You know you've become too partisan about an issue when you don't allow anyone to poke any fun at it.
Besides, if you somehow made the joke in the opposite direction, and put it on late-night TV along with similar jokes, it'd be called the Colbert Report and thousands of people would cheer you on and practically think you're the Second Coming.
Trains are, indeed, great for great big bulk things (notice how you sometimes see freight trains carrying coal and gravel and timber and such), but for actually delivering things the last mile (or the first) it's a lot trickier. Being able to go over surface roads buys you a lot of flexibility, too - routing, pickup dates and times, things like that.
But it's not as if rail isn't already in the middle of a comeback and spending a billion dollars a year or so on new infrastructure. (Freight, that is, of course; people-rail is not so fortunate).
The difference is that World of Warcraft has something interesting on its servers. With Autodesk, all the really interesting stuff is on the desktop.
As such, it's much less trouble to hack Autodesk to play for free than to hack MMORPGs (not that this has stopped a few random free "shards" showing up in various spots from time to time, game to game).
Greenpeace has been pretty good about not doing anything too car-bomby. However, there are a number of other environmental activists (like the Earth Liberation Front and such) who do - in fact, "guerilla warfare" is more or less an explicit part of their mission - and some people probably lump them together, as they share a cause.
Which is less than ideal, but hey, lots of people do things like that. For example, some well-intentioned people lump all the Christians together whether they're midwestern Protestant young-earth-creationist fundamentalists, borderline new-age syncretists, old-school Orthodox or Catholics...
We have another solution at my office (where we do pair programming stuff). Two people... sit next to each other... at the same screen, with two mice / two keyboards. (yay USB!)
And if you need to do it remotely, one uses a program called "screen".
There's already way too much matter. They took a look at the physics, and they expected that there should be an equal amount of matter and anti-matter out there from when the Universe got created, but as far as they can tell, there isn't. So some process at the beginning of the Universe made slightly more Matter than Antimatter, and this asymmetry is already one of the greatest unsolved problems of physics.
Have you measured the effect of gravity on light recently? You ever notice how your flashlight beam actually falls towards the ground when you aim it straight out? No? That's because it's trivially small.
To obscure light, matter would need to absorb it. Assuming that it cannot, the closest to "obscuring" that gravitational interactions could do is to bend it a little so it's facing a different direction. Lensing, and all that fun. I suppose in the worst case, a patch of dark matter could act to randomly diffuse the light going through it, but since it IS matter and it is gravitationally bound, it tends to form clusters like other matter, and you're not going to see diffusion over the million-light-year gaps between the galaxies being observed.
There was also an episode of The A-Team towards the end of its run about a crystal skull. It, too, was widely regarded as the worst episode ever, a fan's nightmare, and such.
The lesson: if it says "crystal skull" anywhere, avoid it like the plague.
For what it's worth, the network load induced by BitTorrent can be sufficient to cause (low-quality) cable modems, broadband routers, and similar devices to become flaky, while they are capable of handling the relatively quiescent and straightforward data streams associated with "normal" use.
Are you implying that the CPI is imperfecT? Well.... duh. But are you implying not linked to the state of the US economy in any meaningful way? I think that takes more than a point-and-laugh to back it up.
Actually, there is a significant body of research revealing that the CPI overstates inflation by failing to adequately account for changes in spending patterns that are tied to very prices of the consumer bundle it sets out to measure, and it doesn't account very well for incremental product improvements, like safer cars or squeezable ketchup bottles that don't get a bunch of stuff stuck in the bottom. (Though that's more of an intermediate/long-range thingy.)
You can get unlimited data and text and 500 minutes of voice for $30/month on Sprint if you get the plan that's been floating around a lot of Hot Deals forums across the net for the last year. For values of 'unlimited data' less than 5 gigabytes a month, per standard Sprint Terms Of Service, I presume?
You don't need a luxury-car-level suspension; you're not going to be using this thing daily for trips to the grocery store or for six hours of driving on the Interstate for a business trip. You just need a vaguely-tolerable trip between your garage and the airport; the rest of your travels can be smooth and comfortable (weather permitting) and you save on hangar space costs.
The US economy grew at.6% (annualized) the last two quarters, amidst a massive spike in oil prices, and food prices, and a financial service sector meltdown, and new-home-building doldrum, and assorted other minor panic. Unemployment remains about 5%, inflation (via the CPI) just.3%. If anything, this testifies to the strength of the rest of the US economy. My local Ph.D. economist opines, "If anything, the government should stop stepping on the gas."
He's simply arguing that the mistake highlights a risk (and an inconvenience) which may be avoided by the mechanism described in TFA, while still addressing the problems which necessitate the ballast dumping in the first place.
(Whether or not the proposed mechanism is, in fact, adequate, feasible, or ultimately desirable/undesirable in a global deployment is, however, beyond the scope of this particular facet of the discussion).
Because the zebra mussel's success leads to failures in other things, which people typically like and care about. Niceties like biodiversity, and conveniences like the ability to have (say) some sort of intake pipe, or boat anchor, or boat hull, underwater that doesn't get absolutely encrusted with creatures.
Can we eat them? Problem solved. No, not really. They filter tons of water and end up collecting all sorts of contaminants, for one thing. They're a royal pain to remove from any surface, for another, very small, and very sharp.
The "other" energy source upgrade in these parts would be some sort of deep drilling for geothermal. Some sort of "singularity engine" black hole deal is also theoretically possible. But zero-point energy is ridiculous.
I really don't see the problem with robots building houses. Have you ever been involved in a) robotics or b) house-building? Combining robots' limited capacity for detecting and dealing with "messy" and unpredictable situations with the reality of putting things together outside of pristine, well-supervised factory conditions is not going to work out all that well, at least with the current levels of technology.
Besides, for the $1 million (+interest, maintenance, fuel) your house-building robot costs you, you can purchase an awful lot of labor that will do the same thing.
It's a lot easier to be against things than for them. That's politics. If you are "FOR" something you have to be willign to defend and justify it, repeatedly. Willing, and able.
You'll need more than rhetoric about "it inspires the little kids into Science!" and "we need to get off Earth ASAP!!! zomg" lines. Also, the "it brings us new technologies, like Tang!" bit grows weak.
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You know you've become too partisan about an issue when you don't allow anyone to poke any fun at it.
Besides, if you somehow made the joke in the opposite direction, and put it on late-night TV along with similar jokes, it'd be called the Colbert Report and thousands of people would cheer you on and practically think you're the Second Coming.
But it's not as if rail isn't already in the middle of a comeback and spending a billion dollars a year or so on new infrastructure. (Freight, that is, of course; people-rail is not so fortunate).
The difference is that World of Warcraft has something interesting on its servers. With Autodesk, all the really interesting stuff is on the desktop. As such, it's much less trouble to hack Autodesk to play for free than to hack MMORPGs (not that this has stopped a few random free "shards" showing up in various spots from time to time, game to game).
2.77777778x10^26 gigawatt-hours.
Greenpeace has been pretty good about not doing anything too car-bomby. However, there are a number of other environmental activists (like the Earth Liberation Front and such) who do - in fact, "guerilla warfare" is more or less an explicit part of their mission - and some people probably lump them together, as they share a cause.
Which is less than ideal, but hey, lots of people do things like that. For example, some well-intentioned people lump all the Christians together whether they're midwestern Protestant young-earth-creationist fundamentalists, borderline new-age syncretists, old-school Orthodox or Catholics...
Hey, my motherboard is made of atoms too!
Such matters are silly fripperies (and we don't need 'em :P)
We have another solution at my office (where we do pair programming stuff). Two people... sit next to each other... at the same screen, with two mice / two keyboards. (yay USB!)
And if you need to do it remotely, one uses a program called "screen".
I've wandered all over this country
Prospecting and digging for gold
I've tunneled, hydraulicked, and cradled,
and, I have been frequently sold!
Because gas is nearing $4 a gallon!
There's already way too much matter. They took a look at the physics, and they expected that there should be an equal amount of matter and anti-matter out there from when the Universe got created, but as far as they can tell, there isn't. So some process at the beginning of the Universe made slightly more Matter than Antimatter, and this asymmetry is already one of the greatest unsolved problems of physics.
Have you measured the effect of gravity on light recently? You ever notice how your flashlight beam actually falls towards the ground when you aim it straight out? No? That's because it's trivially small.
To obscure light, matter would need to absorb it. Assuming that it cannot, the closest to "obscuring" that gravitational interactions could do is to bend it a little so it's facing a different direction. Lensing, and all that fun. I suppose in the worst case, a patch of dark matter could act to randomly diffuse the light going through it, but since it IS matter and it is gravitationally bound, it tends to form clusters like other matter, and you're not going to see diffusion over the million-light-year gaps between the galaxies being observed.
There was also an episode of The A-Team towards the end of its run about a crystal skull. It, too, was widely regarded as the worst episode ever, a fan's nightmare, and such.
The lesson: if it says "crystal skull" anywhere, avoid it like the plague.
For what it's worth, the network load induced by BitTorrent can be sufficient to cause (low-quality) cable modems, broadband routers, and similar devices to become flaky, while they are capable of handling the relatively quiescent and straightforward data streams associated with "normal" use.
Are you implying that the CPI is imperfecT? Well.... duh. But are you implying not linked to the state of the US economy in any meaningful way? I think that takes more than a point-and-laugh to back it up.
Actually, there is a significant body of research revealing that the CPI overstates inflation by failing to adequately account for changes in spending patterns that are tied to very prices of the consumer bundle it sets out to measure, and it doesn't account very well for incremental product improvements, like safer cars or squeezable ketchup bottles that don't get a bunch of stuff stuck in the bottom. (Though that's more of an intermediate/long-range thingy.)
I SSH into a machine on the other coast over my Sprint wifi sometimes, and connect to an irssi session running in 'screen'. It's pretty usable.
You don't need a luxury-car-level suspension; you're not going to be using this thing daily for trips to the grocery store or for six hours of driving on the Interstate for a business trip. You just need a vaguely-tolerable trip between your garage and the airport; the rest of your travels can be smooth and comfortable (weather permitting) and you save on hangar space costs.
The US economy grew at .6% (annualized) the last two quarters, amidst a massive spike in oil prices, and food prices, and a financial service sector meltdown, and new-home-building doldrum, and assorted other minor panic. Unemployment remains about 5%, inflation (via the CPI) just .3%. If anything, this testifies to the strength of the rest of the US economy. My local Ph.D. economist opines, "If anything, the government should stop stepping on the gas."
Invest in America. It's underpriced.
He's simply arguing that the mistake highlights a risk (and an inconvenience) which may be avoided by the mechanism described in TFA, while still addressing the problems which necessitate the ballast dumping in the first place.
(Whether or not the proposed mechanism is, in fact, adequate, feasible, or ultimately desirable/undesirable in a global deployment is, however, beyond the scope of this particular facet of the discussion).
Because the zebra mussel's success leads to failures in other things, which people typically like and care about. Niceties like biodiversity, and conveniences like the ability to have (say) some sort of intake pipe, or boat anchor, or boat hull, underwater that doesn't get absolutely encrusted with creatures.
The "other" energy source upgrade in these parts would be some sort of deep drilling for geothermal. Some sort of "singularity engine" black hole deal is also theoretically possible. But zero-point energy is ridiculous.
Besides, for the $1 million (+interest, maintenance, fuel) your house-building robot costs you, you can purchase an awful lot of labor that will do the same thing.
You'll need more than rhetoric about "it inspires the little kids into Science!" and "we need to get off Earth ASAP!!! zomg" lines. Also, the "it brings us new technologies, like Tang!" bit grows weak.