Sure and maybe they can be used to create flying cars, provide us with "meals in pill form", create artificial gravity in space, enable teleportation, and all the other dreams of the future. "Dreams" is the key word though, for there is currently no direct research (that I know of atleast) that explains how nanobots could do an extremely complex task like sorting out a landfill based on elemental composition. Its all nano-hype.
"500 years from now, we can mine our junkyards, and get practically all of it back for future use."
Can we?
Maybe they will have invented some amazing process which can sort out the rare but extremely useful metals like copper and tungsten which are probably going to be in extremely high demand but are likely to be distributed in extremely minute quantities all around the earth by our extremely naive civilisation.
Most electronics these days end up in massive municipal landfills, trying to mine them would be like trying to mine a needle in an extremely toxic haystack.
"If you notice, other countries that have a government-enforced rating systems (England and Australia, for example) also have banned some games (like Manhunt) outright. It's easier to keep the "really bad" games away from children when they're not allowed to be sold."
I think you'll find that the UK government (btw, "England" does not have its own government") have not banned manhunt or any mainstream game for that matter. Infact I can't find details of any publicly released game being banned in the UK. If anyone knows of any I would be interested to know of them but Manhunt definatly was not banned, a few stores simply stopped stocking it for a short while following a homocide which was claimed to have been a re-enactment of the game.
This suit has absolutely no chance of success. Apart from being naive in its entirety, it would go against many precedent cases.
"Sam Donaldson's New Mexico ranch sued the makers of the video game ''Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'' on Monday, claiming the crimes would not have occurred had the teenager never played the violent game."
He would never have shot them if he didn't have access to the gun either. Simply put, since gun makers aren't accountable for unintended actions carried out with their products, neither are game makers.
"The game trained him ''how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer."
By that rationale, most action films would also be complicit in many homicides. This accusation has been thrown out of court so many times I won't even bother to cite individual cases.
"The plaintiffs accuse the corporate defendants [...] of a ''civil conspiracy,'' saying they should have foreseen their entertainment ''would spawn such copycat violence"
Again, gun and knife makers know their products can be used to commit homicides in the wrong hands yet can't be held accountable so neither can the game producers.
I'm sure however their lawyers - who probably strongly encouraged them to pursue the case - will still get paid regardless of the absolute certainty that the case will fail.
But you missed several steps out, mainly the difficult part which involves generating and delivering energy to the batteries (which btw are an extra unnecessary step). Start off with a naturally available source of chemical energy and the efficiency rate will totally plummet.
To prove the point: try find a car, (non-electric) train, plane or any form of mechanised transport which acheives >70% effiency!
Lastly, something which is 1,000 times more efficient that a 70% efficient motor isn't 70,000% efficient, it is just extremely close to 100% efficient (which means that those annoying thermodynamic laws are kept in check).
If you think of how many thousands of times more efficient insects are at converting chemical energy to kinetic energy than our methods, particularly when it comes to acceleration, then maybe he is on to something!
My mate got a new British passport a couple of weeks ago. The 2nd last page or so has a chip and a large rectangular loop of wire shaped in it. From what I remember, the rectangular loop of wire measured about 8cm long by 2cm high or so.
Obviously this is taken into account and along with a variety of other problems, does severely limit the technique. But plate tectonics only generally alter land located within a thousand kilometres or so of plate boundaries, so many places (such as mainland Australia, which has been tectonically stable since the time of the dinosaurs and for much of the time was a shallow sea) can reveal some climate information. Hence my post stating "i.e. calculating sea level height by erosion caused on rocks which were on the surface at a known point in time"
We simply don't live in the age of empires anymore. (never mind the computer game).
The British had to establish an empire to be able to actually trade with the countries they invaded. i.e. the British love their tea, so they took over India so people back in Britain could drink tea.
With the modern world and the WTO etc., all part of the USA's making, such government intervention is heavily dissuaded. In some sense, the US government shot themselves in the foot. Or in another, far more realistic sense, like always, the people of the USA were sold out by politicians helping some local big businessmen get extremely rich.
Look at Hewlit-Packard - one of the top 50 largest companies in the world (by some accounts anyway), yet they did this partly by getting US politicians to sell out the US public and allow HP to manufacture everything in China rather than the USA.
Accept that wild-fires seem to be happening all the time and storms which use to happen only once every 10 or so years now happen every few years.
I have a mate who performs hydrological computer modelling for my local water company. Flooding in any one area is usually categorised as due to storms of a severity occuring either "once in few years", "once in 10 years", "once in 20 years" etc.
He says that like all water companies, they've now had to move up each storm category because storms of a severity which 30 - 50 years ago would occur "once every 20 years" are now occuring once every 10 years, and storms of a severity which occured "once every 10 years", now occur every few years...
So it's not all that good for us nothern folk either.
The article only actually mentions climate change within the past million years. Measuring temperatures over ththis period is relatively easily done by measuring the makeup of dissolved gas within ice deposits from the period. The gas composition is affected by the temperature at the time the ice freezes so by compiling many samples an extremely accurate climate chart can be put together.
To some extent it is also possible to measure even longer trends of several millions years using a few methods which have varying degrees (haha) of accuracy. Studying the geological effects on rock (i.e. calculating sea level height by erosion caused on rocks which were on the surface at a known point in time) is one of the most common.
Even without patents, copyrights, evil witch-docters and everything else, we still wouldn't have a necessarily "free market". In many ways the very word "free" is itself misleading because it implies that under the right conditions people are able to make a clear-cut, objectively reasoned decision on how to best benefit their lifelyhood.
This is far from a proven truth and in the obviously non-deterministic world that we live in, we mere mortal humans can never hope to posess the omniscience that would be required to know whether product A or product B will in the long run actually provide the greatest improvement to our own quality-of-life.
It's the old Jack and the Beanstalk problem: Jack was essentially conned into trading a cow for some beans, but in the end the beans brang him many riches and a pretty much maximal increase to his quality-of-life for the trade of a mere underweight cow. If however the giant had ended up killing him - something he could not have possibly known at the time of the trade - the beans most certainly would not have improved his quality-of-life!
"Lemme give you a hint: everyone makes fun the the US. They rarely bitch. Why? They make fun of themselves."
Sorry, is this "hint" in relation to some sort of question that I've missed? Because a hint actually pretains to giving away a small part of the answer to a question asked, not making a statment which expresses some point of view along with a retorical question.
It is all subjective though based on what 'value' you assign to everything. A tree might be worth more to a modern westerner when made into furniture, but a caveman would have prefered the raw tree so he could make fire out of it or in the case of a fruit tree, pick fruit from it.
The real point is that wealth is an entirely subjective term even if the use of currency makes wealth somewhat more universal. Ultimatly though, as the old saying "money can't buy you happiness" goes, a rich man is only wealthy if he considers his money the most important thing to him; a younger, poorer but happier man might legitimatly also consider himself the more wealthy.
Not to mention the absolute horde of economic data which shows that a major US slowdown is not only inevitable but has actually already started. It seems though the government are doing absolutly everything they can to cover this up at least till after november.
What makes me mad though is that US companies need all the info they can get to enable them to ride out this slowdown with minimal losses, yet the government is currently hiding the truth purely for political reasons. Come December when they actually start admitting the strikingly obvious, it may be too late. The big companies know the deal, which is at least partly why advertising budgets are plummeting, but it will be the small companies that rely on government data and advice which may well end up getting screwed!
This is what the federal government said about Microsoft's anti-compeditive practices back in the mid 1990's. Would you say they have sure done a great job of regulating Microsoft since then?
A big problem is that whenever one of these massive companies notices a potential regulatory threat to their cash cow, they simply sponsor a few senators and their parties and get the entire thing stopped.
Most of the books released by Christopher Tolkien since his father's death have been predominantly 'new' material. There are meant to be many, many files full of manuscripts that J. R. Tolkien wrote but never published in book form.
I'm extremely glad to see that some more have been put together into what I'm sure will be another amazing book.
Well, it's a bit idiotic not to comprehend that just because I stated solar power has some obvious advantages over sails, doesn't mean sails don't have any other advantages over solar power.
The Solar powered boat does indeed have some 'obvious advantages' over sail, for one it can move when there is no wind or into the direction of the wind. Ellen Macarthur would have found it more difficult going in her sailing ship had she tried to circumnavigate the globe in the other directions as she would have been trying to sail against the general southern hemisphere wind direction.
"Every sailing vessel is basically a solar powered boat. Been doing that for eons. Why change now?"
They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago. They are using a solar-powered, propellor driven vessel which - if the tachnology advances - will have many quite obvious advantages over traditional sailing vessels.
There is a fundamental difference between the US and the UK in how the public preceive "big-brotherness" and the role of the government in general. In the UK there just arn't nearly as many populised "government conspiracy theories" like they are in the USA and very few people fear the government/secret service malicously "spies" on people.
Besides this, the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are owned by either local government/councils (which operate and are widely recognised as being very independant of central/national government) or by private landowners and businesses. Very few of the millions of CCTV cameras which are being, and have been, installed over the last few years in the UK have been requested by any organisation connected to central government.
"european GM resistance has been hijacked by geopolitcal interests"
That's a tall claim. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "geopolitcal interests", sounds a bit like a typical U.S. politics meaningless buzzword to me. Here in Britain GM crops are banned primarily because a government study carried out a couple of years ago found that in the vast majority of GM crops trialled, local wildlife - in and around the fields - had been completely descimated compared with the "conventional farming" control crops.
Monsanto's GM crops were used in several of the trials I believe. Also, most of the criticism towards GM crops in the UK comes from naturalists and enviromentalists. The difference is though, that unlike in the US, the politicians arn't being paid by Monsanto so they don't constantly shout out "GM is good even though I know nothing about the subject", instead they listen to the public consensus which is overwhelmingly anti-GM.
Hmm, you obviously know absolutly nothing about GM crops. Apart from that your argument is completely absurd!
Why on earth would someone develop a GM crop that is resiliant to a herbicide and then not use that herbicide? That makes absolutly no sense at all. GM crops drastically increase the use of herbicides, the only way they could reduce them is to make the GM crop resiliant to all infections and pests - basically impossible.
When using GM crops, the standard procedure is to drop tonnes of the herbicide on the crop, knowing that the crop will not be damaged. Many of the potent herbicides in use in the USA do however cause damage to the health of local people and the enviroment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure and maybe they can be used to create flying cars, provide us with "meals in pill form", create artificial gravity in space, enable teleportation, and all the other dreams of the future. "Dreams" is the key word though, for there is currently no direct research (that I know of atleast) that explains how nanobots could do an extremely complex task like sorting out a landfill based on elemental composition. Its all nano-hype.
"500 years from now, we can mine our junkyards, and get practically all of it back for future use."
Can we?
Maybe they will have invented some amazing process which can sort out the rare but extremely useful metals like copper and tungsten which are probably going to be in extremely high demand but are likely to be distributed in extremely minute quantities all around the earth by our extremely naive civilisation.
Most electronics these days end up in massive municipal landfills, trying to mine them would be like trying to mine a needle in an extremely toxic haystack.
"If you notice, other countries that have a government-enforced rating systems (England and Australia, for example) also have banned some games (like Manhunt) outright. It's easier to keep the "really bad" games away from children when they're not allowed to be sold."
I think you'll find that the UK government (btw, "England" does not have its own government") have not banned manhunt or any mainstream game for that matter. Infact I can't find details of any publicly released game being banned in the UK. If anyone knows of any I would be interested to know of them but Manhunt definatly was not banned, a few stores simply stopped stocking it for a short while following a homocide which was claimed to have been a re-enactment of the game.
This suit has absolutely no chance of success. Apart from being naive in its entirety, it would go against many precedent cases.
"Sam Donaldson's New Mexico ranch sued the makers of the video game ''Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'' on Monday, claiming the crimes would not have occurred had the teenager never played the violent game."
He would never have shot them if he didn't have access to the gun either. Simply put, since gun makers aren't accountable for unintended actions carried out with their products, neither are game makers.
"The game trained him ''how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer."
By that rationale, most action films would also be complicit in many homicides. This accusation has been thrown out of court so many times I won't even bother to cite individual cases.
"The plaintiffs accuse the corporate defendants [...] of a ''civil conspiracy,'' saying they should have foreseen their entertainment ''would spawn such copycat violence"
Again, gun and knife makers know their products can be used to commit homicides in the wrong hands yet can't be held accountable so neither can the game producers.
I'm sure however their lawyers - who probably strongly encouraged them to pursue the case - will still get paid regardless of the absolute certainty that the case will fail.
But you missed several steps out, mainly the difficult part which involves generating and delivering energy to the batteries (which btw are an extra unnecessary step). Start off with a naturally available source of chemical energy and the efficiency rate will totally plummet.
To prove the point: try find a car, (non-electric) train, plane or any form of mechanised transport which acheives >70% effiency!
Lastly, something which is 1,000 times more efficient that a 70% efficient motor isn't 70,000% efficient, it is just extremely close to 100% efficient (which means that those annoying thermodynamic laws are kept in check).
I remember a story a couple of years ago about MSN Virtual Earth denying the existance of the Apple headquaters.
/ 1856220 is the Slashdot article on it.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25
If you think of how many thousands of times more efficient insects are at converting chemical energy to kinetic energy than our methods, particularly when it comes to acceleration, then maybe he is on to something!
My mate got a new British passport a couple of weeks ago. The 2nd last page or so has a chip and a large rectangular loop of wire shaped in it. From what I remember, the rectangular loop of wire measured about 8cm long by 2cm high or so.
1 8/npassport18.jpg
Here's a smallish picture of what the RFID bit looks like: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2005/11/
Obviously this is taken into account and along with a variety of other problems, does severely limit the technique. But plate tectonics only generally alter land located within a thousand kilometres or so of plate boundaries, so many places (such as mainland Australia, which has been tectonically stable since the time of the dinosaurs and for much of the time was a shallow sea) can reveal some climate information. Hence my post stating "i.e. calculating sea level height by erosion caused on rocks which were on the surface at a known point in time "
Here in lies the problem for the USA government:
We simply don't live in the age of empires anymore. (never mind the computer game).
The British had to establish an empire to be able to actually trade with the countries they invaded. i.e. the British love their tea, so they took over India so people back in Britain could drink tea.
With the modern world and the WTO etc., all part of the USA's making, such government intervention is heavily dissuaded. In some sense, the US government shot themselves in the foot. Or in another, far more realistic sense, like always, the people of the USA were sold out by politicians helping some local big businessmen get extremely rich.
Look at Hewlit-Packard - one of the top 50 largest companies in the world (by some accounts anyway), yet they did this partly by getting US politicians to sell out the US public and allow HP to manufacture everything in China rather than the USA.
Accept that wild-fires seem to be happening all the time and storms which use to happen only once every 10 or so years now happen every few years.
I have a mate who performs hydrological computer modelling for my local water company. Flooding in any one area is usually categorised as due to storms of a severity occuring either "once in few years", "once in 10 years", "once in 20 years" etc.
He says that like all water companies, they've now had to move up each storm category because storms of a severity which 30 - 50 years ago would occur "once every 20 years" are now occuring once every 10 years, and storms of a severity which occured "once every 10 years", now occur every few years...
So it's not all that good for us nothern folk either.
The article only actually mentions climate change within the past million years. Measuring temperatures over ththis period is relatively easily done by measuring the makeup of dissolved gas within ice deposits from the period. The gas composition is affected by the temperature at the time the ice freezes so by compiling many samples an extremely accurate climate chart can be put together.
To some extent it is also possible to measure even longer trends of several millions years using a few methods which have varying degrees (haha) of accuracy. Studying the geological effects on rock (i.e. calculating sea level height by erosion caused on rocks which were on the surface at a known point in time) is one of the most common.
Even without patents, copyrights, evil witch-docters and everything else, we still wouldn't have a necessarily "free market". In many ways the very word "free" is itself misleading because it implies that under the right conditions people are able to make a clear-cut, objectively reasoned decision on how to best benefit their lifelyhood.
This is far from a proven truth and in the obviously non-deterministic world that we live in, we mere mortal humans can never hope to posess the omniscience that would be required to know whether product A or product B will in the long run actually provide the greatest improvement to our own quality-of-life.
It's the old Jack and the Beanstalk problem: Jack was essentially conned into trading a cow for some beans, but in the end the beans brang him many riches and a pretty much maximal increase to his quality-of-life for the trade of a mere underweight cow. If however the giant had ended up killing him - something he could not have possibly known at the time of the trade - the beans most certainly would not have improved his quality-of-life!
"Lemme give you a hint: everyone makes fun the the US. They rarely bitch. Why? They make fun of themselves."
Sorry, is this "hint" in relation to some sort of question that I've missed?
Because a hint actually pretains to giving away a small part of the answer to a question asked, not making a statment which expresses some point of view along with a retorical question.
It is all subjective though based on what 'value' you assign to everything. A tree might be worth more to a modern westerner when made into furniture, but a caveman would have prefered the raw tree so he could make fire out of it or in the case of a fruit tree, pick fruit from it.
The real point is that wealth is an entirely subjective term even if the use of currency makes wealth somewhat more universal. Ultimatly though, as the old saying "money can't buy you happiness" goes, a rich man is only wealthy if he considers his money the most important thing to him; a younger, poorer but happier man might legitimatly also consider himself the more wealthy.
Not to mention the absolute horde of economic data which shows that a major US slowdown is not only inevitable but has actually already started. It seems though the government are doing absolutly everything they can to cover this up at least till after november.
What makes me mad though is that US companies need all the info they can get to enable them to ride out this slowdown with minimal losses, yet the government is currently hiding the truth purely for political reasons. Come December when they actually start admitting the strikingly obvious, it may be too late. The big companies know the deal, which is at least partly why advertising budgets are plummeting, but it will be the small companies that rely on government data and advice which may well end up getting screwed!
This is what the federal government said about Microsoft's anti-compeditive practices back in the mid 1990's. Would you say they have sure done a great job of regulating Microsoft since then?
A big problem is that whenever one of these massive companies notices a potential regulatory threat to their cash cow, they simply sponsor a few senators and their parties and get the entire thing stopped.
How on earth was that comment deemed 'Funny'?
OR should it be "How on middle-earth was that comment deemed 'Funny'?"
Now that's funny!
*Tumbleweed rolls accross in background as people stay silent*
Most of the books released by Christopher Tolkien since his father's death have been predominantly 'new' material. There are meant to be many, many files full of manuscripts that J. R. Tolkien wrote but never published in book form.
I'm extremely glad to see that some more have been put together into what I'm sure will be another amazing book.
agreed.
Well, it's a bit idiotic not to comprehend that just because I stated solar power has some obvious advantages over sails, doesn't mean sails don't have any other advantages over solar power.
The Solar powered boat does indeed have some 'obvious advantages' over sail, for one it can move when there is no wind or into the direction of the wind. Ellen Macarthur would have found it more difficult going in her sailing ship had she tried to circumnavigate the globe in the other directions as she would have been trying to sail against the general southern hemisphere wind direction.
"Every sailing vessel is basically a solar powered boat. Been doing that for eons. Why change now?"
They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago. They are using a solar-powered, propellor driven vessel which - if the tachnology advances - will have many quite obvious advantages over traditional sailing vessels.
There is a fundamental difference between the US and the UK in how the public preceive "big-brotherness" and the role of the government in general. In the UK there just arn't nearly as many populised "government conspiracy theories" like they are in the USA and very few people fear the government/secret service malicously "spies" on people.
Besides this, the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are owned by either local government/councils (which operate and are widely recognised as being very independant of central/national government) or by private landowners and businesses. Very few of the millions of CCTV cameras which are being, and have been, installed over the last few years in the UK have been requested by any organisation connected to central government.
"european GM resistance has been hijacked by geopolitcal interests"
That's a tall claim. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "geopolitcal interests", sounds a bit like a typical U.S. politics meaningless buzzword to me. Here in Britain GM crops are banned primarily because a government study carried out a couple of years ago found that in the vast majority of GM crops trialled, local wildlife - in and around the fields - had been completely descimated compared with the "conventional farming" control crops.
Monsanto's GM crops were used in several of the trials I believe. Also, most of the criticism towards GM crops in the UK comes from naturalists and enviromentalists. The difference is though, that unlike in the US, the politicians arn't being paid by Monsanto so they don't constantly shout out "GM is good even though I know nothing about the subject", instead they listen to the public consensus which is overwhelmingly anti-GM.
Hmm, you obviously know absolutly nothing about GM crops. Apart from that your argument is completely absurd!
Why on earth would someone develop a GM crop that is resiliant to a herbicide and then not use that herbicide? That makes absolutly no sense at all. GM crops drastically increase the use of herbicides, the only way they could reduce them is to make the GM crop resiliant to all infections and pests - basically impossible.
When using GM crops, the standard procedure is to drop tonnes of the herbicide on the crop, knowing that the crop will not be damaged. Many of the potent herbicides in use in the USA do however cause damage to the health of local people and the enviroment.