Unlikely. Nearly all population growth is occurring in developing countries. They would handily lose any war with the industrialized countries where most of the food is grown and consumption takes place. Most industrialized countries are at or near zero growth, with some experiencing negative growth (they are shrinking in population).
For whatever reasons, industrialization leads to lower population growth. What's needed to arrest global population growth is to provide education, engineering expertise, contraception, and economic assistance to developing nations so they can modernize their economies ASAP. Providing food, water, and medicinal aid actually exacerbates the problem. They increase survival rates in developing countries without doing anything to stem their high population growth rates, making it that much harder to modernize those countries and increasing their future reliance on foreign aid.
In other words, as contradictory as it may seem, modernization towards self-sufficiency and economic globalization combat global population growth. Anti-globalization and reliance solely on humanitarianism allow it to continue or even exacerbate it.
Because they are more efficient for the same brightness levels, which is especially important for electric cars, since they'll be less of a drain on the batteries.
The typical sedan needs about 20-25 hp to maintain highway speeds. That's 15-19 kW. Car headlights are about 50 Watts each. If as a post above says, laser headlights represent a 70% improvement in efficiency, that means you could replace 100 Watts of headlights with about 60 Watts of laser headlights - a 40 Watt savings.
40 Watts is 0.2%-0.3% of 15-19 kW. If you take the Nissan Leaf which has a nominal 70 mile range at highway speeds, saving 40 Watts will get you about 800-100 feet (240-300 meters) in additional range on a full charge compared to regular halogen headlights. So they represent a trivial amount of energy savings which nobody is going to notice, even on an EV.
That said, BMW is a luxury brand (in the U.S.). So they'll probably be able to sell enough of these to rich people (early adopters) to justify the R&D costs, and it'll help improve the state of the art for everyone. But don't make the mistake of thinking that this will result in any significant energy savings for EVs.
Eyestrain comes about from a mismatch between the brightness of the page you're reading vs the surrounding environment. If you adjust the room's lighting to match that of a backlit display, you will not get eyestrain (in fact if it's perfectly adjusted, you won't be able to tell apart the LCD from the e-ink display). Yes, this means don't use your tablet (or laptop) in a dark bedroom at night. Turn on a desk lamp. The only place e-ink devices really have an advantage when it comes to eyestrain is outdoors in sunlight. Unfortunately it seems transreflective LCD technology has been abandoned, so tablets and laptops can only display in sunlight by cranking out as much brightness as the sun.
What I am saying was that you never publish your encryption keys even if you don't know anything more.
In public key encryption, you're supposed to publish your public key. So the "never publish your encryption keys" rule is not absolute. Obviously that isn't what happened here, but I don't expect a clueless journalist to be aware of these nuances, and so I wouldn't judge his behavior based on a "default' rule which is by no means absolute.
Education is expensive for the same reason home prices spiked. There was easy access to low interest government backed loans. If you are out of work, the answer is go back to school and learn a new skill. When you can't find an opening in your new field at your minimum income needs, you become underemployeed in a field other than engineering, while your engineering position goes to someone with lower overhead.
I don't think that's a deep enough analysis. Home prices spiked because of easy access to loans coupled with a shortage of housing due to homebuilders not being able to instantly ramp up production to meet increased demand.
A similar situation has developed in education, only instead of there being a shortage of space in universities, there's a shortage of space in desirable universities. Those universities have figured out that while it costs them a fixed amount to provide an education, the amount people are willing to pay for that education is based on how much it increases their future earning potential, not how much it costs the university to provide it. So they crank up the price, and students, or rather, their parents, willingly pay it so junior can have "Big Name University" at the top of his diploma.
So the solution (and I say this as a conservative) is to increase the supply of good-quality low-cost universities. Public universities and free educational services like Kahn Academy need to be well-funded and expanded, so they can provide competitive pressure on private universities. The name of the school needs to become less valuable, with more emphasis placed on the coursework you took and passed. This will keep prices closer to what it costs to actually provide the education, rather than how much having the school's name and degree on your resume is worth to the student.
If your entire lifestyle is subsidized by borderline slave labor elsewhere, is it moral to continue living it?
And, really, is it? I dare say Americans were living pretty well in the middle of the century, without relying on cheap overseas labor.
It's more nuanced than that. While those "borderline slave labor" jobs may be abhorrent to us, in those countries they are actually considered good, desirable jobs. In other words, not giving the people in those countries the "borderline slave labor" jobs consigns them to even worse fates - usually subsistence farming where a single drought, flood, or insect plague can plunge them into starvation. So it would actually be less moral to deprive them of those jobs.
On an abstract level, you cannot instantaneously convert a 3rd world economy into a 1st world economy. It has to gradually work its way up, which means it has to start with jobs which would be considered "borderline slave labor" by people in developed nations. It's a necessary transitory step to developing your economy. If the wages and working conditions persist at slave labor levels, then you have something to worry about. But average wages in China have been increasing at a pretty good clip, indicating international trade and those "slave labor" jobs are indeed helping lift the Chinese people out of abject poverty.
It's counterproductive to design a research sub with the capability to dive past about 6500 meters (which the Shinkai 6500 can do). That's deep enough to reach about 98% of the ocean's floor. Anything significantly beyond that and you're adding excess weight and strength which will only be useful if you've visiting a few trenches. For studying the rest of the ocean, it's just useless baggage. You're better off designing one general-purpose DSV for research in the majority of the ocean, and another one specially-made to be stronger for researching trenches.
Today I learned that people would rather breathe toxic fumes from coal fired power plants than spend $3 extra per year to have clean air.
If it were truly only a difference of $3 per year, then solar would be enjoying great success in the market. The average U.S. household electricity use was about 10,500 kWh. Average retail electricity price for the U.S. is $0.112 per kWh, for an annual cost of $1176 per household per year.
Electricity from solar costs (excluding subsidies, since the whole point of this exercise is to see if solar is "worth it") about $0.25-$0.30 per kWh. So it would in fact cost the average U.S. household an extra $1500 to $2000 per year to switch completely over to solar.
I completely agree with phasing out our toxic coal plants, but solar is far from ready, neither technologically nor economically, to fill in for coal. The only technology which can do that today is nuclear. While its waste is still a problem, it is considerably less of a problem than the pollution from coal. And its cost ($0.05-$0.07 per kWh wholesale) is competitive with coal ($0.04 per kWh for wholesale). The best course of action is to shift over to nuclear power now, then shift from nuclear to solar/wind in the future when those technologies mature.
These guys and Evergreen Solar both had viable advanced products, good ideas, and solid business practices and a eagerness to hire local/american workers to do a job that desperately needs doing. The folded because of 'free trade' competition with China who is more than willing to dump silicon tetrachloride in people's backyards (rather than recycling it as is required here)
If dumping it is so evil and recycling it is so expensive, then perhaps part of the problem is that solar energy isn't as clean as its proponents are making it out to be?
the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.
Eh? Pretty much everyone knew PDAs and phones were going to converge. A lot of geeks didn't like it since PDAs were "their" toy while phones were something the masses used. But once the Blackberry took off it was pretty clear that they would converge. The only question was whether the PDA would become a phone, or the phone would become a PDA. That may sound like semantics, but from a user interface standpoint there's a huge difference. With the former, you basically have a small computer where you can run a program which lets you make phone calls. With the latter, the device is still primarily a phone, and the computing features provide additional functionality.
Palm and Microsoft bet on the former. Apple, fresh from conquering the MP3 player market with a super-easy-to-use UI on inferior features and hardware, bet on the latter. The rest, as they say, is history. But it's not like Apple was the only one with the idea. What made Apple's offering stand out was they used the computer to enhance and simplify the phone's functionality, rather than make the phone more complicated to make it run within PalmOS' or WinCE's pre-existing paradigm.
Problem with your thinking is....no tablet looked anything remotely like the ipad until the ipad came out. Look at the picture at the bottom of the link to see the blatant copying Samsung did
Look at the picture inside this link to see the blatant copying Samsung did. Clearly Samsung built a time machine in 2006, jumped ahead to 2010 to see what the iPad would look like, and stole its design to use in their digital picture frame!
As people have been trying to tell you Apple fans, there is nothing innovative about a flat black rectangle with rounded corners. If there is, then it's Apple who should be criticized for ripping off Samsung's design from 2006.
So this becomes a moral issue. Companies should have a "don't sell to dictators" policy. We should isolate them from all trade. No more business with China until they have a freely elected government. No more oil from Saudi Arabia until the kingdom is overthrown.
Yeah, that's worked real well with Cuba. The U.S. has had a trade embargo against them for some 50 years now, and last I checked their dictator was still sitting comfy with his position.
I don't know what's the best method to indirectly topple a dictator. The trade embargo method you propose seems to have a worse track record than the free trade method we're trying with China (trade normally, allow middle class to gain wealth and power), though there are also cases like Saudi Arabia where trade hasn't given the average person much more power. I suspect the best solution is quite a bit more nuanced than the one you're proposing. Certain types of trade (particularly ones like in this case, which make it easier for dictators to control their population) should be embargoed. Others should be freely allowed.
It does make one wonder though if the decades of suffering endured by those people while we wait for indirect methods to work are really preferable to a few years of suffering following a full-scale invasion and setting up a democratic government. Looking back at history, it seems the greatest outburst of democracy followed WWII, when the Allies gained control over numerous nations which had formerly been subjugated by Germany, Japan, and Italy a few years prior, and re-established them as fledgling democracies.
And BTW, most of the trade sanctions against Libya were dropped when Ghadaffi renounced terrorism, following his adopted daughter being killed in a U.S. bombing raid (a story which now looks like was false). I guess the thinking was that if you want to encourage leaders, even malevolent ones, to give up terrorism, you have to give then something in return when they do. In Libya's case, it was normalization of trade.
a report out recently that looked at the viability of large climate engineering projects that would basically alter large parts of the atmosphere to reduce greenhouse gases or basically reverse some of the effects of climate change.
The problem with removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is that those gases (CO2, H2O) are given off as end products in energy production because they are at a low energy potential. To split up or convert CO2 and H2O into other molecules involves putting energy back into them, which defeats the reason why they were created in the first place - to release energy.
In other words, aside from sequestering (burying CO2 deep underground where hopefully it'll never get out again), due to efficiency losses, you are better off coming up with new cleaner methods of energy generation. Any system you develop which can disassociate atmospheric CO2 and H2O will be less effective than simply using that system to generate energy. e.g. Running CO2 scrubbers powered by natural gas would generate more CO2 than it scrubbed. Running a wind/solar-powered CO2 scrubber would remove less CO2 than if you just hooked the wind/solar-powered mechanism up to the grid and used its electricity to offset electrical generation from coal plants. The only technology we have right now which could potentially satisfy both our current energy demands and provide excess power to disassociate greenhouse gases is nuclear.
A +/- system suffers the same problem as Slashdot's moderating system. The majority uses the -1 to punish the minority.
Say 4 of 5 people hold a majority view here. Say there are 400 posts representing the majority view, and 100 posts representing the minority view. Say on average there is 1 randomly selected moderator per 10 posters, and the moderators' views have the same distribution. And say that Slashdot only allowed positive mods.
There are 40 mods giving +1 to 400 majority-view posts, for an average of 40/400 = +0.1 per post.
There are 10 mods giving +1 to the 100 minority-view posts, also for an average of +0.1 per post.
Now toss in negative mods. Say one in ten mods gives a -1 to an opposing viewpoint rather than a +1 to their favored viewpoint.
The majority view gets 400 posts, 36 +1 mods, and 1 -1 mod, for an overall average score of 35/400 = +0.0875 per post.
The minority view gets 100 posts, 9 +1 mods, and 4 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 5/100 = +0.05 per post.
The situation gets worse the more people tend to use negative mods. When the ratio of negative to positive mods matches that of the distribution of views (i.e. 1 negative mod for ever 4 positive mods in my example), the negative mods from the majority completely cancel out the positive mods from the minority and the minority view ends up with a 0 ranking average. If the ratio of negative to positive mods is greater than the ratio of minority to majority views, the posts representing the minority view end up with an average negative ranking. Algebraically:
p = % of positive moderations
n = % of negative moderations
A = majority population
B = minority population
Average majority view ranking = Ap - Bn
Average minority view ranking = Bp - An
It's pretty easy to see that if A > B, this skews the majority rankings to be higher than the minority rankings. And if A >> B, B basically has no say in the rankings, and the rankings are almost entirely determined by A's opinions.
So basically negative mods act as a force multiplier, allowing the majority to influence rankings beyond their actual numbers. That is, negative mods tend to produce rankings which reflect the majority view, rather than a utilitarian view. If you want rankings which reflect how useful a site is to the people who want the info on the site you use a +1-only mod system. If you want rankings to reflect the majority's opinion of a site even if it contains nothing they wanted to find, then you use a +/- mod system.
If Google were to allow -1 mods, expect pages for niche topics like Linux to get pounded into the negative, while pages for larger market-share products like Windows are barely affected. Basically, hundreds of millions of people would do searches on Windows topics, and -1 the occasional Linux page which got into their search results. But those "occasional" -1s against Linux pages would likely far outnumber the +1s given to Linux pages by the few million people doing searches for Linux.
You're assuming a hurricane is worse than not-a-hurricane. It isn't always. Hurricane reflects windspeed, but speed is not the only measure of damage.
Not only that, but there isn't much difference between a storm with 73 mph sustained winds vs. 78 mph sustained winds. Although we like to pigeonhole these storms into discrete categories, we have to remember that we're actually looking at a smooth and continuous scale of wind speeds.
Second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history was Hurricane Mitch in 1998. If you closely look at the storm track, you'll notice that the entire time it was over land it was "only" a tropical storm or tropical depression. Like Allison, it moved slowly and lingered, killing people with massive rainfall causing tremendous flooding and landslides. It nearly drove Honduras back into the stone age.
For EV owners who have longer trips, they can take their second car, rent a car or fly.
I agree with this sentiment. Rather than buying a single car which has to serve two purposes (short daily commutes, occasional long trips), buy a single car highly optimized for one purpose (short daily commutes), and use a different means to fill the other need (second car, rental, flying for long trips).
However, this runs counter to the way most people think. The car's operating expenses are neglected as noise, while the annoyance that the car can't handle a long trip is ever-present in their minds. That is, a regular car might cost $20k, cost $2k to operate each year. An EV might cost $20k, cost $500 to operate each year, meaning you have $1.5k "available" to use on a rental car for the long trip while still coming out ahead. But all people will think about is how they had to pay $1k "extra" to rent a car for the trip.
The same psychological mistake crops up all over the place. People ignore the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer ink because the purchase price of the printer was so much lower than for a laser printer. People write off nuclear power for electricity because of the waste problem, while ignoring that the extra cost of renewables far exceeds the what it would cost to handle the waste problem. People will prefer to overpay on their income tax withholdings so they will "get" a refund in April, rather than underpay, put the extra money into an interest-bearing account, and give up the money to the government only on the last day of the deadline.
So while I agree with the logic of your solution, it's just not going to fly in the real world. People aren't wired that way.
It's a good lesson to any CEO thinking that engineering R&D generates very little return on investment, and so can be safely cut to reduce costs. HP cut R&D in favor of what it thought was directly driving their revenue - sales, manufacturing, and marketing. They're now learning that such a move limits their products to low-end easy-to-replicate low-margin items. R&D is what allows you to make and sell high-end high-profit hard-to-duplicate products. Heck, even their much-maligned inkjet printer ink business was spawned by HP R&D playing with microscopic resistors to create tiny bubbles in fluids. As it stands now, Intel probably makes more money selling a single high-end CPU than HP makes selling a dozen PCs.
Case and point, this gizmo will see the red light ahead and slow you down enough so the light will turn green before you get there. The guy behind you, planning to make a left turn, wants to get to the light while it's still red so he can trigger the left turn green arrow this red light cycle. So you're effectively subsidizing your gas savings by forcing the guy behind you to idle in the left turn lane for 1-2 extra minutes.
A lot of the conflict over fanboi-ism stems from fundamental differences in user expectations. Slashdot, with its base of scientists, engineers, and technically-minded people, is firmly on the form-follows-function side. Most Apple fans, being designers and artistic types, are on the form-trumps-function side. Take something like the simplified easy-to-use GUI on the Macs. The slashdot crowd see it as a productivity limitation because they already knew how to do that stuff before, but Apple prioritized form over function and thus made it harder for them to get at the lesser-used functionality. The Apple fans see the exact same thing as a productivity improvement because the easier form it lets them accomplish stuff they didn't know how to do before.
Storm surge and flooding is a huge factor in large storms like this. The second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history was Hurricane Mitch in 1998. If you look at its storm track you'll notice the entire time it was over land, it was "only" a tropical storm or a tropical depression.
The fact that they got getting caught doing it but are schizophrenically denying it is the part that bothers me.
We're not the intended target of the lie. To China, the West is hostile to them. We already have a crappy opinion of their government, and they couldn't care less if our opinion got any worse.
The lie is for the Chinese people. If they can fool the Chinese people into believing this never happened, that helps them stay in power that much longer. In fact, if they can convince the Chinese people that this was all a lie made up by the West (and Falun Gong), it's a net positive for them. This is the kind of BS you can successfully pull off if there isn't a free press.
Had we taken heed 30 years ago and done something about it, the cost would have been substantially lower and ultimately if we were wrong it would be dirt cheap to go back to our old ways.
The solution is obvious and still dirt cheap (in comparison). Shift our fossil-fuel based power infrastructure over to nuclear. Yeah the waste is a problem, but it's substantially less of a problem than massive CO2 emissions (as well as the other crap that comes from burning fossil fuels). This was the only practical solution when AGW first started making headlines. It remains the only practical solution today.
Unfortunately, a not-insignificant fraction of AGW-proponents are vehemently opposed to nuclear power. That's the problem. AGW-denial only became popular when AGW-proponents rejected nuclear out of hand and artifiically limited the possible solutions to considerably more expensive and technologically immature "green" renewables. Yeah those technologies might solve the problem in the future, but they're not ready today. Shift our energy generation over to nuclear now, then shift from nuclear to renewables in the future as the technology matures. It's hypocritical to claim on the one hand that AGW is such a huge problem that we need to do something about it ASAP, but on the other hand say that it can wait until renewable technologies are developed enough that they can satisfy the majority of our power needs.
A great painting is simply an arrangement of inexpensive paint on canvas, a great novel is simply familiar words rearranged on a page, great music is simply the same notes rearranged, and great software is simply 1s and 0s (NB *never* a random collection of bits). Yet somehow all these things are valued above mediocre paintings, novels and software, and people are willing to pay for certain arrangements of 1s and 0s, not because they are stupid, and all 1s and 0s are the same value, but because particular arrangements of information are valuable.
The difference is that a great painting, the print issue of a great novel, and the original stamping of a great music album cannot be exactly duplicated. An arrangement of 1s and 0s can be exactly duplicated such that the copy is indistinguishable from the original. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value, but that does mean selling it in such a way that it is "the only copy in existence" is downright silly. If it's so great, you'll make a lot more money copying it and selling it cheaply until everyone has one.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely. Nearly all population growth is occurring in developing countries. They would handily lose any war with the industrialized countries where most of the food is grown and consumption takes place. Most industrialized countries are at or near zero growth, with some experiencing negative growth (they are shrinking in population).
For whatever reasons, industrialization leads to lower population growth. What's needed to arrest global population growth is to provide education, engineering expertise, contraception, and economic assistance to developing nations so they can modernize their economies ASAP. Providing food, water, and medicinal aid actually exacerbates the problem. They increase survival rates in developing countries without doing anything to stem their high population growth rates, making it that much harder to modernize those countries and increasing their future reliance on foreign aid.
In other words, as contradictory as it may seem, modernization towards self-sufficiency and economic globalization combat global population growth. Anti-globalization and reliance solely on humanitarianism allow it to continue or even exacerbate it.
The typical sedan needs about 20-25 hp to maintain highway speeds. That's 15-19 kW. Car headlights are about 50 Watts each. If as a post above says, laser headlights represent a 70% improvement in efficiency, that means you could replace 100 Watts of headlights with about 60 Watts of laser headlights - a 40 Watt savings.
40 Watts is 0.2%-0.3% of 15-19 kW. If you take the Nissan Leaf which has a nominal 70 mile range at highway speeds, saving 40 Watts will get you about 800-100 feet (240-300 meters) in additional range on a full charge compared to regular halogen headlights. So they represent a trivial amount of energy savings which nobody is going to notice, even on an EV.
That said, BMW is a luxury brand (in the U.S.). So they'll probably be able to sell enough of these to rich people (early adopters) to justify the R&D costs, and it'll help improve the state of the art for everyone. But don't make the mistake of thinking that this will result in any significant energy savings for EVs.
Eyestrain comes about from a mismatch between the brightness of the page you're reading vs the surrounding environment. If you adjust the room's lighting to match that of a backlit display, you will not get eyestrain (in fact if it's perfectly adjusted, you won't be able to tell apart the LCD from the e-ink display). Yes, this means don't use your tablet (or laptop) in a dark bedroom at night. Turn on a desk lamp. The only place e-ink devices really have an advantage when it comes to eyestrain is outdoors in sunlight. Unfortunately it seems transreflective LCD technology has been abandoned, so tablets and laptops can only display in sunlight by cranking out as much brightness as the sun.
In public key encryption, you're supposed to publish your public key. So the "never publish your encryption keys" rule is not absolute. Obviously that isn't what happened here, but I don't expect a clueless journalist to be aware of these nuances, and so I wouldn't judge his behavior based on a "default' rule which is by no means absolute.
I don't think that's a deep enough analysis. Home prices spiked because of easy access to loans coupled with a shortage of housing due to homebuilders not being able to instantly ramp up production to meet increased demand.
A similar situation has developed in education, only instead of there being a shortage of space in universities, there's a shortage of space in desirable universities. Those universities have figured out that while it costs them a fixed amount to provide an education, the amount people are willing to pay for that education is based on how much it increases their future earning potential, not how much it costs the university to provide it. So they crank up the price, and students, or rather, their parents, willingly pay it so junior can have "Big Name University" at the top of his diploma.
So the solution (and I say this as a conservative) is to increase the supply of good-quality low-cost universities. Public universities and free educational services like Kahn Academy need to be well-funded and expanded, so they can provide competitive pressure on private universities. The name of the school needs to become less valuable, with more emphasis placed on the coursework you took and passed. This will keep prices closer to what it costs to actually provide the education, rather than how much having the school's name and degree on your resume is worth to the student.
It's more nuanced than that. While those "borderline slave labor" jobs may be abhorrent to us, in those countries they are actually considered good, desirable jobs. In other words, not giving the people in those countries the "borderline slave labor" jobs consigns them to even worse fates - usually subsistence farming where a single drought, flood, or insect plague can plunge them into starvation. So it would actually be less moral to deprive them of those jobs.
On an abstract level, you cannot instantaneously convert a 3rd world economy into a 1st world economy. It has to gradually work its way up, which means it has to start with jobs which would be considered "borderline slave labor" by people in developed nations. It's a necessary transitory step to developing your economy. If the wages and working conditions persist at slave labor levels, then you have something to worry about. But average wages in China have been increasing at a pretty good clip, indicating international trade and those "slave labor" jobs are indeed helping lift the Chinese people out of abject poverty.
It's counterproductive to design a research sub with the capability to dive past about 6500 meters (which the Shinkai 6500 can do). That's deep enough to reach about 98% of the ocean's floor. Anything significantly beyond that and you're adding excess weight and strength which will only be useful if you've visiting a few trenches. For studying the rest of the ocean, it's just useless baggage. You're better off designing one general-purpose DSV for research in the majority of the ocean, and another one specially-made to be stronger for researching trenches.
If it were truly only a difference of $3 per year, then solar would be enjoying great success in the market. The average U.S. household electricity use was about 10,500 kWh. Average retail electricity price for the U.S. is $0.112 per kWh, for an annual cost of $1176 per household per year.
Electricity from solar costs (excluding subsidies, since the whole point of this exercise is to see if solar is "worth it") about $0.25-$0.30 per kWh. So it would in fact cost the average U.S. household an extra $1500 to $2000 per year to switch completely over to solar.
I completely agree with phasing out our toxic coal plants, but solar is far from ready, neither technologically nor economically, to fill in for coal. The only technology which can do that today is nuclear. While its waste is still a problem, it is considerably less of a problem than the pollution from coal. And its cost ($0.05-$0.07 per kWh wholesale) is competitive with coal ($0.04 per kWh for wholesale). The best course of action is to shift over to nuclear power now, then shift from nuclear to solar/wind in the future when those technologies mature.
If dumping it is so evil and recycling it is so expensive, then perhaps part of the problem is that solar energy isn't as clean as its proponents are making it out to be?
Eh? Pretty much everyone knew PDAs and phones were going to converge. A lot of geeks didn't like it since PDAs were "their" toy while phones were something the masses used. But once the Blackberry took off it was pretty clear that they would converge. The only question was whether the PDA would become a phone, or the phone would become a PDA. That may sound like semantics, but from a user interface standpoint there's a huge difference. With the former, you basically have a small computer where you can run a program which lets you make phone calls. With the latter, the device is still primarily a phone, and the computing features provide additional functionality.
Palm and Microsoft bet on the former. Apple, fresh from conquering the MP3 player market with a super-easy-to-use UI on inferior features and hardware, bet on the latter. The rest, as they say, is history. But it's not like Apple was the only one with the idea. What made Apple's offering stand out was they used the computer to enhance and simplify the phone's functionality, rather than make the phone more complicated to make it run within PalmOS' or WinCE's pre-existing paradigm.
Look at the picture inside this link to see the blatant copying Samsung did. Clearly Samsung built a time machine in 2006, jumped ahead to 2010 to see what the iPad would look like, and stole its design to use in their digital picture frame!
As people have been trying to tell you Apple fans, there is nothing innovative about a flat black rectangle with rounded corners. If there is, then it's Apple who should be criticized for ripping off Samsung's design from 2006.
Yeah, that's worked real well with Cuba. The U.S. has had a trade embargo against them for some 50 years now, and last I checked their dictator was still sitting comfy with his position.
I don't know what's the best method to indirectly topple a dictator. The trade embargo method you propose seems to have a worse track record than the free trade method we're trying with China (trade normally, allow middle class to gain wealth and power), though there are also cases like Saudi Arabia where trade hasn't given the average person much more power. I suspect the best solution is quite a bit more nuanced than the one you're proposing. Certain types of trade (particularly ones like in this case, which make it easier for dictators to control their population) should be embargoed. Others should be freely allowed.
It does make one wonder though if the decades of suffering endured by those people while we wait for indirect methods to work are really preferable to a few years of suffering following a full-scale invasion and setting up a democratic government. Looking back at history, it seems the greatest outburst of democracy followed WWII, when the Allies gained control over numerous nations which had formerly been subjugated by Germany, Japan, and Italy a few years prior, and re-established them as fledgling democracies.
And BTW, most of the trade sanctions against Libya were dropped when Ghadaffi renounced terrorism, following his adopted daughter being killed in a U.S. bombing raid (a story which now looks like was false). I guess the thinking was that if you want to encourage leaders, even malevolent ones, to give up terrorism, you have to give then something in return when they do. In Libya's case, it was normalization of trade.
The problem with removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is that those gases (CO2, H2O) are given off as end products in energy production because they are at a low energy potential. To split up or convert CO2 and H2O into other molecules involves putting energy back into them, which defeats the reason why they were created in the first place - to release energy.
In other words, aside from sequestering (burying CO2 deep underground where hopefully it'll never get out again), due to efficiency losses, you are better off coming up with new cleaner methods of energy generation. Any system you develop which can disassociate atmospheric CO2 and H2O will be less effective than simply using that system to generate energy. e.g. Running CO2 scrubbers powered by natural gas would generate more CO2 than it scrubbed. Running a wind/solar-powered CO2 scrubber would remove less CO2 than if you just hooked the wind/solar-powered mechanism up to the grid and used its electricity to offset electrical generation from coal plants. The only technology we have right now which could potentially satisfy both our current energy demands and provide excess power to disassociate greenhouse gases is nuclear.
A +/- system suffers the same problem as Slashdot's moderating system. The majority uses the -1 to punish the minority.
Say 4 of 5 people hold a majority view here. Say there are 400 posts representing the majority view, and 100 posts representing the minority view. Say on average there is 1 randomly selected moderator per 10 posters, and the moderators' views have the same distribution. And say that Slashdot only allowed positive mods.
There are 40 mods giving +1 to 400 majority-view posts, for an average of 40/400 = +0.1 per post.
There are 10 mods giving +1 to the 100 minority-view posts, also for an average of +0.1 per post.
Now toss in negative mods. Say one in ten mods gives a -1 to an opposing viewpoint rather than a +1 to their favored viewpoint.
The majority view gets 400 posts, 36 +1 mods, and 1 -1 mod, for an overall average score of 35/400 = +0.0875 per post.
The minority view gets 100 posts, 9 +1 mods, and 4 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 5/100 = +0.05 per post.
The situation gets worse the more people tend to use negative mods. When the ratio of negative to positive mods matches that of the distribution of views (i.e. 1 negative mod for ever 4 positive mods in my example), the negative mods from the majority completely cancel out the positive mods from the minority and the minority view ends up with a 0 ranking average. If the ratio of negative to positive mods is greater than the ratio of minority to majority views, the posts representing the minority view end up with an average negative ranking. Algebraically:
p = % of positive moderations
n = % of negative moderations
A = majority population
B = minority population
Average majority view ranking = Ap - Bn
Average minority view ranking = Bp - An
It's pretty easy to see that if A > B, this skews the majority rankings to be higher than the minority rankings. And if A >> B, B basically has no say in the rankings, and the rankings are almost entirely determined by A's opinions.
So basically negative mods act as a force multiplier, allowing the majority to influence rankings beyond their actual numbers. That is, negative mods tend to produce rankings which reflect the majority view, rather than a utilitarian view. If you want rankings which reflect how useful a site is to the people who want the info on the site you use a +1-only mod system. If you want rankings to reflect the majority's opinion of a site even if it contains nothing they wanted to find, then you use a +/- mod system.
If Google were to allow -1 mods, expect pages for niche topics like Linux to get pounded into the negative, while pages for larger market-share products like Windows are barely affected. Basically, hundreds of millions of people would do searches on Windows topics, and -1 the occasional Linux page which got into their search results. But those "occasional" -1s against Linux pages would likely far outnumber the +1s given to Linux pages by the few million people doing searches for Linux.
Not only that, but there isn't much difference between a storm with 73 mph sustained winds vs. 78 mph sustained winds. Although we like to pigeonhole these storms into discrete categories, we have to remember that we're actually looking at a smooth and continuous scale of wind speeds.
Second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history was Hurricane Mitch in 1998. If you closely look at the storm track, you'll notice that the entire time it was over land it was "only" a tropical storm or tropical depression. Like Allison, it moved slowly and lingered, killing people with massive rainfall causing tremendous flooding and landslides. It nearly drove Honduras back into the stone age.
I agree with this sentiment. Rather than buying a single car which has to serve two purposes (short daily commutes, occasional long trips), buy a single car highly optimized for one purpose (short daily commutes), and use a different means to fill the other need (second car, rental, flying for long trips).
However, this runs counter to the way most people think. The car's operating expenses are neglected as noise, while the annoyance that the car can't handle a long trip is ever-present in their minds. That is, a regular car might cost $20k, cost $2k to operate each year. An EV might cost $20k, cost $500 to operate each year, meaning you have $1.5k "available" to use on a rental car for the long trip while still coming out ahead. But all people will think about is how they had to pay $1k "extra" to rent a car for the trip.
The same psychological mistake crops up all over the place. People ignore the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer ink because the purchase price of the printer was so much lower than for a laser printer. People write off nuclear power for electricity because of the waste problem, while ignoring that the extra cost of renewables far exceeds the what it would cost to handle the waste problem. People will prefer to overpay on their income tax withholdings so they will "get" a refund in April, rather than underpay, put the extra money into an interest-bearing account, and give up the money to the government only on the last day of the deadline.
So while I agree with the logic of your solution, it's just not going to fly in the real world. People aren't wired that way.
It's a good lesson to any CEO thinking that engineering R&D generates very little return on investment, and so can be safely cut to reduce costs. HP cut R&D in favor of what it thought was directly driving their revenue - sales, manufacturing, and marketing. They're now learning that such a move limits their products to low-end easy-to-replicate low-margin items. R&D is what allows you to make and sell high-end high-profit hard-to-duplicate products. Heck, even their much-maligned inkjet printer ink business was spawned by HP R&D playing with microscopic resistors to create tiny bubbles in fluids. As it stands now, Intel probably makes more money selling a single high-end CPU than HP makes selling a dozen PCs.
Case and point, this gizmo will see the red light ahead and slow you down enough so the light will turn green before you get there. The guy behind you, planning to make a left turn, wants to get to the light while it's still red so he can trigger the left turn green arrow this red light cycle. So you're effectively subsidizing your gas savings by forcing the guy behind you to idle in the left turn lane for 1-2 extra minutes.
A lot of the conflict over fanboi-ism stems from fundamental differences in user expectations. Slashdot, with its base of scientists, engineers, and technically-minded people, is firmly on the form-follows-function side. Most Apple fans, being designers and artistic types, are on the form-trumps-function side. Take something like the simplified easy-to-use GUI on the Macs. The slashdot crowd see it as a productivity limitation because they already knew how to do that stuff before, but Apple prioritized form over function and thus made it harder for them to get at the lesser-used functionality. The Apple fans see the exact same thing as a productivity improvement because the easier form it lets them accomplish stuff they didn't know how to do before.
Storm surge and flooding is a huge factor in large storms like this. The second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history was Hurricane Mitch in 1998. If you look at its storm track you'll notice the entire time it was over land, it was "only" a tropical storm or a tropical depression.
Heaven forbid they use the money from ATM fees to actually improve the ATM network, rather than pocketing it as pure profit.
We're not the intended target of the lie. To China, the West is hostile to them. We already have a crappy opinion of their government, and they couldn't care less if our opinion got any worse.
The lie is for the Chinese people. If they can fool the Chinese people into believing this never happened, that helps them stay in power that much longer. In fact, if they can convince the Chinese people that this was all a lie made up by the West (and Falun Gong), it's a net positive for them. This is the kind of BS you can successfully pull off if there isn't a free press.
The solution is obvious and still dirt cheap (in comparison). Shift our fossil-fuel based power infrastructure over to nuclear. Yeah the waste is a problem, but it's substantially less of a problem than massive CO2 emissions (as well as the other crap that comes from burning fossil fuels). This was the only practical solution when AGW first started making headlines. It remains the only practical solution today.
Unfortunately, a not-insignificant fraction of AGW-proponents are vehemently opposed to nuclear power. That's the problem. AGW-denial only became popular when AGW-proponents rejected nuclear out of hand and artifiically limited the possible solutions to considerably more expensive and technologically immature "green" renewables. Yeah those technologies might solve the problem in the future, but they're not ready today. Shift our energy generation over to nuclear now, then shift from nuclear to renewables in the future as the technology matures. It's hypocritical to claim on the one hand that AGW is such a huge problem that we need to do something about it ASAP, but on the other hand say that it can wait until renewable technologies are developed enough that they can satisfy the majority of our power needs.
The difference is that a great painting, the print issue of a great novel, and the original stamping of a great music album cannot be exactly duplicated. An arrangement of 1s and 0s can be exactly duplicated such that the copy is indistinguishable from the original. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value, but that does mean selling it in such a way that it is "the only copy in existence" is downright silly. If it's so great, you'll make a lot more money copying it and selling it cheaply until everyone has one.