Why would non-organic strawberries have a longer shelf life? They're the same plant. The difference is in how the strawberry is grown, not in the final product, unless there's a pesticide residue on the fruit when you get it. In which case I'd think you'd want the organic one. As it turns out, BTW, the pesticide most commonly used on strawberries, methyl bromide, does stay on them. Also, organic strawberries are actually *more* resistant to rot than conventional strawberries.
You can melt steel with a 10' mirror. You can't melt *much* steel, but getting high temperatures isn't a problem; the question is whether the yield is enough per square meter of mirror to be worth it, and whether it scales up to higher efficiencies as you increase the area of the mirror and the size of the reactor vessel.
So, presumably the output of the reaction is zinc oxide and hydrogen. Is this really "clean?" Seems like using up a ton of free zinc, which has embodied energy, and then pulling a bunch of oxygen out of the atmosphere to make that happen, is trading one problem for another, and is in no sense "clean."
Nobody picks guile because in practice it's hard to do anything real with it. Possibly that's changed since the last time I evaluated it, but last time I evaluated it, batteries were most definitely not included.
To this end I find taking notes on a full-sized keyboard is the fastest--I type much faster than I write, and writing makes my hands tired very quickly. Of course, mostly when I'm taking notes at a lecture I don't have to draw a picture or write down a complex equation; keyboards completely fall over as soon as you need to do that. If you waste time faffing around with a note-taking device when it's in front of you, that's because you didn't learn how to use it before. Never try to learn how to use a note-taking device at a lecture.
My usual note-taking device is an iPad with an external keyboard. If there were a way to draw accurately on it, it would be perfect.
Oh come on, why does it have to be useful? The hotel let us do it! (I'm guessing that it had a USB ethernet dongle, but I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure.)
I feel very fortunate that a majority of my business travel is to IETF meetings, because this is the only time that I ever experience functional internet in a hotel. It can be pretty fantastic--in Hiroshima, the WIDE team rewired _all_ of the IETF hotels, which is about five different hotels. In almost every IETF since Seoul, the IETF NOC has provided the connectivity for the conference hotel for the duration of the conference, and the connectivity has been excellent.
It's too bad that hotels can't afford to pay IETF geeks to fix their connections on a more general basis, and that there isn't a commercial provider that's able to provide a similar level of service for a price hotels can afford. Sometimes I think we ought to have an independent hotel WiFi rating service, so that hotels would have to actually compete on the basis of the quality of their Internet service.
So basically what you're saying is that there's no obvious distinction to draw between things being red and things being hot, and so either both should be patentable, or neither should. This is entirely correct. Patents are a bad idea. We should just get rid of them entirely. Okay, now, back to the real world. In the real world, we aren't abandoning patents altogether, so courts have to litigate these stupid angel-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions, and they have to come up with plausible-seeming justifications for invalidating patents that are clearly bogus, while still pretending that these same justifications don't apply to less glaring cases to which, as you have pointed out, they really do apply. Sux2bus.
This isn't true--there are managers who are good by design. They just aren't all that common, because it's rare for a company to reward people for that.
I've also worked under quite a few female and male managers. I've had good and bad experiences with both. I am deeply skeptical that sex is the major variable. It may well be true that men are more likely to be authoritarian, but that hasn't been my experience. I could theorize from anecdotal evidence that women have various common qualities, but I suspect that other male managers I haven't happened to work for have had those same qualities.
I think the major variable is competence. Competence is a hard thing to achieve for managers, because they get a lot of really bad training, or in many cases no training. In the set of all managers who are poorly trained, it's probably true that for reasons which may be cultural or may be innate, there are measurable differences between the problems women have and the problems men have. But I think it's equally likely that among managers who are competent, these differences lose their significance. I think that organizations looking to have better management would be well advised to focus on competence rather than on sex.
Missile defense systems are actually offensive weapons, because they enable the country that operates them to engage in a first strike without fear of reprisal.
Of course, all of this is extremely hypothetical: the ROI on a first strike is so far in the negative that you'd need a telescope to see the bottom of the pit. Nobody benefits from a first strike. Not even Iran.
What this is really about is what every other military boondoggle is about: money for the military-industrial complex. Missile defense systems are _really_ expensive. People are afraid of missiles. So a missile defense system is a really excellent way to separate the taxpayers from their money. And that is what this push to deploy missiles near Iran is about. Who cares if the Russkies pull out of the disarmament talks? Then we'll need more missile defense systems, and that's even more taxpayer money plundered by the M.I.C.
Finder, Bone Dance and Falcon, by Emma Bull. Three completely different novels, all fantastic. She's still writing, but you asked for old stuff.
M.A. Foster did a series about a transhuman species called the Ler that I found really haunting and freaky back in the day.
The Witches of Karres, by James Schmitz (a couple of fairly decent sequels have been written, but the original is unmatched).
The Last Planet, by Andre Norton.
The Chronicles of the Deryni, by Katherine Kurtz.
The Family Tree, by Sheri Tepper (this is one of her best books, so even if you've read others and didn't like them that much, I still recommend this one).
The Musashi Flex series, by Steve Perry (and anything else by Steve Perry, for that matter).
Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire, which it pains me to refer to as an oldie, which has one of the most insanely great and physically realistic space battle scenes _ever_.
Silk Roads and Shadows, by Susan Schwartz (she gets the Buddhism mostly wrong, but it's still a great book).
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (who put a spaceport in Hamtramck and explained how to pronounce it) and The Demolished Man, also by Alfred Bester.
All The Myriad Ways (the short story collection) by Larry Niven.
Exactly right. What Democracy does is not to produce brilliant governments, but to avoid brilliantly bad governments. If you look at where famines occur in the world, they always occur in places where democracy either isn't available, or isn't working. The problem is that when you get above this level to more abstract risks, like global climate change or pollution, there's no feedback loop, so democracy fares more poorly.
Most people I know, democrat or republican, are against government waste, generally willing to pay taxes for things that they consider important, and agree on many of the key things that are important. However, neither group ever seems to actually demand that the people they vote for stand up for these values. We wind up voting for people who make little effort to serve our interests, and instead serve the interests of the large corporations who depend on government largess, either in the form of a thumb on the scale of competition, a no-bid contract, or a direct handout.
Why do we wind up here? Because nobody actually pays attention to what their representatives and senators do, except when they get a panicked message from a public interest group they subscribe to telling them either that their representative is a hero, or that they are a crook. So, AC, if you want to see this change, pay attention to what the people you vote for actually do, and how much it actually represents what you want done. Vote carefully in the primaries—kick the bastards out if they don't represent your interests. Vote for the opposing party, even if you disagree with them on the details of how to run the government, if you think they will behave in a less corrupt fashion than the person running for your party (don't worry, usually they're both corrupt). If both major candidates are corrupt, vote for someone else, unless one is clearly and substantially more corrupt than the other.
Corruption should be the single most important issue you consider when voting. If it isn't, your candidates position on everything else doesn't matter, because they are corrupt, and can't be counted on to do what they promise anyway.
Our economy is in the tank anyway because we've stopped manufacturing things. So if your big concern at the moment is money (which it is for a lot of people because of the poor economy), you might want to make yourself aware of the growth opportunities in the field... Most people who are into green tech want better tech, not less tech. My wife and I are building a house that we expect will use about 1/8th the energy a normal house uses for heating in the winter (we live in Vermont). The house will be a lot more comfortable to live in than a regular house, because we won't be heating the air as much, and the air will be fresher, because with a heat recovery ventilator we're actually getting more air exchanges than a leaky house, but using less energy. So it's just the opposite of wearing a hair shirt—we'll be more comfortable using less energy.
They do talk about it. You just (evidently) don't listen.
Global temperature increase shifts the atmospheric circulation cells, so that they land in different places. It shifts the jet stream, so that weather is carried to different places. It shifts oceanic currents; there's a big concern that global warming may actually result in a major drop in temperatures in northern Europe. There are many factors that decide what the temperature will be outside your house today; global warming is not the largest factor by a long shot. But where the Hadley Cells, Ferrell Cells and Polar Cells land has a big effect on the weather you experience, and that _is_ affected by global temperature increases in the one degree range. These effects aren't necessarily temperature increases; they are just as likely to be more energetic storms, or droughts, or floods.
However, it's also worth noting that 1 degree is currently considered a fairly unrealistic best-case scenario, because since we started trying to take some weak action to address Global Warming, China seriously ramped up the amount of coal they're burning, so atmospheric CO2 levels are going up faster than predicted.
Yeah, computer models suck. That's why airplanes keep falling out of the sky, why missiles never hit their targets, and why you can never get the temperature of the brew head on your espresso machine just right. Er, wait, you can do all of these things. Because of computer models.
Remember when the weather forecast was always wrong? It's been really remarkably precise recently when I've followed it, which I do a lot, because I enjoy outdoor sports. It's been scarily precise. Predictions a week out come true with astonishing regularity. This is weather, which is rapidly changing and chaotic, not climate, which is slow and relatively predictable.
The problem with your completely ignorant assertion here is that in fact the models do appear to be getting more accurate, not less. The debates are not over whether there is warming, but over how much, and what the effect will be, and how soon the effect will come. Nobody is debating whether it's coming except people who are making a short-term killing on carbon externalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would non-organic strawberries have a longer shelf life? They're the same plant. The difference is in how the strawberry is grown, not in the final product, unless there's a pesticide residue on the fruit when you get it. In which case I'd think you'd want the organic one. As it turns out, BTW, the pesticide most commonly used on strawberries, methyl bromide, does stay on them. Also, organic strawberries are actually *more* resistant to rot than conventional strawberries.
That's what I do. Ride to eat, eat to ride...
Car accidents send 30-50k people per year to the *morgue*. Life is dangerous, but that doesn't mean that every activity is equally dangerous.
Never been to Vermont, have you?
Er, nevermind, should have RTFA.
You can melt steel with a 10' mirror. You can't melt *much* steel, but getting high temperatures isn't a problem; the question is whether the yield is enough per square meter of mirror to be worth it, and whether it scales up to higher efficiencies as you increase the area of the mirror and the size of the reactor vessel.
So, presumably the output of the reaction is zinc oxide and hydrogen. Is this really "clean?" Seems like using up a ton of free zinc, which has embodied energy, and then pulling a bunch of oxygen out of the atmosphere to make that happen, is trading one problem for another, and is in no sense "clean."
Nobody picks guile because in practice it's hard to do anything real with it. Possibly that's changed since the last time I evaluated it, but last time I evaluated it, batteries were most definitely not included.
To this end I find taking notes on a full-sized keyboard is the fastest--I type much faster than I write, and writing makes my hands tired very quickly. Of course, mostly when I'm taking notes at a lecture I don't have to draw a picture or write down a complex equation; keyboards completely fall over as soon as you need to do that. If you waste time faffing around with a note-taking device when it's in front of you, that's because you didn't learn how to use it before. Never try to learn how to use a note-taking device at a lecture.
My usual note-taking device is an iPad with an external keyboard. If there were a way to draw accurately on it, it would be perfect.
Oh come on, why does it have to be useful? The hotel let us do it! (I'm guessing that it had a USB ethernet dongle, but I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure.)
I feel very fortunate that a majority of my business travel is to IETF meetings, because this is the only time that I ever experience functional internet in a hotel. It can be pretty fantastic--in Hiroshima, the WIDE team rewired _all_ of the IETF hotels, which is about five different hotels. In almost every IETF since Seoul, the IETF NOC has provided the connectivity for the conference hotel for the duration of the conference, and the connectivity has been excellent.
It's too bad that hotels can't afford to pay IETF geeks to fix their connections on a more general basis, and that there isn't a commercial provider that's able to provide a similar level of service for a price hotels can afford. Sometimes I think we ought to have an independent hotel WiFi rating service, so that hotels would have to actually compete on the basis of the quality of their Internet service.
So basically what you're saying is that there's no obvious distinction to draw between things being red and things being hot, and so either both should be patentable, or neither should. This is entirely correct. Patents are a bad idea. We should just get rid of them entirely. Okay, now, back to the real world. In the real world, we aren't abandoning patents altogether, so courts have to litigate these stupid angel-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions, and they have to come up with plausible-seeming justifications for invalidating patents that are clearly bogus, while still pretending that these same justifications don't apply to less glaring cases to which, as you have pointed out, they really do apply. Sux2bus.
This isn't true--there are managers who are good by design. They just aren't all that common, because it's rare for a company to reward people for that.
I've also worked under quite a few female and male managers. I've had good and bad experiences with both. I am deeply skeptical that sex is the major variable. It may well be true that men are more likely to be authoritarian, but that hasn't been my experience. I could theorize from anecdotal evidence that women have various common qualities, but I suspect that other male managers I haven't happened to work for have had those same qualities.
I think the major variable is competence. Competence is a hard thing to achieve for managers, because they get a lot of really bad training, or in many cases no training. In the set of all managers who are poorly trained, it's probably true that for reasons which may be cultural or may be innate, there are measurable differences between the problems women have and the problems men have. But I think it's equally likely that among managers who are competent, these differences lose their significance. I think that organizations looking to have better management would be well advised to focus on competence rather than on sex.
Missile defense systems are actually offensive weapons, because they enable the country that operates them to engage in a first strike without fear of reprisal.
Of course, all of this is extremely hypothetical: the ROI on a first strike is so far in the negative that you'd need a telescope to see the bottom of the pit. Nobody benefits from a first strike. Not even Iran.
What this is really about is what every other military boondoggle is about: money for the military-industrial complex. Missile defense systems are _really_ expensive. People are afraid of missiles. So a missile defense system is a really excellent way to separate the taxpayers from their money. And that is what this push to deploy missiles near Iran is about. Who cares if the Russkies pull out of the disarmament talks? Then we'll need more missile defense systems, and that's even more taxpayer money plundered by the M.I.C.
Finder, Bone Dance and Falcon, by Emma Bull. Three completely different novels, all fantastic. She's still writing, but you asked for old stuff.
M.A. Foster did a series about a transhuman species called the Ler that I found really haunting and freaky back in the day.
The Witches of Karres, by James Schmitz (a couple of fairly decent sequels have been written, but the original is unmatched).
The Last Planet, by Andre Norton.
The Chronicles of the Deryni, by Katherine Kurtz.
The Family Tree, by Sheri Tepper (this is one of her best books, so even if you've read others and didn't like them that much, I still recommend this one).
The Musashi Flex series, by Steve Perry (and anything else by Steve Perry, for that matter).
Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire, which it pains me to refer to as an oldie, which has one of the most insanely great and physically realistic space battle scenes _ever_.
Silk Roads and Shadows, by Susan Schwartz (she gets the Buddhism mostly wrong, but it's still a great book).
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (who put a spaceport in Hamtramck and explained how to pronounce it) and The Demolished Man, also by Alfred Bester.
All The Myriad Ways (the short story collection) by Larry Niven.
My favorite of his books is The Warhound and the World's Pain. Kind of obscure, but it made a big impression.
Consciousness.
Exactly right. What Democracy does is not to produce brilliant governments, but to avoid brilliantly bad governments. If you look at where famines occur in the world, they always occur in places where democracy either isn't available, or isn't working. The problem is that when you get above this level to more abstract risks, like global climate change or pollution, there's no feedback loop, so democracy fares more poorly.
Give your enemy a primer on all your motivations and explain how you are organized. What are we, gorillas pounding our chests?
It was inevitable that SOPA was going to pass in December, too. For pity's sake, man, don't concede the game before it's over.
Most people I know, democrat or republican, are against government waste, generally willing to pay taxes for things that they consider important, and agree on many of the key things that are important. However, neither group ever seems to actually demand that the people they vote for stand up for these values. We wind up voting for people who make little effort to serve our interests, and instead serve the interests of the large corporations who depend on government largess, either in the form of a thumb on the scale of competition, a no-bid contract, or a direct handout.
Why do we wind up here? Because nobody actually pays attention to what their representatives and senators do, except when they get a panicked message from a public interest group they subscribe to telling them either that their representative is a hero, or that they are a crook. So, AC, if you want to see this change, pay attention to what the people you vote for actually do, and how much it actually represents what you want done. Vote carefully in the primaries—kick the bastards out if they don't represent your interests. Vote for the opposing party, even if you disagree with them on the details of how to run the government, if you think they will behave in a less corrupt fashion than the person running for your party (don't worry, usually they're both corrupt). If both major candidates are corrupt, vote for someone else, unless one is clearly and substantially more corrupt than the other.
Corruption should be the single most important issue you consider when voting. If it isn't, your candidates position on everything else doesn't matter, because they are corrupt, and can't be counted on to do what they promise anyway.
Our economy is in the tank anyway because we've stopped manufacturing things. So if your big concern at the moment is money (which it is for a lot of people because of the poor economy), you might want to make yourself aware of the growth opportunities in the field... Most people who are into green tech want better tech, not less tech. My wife and I are building a house that we expect will use about 1/8th the energy a normal house uses for heating in the winter (we live in Vermont). The house will be a lot more comfortable to live in than a regular house, because we won't be heating the air as much, and the air will be fresher, because with a heat recovery ventilator we're actually getting more air exchanges than a leaky house, but using less energy. So it's just the opposite of wearing a hair shirt—we'll be more comfortable using less energy.
They do talk about it. You just (evidently) don't listen.
Global temperature increase shifts the atmospheric circulation cells, so that they land in different places. It shifts the jet stream, so that weather is carried to different places. It shifts oceanic currents; there's a big concern that global warming may actually result in a major drop in temperatures in northern Europe. There are many factors that decide what the temperature will be outside your house today; global warming is not the largest factor by a long shot. But where the Hadley Cells, Ferrell Cells and Polar Cells land has a big effect on the weather you experience, and that _is_ affected by global temperature increases in the one degree range. These effects aren't necessarily temperature increases; they are just as likely to be more energetic storms, or droughts, or floods.
However, it's also worth noting that 1 degree is currently considered a fairly unrealistic best-case scenario, because since we started trying to take some weak action to address Global Warming, China seriously ramped up the amount of coal they're burning, so atmospheric CO2 levels are going up faster than predicted.
Yeah, computer models suck. That's why airplanes keep falling out of the sky, why missiles never hit their targets, and why you can never get the temperature of the brew head on your espresso machine just right. Er, wait, you can do all of these things. Because of computer models.
Remember when the weather forecast was always wrong? It's been really remarkably precise recently when I've followed it, which I do a lot, because I enjoy outdoor sports. It's been scarily precise. Predictions a week out come true with astonishing regularity. This is weather, which is rapidly changing and chaotic, not climate, which is slow and relatively predictable.
The problem with your completely ignorant assertion here is that in fact the models do appear to be getting more accurate, not less. The debates are not over whether there is warming, but over how much, and what the effect will be, and how soon the effect will come. Nobody is debating whether it's coming except people who are making a short-term killing on carbon externalities.
How do you make billions of dollars off of Global Warming (other than by selling more oil)?