Thalidomide was produced before we knew drugs impacted the unborn.
In fact, we knew very well that drugs affected the unborn. In fact, the thalidomide tragedy was almost completely avoided in the US, because that worthless government agency, the FDA, refused to grant authority to market it in the US until potential adverse effects were studied further.
Even so, the Pinto was a perfectly fine vehicle except for an engineering mistake on the rear differential.
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the families of those who died in them.
You do realize that those things are produced and exported by Communist China, right? Are you really holding that up as the pinnacle of free market capitalism
Oh, come on - you can't be serious. "Communist" China bears about as much resemblance to communism as Swiss cheese does to Switzerland. They're communist in name only. The point is that their problems are defective because companies there can and do get away with ignoring regulations, to the extent that regulations even exist.
Not that this means we should ignore wind turbine problems, but seriously - we ought to develop a sense of perspective. A wind turbine breaks, and you've broken a wind turbine (typically they're spaced away from everything, so collateral damage will be pretty minimal). An oil rig goes down, and, well... you can read the news and look at the pictures.
The universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller particles. Behind atoms we find electrons, behind electrons we find quarks.
Dude, this is clearly some sense of the word "infinite" of which I haven't been previously aware. A couple things: 1) atoms -> electrons -> quarks is three levels, which is not exactly infinity. 2) I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but electrons are not made of quarks. They're truly elementary particles. 3) No one thinks there's anything below quarks - the Standard Model may have some issues, but no one seriously questions the elementary status of quarks. 4) you can't do anything with quarks anyway - practically speaking, you can't even see an individual quark. They're tightly bound to each other in the form of hadrons.
I think that in practice, we're going to run into problems before we even get to the level of atoms. Lithographic processes can only get you so far - we're already into the extreme ultraviolet, so to get smaller features we're going to have start getting into x-rays/gamma rays, which have rather unfortunate health and safety issues associated with them, not to mention the difficult engineering problems involved in generating tightly focused beams. And even if you can solve that problem, you have to deal with noise introduced by electrons just leaking from one lead to another. I think 246 doublings is way, way generous.
... is that not all Catholic priests have to be celibate. If, say, you're a married Episcopal priest, and you convert to become a Catholic priest, well, obviously you get to keep your wife. Also, the Catholic church is made up of a couple of different "rites" - the Roman rite is most familiar, but there are various others. And in some of the others, yeah, priests can be married too. There is literally nothing to this insistence on celibacy for (some) priests beyond "we've always done it this way". And that's not even true.
More seriously - dear Catholic church: maybe if you're having trouble with recruiting, it might be a good idea to look at your medieval personnel policies? You know, like maybe letting priests get married, letting women in, etc, etc. Might cut down on the pervert problem too. I'm just sayin'.
... aka six months. For those just tuning in at home, this unit of time was popularized by one Thomas Friedman, a columnist who was thoroughly mocked on the Internets for his unfortunate habit of claiming that we needed another six months in Iraq to know if it was a success, and then when the six months had gone by, proclaim that another six months was needed. Over and over and over again - to the point where various critics would make a note on their calendars, and then after six months ask "well, it's been another Friedman unit... can we go home now?" Would have been funny, except that it was sad.
Given that there's an infinite supply of ever-changing pr0n on the internet available for free, I have to wonder why anyone would bother stashing it on a local disk. It's like saving bottles of air.
... I was a naval exercise controller. As the junior guy, I had the night shift, which not so coincidentally, was when most of the action occurred. First thing in the morning, my boss had to brief the admiral on what training objectives had been accomplished, some other stuff, and... how the engagements during the night had gone down. So one of my big roles was to prepare slides that showed this. People can rant about Powerpoint all they want, but it would have been essentially impossible to make anyone understand how an engagement had progressed without being able to flash a diagram of it up on the screen. Back in the day, people hand-drew these for things like history books, but hand-drawn diagrams would have taken way too long to be useful for our purposes.
Let's get it straight, folks: Powerpoint doesn't make us dumber, people make us dumber (with bad slides).
The costs of even going to some extrasolar planet (not to mention sending an invasion/economic exploitation force) would be so huge that there would effectively never be any return on the investment, so we dont' really have to worry about being invaded for economic reasons after all. An Orion Project style mission to Alpha Centauri was once estimated to cost a tenth of the entire US GDP - or a trillion and a half dollars in today's figures. That just gets a spaceship there. To actually invade some planet, well, you'd have to send a few scouting missions first, to know what you were getting into. Then you'd have to build and send your invasion force. Since even optimistic estimates for getting two Alpha Centauri (in the Orion-type ship) were 40+ years, this project would take hundreds of years and cost uncounted trillions of dollars. And then how do you actually monetize what you'd get? Who would get the money?
Stephen Hawking is a smart guy, but he needs to think this one through. This is not even a remotely realistic threat.
To be so rapacious as to need this many resources, your hypothetical society would have to be growing exponentially in numbers. And if it was growing exponentially in numbers, it would fill up the entire galaxy in a matter of a few thousand years. Given that the galaxy is [voice="sagan"] billions and billions [/voice] of years old... it's highly, highly probable that this would have already happened, and absolutely tremendously unlikely that it's just getting started now(ish). So the fact that we haven't already been pillaged is pretty good prima facie evidence that this kind of thing is not going on.
There's nothing particularly special about earth - it's made up of all the same stuff as the rest of the chunks of rock out there. Why would aliens even bother to show up?
... the chances of there being anything like drugs appearing on some other planet is approximately nil. The fact is that there just isn't anything on these planets that would be worth the expense of recovering it. Your story makes for good SF, but it doesn't match up with reality very well.
Radiation hormesis. Disclaimer: while this is not a generally accepted theory, it's not complete kooky-town, either. This is one of those cases in which reasonable people can disagree about whether it's true. Personally, I don't know enough to form an opinion.
Sure, gravity gets it all together for you. But then you have to lift it up out of the gravity well and ship it all the way back to where your home civilization can use it. Why bother, when you can get the same thing anywhere?
The chance of anyone even being able to pick the broadcast out of background noise seems exceedingly small. The chance of turning that analog signal back into a moving picture seems even smaller. And even given all that, what on earth would an alien civilization make of it? A funny-looking biped waving it's forelimbs and making screechy noises, in front of a big crowd of other roaring bipeds. With literally no context at all, it would be the video equivalent of Linear B.
Besides planets in reality are pretty crappy resources for any interstellar species, nebula and dust clouds have stupendously huge quantities of material available, sufficient to make thousands even millions of suns, already in affect mined, granulated to a fine powder and just requiring filtering to extract the desired elements.
The good news: there's no particular reason for alien species to invade the earth for "resources", because realistically, all rocky planets are more or less the same. Big balls of silicate minerals, lots of iron, nickel, aluminum, smaller quantities of other stuff. You don't have to come to earth to get this stuff, you can get it quite literally anywhere. Or if you need volatiles, there are plenty of comets waiting to be picked up.
The bad news: that pretty much means that there's essentially no chance of kicking off a space-based economy - since there's nothing particularly unique to be "mined" in space, and getting stuff from up there is ludicrously expensive, we'll probably just save our money and keep using the stuff down here at the bottom of the gravity well.
Some of the things you mention really are obscure geek issues (non geeks object to using iTunes? Complain about the lack of multitasking? Really?)... but a lot of this stuff is a genuine pain in the ass. One you didn't mention: the absolutely worthless lock and home screens. The lock screen has nothing but the time and date, and the home screen has nothing but an array of application icons and the time. No useful information or functions are allowed to appear in either place. Why? Because Steve said so. Don't like it? Tough shit.
For the time being I'm going to continue with the iPhone, but if things don't improve in the fairly near future, I may be in the market for an Android phone.
... and I agree that a lot of the specs on the iPhone were, well, lame. The 650 did do more than than the iPhone did on release. But dude, the iPhone was released a while ago now, ok? Some particulars:
Also, I had AIM chat on my old Treo when I wanted it. It would actually notify me if somebody IMed me. iPhone has IM applications, but at least until a few months ago, couldn't run anything in the background to get notifications (I don't really use IM anymore, so I haven't checked this out lately - I suspect that you can now get IM apps that run in the background with iPhone OS 3.0).
Yep, you're right. iPhone 3.0 addressed this - while the IM application doesn't literally run in the background, it does get "push notification"... which is more-or-less equivalent for IM. Works fine.
Shit, I remember when iPhone came out and Apple said nobody needed a native app SDK at all! They said everything should be a web app. They had no intention of even creating an SDK and App Store until they got petitions from users demanding it!
Yeah, and I didn't buy an iPhone until they fixed that. Which they did. A couple years ago.
Some of the criticisms are (IMHO) legitimate - the IMAP idle thing, Apple's ultra-rigid control of the App Store. But a lot of the stuff you're talking about is pretty outdated at this point.
It applies equally well to proper Macs. It's just a lot easer for a "geek" to modify a Mac so it's more flexible.
Oh, spare me. That sentence would be just as true if you substituted "Windows" for "Mac". It would almost be true if you substituted "Linux" (the difference being that it's essentially impossible for a non-geek to modify Linux to do something different than what, say, Ubuntu wanted them to do). Mac makes it hard for newbies to customize by design (which in your book apparently == "crippling the device"). Windows makes it hard for newbies to customize/cripples the device by making it confusing. Linux does some of each, with proportions varying by distro.
I use all three OS's, and I'm just as annoyed by OS fanboys as anyone. But you know what's just as annoying? OS trolls.
Because anyone who's been to Japan is automatically more trustworthy on this subject than actual DATA (which, famously, is not the plural of anecdote).
Guess what! I've been to Japan too! But I'll be signing up for the actual statistics, rather than yours or my random impressions.
By making the battery non-removable, Apple can make it larger and hold more of a charge. The thinking is that most people will be able to charge the thing pretty readily at some point during their day, and they'll be ready to move on to a new phone by the time the old battery wears out. That sucks for people like you, who don't have ready access to a plug all the time. But that's the tradeoff Apple's made. So unfortunately, your choice is to suck it up and live with the problem, or buy some other phone.
One thing I will point out: if you really, really want the iPhone, but can't deal with the lack of a second battery... they make external batteries for the thing. You can get models that connect to the dock port via a lead, or models that consist of an iPhone case with an external battery built in. Either way, kinda clunky and not for me, but better than nothing.
Yes, coal is much dirtier than nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power is inevitably going to have to be part of our power generation portfolio for the foreseeable future (probably a fairly significant part). But you can't wave away the real issues involving nuclear power by saying "but but but... coal is worse!" Nuclear energy is safe when we make it safe - by putting a lot of time, expense, and effort into safety systems and processes. If/when we let safety systems degrade, we neglect to train in safety procedures, and we fail to conduct proper oversight of nuclear plant operations... then it won't be clean and safe anymore. And pretending otherwise is counterproductive... which is the point that the GP is trying to make.
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Very hoppy in the west coast style. Brewed in Chico, CA, but available just about everywhere.
various Sam Adams products. Boston Lager is pretty good, and some of their specialty brews are really excellent.
Blue Moon - local take on a Belgian style ale. Actually produced by a subsidiary of one of the big breweries, and not as good (in my opinion) as the real thing... but far from swill.
Local choices will vary by location, but most mid-sized and larger towns have at least some kind of a local-ish beer choice as well.
The renaissance in homebrewing in the US really forced the beer industry here to get its act together. Having tasted the real thing, people became much less willing to drink the swill.
It's sort of unfair to refer to "American beer" when what you're really thinking of is Bud-Mil-Coors. Not so long ago, it was certainly true that you had a choice of crappy mass-produced beer and nothing else. But nowadays, decent beer is available in every podunk town. Of course, there's still an ocean of the swill produced, but good domestic beer is easy to find.
Depends on the nature of your business...
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
... if you're working on a services type contract, every minute of your employee's time is direct-billed to your customer. On the other hand, buying computer equipment gets wrapped up in your overhead, which makes you look more expensive. This is not to say that deliberately try to be inefficient to get more revenue, but it doesn't exactly provide incentives to be efficient.
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In fact, we knew very well that drugs affected the unborn. In fact, the thalidomide tragedy was almost completely avoided in the US, because that worthless government agency, the FDA, refused to grant authority to market it in the US until potential adverse effects were studied further.
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the families of those who died in them.
Oh, come on - you can't be serious. "Communist" China bears about as much resemblance to communism as Swiss cheese does to Switzerland. They're communist in name only. The point is that their problems are defective because companies there can and do get away with ignoring regulations, to the extent that regulations even exist.
... which never have these problems:
Deepwater Horizon pics
Not that this means we should ignore wind turbine problems, but seriously - we ought to develop a sense of perspective. A wind turbine breaks, and you've broken a wind turbine (typically they're spaced away from everything, so collateral damage will be pretty minimal). An oil rig goes down, and, well... you can read the news and look at the pictures.
Dude, this is clearly some sense of the word "infinite" of which I haven't been previously aware. A couple things: 1) atoms -> electrons -> quarks is three levels, which is not exactly infinity. 2) I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but electrons are not made of quarks. They're truly elementary particles. 3) No one thinks there's anything below quarks - the Standard Model may have some issues, but no one seriously questions the elementary status of quarks. 4) you can't do anything with quarks anyway - practically speaking, you can't even see an individual quark. They're tightly bound to each other in the form of hadrons.
I think that in practice, we're going to run into problems before we even get to the level of atoms. Lithographic processes can only get you so far - we're already into the extreme ultraviolet, so to get smaller features we're going to have start getting into x-rays/gamma rays, which have rather unfortunate health and safety issues associated with them, not to mention the difficult engineering problems involved in generating tightly focused beams. And even if you can solve that problem, you have to deal with noise introduced by electrons just leaking from one lead to another. I think 246 doublings is way, way generous.
... is that not all Catholic priests have to be celibate. If, say, you're a married Episcopal priest, and you convert to become a Catholic priest, well, obviously you get to keep your wife. Also, the Catholic church is made up of a couple of different "rites" - the Roman rite is most familiar, but there are various others. And in some of the others, yeah, priests can be married too. There is literally nothing to this insistence on celibacy for (some) priests beyond "we've always done it this way". And that's not even true.
More seriously - dear Catholic church: maybe if you're having trouble with recruiting, it might be a good idea to look at your medieval personnel policies? You know, like maybe letting priests get married, letting women in, etc, etc. Might cut down on the pervert problem too. I'm just sayin'.
... aka six months. For those just tuning in at home, this unit of time was popularized by one Thomas Friedman, a columnist who was thoroughly mocked on the Internets for his unfortunate habit of claiming that we needed another six months in Iraq to know if it was a success, and then when the six months had gone by, proclaim that another six months was needed. Over and over and over again - to the point where various critics would make a note on their calendars, and then after six months ask "well, it's been another Friedman unit... can we go home now?" Would have been funny, except that it was sad.
Given that there's an infinite supply of ever-changing pr0n on the internet available for free, I have to wonder why anyone would bother stashing it on a local disk. It's like saving bottles of air.
... I was a naval exercise controller. As the junior guy, I had the night shift, which not so coincidentally, was when most of the action occurred. First thing in the morning, my boss had to brief the admiral on what training objectives had been accomplished, some other stuff, and... how the engagements during the night had gone down. So one of my big roles was to prepare slides that showed this. People can rant about Powerpoint all they want, but it would have been essentially impossible to make anyone understand how an engagement had progressed without being able to flash a diagram of it up on the screen. Back in the day, people hand-drew these for things like history books, but hand-drawn diagrams would have taken way too long to be useful for our purposes.
Let's get it straight, folks: Powerpoint doesn't make us dumber, people make us dumber (with bad slides).
The costs of even going to some extrasolar planet (not to mention sending an invasion/economic exploitation force) would be so huge that there would effectively never be any return on the investment, so we dont' really have to worry about being invaded for economic reasons after all. An Orion Project style mission to Alpha Centauri was once estimated to cost a tenth of the entire US GDP - or a trillion and a half dollars in today's figures. That just gets a spaceship there. To actually invade some planet, well, you'd have to send a few scouting missions first, to know what you were getting into. Then you'd have to build and send your invasion force. Since even optimistic estimates for getting two Alpha Centauri (in the Orion-type ship) were 40+ years, this project would take hundreds of years and cost uncounted trillions of dollars. And then how do you actually monetize what you'd get? Who would get the money?
Stephen Hawking is a smart guy, but he needs to think this one through. This is not even a remotely realistic threat.
To be so rapacious as to need this many resources, your hypothetical society would have to be growing exponentially in numbers. And if it was growing exponentially in numbers, it would fill up the entire galaxy in a matter of a few thousand years. Given that the galaxy is [voice="sagan"] billions and billions [/voice] of years old... it's highly, highly probable that this would have already happened, and absolutely tremendously unlikely that it's just getting started now(ish). So the fact that we haven't already been pillaged is pretty good prima facie evidence that this kind of thing is not going on.
There's nothing particularly special about earth - it's made up of all the same stuff as the rest of the chunks of rock out there. Why would aliens even bother to show up?
... the chances of there being anything like drugs appearing on some other planet is approximately nil. The fact is that there just isn't anything on these planets that would be worth the expense of recovering it. Your story makes for good SF, but it doesn't match up with reality very well.
Radiation hormesis. Disclaimer: while this is not a generally accepted theory, it's not complete kooky-town, either. This is one of those cases in which reasonable people can disagree about whether it's true. Personally, I don't know enough to form an opinion.
Sure, gravity gets it all together for you. But then you have to lift it up out of the gravity well and ship it all the way back to where your home civilization can use it. Why bother, when you can get the same thing anywhere?
The chance of anyone even being able to pick the broadcast out of background noise seems exceedingly small. The chance of turning that analog signal back into a moving picture seems even smaller. And even given all that, what on earth would an alien civilization make of it? A funny-looking biped waving it's forelimbs and making screechy noises, in front of a big crowd of other roaring bipeds. With literally no context at all, it would be the video equivalent of Linear B.
The good news: there's no particular reason for alien species to invade the earth for "resources", because realistically, all rocky planets are more or less the same. Big balls of silicate minerals, lots of iron, nickel, aluminum, smaller quantities of other stuff. You don't have to come to earth to get this stuff, you can get it quite literally anywhere. Or if you need volatiles, there are plenty of comets waiting to be picked up.
The bad news: that pretty much means that there's essentially no chance of kicking off a space-based economy - since there's nothing particularly unique to be "mined" in space, and getting stuff from up there is ludicrously expensive, we'll probably just save our money and keep using the stuff down here at the bottom of the gravity well.
Some of the things you mention really are obscure geek issues (non geeks object to using iTunes? Complain about the lack of multitasking? Really?)... but a lot of this stuff is a genuine pain in the ass. One you didn't mention: the absolutely worthless lock and home screens. The lock screen has nothing but the time and date, and the home screen has nothing but an array of application icons and the time. No useful information or functions are allowed to appear in either place. Why? Because Steve said so. Don't like it? Tough shit.
For the time being I'm going to continue with the iPhone, but if things don't improve in the fairly near future, I may be in the market for an Android phone.
... and I agree that a lot of the specs on the iPhone were, well, lame. The 650 did do more than than the iPhone did on release. But dude, the iPhone was released a while ago now, ok? Some particulars:
Yep, you're right. iPhone 3.0 addressed this - while the IM application doesn't literally run in the background, it does get "push notification"... which is more-or-less equivalent for IM. Works fine.
Yeah, and I didn't buy an iPhone until they fixed that. Which they did. A couple years ago.
Some of the criticisms are (IMHO) legitimate - the IMAP idle thing, Apple's ultra-rigid control of the App Store. But a lot of the stuff you're talking about is pretty outdated at this point.
Oh, spare me. That sentence would be just as true if you substituted "Windows" for "Mac". It would almost be true if you substituted "Linux" (the difference being that it's essentially impossible for a non-geek to modify Linux to do something different than what, say, Ubuntu wanted them to do). Mac makes it hard for newbies to customize by design (which in your book apparently == "crippling the device"). Windows makes it hard for newbies to customize/cripples the device by making it confusing. Linux does some of each, with proportions varying by distro.
I use all three OS's, and I'm just as annoyed by OS fanboys as anyone. But you know what's just as annoying? OS trolls.
Because anyone who's been to Japan is automatically more trustworthy on this subject than actual DATA (which, famously, is not the plural of anecdote).
Guess what! I've been to Japan too! But I'll be signing up for the actual statistics, rather than yours or my random impressions.
By making the battery non-removable, Apple can make it larger and hold more of a charge. The thinking is that most people will be able to charge the thing pretty readily at some point during their day, and they'll be ready to move on to a new phone by the time the old battery wears out. That sucks for people like you, who don't have ready access to a plug all the time. But that's the tradeoff Apple's made. So unfortunately, your choice is to suck it up and live with the problem, or buy some other phone.
One thing I will point out: if you really, really want the iPhone, but can't deal with the lack of a second battery... they make external batteries for the thing. You can get models that connect to the dock port via a lead, or models that consist of an iPhone case with an external battery built in. Either way, kinda clunky and not for me, but better than nothing.
Yes, coal is much dirtier than nuclear power. Yes, nuclear power is inevitably going to have to be part of our power generation portfolio for the foreseeable future (probably a fairly significant part). But you can't wave away the real issues involving nuclear power by saying "but but but... coal is worse!" Nuclear energy is safe when we make it safe - by putting a lot of time, expense, and effort into safety systems and processes. If/when we let safety systems degrade, we neglect to train in safety procedures, and we fail to conduct proper oversight of nuclear plant operations... then it won't be clean and safe anymore. And pretending otherwise is counterproductive... which is the point that the GP is trying to make.
available nationwide:
Local choices will vary by location, but most mid-sized and larger towns have at least some kind of a local-ish beer choice as well.
The renaissance in homebrewing in the US really forced the beer industry here to get its act together. Having tasted the real thing, people became much less willing to drink the swill.
It's sort of unfair to refer to "American beer" when what you're really thinking of is Bud-Mil-Coors. Not so long ago, it was certainly true that you had a choice of crappy mass-produced beer and nothing else. But nowadays, decent beer is available in every podunk town. Of course, there's still an ocean of the swill produced, but good domestic beer is easy to find.
... if you're working on a services type contract, every minute of your employee's time is direct-billed to your customer. On the other hand, buying computer equipment gets wrapped up in your overhead, which makes you look more expensive. This is not to say that deliberately try to be inefficient to get more revenue, but it doesn't exactly provide incentives to be efficient.