Junkyard Wars will never be the same as the original Scrapheap Challenge. JW doesn't have Rob Llewellyn (sp?) for one thing.
For another, more important thing, they also don't have Cathy Rogers anymore. She's jumped ship and moved to Full Metal Challenge. Sadly, she represented the last bastion of Britishisms on the show--nevermore will we hear the verb, to bodge.
Aren't the sandworms supposed to be silicon-based life? Or was that an extrapolation from Dune fandom and not in the Herbert novels? It would be consistent with the sandworms being hydrophobic.
It's been a while since I read Dune et al., so I couldn't say exactly what Herbert specified in his works. Nevertheless, it's not a totally absurd notion, merely exotic--so Herbert probably figured he could get away with it in a work of fiction.;) Also, I suppose that a creature could get away with having a lot of silicon-based biochemistry on the inside as long as it was fairly well sealed.
Silicon compounds could also play a role in the carapace of a sandworm. silica (silicon dioxide) and silicon carbide are both very hard, very durable compounds out of which one could construct the body of a sandworm. For such a creature, you would want that kind of abrasion and thermal resistance.
I am hard pressed that a silicon or silicon-carbon based chemical would be useful as a drug.
You're right; most drugs in use today are very definitely carbon based. Nevertheless, there are exceptions. cis-diamminedichloroplatinum(II) (a.k.a. cisplatin) is a small inorganic molecule that has been used for decades in chemotherapy. I mention it because it is probably the best-known inorganic drug. A quick Google search also revealed Amedis Pharmaceuticals. They actually specialize in developing drugs containing silicon. From their site I gather that they are both attempting to substitute silicon for carbon in some existing experimental drugs, and also trying to develop drugs from scratch based on silicon chemistry.
See also John Lovelock; he was an atmospheric chemist who may have been the original proponent of the atmospheric disequilibrium test for life.
Although it's a good test, and I think it's an excellent one to use when we search for life on extrasolar worlds, it falls down in at least a few cases I can think of off the top of my head.
First, if there isn't very much life on Mars. It's dying out, or it only ever existed in small niches, etc. You won't be dumping enough of the waste products of life into the atmosphere to detect.
Mars is a smaller, cooler world--perhaps the metabolism of life there is quite a bit slower. When it was warmer, maybe the Martian seas teemed with life and the atmosphere was loaded with oxygen. Now, natural selection has left behind only species which carefully hoard their resources. Perhaps there's a new generation of martian bacteria once every thousand years. Again, the rate of production of waste products is low, so the atmosphere's composition remains close to what one would expect for a 'dead' world.
Who says that any of the chemical species consumed or excreted have to be substances that affect the composition of the atmosphere (directly or indirectly). Perhaps there are bacteria that feed on deeply buried sulfides in the martian crust, never exchanging any material with the atmosphere at all.
That said, Mars very probably is a dead world. But if it's not, I'd hate to miss it. There have been more than a few phenomena brought to the attention of science in the last few centuries that have been obviously impossible...to any reasonable scientist.
Of all the hundreds of elements that exist in the universe, only the Carbon atom is capable of connecting to (up to four) other Carbon atoms and thus creating arbitraily large molecules.
Close to true...but not absolutely. In principle, it is possible to construct analogues of most organic compounds using a silicon backbone, rather than carbon. Silicon atoms also can form four covalent bonds to adjacent atoms. I've already noted in another post that they would perform poorly in most environments, however--such compounds tend to decompose readily in the presence of even trace amounts of water.
For example, a strand of DNA is single Carbon based molecule about 2 meters long.
I hate to nitpick (well no, not really...I live for it) but the backbone of one strand of DNA isn't pure carbon. It contains phosphorus and oxygen as well. IIRC, the chain goes -O-P-O-C-C-C- and repeats (Phosphate, 5', 4', 3' carbons of deoxyribose ring, then back to phosphate again). To attach things to the chain, you only need to have species that will let you form a third bond to it. In DNA, those things are attached to the ribose, but it doesn't have to be that way.
To be fair, your heart is in the right place--it's realitively easy to prepare synthetic polymers hundreds of thousands or millions of carbon atoms long, with pure carbon backbones.
You're not giving water enough credit. Basically, the important thing is to qualify what is life: life is the creation of complex systems that can adapt and increase in complexity over time...In order to satisfy that definition, you need a framework which allows you tons of complexity, which is what water gives you. Gotta love water.
Eh? You're giving water too much credit, now. The stuff on which all our beloved complex molecules depend is carbon--water is just a useful solvent. In and of itself, water creates structures like ice crystals or cages (e.g. clathrates). Interesting for a number of reasons, sometimes very pretty, but not particularly 'complex' in the sense that you mean. For us, water is a very nice solvent because it is polar (you can dissolve ions in it) and amphoteric (it can act as a proton donor or acceptor depending on ambient conditions). Liquid ammonia (NH_3) would do almost as well, in principle.
Water is the simplest dipole that can form. You can't make a dipole out of HX, and if you want H2X, water's the easiest choice.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. HX--where X is anything but hydrogen--is always a dipole.
The parent post is very thorough, and very good guide to why we think water is important. A note regarding silicon compounds--molecules that contain silicon atoms in long chains (as carbon does in almost any biomolecule you could think of) can exist, and can be synthesized quite readily in the lab. Unfortunately, these long silicon chains tend to be very sensitive to water. They decompose--sometimes violently--when exposed to liquid water or its vapour. Even the trace amounts of water in the Martian atmosphere would probably be too much for silicon-based life to handle.
Which is not to say silicon-based life is impossible--just that much more unlikely. As the parent notes, perhaps a combination of carbon and silicon would work, but that seems to be a lot of trouble. To be fair, life does have a way of surprising us, even on Earth.
It's pseudo-philosophy, just like Contact is pseudo-scientific.
To be fair to Carl Sagan, the book version of Contact (preceding the movie by many years) was IMHO much superior to the movie. In a book, one has the time and space to much more thoroughly explore both science and philosphy--which Sagan did.
Usually plastic cases (or the components inside most likely to generate stray RF) are lined with a metal mesh material of some sort to provide shielding. Actually, the problem works both ways, as the parent points out--other nearby components (CRT, the wall wart for your printer, the blender in the kitchen on the other side of the wall) typically produce more RF interference than the components in your case. Which is an excellent reason to shield your case. You're not just protecting the world from your computer--you're protecting your computer from the world.
All a terrorist would need to do is get one working nuclear weapon into some port city to kill hundreds of thousands of people. This would make death due to tobacco look like nothing.
Okay idea; bad example. It is estimated by various*sources* that the annual death toll due to smoking in the United States is on the order of half a million per year.
The CDC estimates that of the six hundred thousand cancer deaths per year in the United States, one third are the direct result of cigarette smoking, costing $60 billion per year in direct health costs and loss of productivity.
How about a "war on smoking"? Tobacco use costs the United States almost as much each year as invading Iraq did--if we only count the costs of cancer care. You want to protect American lives? How about a Tomahawk or two for Philip Morris?
On the other hand, it's marginally possible that humans can be used to extract energy from food such as carbohydrates, even if some entropy is increased in the process. Maybe the alternatives for using that particular fuel were not that efficient or practical.
The problem is that you could just burn the carbohdyrates to get the chemical energy out of them. Same stuff in (carbohydrates and oxygen); same stuff out (carbon dioxide and water). The process is more efficient in an incinerator--none of this insoluble and indigestible fiber to deal with, no solid waste at the end, unless there was good bit of inorganic contamination in your feedstock. Also, you don't have to devote a significant portion of energy budget to keeping a fragile biological system running and replicating.
You're missing the point. Slashdot geeks are always talking about how online music is going to kill the traditional brick and mortar music sales. Those makes billions in profit. This makes tens of millions in profit. It should be obvious that as a REPLACEMENT for traditional sales online sales are not very attractive.
Not very attractive to whom? The bricks and mortar retailers earning billions in profit? Why would Apple be concerned about beating them?
Also (and this has been noted in other posts) right now Apple is only able to target the small fraction of the population that own Macs/iPods, yet they've still managed to move a million songs in their first week. Of course it's a small start compared to the entire music industry, but they've got nowhere to go but up.
If all of the current sales through bricks and mortar were instead conducted online through Apple, everybody involved would be quite happy. The marginal cost for each copy of a track is nearly nil (just bandwidth)--virtually all of that $0.99 revenue gets shared by Apple, the labels, and the artists, with none going to manufacturing, distribution, unsold overstock, not to mention all the rent that bricks and mortar retailers pay.
ither way, the gist of the message is the same: why would an industry that makes billions in profit be interested in making only tens of millions in profit[...]?
Let's say that you have a good job in IT and you're pulling in $60,000 a year. I offer you the chance to bring in an extra $100 to test drive a Ferrari for me, because I value your opinions.
Would you say no?
Why would a company be interested in a few tens of millions of dollars? Because:
1. Ten million dollars is ten million dollars. Profit is profit.
2. It's high profile. The recent publicity is worth every penny Apple has spent on this project, whether it ever makes money or not.
3. It's fun. Someone (several someones, actually) at Apple are pleased that they've successfully launched a new product--heck, a new business model. They like to know that they've created something that people like, and that makes people happy. There are probably people at Apple (and at most companies) that would work on a project like this in their spare time, just for kicks.
4. It will probably increase sales of Apple hardware.
And can you imagine the outcry if Microsoft began selling music inside Windows Media Player? Slashdot would be screaming about the monopoly.
Slashdot might, and it might not. If it did (and I'm amused to note that we're all considered some sort of collective mind now) it would be wrong.
You can still buy all your music in a bricks and mortar store, rip it, and listen to it with your iPod.
Apple hasn't created a monopoly here. They aren't trying to prevent you from playing music bought elsewhere in the iPod. Yes, music that you download through their software must be played on their hardware--but that's a DRM issue associated with being able to license the music in the first place.
I'm not sure how American politics works, but in Australia, politicians move portfolios all the time, and there is no way any of them can become an expert in their area in just a few months.
Canada operates under a similar system. The Prime Minister selects from Members of Parliament individuals to serve as Ministers with various portfolios (Finance, Health, Defense, Agriculture, etc.) It is these Ministers who have to answer questions in the House of Commons and take the heat from the press. In most government departments, there is a deputy minister serving immediately under the minister. This deputy minister is an employee who in all likelihood will hold the post for years. It is this individual who is responsible for the much of the administration of a department, really subject only to major policy decisions handed down from the Minister and Parliament. I presume that Australia's system is similar, with a system of deputy ministers who actually know the portfolios to advise appointed ministers. To be fair, in Canada I have noticed that appointments to Cabinet seem to be fairly stable--most Ministers seem to be lasting at least a couple of years, of late.
In the United States, Cabinet officials are appointed (usually by the President); these appointments must be 'confirmed' (approved) by the Senate. Members of the Cabinet generally last as long as the President does, unless they screw up badly and are forced to resign.
You forgot donuts. Or, more accurately, donut shops. Tim Horton's is a part of our national identity, too. Recently I went on a road trip to the University of Notre Dame (my university in Canada regularly sends a few students down there to do research). Crossing the border, we declared that we were carrying various personal effects, a large box of Timbits (donut holes), and a twelve of Sleeman Cream Ale*.
*Stronger Canadian beer is the real reason why we seem so laid back. An old joke: What do American beer and having sex in a canoe have in common? Answer: They're both f*cking close to water.
Canada is the US's number one oil source, followed distantly by Saudi Arabia. It's also a OPEC nation.
Are you kidding, trolling, or just insane? Canada is not, and has never been, an OPEC nation.
The eleven OPEC countries are Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq (perhaps not for long under U.S. rule), Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.
...if it's all this bad, why don't planes fall out of the sky from all the existing thousands of cell phone towers all broadcasting, and tv and radio stations and other sorts of radio wave emitting places? Why not? Is it *really* that bad, or is this FUD?
Truth is, most of the time, it doesn't make a whit of difference whether or not someone in the cabin (or even in the cockpit) has a mobile phone or WiFi device powered up. It seems that problems only arise when a combination of circumstances come together. Those circumstances are apparently relatively rare, which is why there are so few reported incidents associated with interference from consumer electronics.
There may also be cases where interference causes a malfunction, but the malfunction is not traced back to cellular interference. Aircraft are generally very carefully engineered pieces of equipment--a lot of things have to go wrong to get one to drop out of the sky.
As for interference from cellular towers on the ground--signal strength usually falls off with distance according to an inverse square law (IIRC). Consequently, there's very little signal power from the ground to worry about.
Finally, there seems to be a very small chance that radio interference of any kind will bring down an aircraft, and only a slightly larger chance that it would even cause enough trouble to draw the attention of the flight crew. Nevertheless, small is not zero. Over thousands of flights and millions of passengers each year, there's no point in tempting fate--odds are you'll lose eventually. You can't do much about the towers on the ground. You can do something about the consumer electronics in the cabin--so you do.
Anybody who is important enough to need to be in touch all the time can afford to use the purpose-built appropriately shielded telephone equipment aboard the plane.
You missed one. Grams are not a unit of force. Under SI (mks) force is measured in newtons. Older individuals that grew up under cgs may also use dynes. (1 newton = 1E5 dynes). Grams are a measure of mass.
So the article text should indicate that a 1 gram nanomuscle can exert 1.4 newtons of force. Quite impressive, actually.
Embarrassing that 'science' reporters don't know better. Anyone who has taken a high school physics course should be able to use those units correctly.
It's only 99 cents, right? Cheap! 15 or 20 tracks later, I'll realize I just dropped $20.
Yeah, but the difference is that now you've dropped twenty bucks to get the three or four good tracks from each of a half dozen different albums, rather than paying for all the filler on one CD. Not only that, you didn't have to get in your car and drive to the mall.
You got value for your money, and you saved the planet. Feel warm and fuzzy? Reward yourself with another couple of songs.;)
EVERYONE rounds their price down slightly, so it appears cheaper when you quickly look at it. In fact, in the past decade many stores have successfully gone to a '95 cents' model, where $9.95 somehow looks more appealing to the shopper than $9.99. A whopping 4 cents less profit, but an amazing increase in sales.
Actually, there's even a bit of a backlash against this practice in some circles. In addition to being perceived as less expensive, products priced this way are also perceived as 'cheap'--lower in quality, and so forth. If you go to an upscale restaurant (or a restaurant that wants to be thought of as upscale, at least) you'll notice that the prices drop the decimals altogether. That salad isn't $15.99, it's $16. That steak isn't $42.95, it's $43. The last digit will almost never be a nine, either.
Incidentally, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't pegged their price at $0.95 rather $0.99, for exactly the reason that you mention.
Yarr. Anyhow, the moral of the story is - don't fscking bother. High schools are havens for idiocy. You'll run into legions of dolts who will insist that you must be up to no good, because, dang nabbit, good people don't talk about things like front side bus speeds.
Well, not all high schools. I went to high school a few years back in a grossly underfunded jurisdition (Ontario--at the time the provincial Minister of Education was a dropout, which admirably encapsulated the government's attitude towards education). There certainly wasn't any money to be had for staff to maintain the school networks. The teacher responsible for the computer labs realized that there was a tremendous resource right at his fingertips. Several of us were drafted. In exchange, we enjoyed admin privileges on the network, as well as frequent gaming nights.
I imagine that there are a lot of schools where a small group of dedicated students would be glad to trade some of their time for extra privileges. A little quid pro quo is wonderful thing. Also, this sort of activity looks good on university applications.
In reference to (a)...
By that logic then the only reason why cancer is a problem in humans is because we are living longer than "normal". I guess that makes sense though, since we didn't always live well into our 70's.
It's one of the perqs of being a predator. If you're at the top of the food chain, you get to die of natural causes. Also, from the standpoint of evolution, anything that happens to us after age thirty-five, health-wise, is totally irrelevant because it won't interfere with our ability to procreate and at least start raising young. Since most cancers strike later in life, there has never been any selection pressure to breed it out.
So then the solution for humans is either selective breeding programs or genetic manipulation? or maybe we creat a lifespan law. Anyone who lives to see the age of say...65 has 5 years to live before they are "put to sleep" as they say in the animal welfare biz.
Those are some scary ideas, but are the only ones that I can think of, maybe I am being short sighted.
Yes, those are the only solutions, if you want to completely eliminate the incidence of cancer. Does that policy make sense, though? "We're going to kill you know, because otherwise you might get cancer and die later." Thanks, but I'll take my chances.
Slashdot Mirror
For another, more important thing, they also don't have Cathy Rogers anymore. She's jumped ship and moved to Full Metal Challenge. Sadly, she represented the last bastion of Britishisms on the show--nevermore will we hear the verb, to bodge.
Only if your porn is on a secure website.
Silicon compounds could also play a role in the carapace of a sandworm. silica (silicon dioxide) and silicon carbide are both very hard, very durable compounds out of which one could construct the body of a sandworm. For such a creature, you would want that kind of abrasion and thermal resistance.
I am hard pressed that a silicon or silicon-carbon based chemical would be useful as a drug.
You're right; most drugs in use today are very definitely carbon based. Nevertheless, there are exceptions. cis-diamminedichloroplatinum(II) (a.k.a. cisplatin) is a small inorganic molecule that has been used for decades in chemotherapy. I mention it because it is probably the best-known inorganic drug. A quick Google search also revealed Amedis Pharmaceuticals. They actually specialize in developing drugs containing silicon. From their site I gather that they are both attempting to substitute silicon for carbon in some existing experimental drugs, and also trying to develop drugs from scratch based on silicon chemistry.
See also John Lovelock; he was an atmospheric chemist who may have been the original proponent of the atmospheric disequilibrium test for life.
Although it's a good test, and I think it's an excellent one to use when we search for life on extrasolar worlds, it falls down in at least a few cases I can think of off the top of my head.
First, if there isn't very much life on Mars. It's dying out, or it only ever existed in small niches, etc. You won't be dumping enough of the waste products of life into the atmosphere to detect.
Mars is a smaller, cooler world--perhaps the metabolism of life there is quite a bit slower. When it was warmer, maybe the Martian seas teemed with life and the atmosphere was loaded with oxygen. Now, natural selection has left behind only species which carefully hoard their resources. Perhaps there's a new generation of martian bacteria once every thousand years. Again, the rate of production of waste products is low, so the atmosphere's composition remains close to what one would expect for a 'dead' world.
Who says that any of the chemical species consumed or excreted have to be substances that affect the composition of the atmosphere (directly or indirectly). Perhaps there are bacteria that feed on deeply buried sulfides in the martian crust, never exchanging any material with the atmosphere at all.
That said, Mars very probably is a dead world. But if it's not, I'd hate to miss it. There have been more than a few phenomena brought to the attention of science in the last few centuries that have been obviously impossible...to any reasonable scientist.
Close to true...but not absolutely. In principle, it is possible to construct analogues of most organic compounds using a silicon backbone, rather than carbon. Silicon atoms also can form four covalent bonds to adjacent atoms. I've already noted in another post that they would perform poorly in most environments, however--such compounds tend to decompose readily in the presence of even trace amounts of water.
For example, a strand of DNA is single Carbon based molecule about 2 meters long.
I hate to nitpick (well no, not really...I live for it) but the backbone of one strand of DNA isn't pure carbon. It contains phosphorus and oxygen as well. IIRC, the chain goes -O-P-O-C-C-C- and repeats (Phosphate, 5', 4', 3' carbons of deoxyribose ring, then back to phosphate again). To attach things to the chain, you only need to have species that will let you form a third bond to it. In DNA, those things are attached to the ribose, but it doesn't have to be that way.
To be fair, your heart is in the right place--it's realitively easy to prepare synthetic polymers hundreds of thousands or millions of carbon atoms long, with pure carbon backbones.
Eh? You're giving water too much credit, now. The stuff on which all our beloved complex molecules depend is carbon--water is just a useful solvent. In and of itself, water creates structures like ice crystals or cages (e.g. clathrates). Interesting for a number of reasons, sometimes very pretty, but not particularly 'complex' in the sense that you mean. For us, water is a very nice solvent because it is polar (you can dissolve ions in it) and amphoteric (it can act as a proton donor or acceptor depending on ambient conditions). Liquid ammonia (NH_3) would do almost as well, in principle.
Water is the simplest dipole that can form. You can't make a dipole out of HX, and if you want H2X, water's the easiest choice.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. HX--where X is anything but hydrogen--is always a dipole.
The parent post is very thorough, and very good guide to why we think water is important. A note regarding silicon compounds--molecules that contain silicon atoms in long chains (as carbon does in almost any biomolecule you could think of) can exist, and can be synthesized quite readily in the lab. Unfortunately, these long silicon chains tend to be very sensitive to water. They decompose--sometimes violently--when exposed to liquid water or its vapour. Even the trace amounts of water in the Martian atmosphere would probably be too much for silicon-based life to handle.
Which is not to say silicon-based life is impossible--just that much more unlikely. As the parent notes, perhaps a combination of carbon and silicon would work, but that seems to be a lot of trouble. To be fair, life does have a way of surprising us, even on Earth.
To be fair to Carl Sagan, the book version of Contact (preceding the movie by many years) was IMHO much superior to the movie. In a book, one has the time and space to much more thoroughly explore both science and philosphy--which Sagan did.
Usually plastic cases (or the components inside most likely to generate stray RF) are lined with a metal mesh material of some sort to provide shielding. Actually, the problem works both ways, as the parent points out--other nearby components (CRT, the wall wart for your printer, the blender in the kitchen on the other side of the wall) typically produce more RF interference than the components in your case. Which is an excellent reason to shield your case. You're not just protecting the world from your computer--you're protecting your computer from the world.
Okay idea; bad example. It is estimated by various* sources* that the annual death toll due to smoking in the United States is on the order of half a million per year.
The CDC estimates that of the six hundred thousand cancer deaths per year in the United States, one third are the direct result of cigarette smoking, costing $60 billion per year in direct health costs and loss of productivity.
How about a "war on smoking"? Tobacco use costs the United States almost as much each year as invading Iraq did--if we only count the costs of cancer care. You want to protect American lives? How about a Tomahawk or two for Philip Morris?
*PDF links.
The problem is that you could just burn the carbohdyrates to get the chemical energy out of them. Same stuff in (carbohydrates and oxygen); same stuff out (carbon dioxide and water). The process is more efficient in an incinerator--none of this insoluble and indigestible fiber to deal with, no solid waste at the end, unless there was good bit of inorganic contamination in your feedstock. Also, you don't have to devote a significant portion of energy budget to keeping a fragile biological system running and replicating.
Not very attractive to whom? The bricks and mortar retailers earning billions in profit? Why would Apple be concerned about beating them?
Also (and this has been noted in other posts) right now Apple is only able to target the small fraction of the population that own Macs/iPods, yet they've still managed to move a million songs in their first week. Of course it's a small start compared to the entire music industry, but they've got nowhere to go but up.
If all of the current sales through bricks and mortar were instead conducted online through Apple, everybody involved would be quite happy. The marginal cost for each copy of a track is nearly nil (just bandwidth)--virtually all of that $0.99 revenue gets shared by Apple, the labels, and the artists, with none going to manufacturing, distribution, unsold overstock, not to mention all the rent that bricks and mortar retailers pay.
Let's say that you have a good job in IT and you're pulling in $60,000 a year. I offer you the chance to bring in an extra $100 to test drive a Ferrari for me, because I value your opinions.
Would you say no?
Why would a company be interested in a few tens of millions of dollars? Because:
1. Ten million dollars is ten million dollars. Profit is profit.
2. It's high profile. The recent publicity is worth every penny Apple has spent on this project, whether it ever makes money or not.
3. It's fun. Someone (several someones, actually) at Apple are pleased that they've successfully launched a new product--heck, a new business model. They like to know that they've created something that people like, and that makes people happy. There are probably people at Apple (and at most companies) that would work on a project like this in their spare time, just for kicks.
4. It will probably increase sales of Apple hardware.
Slashdot might, and it might not. If it did (and I'm amused to note that we're all considered some sort of collective mind now) it would be wrong.
You can still buy all your music in a bricks and mortar store, rip it, and listen to it with your iPod.
Apple hasn't created a monopoly here. They aren't trying to prevent you from playing music bought elsewhere in the iPod. Yes, music that you download through their software must be played on their hardware--but that's a DRM issue associated with being able to license the music in the first place.
Right. 'Cause they're having a lot of trouble selling iPods...
Canada operates under a similar system. The Prime Minister selects from Members of Parliament individuals to serve as Ministers with various portfolios (Finance, Health, Defense, Agriculture, etc.) It is these Ministers who have to answer questions in the House of Commons and take the heat from the press. In most government departments, there is a deputy minister serving immediately under the minister. This deputy minister is an employee who in all likelihood will hold the post for years. It is this individual who is responsible for the much of the administration of a department, really subject only to major policy decisions handed down from the Minister and Parliament. I presume that Australia's system is similar, with a system of deputy ministers who actually know the portfolios to advise appointed ministers. To be fair, in Canada I have noticed that appointments to Cabinet seem to be fairly stable--most Ministers seem to be lasting at least a couple of years, of late.
In the United States, Cabinet officials are appointed (usually by the President); these appointments must be 'confirmed' (approved) by the Senate. Members of the Cabinet generally last as long as the President does, unless they screw up badly and are forced to resign.
You forgot donuts. Or, more accurately, donut shops. Tim Horton's is a part of our national identity, too. Recently I went on a road trip to the University of Notre Dame (my university in Canada regularly sends a few students down there to do research). Crossing the border, we declared that we were carrying various personal effects, a large box of Timbits (donut holes), and a twelve of Sleeman Cream Ale*.
*Stronger Canadian beer is the real reason why we seem so laid back. An old joke: What do American beer and having sex in a canoe have in common? Answer: They're both f*cking close to water.
Are you kidding, trolling, or just insane? Canada is not, and has never been, an OPEC nation.
The eleven OPEC countries are Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq (perhaps not for long under U.S. rule), Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.
Truth is, most of the time, it doesn't make a whit of difference whether or not someone in the cabin (or even in the cockpit) has a mobile phone or WiFi device powered up. It seems that problems only arise when a combination of circumstances come together. Those circumstances are apparently relatively rare, which is why there are so few reported incidents associated with interference from consumer electronics.
There may also be cases where interference causes a malfunction, but the malfunction is not traced back to cellular interference. Aircraft are generally very carefully engineered pieces of equipment--a lot of things have to go wrong to get one to drop out of the sky.
As for interference from cellular towers on the ground--signal strength usually falls off with distance according to an inverse square law (IIRC). Consequently, there's very little signal power from the ground to worry about.
Finally, there seems to be a very small chance that radio interference of any kind will bring down an aircraft, and only a slightly larger chance that it would even cause enough trouble to draw the attention of the flight crew. Nevertheless, small is not zero. Over thousands of flights and millions of passengers each year, there's no point in tempting fate--odds are you'll lose eventually. You can't do much about the towers on the ground. You can do something about the consumer electronics in the cabin--so you do.
Anybody who is important enough to need to be in touch all the time can afford to use the purpose-built appropriately shielded telephone equipment aboard the plane.
You must be awfully young if you learned BASIC on an Apple...
So the article text should indicate that a 1 gram nanomuscle can exert 1.4 newtons of force. Quite impressive, actually.
Embarrassing that 'science' reporters don't know better. Anyone who has taken a high school physics course should be able to use those units correctly.
Yeah, but the difference is that now you've dropped twenty bucks to get the three or four good tracks from each of a half dozen different albums, rather than paying for all the filler on one CD. Not only that, you didn't have to get in your car and drive to the mall.
You got value for your money, and you saved the planet. Feel warm and fuzzy? Reward yourself with another couple of songs. ;)
Actually, there's even a bit of a backlash against this practice in some circles. In addition to being perceived as less expensive, products priced this way are also perceived as 'cheap'--lower in quality, and so forth. If you go to an upscale restaurant (or a restaurant that wants to be thought of as upscale, at least) you'll notice that the prices drop the decimals altogether. That salad isn't $15.99, it's $16. That steak isn't $42.95, it's $43. The last digit will almost never be a nine, either.
Incidentally, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't pegged their price at $0.95 rather $0.99, for exactly the reason that you mention.
Well, not all high schools. I went to high school a few years back in a grossly underfunded jurisdition (Ontario--at the time the provincial Minister of Education was a dropout, which admirably encapsulated the government's attitude towards education). There certainly wasn't any money to be had for staff to maintain the school networks. The teacher responsible for the computer labs realized that there was a tremendous resource right at his fingertips. Several of us were drafted. In exchange, we enjoyed admin privileges on the network, as well as frequent gaming nights.
I imagine that there are a lot of schools where a small group of dedicated students would be glad to trade some of their time for extra privileges. A little quid pro quo is wonderful thing. Also, this sort of activity looks good on university applications.
It's one of the perqs of being a predator. If you're at the top of the food chain, you get to die of natural causes. Also, from the standpoint of evolution, anything that happens to us after age thirty-five, health-wise, is totally irrelevant because it won't interfere with our ability to procreate and at least start raising young. Since most cancers strike later in life, there has never been any selection pressure to breed it out.
So then the solution for humans is either selective breeding programs or genetic manipulation? or maybe we creat a lifespan law. Anyone who lives to see the age of say...65 has 5 years to live before they are "put to sleep" as they say in the animal welfare biz. Those are some scary ideas, but are the only ones that I can think of, maybe I am being short sighted.
Yes, those are the only solutions, if you want to completely eliminate the incidence of cancer. Does that policy make sense, though? "We're going to kill you know, because otherwise you might get cancer and die later." Thanks, but I'll take my chances.