Well, when the US tries to encourage local companies and startups to take advantage of new technologies, and it backfires, then the government gets blamed (see the Solyndra kerfluffle.) Can't win.
Yes but Made In China has nothing to do with that.
Made In China: because our environmental controls are effectively nonexistent compared to yours.
Sure there's cost-of-labor (etc) factors too but in these High-Tech (ie lots of mostly toxic chemicals somewhere in the manufacturing process) industries, cost of containing (or more often than not, cleaning-up-after) pollution is prohibitive.
Someone needs to educate these companies that doing all your toxic production in a foreign country is functionally equivalent to a goldfish swimming to the other side of the bowl to take a crap.
In Australia the anti-nuclear lobbyists won hands down with essentially NO resistance whatsoever.
ANSTO and The Lucas Heights installation used to be a WORLD LEADING hotbed of nuclear technology , research etc. In recent years we've become somewhat of a backwater in that regard.
There have been articles demonstrating that, watt for watt, electric vehicles may result in more emissions than Diesel ones in areas where a lot of electricity is produced using coal.
Agreed!
Electric Vehicles where the juice comes from burnt-dead-things mostly just moves the emissions from high-density urban to a more rural setting.
Nice for the local environmental quality (and due to benefits of scale possible slightly less overall emissions from that coal-fired-plant, I'd guess - maybe). Some times you need to take things ONE STEP AT A TIME.
Once you have the tech and infrastructure (fast recharge, high density distribution and retail delivery) for an EV/transport economy it consumes MORE electricity, so there's more MONEY in the ECONOMY for investing in cleaner (and more efficient) electricity generation.
And even nuclear power is a problem there - mining and enrichment are very expensive phases and they produce carbon dioxide.
It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
You'd be surprised. Plans for some of the next generation (4th) Nuclear Power Stations involves technology use existing nuclear waste as the primary fuel. - No mining - no refining - consumes existing nuclear waste - produces significantly less 'waste' product - waste which is significantly less radioactive (per unit of volume, mass, or whatever) - AND said waste is useless for weaponisation.
HOWEVER: Anti-Nuclear Protesters will tell you that all nuclear power is bad. They're ABSOLUTELY WRONG (although I will concede that all *currently-deployed* nuclear power tech has HUGE downsides)
Think I'm full of it? Check it out on wikipedia, LOTS of articles about the many and various technologies being researched for 4th Gen Nuclear Power Generation.
^ Hardy, p. 1237. "Early Americans wrote of the right in light of three considerations: (1) as auxiliary to a natural right of self-defense; (2) as enabling an armed people to deter undemocratic government; and (3) as enabling the people to organize a militia system."
(my BOLD)
Yet you passively stand by and let your leaders perpetrate the most abominable atrocities. (anyone for guantanamo?)
Clearly this is why he's not actually going into space.
In Space No-One Can hear You Scream.
Although, to be really picky, his scream will be really short. Given that he'll be wearing a fully-enclosed helmet I'd guestimate something approximating a couple of inches.
The issue is that journo-droids spend SO MUCH TIME dumbing-down their story for "the unwashed barely literate masses" that instead of actually INFORMING them they're just spouting mindless rubbish which ONLY VAGUELY relates to the actual issue/story at hand.
That, my friend, is nothing more than media-hype!
UNFORTUNATELY the dictionary-entry for 'journalism" describes *exactly* this problem.
journalism [jur-nl-iz-uhm] Show IPA
noun
1.
the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business.
2.
press1 ( def. 31 ) .
3.
a course of study preparing students for careers in reporting, writing, and editing for newspapers and magazines.
4.
writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing: He calls himself a historian, but his books are mere journalism.
Nothing there at all about "informing" or "educating", it's nothing more than "make shit up and yak on about it".
Oh Yeah - God Particle is SUCH a wonderful term - pity the journo-drones don't actually understand what they're saying.
A particle is a piece of a thing.
So A God Particle would be A PIECE OF GOD.
Insert mentally-deficient worship here.
Anyhow, this being/. what everyone here is *really* interested in finding is the Oh God! particle.
(disclaimer: in the interest of retaining a G rating in this post I have not included the usually obligatory clicky-linky. It's safe to assume that everyone here has a large collection of same already.)
For Example: In todays fog-bound and befuddled cellular market we find people BLATANTLY branding their products 4G when , in actual fact, they are NOT.
And no I'm not just talking about The BIG A who chose to market their 4G (ie LTE capable) product in Australia as such even though it COULD NOT talk to the LTE network in Australia. I'm talking about branding a product as 4G when it DOES NOT USE ACTUAL 4G TECHNOLOGY.
So if there's no real (ie financially punitive damages) backlash in the 4G-not-really arena, then why should we care about "you say poh-tay-toh, I say spud" rapidly approaching in the *istor market?
After all, in this case The End User is *actually* going to see huge benefits from the new technology (as opposed to tons of marketing-hype, additional cost, and zero actual benefit as seen with some vendors of "4G")
Anyone with more than half a brain can do a quick search for "declining advertising revenues" and IMMEDIATELY discover this decline in revenues is NOT RESTRICTED TO THE INTERNET.
Also this declining in advertising revenus has been going on for years.
Rapidly declining advertising revenues continue to be the industry’s core problem. The losses in 2011 were slightly worse than those of 2010 – 7.3% compared to 6.3%. Ad revenues are now less than half what they were in 2006.
The New York Times Company reported on Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit declined 12.2 percent as rising subscription and digital advertising revenue at its largest newspapers could not offset the continued drop-off in print advertising.
Meanwhile, free to air broadcasters have experienced multi-million dollar dives in profits and are writing their assets down as worthless. Channel 7, 9 and 10 are crippled by debt and funding problems in the face of declining advertising revenues and changing trends. Likewise, print media is experiencing huge decreases in both readership and advertising revenue.
The deficit of the Romanian's public TV, SRTV (www.tvr.ro), decreased by 0.71% in 2011, to €36.7 million Euro, while revenue from advertising was 7.4 million euro in 2011, down 24.06% from 2010.
A steady decline in print circulation and a precipitous drop in advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially classified advertising, have taken their toll on newspapers and newspaper chains.
Not In Principle, but In Practice. (the all pervasive in your face obnoxious page-filling ads which lead to websites spreading a 100 word article across SEVEN PAGES)
A few years ago there was a delightful little study by (some of) The Big Players in Internet Advertising which announced that FEW people were actually clicking on their ads, and in fact FEWER people every year.
Their analysis of the problem was that NOBODY NOTICED the advertising, and thus we have the excessive-to-the-point-of-insanity IN YOUR FACE advertising model that is all too pervasive today.
Google (on the other hand) has always pursued the model that if you properly target your ads, the user is more likely to click (and thusly you can show them LESS ads).{on the flipside, privacy issues, tracking issues, etc etc etc - life is a compromise}
I would suggest this observed lack of value and race-to-the-bottom in the Internet Advertising industry is a DIRECT result of assuming that your target audience is BLIND AND STUPID and mirrors the RIAA/MPAA model of assuming their users are IMMORAL LAWBREAKERS (and that by CHOICE, not necessity).
They *currently* have no actual (concrete, well defined, or even roughly sketched out) idea how to monetize their users beyond a vague "we have all this data and squillions of users surely that's worth money".
Only the most retarded idiot has *any* confidence in the Future Financial Security of Facebook Shares other than as a mid-term pump-n-dump scheme.
Sure I may be wrong, they *may* turn things around, but based on *real facts* and *current* evidence, they're royally fucked.
Having said that: the stock market is ALL about speculation and sometimes that risk you punted on pays out and the rest of us end up kicking ourselves.
The Stock Market is Risk Vs Reward. HUGE Reward almost always implies HUGE Risk (and sometimes even vice versa).
Any time you politely request that these PRO FRACKING people prove conclusively that there's absolutely no chance their operations will contaminate the environment (or words to that effect) their response always amounts to "our lawyers have advised us there's no way you can conclusively prove that ANY (potential) contamination was a DIRECT result of our operations."
Everybody with any real sense knows that if you ask for "hard science" and all they do is LAWYER UP you can BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR it's a shifty operation.
And by that all I mean is they KNOW there's no way to be sure they will not contaminate the environment, but the money is worth it and they're fairly sure you'll never make the charges stick.
The short version of what scientists are *actually* saying boils down to:
We theorised where IT would be and when we finally looked THERE we found SOMETHING which isn't Absolutely Not IT.
Reports I've read (forgot URLs, sue me) indicated the result found was NOT exactly as expected, but also not so massively different that they'd be sure it was NOT The Higgs.
More like: Scientist1: Yup, that's the Higgs! Scientist2: But I thought you said it'd have black spots not very very dark brown. Scientist1: Well if we'd solved everything then what are we going to do after that?
Choice argues that THE WHOLE CONCEPT of location based rights-to-distribute is fundamentally retarded in the sense that IN PRACTICE it DECREASES PRODUCT SALES.
Yes, in theory the plan is that Distributor X acquires (usually purchases, by up front payment or otherwise) EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS to handle ALL sales of Vendor Y products in a specified region.
In Reality Distributor X:
(a) now has a monopoly , and subsequently goes out of their way to SCREW THE CUSTOMER
(b) almost *never* actually distributes ALL of the products of Vendor Y (forcing prospective customers to pursue copyright infringement)
BOTH of these actions ACTIVELY DECREASE SALES VOLUMES.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait.. AdultFriendFinder is a real thing? I just assumed it was a thinly veiled front for prostitution.
You are incorrect. It is not thinly veiled.
Well of course not, AdultFriendFinder is full of Velvet Curtains.
Well, when the US tries to encourage local companies and startups to take advantage of new technologies, and it backfires, then the government gets blamed (see the Solyndra kerfluffle.) Can't win.
Yes but Made In China has nothing to do with that.
Made In China: because our environmental controls are effectively nonexistent compared to yours.
Sure there's cost-of-labor (etc) factors too but in these High-Tech (ie lots of mostly toxic chemicals somewhere in the manufacturing process) industries, cost of containing (or more often than not, cleaning-up-after) pollution is prohibitive.
Someone needs to educate these companies that doing all your toxic production in a foreign country is functionally equivalent to a goldfish swimming to the other side of the bowl to take a crap.
“screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics,” or SFPV
The two hyphenated pairs get a single letter. The single compound word gets two letter. Stop the madness!
Perhaps these guys were smart enough to realize that SFP has already been abused beyond recognition for many and diverse causes and they needed to add (at least) another letter in order to stop the madness.
In Australia the anti-nuclear lobbyists won hands down with essentially NO resistance whatsoever.
ANSTO and The Lucas Heights installation used to be a WORLD LEADING hotbed of nuclear technology , research etc. In recent years we've become somewhat of a backwater in that regard.
"migrate" is insightful???
Migration is a short-term strategy, if everybody moves inland by a mile within the next 100 years THEN WHAT?
You still have a massive ongoing overheating problem undergoing a geometric escalation of badness.
In the second hundred years you'll need to move everyone inland 5 miles, etc etc etc until there's no habitable land left.
THIS KIND OF RETARDEDNESS is WHY we're having such dramas in the first place.
NOBODY plans for the long-term.
There have been articles demonstrating that, watt for watt, electric vehicles may result in more emissions than Diesel ones in areas where a lot of electricity is produced using coal.
Agreed!
Electric Vehicles where the juice comes from burnt-dead-things mostly just moves the emissions from high-density urban to a more rural setting.
Nice for the local environmental quality (and due to benefits of scale possible slightly less overall emissions from that coal-fired-plant, I'd guess - maybe). Some times you need to take things ONE STEP AT A TIME.
Once you have the tech and infrastructure (fast recharge, high density distribution and retail delivery) for an EV/transport economy it consumes MORE electricity, so there's more MONEY in the ECONOMY for investing in cleaner (and more efficient) electricity generation.
And even nuclear power is a problem there - mining and enrichment are very expensive phases and they produce carbon dioxide. It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
You'd be surprised. Plans for some of the next generation (4th) Nuclear Power Stations involves technology use existing nuclear waste as the primary fuel.
- No mining
- no refining
- consumes existing nuclear waste
- produces significantly less 'waste' product
- waste which is significantly less radioactive (per unit of volume, mass, or whatever)
- AND said waste is useless for weaponisation.
HOWEVER: Anti-Nuclear Protesters will tell you that all nuclear power is bad. They're ABSOLUTELY WRONG (although I will concede that all *currently-deployed* nuclear power tech has HUGE downsides)
Think I'm full of it? Check it out on wikipedia, LOTS of articles about the many and various technologies being researched for 4th Gen Nuclear Power Generation.
It's called a right to bear arms. It's a right because it was considered necessary for the defense of our basic rights.
yes but you've all forgotten WHY you felt it was so important to have this RIGHT cast in stone for all eternity.
^ Hardy, p. 1237. "Early Americans wrote of the right in light of three considerations: (1) as auxiliary to a natural right of self-defense; (2) as enabling an armed people to deter undemocratic government; and (3) as enabling the people to organize a militia system."
(my BOLD)
Yet you passively stand by and let your leaders perpetrate the most abominable atrocities. (anyone for guantanamo?)
longest scream in free fall
Clearly this is why he's not actually going into space.
In Space No-One Can hear You Scream.
Although, to be really picky, his scream will be really short. Given that he'll be wearing a fully-enclosed helmet I'd guestimate something approximating a couple of inches.
The secret of flying is to throw oneself at the ground - and miss.
People, people ... PLEASE provide references/citations/URLs for stuff you didn't just make up yourself.
The issue is that journo-droids spend SO MUCH TIME dumbing-down their story for "the unwashed barely literate masses" that instead of actually INFORMING them they're just spouting mindless rubbish which ONLY VAGUELY relates to the actual issue/story at hand.
That, my friend, is nothing more than media-hype!
UNFORTUNATELY the dictionary-entry for 'journalism" describes *exactly* this problem.
journalism [jur-nl-iz-uhm] Show IPA noun 1. the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business. 2. press1 ( def. 31 ) . 3. a course of study preparing students for careers in reporting, writing, and editing for newspapers and magazines. 4. writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing: He calls himself a historian, but his books are mere journalism.
Nothing there at all about "informing" or "educating", it's nothing more than "make shit up and yak on about it".
Oh Yeah - God Particle is SUCH a wonderful term - pity the journo-drones don't actually understand what they're saying.
/. what everyone here is *really* interested in finding is the Oh God! particle.
A particle is a piece of a thing.
So A God Particle would be A PIECE OF GOD.
Insert mentally-deficient worship here.
Anyhow, this being
(disclaimer: in the interest of retaining a G rating in this post I have not included the usually obligatory clicky-linky. It's safe to assume that everyone here has a large collection of same already.)
For Example: In todays fog-bound and befuddled cellular market we find people BLATANTLY branding their products 4G when , in actual fact, they are NOT.
And no I'm not just talking about The BIG A who chose to market their 4G (ie LTE capable) product in Australia as such even though it COULD NOT talk to the LTE network in Australia. I'm talking about branding a product as 4G when it DOES NOT USE ACTUAL 4G TECHNOLOGY.
So if there's no real (ie financially punitive damages) backlash in the 4G-not-really arena, then why should we care about "you say poh-tay-toh, I say spud" rapidly approaching in the *istor market?
After all, in this case The End User is *actually* going to see huge benefits from the new technology (as opposed to tons of marketing-hype, additional cost, and zero actual benefit as seen with some vendors of "4G")
Also this declining in advertising revenus has been going on for years.
http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/newspapers-building-digital-revenues-proves-painfully-slow/newspapers-by-the-numbers/
Rapidly declining advertising revenues continue to be the industry’s core problem. The losses in 2011 were slightly worse than those of 2010 – 7.3% compared to 6.3%. Ad revenues are now less than half what they were in 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/business/media/quarterly-profit-falls-12-2-at-times-co.html
The New York Times Company reported on Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit declined 12.2 percent as rising subscription and digital advertising revenue at its largest newspapers could not offset the continued drop-off in print advertising.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120703-702076.html
Mediaset SpA (MS.MI), Italy's largest private broadcaster, expects advertising revenue in its home market to decline in the first half of 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/08/itv-advertising-sales-drop
ITV expected to report first decline in ad revenues for 18 months
http://www.exa.com.au/articles/autumn_09/
Meanwhile, free to air broadcasters have experienced multi-million dollar dives in profits and are writing their assets down as worthless. Channel 7, 9 and 10 are crippled by debt and funding problems in the face of declining advertising revenues and changing trends. Likewise, print media is experiencing huge decreases in both readership and advertising revenue.
http://www.filmneweurope.com/news/romania/declining-ad-revenues-at-romanian-tv
The deficit of the Romanian's public TV, SRTV (www.tvr.ro), decreased by 0.71% in 2011, to €36.7 million Euro, while revenue from advertising was 7.4 million euro in 2011, down 24.06% from 2010.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-15/sbs-admits-financial-trouble/3830502
SBS battling falling ad revenue
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/digital-transform/print-editions-decline/
A steady decline in print circulation and a precipitous drop in advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially classified advertising, have taken their toll on newspapers and newspaper chains.
DISCLOSURE: I Hate Ads!
Not In Principle, but In Practice. (the all pervasive in your face obnoxious page-filling ads which lead to websites spreading a 100 word article across SEVEN PAGES)
A few years ago there was a delightful little study by (some of) The Big Players in Internet Advertising which announced that FEW people were actually clicking on their ads, and in fact FEWER people every year.
Their analysis of the problem was that NOBODY NOTICED the advertising, and thus we have the excessive-to-the-point-of-insanity IN YOUR FACE advertising model that is all too pervasive today.
Google (on the other hand) has always pursued the model that if you properly target your ads, the user is more likely to click (and thusly you can show them LESS ads).{on the flipside, privacy issues, tracking issues, etc etc etc - life is a compromise}
I would suggest this observed lack of value and race-to-the-bottom in the Internet Advertising industry is a DIRECT result of assuming that your target audience is BLIND AND STUPID and mirrors the RIAA/MPAA model of assuming their users are IMMORAL LAWBREAKERS (and that by CHOICE, not necessity).
Unless you're a real pro financial analyst ....
Insert ROFLMAO here.
Facebook current revenues are 99.99% ad-based.
They *currently* have no actual (concrete, well defined, or even roughly sketched out) idea how to monetize their users beyond a vague "we have all this data and squillions of users surely that's worth money".
Only the most retarded idiot has *any* confidence in the Future Financial Security of Facebook Shares other than as a mid-term pump-n-dump scheme.
Sure I may be wrong, they *may* turn things around, but based on *real facts* and *current* evidence, they're royally fucked.
Having said that: the stock market is ALL about speculation and sometimes that risk you punted on pays out and the rest of us end up kicking ourselves.
The Stock Market is Risk Vs Reward. HUGE Reward almost always implies HUGE Risk (and sometimes even vice versa).
I for one have been completely underwhelmed by all this excessive advertising.
Firstly literally (not impressed in the slightest), and secondly literally (having installed an exception ad-blocker).
Seriously folks, seeing *ads* on the internet is the equivalent of Browsing Without Protection.
You DO use Protection, Don't You?
Pathos: The Love Child of Two-Thirds of The Three Musketeers.
The US Military is too afraid that we'll send The Wiggles there permanently to even consider an invasion.
They've stopped worrying about The Wiggles Threat ever since the Three Original Cast announced they're leaving.
Does anyone know the current $/km^2 of destruction for nuclear devices is these days?
It's a logarithmic scale with respect to megatons vs radius. Asteroid deorbinting might be more cost effective for something as big as a continent.
Biological warfare is significantly more cost-effective.
For Reference See: Rabbits, Camels, Toads.
like the chorus from Mustang Sally.
And I do mean that in all seriousness.
Any time you politely request that these PRO FRACKING people prove conclusively that there's absolutely no chance their operations will contaminate the environment (or words to that effect) their response always amounts to "our lawyers have advised us there's no way you can conclusively prove that ANY (potential) contamination was a DIRECT result of our operations."
Everybody with any real sense knows that if you ask for "hard science" and all they do is LAWYER UP you can BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR it's a shifty operation.
And by that all I mean is they KNOW there's no way to be sure they will not contaminate the environment, but the money is worth it and they're fairly sure you'll never make the charges stick.
What would you do?
I'd grab a beer, start up the BBQ, prepare some T-Bones with some olive oil and some spices, and lay out in the sun.
Did I win?
Maaaaaaayte!
You forgot the shrimp!
consistent with The Higgs Boson
The short version of what scientists are *actually* saying boils down to:
We theorised where IT would be and when we finally looked THERE we found SOMETHING which isn't Absolutely Not IT.
Reports I've read (forgot URLs, sue me) indicated the result found was NOT exactly as expected, but also not so massively different that they'd be sure it was NOT The Higgs.
More like:
Scientist1: Yup, that's the Higgs!
Scientist2: But I thought you said it'd have black spots not very very dark brown.
Scientist1: Well if we'd solved everything then what are we going to do after that?
Choice argues that THE WHOLE CONCEPT of location based rights-to-distribute is fundamentally retarded in the sense that IN PRACTICE it DECREASES PRODUCT SALES. Yes, in theory the plan is that Distributor X acquires (usually purchases, by up front payment or otherwise) EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS to handle ALL sales of Vendor Y products in a specified region. In Reality Distributor X: (a) now has a monopoly , and subsequently goes out of their way to SCREW THE CUSTOMER (b) almost *never* actually distributes ALL of the products of Vendor Y (forcing prospective customers to pursue copyright infringement) BOTH of these actions ACTIVELY DECREASE SALES VOLUMES.