I'm being honest here. I'm a scientest. I work on biosensors. Politics aside, you want me to not have access to Anthrax, SARS, or any other virus, fine. Tell me how I am supposed to help people when I can't study the problem.
Anthrax is a bacteria, not a virus. What work on biosensors do you do as a "scientest" that you don't know this?
That greatly reduces the (already low) incentive of software companies to rapidly patch their vulnerabilities, though. MSFT does a horrible job already -- do you think they'd provide a more secure environment if an insecure environment told their lawyers who to sue?
When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
It will happen -- the question is not whether or not an asteroid will hit the earth and whack us back to rats and cockroaches again, the question is whether we'll still be here when it happens, in some shape or form of an organized society. The risk of dying of an asteroid impact is also very small, but because so many people would die as a result of such an impact the risk in terms of total lives is large compared to other, far better funded projects (like earthquake/volcano prediction and mitigation which, in the U.S., costs taxpayers ~$50M per probabilistic death).
On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.
Great. any ideas on how to address those problems, or will you just use those problems to make an excuse for not addressing a less likely but much more dangerous hazard? An asteroid is far more likely to put an end to the american way of life than famine or disease. A significant thermonuclear exchange could do the job, as could hundreds of years of economic shifts and global warming, but these are problems that don't effect the U.S. and have no tenable solution.
On Famine: A bunch of people live in an environment where it is impossible to grow their own food and they lack the industrial capacity to be able to afford to import food, so they're starving. It sucks. The U.S. does send aide, but this is not a problem that will be solved by spending -- these people either need to die, move, or find a way to feed themselves because spending billions on some sort of global foodstamps program is not a solution to famine -- just like icing down someone with a fever does nothing to help them defeat the infection that is causing the fever, feeding the foodless will only create more foodless while destroying the global market for food. The problem is not, by the way, that there isn't enough food, just that these people can't afford to buy it and/or won't accept american surplus. It's an economic and distributive problem and, while there is no good philosophical reason to let anyone starve, the economic, practical reasons are the ones that keep you (gainfully employed 1st-world citizen) from starving by keeping the farmers employed.
On Disease: People die. tough beans, that's the way it is. Some diseases are horrendous and terrible, and AIDS in Africa and southeast Asia is horrible, but again there is no good solution to the problem and in many cases these diseases are attacking areas already massively overpopulated, undernourished, and poor. Do the poor deserve to live long, fulfilling lives just as much as the rich? Yes. Should the rich be forced to shorten their lives in order to lengthen the lives of the poor? No. This is the choice -- compell pharmaceutical companies to deliver drugs to third world countries at bottom dollar rates only to have a large portion of those drugs, sold at or below cost (with govt subsidies in the latter case) dumped into the profitable markets. What happens then? Nobody gets the drugs because the ROI disappears. We already give free AIDS medications to many patients in africa, for example, but many of those with the disease sell some of their doses back to american individuals and/or continue to have unprotected sex with uninfected individuals, spreading the disease and allowing it to build resistance to our drugs.
Disease is a fact of life, and seeking to somehow eliminate it is an unrealistic goal. Nevertheless, the U.S. spends massive amounts of money on every sort of disease -- I doubt there's a disease out there that a qualified individual couldn't get federal dollars to research. Medicine has advanced a g
I get upwards of 10 hours on my IBM R40 thinkpad (using the modular bay battery, about 6 hours w/o it)... and that's not even in the most power-efficient mode.
I can't believe you got modded up for this misinformation. I know, I know "welcome to slashdot, you must be new here" but there's just no logic to your statements and you didn't do the slightest bit of research to back yourself up on a subject that you obviously know nothing about.
Take this for example:
The fact that you child was born with down syndrome has just about as much to do with the doctor that delivered him\her as the sex of that child does.
Down Syndrome, or Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder. The doctor couldn't give a baby down syndrome any more than he or she could turn the baby into a frog. If any doctor ever lost a suit alleging that the doctor caused a baby's down syndrome, it was because the doctor hired a terrible lawyer and either didn't understand Down Syndrome or couldn't explain it.
The total crap part is that you can sue ANYTIME after birth and claim that the doctor that delivered you caused any problems that you have now. I personally talked to a doctor that is being sued by some parents because their child didnt get into the college they were planning on, so they sued the doctor for causing long lasting brain damage 18 years after the birth. The really sad part is the doctor lost the lawsuit and is now repsonsible for paying millions of dollars of damages to the family. And let me say, this is a totaly normal kid who simply didnt get high enough grades on his entrance exams to a college, not some highly deformed retarded human being.
Again, this doctor did a lot wrong. This doctor was apparently operating without malpractice insurance which is just stupid. Don't say that we shouldn't live in a society where we have to have insurance -- that's nonsense. We place ourselves in the care of doctors who have the ability to do great harm and, when they do harm, the victims should be compensated. Malpractice insurance is a way of allowing for doctors that are not super-rich before they start practicing. Almost every private contractor carries insurance against liability and malpractice both for their protection and for the protection of their clients, and, really, if you value your life, health, or property you should never do business with a contractor that lacks the capacity to compensate you if he screws up.
More to the point in this case, though, this doc got horrible representation if he or she lost this case. If this child had some sort of mental defect leading to a low IQ, that would have been picked up a dozen or so times before he took his college boards. In civil cases, respondents are protected against frivolous lawsuits by a statute of limitations, most commonly dating a few years from the date of discovery.
The S.o.L. varies from state to state, but, for example, in georgia:
In no event may an action for medical malpractice be brought more than five years after the date on which the negligent or wrongful act or omission occurred.
Linky
These things tend to be pretty similar from one state to the next, and while I have no idea where you live, odds are a half-decent lawyer would have had this malpractice case thrown out of court before the first witness took the stand because (surprise) the plaintiff had no standing to make the claim.
This doctor hired a horrible lawyer, apparently, one who should never have passed a bar exam, and one who could be easily outfoxed by anyone with an internet connection and a enough intelligence to use google. If you got fired for hiring an IT professional who had never used a computer before, why would you blame your boss?
Law is an i
sensationalism... bleh...
on
Three Headed Frog
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The creature - which has six legs - has stunned BBC wildlife experts who warned it could be an early warning of environmental problems.
When there are a few hundred documented cases of this it's time to be alarmed. Here, it looks like a few eggs failed to adequately separate. I doubt the frogs even have the same DNA. The fact that their pond was 2-3 Kelvin warmer than it would have been 50 years ago has nothing to do with this freak occurance.
If we told the muslim world that attacks against the US like 9/11 would result in the assured destruction of the arab or muslim world, we wouldn't have attacks against us by those people. Terrorists and other rogue elements in the arab and muslim world are not immune to pressure from their own kind, since many of them are secretly supported by other more visible members of their communities.
These people know that if we choose to escalate this war into total warfare against the larger target (the Arab world, for example) that they cannot win and in fact, face the a high risk of losing their entire civilization.
You, sir, are an idiot. Such a threat of obliteration would be impossible to carry out, and it assumes that the muslim civilisation is somehow monolithic -- it isn't. There are plenty of muslims living in the caves of afghanistan, for example, who would prefer to see the rest of the muslim world destroyed because they believe that these "other muslims" are defiling the religion. There are plenty of groups that have political conflicts with specific groups who happen to be muslim and would gladly launch a fake attack against the U.S. in an effort to obliterate their enemies.
More importantly, though, the "muslim civilisation" is intertwined with our own. If I had a slightly better arm I could throw a rock and hit a nearby mosque with a 100 car parking lot that overflows at worship times every day. These people had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in 2001, but you'd have them, and perhaps me, killed because they share some religious beliefs? Should we threaten to kill all people of Scottish descent because of McVeigh?
The "muslim world" is also heavily populated by non-muslims. One of my roommates in prep school had family working in Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Lebanon have strong secular presences, not to mention countries like Bosnia, Georgia, or Azerbijan. In other words, your statements are stupid because there would be no way to attack the "muslim civilisation" with nukes without taking out a substantial other population that you care about.
You either aren't thinking, or have some sort of repressed racial hatred. These guys were terrorists first and muslims second -- Islam was their excuse to commit terrorism, and their goal was the act of terrorism itself, not the furthering of Islam. Terrorism is about frustration, not political activism, and threatening to destroy someone's home and culture will only increase that frustration. These people were brainwashed into killing themselves in the hopes of bringing down the U.S. because they hated the U.S., not because they thought that their actions would help Islam. They no doubt thought the latter as well, but that's not adequate motivation for suicide.
Just sit back and think a bit before you spout off about wiping out more than a billion people. If the terrorists had just happened to be Irish, or Japanese, or Puerto Rican, or whatever your nationality/ethnicity, would you so quickly embrace the obliteration of that race/ethnicity/culture/etc?
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Legally in the U.S., a corporation is a person, therefore they are afforded equal protection under the law, and their first-ammendment rights should be protected as much as yours or mine. If you have caselaw with a different interpretation of the 14th ammendment, please share.
All of the carbon (and iron and nitrogen and oxygen and silicon and etc other than H, He, and maybe some Li and Be) on earth is older than the solar system, save for some fraction fo the above formed by radioactive decay. The solar system has no viable method to create and deposit significant amounts of (say) carbon on the earth, therefore any carbon here was here before the solar system condensed. It would be more newsworthy if the carbon were significantly newer than the solar system.
I haven't RTFA'd yet, but even if the significance of this carbon is that it has some special chemical form, there's no reason to assume that this bonding took place before the earth formed, as the component atoms would decay at the same rate, resulting in the same isotope ratios whether they were bonded or not...
The universe is something of an open sewer, filled with the waste products of billions of billions of exploded stars. It's not surprising that we picked up some of that trash, or that some of that trash is older than the trash that made us. IMHO this is of significant interest only because it sticks yet another fork in the creationist b.s.
Environmental damage is impossible to quantify. There is no challenge to be met other than to try our best to live in a sustainable world. Current trends point to a severe overburdening of resources. If we do wish to rise to the challenge we're going to have to do it soon.
Don't impose your limitations on me. Anyone trying to make an argument who starts that argument claiming that a physical phenomenon cannot be quantified should be banned from any further participation in the discussion. How can you even think about "liv[ing] in a sustainable world" or "a severe overburdening of resources" without first quantifying whatever environmental damage, if any, we are causing? Before one can speak intelligently on these subjects, he must first determine usage rates and the natural replenishment rates of our resources.
If you looked into this a little bit, you'd be surprised. The united states, for example, supposedly recaptures more CO2 than it produces. How is it easy for a bunch of big bad evil fat fedgov americans to do this? Easy: we cut down an insane number of trees, turn them into paper that goes into our vast corporate wastelands, and plant replacement trees. Environmentalism, real environmentalism, isn't about making a pretty countryside, it's about managing our resources and it is fundamentally a quantitative pursuit.
As for these doomsday predictions, they are often based on faulty methods (i.e. not counting newly planted forest but counting the forest area that was cut down before it; wild, untestable estimates of extinction rates that also ignore the creation of new species; the assumption that there will be no future improvements in the productive capacity of a unit of land or labor.). These predictions have been around for more than 200 years (See Malthus, T.R.) and, more than anything else, are created by researchers who ignore facts to push their agenda.
I'm an environmentalist. I'm staunchly opposed to unstainable development. Unlike most environmentalists, though, I don't assume that anything that a corporation does, or anything that is profitable for anyone, is detrimental to the environment. The human effect on the environment is incredibly small, though. Even in areas such as the Amazon rain forest where acre after acre of forest are burned, it's unlikely that a substantial number of "meaningful" species are extinguished. The species that are hurt the most by these activities are the big, furry, marketable ones. The most important species -- the insects that live in the forest and the myriad plants that live on and around the trees -- can and do coexist in the resulting semiagricultural land. Would it be better if the forest weren't burned down? yes. Are we really threatened in any way because we lose 1 obscure, undiscovered new-world monkey species per year? no. Are trees good? yes. will the forest retake the burned area after it loses its usefuless for cattle farming? probably. Should we do something to slow the destruction of the rainforest? yes. Is there a viable alternative for every wouldbe farmer/rancher in the area that would bring equal or better ROI? not that I know of.
Unfortunately the marketing done by the WWF has backfired, and they've been taken over by fake environmentalists, more worried about the real-life versions of their snow leopard beanie babies than studying or protecting the environment. They also have suffered from the mistaken idea that "the environment" is a static thing. Birds of prey are moving into cities and using parks as hunting grounds and skyscrapers as nesting sites. A species of cockroach in NYC has adapted to feed off of the insulation on wires in electronics. Bears, racoons, and skunks regularly venture deep into cities to forage through trashcans. The environment is always changing, but it is this constant change that creates the variation in species that environmentalists should seek to protect and promote.
I'm not an astronomer, and I guess I never really thought about doing it this way, but this approach is brilliant. Assuming a suitably precise spectral analysis of IR can be made, both the size and distance of a non-gassy planet can be determined. There would be two possibilities at every value, but I would assume that a planet would suck in nearby dust and debris so that "planets" would be present where there was a deviation from the "even distribution" dust curve, and the value at that peak or valley would determine the size of the planet. The habitable zone of each planet should be relatively easy to determine, and (I assume) that a spectral analysis in the visual spectrum could verify the presence of oxygen and water.
If we ever figure out how to get up to.01c without breaking the bank, this should give us a great idea about where to send probes and, eventually, where to focus any colonisation efforts.
That being said, I think by the time we, as a people, are advanced enough to travel to another solar system, that we may not be interested in reentering a planetary gravity well once we get there...
1) If you don't think there's a healthy portion of rat in whatever grain products you consume, you're delucing yourself.
2) A "supercow" with muscles that recover, repair, and grow more quickly would not be at any greater risk for the contraction or propagation of a BSE-related disease.
3) I doubt supercows would be grown for human consumption, anyway. Beef quality is largely dependent on fat content. If cows that put on muscle at an accelerated rate were appealing, they wouldn't castrate beef steers. The main costs for raising cattle for slaughter include food and labor, and "supercows" would require more food, more labor (they'd be harder to control) and would probably not be ready for slaughter any more quickly. Cutting fat for muscle could also make the cattle significantly less hardy, increasing costs during long, cold winters.
I've probably consumed 55 gallons of diet soda. But more to the point: You can feed a rat an absurd amount of aspirin and it doesn't get cancer. It's not just a matter of degree. In fact, a quick search turns up some articles about the tumor-inhibiting properties of aspirin in rats.
That rat weighs ~.5 lbs and you weigh (say) ~200 lbs. Have you consumed 22000 gallons of soda during a very short period, like with the study?
As for asprin in rats, try giving a rat (say) 176000 scaled doses over a short period and see what happens. My money's on either a massive ulcer or liver failure...
Buddy, IBM invented this phony patent business. They made it a common practice starting ~30 years ago to walk into startup companies with random patents and threaten to sue. Even when the startups pointed out that none of the patents the IBM lawyer brought were even remotely close to what the startup was doing, the lawyer would say something along the lines of "Look, we have 25k active patents. We'll find a half dozen that are close enough and sue you using those unless you give us X" where X was some substantial financial settlement or a crosslicensing agreement. I like patents because without them there would be no incentive for research or establishing new markets, but IBM has long been the king of ridiculous patent abuses. The media just doesn't report on them because they don't pay attention to the press releases of startups, if the startups even make press releases. IBM doesn't brag about their abuses because when the shoe is on the other foot they can cry to the media and portray the suit, even if it is legitimate, to their potential stockholders and jurors as petty and frivolous...
If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.
Could you show me where in the constitution it says that a contested slate of electoral votes would allow the issue to devolve to the senate (linked below). Once the Court made its ruling on how and when the votes were to be counted, there would be no grounds or avenue for subsequent appeal. It's the supreme court, and the name means just that. In the event that no decision was reached on the votes then, yes, the vote would have gone to congress, but not in the way that you describe. Each state has 1 vote and Bush won more total states, so he would have won that election (unless you want to make the case that senators and representatives from a state that voted for bush would have cast their vote for Gore and lost any chance of being reelected)... We only have a democracy when we follow the proscribed rules, and while it may be convenient to avoid the rules at times, doing so makes the united states a dictatorship.
But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request
Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.
Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.
I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong. They are the referees that determine which rules are just and how they should be interpreted and enforced. You can't have a truly democratic system without a powerful court because those abused by the tyranny of the majority have no recourse. As for the case of Gore v. Bush, it looks like the court failed. It didn't fail because Bush won (though I would have prefered Gore), it failed because in a situation that needed a conclusive end it rendered the worst possible verdict for the sanctity of democracy in the United States. They said that a recount should happen, but becuase of an artificial deadline ~50 days before the winner would take office and less than a day after the decision, a full recount requiring less than a week would just be too inconvenient to endure. The case should have been about how to count the votes, with the democrats arguing one way and the republicans arguing another. Instead, the republican council argued that there should be no recount at all... As a litigation tactic, this was good -- if you won the first count, argue against any subsequent recounts. As it concerns the country, though, this was a horrible argument, and a less radical court would have seen the importance of deciding the election with a universal standard of fairness rather than doing what it did. The Gore v. Bush decision may have been the single worst supreme court decision since the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, but at least in Scott the court had a sound legal principle to support its decision.
Anyway, I can't believe you're claiming the democrats should somehow be blamed or tarnished for seeking a recount in an election where equal protection had obviously been violated. The fact that such a request even made it into a court should tell you that the republican party, at least at the time, cared more about being in power than it cared about the democratic nature of the united states or its constitution.
It is not resonable to expect every member of your society to be a research scientist just to earn a decent living.
And what is a decent living? Americans have an incredibly high standard of living and, barring an invasion, they will from this point forward. The geographical advantages of the United States, combined with the incredibly high education rate, will ensure that the average American can feed and clothe himself with more disposable income left over than workers in most other countries, regardless of brute labor outsourcing.
Just because you don't have the education to pull down a mid-6 figure salary doesn't mean the system is broken. If you don't like your job, get a new one or go back to school instead of whining about some guy in India who is better suited to do your job than you are.
What we are gravitating towards is a society composed mainly of very poor people controlled by a few very rich people. When that happens you should review your French history particlulary the period from say 1780 through 1812, give or take a few years. Alternately look at Russian history from say 1905 - 1920.
How can someone dense enough to think like this actually float? I know you're trolling, but I'll answer anyway. The United States has a far more even distribution of wealth now than Russia or France had during their revolutionary periods. It's less equal now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, but there are fluctuations up and down w.r.t. the distribution of wealth. Anyway, if you have a job, odds are you get paid a lot better than the military you'd be counting on to help you with your revolution, and whining to some soldier about how you're only making $20k more than them instead of $30k because you're no better educated than some guy in India isn't really going to win him over.
Most laywers don't care one way or the other. Academics (professors) are fairly split over whether all this is a good idea. Executives love it because they give themselves fat bonuses with the money they make sending jobs overseas. Most researches are either blissfully unaware or are wondering when they will be outsourced as well.
Whether or not these workers are aware of the situation has nothing to do with the fact that they are the "pure knowledge workers" that you claimed do not exist. Believe it or not, a company won't outsource their CEO's and it's not possible to outsource legal work. Our professors are the foundation of our economy and our researchers develop the technology that is new enough to manufacture profitably in the united states. The united states has the best higher education system in the world and, because of critical mass issues, this is unlikely to change. The pre-college education system in the united states is also much broader than it is in almost any other country, and while the graduates of most other countries' school systems have more developed skills, American graduates have a broader range of skills and knowledge, making them ideally suited to the entrepreneurial environment encouraged by the current economic climate.
After all research can be done much more cheaply in India than here. PHD's grow on trees, no EPA to deal with, no FDA. Want to run clinical trials, go get some low caste individuals sleeping on the sidewalk and wala test subjects. If a few die no one will care. Point is, almost everyjob can be done overseas more cheaply, including yours, however we americans have to SOMETHING.
The cost of the medical research you seem to be focusing on isn't product development, but FDA approval. Why do they get this? Because they want to market the drug in the U.S. They could sell the drugs in india much earlier, often ten years or more earlier, than they could sell them in the United States. This is why many patients awaiting unapproved medication go to mexican pharmacies when conventional treatments fail to cure them. Unsurprisingly, most of the research is conducted in developed countries, and b
People poo-poo this point of view, but I have yet to see any of these supposed "pure knowlege worker" positions advertised in the local paper. My guess is they don't exist and never will. They are the very wealthy elite's attempts to smoke screen the middle class.
They're called lawyers, professors, researchers, and executives... If your software job gets outsourced, either go and work at a research firm/university where there is a need for custom software or a company that offers in-person support for law firms or other businesses... As for your complaint about outsourcing the production of consumer merchandise, even if all such production were outsourced it wouldn't mean negative growth. Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services. It seems counterintuitive, but you don't have to manufacture anything to have a high-growth economy. Anyway, once we reduce a practice from an art to a science, it makes sense to export those tasks to a workforce that has been more narrowly educated in order to develop new products or industries in this country. Jonas Salk wouldn't have cured polio working in the neighborhood textile mill...
In addition, it is generally unethical for attorneys to pocket a fee that is far in excess of the award.
If the $200k was to cover his legal fees incurred protecting himself from the wrongful prosecution and civil rights abuses then it would be understandable for those damages to go to his lawyers. Rather, the FTCA (which I believe would be the governing law in this case) limits lawyer fees to not more than 20% of awarded damages. Unless some of the damages that Jackson sued for were lawyer fees, losing 80% of his award to lawyers would have not only been unethical, but illegal.
An analagous situation would be OJ Simpson suing LA for wrongful prosecution, and using his legal fees and lost income as a basis for his damages. IANALY, but such lawsuits are uncommon, or are not often successful, because the plaintiff has to prove that the prosecutor was incompetent or malicious. In Jackson's case, I would assume that he won because he was able to prove that if the FBI had adequate understanding of computers that they would not have bothered him. This is all, of course, a guess based on an unsubstantiated allocation of awarded damages, so it might not reflect what actually happened at all...
A: They're both clueless.
Alternate answer: They're both looking at how to rig future elections in their favor with these incredibly flawed systems.
Or, perhaps more likely, one is clueless and the other is looking at how to rig elections. Why you think both parties see this issue the same way is beyond me, and not terribly logical. While the parties in the U.S. often want the same things, they often want them for different reasons.
The internet is so significant, and carries so much trade, that taxation is inevitable and so long as it's sensible and not punitive, why not?
Parent is pretty much 100% bullshit, but this part is particularly bad. Say you want to buy a doodad from Joebob's Olde-Tyme Doodad Shoppe in Biloxy, MS. Tax has already been paid on all the doodad parts and on shipping and importing all the doodad parts. You already paid tax on your telecom service, as did Joebob's, and you're paying taxes and tolls to ship the doodads from Biloxy to wherever you are. You've also paid for Joebob's property taxes and any other taxes in Biloxy for doing business or employing doodad-makers. Before any sales tax has been applied, you've already been pretty heavily taxed, so this whole "the poor government, they don't have any way to make any money anymore" idea is pretty much a canard.
Sales tax is the fee the government collects for making an environment conducive to retail trade. It's the tax they use to help make well-groomed minimum wage employees, accessible surface streets, and nearby attractions meant to increase retail activity. If I'm not using those resources then I shouldn't be taxed for using them, and as I'm already paying taxes for having wires hook my house up to the internet and for every other part of the transaction, I shouldn't be taxed for anything else, either. There's no justification for a tax that doesn't arise from an additional service provided by the government.
The government is not a business -- its job is not to make a profit, but to economically facilitate the making of profit by private enterprises. If the government is taxing for services it's not providing then it's not doing its job.
Okay, not really, but you should think more about this, seeing as you're a rocket scientist and all. True, earth naturally emits ~150BN tons of CO2 every year and we puny humans only contribute 7 or 8 billion tons, but that's not the whole story. The environment also absorbs about ~150BN tons of CO2 through natural processes. That's why we can get a better tan here than on venus. we know for sure that greenhouse gasses can cause global warming, the question is whether or not we are making a net contribution. If the environment can absorb our 7BN tons of CO2 indefinitely then that's great. If it can't, though, then that 7BN tons/year will add up quickly and have a large effect. the best way to avoid such effects is to get our production down into a range that can be absorbed naturally.
All of this "environment" stuff aside, though, the squandering of resources is foolish. There is a finite amount of black energy-rich crap buried underneath our mountains and sand dunes. It is by far the most easily exploited energy source on the planet. When, at some point in the future we wish to invest a large amount of energy into a single project -- such as a space elevator or a moon settlement or a mars settlement -- having access to such an easily exploited energy source would greatly reduce the cost and increase the likelihood of such an important investment being made... the current attitude is to engage in a arms race of blingin' one-ups-manship, buying larger and more ridiculous cars and appliances until our capacity to use energy, and our inability to function without it, criples us and makes any attempt to concentrate energy, even to invest it in some noble, productive task, impossible. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large, except in the tragedy of the commons, the grass can grow back.
It really flies in the face of the standard nutritionist's "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" dogma.
Well, there's a problem with measuring calories the way I assume they measured them... A "calorie" of fat is the amount of fat needed in combustion to heat 1 gram of water 1 kelvin from RT. (In nutritional parlance, a Calorie is 1000 of these calories). anyway, you can burn protein, fat, and glucose with similar efficiencies through combustion, but the body doesn't work that way. In order to use any energy, your body converts that fat/protein into glucose, which is not 100% efficient. If, say, the conversion is 95% efficient, which would be pretty good, then you can eat 1000 calories of fat for every 950 calories of starch. It's also worth noting that just because you eat fat/protein doesn't mean that your body sticks that fat/protein somewhere -- your liver may convert it into something more useful at the moment. The same thing goes with starch. Back in the 60's there were some crazy diets that involved not eating any fats, though, and because there are some fats that the body needs and cannot synthesize, that went badly.
The key is just doing what works for you and focusing on health rather than weight. I could probably lose 5-10 lbs if I went hardcore Atkins, but I am pretty healthy and high-energy now on a more balanced (but still high-protein, low-carb) diet because I spend ~70 mins/day in low-impact aerobic activity and another half hour lifting. I can change my weight whenever, but maintaining cardiovascular fitness is far more important for me at this point than whether my belly is well-insulated...
If you like to bet, I'm game : I'll even let you bet 20 to 1 that Microsoft's days are numbered. How about it?
What are the upper bounds on this number?
Slashdot Mirror
Anthrax is a bacteria, not a virus. What work on biosensors do you do as a "scientest" that you don't know this?
That greatly reduces the (already low) incentive of software companies to rapidly patch their vulnerabilities, though. MSFT does a horrible job already -- do you think they'd provide a more secure environment if an insecure environment told their lawyers who to sue?
It will happen -- the question is not whether or not an asteroid will hit the earth and whack us back to rats and cockroaches again, the question is whether we'll still be here when it happens, in some shape or form of an organized society. The risk of dying of an asteroid impact is also very small, but because so many people would die as a result of such an impact the risk in terms of total lives is large compared to other, far better funded projects (like earthquake/volcano prediction and mitigation which, in the U.S., costs taxpayers ~$50M per probabilistic death).
Great. any ideas on how to address those problems, or will you just use those problems to make an excuse for not addressing a less likely but much more dangerous hazard? An asteroid is far more likely to put an end to the american way of life than famine or disease. A significant thermonuclear exchange could do the job, as could hundreds of years of economic shifts and global warming, but these are problems that don't effect the U.S. and have no tenable solution.
On Famine: A bunch of people live in an environment where it is impossible to grow their own food and they lack the industrial capacity to be able to afford to import food, so they're starving. It sucks. The U.S. does send aide, but this is not a problem that will be solved by spending -- these people either need to die, move, or find a way to feed themselves because spending billions on some sort of global foodstamps program is not a solution to famine -- just like icing down someone with a fever does nothing to help them defeat the infection that is causing the fever, feeding the foodless will only create more foodless while destroying the global market for food. The problem is not, by the way, that there isn't enough food, just that these people can't afford to buy it and/or won't accept american surplus. It's an economic and distributive problem and, while there is no good philosophical reason to let anyone starve, the economic, practical reasons are the ones that keep you (gainfully employed 1st-world citizen) from starving by keeping the farmers employed.
On Disease: People die. tough beans, that's the way it is. Some diseases are horrendous and terrible, and AIDS in Africa and southeast Asia is horrible, but again there is no good solution to the problem and in many cases these diseases are attacking areas already massively overpopulated, undernourished, and poor. Do the poor deserve to live long, fulfilling lives just as much as the rich? Yes. Should the rich be forced to shorten their lives in order to lengthen the lives of the poor? No. This is the choice -- compell pharmaceutical companies to deliver drugs to third world countries at bottom dollar rates only to have a large portion of those drugs, sold at or below cost (with govt subsidies in the latter case) dumped into the profitable markets. What happens then? Nobody gets the drugs because the ROI disappears. We already give free AIDS medications to many patients in africa, for example, but many of those with the disease sell some of their doses back to american individuals and/or continue to have unprotected sex with uninfected individuals, spreading the disease and allowing it to build resistance to our drugs.
Disease is a fact of life, and seeking to somehow eliminate it is an unrealistic goal. Nevertheless, the U.S. spends massive amounts of money on every sort of disease -- I doubt there's a disease out there that a qualified individual couldn't get federal dollars to research. Medicine has advanced a g
I get upwards of 10 hours on my IBM R40 thinkpad (using the modular bay battery, about 6 hours w/o it)... and that's not even in the most power-efficient mode.
Take this for example:
Down Syndrome, or Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder. The doctor couldn't give a baby down syndrome any more than he or she could turn the baby into a frog. If any doctor ever lost a suit alleging that the doctor caused a baby's down syndrome, it was because the doctor hired a terrible lawyer and either didn't understand Down Syndrome or couldn't explain it.
Again, this doctor did a lot wrong. This doctor was apparently operating without malpractice insurance which is just stupid. Don't say that we shouldn't live in a society where we have to have insurance -- that's nonsense. We place ourselves in the care of doctors who have the ability to do great harm and, when they do harm, the victims should be compensated. Malpractice insurance is a way of allowing for doctors that are not super-rich before they start practicing. Almost every private contractor carries insurance against liability and malpractice both for their protection and for the protection of their clients, and, really, if you value your life, health, or property you should never do business with a contractor that lacks the capacity to compensate you if he screws up.
More to the point in this case, though, this doc got horrible representation if he or she lost this case. If this child had some sort of mental defect leading to a low IQ, that would have been picked up a dozen or so times before he took his college boards. In civil cases, respondents are protected against frivolous lawsuits by a statute of limitations, most commonly dating a few years from the date of discovery.
The S.o.L. varies from state to state, but, for example, in georgia:
Linky
These things tend to be pretty similar from one state to the next, and while I have no idea where you live, odds are a half-decent lawyer would have had this malpractice case thrown out of court before the first witness took the stand because (surprise) the plaintiff had no standing to make the claim.
This doctor hired a horrible lawyer, apparently, one who should never have passed a bar exam, and one who could be easily outfoxed by anyone with an internet connection and a enough intelligence to use google. If you got fired for hiring an IT professional who had never used a computer before, why would you blame your boss?
Law is an i
When there are a few hundred documented cases of this it's time to be alarmed. Here, it looks like a few eggs failed to adequately separate. I doubt the frogs even have the same DNA. The fact that their pond was 2-3 Kelvin warmer than it would have been 50 years ago has nothing to do with this freak occurance.
You, sir, are an idiot. Such a threat of obliteration would be impossible to carry out, and it assumes that the muslim civilisation is somehow monolithic -- it isn't. There are plenty of muslims living in the caves of afghanistan, for example, who would prefer to see the rest of the muslim world destroyed because they believe that these "other muslims" are defiling the religion. There are plenty of groups that have political conflicts with specific groups who happen to be muslim and would gladly launch a fake attack against the U.S. in an effort to obliterate their enemies.
More importantly, though, the "muslim civilisation" is intertwined with our own. If I had a slightly better arm I could throw a rock and hit a nearby mosque with a 100 car parking lot that overflows at worship times every day. These people had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in 2001, but you'd have them, and perhaps me, killed because they share some religious beliefs? Should we threaten to kill all people of Scottish descent because of McVeigh?
The "muslim world" is also heavily populated by non-muslims. One of my roommates in prep school had family working in Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Lebanon have strong secular presences, not to mention countries like Bosnia, Georgia, or Azerbijan. In other words, your statements are stupid because there would be no way to attack the "muslim civilisation" with nukes without taking out a substantial other population that you care about.
You either aren't thinking, or have some sort of repressed racial hatred. These guys were terrorists first and muslims second -- Islam was their excuse to commit terrorism, and their goal was the act of terrorism itself, not the furthering of Islam. Terrorism is about frustration, not political activism, and threatening to destroy someone's home and culture will only increase that frustration. These people were brainwashed into killing themselves in the hopes of bringing down the U.S. because they hated the U.S., not because they thought that their actions would help Islam. They no doubt thought the latter as well, but that's not adequate motivation for suicide.
Just sit back and think a bit before you spout off about wiping out more than a billion people. If the terrorists had just happened to be Irish, or Japanese, or Puerto Rican, or whatever your nationality/ethnicity, would you so quickly embrace the obliteration of that race/ethnicity/culture/etc?
Legally in the U.S., a corporation is a person, therefore they are afforded equal protection under the law, and their first-ammendment rights should be protected as much as yours or mine. If you have caselaw with a different interpretation of the 14th ammendment, please share.
All of the carbon (and iron and nitrogen and oxygen and silicon and etc other than H, He, and maybe some Li and Be) on earth is older than the solar system, save for some fraction fo the above formed by radioactive decay. The solar system has no viable method to create and deposit significant amounts of (say) carbon on the earth, therefore any carbon here was here before the solar system condensed. It would be more newsworthy if the carbon were significantly newer than the solar system.
I haven't RTFA'd yet, but even if the significance of this carbon is that it has some special chemical form, there's no reason to assume that this bonding took place before the earth formed, as the component atoms would decay at the same rate, resulting in the same isotope ratios whether they were bonded or not...
The universe is something of an open sewer, filled with the waste products of billions of billions of exploded stars. It's not surprising that we picked up some of that trash, or that some of that trash is older than the trash that made us. IMHO this is of significant interest only because it sticks yet another fork in the creationist b.s.
Environmental damage is impossible to quantify. There is no challenge to be met other than to try our best to live in a sustainable world. Current trends point to a severe overburdening of resources. If we do wish to rise to the challenge we're going to have to do it soon.
Don't impose your limitations on me. Anyone trying to make an argument who starts that argument claiming that a physical phenomenon cannot be quantified should be banned from any further participation in the discussion. How can you even think about "liv[ing] in a sustainable world" or "a severe overburdening of resources" without first quantifying whatever environmental damage, if any, we are causing? Before one can speak intelligently on these subjects, he must first determine usage rates and the natural replenishment rates of our resources.
If you looked into this a little bit, you'd be surprised. The united states, for example, supposedly recaptures more CO2 than it produces. How is it easy for a bunch of big bad evil fat fedgov americans to do this? Easy: we cut down an insane number of trees, turn them into paper that goes into our vast corporate wastelands, and plant replacement trees. Environmentalism, real environmentalism, isn't about making a pretty countryside, it's about managing our resources and it is fundamentally a quantitative pursuit.
As for these doomsday predictions, they are often based on faulty methods (i.e. not counting newly planted forest but counting the forest area that was cut down before it; wild, untestable estimates of extinction rates that also ignore the creation of new species; the assumption that there will be no future improvements in the productive capacity of a unit of land or labor.). These predictions have been around for more than 200 years (See Malthus, T.R.) and, more than anything else, are created by researchers who ignore facts to push their agenda.
I'm an environmentalist. I'm staunchly opposed to unstainable development. Unlike most environmentalists, though, I don't assume that anything that a corporation does, or anything that is profitable for anyone, is detrimental to the environment. The human effect on the environment is incredibly small, though. Even in areas such as the Amazon rain forest where acre after acre of forest are burned, it's unlikely that a substantial number of "meaningful" species are extinguished. The species that are hurt the most by these activities are the big, furry, marketable ones. The most important species -- the insects that live in the forest and the myriad plants that live on and around the trees -- can and do coexist in the resulting semiagricultural land. Would it be better if the forest weren't burned down? yes. Are we really threatened in any way because we lose 1 obscure, undiscovered new-world monkey species per year? no. Are trees good? yes. will the forest retake the burned area after it loses its usefuless for cattle farming? probably. Should we do something to slow the destruction of the rainforest? yes. Is there a viable alternative for every wouldbe farmer/rancher in the area that would bring equal or better ROI? not that I know of.
Unfortunately the marketing done by the WWF has backfired, and they've been taken over by fake environmentalists, more worried about the real-life versions of their snow leopard beanie babies than studying or protecting the environment. They also have suffered from the mistaken idea that "the environment" is a static thing. Birds of prey are moving into cities and using parks as hunting grounds and skyscrapers as nesting sites. A species of cockroach in NYC has adapted to feed off of the insulation on wires in electronics. Bears, racoons, and skunks regularly venture deep into cities to forage through trashcans. The environment is always changing, but it is this constant change that creates the variation in species that environmentalists should seek to protect and promote.
Are there polutants that should be kept out of th
I'm not an astronomer, and I guess I never really thought about doing it this way, but this approach is brilliant. Assuming a suitably precise spectral analysis of IR can be made, both the size and distance of a non-gassy planet can be determined. There would be two possibilities at every value, but I would assume that a planet would suck in nearby dust and debris so that "planets" would be present where there was a deviation from the "even distribution" dust curve, and the value at that peak or valley would determine the size of the planet. The habitable zone of each planet should be relatively easy to determine, and (I assume) that a spectral analysis in the visual spectrum could verify the presence of oxygen and water.
.01c without breaking the bank, this should give us a great idea about where to send probes and, eventually, where to focus any colonisation efforts.
If we ever figure out how to get up to
That being said, I think by the time we, as a people, are advanced enough to travel to another solar system, that we may not be interested in reentering a planetary gravity well once we get there...
1) If you don't think there's a healthy portion of rat in whatever grain products you consume, you're delucing yourself.
2) A "supercow" with muscles that recover, repair, and grow more quickly would not be at any greater risk for the contraction or propagation of a BSE-related disease.
3) I doubt supercows would be grown for human consumption, anyway. Beef quality is largely dependent on fat content. If cows that put on muscle at an accelerated rate were appealing, they wouldn't castrate beef steers. The main costs for raising cattle for slaughter include food and labor, and "supercows" would require more food, more labor (they'd be harder to control) and would probably not be ready for slaughter any more quickly. Cutting fat for muscle could also make the cattle significantly less hardy, increasing costs during long, cold winters.
I've probably consumed 55 gallons of diet soda. But more to the point: You can feed a rat an absurd amount of aspirin and it doesn't get cancer. It's not just a matter of degree. In fact, a quick search turns up some articles about the tumor-inhibiting properties of aspirin in rats.
That rat weighs ~.5 lbs and you weigh (say) ~200 lbs. Have you consumed 22000 gallons of soda during a very short period, like with the study?
As for asprin in rats, try giving a rat (say) 176000 scaled doses over a short period and see what happens. My money's on either a massive ulcer or liver failure...
Buddy, IBM invented this phony patent business. They made it a common practice starting ~30 years ago to walk into startup companies with random patents and threaten to sue. Even when the startups pointed out that none of the patents the IBM lawyer brought were even remotely close to what the startup was doing, the lawyer would say something along the lines of "Look, we have 25k active patents. We'll find a half dozen that are close enough and sue you using those unless you give us X" where X was some substantial financial settlement or a crosslicensing agreement. I like patents because without them there would be no incentive for research or establishing new markets, but IBM has long been the king of ridiculous patent abuses. The media just doesn't report on them because they don't pay attention to the press releases of startups, if the startups even make press releases. IBM doesn't brag about their abuses because when the shoe is on the other foot they can cry to the media and portray the suit, even if it is legitimate, to their potential stockholders and jurors as petty and frivolous...
If your going by the Constitution, the recount should have proceeded and, since whichever side lost probably would have taken it to Congress, Congress should have decided.
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Could you show me where in the constitution it says that a contested slate of electoral votes would allow the issue to devolve to the senate (linked below). Once the Court made its ruling on how and when the votes were to be counted, there would be no grounds or avenue for subsequent appeal. It's the supreme court, and the name means just that. In the event that no decision was reached on the votes then, yes, the vote would have gone to congress, but not in the way that you describe. Each state has 1 vote and Bush won more total states, so he would have won that election (unless you want to make the case that senators and representatives from a state that voted for bush would have cast their vote for Gore and lost any chance of being reelected)... We only have a democracy when we follow the proscribed rules, and while it may be convenient to avoid the rules at times, doing so makes the united states a dictatorship.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request
Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.
Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.
I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong. They are the referees that determine which rules are just and how they should be interpreted and enforced. You can't have a truly democratic system without a powerful court because those abused by the tyranny of the majority have no recourse. As for the case of Gore v. Bush, it looks like the court failed. It didn't fail because Bush won (though I would have prefered Gore), it failed because in a situation that needed a conclusive end it rendered the worst possible verdict for the sanctity of democracy in the United States. They said that a recount should happen, but becuase of an artificial deadline ~50 days before the winner would take office and less than a day after the decision, a full recount requiring less than a week would just be too inconvenient to endure. The case should have been about how to count the votes, with the democrats arguing one way and the republicans arguing another. Instead, the republican council argued that there should be no recount at all... As a litigation tactic, this was good -- if you won the first count, argue against any subsequent recounts. As it concerns the country, though, this was a horrible argument, and a less radical court would have seen the importance of deciding the election with a universal standard of fairness rather than doing what it did. The Gore v. Bush decision may have been the single worst supreme court decision since the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, but at least in Scott the court had a sound legal principle to support its decision.
Anyway, I can't believe you're claiming the democrats should somehow be blamed or tarnished for seeking a recount in an election where equal protection had obviously been violated. The fact that such a request even made it into a court should tell you that the republican party, at least at the time, cared more about being in power than it cared about the democratic nature of the united states or its constitution.
It is not resonable to expect every member of your society to be a research scientist just to earn a decent living.
And what is a decent living? Americans have an incredibly high standard of living and, barring an invasion, they will from this point forward. The geographical advantages of the United States, combined with the incredibly high education rate, will ensure that the average American can feed and clothe himself with more disposable income left over than workers in most other countries, regardless of brute labor outsourcing.
Just because you don't have the education to pull down a mid-6 figure salary doesn't mean the system is broken. If you don't like your job, get a new one or go back to school instead of whining about some guy in India who is better suited to do your job than you are.
What we are gravitating towards is a society composed mainly of very poor people controlled by a few very rich people. When that happens you should review your French history particlulary the period from say 1780 through 1812, give or take a few years. Alternately look at Russian history from say 1905 - 1920.
How can someone dense enough to think like this actually float? I know you're trolling, but I'll answer anyway. The United States has a far more even distribution of wealth now than Russia or France had during their revolutionary periods. It's less equal now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, but there are fluctuations up and down w.r.t. the distribution of wealth. Anyway, if you have a job, odds are you get paid a lot better than the military you'd be counting on to help you with your revolution, and whining to some soldier about how you're only making $20k more than them instead of $30k because you're no better educated than some guy in India isn't really going to win him over.
Most laywers don't care one way or the other. Academics (professors) are fairly split over whether all this is a good idea. Executives love it because they give themselves fat bonuses with the money they make sending jobs overseas. Most researches are either blissfully unaware or are wondering when they will be outsourced as well.
Whether or not these workers are aware of the situation has nothing to do with the fact that they are the "pure knowledge workers" that you claimed do not exist. Believe it or not, a company won't outsource their CEO's and it's not possible to outsource legal work. Our professors are the foundation of our economy and our researchers develop the technology that is new enough to manufacture profitably in the united states. The united states has the best higher education system in the world and, because of critical mass issues, this is unlikely to change. The pre-college education system in the united states is also much broader than it is in almost any other country, and while the graduates of most other countries' school systems have more developed skills, American graduates have a broader range of skills and knowledge, making them ideally suited to the entrepreneurial environment encouraged by the current economic climate.
After all research can be done much more cheaply in India than here. PHD's grow on trees, no EPA to deal with, no FDA. Want to run clinical trials, go get some low caste individuals sleeping on the sidewalk and wala test subjects. If a few die no one will care. Point is, almost everyjob can be done overseas more cheaply, including yours, however we americans have to SOMETHING.
The cost of the medical research you seem to be focusing on isn't product development, but FDA approval. Why do they get this? Because they want to market the drug in the U.S. They could sell the drugs in india much earlier, often ten years or more earlier, than they could sell them in the United States. This is why many patients awaiting unapproved medication go to mexican pharmacies when conventional treatments fail to cure them. Unsurprisingly, most of the research is conducted in developed countries, and b
People poo-poo this point of view, but I have yet to see any of these supposed "pure knowlege worker" positions advertised in the local paper. My guess is they don't exist and never will. They are the very wealthy elite's attempts to smoke screen the middle class.
They're called lawyers, professors, researchers, and executives... If your software job gets outsourced, either go and work at a research firm/university where there is a need for custom software or a company that offers in-person support for law firms or other businesses... As for your complaint about outsourcing the production of consumer merchandise, even if all such production were outsourced it wouldn't mean negative growth. Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services. It seems counterintuitive, but you don't have to manufacture anything to have a high-growth economy. Anyway, once we reduce a practice from an art to a science, it makes sense to export those tasks to a workforce that has been more narrowly educated in order to develop new products or industries in this country. Jonas Salk wouldn't have cured polio working in the neighborhood textile mill...
Although former enemies, the Andorian Imperial Guard helps the Enterprise crew steal the Xindi's superweapon. Seems abrupt.
In addition, it is generally unethical for attorneys to pocket a fee that is far in excess of the award.
If the $200k was to cover his legal fees incurred protecting himself from the wrongful prosecution and civil rights abuses then it would be understandable for those damages to go to his lawyers. Rather, the FTCA (which I believe would be the governing law in this case) limits lawyer fees to not more than 20% of awarded damages. Unless some of the damages that Jackson sued for were lawyer fees, losing 80% of his award to lawyers would have not only been unethical, but illegal.
An analagous situation would be OJ Simpson suing LA for wrongful prosecution, and using his legal fees and lost income as a basis for his damages. IANALY, but such lawsuits are uncommon, or are not often successful, because the plaintiff has to prove that the prosecutor was incompetent or malicious. In Jackson's case, I would assume that he won because he was able to prove that if the FBI had adequate understanding of computers that they would not have bothered him. This is all, of course, a guess based on an unsubstantiated allocation of awarded damages, so it might not reflect what actually happened at all...
A: They're both clueless.
Alternate answer: They're both looking at how to rig future elections in their favor with these incredibly flawed systems.
Or, perhaps more likely, one is clueless and the other is looking at how to rig elections. Why you think both parties see this issue the same way is beyond me, and not terribly logical. While the parties in the U.S. often want the same things, they often want them for different reasons.
The internet is so significant, and carries so much trade, that taxation is inevitable and so long as it's sensible and not punitive, why not?
Parent is pretty much 100% bullshit, but this part is particularly bad. Say you want to buy a doodad from Joebob's Olde-Tyme Doodad Shoppe in Biloxy, MS. Tax has already been paid on all the doodad parts and on shipping and importing all the doodad parts. You already paid tax on your telecom service, as did Joebob's, and you're paying taxes and tolls to ship the doodads from Biloxy to wherever you are. You've also paid for Joebob's property taxes and any other taxes in Biloxy for doing business or employing doodad-makers. Before any sales tax has been applied, you've already been pretty heavily taxed, so this whole "the poor government, they don't have any way to make any money anymore" idea is pretty much a canard.
Sales tax is the fee the government collects for making an environment conducive to retail trade. It's the tax they use to help make well-groomed minimum wage employees, accessible surface streets, and nearby attractions meant to increase retail activity. If I'm not using those resources then I shouldn't be taxed for using them, and as I'm already paying taxes for having wires hook my house up to the internet and for every other part of the transaction, I shouldn't be taxed for anything else, either. There's no justification for a tax that doesn't arise from an additional service provided by the government.
The government is not a business -- its job is not to make a profit, but to economically facilitate the making of profit by private enterprises. If the government is taxing for services it's not providing then it's not doing its job.
You're a moron.
Okay, not really, but you should think more about this, seeing as you're a rocket scientist and all. True, earth naturally emits ~150BN tons of CO2 every year and we puny humans only contribute 7 or 8 billion tons, but that's not the whole story. The environment also absorbs about ~150BN tons of CO2 through natural processes. That's why we can get a better tan here than on venus. we know for sure that greenhouse gasses can cause global warming, the question is whether or not we are making a net contribution. If the environment can absorb our 7BN tons of CO2 indefinitely then that's great. If it can't, though, then that 7BN tons/year will add up quickly and have a large effect. the best way to avoid such effects is to get our production down into a range that can be absorbed naturally.
All of this "environment" stuff aside, though, the squandering of resources is foolish. There is a finite amount of black energy-rich crap buried underneath our mountains and sand dunes. It is by far the most easily exploited energy source on the planet. When, at some point in the future we wish to invest a large amount of energy into a single project -- such as a space elevator or a moon settlement or a mars settlement -- having access to such an easily exploited energy source would greatly reduce the cost and increase the likelihood of such an important investment being made... the current attitude is to engage in a arms race of blingin' one-ups-manship, buying larger and more ridiculous cars and appliances until our capacity to use energy, and our inability to function without it, criples us and makes any attempt to concentrate energy, even to invest it in some noble, productive task, impossible. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large, except in the tragedy of the commons, the grass can grow back.
It really flies in the face of the standard nutritionist's "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" dogma.
Well, there's a problem with measuring calories the way I assume they measured them... A "calorie" of fat is the amount of fat needed in combustion to heat 1 gram of water 1 kelvin from RT. (In nutritional parlance, a Calorie is 1000 of these calories). anyway, you can burn protein, fat, and glucose with similar efficiencies through combustion, but the body doesn't work that way. In order to use any energy, your body converts that fat/protein into glucose, which is not 100% efficient. If, say, the conversion is 95% efficient, which would be pretty good, then you can eat 1000 calories of fat for every 950 calories of starch. It's also worth noting that just because you eat fat/protein doesn't mean that your body sticks that fat/protein somewhere -- your liver may convert it into something more useful at the moment. The same thing goes with starch. Back in the 60's there were some crazy diets that involved not eating any fats, though, and because there are some fats that the body needs and cannot synthesize, that went badly.
The key is just doing what works for you and focusing on health rather than weight. I could probably lose 5-10 lbs if I went hardcore Atkins, but I am pretty healthy and high-energy now on a more balanced (but still high-protein, low-carb) diet because I spend ~70 mins/day in low-impact aerobic activity and another half hour lifting. I can change my weight whenever, but maintaining cardiovascular fitness is far more important for me at this point than whether my belly is well-insulated...
If you like to bet, I'm game : I'll even let you bet 20 to 1 that Microsoft's days are numbered. How about it? What are the upper bounds on this number?