Or laughter is as old as rats and dogs, inherited from a common ancestor, passed down as a trait. It could come from a collectively common ancestor of rats, dogs and monkeys, from a very very long time ago.
The Internet is owned by a company too. Maybe not today. Not yet. Eventually though... u have to deph1ne 0wn3rsh1p - if someone kontrolz da browsa market, and there is no other choice, if someone kontrolz all axxece 2 da Internet, do dey 0wn da Internet?
It has to be inflatable, and with helium for that matter, (possibly hydrogen - hydrogen's benefit is increased load carrying capacity, detriment is risk of Hindenburg-like H2/O2 combustion) so that it supports itself upward in mid air, kind of pillared directly into air, and you don't need super strong carbon fiber structures where the load is carried along the full length of a cable. It's actually the cleverest space elevator design so far, at least for the very bottom part, where there is atmosphere. Above the atmosphere you'd still need a traditional space elevator cable, but if you can only climb up to the top of the atmosphere very cheaply, vehicle launch costs might be a lot cheaper because of lack of air drag energy costs simply to fly through the atmosphere. Launching something towards the east would pick up the speed of rotation of the Earth as far as centrifugal force is concerned, and save some fuel that way too. Fuel costs in rockets are extremely expensive, because the bulk of the rocket is fuel and much of the fuel is simply used to lift the rest of the fuel. Fuel savings compound, especially liquid oxygen. In fact if there were a way to do oxygen liquefaction cheaply up at the top of the tower from the very limited partial oxygen pressure, you could climb to the top very light and very cheap, make a lot of liquid oxygen suddenly as you start dropping through the atmosphere suspended by a huge super light superhuge parachute of solar panels, and once you're full of liquid oxygen, ignite and start flying. I don't know if it's doable at all.
But when talking apes vs. humans, there is a high chance that laughter was around in the common ancestor 16 million years ago, as opposed to both descendant sub lines of evolving it independently, say 9.8 and 5.3 million years ago.
I thought the 3 mile incident was caused by someone falling asleep at the controls and knocking them over. Of course that's not the official wording, but what if "terrorists" feed you some time delayed release sleeping pill or better yet, a hallucinogen. If you were a control operator, you might all of a sudden see the knobs rotate in all kinds of directions, with you trying to compensate.
You think the Gods of Olympus, or the powers that be today, don't get bored sometimes and play with real people's lives, to study and see what happens? In fact some unpracticed and unplanned-for "fire drill"-like candid camera exercises in nuclear plants might just be on the agenda of the Nuclear Safety Commission and the Dept of Fatherland Security. (Gotta love buzzwords.)
I'm sure as hell not gonna ever take a "control rod technician" job, that I was kind of ushered towards, in this unemployment economy, two months ago. Because of pretty much the above reasons. I get messed with too much as it is, don't need to enter situations where the potential is even greater for trouble. Quiet, peace and safety of others are golden. Self risk, such as rock climbing, is a personal choice, with the option to refuse or accept, that's up to yourself, but making that choice for others, that's quite different.
If the people in charge really do a good job, they will create lots of decoy places, empty of anything, other than a few guards waiting for the retards who show up, so they can be interrogated over what really bugs them so much that they are willing to jump all those fences.
Ultimately the real war should be psychological, about the root causes of what angers somebody against someone else, and the tensions eased. Sometimes however, you might find yourself handpicked into a situation where the tensions are compounded against you, as an exercise by those in charge of keeping guard. If you're wise, you will be a pussy, and let everyone walk all over you, and just take all the slaps in the face like a saint. It can be done.
Some people in the Dept of Fatherland Security are really bored, because there is not enough action, and it's hard for them to justify their jobs. They can't find people skilled enough to build a bomb, who can be motivated or pissed off enough to do so, even with superhuman effort on their part.
People who are smart enough simply won't do it. Because if they did that would be the ultimate excuse to take all your freedoms away, because the antiterrorism message today is falling on deaf ears, and people prefer having their freedoms instead.
Even terrorists fight for some kind of cause, and sometimes the price is too high to pay for advancing your cause. I don't see homegrown US nuclear terrorists, because of the few that happened, one denied things, so that might have been a setup, another did a manifesto and just wanted attention, and the rest all came from the middle east. The only place I can really see that much hatred between neighbors is the middle east, and they might come over here, if they were angered enough, and had the technology in hand. Iran might be cocky and demanding at international conferences, but for them to pull the trigger would be an immediate suicide. The real issue is them supplying others who are angered enough, and whatever will be will be. India and Pakistan have been going at it, and they could have used the stuff, and they continue to get angered against each other, but the nuclear trigger hasn't been pulled yet, and hopefully never will be.
Ideally people should stop angering each other to the point where they are willing to kill each other. There should be a way where both you and I can find room and place in this world to coexist or be far enough to leave each other alone. That means sacrifice and compromise on both side.
For instance, me, I really believe in reducing dependence on oil, and driving less, but unfortunately the only way to really find peace is to run away far from any neighbours, and driving a lot over it. That's a large sacrifice, but still preferable to standing your ground and fighting, or trying to convince someone to change their mind. I prefer peace at almost any sacrifice. And I'd like to think so do most people in the world, it takes a tremendous amount of either tresspassing for people to generate enough hate, or selfishness for yourself/family/tribe/nation/etc.. uncaring of those outside of it, for committing enough trespassing so that killing to starts happening as a retaliation.
You can say GM and Ford and Chrysler are going under to take down the UAW representing the rights of workers as a political force. Whether the UAW ceases existing, or the concessions it makes for the base it represents leave the base so financially strangled they become slaves to money and employers, slaves to necessity and no longer represent free will, unless suicidal, is irrelevant.
The number of people as workers is always more than employers, and this represents an imbalance in society, concentration of power, which then leads to abuse, and abuse leads to retaliation and violence. A dominant middle class, or dominant equality in society, together with personal incentives present is the key to peace and nonviolence and overall human happiness. Middle class employees are a product of unions, they don't happen on their own. The natural behavior is the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, compound interest compounds to the extreme in either direction. Unless the many weak collectively gang up and stand up to the few strong. But then the danger is "falling off on the other side of the horse," where the union, the gang becomes too abusive, and blindly takes down the whole business enterprise, including the employer and themselves with it.
Another way is as a self sufficient yeoman farmer society, hailed by Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton. But these days farming is impossible because of low market price of food, and high cost of property taxes. In absence of high property taxes the yeoman farming society would be possible, but vulnerable to external attack because of insufficient defense funding. Also there is not enough land for everyone, as the Malthusian catastrophe hits. The population does not know how to practice self check and grows out of bounds without abusive control measures. In a sense abuse is a necessity to maintain balance. That is the most unfortunate thing of all as far as human happiness goes, and is the root cause of competition wars and suffering in the end, because there is not enough of... for everyone, because there is too many of us, or there will be too many of us.
A massive scale small business based society where everyone is an employer is next to impossible to work out, because non farming individuals are not self sufficient because they are dependent on food. They can't say time-out and not participate for a few years as self sufficient yeoman farmers could, and retain their own free will, their free unbiased vote, because small business people have to purchase their own food and are therefore dependent on others, they are drawn into "Da game" by necessity to feed. Economy as a whole is vulnerable to the phenomenon of "economies of scale," and if you have to participate in "Da game" by necessity, you will lose out to those who are stronger, and we're back to the strong get stronger and weak get weaker, abuse and retaliation for abuse. If you're self sufficient, then you simply are not forced to participate in "Da game" and then "Da game" doesn't exist, because you can sell things for practically free too, and "economies of scale" can't abuse their power. I've always said "don't hate da playa, hate da game, bitch!"
So in the absence of self sufficient individuals in society - which is unworkable anyway because of Malthusian issues and defense funding reasons - the only way to ensure overall human happiness on a large scale is to ensure a dominant middle class through collective cooperation and bargaining, to have economies of scale institutions, and the participants - very few but very powerful individuals called employers to be in balance with the very many individuals but each having relatively little power, at the discussion table. If either the union or the employer get stronger, things go out of balance. If anything, the balance going out of whack by the employer getting stronger, we would have a dictatorship society with tremendous human suffering, but it's still sustainable, and things get
Concreting all roads could be done when the next road repair is due. I don't think the incremental cost from asphalt to concrete is so grave, compared to the cost of setting up the whole road repair operation. Moreover asphalt uses hydrocarbon tars that could be converted to fuel in refineries by a process similar to coal gasification. Moreover tars contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, known carcinogens. Cigarette smoke contains the same carcinogens, and people don't die instantly or get cancer instantly from it. Still, skin contact with asphalt, or slow leach of these compounds into the groundwater is not a good thing.
Even on Wikipedia you're posting an opinion. An opinion of what citations are appropriate, and if you do it right, in other people's opinion, by "self professed expert's" opinion, then it's left there. It's like the collective body of human knowledge has to fit in everyone's head, in similar ways, as a coherent whole, and my thoughts reflect your thoughts reflect Pete's thoughts over there so we're on the same page. Even experts have to join in into this collective understanding of things, and unless they can formulate their opinion in ways that are graspable by others, their work is useless. Once their work is graspable by others, it's hard to say their opinion is different or better, because those who grasped it are equally able to hold the same opinion.
That's one side of the story, because yes, experts do know of the subtleties of a topic, because it's hard to formulate knowledge of very many things into succinct direct factual statements, because there are subtle cases where the opposite of the formulated statement is true. What makes someone an expert is being very aware of the exceptions, of when the factual statement is false. So a simple quotation of a succinct factual statement from published literature is not proper knowledge. The human brain is good at looking at very many different things, and drawing succinct guiding principles from them, to simplify and save thought processes. It's how the human brain functions, by generalizations, by stereotyping, but succinct generalizations are sometimes forced onto a topic where they don't really fit well, and instead a long winded deliberation is more appropriate. Wikipedia articles are often very good at highlighting these subtleties involving a topic, and it's like the experts actually wrote these Wikipedia articles themselves, and simple quoting of experts from a distance by those who don't understand the subtleties is not appropriate. No original research? There is no other proper knowledge but original research or equivalent mirroring of it, the only proper knowledge is full knowledge, and little knowledge is dangerous. There is a fading zone though, a balance, a tradeoff between long windedness of a Wikipedia article, vs. full and proper knowledge, full and proper description of a topic, because an encyclopedia article does have to be somewhat succinct, because the reader comes to it to quickly grasp the major ideas in a topic, and get a good starting base, and then the fine points can be further researched in the expert literature.
By the way there are also cases of crackpots successfully publishing literature in widely acclaimed scientific journals, and a Wikipedia editor who's a "non-expert" might decide to arbitrate and overrule the cited information. Just because something is published literature it does not always mean it is better than the collective agreement of Wikipedia editor's personal, private opinions.
Wikipedia, is full of opinions. Even though it is supposed to contain no original research, you could say that there is no such thing as original research, because almost no original research in general is totally original, but it is derived as a natural flow of ideas from other people's work. Newton said that he might have been able to see farther than others, but that was because he was standing on shoulders of giants. There are very few exceptions, such as Cantor's math of infinites, or Bolyai's axiom of parallels, where people have pitted their minds against a topic for millenia, and a very fresh view is presented, and you could say it's not a natural flow of ideas from what was previously known. But even there you can say that eventually someone else would have come up with the same ideas or something very similar, and it's a natural flow, it just took a while to make the next step, and those successful in making that next step contributed more significantly than usual, and possibly deserve some greater reward (even if it's hard to come up with a proper reward for Cantor or Bolyai, how do you measure the value of such progress in $ terms?) There is no completely individualized human knowledge, we all contribute by chiseling at the whole, adding little tidbits here and there.
And it's probably best that way.. a uniculture of anything is very vulnerable to subversion and extermination, because there is an Achilles-heel, an easy point of attack. But as long as there are many different forks and new things shooting up everywhere, like fresh grass over a cleared field, well, that's what's called life finds a way to keep going, if there is a way.
Or nobody gives him a job, or the jobs he gets are bullshit jobs, etc, etc.. the possibilities are many. Most people like a decent job with a steady income. It's often a question of what's decent. I used to be not willing to do very hazardous jobs, now it's like what do I have to live for anymore. As long as they pay well, I might actually get the chance to have a life, or die from the hazard, but it's still better than certainty and guarantee of never having really lived, because you were always financially strangled. And if you have principles, you will not take the unethical roads to make money, no matter how great the pressure. You can always be your own person, or at least try to be.
Homelessness is a very grave sacrifice, but sometimes it's the best of the options that you can choose from. It's not as simple as someone does not want to work - most people want to feel like they are doing something in life, doing something worthwhile. Then it comes to what is really work, only stuff you get an income from? Isaac Newton writing the Pincipia, while sustaining himself from a small farm. Was writing the Principia work? Is a hobby, an entertainment, work? Is the exchange of money what classifies something as work? We have a system of finances that directs actions of most people, and we go by it because we don't know what's better. But the system is not absolute perfection, it doesn't do it's job well, but both extremes - neither communism (total distribution of resources - nobody has personal incentives) nor full blown absolute capitalism (or feudalism with serfdom as a better example of concentrated power, where very few people dictate the rules to everyone) have been the magic answer to most overall human happiness.
It's very hard to get soft rubbery material that stands up well to traffic abrasion in any other color than black. Tar/asphalt is black, and anything light colored, such as clay, is either rock hard or wet/swampy/quicksandy. It's hard to drive cars in quicksand with high mpg. Rock hard is an option, and cement roads are an option, but the ride isn't quite as smooth, and the tires wear faster. But, also, it may last much longer between repairs. It takes lots of technology to develop rock hard light colored pavement that doesn't crack from ice, and it's very cheap.
Carbon black/soot/asphalt/highly polycondensed(graphitized) aromatic hydrocarbons cannot be bleached to colorless/white like most other organic chemicals that have very specific chemical double bonds that resonate in visible light frequencies, and get attacked easily by oxidizers such as peroxide or hypochlorite. Carbon black is one of the most inert and unreactive materials there is at cold temperatures, but at high temperatures it burns well in oxygen.
Carbon black and rubber are an old world nanotech magic combination made for each other, and nothing even comes close to touching this pair. Tires will always be rubber, and economical rubber will always have carbon black. Back in the 20's you had some white sidewall tires, filled with ZnO, for aesthetic purposes (in a time when you still had an inner tire tube, air resistant butyl rubber technology hasn't even been invented yet), but soon it was realized just how good carbon black is in comparison, and white completely disappeared. Railroad - steel on smooth steel - is a better transportation option because of reduced friction/rolling resistance. But you lose the freedom to go anywhere, you have to stick to the track laid. In very dense cities, personal minitrams coordinated by computers as far as traffic is concerned (where you input your destination like into a car GPS), are an idea, to go about town and run errands, because maintaining steel railroad is cheaper than asphalt, per cumulative lifetime tonnage/meter, plus electrified rail produces no smog, and needs no expensive batteries. But offroad SUV's, where no steel track has been laid, will always have rubber tires. A combo car could lower and raise a steel/rubber set of tires.
Actually "painting" per se is the wrong thing to do. He probably means "coloring." There are two colors when it comes to standing up to sunlight - black and white. Black is carbon black based, cheap, and it absorbs UV rays, including all other rays. White is TiO2, titanium dioxide based, not cheap, and it absorbs UV rays, but nothing else. Other colors don't last, unless tinted with previous ingredients, so they are either loaded with carbon black/TiO2 and you have nuances of grey, or loaded with TiO2 and you have very light colors - light pink, light teal, etc. - think of vinyl siding colors.
There is usually some CaCO3 ground limestone and some clay mixed in as a filler with the whites, but this does not protect against UV without TiO2 present. And any plastic or organic binder material will yellow from extended exposure to sunlight, unless TiO2 filled. PVC is an exception, it will yellow first, then start chalking off as dust on extended weathering. PVC siding is still loaded with TiO2, because that absorbs UV and retards degradation to yellow, and once yellow catalyzes the air oxidation - chalking back to white.
Most roofing is asphalt based, because it's cheap, light, waterproof, and highly weatherable. Whatever Obama's science officer wants, money talks. He has to find a way to make the pocket book budget work with his plans. Such as paying for it himself, as in tax money back.
Ceramic roofs are the traditional extremely weatherable roof material, but they are heavy, brittle, expensive to install, and white color in them is very expensive. Most of the cheap ceramic roofs are reddish-brownish because of iron oxides present in clay. Once installed, they can last for 100+ years. In today's business world they've fallen out of use because, time is money, and nobody has the time anymore to piss around with tiny shingles like they used to back in the old days.
Metal roofs are heavy, expensive, expensive to install, but they also function as an extended tin-foil hat, so aliens can't easily read your thoughts from outer space. Depending on the metal, they may eventually rust away (such as zinc anodized steel once the zinc is consumed), or be covered with green patina that may last for centuries in the absence of acid rain (copper).
Creativity is still enhanced by being well off. Not filthy rich, but comfortably situated in life, having tons of time on your hands. Wealth is important for creativity, but not as a direct reward for creativity, but to create the atmosphere, and simply the possibility.
For example, Isaac Newton was a yeoman farmer, and the income his small generated allowed him to sustain his vast library of books, and dedicate his time to his passions. Many people are caught up in a sustenance hamsterwheel, where they are forced to dedicate all their attention and resources simply to sustain the basic needs of food, shelter, etc. If people were not caught up in artificial hamster wheels, the true effort of sustenance, would be, as quoted from H.D.Thoreau's Walden:
"For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor
of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I
could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well
as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study."
Somebody noted that he was a momma's boy, and he got home baked cookies every Saturday, and he trotted into Concord almost daily, so the statement should be taken with a grain of salt, but it still means a lot.
Still, how many people today are caught up in working their asses off trying to make ends meet on such things as housing cost, insurance cost and taxes? In fact living like Thoreau did is made illegal these days, just so the hamsterwheels keep spinning. His way of living was too cheap, and because of that these days it does not live up to the demands of building code officials. How many people have the means to truly dedicate themselves to a hobby these days? For instance, if robotics is your hobby, living in an efficiency or very crowded housing does not allow you to have a shop with tools where you can fabricate things. You can have a guitar, but music is not everyone's passion, and the neighbors might have a problem with you making noise. You don't have to be filthy rich to have a toolshop, but you have to be comfortably well off. How many people are comfortably well off these days, and how many are so deep in debt they don't kow how they will ever pay it off, maybe in 30 years? As a country wide epidemic, people not being comfortably well off, it seriously affects a nations creativity and competitive edge in the global marketplace.
Creativity is hindered tremendously by forces trying to keep a lid on the population, keeping a population under check and under control. You can't just, for instance, hand out random patents to random people and let them become rich overnight, out of control. How is an oligarchy going to maintain power under such circumstances? The history of humankind is pretty much who can control whose actions. Whether we invent something or hinder creativity is a secondary question, whether the world is a better place or stays the same, the important things is: who's on top, who's calling the shots. Those on top always worry about losing control, or them themselves becoming controlled by others (rightfully so, I may add, but it's a fact of life, simply the way things are, recognize the way things are.) Control of their own subjects in their own country, while countries free from such internal hindrance fly free with creativity and leave the control-freak societies in the dust. Hence the USA has massive brainpower import, because it's one of the most brainwashing control-freak society there is in the world. In the name of security, these days. Let us control you - those are our reasons why, if you don't like them, just say so, we can come up with other reasons. But control of others is the most important thing, otherwise those others overpower you and do nasty things to you. How can you trust giving up control of what other people do? Still, imagine Newton having to put up with such hamster wheel piecemeal existence, where freedom is quoted in the books, but next to impossible to realize in practice. The Principia might have never been written.
In general, fermenting alcohol is like wasting a major part of the food energy, by letting bacteria eat it and waste it, not completely to zero, but only to ethanol, in anaerobic conditions. Ideally there should be a way to get hydrocarbons out of sugars and cellulose, without wasting the stored photosynthetic energy for feeding other lifeforms.
I drive through the countryside in Ohio, and I see a massive amount of oil pumps, that never move, except when the price of oil goes over like $4/gal. I wondered how much oil is there still left. The answer is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripper_well : Over 78% of US oil wells are classified as stripper wells , and they produce 15% of the total oil production in the US.
Moreover they produce oil in barely economical ways, barely breaking even, and they are at risk of being prematurely plugged - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_energy_gain. So basically all those oil wells you see in the country side are almost empty, as if squeezing last drops from an already squeezed lemon. The oil is gone, eventually it's gone. The Standard Oil of Ohio made Rockefeller rich, but there is barely a few drops of oil left around here.
We have still plenty of coal. But oil extraction is an order of magnitude cheaper than coal mining, per unit energy extracted, because oil is a liquid.
Somehow being labeled as "Senior Java Architect" seems to me like being made fun of. I would only want to be labeled that if it came with a fat salary, and only for the money, because passionate zeal for the topic would still be nonexistent, because the whole thing is so far off into bloated nontransparent bullshit land, that only retards truly believe in it.
And when Java version 13.22.5.pre99.post05-rc4 is finally out, it will also blow the pants off painstaking manually optimized assembly programs too, as far as speed of execution is concerned. You doubt my statement? Then just wait and see for yourself!
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I hereby grant you the right to give birth and breastfeed. Go ahead, you're free to do it, if you can. The government won't interfere.
Or laughter is as old as rats and dogs, inherited from a common ancestor, passed down as a trait. It could come from a collectively common ancestor of rats, dogs and monkeys, from a very very long time ago.
The Internet is owned by a company too. Maybe not today. Not yet. Eventually though... u have to deph1ne 0wn3rsh1p - if someone kontrolz da browsa market, and there is no other choice, if someone kontrolz all axxece 2 da Internet, do dey 0wn da Internet?
It has to be inflatable, and with helium for that matter, (possibly hydrogen - hydrogen's benefit is increased load carrying capacity, detriment is risk of Hindenburg-like H2/O2 combustion) so that it supports itself upward in mid air, kind of pillared directly into air, and you don't need super strong carbon fiber structures where the load is carried along the full length of a cable. It's actually the cleverest space elevator design so far, at least for the very bottom part, where there is atmosphere. Above the atmosphere you'd still need a traditional space elevator cable, but if you can only climb up to the top of the atmosphere very cheaply, vehicle launch costs might be a lot cheaper because of lack of air drag energy costs simply to fly through the atmosphere. Launching something towards the east would pick up the speed of rotation of the Earth as far as centrifugal force is concerned, and save some fuel that way too. Fuel costs in rockets are extremely expensive, because the bulk of the rocket is fuel and much of the fuel is simply used to lift the rest of the fuel. Fuel savings compound, especially liquid oxygen. In fact if there were a way to do oxygen liquefaction cheaply up at the top of the tower from the very limited partial oxygen pressure, you could climb to the top very light and very cheap, make a lot of liquid oxygen suddenly as you start dropping through the atmosphere suspended by a huge super light superhuge parachute of solar panels, and once you're full of liquid oxygen, ignite and start flying. I don't know if it's doable at all.
But when talking apes vs. humans, there is a high chance that laughter was around in the common ancestor 16 million years ago, as opposed to both descendant sub lines of evolving it independently, say 9.8 and 5.3 million years ago.
You are talking about a concept similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_realizability.
I have an id named sumdumfuk on a dating site.
I thought the 3 mile incident was caused by someone falling asleep at the controls and knocking them over. Of course that's not the official wording, but what if "terrorists" feed you some time delayed release sleeping pill or better yet, a hallucinogen. If you were a control operator, you might all of a sudden see the knobs rotate in all kinds of directions, with you trying to compensate.
You think the Gods of Olympus, or the powers that be today, don't get bored sometimes and play with real people's lives, to study and see what happens? In fact some unpracticed and unplanned-for "fire drill"-like candid camera exercises in nuclear plants might just be on the agenda of the Nuclear Safety Commission and the Dept of Fatherland Security. (Gotta love buzzwords.)
I'm sure as hell not gonna ever take a "control rod technician" job, that I was kind of ushered towards, in this unemployment economy, two months ago. Because of pretty much the above reasons. I get messed with too much as it is, don't need to enter situations where the potential is even greater for trouble. Quiet, peace and safety of others are golden. Self risk, such as rock climbing, is a personal choice, with the option to refuse or accept, that's up to yourself, but making that choice for others, that's quite different.
If the people in charge really do a good job, they will create lots of decoy places, empty of anything, other than a few guards waiting for the retards who show up, so they can be interrogated over what really bugs them so much that they are willing to jump all those fences.
Ultimately the real war should be psychological, about the root causes of what angers somebody against someone else, and the tensions eased. Sometimes however, you might find yourself handpicked into a situation where the tensions are compounded against you, as an exercise by those in charge of keeping guard. If you're wise, you will be a pussy, and let everyone walk all over you, and just take all the slaps in the face like a saint. It can be done.
Some people in the Dept of Fatherland Security are really bored, because there is not enough action, and it's hard for them to justify their jobs. They can't find people skilled enough to build a bomb, who can be motivated or pissed off enough to do so, even with superhuman effort on their part. People who are smart enough simply won't do it. Because if they did that would be the ultimate excuse to take all your freedoms away, because the antiterrorism message today is falling on deaf ears, and people prefer having their freedoms instead.
Even terrorists fight for some kind of cause, and sometimes the price is too high to pay for advancing your cause. I don't see homegrown US nuclear terrorists, because of the few that happened, one denied things, so that might have been a setup, another did a manifesto and just wanted attention, and the rest all came from the middle east. The only place I can really see that much hatred between neighbors is the middle east, and they might come over here, if they were angered enough, and had the technology in hand. Iran might be cocky and demanding at international conferences, but for them to pull the trigger would be an immediate suicide. The real issue is them supplying others who are angered enough, and whatever will be will be. India and Pakistan have been going at it, and they could have used the stuff, and they continue to get angered against each other, but the nuclear trigger hasn't been pulled yet, and hopefully never will be. Ideally people should stop angering each other to the point where they are willing to kill each other. There should be a way where both you and I can find room and place in this world to coexist or be far enough to leave each other alone. That means sacrifice and compromise on both side.
For instance, me, I really believe in reducing dependence on oil, and driving less, but unfortunately the only way to really find peace is to run away far from any neighbours, and driving a lot over it. That's a large sacrifice, but still preferable to standing your ground and fighting, or trying to convince someone to change their mind. I prefer peace at almost any sacrifice. And I'd like to think so do most people in the world, it takes a tremendous amount of either tresspassing for people to generate enough hate, or selfishness for yourself/family/tribe/nation/etc.. uncaring of those outside of it, for committing enough trespassing so that killing to starts happening as a retaliation.
You can say GM and Ford and Chrysler are going under to take down the UAW representing the rights of workers as a political force. Whether the UAW ceases existing, or the concessions it makes for the base it represents leave the base so financially strangled they become slaves to money and employers, slaves to necessity and no longer represent free will, unless suicidal, is irrelevant. The number of people as workers is always more than employers, and this represents an imbalance in society, concentration of power, which then leads to abuse, and abuse leads to retaliation and violence. A dominant middle class, or dominant equality in society, together with personal incentives present is the key to peace and nonviolence and overall human happiness. Middle class employees are a product of unions, they don't happen on their own. The natural behavior is the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, compound interest compounds to the extreme in either direction. Unless the many weak collectively gang up and stand up to the few strong. But then the danger is "falling off on the other side of the horse," where the union, the gang becomes too abusive, and blindly takes down the whole business enterprise, including the employer and themselves with it.
... for everyone, because there is too many of us, or there will be too many of us.
Another way is as a self sufficient yeoman farmer society, hailed by Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton. But these days farming is impossible because of low market price of food, and high cost of property taxes. In absence of high property taxes the yeoman farming society would be possible, but vulnerable to external attack because of insufficient defense funding. Also there is not enough land for everyone, as the Malthusian catastrophe hits. The population does not know how to practice self check and grows out of bounds without abusive control measures. In a sense abuse is a necessity to maintain balance. That is the most unfortunate thing of all as far as human happiness goes, and is the root cause of competition wars and suffering in the end, because there is not enough of
A massive scale small business based society where everyone is an employer is next to impossible to work out, because non farming individuals are not self sufficient because they are dependent on food. They can't say time-out and not participate for a few years as self sufficient yeoman farmers could, and retain their own free will, their free unbiased vote, because small business people have to purchase their own food and are therefore dependent on others, they are drawn into "Da game" by necessity to feed. Economy as a whole is vulnerable to the phenomenon of "economies of scale," and if you have to participate in "Da game" by necessity, you will lose out to those who are stronger, and we're back to the strong get stronger and weak get weaker, abuse and retaliation for abuse. If you're self sufficient, then you simply are not forced to participate in "Da game" and then "Da game" doesn't exist, because you can sell things for practically free too, and "economies of scale" can't abuse their power. I've always said "don't hate da playa, hate da game, bitch!"
So in the absence of self sufficient individuals in society - which is unworkable anyway because of Malthusian issues and defense funding reasons - the only way to ensure overall human happiness on a large scale is to ensure a dominant middle class through collective cooperation and bargaining, to have economies of scale institutions, and the participants - very few but very powerful individuals called employers to be in balance with the very many individuals but each having relatively little power, at the discussion table. If either the union or the employer get stronger, things go out of balance. If anything, the balance going out of whack by the employer getting stronger, we would have a dictatorship society with tremendous human suffering, but it's still sustainable, and things get
Concreting all roads could be done when the next road repair is due. I don't think the incremental cost from asphalt to concrete is so grave, compared to the cost of setting up the whole road repair operation. Moreover asphalt uses hydrocarbon tars that could be converted to fuel in refineries by a process similar to coal gasification. Moreover tars contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, known carcinogens. Cigarette smoke contains the same carcinogens, and people don't die instantly or get cancer instantly from it. Still, skin contact with asphalt, or slow leach of these compounds into the groundwater is not a good thing.
I did not mean plastic roads per se, but I recall working with a plastic material and seeing it mentioned as an asphalt additive. I might have been a bit biased by this experience. Here is an example (Dupont Elvaloy modified asphalt): http://www.ecopathindustries.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=87&Itemid=94
Even on Wikipedia you're posting an opinion. An opinion of what citations are appropriate, and if you do it right, in other people's opinion, by "self professed expert's" opinion, then it's left there. It's like the collective body of human knowledge has to fit in everyone's head, in similar ways, as a coherent whole, and my thoughts reflect your thoughts reflect Pete's thoughts over there so we're on the same page. Even experts have to join in into this collective understanding of things, and unless they can formulate their opinion in ways that are graspable by others, their work is useless. Once their work is graspable by others, it's hard to say their opinion is different or better, because those who grasped it are equally able to hold the same opinion.
That's one side of the story, because yes, experts do know of the subtleties of a topic, because it's hard to formulate knowledge of very many things into succinct direct factual statements, because there are subtle cases where the opposite of the formulated statement is true. What makes someone an expert is being very aware of the exceptions, of when the factual statement is false. So a simple quotation of a succinct factual statement from published literature is not proper knowledge. The human brain is good at looking at very many different things, and drawing succinct guiding principles from them, to simplify and save thought processes. It's how the human brain functions, by generalizations, by stereotyping, but succinct generalizations are sometimes forced onto a topic where they don't really fit well, and instead a long winded deliberation is more appropriate. Wikipedia articles are often very good at highlighting these subtleties involving a topic, and it's like the experts actually wrote these Wikipedia articles themselves, and simple quoting of experts from a distance by those who don't understand the subtleties is not appropriate. No original research? There is no other proper knowledge but original research or equivalent mirroring of it, the only proper knowledge is full knowledge, and little knowledge is dangerous. There is a fading zone though, a balance, a tradeoff between long windedness of a Wikipedia article, vs. full and proper knowledge, full and proper description of a topic, because an encyclopedia article does have to be somewhat succinct, because the reader comes to it to quickly grasp the major ideas in a topic, and get a good starting base, and then the fine points can be further researched in the expert literature.
By the way there are also cases of crackpots successfully publishing literature in widely acclaimed scientific journals, and a Wikipedia editor who's a "non-expert" might decide to arbitrate and overrule the cited information. Just because something is published literature it does not always mean it is better than the collective agreement of Wikipedia editor's personal, private opinions.
Wikipedia, is full of opinions. Even though it is supposed to contain no original research, you could say that there is no such thing as original research, because almost no original research in general is totally original, but it is derived as a natural flow of ideas from other people's work. Newton said that he might have been able to see farther than others, but that was because he was standing on shoulders of giants. There are very few exceptions, such as Cantor's math of infinites, or Bolyai's axiom of parallels, where people have pitted their minds against a topic for millenia, and a very fresh view is presented, and you could say it's not a natural flow of ideas from what was previously known. But even there you can say that eventually someone else would have come up with the same ideas or something very similar, and it's a natural flow, it just took a while to make the next step, and those successful in making that next step contributed more significantly than usual, and possibly deserve some greater reward (even if it's hard to come up with a proper reward for Cantor or Bolyai, how do you measure the value of such progress in $ terms?) There is no completely individualized human knowledge, we all contribute by chiseling at the whole, adding little tidbits here and there.
And it's probably best that way.. a uniculture of anything is very vulnerable to subversion and extermination, because there is an Achilles-heel, an easy point of attack. But as long as there are many different forks and new things shooting up everywhere, like fresh grass over a cleared field, well, that's what's called life finds a way to keep going, if there is a way.
Or nobody gives him a job, or the jobs he gets are bullshit jobs, etc, etc.. the possibilities are many. Most people like a decent job with a steady income. It's often a question of what's decent. I used to be not willing to do very hazardous jobs, now it's like what do I have to live for anymore. As long as they pay well, I might actually get the chance to have a life, or die from the hazard, but it's still better than certainty and guarantee of never having really lived, because you were always financially strangled. And if you have principles, you will not take the unethical roads to make money, no matter how great the pressure. You can always be your own person, or at least try to be.
Homelessness is a very grave sacrifice, but sometimes it's the best of the options that you can choose from. It's not as simple as someone does not want to work - most people want to feel like they are doing something in life, doing something worthwhile. Then it comes to what is really work, only stuff you get an income from? Isaac Newton writing the Pincipia, while sustaining himself from a small farm. Was writing the Principia work? Is a hobby, an entertainment, work? Is the exchange of money what classifies something as work? We have a system of finances that directs actions of most people, and we go by it because we don't know what's better. But the system is not absolute perfection, it doesn't do it's job well, but both extremes - neither communism (total distribution of resources - nobody has personal incentives) nor full blown absolute capitalism (or feudalism with serfdom as a better example of concentrated power, where very few people dictate the rules to everyone) have been the magic answer to most overall human happiness.
It's very hard to get soft rubbery material that stands up well to traffic abrasion in any other color than black. Tar/asphalt is black, and anything light colored, such as clay, is either rock hard or wet/swampy/quicksandy. It's hard to drive cars in quicksand with high mpg. Rock hard is an option, and cement roads are an option, but the ride isn't quite as smooth, and the tires wear faster. But, also, it may last much longer between repairs. It takes lots of technology to develop rock hard light colored pavement that doesn't crack from ice, and it's very cheap.
Carbon black/soot/asphalt/highly polycondensed(graphitized) aromatic hydrocarbons cannot be bleached to colorless/white like most other organic chemicals that have very specific chemical double bonds that resonate in visible light frequencies, and get attacked easily by oxidizers such as peroxide or hypochlorite. Carbon black is one of the most inert and unreactive materials there is at cold temperatures, but at high temperatures it burns well in oxygen.
Carbon black and rubber are an old world nanotech magic combination made for each other, and nothing even comes close to touching this pair. Tires will always be rubber, and economical rubber will always have carbon black. Back in the 20's you had some white sidewall tires, filled with ZnO, for aesthetic purposes (in a time when you still had an inner tire tube, air resistant butyl rubber technology hasn't even been invented yet), but soon it was realized just how good carbon black is in comparison, and white completely disappeared. Railroad - steel on smooth steel - is a better transportation option because of reduced friction/rolling resistance. But you lose the freedom to go anywhere, you have to stick to the track laid. In very dense cities, personal minitrams coordinated by computers as far as traffic is concerned (where you input your destination like into a car GPS), are an idea, to go about town and run errands, because maintaining steel railroad is cheaper than asphalt, per cumulative lifetime tonnage/meter, plus electrified rail produces no smog, and needs no expensive batteries. But offroad SUV's, where no steel track has been laid, will always have rubber tires. A combo car could lower and raise a steel/rubber set of tires.
Actually "painting" per se is the wrong thing to do. He probably means "coloring." There are two colors when it comes to standing up to sunlight - black and white. Black is carbon black based, cheap, and it absorbs UV rays, including all other rays. White is TiO2, titanium dioxide based, not cheap, and it absorbs UV rays, but nothing else. Other colors don't last, unless tinted with previous ingredients, so they are either loaded with carbon black/TiO2 and you have nuances of grey, or loaded with TiO2 and you have very light colors - light pink, light teal, etc. - think of vinyl siding colors.
There is usually some CaCO3 ground limestone and some clay mixed in as a filler with the whites, but this does not protect against UV without TiO2 present. And any plastic or organic binder material will yellow from extended exposure to sunlight, unless TiO2 filled. PVC is an exception, it will yellow first, then start chalking off as dust on extended weathering. PVC siding is still loaded with TiO2, because that absorbs UV and retards degradation to yellow, and once yellow catalyzes the air oxidation - chalking back to white.
Most roofing is asphalt based, because it's cheap, light, waterproof, and highly weatherable. Whatever Obama's science officer wants, money talks. He has to find a way to make the pocket book budget work with his plans. Such as paying for it himself, as in tax money back.
Ceramic roofs are the traditional extremely weatherable roof material, but they are heavy, brittle, expensive to install, and white color in them is very expensive. Most of the cheap ceramic roofs are reddish-brownish because of iron oxides present in clay. Once installed, they can last for 100+ years. In today's business world they've fallen out of use because, time is money, and nobody has the time anymore to piss around with tiny shingles like they used to back in the old days.
Metal roofs are heavy, expensive, expensive to install, but they also function as an extended tin-foil hat, so aliens can't easily read your thoughts from outer space. Depending on the metal, they may eventually rust away (such as zinc anodized steel once the zinc is consumed), or be covered with green patina that may last for centuries in the absence of acid rain (copper).
Creativity is still enhanced by being well off. Not filthy rich, but comfortably situated in life, having tons of time on your hands. Wealth is important for creativity, but not as a direct reward for creativity, but to create the atmosphere, and simply the possibility.
For example, Isaac Newton was a yeoman farmer, and the income his small generated allowed him to sustain his vast library of books, and dedicate his time to his passions. Many people are caught up in a sustenance hamsterwheel, where they are forced to dedicate all their attention and resources simply to sustain the basic needs of food, shelter, etc. If people were not caught up in artificial hamster wheels, the true effort of sustenance, would be, as quoted from H.D.Thoreau's Walden:
"For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study."
Somebody noted that he was a momma's boy, and he got home baked cookies every Saturday, and he trotted into Concord almost daily, so the statement should be taken with a grain of salt, but it still means a lot.
Still, how many people today are caught up in working their asses off trying to make ends meet on such things as housing cost, insurance cost and taxes? In fact living like Thoreau did is made illegal these days, just so the hamsterwheels keep spinning. His way of living was too cheap, and because of that these days it does not live up to the demands of building code officials. How many people have the means to truly dedicate themselves to a hobby these days? For instance, if robotics is your hobby, living in an efficiency or very crowded housing does not allow you to have a shop with tools where you can fabricate things. You can have a guitar, but music is not everyone's passion, and the neighbors might have a problem with you making noise. You don't have to be filthy rich to have a toolshop, but you have to be comfortably well off. How many people are comfortably well off these days, and how many are so deep in debt they don't kow how they will ever pay it off, maybe in 30 years? As a country wide epidemic, people not being comfortably well off, it seriously affects a nations creativity and competitive edge in the global marketplace.
Creativity is hindered tremendously by forces trying to keep a lid on the population, keeping a population under check and under control. You can't just, for instance, hand out random patents to random people and let them become rich overnight, out of control. How is an oligarchy going to maintain power under such circumstances? The history of humankind is pretty much who can control whose actions. Whether we invent something or hinder creativity is a secondary question, whether the world is a better place or stays the same, the important things is: who's on top, who's calling the shots. Those on top always worry about losing control, or them themselves becoming controlled by others (rightfully so, I may add, but it's a fact of life, simply the way things are, recognize the way things are.) Control of their own subjects in their own country, while countries free from such internal hindrance fly free with creativity and leave the control-freak societies in the dust. Hence the USA has massive brainpower import, because it's one of the most brainwashing control-freak society there is in the world. In the name of security, these days. Let us control you - those are our reasons why, if you don't like them, just say so, we can come up with other reasons. But control of others is the most important thing, otherwise those others overpower you and do nasty things to you. How can you trust giving up control of what other people do? Still, imagine Newton having to put up with such hamster wheel piecemeal existence, where freedom is quoted in the books, but next to impossible to realize in practice. The Principia might have never been written.
In general, fermenting alcohol is like wasting a major part of the food energy, by letting bacteria eat it and waste it, not completely to zero, but only to ethanol, in anaerobic conditions. Ideally there should be a way to get hydrocarbons out of sugars and cellulose, without wasting the stored photosynthetic energy for feeding other lifeforms.
I drive through the countryside in Ohio, and I see a massive amount of oil pumps, that never move, except when the price of oil goes over like $4/gal. I wondered how much oil is there still left. The answer is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripper_well : Over 78% of US oil wells are classified as stripper wells , and they produce 15% of the total oil production in the US.
Moreover they produce oil in barely economical ways, barely breaking even, and they are at risk of being prematurely plugged - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_energy_gain. So basically all those oil wells you see in the country side are almost empty, as if squeezing last drops from an already squeezed lemon. The oil is gone, eventually it's gone. The Standard Oil of Ohio made Rockefeller rich, but there is barely a few drops of oil left around here.
We have still plenty of coal. But oil extraction is an order of magnitude cheaper than coal mining, per unit energy extracted, because oil is a liquid.
Somehow being labeled as "Senior Java Architect" seems to me like being made fun of. I would only want to be labeled that if it came with a fat salary, and only for the money, because passionate zeal for the topic would still be nonexistent, because the whole thing is so far off into bloated nontransparent bullshit land, that only retards truly believe in it.
And when Java version 13.22.5.pre99.post05-rc4 is finally out, it will also blow the pants off painstaking manually optimized assembly programs too, as far as speed of execution is concerned. You doubt my statement? Then just wait and see for yourself!