> And the human resources troll reading a paragraph like that doesn't see > ACME-FOOLATOR 12.5 WITH MEGA-XML, and tosses your resume in the garbage.
So what? I wouldn't want to work for a company with an HR department that clueless. I've got better things to do with my time than put up with Catbert's schenanighans. I like to go home at night feeling like I've done something *worthwhile* at work, not just sat around playing company politics, attending pointless meetings, and leveraging inane buzzwords.
If you read the whole article, it really does seem like a safe and sane design. Among other things, even once it's activated it doesn't do squat unless communication with the Kremlin is lost *and* there is evidence of a nuclear strike, at the same time. Even then, the worst thing it ever does is turn control of the nukes over to the humans in the nuclear launch bunkers. Nothing gets launched unless a human makes the decision to launch.
In other words, the Dead Hand is in no way a "Doomsday Machine". It's a failsafe system to allow the military to continue to function if the top brass is wiped out by a nuclear strike.
Furthermore it is actually a good deal more cautious than the US solution to the same problem: during the Cold War, we actually kept the security codes on all of the nuclear missiles set to an all-zeroes passcode, and everyone who worked with them knew it, so the humans who were in the launch bunkers had the capability to make the decision to launch at *any* time, whether there was evidence of a Soviet attack or not, and whether the lines of communication with the White House were compromised or not. I like the Soviet approach better. It provides better protection against a trigger-happy young officer in the launch bunker.
> You're right, nuclear weapons have kept us from getting > involved in another massive global shooting war. On the > other hand, they've allowed us to settle into a basically > constant series of low-level conflicts across the globe.
No, we always had that. Even during Pax Romana there were always low-level conflicts at the periphery. Always.
Yeah, but someone living in northeastern Ohio would probably need about ten *acres* of solar cells to meet the energy needs of an average household, unless you can provide enough batteries to store the summer excess to last all winter. (In the fall and winter, NEO can go *months* without direct sunlight, so your panels would be running on the diffused ambient light that filters down through the cloud cover, which is typically about half as bright as a normally-lit indoor room.)
> Economic Efficiency is a non-stable and non-quantifiable metric.
There are limits to how precisely it can be pinned down, but some arrangements are obviously more reasonable than others.
> In the real world, such calculations have 'proved' that > the United States doesn't need high speed cargo rail,
That conclusion is correct. The problem with any railroad is that it's only practical when huge amounts of cargo (or passengers for that matter) need to travel exactly the same route all the time. We do use it for things like taking coal to steel mills, but delivery speed doesn't matter there. A high-speed cargo rail would have VERY limited applicability in the United States. If you're from Europe or southern California, you might really have a sense of this until you drive across the Midwestern US in a car a couple of times. Put simply, only a small percentage of our cargo starts or stops at a major city.
> it just needs to keep subsidising the airlines.
That's a separate issue and not significantly related to the rail question. The airlines mostly handle passenger traffic and mail. Almost all cargo goes on eighteen-wheeled semi trucks, because they can deliver to any destination.
> It's 'proved' that shipping from say, Nice to Tuniz by truck, > through nations such as Lebanon, in time of war, is 'better' > than shipping straight across the sea by blimp.
Any kind of reasoning can fail of the person applying it fails to take important factors (such as war, for instance) into account. That's neither here nor there.
> NO consequence is bad enough to make you not take an offer, > IF the consequence occurs far enough in the future
That's a straw man, and not a particularly clever one. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever seriously argued in favor of doing anything that they knew would destroy their entire race a couple of centuries down the road. Nobody. Ever.
Economic efficiency *does* matter for solar cells, and ones that are cheaper to manufacture (for any given level of energy output) are better, and such research is important, because if the solar panels can pay for themselves in a year and continue producing energy for ten or twenty years, people *will* buy and install and use them; whereas, currently most people are not buying or installing or using them, because they don't produce enough energy to pay for themselves fast enough to cover the opportunity cost of whatever else people could buy with the same money.
I don't know whether these nanotubes will lead to the kind of solar cells that are really needed, or whether it's a blind alley. The researchers don't know that either. But in the absence of any knowledge of a *better* technology, it's worth exploring the possibility.
> Vista is the Zune of operating systems. >..except for having hundreds of millions of sales, you mean?
That's mostly because of the conditions Microsoft levies on OEMs. You have to officially *sell* Vista on all of the computers you sell (well, all the ones in the product line anyway) in order to be able to actually sell (the much more popular) Windows XP, on any of them.
And as a consumer, you have to officially buy Vista in order to get Windows XP. And the only (fully powered non-netbook) laptops I'm aware of that you can buy without officially buying Vista are MacBooks, which are only available in a fairly limited range of price and performance categories.
It's still a pretty strange analogy. I prefer the one my dentist (who is not an IT professional) gave me: Vista is the new Windows Me. Once the next version comes out, Vista will be pointedly forgotten.
> most criminals who are > caught (and yes, this is > most of them)
Just about all of them get caught at some point, because each time they *don't* get caught their mind subconsciously revises downward its estimate of the chances of getting caught and the need for caution. So naturally the longer they go without getting caught the more careless they become.
An intelligent criminal who is *aware* of this phenomenon can consciously resist it for a while, but eventually he'll start thinking he's *good* at being careful, and then he'll get cocky and careless. It's just human nature.
The only really reliable way to avoid getting caught is to never get started in the first place.
> maybe, it is very silly of us to expect a country with one of the lowest numbers of > computers per capita in the world to produce so many qualified computer engineers.
Per capita figures are almost totally irrelevant when you talk about India, because of the massive economic diversity in that country.
Try to imagine overlaying modern California with Sweden, Mexico, Afghanistan, Molvania, Iran, Nigeria, and ancient Gaul, all right on top of one another in the same geographical space, so that you've got Silicon Valley execs on their way to work driving right past entire extended families who can't afford a grass hut to huddle in, and every economic level in between, all living in close proximity to one another but not really intermixing, and they all think this is normal.
Yeah, it's a strange place.
You *think* there's economic diversity where you live, that some people are rich and others are poor, but on the whole the US is pretty economically smoothed out, compared to India. Sure, there's a small handful of multi-billionaires, but overwhelmingly most of the population is within a couple orders of magnitude of average. The poorest people have regular access to indoor plumbing and electrical power, and anyone who makes a seven-figure income is very well off. Compared to India, this is a fairly narrow range of economic situations.
So anyway, as I was saying, per capita averages don't really mean much in India, because the standard deviation is so high. A huge percentage of the population is nowhere near the average.
The more relevant questions would be whether the education system in India is capable of producing qualified computer engineers (I suspect so, but I don't really know) and, perhaps more to the point, whether the hiring managers at the places where you've worked have known how to effectively distinguish between qualified engineers and unqualified ones. Because while I suspect India produces some highly qualified people, I'm pretty sure they also have plenty of unqualified people.
> Winders is completely not designed to be used remotely... > Even their so-called 'server' versions.
Depends on available bandwidth. Remote Desktop works very well indeed over Fast Ethernet (100 megabits/second full duplex). We've got a Windows Server 2003 system at work that I use this way on a regular basis, and I've never noticed any problem. It's completely responsive, just like having the actual machine at your desk.
Granted, it's not ssh. You can use ssh over dialup.
> Or by more than one person at a time.
*That* depends on exactly how beefy your hardware is. Drop ten grand on a PowerEdge server that sounds like a jet plane when it starts up, and a couple of people can use it at once, no problem, even if one of you is running complex queries against SQL Server while the thing is also serving as an application server (and domain controller, and DNS server) for a dozen or so workstations *and* serving out a low-volume public website via IIS.
> They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, > no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion. > There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
That's an important, if unpleasant, thing to realize.
But there's more, and it's worse.
Sooner or later you figure out that you're actually one of them.
> Up until this very moment I have been under the misguided notion that the > nucleus of an atom was orbited by electrons within groups called "shells",
That model is close enough to still be useful, although there is much that it does not explain.
> and these worked very similarly to satellites around a planet.
No, that's been thoroughly discredited decades ago. A satellite in space has a specific known location within its orbit at any given point in time and moves predictably along an established trajectory, based on inherently-macroscopic physical properties like inertia. Subatomic phenomena absolutely don't do that, ever. For one thing, they don't have enough mass to have any significant inertia or gravity. Also, they're small enough that the close-range forces can have a relevant impact on their overall behavior.
> and that the "shells" model given to 16 year olds is (understandably) over-simplified.
All models are over-simplified. It's just a question of how *much* they're oversimplified, and in what ways.
Take, for example, the covalent and ionic models of molecular bonding. On the surface they seem to be contradictory, but that's because they're just models, and they're oversimplified in different ways. They are both useful because they both correctly describe *some* properties of molecular bonding, but neither model is entirely correct. Depending on the circumstances of a particular reaction, one or the other of them may seem to be more accurate. For example, the ionic bonding model is very good for describing what's going on in a solution of sodium chloride in water. The covalent model fails to describe some aspects of this material, perhaps most notably its electrolytic properties. On the other hand, the ionic bonding model does not adequately explain what's going on in large hydrocarbon chains, and the covalent model comes much closer. You can tell yourself, "well, the salt and water are ionic compounds and the dodecane is a covalent molecule", but all you're really saying is that one model does a better job of explaining the one substance, and the other substance is better explained by the other model. The truth is that the same basic forces are at work in both compounds. Both models are oversimplified, but in different ways that to a greater or lesser extent account (or fail to account) for different situations.
So yes, the orbital-shells model is oversimplified. For that matter, the "standard model" in particle physics is oversimplified. It's a model.
The tip of a human finger just doesn't have the same kind of resolution as a mouse (or trackball or any other modern pointing device you care to name, with the exception of the ones that come built into laptops, which are universally horrible, which is why most laptop owners carry a USB mouse around in the laptop bag).
Touchscreen works well for special-purpose applications that can be designed totally around a multiple-choice concept, like those greeting card kiosks at the mall, but for a general-purpose desktop, it's just not appropriate. A regular old five dollar mouse is significantly superior.
Apple makes touch work on some of their special devices (notably the iPhone) because they design the interface around it. If you only have twelve buttons on the screen at a time, you only need an effective resolution of one-third of the screen width and one-quarter of its height, which is achievable as long as the user doesn't have the thick callused fingers of a diabetic former factory worker (like, say, my dad).
But if the user were trying to do typical desktop tasks, like word processing for example, they'd be trying to do things like select text, and suddenly now the resolution needs to be fine enough to let the user select an individual word out of a screenful of type. With a mouse this is very easy -- it's designed to point at an individual pixel, so a large construct that takes up multiple pixels in each direction, like a nine-point character, is no problem at all. But it's not so easy with a touchscreen.
Some users also do things that actually push the limits of the resolution of a mouse. Image editing (pixels or spline control points, take your pick), font editing, certain kinds of games,... for these tasks, touchscreen would be no use whatsoever.
So even if you did have a touchscreen on your desktop, you'd still need a mouse as well. Whereas, if you have a mouse, you really don't need a touchscreen, because the mouse can do it all.
In other words, it's not in any way a photo of the orbitals in an individual atom. It's a collection of superimposed exposures produced by dozens of electrons given off by a number of atoms.
This makes sense to me. I don't think it will ever be possible to *actually* image individual subatomic phenomena (e.g., electrons), because subatomic phenomena don't have a specific shape and form like a macroscopic object does. We call them "particles" because it's traditional terminology, but they're *not* particles if by particles you mean "like little dust motes, only smaller".
Subatomic phenomena do not have the properties of macroscopic objects (shape, color, texture, hardness, etc), because the properties of macroscopic objects arise from the fact that they are composed of a particular arrangement of atoms and/or molecules.
There's an easier way. Easier to draw up the legislation, easier to implement, easier to maintain and administer, less administrative overhead, less hassle for all concerned, more difficult for individuals to effectively circumvent...
Yeah, so anyway, the easy way is to just put an excise tax on gas. Simple. Effective.
> I don't see how this is any different than the current situation with Flash.
You can just not bother to install Flash, or use FlashBlock if you prefer, and your web browsing experience is not harmed in any way. If the pointless gratuitously annoying stuff is built right into the browser, it'll be harder to avoid.
> First world nations tend to have negative population growth rates
Yes, but first-world nations generally don't have a big problem with starvation anyway. It was the other part of the world where the Green Revolution really had an impact. So I would say the low pop-growth rates in first-world nations aren't really very relevant to the question of whether the Green Revolution was a good thing. The high population growth rates in the third world are more to the point. The other poster was saying that since continual population growth would eventually max out the food production capacity anyway, the Green Revolution wasn't really beneficial. For the record, I do not endorse his reasoning; I'm only saying that your answer doesn't do a very good job of arguing the contrary position.
> Problem is, many people in these countries don't want GM seed. > So how many people are stepping up to the plate to donate > free organic seed to those who want it?
Umm, perhaps you should stop for a minute and go read the relevant history. You seem to be significantly confused about what did or did not take place. (Hint: the Green Revolution was mostly about educating farmers to quit killing the land with subsistence farming and do things like proper crop rotation. To the extent that seeds were distributed, it was to facilitate broader adoption of higher-yield crops and hardier cultivars thereof. I assure you, General Motors was not in any way involved.)
> Can they invent a car that pulls over, stops, kills the > engine, and locks the wheels/transmission and ignition for > 15 minutes when the driver gets too close to another car?
Heh. But the people with the greatest need for the technology would never willingly adopt it.
> Preferably with an alarm that cannot easily be shut off.
Oooh, can it play car dealership commercials for the whole fifteen minutes?
I suspect it'd be mostly paper and toner. (What, you think a court would accept something inherently electronic, like email, in electronic form? Haha.)
Slashdot Mirror
> And the human resources troll reading a paragraph like that doesn't see
> ACME-FOOLATOR 12.5 WITH MEGA-XML, and tosses your resume in the garbage.
So what? I wouldn't want to work for a company with an HR department that clueless. I've got better things to do with my time than put up with Catbert's schenanighans. I like to go home at night feeling like I've done something *worthwhile* at work, not just sat around playing company politics, attending pointless meetings, and leveraging inane buzzwords.
> Nothing can go wrong!
If you read the whole article, it really does seem like a safe and sane design. Among other things, even once it's activated it doesn't do squat unless communication with the Kremlin is lost *and* there is evidence of a nuclear strike, at the same time. Even then, the worst thing it ever does is turn control of the nukes over to the humans in the nuclear launch bunkers. Nothing gets launched unless a human makes the decision to launch.
In other words, the Dead Hand is in no way a "Doomsday Machine". It's a failsafe system to allow the military to continue to function if the top brass is wiped out by a nuclear strike.
Furthermore it is actually a good deal more cautious than the US solution to the same problem: during the Cold War, we actually kept the security codes on all of the nuclear missiles set to an all-zeroes passcode, and everyone who worked with them knew it, so the humans who were in the launch bunkers had the capability to make the decision to launch at *any* time, whether there was evidence of a Soviet attack or not, and whether the lines of communication with the White House were compromised or not. I like the Soviet approach better. It provides better protection against a trigger-happy young officer in the launch bunker.
> You're right, nuclear weapons have kept us from getting
> involved in another massive global shooting war. On the
> other hand, they've allowed us to settle into a basically
> constant series of low-level conflicts across the globe.
No, we always had that. Even during Pax Romana there were always low-level conflicts at the periphery. Always.
Yeah, but someone living in northeastern Ohio would probably need about ten *acres* of solar cells to meet the energy needs of an average household, unless you can provide enough batteries to store the summer excess to last all winter. (In the fall and winter, NEO can go *months* without direct sunlight, so your panels would be running on the diffused ambient light that filters down through the cloud cover, which is typically about half as bright as a normally-lit indoor room.)
> Economic Efficiency is a non-stable and non-quantifiable metric.
There are limits to how precisely it can be pinned down, but some arrangements are obviously more reasonable than others.
> In the real world, such calculations have 'proved' that
> the United States doesn't need high speed cargo rail,
That conclusion is correct. The problem with any railroad is that it's only practical when huge amounts of cargo (or passengers for that matter) need to travel exactly the same route all the time. We do use it for things like taking coal to steel mills, but delivery speed doesn't matter there. A high-speed cargo rail would have VERY limited applicability in the United States. If you're from Europe or southern California, you might really have a sense of this until you drive across the Midwestern US in a car a couple of times. Put simply, only a small percentage of our cargo starts or stops at a major city.
> it just needs to keep subsidising the airlines.
That's a separate issue and not significantly related to the rail question. The airlines mostly handle passenger traffic and mail. Almost all cargo goes on eighteen-wheeled semi trucks, because they can deliver to any destination.
> It's 'proved' that shipping from say, Nice to Tuniz by truck,
> through nations such as Lebanon, in time of war, is 'better'
> than shipping straight across the sea by blimp.
Any kind of reasoning can fail of the person applying it fails to take important factors (such as war, for instance) into account. That's neither here nor there.
> NO consequence is bad enough to make you not take an offer,
> IF the consequence occurs far enough in the future
That's a straw man, and not a particularly clever one. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever seriously argued in favor of doing anything that they knew would destroy their entire race a couple of centuries down the road. Nobody. Ever.
Economic efficiency *does* matter for solar cells, and ones that are cheaper to manufacture (for any given level of energy output) are better, and such research is important, because if the solar panels can pay for themselves in a year and continue producing energy for ten or twenty years, people *will* buy and install and use them; whereas, currently most people are not buying or installing or using them, because they don't produce enough energy to pay for themselves fast enough to cover the opportunity cost of whatever else people could buy with the same money.
I don't know whether these nanotubes will lead to the kind of solar cells that are really needed, or whether it's a blind alley. The researchers don't know that either. But in the absence of any knowledge of a *better* technology, it's worth exploring the possibility.
> Vista is the Zune of operating systems. ..except for having hundreds of millions of sales, you mean?
>
That's mostly because of the conditions Microsoft levies on OEMs. You have to officially *sell* Vista on all of the computers you sell (well, all the ones in the product line anyway) in order to be able to actually sell (the much more popular) Windows XP, on any of them.
And as a consumer, you have to officially buy Vista in order to get Windows XP. And the only (fully powered non-netbook) laptops I'm aware of that you can buy without officially buying Vista are MacBooks, which are only available in a fairly limited range of price and performance categories.
It's still a pretty strange analogy. I prefer the one my dentist (who is not an IT professional) gave me: Vista is the new Windows Me. Once the next version comes out, Vista will be pointedly forgotten.
I think you're off by at least six years. Poop jokes are inherently hilarious to most twelve-year-old boys, unless I am gravely mistaken. HTH.HAND.
> most criminals who are
> caught (and yes, this is
> most of them)
Just about all of them get caught at some point, because each time they *don't* get caught their mind subconsciously revises downward its estimate of the chances of getting caught and the need for caution. So naturally the longer they go without getting caught the more careless they become.
An intelligent criminal who is *aware* of this phenomenon can consciously resist it for a while, but eventually he'll start thinking he's *good* at being careful, and then he'll get cocky and careless. It's just human nature.
The only really reliable way to avoid getting caught is to never get started in the first place.
> maybe, it is very silly of us to expect a country with one of the lowest numbers of
> computers per capita in the world to produce so many qualified computer engineers.
Per capita figures are almost totally irrelevant when you talk about India, because of the massive economic diversity in that country.
Try to imagine overlaying modern California with Sweden, Mexico, Afghanistan, Molvania, Iran, Nigeria, and ancient Gaul, all right on top of one another in the same geographical space, so that you've got Silicon Valley execs on their way to work driving right past entire extended families who can't afford a grass hut to huddle in, and every economic level in between, all living in close proximity to one another but not really intermixing, and they all think this is normal.
Yeah, it's a strange place.
You *think* there's economic diversity where you live, that some people are rich and others are poor, but on the whole the US is pretty economically smoothed out, compared to India. Sure, there's a small handful of multi-billionaires, but overwhelmingly most of the population is within a couple orders of magnitude of average. The poorest people have regular access to indoor plumbing and electrical power, and anyone who makes a seven-figure income is very well off. Compared to India, this is a fairly narrow range of economic situations.
So anyway, as I was saying, per capita averages don't really mean much in India, because the standard deviation is so high. A huge percentage of the population is nowhere near the average.
The more relevant questions would be whether the education system in India is capable of producing qualified computer engineers (I suspect so, but I don't really know) and, perhaps more to the point, whether the hiring managers at the places where you've worked have known how to effectively distinguish between qualified engineers and unqualified ones. Because while I suspect India produces some highly qualified people, I'm pretty sure they also have plenty of unqualified people.
> Winders is completely not designed to be used remotely...
> Even their so-called 'server' versions.
Depends on available bandwidth. Remote Desktop works very well indeed over Fast Ethernet (100 megabits/second full duplex). We've got a Windows Server 2003 system at work that I use this way on a regular basis, and I've never noticed any problem. It's completely responsive, just like having the actual machine at your desk.
Granted, it's not ssh. You can use ssh over dialup.
> Or by more than one person at a time.
*That* depends on exactly how beefy your hardware is. Drop ten grand on a PowerEdge server that sounds like a jet plane when it starts up, and a couple of people can use it at once, no problem, even if one of you is running complex queries against SQL Server while the thing is also serving as an application server (and domain controller, and DNS server) for a dozen or so workstations *and* serving out a low-volume public website via IIS.
> They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience,
> no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.
> There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
That's an important, if unpleasant, thing to realize.
But there's more, and it's worse.
Sooner or later you figure out that you're actually one of them.
> an idealist might say [morals and ethics] could one day stop things such as war.
An idealist might say that, if he were, in addition to being an idealist, also incredibly naive.
Paranoia is a basic job requirement for security people.
> Everything down to the component level is produced there. If they
> wanted to bug them they could do it at any point during manufacture.
It wouldn't be cost effective to bug all of the computers made, and then who would analyze all of the data? It's a self-defeating proposition.
On the other hand, a chance to plant a bug in one particular device that is known to belong to a strategically *important* person, that's different.
> Up until this very moment I have been under the misguided notion that the
> nucleus of an atom was orbited by electrons within groups called "shells",
That model is close enough to still be useful, although there is much that it does not explain.
> and these worked very similarly to satellites around a planet.
No, that's been thoroughly discredited decades ago. A satellite in space has a specific known location within its orbit at any given point in time and moves predictably along an established trajectory, based on inherently-macroscopic physical properties like inertia. Subatomic phenomena absolutely don't do that, ever. For one thing, they don't have enough mass to have any significant inertia or gravity. Also, they're small enough that the close-range forces can have a relevant impact on their overall behavior.
> and that the "shells" model given to 16 year olds is (understandably) over-simplified.
All models are over-simplified. It's just a question of how *much* they're oversimplified, and in what ways.
Take, for example, the covalent and ionic models of molecular bonding. On the surface they seem to be contradictory, but that's because they're just models, and they're oversimplified in different ways. They are both useful because they both correctly describe *some* properties of molecular bonding, but neither model is entirely correct. Depending on the circumstances of a particular reaction, one or the other of them may seem to be more accurate. For example, the ionic bonding model is very good for describing what's going on in a solution of sodium chloride in water. The covalent model fails to describe some aspects of this material, perhaps most notably its electrolytic properties. On the other hand, the ionic bonding model does not adequately explain what's going on in large hydrocarbon chains, and the covalent model comes much closer. You can tell yourself, "well, the salt and water are ionic compounds and the dodecane is a covalent molecule", but all you're really saying is that one model does a better job of explaining the one substance, and the other substance is better explained by the other model. The truth is that the same basic forces are at work in both compounds. Both models are oversimplified, but in different ways that to a greater or lesser extent account (or fail to account) for different situations.
So yes, the orbital-shells model is oversimplified. For that matter, the "standard model" in particle physics is oversimplified. It's a model.
The tip of a human finger just doesn't have the same kind of resolution as a mouse (or trackball or any other modern pointing device you care to name, with the exception of the ones that come built into laptops, which are universally horrible, which is why most laptop owners carry a USB mouse around in the laptop bag).
... for these tasks, touchscreen would be no use whatsoever.
Touchscreen works well for special-purpose applications that can be designed totally around a multiple-choice concept, like those greeting card kiosks at the mall, but for a general-purpose desktop, it's just not appropriate. A regular old five dollar mouse is significantly superior.
Apple makes touch work on some of their special devices (notably the iPhone) because they design the interface around it. If you only have twelve buttons on the screen at a time, you only need an effective resolution of one-third of the screen width and one-quarter of its height, which is achievable as long as the user doesn't have the thick callused fingers of a diabetic former factory worker (like, say, my dad).
But if the user were trying to do typical desktop tasks, like word processing for example, they'd be trying to do things like select text, and suddenly now the resolution needs to be fine enough to let the user select an individual word out of a screenful of type. With a mouse this is very easy -- it's designed to point at an individual pixel, so a large construct that takes up multiple pixels in each direction, like a nine-point character, is no problem at all. But it's not so easy with a touchscreen.
Some users also do things that actually push the limits of the resolution of a mouse. Image editing (pixels or spline control points, take your pick), font editing, certain kinds of games,
So even if you did have a touchscreen on your desktop, you'd still need a mouse as well. Whereas, if you have a mouse, you really don't need a touchscreen, because the mouse can do it all.
In other words, it's not in any way a photo of the orbitals in an individual atom. It's a collection of superimposed exposures produced by dozens of electrons given off by a number of atoms.
This makes sense to me. I don't think it will ever be possible to *actually* image individual subatomic phenomena (e.g., electrons), because subatomic phenomena don't have a specific shape and form like a macroscopic object does. We call them "particles" because it's traditional terminology, but they're *not* particles if by particles you mean "like little dust motes, only smaller".
Subatomic phenomena do not have the properties of macroscopic objects (shape, color, texture, hardness, etc), because the properties of macroscopic objects arise from the fact that they are composed of a particular arrangement of atoms and/or molecules.
Yeah, and everyone knows electrons are yellow, not blue.
There's an easier way. Easier to draw up the legislation, easier to implement, easier to maintain and administer, less administrative overhead, less hassle for all concerned, more difficult for individuals to effectively circumvent...
Yeah, so anyway, the easy way is to just put an excise tax on gas. Simple. Effective.
> I don't see how this is any different than the current situation with Flash.
You can just not bother to install Flash, or use FlashBlock if you prefer, and your web browsing experience is not harmed in any way. If the pointless gratuitously annoying stuff is built right into the browser, it'll be harder to avoid.
> First world nations tend to have negative population growth rates
Yes, but first-world nations generally don't have a big problem with starvation anyway. It was the other part of the world where the Green Revolution really had an impact. So I would say the low pop-growth rates in first-world nations aren't really very relevant to the question of whether the Green Revolution was a good thing. The high population growth rates in the third world are more to the point. The other poster was saying that since continual population growth would eventually max out the food production capacity anyway, the Green Revolution wasn't really beneficial. For the record, I do not endorse his reasoning; I'm only saying that your answer doesn't do a very good job of arguing the contrary position.
> Problem is, many people in these countries don't want GM seed.
> So how many people are stepping up to the plate to donate
> free organic seed to those who want it?
Umm, perhaps you should stop for a minute and go read the relevant history. You seem to be significantly confused about what did or did not take place. (Hint: the Green Revolution was mostly about educating farmers to quit killing the land with subsistence farming and do things like proper crop rotation. To the extent that seeds were distributed, it was to facilitate broader adoption of higher-yield crops and hardier cultivars thereof. I assure you, General Motors was not in any way involved.)
> Can they invent a car that pulls over, stops, kills the
> engine, and locks the wheels/transmission and ignition for
> 15 minutes when the driver gets too close to another car?
Heh. But the people with the greatest need for the technology would never willingly adopt it.
> Preferably with an alarm that cannot easily be shut off.
Oooh, can it play car dealership commercials for the whole fifteen minutes?
> Imperial or US gallons?
17 mpg is abysmal either way, especially for a sedan.
I suspect it'd be mostly paper and toner. (What, you think a court would accept something inherently electronic, like email, in electronic form? Haha.)