You need to lobby the automotive industry with this.
The truth is that electric vehicles simply make far more sense than combustion ones for everything except long-haul driving (over 100 miles/day). They have ever since the advent of rechargeable batteries - yes, even the clunky lead ones. Well-to-wheel nergy efficiency is still way above 50mpg. GM's EV1 ran with lead acid batteries, for example.
Today, there is simply no room for debate at all. The newest Li-ion batteries recharge in just a few hours, are relatively lightweight, and will get you 200+ miles per charge. The reason the auto industry doesn't want electrics is because of their after market for parts and service - something on the order of $100 billion / year. Electric vehicles - especially those with regenerative breaking - require virtually no maintenance other than tires over the useful life of the vehicle. No oil. No plugs. No belts or fans. No transmission fluid. No engine flushes or tuning. Nothing. THAT's why the industry wants a fuel-based alternative energy solution instead of BEVs - that's why they're pushing plug-in hybrids and biofeuls instead of all-electrics.
Incidentally, there are ultra-quick-charge battery/capacitor technologies on the horizon that could eliminate the long-haul problem too. All-electric is the way forward, not hydrogen or fuel-cells or hybrids or biofuels. Hell, if you're going to use biofuels, use them to run turbines in power plants.
Presumably there is some cyber-analogy to the brick-and-mortar public vs private property issue. If a door to a public building is open, you CAN enter (during stated operating hours). But on private property, that is not so. Similarly, on an unsecured public network the parent argument might hold, but on a private unsecured network then your analogy would seem to stand up quite well.
Anyone know how the law distinguishes unsecured public and private network access?
Not sure about strangers breathing, but I often hear several other conversations while on my cellphone (AT&T). If you can tap into other folks' lines by accident, I figure it's readily feasible to do so on purpose.
It's a terrible tragedy that such a foolhardy strategy has been embraced by our current adminstration. The simple fact is that the garbage advocated in this 'doctrinal' guide is not counter-terrorism, it's merely counter-productive. You can leave aside the entire philosophical argument for fighting fire with water instead of with fire, leading by example, winning over others through cooperation and conversation rather than conflict and so on, and instead simply crunch the numbers: we could save far more American lives for far less money with a War on Drunk Driving or a War on Idiots Driving While Talking On The Phone than we ever will with the War on Terror, to pick just two examples off the top of my head.
We lost 3000 souls on 9/11. Yet we've lost nearly 5000 in Iraq. Meanwhile, we steadily lose 50,000/year to drunk driving, another several thousand to those fools driving while talking on their phones. The numbers simply don't support a War on Terror no matter how you juggle them. This war of abstraction is, in fact, a Campaign of Terror to frighten our citizenry into submission in order keep the current military-industrial complex in power. It is as shameless as it is sickening, and the perpetrators leading the charade should be behind bars instead of in the White House.
Wait, this actually happens in the States? You can buy counterfeit microsoft software at stores?
What kind of moron goes to the trouble of setting up and registering and licensing a full-blow business and the sells counterfeit software? I mean, I can understand doing it at swap meets and out of your car or something, but this is like someone setting up a watch store that sells fake Rolexes. It just seems crazy that it happens in the US.
It's not the same land or farming resources, though. Switchgrass grows on a wider variety of soil and climate, meaning it can be grown in places where you couldn't grow food crops, and doesn't require much seeding or fertilizer.
Algae is an even better option. You can grow it in concrete ponds paved over any surface. And you can use seawater, not just freshwater. We're looking at growing algae in concrete raceway ponds paved onto unusable lava rock fields in Hawaii, fed by untreated seawater pumped right out of the ocean.
The great thing about algae is that it is a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to stored energy than larger plants, since it doesn't have to spend any of that energy building a scaffolding for itself. Most data puts algae at about 10-20 times the efficiency of other biofuel crops. The data I've seen also show a better ability of algae to produce oils than starches - which is more efficient anyway, as I understand it. That means algae is appropriate for biodiesel, not ethanol or a gasoline replacement.
Biodiesel would be just as good as a gasoline replacement, for all the reasons argued by the switchfuel folks: it preserves the utility of all existing technology and infrastructure, while gleaning the benefits of closing the carbon loop. Clean diesel engines are a very mature technology - just look at the auto market in Europe. And the added benefit is that you don't have to use agricultural land to produce algae - useless desert would work just fine.
Algae is the way forward for biofuels, no question.
Because in the incredibly sad state of affairs that is the US educational and political system, science - and with it the future of our nation - is genuinely threatened by religious lunacy and the moronic beliefs and ravings of dysfunctional schizoid-delusional sociopaths. Science IS modernity. That's all there is to it. The only thing we have that cultures didn't have 500, or 1000, or 2000 years ago, is science - and scientifically-derrived knowledge. We HAD religion. Only science has fostered new insights into the nature of reality. And as a result of those insights, we now have the modern world and the wonders of technology - from dentistry to antibiotics to cheap clothing to the internet and cell phones. Science gave us EVERYTHING that makes us different from the middle-eastern tribesman and shepherds of the 1st Century.
Scientists are preoccupied with Creationism because modern American Christianity has degenerated into a freakish, extremist cult that is substantively no different that Wahabism or Scientology - the only difference is that these people are in charge of our government. If that's not a threat you should be concerned about for the sake of your children grandchildren, then I don't know what is.
In highschool I looked into massive flywheels as potential storage devices for coupling with solar power. The math doesn't work out. Flywheels can only hold a tiny fraction of the energy necessary to be useful in most applications - their energy density is, well, pretty pathetic. Tiny, tiny flywheels are great as capacitors in small devices, but anything bigger than about the size of radio-controlled car is just not feasible. You need both ultra-high rpms and a very massive wheel to get anything useful into a car-sized machine. The extra weight harms efficiency, and the high rpms turn the whole machine into a time-bomb.
One possible application would be for flywheels to act as capacitors instead of as batteries. In this function, they might assist with regnerative braking. But so-called ultracapacitors are on the horizon anyway, so flywheels are probably just not going to.. ahem.. fly.
there's very few better things we could have done with our intelligence for the continuance of life on Earth than releasing all of the trapped CO2 back into the atmosphere so that it can be used again... The only species that are going to really be adversely affected by this sort of change are those who have set up permanent settlements right next to the water and can't easily retreat further inland as the water rises.
Obviously you're not familiar with the apocalyptic danger posed by ocean acidification. Here are the highlights: the bulk of CO2 we release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels does NOT go into the atmospheric and create climate change; rather, is absorbed by the ocean, which creates carbonic acid, which lowers the ocean's pH. Among other nasty side effects, this reduces the available calcium carbonate in seawater, which both makes it harder for animals to grow and maintain shells and skeletons. This is a problem from microscopic (think planktonic diatoms) to the macroscopic (think blue whales).
Ocean acidification is a vastly larger problem that changes in weather, because it affects the entire marine ecosystem worldwide from top to bottom. Slightly warmer or colder continental weather is no big deal, and even adjusting to rising sea levels is probably managable not only for people but for wildlife. But a collapse of ocean ecosystems is going to be a seriously bad day for everyone.
I'm a moderate rightist, and I approve this message.
This is why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
suggest the concepts were good but too early for their time
No kidding. Some friends and I tried to start a digital music distribution.com in 1995 - this was years before Napster and mp3.com, a decade or more before iTunes et al. We had an end-to-end system sorted out - one-click download and burn to CD (this was way before portable.mp3 players), $1 songs, etc, etc. It was just WAY too early. None of us ever imagined the RIAA would have its head so obscenely far up its ass. Thankfully, we didn't burn through millions of other people's venture dollars - though the stories of meetings with those idiots are quite funny.
Thanks for the useful links, but I wouldn't drink the Koolaid just yet.
"All Natural" can mean almost anything - just have a look at the ingredients on the back of anything bearing that label and decide for yourself how 'all natural' processed food is. Remember all that pet food that was tainted? Half of it was branded 'all natural' and all of it was billed as being full of 'wholesome goodness' and other such crap. Sure, if by 'all natural' 'wholesome goodness' you actually mean 'pool cleaner'. How about milk? It does a body good, right? Ever been to a dairy farm or a pasteurizing plant? They tend not to show the pus-filled milking tubes in the magazine ads. Is that not slightly deceptive? Know what happens to expired milk - it goes right back to the plant for reprocessing. Mmmmm, yummy, spoiled milk recycled right bac in with the 'farm fresh' stuff! And don't even get me started on the claims made by peddlers of bottled water.
Companies may adhere to the letter of the law, but certainly not to the spirit. Advertising is notoriously deceptive and misleading, in food and health and computers and virtually every other industry. Until you've worked in any of these industries, you need to be very cautious about taking their proclamations of sincerity and legal adherence on faith.
While it's great that a big corporation is being held liable for false advertising, aren't there worse examples out there than computer technical support? What about false advertising for medicines, diets, and health-related products and services? Alternative medicine is one gigantic - and very dangerous - scam. What about all the food product labeling - low fat, organic, and all that meaningless garbage that is totally deceptive? And what about the goddamn P3N15 3nlArgment pi11s I paid through the nose for - those farking things didn't work AT ALL!
I can handling wiping off finger marks, but the lag on that demo is totally unacceptable. Unless it was running on a 5-year-old celeron-based laptop with 128MB of RAM, or unless the whole demo was running in emulation, that interface is simply DOA. Would any of us put up with 1/2-second lag in a mouse-driven GUI? No way.
to suggest that all businesses only care about cash must, by extension, mean that this is true of all people.
Bullshit right back at ya. There are clear separations between individuals and organizations, one of the most fundamental of which is a distinction between the values they hold. Guilt by association may still apply, people must of course be accountable for their own behavior, and the old Nazi 'I was just following orders' excuse holds little water even under extreme circumstances, BUT, you are talking about values and priorities ("businesses only CARE about...") here, not about outcomes. It is certainly possible to work for an organization whose values and priorities you don't share - you can either be ignorant of them, or disagree with them vehemently. I've worked for companies I despise. I may have been complicit in their wrongdoings, but that doesn't mean that I only care about cash.
And what's more, I think the GP post has it right in virtually all circumstances: morals are swept aside by the profit motive. This is not just true of large corporations, though they offer the most obvious examples - after all, they have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profit as an integral part of how they are structured. But ALL for-profit enterprise violates the Golden Rule - the (largely agreed upon) basis of all human morality. In no other realm of human discourse to we so gamely fail to treat others the way we would wish to be treated ourselves. If you had something in your possession - life-saving drugs, food, water, toys, a car, software, anything at all - would you charge your close friends and family 'whatever price they could bear' in order to maximize your profit? Not unless you are a sociopath. But with customers? Game on.
Profit is, by definition, always gotten at someone else's expense. That makes the profit motive inherently immoral. I'm passing no judgment here - the system works pretty well overall. But immorality is part and parcel - that's just an inescapable fact.
There are, predictably, plenty of comments here and elsewhere on the interwebs about the doomsday scenarios conjured by plastic-eating bacteria. Of course, those scenarios have been covered in sci-fi for decades (Mutant 59, Andromeda Strain, Pandora's Genes, on Sliders, etc).
What isn't getting much notice is the fact that this story is just really good news: it turns out that plastic bags biodegrade through bacterial action just like wood or paper. Where are the cheers?
Wood and paper don't liquify overnight due to unstoppable bacteria - we make plenty of packaging out of paper and even build quite sturdy structures out of wood. But they break down eventually. It all works out quite well for everyone - us, bacteria, and the environment. Well, as it turns out, so do plastic bags. Considering most people think plastic bags are going to last hundreds of thousands of years, they are viewed as much more evil litter than paper bags. Turns out this view is misguided. Isn't that cause for celebration?
Hopefully, it will turn out that styrofoam, PET, PE, PVC and all the hundreds of other plastics and petrochemicals biodegrade too. This is not to say that plastic litter s not a problem. It is better for farm animals and sea turtles to eat paper bags by accident than plastic ones. But still, the idea that the giant Pacific garbage vortex won't be there forever is comforting news.
I'm not sure seasteading is necessarily the best bet. Creating artificial islands might be more feasible than creating floating platforms. There are a vast number of seamounts just under the ocean's surface (ie: within 20 meters) that lie well outside any territorial waters of nations, particularly in the southwestern Pacific and the mid-atlantic. I'm not sure the advantages of mobility offered by seastead platforms outweigh the advantages of building up from the seafloor itself. And don't get locked into thinking this could only be done by building a tower down from the surface. For a a relatively modest cost (hundreds of millions), artificial islands make from deposited rubble just like the projects in Dubai could be undertaken in hundreds of locations worldwide.
Unless I'm mistaken, only non-obvious inventions can be protected by patents. Even if something is novel, useful, or a new combination of existing ideas, it must still be non-obvious to be patentable.
While it's a good thing that a hardware vendor is initiating some sort of performance standard that will help the mass market determine whether a machine can play most games, I think it would make more sense if this was done in software with benchmarking.
Vista already has this feature, if I recall (I still use XP). But if I recall correctly, it's a random 1-5 metric - maybe with a decimal? - and it doesn't offer anything useful like, "Unreal Tournament 3 requires a score of 3.5 or higher; Crysis requires a 4.8 or higher" etc.
I hate to say it, but for Windows gaming there should be a Microsoft-led campaign to get games to list performance scores. To play Game X with full-features (AA, high res, max effects, etc) then you need so-and-so score. For average performance on Game X, you need so-and-so score. My guess is that this was the original intention with Vista, but that the ball got dropped somewhere along the way.
I really prefer email as my primary method of communicating.
Different things work for different people who work in different contexts. In my work, email is hopelessly slow and ineffective. I can't wait an hour or a day or a week to exchange information with someone. Very often, my entire workflow depends on getting the right piece of information - the answer to a question, a critical point of data, the name of a person who I need to get in touch with. If I rely solely on email, my workflow stops until I get a response. It would be a crazy, foolish mistake to do so.
So declarations that email is more efficient or effective than using the phone are only true within a very narrow work context. That context may be common among slashdotters - writing code in cubicle-land, for example - but in my experience the delays caused by email are VERY often workflow critical failure points. From a management and operations standpoint, CFPs are unacceptable; you do everything you can to eliminate them.
Lastly, the anonymity and temporal disjunction of email makes it a much easier way for many people to communicate with others than a real-time conversation. I don't fault people for being introverted, shy, uncomfortable, antisocial, or otherwise unable to communicate well with others in conversation, but having said that I think email has become a crutch for many folks who lack the ability to confidently and effectively communicate with others in a professional work environment. There simply is no replacement for a real conversation. If you can't have one with your co-workers, your boss, or your customers, then your career - and life - options are going to be severely limited.
Although the article does a good job of being nonchalant and avoiding hyperbole, it seems that there are going to be some major implications from this 'correction'. Some are alluded to in the article - that stars are brighter than expected and that some of the 'missing mass' in the universe has apparently been found. But doesn't that open up a big can of worms? Aren't recent dark matter and dark energy theories calibrated to older and - apparently - now inaccurate data about how matter/mass there is in the universe?
Anyone case to elaborate on what kind of shake-up this is going to have for astronomy and cosmology?
why are there so many ads? Well, ads simply *work*. If they didn't, there would be no marketing departments and no billboards, no jingles on the radio, no Super Bowl extravaganza commericials.
It's a tempting logical leap to make, but I suspect this assumption is at least partly false.
There are two kinds of advertising: ads that inform, and ads that create brand-awareness. TV and radio spots for Rogaine or a 3-day sale at your local hardware store are informative - they give you information about something you might want or need. Billboards with the Coca Cola or McDonalds logo or radio jingles with infectious memes (much more rare now than in the past, I notice) do not inform, they simply keep the brand in the public consciousness - and they serve as a sort of peacock's tail: they're a flashy, expensive demonstration that the company is thriving enough to throw money away on extravagances, which builds brand confidence.
The extent to which either of these techniques really work is highly debatable. The strongest evidence that they DO work comes from... wait for it... studies funded by the media, which lives or dies by ad revenue.
How often do you rush out to buy something because you learn about it in a TV ad? Do you ever really go to Carls Jr. for a burger because you glimpsed their $50 million ad campaign a few times? Would you actually buy less Diet Coke if they didn't have $500 million worth of billboard advertisement everywhere?
Personally, I suspect most advertising barely works at all. But thank goodness TV has convinced companies it does, otherwise we'd have no Battlestar Galactica!
In the case of abortion I am against the whole practice because it _might_ be murder. Until we can prove otherwise I would stick with that.
You proceed from the false assumption that there is a reasonable likelihood that abortion is murder. This is a common logical falacy, closely related (not coincidentally) to the theist-atheist debate about the existance of God. In the case of God, the false assumption is that the likelihood of God existing is equal to the likelihood of God not existing. This is nonsense. The probabilities are not remotely close to being equal. For example, I haven't talked to my wife since this morning, so there is a chance she could have won $100 million in the lottery. I don't know for sure she HASN'T won the lottery, but just because I don't KNOW doesn't automatically mean there is a 50:50 chance she has or hasn't.
Returning to the abortion issue, even if you proceed from the (very weak) position that we must be agnostic about whether abortion is murder, the probability that we will one day 'discover' that it IS murder (for reasons you don't even conjecture) is vanishingly small. The burden is therefore on you, today, to make a compelling case to the contrary. This case is normally made with appeals to 'soul' and 'spirit'. To me, that's just a bunch of horseshit.
You can put together a box with a network connection for well under $500 these days. Hell, for $200 million - the cost of a new plane or two - the USAF could just buy a million of those $200 PCs for all the starving children in developing countries.
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The truth is that electric vehicles simply make far more sense than combustion ones for everything except long-haul driving (over 100 miles/day). They have ever since the advent of rechargeable batteries - yes, even the clunky lead ones. Well-to-wheel nergy efficiency is still way above 50mpg. GM's EV1 ran with lead acid batteries, for example.
Today, there is simply no room for debate at all. The newest Li-ion batteries recharge in just a few hours, are relatively lightweight, and will get you 200+ miles per charge. The reason the auto industry doesn't want electrics is because of their after market for parts and service - something on the order of $100 billion / year. Electric vehicles - especially those with regenerative breaking - require virtually no maintenance other than tires over the useful life of the vehicle. No oil. No plugs. No belts or fans. No transmission fluid. No engine flushes or tuning. Nothing. THAT's why the industry wants a fuel-based alternative energy solution instead of BEVs - that's why they're pushing plug-in hybrids and biofeuls instead of all-electrics.
Incidentally, there are ultra-quick-charge battery/capacitor technologies on the horizon that could eliminate the long-haul problem too. All-electric is the way forward, not hydrogen or fuel-cells or hybrids or biofuels. Hell, if you're going to use biofuels, use them to run turbines in power plants.
Anyone know how the law distinguishes unsecured public and private network access?
Not sure about strangers breathing, but I often hear several other conversations while on my cellphone (AT&T). If you can tap into other folks' lines by accident, I figure it's readily feasible to do so on purpose.
metacafe link here and TED link here.
We lost 3000 souls on 9/11. Yet we've lost nearly 5000 in Iraq. Meanwhile, we steadily lose 50,000/year to drunk driving, another several thousand to those fools driving while talking on their phones. The numbers simply don't support a War on Terror no matter how you juggle them. This war of abstraction is, in fact, a Campaign of Terror to frighten our citizenry into submission in order keep the current military-industrial complex in power. It is as shameless as it is sickening, and the perpetrators leading the charade should be behind bars instead of in the White House.
What kind of moron goes to the trouble of setting up and registering and licensing a full-blow business and the sells counterfeit software? I mean, I can understand doing it at swap meets and out of your car or something, but this is like someone setting up a watch store that sells fake Rolexes. It just seems crazy that it happens in the US.
Algae is an even better option. You can grow it in concrete ponds paved over any surface. And you can use seawater, not just freshwater. We're looking at growing algae in concrete raceway ponds paved onto unusable lava rock fields in Hawaii, fed by untreated seawater pumped right out of the ocean.
The great thing about algae is that it is a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to stored energy than larger plants, since it doesn't have to spend any of that energy building a scaffolding for itself. Most data puts algae at about 10-20 times the efficiency of other biofuel crops. The data I've seen also show a better ability of algae to produce oils than starches - which is more efficient anyway, as I understand it. That means algae is appropriate for biodiesel, not ethanol or a gasoline replacement.
Biodiesel would be just as good as a gasoline replacement, for all the reasons argued by the switchfuel folks: it preserves the utility of all existing technology and infrastructure, while gleaning the benefits of closing the carbon loop. Clean diesel engines are a very mature technology - just look at the auto market in Europe. And the added benefit is that you don't have to use agricultural land to produce algae - useless desert would work just fine.
Algae is the way forward for biofuels, no question.
Scientists are preoccupied with Creationism because modern American Christianity has degenerated into a freakish, extremist cult that is substantively no different that Wahabism or Scientology - the only difference is that these people are in charge of our government. If that's not a threat you should be concerned about for the sake of your children grandchildren, then I don't know what is.
One possible application would be for flywheels to act as capacitors instead of as batteries. In this function, they might assist with regnerative braking. But so-called ultracapacitors are on the horizon anyway, so flywheels are probably just not going to .. ahem .. fly.
Obviously you're not familiar with the apocalyptic danger posed by ocean acidification. Here are the highlights: the bulk of CO2 we release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels does NOT go into the atmospheric and create climate change; rather, is absorbed by the ocean, which creates carbonic acid, which lowers the ocean's pH. Among other nasty side effects, this reduces the available calcium carbonate in seawater, which both makes it harder for animals to grow and maintain shells and skeletons. This is a problem from microscopic (think planktonic diatoms) to the macroscopic (think blue whales).
Ocean acidification is a vastly larger problem that changes in weather, because it affects the entire marine ecosystem worldwide from top to bottom. Slightly warmer or colder continental weather is no big deal, and even adjusting to rising sea levels is probably managable not only for people but for wildlife. But a collapse of ocean ecosystems is going to be a seriously bad day for everyone.
I'm a moderate rightist, and I approve this message.
This is why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
No kidding. Some friends and I tried to start a digital music distribution .com in 1995 - this was years before Napster and mp3.com, a decade or more before iTunes et al. We had an end-to-end system sorted out - one-click download and burn to CD (this was way before portable .mp3 players), $1 songs, etc, etc. It was just WAY too early. None of us ever imagined the RIAA would have its head so obscenely far up its ass. Thankfully, we didn't burn through millions of other people's venture dollars - though the stories of meetings with those idiots are quite funny.
"All Natural" can mean almost anything - just have a look at the ingredients on the back of anything bearing that label and decide for yourself how 'all natural' processed food is. Remember all that pet food that was tainted? Half of it was branded 'all natural' and all of it was billed as being full of 'wholesome goodness' and other such crap. Sure, if by 'all natural' 'wholesome goodness' you actually mean 'pool cleaner'. How about milk? It does a body good, right? Ever been to a dairy farm or a pasteurizing plant? They tend not to show the pus-filled milking tubes in the magazine ads. Is that not slightly deceptive? Know what happens to expired milk - it goes right back to the plant for reprocessing. Mmmmm, yummy, spoiled milk recycled right bac in with the 'farm fresh' stuff! And don't even get me started on the claims made by peddlers of bottled water.
Companies may adhere to the letter of the law, but certainly not to the spirit. Advertising is notoriously deceptive and misleading, in food and health and computers and virtually every other industry. Until you've worked in any of these industries, you need to be very cautious about taking their proclamations of sincerity and legal adherence on faith.
While it's great that a big corporation is being held liable for false advertising, aren't there worse examples out there than computer technical support? What about false advertising for medicines, diets, and health-related products and services? Alternative medicine is one gigantic - and very dangerous - scam. What about all the food product labeling - low fat, organic, and all that meaningless garbage that is totally deceptive? And what about the goddamn P3N15 3nlArgment pi11s I paid through the nose for - those farking things didn't work AT ALL!
I can handling wiping off finger marks, but the lag on that demo is totally unacceptable. Unless it was running on a 5-year-old celeron-based laptop with 128MB of RAM, or unless the whole demo was running in emulation, that interface is simply DOA. Would any of us put up with 1/2-second lag in a mouse-driven GUI? No way.
Bullshit right back at ya. There are clear separations between individuals and organizations, one of the most fundamental of which is a distinction between the values they hold. Guilt by association may still apply, people must of course be accountable for their own behavior, and the old Nazi 'I was just following orders' excuse holds little water even under extreme circumstances, BUT, you are talking about values and priorities ("businesses only CARE about...") here, not about outcomes. It is certainly possible to work for an organization whose values and priorities you don't share - you can either be ignorant of them, or disagree with them vehemently. I've worked for companies I despise. I may have been complicit in their wrongdoings, but that doesn't mean that I only care about cash.
And what's more, I think the GP post has it right in virtually all circumstances: morals are swept aside by the profit motive. This is not just true of large corporations, though they offer the most obvious examples - after all, they have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profit as an integral part of how they are structured. But ALL for-profit enterprise violates the Golden Rule - the (largely agreed upon) basis of all human morality. In no other realm of human discourse to we so gamely fail to treat others the way we would wish to be treated ourselves. If you had something in your possession - life-saving drugs, food, water, toys, a car, software, anything at all - would you charge your close friends and family 'whatever price they could bear' in order to maximize your profit? Not unless you are a sociopath. But with customers? Game on.
Profit is, by definition, always gotten at someone else's expense. That makes the profit motive inherently immoral. I'm passing no judgment here - the system works pretty well overall. But immorality is part and parcel - that's just an inescapable fact.
What isn't getting much notice is the fact that this story is just really good news: it turns out that plastic bags biodegrade through bacterial action just like wood or paper. Where are the cheers?
Wood and paper don't liquify overnight due to unstoppable bacteria - we make plenty of packaging out of paper and even build quite sturdy structures out of wood. But they break down eventually. It all works out quite well for everyone - us, bacteria, and the environment. Well, as it turns out, so do plastic bags. Considering most people think plastic bags are going to last hundreds of thousands of years, they are viewed as much more evil litter than paper bags. Turns out this view is misguided. Isn't that cause for celebration?
Hopefully, it will turn out that styrofoam, PET, PE, PVC and all the hundreds of other plastics and petrochemicals biodegrade too. This is not to say that plastic litter s not a problem. It is better for farm animals and sea turtles to eat paper bags by accident than plastic ones. But still, the idea that the giant Pacific garbage vortex won't be there forever is comforting news.
I'm not sure seasteading is necessarily the best bet. Creating artificial islands might be more feasible than creating floating platforms. There are a vast number of seamounts just under the ocean's surface (ie: within 20 meters) that lie well outside any territorial waters of nations, particularly in the southwestern Pacific and the mid-atlantic. I'm not sure the advantages of mobility offered by seastead platforms outweigh the advantages of building up from the seafloor itself. And don't get locked into thinking this could only be done by building a tower down from the surface. For a a relatively modest cost (hundreds of millions), artificial islands make from deposited rubble just like the projects in Dubai could be undertaken in hundreds of locations worldwide.
Unless I'm mistaken, only non-obvious inventions can be protected by patents. Even if something is novel, useful, or a new combination of existing ideas, it must still be non-obvious to be patentable.
Vista already has this feature, if I recall (I still use XP). But if I recall correctly, it's a random 1-5 metric - maybe with a decimal? - and it doesn't offer anything useful like, "Unreal Tournament 3 requires a score of 3.5 or higher; Crysis requires a 4.8 or higher" etc.
I hate to say it, but for Windows gaming there should be a Microsoft-led campaign to get games to list performance scores. To play Game X with full-features (AA, high res, max effects, etc) then you need so-and-so score. For average performance on Game X, you need so-and-so score. My guess is that this was the original intention with Vista, but that the ball got dropped somewhere along the way.
Different things work for different people who work in different contexts. In my work, email is hopelessly slow and ineffective. I can't wait an hour or a day or a week to exchange information with someone. Very often, my entire workflow depends on getting the right piece of information - the answer to a question, a critical point of data, the name of a person who I need to get in touch with. If I rely solely on email, my workflow stops until I get a response. It would be a crazy, foolish mistake to do so.
So declarations that email is more efficient or effective than using the phone are only true within a very narrow work context. That context may be common among slashdotters - writing code in cubicle-land, for example - but in my experience the delays caused by email are VERY often workflow critical failure points. From a management and operations standpoint, CFPs are unacceptable; you do everything you can to eliminate them.
Lastly, the anonymity and temporal disjunction of email makes it a much easier way for many people to communicate with others than a real-time conversation. I don't fault people for being introverted, shy, uncomfortable, antisocial, or otherwise unable to communicate well with others in conversation, but having said that I think email has become a crutch for many folks who lack the ability to confidently and effectively communicate with others in a professional work environment. There simply is no replacement for a real conversation. If you can't have one with your co-workers, your boss, or your customers, then your career - and life - options are going to be severely limited.
Anyone case to elaborate on what kind of shake-up this is going to have for astronomy and cosmology?
That religion is for morons, not just mormons?
It's a tempting logical leap to make, but I suspect this assumption is at least partly false.
There are two kinds of advertising: ads that inform, and ads that create brand-awareness. TV and radio spots for Rogaine or a 3-day sale at your local hardware store are informative - they give you information about something you might want or need. Billboards with the Coca Cola or McDonalds logo or radio jingles with infectious memes (much more rare now than in the past, I notice) do not inform, they simply keep the brand in the public consciousness - and they serve as a sort of peacock's tail: they're a flashy, expensive demonstration that the company is thriving enough to throw money away on extravagances, which builds brand confidence.
The extent to which either of these techniques really work is highly debatable. The strongest evidence that they DO work comes from ... wait for it ... studies funded by the media, which lives or dies by ad revenue.
How often do you rush out to buy something because you learn about it in a TV ad? Do you ever really go to Carls Jr. for a burger because you glimpsed their $50 million ad campaign a few times? Would you actually buy less Diet Coke if they didn't have $500 million worth of billboard advertisement everywhere?
Personally, I suspect most advertising barely works at all. But thank goodness TV has convinced companies it does, otherwise we'd have no Battlestar Galactica!
You proceed from the false assumption that there is a reasonable likelihood that abortion is murder. This is a common logical falacy, closely related (not coincidentally) to the theist-atheist debate about the existance of God. In the case of God, the false assumption is that the likelihood of God existing is equal to the likelihood of God not existing. This is nonsense. The probabilities are not remotely close to being equal. For example, I haven't talked to my wife since this morning, so there is a chance she could have won $100 million in the lottery. I don't know for sure she HASN'T won the lottery, but just because I don't KNOW doesn't automatically mean there is a 50:50 chance she has or hasn't.
Returning to the abortion issue, even if you proceed from the (very weak) position that we must be agnostic about whether abortion is murder, the probability that we will one day 'discover' that it IS murder (for reasons you don't even conjecture) is vanishingly small. The burden is therefore on you, today, to make a compelling case to the contrary. This case is normally made with appeals to 'soul' and 'spirit'. To me, that's just a bunch of horseshit.
You can put together a box with a network connection for well under $500 these days. Hell, for $200 million - the cost of a new plane or two - the USAF could just buy a million of those $200 PCs for all the starving children in developing countries.