellious stance towards the US, but I don't see the sense in actually taking that to all-out war.
Now, a cold war, that's something else. We could very well be heading towards a cold war between China and the US, despite the currently reasonably warm trade relationships.
sic
adv.
Who or what were you quoting there?
I've never called a number, only to find out it's blocked, and the phone company demands $50 more every month to un-block it.
But you do have to pay extra depending on which number you call, just like you have to pay extra depending on which port you connect to. Everything close to you on the network is free, everything long distance costs money. They do both have similar revenue schemes.
People thought the internet would be different. They thought it would be free and unregulated. They were wrong. It's obvious in hindsight that the internet was never meant to be free. The powers that be would never allow it.
create easy to follow instructions on a web page for Joe, or create a script or bin they could download and run
No, no, you don't understand. There are two things you must know about Joe Sixpack: he doesn't read, and he doesn't do anything technical unless you force him to (and gather the ill will associated with such an action). When Joe sees a mail with instructions, he'll glance at how long it is, decide it's too long, and delete it. If he gets an exe in his inbox, he'll feel scared of what it might do (even if it would clean up his system), and will delete it.
People don't even read the single line of text in dialog boxes. You have no idea how opposed the average user is to simple concepts like reading and running new programs. All they want is their google, their outlook, and their solitaire.
That's why linux gets such consistent bad reviews in usability. The developers make assumptions about what people are willing to do which are highly unrealistic. Apple and MS design their OS so that you can be functionally illiterate and still mostly stumble your way through it by following the pretty pictures and clicking the brightest button.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the average used is dumb, they're just incredibly lazy about anything technical. It has to "just work" for them.
Just block port 25 by default. If someone calls up and asks for it to be enabled, do it free of charge, no questions asked.
I actually read the article. They considered doing that and decided not to because since every support call of that sort would cost them $9, the total cost would be $58 million.
Although they could have just charged a $9 administration fee for enabling port 25. I highly doubt a lot of people would have objected to that.
Actually, helium may be inert, but oxygen gets transferred to your bloodstream through osmotic pressure, and the helium stops that from happening as efficiently. Basically it clogs up your lung follicles and stops the transfer of oxygen from happening. Even though it is inert, breathing helium is indeed dangerous.
I knew that when I made the joke about the funny voices, but you never should leave a joke unsaid just because it's not PC.
Well taking that you get left with helium its obvious that a by product will be a market for baloons
Not to mention all the funny voices.
You can easily generate mnemonic passwords using pwgen.
It's definitely easy to remember mnemonic passwords. I've been able to not log into a machine for months, come back to it and remember the mnemonic password unique to that machine.
"best reef to dive is now a graveyard" - hm, you sure the reason is global warming and not by any chance the divers who caused this?
Look up reef bleaching. It's a man-made disaster, but it has nothing to do with tourism.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods.
Modern fission reactors are designed to fail safe. If something happens to them, they shut down. New reactors no longer use flawed designs like chernobyl (and chernobyl only had a meltdown because they did not follow safety regulations and did stuff that they knew was extremely dangerous). It would be difficult for a terrorist to create catastrophical disasters by attacking a modern fission plant.
A solution to the nuclear waste would be to store it until we can dump it somewhere off-planet. Getting the space elevator built would give us launch capability to throw stuff into the sun (with nanotech on the horizon, a space elevator isn't more than 50 years away).
And meanwhile it could tide us over until fusion becomes a reality. Although it really is disappointing how little effort is being invested in fusion. There's ITER, but they haven't even agreed on where to build that yet.
Yeah, that's because your tiny cars are half the size of your average car sold in the US. Heck, we can't even buy cars as small as what you have over there.
No, there is no punishment for inefficient engines in the US. Europe has vehicle taxes based on engine size, in addition to extremely strict emissions regulations, so manufacturers are encouraged to provide hi-tech engines with smaller volumes but higher performance. A one liter engine can drive a regular car just fine, a 2 liter engine can drive an suv. The US tax system however encourages heavier cars and bigger engines, as a result US cars are woefully inefficient.
That doesn't even get into the whole point that the US tax system actually encourages manufacturers to make their cars bigger and heavier.
On the other hand, apple has demonstrated you can make an operating system that works for both joe sixpack and jim geek.
Ofcourse, apple did it by innovating, redesigning the file system layout to make it more usable, building something better than X, and so on.
I think linux developers are locked too closely into the *nix mindset of "this is how you do things, and not differently" to outdesign apple. And until you outdesign apple you don't have a shot at microsoft's marketshare, because even apple doesn't have a shot at that.
There are rebuttals to that page out on the net, and they basically go "liar!" without actually citing evidence. Moore might be lying on that page, and might be lying in bowling, but there's no way to know for sure without actually interviewing the people he interviewed yourself, since no one has done a good job doing an unbiased analysis of the claims in bowling.
using Milosevic-era Serbian TV footage to shed light on the Balkan conflict is a bit like using WWII Nazi footage to shed light on the holocaust
You should know better than to disregard evidence because of the source it comes from. If it is genuine you can take facts from it, regardless of who made it.