Whenever you read an article talking about storing lots of energy in capacitors and involves the application of vortices, it's a pretty good indication that you're looking at something published by a crackpot. This is usually the same type of person who believes that perpetual motion *is* possible if only you could just break the 100% efficiency barrier. When an article goes on to talk about how the government doesn't want this device to work because they're protecting another industry, your bullshit spider sense has got to start tingling.
I'm not claiming that I'm an expert in fusion, but I don't believe for one second that the 'plasmoid' or whatever torroidial structure appears at the end of tube can be self-sustaining, let alone generate power.
We've got the laws of thermodynamics for a reason. Let's not forget them when faced with the temptation of limitless power.
All in all, I think Homer Simpson said it best: "you're living in a land of make believe, with elves and fairies and little frogs with funny green hats!"
This was the last straw for me. I've spent so much money on faulty Microsoft software over the last ten years, and now they're going to treat me like a criminal.
A hypothesis. They have not seen it actually occur or any stages of it occuring.
It's not so much a hypothesis as it is supporting evidence for evolution. Evolution makes the hypothesis that a complex structure like the eye can't come from nowhere, and since there are a bunch of animals with eyes out there, that there's probably a common ancestry.
What the researchers have found is that an organism that essentially stopped evolving a long time ago has photosensitive areas (read: extremely primitive eyes) that use extremely similar molecules as our eyes. This doesn't lead to any new hypothesis, but it does support the hypothesis that eyes evolved.
It's very similar to looking at the similar genetics and body chemistry of apes. Any animal that is 1% different from us is probably very closely related.
Finally, science never 'proves' anything. There's lots of supporting evidence for things like relativity, evolution, quantum physics, etc., but they've never been (and can never be) proven to be true. They work very well right now, but there may be a theory or method that comes along to usurp them (much like relativity usurped Newtonian physics in describing motion).
the choice between the two is an entirely arbitrary act of faith.
That's not entirely true. There is a great deal of evidence supporting science. For example, no matter what you happen to believe, the speed of light is a measured constant - even if the bible were to say otherwise.
The biggest difference between science and religion is that science is designed to be disproven while religion forces you to make the a priori assumption that everything it says is true.
This items made me recall a science film we watched when I was in grade 8. It was all about chromosomes.
There was an actor playing a typical I-don't-care-about-no-science-so- long-as-my-tractor-runs-right yokel who, as the 'scientist' (read: guy in a lab coat) noted that the fruit fly has five chromosomes and humans have 23, remarked "well, that's because people are the most advanced creatures on the planet."
The look on his face was priceless when he found out that potatoes have over forty.
People who watch The Daily Show did better on a quiz about their political knowledge than people who watch any of the cable news shows - FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc.
Doesn't that mean he's doing his duty to inform people?
The Daily Show is very much like School House Rock for politics - it presents the subject matter in a fun/funny way, and it seems to stick to people much more readily than the real news.
I really don't think there's much difference once you get over 2 megapixels though
2.0 megapixels may be fine for you, but if you want enlarged colour prints, good luck.
And that's not really the point of this (extremely brief) article anyhow - it's not the number of pixels you have so much as how you use them (or what physical size within the camear they happen to be).
The removal of leaded gasoline helped destroy detroit and the american manufacturing base. So, yeah, we are breathing cleaner air, and saving the lives of a few thousand people for it, but, the price has been that millions of people had their lives destroyed because the retooling required to make engines that effectively run on leadless gasoline helped undermine american manufacturing sovereignty.
The only thing that "destroyed Detroit" was competition from foreign (notably Japanese) car manufacturers. It was the completely inbred "we are the best car companies in the world because we are American car companies" mentality that made the car industry lethargic and slow to respond to market factors (such as the energy crisis in the 1970s).
The only thing that cost American auto workers their jobs was the industry push to cheap foreign (ie. Mexican) labour.
The auto industry got its first real wakeup call in the 1970s with the energy crisis, and they have responded by introducing cheap-ass cars (ie. the pinto) and cars that are less energy-efficient (ie. SUVs) than their foreign competition. This is not a very effective strategy, if you ask me. The problem with the auto industry is a lack of invention and innovation, and this is not related to the elimination of leaded gasoline whatsoever.
This is a problem with American industry in general - they are unwilling to fundamentally change the way they do business because they feel some privilege in knowing that they are American industry (and that the government will bail them out if things get really tough). And the public is not pushing them to change, either. Many decry the loss of American jobs to cheap foreign labour, but they are unwilling to accept a lower minimum wage, and they will not push for a global minimum wage equivalent to their own because they're not willing to buy more expensive goods. It's quite the paradox.
Had Richard Nixon not founded the EPA, we might have actually had avoided the destruction of the American middle class. So, yeah, you can science is an absolute, lead is clearly bad. But, relentlessly implementing without a sober examination of the actual cost of doing so is simply, um, bad science. Why not have a cost benefit breakdown for environmental legislation - isn't that, um, scientific?
I just love it when people see the EPA as a massive anti-industry group. Compared to other countries (Germany, for example) the EPA is about as effective as a fly trying to take down an elephant. To the best of my knowledge, complying with EPA directives has never done any significant damage to a company's bottom line (unless there were some company called "Illegal Toxic Wast Dumping 'R Us" or something), and their actions have made America a cleaner, safer place to live. This has boosted the general health of the population, which is equivalent to a more productive work force and a reduced strain on the medical system.
Relentless implementation without sober examination is really bad politics, not bad science (just look at Bush's tax cut - has nothing to do with science at all). The removal of lead from gasoline didn't happen overnight, either. It took years and years of political wrangling and defeating bad industry studies to give everyone involved the impression that filling the environment with all the extra lead was *very* bad for people.
The removal of lead from gasoline did not kill the American auto industry - it merely placed a small constraint on their future manufacturing, namely that their engines should work with unleaded fuel. Telling an industry that their products have to be marginally better has never hurt anyone. Were the government to mandate that all vehicles had to get 50MPG, it would be unreasonable as the technology to implement that requirement is unstested and under developed. But clearly making car engines that burn lead-free gas was a fairly easy tweak, as we're all driving them today (and have been for many years).
Um, Galileo was considered a heretic not because he was a scientist, but because he couldn't back a lot of his own claims up, and, because he also called the Pope an idiot.
Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the history of science knows that the reasons for Galileo's house arrest were complex. He did not believe that the Pope, who had been his friend, would let him fall to the inquisition. And for proof, all he needed to show were the moons of Jupiter that his discovered (and named after the Medici family - his patrons).
Similarly, much ado is made of how Copernicus had to "fight the power" of the church because he dared to propose the earth went around sun, but in reality tables produced from Copernicus's circular orbits were less accurate than their Ptolemiac predecessors.
Copernicus never fought the power. His book wasn't published until after his death.
The other thing that people forget is that science is a tool, not a means to an end. Science teaches us how to make things and how to better exploit the world around us. To say that there is an innate value system built around science is absurd. At the end of the day, there's little difference between Martha Stewart teaching how to put little curly cues on a cake, and a scientist teaching how to make an atom split. It's just an exotic Home Depot, and nothing more. As such, science must always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will.
Science may be a tool, but it is a tool for understanding ourselves, the world around us, and the universe at large. And it does have a value system - it is simply that the truth will prevail through peer review.
To say that it teaches us how to better exploit the world is also a misnomer. It teaches us how things work - the exploitation comes in the hands of technologists and engineers who apply the knowlege.
Calling science an "exotic Home Depot" is absurd. Science does not build tools, it builds knowledge. It's more akin to the best-stocked library in the world than a home improvement store.
Saying that science must "always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will" is ludicrous. Before important work by scientists, it was believed that tetrahedral lead was a perfectly innocuous additive to gasoline. The popular will wanted cheap gas that didn't make their car engines knock, and the political will was to keep the lead and oil companies happy by sweeping study after study pointing out the harmful effects of lead under the rug. It was only by the prolonged actions of scientists (and yes [gasp] environmentalists) that we are now breathing much less-toxic air. Politicians love nothing more than to protect the status quo (and prove that their opposition is a bunch of lying dogs even though they support nearly the same issues, but I digress), and the people are happiest when they're ignorant. It may be an unenviable task, but until the people and the government become interested in the truth, it will be up to scientists to push their ideas as hard as they can.
It must always tell the truth, to be sure, but we are under no obligation to abide by it or accept that what it teaches is useful or even valuable.
(I find it kind of ironic that you hold science to the standard of always telling the truth, but you don't put the same qualifications on politicians or the "popular will.")
We must, by definition, abide by the truth. If we did not accept Copernicus and Kepler's truth about how the planets really moved, or if we didn't accept Newton's laws, space travel would be impossible. Ignoring the truth does not make it go away, and is usually much more painful than just accepting it in the long run.
Finally, knowledge is always valuable. Let us not forget that knowledge = power.
Um, we got to the Moon in 7 years last time and that was with vacuum tubes. Don't you think we could build the telescope during that ramp up time too?
No. We can't. Space travel is just as expensive as it was when the Saturn V rockets where the hippest thing on the block. The truth is that missions to the moon would not be that much more advanced than they were thirty years ago. They *would* probably replace the vacuum tubes with CMOS-based logic circuitry, and some of the materials would be more advanced, but that's about it. I'd put money on the boondogle, sorry Moon Base, getting nuclear weapons before it gets a Hubble-quality telescope.
Faster, Better, Cheaper? Pick two and toss out one. We all know that low cost and space are desirable, the only problem is that low cost and government aint gonna happen. By its nature government views the spending as a positive. Hell, government will spend the saving on something else. Its all pointless. I say spend more for less is probably the best solution:)
That's not wholly true. Take the example of the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario). They turn a profit, and as one of the largest purchasers of liquor and wine in the world, provide booze for the citizens of Ontario at a price that is at least 15-20% lower than it would be with free maret distributors.
any technology that allows for people to protect their privacy within reason should be allowed and accepted.
But cellphone jamming won't prevent people from taking pictures of you with their phones and transmitting them later, or recording what you say in a voice memo. Cellphone jamming isn't about privacy - it's about putting the offensive cellphone talker in the same league with the chain smoker. If they need to partake in their addiction, they're more than welcome to do so outside. If you want privacy from personal communication devices, build a HERF gun.
On another note, I didn't think that jamming CDMA was possible at such low power. I can understand that GSM (which uses one channel) would be a fairly easy to jam by transmitting noise on the channel, but CDMA uses multiple channels, and the signal gets integrated over time, so random noise should have a nearly negligible effect. I'd imagine that any device that tries to block all of these channels would need to be more powerful and thus far larger and more expensive than its GSM counterpart.
For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
It's not really that the "best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe." They just believed in the common dogma that Aristotle and Plato had observed the absolute truth in their writings. It wasn't until Kepler and Galileo that the geocentric universe was seriously challenged.
Don't blame science for those 2000 years of dogmatic thinking, blame everyone for trusting absolutely the writing of two really old greek guys.
The point I was trying to make was where private companies have taken over previously public institutions, there has not been the success foreseen by the original poster.
I agree that basing arguments on the work on Michael Moore can be dangerous, but I don't think his characterization of Americans as paranoid gun nuts was too far off the mark.
%gt;I was just thinking, what happened to the space program is a classic example of why it's better for things to be privatized.
You've seen Bowling for Columbine, right? The private welfare thing seems to work *really* well. Don't forget that private companies are rarely, if ever, altrusitic. They have no morality - no sense of common good. They serve only to turn a profit for their shareholders/owners. The pure science that the Hubble facilitates is not usually profitable (what good does it do GM to know the true age of the universe?) and thus unfundable by private companies. You could argue that if scientists/organizations were charged enough, such a telescope could be profitable, but I highly doubt it.
>it becomes an entrenched bureauocracy (sic)... The moon race isn't the only example
The moon race was typical, American posturing in action. And if it did become an "entrenched bureaucracy," why aren't we still sending people there?
>public education
Yeah, it's always been a bad idea to give away an education. It's not like technology (developed by people with free public educations) has been the one thing that really drove the US to the top of the heap.
It would have been really nice if they gave some stress/strain data for these things. From the article you can't tell whether they're stretching the metal using a 10N or 1000KN force.
> Once the show has been aired, what do they care if I watch the commercials or not?
The cable and satellite companies don't care whether you're watching ads or not, but the advertisers definitely do. If PVRs were present in the vast majority of viewers' homes, it would be reasonable for the advertisers to assume that a good number of their ads were not being watched. Consequently, they wouldn't be willing to pay the same advertising fee, and the bottom would drop out of this very important revenue stream for the broadcasters.
What bothers me more is Gary Lauder's assumption that the privilege of watching television comes with the responsibility of viewing every single banal advertisement on television ("I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped...").
I realize that advertising provides the cash to make the programming we cherish (Amazing Race, Enterprise, etc.), but advertisers don't have the right to make truly horrible ads (like every car or shampoo ad ever) and force them down our throats.
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Covalent bonds are a completely different thing. They're the bonds between atoms, not the energy that holds individual atoms together.
Bullshit!
Whenever you read an article talking about storing lots of energy in capacitors and involves the application of vortices, it's a pretty good indication that you're looking at something published by a crackpot. This is usually the same type of person who believes that perpetual motion *is* possible if only you could just break the 100% efficiency barrier. When an article goes on to talk about how the government doesn't want this device to work because they're protecting another industry, your bullshit spider sense has got to start tingling.
I'm not claiming that I'm an expert in fusion, but I don't believe for one second that the 'plasmoid' or whatever torroidial structure appears at the end of tube can be self-sustaining, let alone generate power.
We've got the laws of thermodynamics for a reason. Let's not forget them when faced with the temptation of limitless power.
All in all, I think Homer Simpson said it best: "you're living in a land of make believe, with elves and fairies and little frogs with funny green hats!"
This was the last straw for me. I've spent so much money on faulty Microsoft software over the last ten years, and now they're going to treat me like a criminal.
I'm ordering a Power Mac as soon as I get home.
Just pull the plug.
A hypothesis. They have not seen it actually occur or any stages of it occuring.
It's not so much a hypothesis as it is supporting evidence for evolution. Evolution makes the hypothesis that a complex structure like the eye can't come from nowhere, and since there are a bunch of animals with eyes out there, that there's probably a common ancestry.
What the researchers have found is that an organism that essentially stopped evolving a long time ago has photosensitive areas (read: extremely primitive eyes) that use extremely similar molecules as our eyes. This doesn't lead to any new hypothesis, but it does support the hypothesis that eyes evolved.
It's very similar to looking at the similar genetics and body chemistry of apes. Any animal that is 1% different from us is probably very closely related.
Finally, science never 'proves' anything. There's lots of supporting evidence for things like relativity, evolution, quantum physics, etc., but they've never been (and can never be) proven to be true. They work very well right now, but there may be a theory or method that comes along to usurp them (much like relativity usurped Newtonian physics in describing motion).
the choice between the two is an entirely arbitrary act of faith.
That's not entirely true. There is a great deal of evidence supporting science. For example, no matter what you happen to believe, the speed of light is a measured constant - even if the bible were to say otherwise.
The biggest difference between science and religion is that science is designed to be disproven while religion forces you to make the a priori assumption that everything it says is true.
Whenever one of my hookups asks me how big I am, I just say "I've never had any complaints."
:)
Then I whisper "but that's probably because I'm huge."
Never fails.
This items made me recall a science film we watched when I was in grade 8. It was all about chromosomes.
There was an actor playing a typical I-don't-care-about-no-science-so- long-as-my-tractor-runs-right yokel who, as the 'scientist' (read: guy in a lab coat) noted that the fruit fly has five chromosomes and humans have 23, remarked "well, that's because people are the most advanced creatures on the planet."
The look on his face was priceless when he found out that potatoes have over forty.
People who watch The Daily Show did better on a quiz about their political knowledge than people who watch any of the cable news shows - FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc.
Doesn't that mean he's doing his duty to inform people?
The Daily Show is very much like School House Rock for politics - it presents the subject matter in a fun/funny way, and it seems to stick to people much more readily than the real news.
I really don't think there's much difference once you get over 2 megapixels though
2.0 megapixels may be fine for you, but if you want enlarged colour prints, good luck.
And that's not really the point of this (extremely brief) article anyhow - it's not the number of pixels you have so much as how you use them (or what physical size within the camear they happen to be).
The removal of leaded gasoline helped destroy detroit and the american manufacturing base. So, yeah, we are breathing cleaner air, and saving the lives of a few thousand people for it, but, the price has been that millions of people had their lives destroyed because the retooling required to make engines that effectively run on leadless gasoline helped undermine american manufacturing sovereignty.
The only thing that "destroyed Detroit" was competition from foreign (notably Japanese) car manufacturers. It was the completely inbred "we are the best car companies in the world because we are American car companies" mentality that made the car industry lethargic and slow to respond to market factors (such as the energy crisis in the 1970s).
The only thing that cost American auto workers their jobs was the industry push to cheap foreign (ie. Mexican) labour.
The auto industry got its first real wakeup call in the 1970s with the energy crisis, and they have responded by introducing cheap-ass cars (ie. the pinto) and cars that are less energy-efficient (ie. SUVs) than their foreign competition. This is not a very effective strategy, if you ask me. The problem with the auto industry is a lack of invention and innovation, and this is not related to the elimination of leaded gasoline whatsoever.
This is a problem with American industry in general - they are unwilling to fundamentally change the way they do business because they feel some privilege in knowing that they are American industry (and that the government will bail them out if things get really tough). And the public is not pushing them to change, either. Many decry the loss of American jobs to cheap foreign labour, but they are unwilling to accept a lower minimum wage, and they will not push for a global minimum wage equivalent to their own because they're not willing to buy more expensive goods. It's quite the paradox.
Had Richard Nixon not founded the EPA, we might have actually had avoided the destruction of the American middle class. So, yeah, you can science is an absolute, lead is clearly bad. But, relentlessly implementing without a sober examination of the actual cost of doing so is simply, um, bad science. Why not have a cost benefit breakdown for environmental legislation - isn't that, um, scientific?
I just love it when people see the EPA as a massive anti-industry group. Compared to other countries (Germany, for example) the EPA is about as effective as a fly trying to take down an elephant. To the best of my knowledge, complying with EPA directives has never done any significant damage to a company's bottom line (unless there were some company called "Illegal Toxic Wast Dumping 'R Us" or something), and their actions have made America a cleaner, safer place to live. This has boosted the general health of the population, which is equivalent to a more productive work force and a reduced strain on the medical system.
Relentless implementation without sober examination is really bad politics, not bad science (just look at Bush's tax cut - has nothing to do with science at all). The removal of lead from gasoline didn't happen overnight, either. It took years and years of political wrangling and defeating bad industry studies to give everyone involved the impression that filling the environment with all the extra lead was *very* bad for people.
The removal of lead from gasoline did not kill the American auto industry - it merely placed a small constraint on their future manufacturing, namely that their engines should work with unleaded fuel. Telling an industry that their products have to be marginally better has never hurt anyone. Were the government to mandate that all vehicles had to get 50MPG, it would be unreasonable as the technology to implement that requirement is unstested and under developed. But clearly making car engines that burn lead-free gas was a fairly easy tweak, as we're all driving them today (and have been for many years).
Um, Galileo was considered a heretic not because he was a scientist, but because he couldn't back a lot of his own claims up, and, because he also called the Pope an idiot.
Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the history of science knows that the reasons for Galileo's house arrest were complex. He did not believe that the Pope, who had been his friend, would let him fall to the inquisition. And for proof, all he needed to show were the moons of Jupiter that his discovered (and named after the Medici family - his patrons).
Similarly, much ado is made of how Copernicus had to "fight the power" of the church because he dared to propose the earth went around sun, but in reality tables produced from Copernicus's circular orbits were less accurate than their Ptolemiac predecessors.
Copernicus never fought the power. His book wasn't published until after his death.
The other thing that people forget is that science is a tool, not a means to an end. Science teaches us how to make things and how to better exploit the world around us. To say that there is an innate value system built around science is absurd. At the end of the day, there's little difference between Martha Stewart teaching how to put little curly cues on a cake, and a scientist teaching how to make an atom split. It's just an exotic Home Depot, and nothing more. As such, science must always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will.
Science may be a tool, but it is a tool for understanding ourselves, the world around us, and the universe at large. And it does have a value system - it is simply that the truth will prevail through peer review.
To say that it teaches us how to better exploit the world is also a misnomer. It teaches us how things work - the exploitation comes in the hands of technologists and engineers who apply the knowlege.
Calling science an "exotic Home Depot" is absurd. Science does not build tools, it builds knowledge. It's more akin to the best-stocked library in the world than a home improvement store.
Saying that science must "always take a back seat to political considerations and the popular will" is ludicrous. Before important work by scientists, it was believed that tetrahedral lead was a perfectly innocuous additive to gasoline. The popular will wanted cheap gas that didn't make their car engines knock, and the political will was to keep the lead and oil companies happy by sweeping study after study pointing out the harmful effects of lead under the rug. It was only by the prolonged actions of scientists (and yes [gasp] environmentalists) that we are now breathing much less-toxic air. Politicians love nothing more than to protect the status quo (and prove that their opposition is a bunch of lying dogs even though they support nearly the same issues, but I digress), and the people are happiest when they're ignorant. It may be an unenviable task, but until the people and the government become interested in the truth, it will be up to scientists to push their ideas as hard as they can.
It must always tell the truth, to be sure, but we are under no obligation to abide by it or accept that what it teaches is useful or even valuable.
(I find it kind of ironic that you hold science to the standard of always telling the truth, but you don't put the same qualifications on politicians or the "popular will.")
We must, by definition, abide by the truth. If we did not accept Copernicus and Kepler's truth about how the planets really moved, or if we didn't accept Newton's laws, space travel would be impossible. Ignoring the truth does not make it go away, and is usually much more painful than just accepting it in the long run.
Finally, knowledge is always valuable. Let us not forget that knowledge = power.
Um, we got to the Moon in 7 years last time and that was with vacuum tubes. Don't you think we could build the telescope during that ramp up time too?
No. We can't. Space travel is just as expensive as it was when the Saturn V rockets where the hippest thing on the block. The truth is that missions to the moon would not be that much more advanced than they were thirty years ago. They *would* probably replace the vacuum tubes with CMOS-based logic circuitry, and some of the materials would be more advanced, but that's about it. I'd put money on the boondogle, sorry Moon Base, getting nuclear weapons before it gets a Hubble-quality telescope.
Faster, Better, Cheaper? Pick two and toss out one. We all know that low cost and space are desirable, the only problem is that low cost and government aint gonna happen. By its nature government views the spending as a positive. Hell, government will spend the saving on something else. Its all pointless. I say spend more for less is probably the best solution :)
That's not wholly true. Take the example of the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario). They turn a profit, and as one of the largest purchasers of liquor and wine in the world, provide booze for the citizens of Ontario at a price that is at least 15-20% lower than it would be with free maret distributors.
any technology that allows for people to protect their privacy within reason should be allowed and accepted.
But cellphone jamming won't prevent people from taking pictures of you with their phones and transmitting them later, or recording what you say in a voice memo. Cellphone jamming isn't about privacy - it's about putting the offensive cellphone talker in the same league with the chain smoker. If they need to partake in their addiction, they're more than welcome to do so outside. If you want privacy from personal communication devices, build a HERF gun.
On another note, I didn't think that jamming CDMA was possible at such low power. I can understand that GSM (which uses one channel) would be a fairly easy to jam by transmitting noise on the channel, but CDMA uses multiple channels, and the signal gets integrated over time, so random noise should have a nearly negligible effect. I'd imagine that any device that tries to block all of these channels would need to be more powerful and thus far larger and more expensive than its GSM counterpart.
For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
It's not really that the "best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe." They just believed in the common dogma that Aristotle and Plato had observed the absolute truth in their writings. It wasn't until Kepler and Galileo that the geocentric universe was seriously challenged.
Don't blame science for those 2000 years of dogmatic thinking, blame everyone for trusting absolutely the writing of two really old greek guys.
The point I was trying to make was where private companies have taken over previously public institutions, there has not been the success foreseen by the original poster.
I agree that basing arguments on the work on Michael Moore can be dangerous, but I don't think his characterization of Americans as paranoid gun nuts was too far off the mark.
%gt;I was just thinking, what happened to the space program is a classic example of why it's better for things to be privatized.
You've seen Bowling for Columbine, right? The private welfare thing seems to work *really* well. Don't forget that private companies are rarely, if ever, altrusitic. They have no morality - no sense of common good. They serve only to turn a profit for their shareholders/owners. The pure science that the Hubble facilitates is not usually profitable (what good does it do GM to know the true age of the universe?) and thus unfundable by private companies. You could argue that if scientists/organizations were charged enough, such a telescope could be profitable, but I highly doubt it.
>it becomes an entrenched bureauocracy (sic)... The moon race isn't the only example
The moon race was typical, American posturing in action. And if it did become an "entrenched bureaucracy," why aren't we still sending people there?
>public education
Yeah, it's always been a bad idea to give away an education. It's not like technology (developed by people with free public educations) has been the one thing that really drove the US to the top of the heap.
One last thing: Ayn Rand was a whore.
There should really be a law passed that remotely destroys senators who have obviously sold out to the man.
> titanium-based alloys
It would have been really nice if they gave some stress/strain data for these things. From the article you can't tell whether they're stretching the metal using a 10N or 1000KN force.
>how long until we see this metal in Oakleys
Given Oakley's policy of "finding the weirdest shit possible to put in our frames," I'm sort of surprised it's not already in their catalogue.
> it could rival the theoretical nanotube composites
Carbon nanotubes are, at least in theory, one huge molecule, where these new alloys are still ionically bonded atoms.
And as we all know, covalent (molecular) bonds are much stronger.
Call me old-fashioned, but you can't beat The Onion (or a reprint thereof).
> Once the show has been aired, what do they care if I watch the commercials or not?
The cable and satellite companies don't care whether you're watching ads or not, but the advertisers definitely do. If PVRs were present in the vast majority of viewers' homes, it would be reasonable for the advertisers to assume that a good number of their ads were not being watched. Consequently, they wouldn't be willing to pay the same advertising fee, and the bottom would drop out of this very important revenue stream for the broadcasters.
What bothers me more is Gary Lauder's assumption that the privilege of watching television comes with the responsibility of viewing every single banal advertisement on television ("I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped...").
I realize that advertising provides the cash to make the programming we cherish (Amazing Race, Enterprise, etc.), but advertisers don't have the right to make truly horrible ads (like every car or shampoo ad ever) and force them down our throats.
Saying that scientific process has definitely proved something is impossible. It's all about really good approximations.