Wow! Rage, hysteria, and I think you actually got some flecks of spittle on me through the internet!
I quipped that developing good and useful software would be the same as fighting Microsoft.
Motive aside, they are the same thing. If you make better and more useful software than MS does, people will use it (Firefox over IE, iTunes over WMP).
United States 3.7 M sq miles 280 M people Oh, and WITHOUT the unserviced arctic wastes of Alaska: 3.1 M sq mi
So a "European" cell provider like T-Mobile realistically covers 2/3 the area of the US. Wow, what an advantage for them. And somehow they manage to cover the US as well, without collapsing upon themselves in a singularity.
with multiple overlapping jurisdictions
Are you smoking crack? The US has *one* jurisdiction that regulates cellular communications: the whole damn thing, by way of the FCC. Cellular service doesn't come under nearly the same local regulation that a landline company comes under, because cellular services are not granted local monopolies.
The Europeans were the ones at a disadvantage, thanks to their "multiple jurisdictions," and they managed to hammer out universal guidelines.
Seriously, do you think that a French cellphone on Orange (T-Mobile) suddenly stops working when you cross the border to the UK or Germany?
Because much like my phone hasn't died at the state line since about 1998, pan-European cell phone companies cover the whole continent through their own networks or through agreements with other regional providers.
You're right on one account: it's not "evil" corporations. It's corporations that are optimized for the regulatory environment that we have here in the states. If we did the simple things that the European regulators have already done, like mandating unlocked phones, our corporations would optimize for THOSE conditions and continue making billions of bucks. Ta-da.
In one corner we've got a global powerhouse of a company that commands 10% US market share (shipments) of personal computers, with even better numbers if you look at laptops only, and a huge share of the smartphone market. That's about 6 million computers per year. Oh, and their OS has no problems dealing with Windows-centric networks and filesystems, and is POSIX-Certified. On top of that, major software houses produce software for the Mac OS, in addition to Apple's in-house software which (in some cases, like Shake) is recognized as some of the best in the industry.
In the other, we've got the defunct today, not-quite-dead tomorrow zombie remains of a corporation that was cool but probably didn't ship that many computers in its HISTORY. Oh, and their OS really *is* a niche OS--it's has no developers, no compatibility, and nothing special to recommend it over anything else.
derp derp derp yeah, questioning the relevance of Amiga is "just" like questioning the relevance of Apple. If you want to try that line of reasoning, you should pick a better target for your angst: drop some trash-talk on FreeDOS, or Minix. I was going to throw in VMS, but then I realized that I actually use VMS all the time and people are paid to use VMS. Amiga, not so much.
But I'll still have to have the disk in to play the game, right? I'm thinking that if I still have to get up, dig around for a disk, switch disks, etc., I'm not really saving myself any time by installing to my HD. Maybe the loading screens are a little faster, but it's not going to fix framerate issues during big fights or anything.
It still seems like a feature without a purpose. The whole reason for doing "disk installs" on a modded console is so that you can have all of your games instantly playable, without switching disks.
Color me stupid if I'm missing something, but WTF is the point of installing regular, disk-based 360 games on the HD? You're STILL required to have the disk in if you want to play the game, and when I installed Fallout 3 on my HD I didn't notice any great gains in loading time. I might as well keep that space free for DLC and other downloaded games (full versions of which are starting to appear on the online store).
Except for being the guy who briefed the Apollo astronauts. And writing the book(s) on exobiology. And a bunch of other stuff that you haven't heard about, because you haven't cared to look.
Read again. I was rebutting OP's suggestion that the Tesla loan is for "building cars outside of the US" and "stimulating the UK." OP made no distinction between the Tesla loan and the Fisker loan, and in fact painted them with the same broad brush. In this case, completely unfairly to Tesla.
I didn't make any claims about Fiskar, because I don't know much about it. But I do know that OP was wrong in their characterization of Tesla, and that's what I was pointing out.
Tesla got a loan to develop a sedan (from the ground up) that they will produce in the US.
They currently sell a Lotus Elise-based sports car, because (as a start up) they couldn't afford to develop both the drivetrain AND the rest of the car. It was more efficient for them to source the body/frame from Lotus.
Not only that, but the current generation sports car that Tesla's selling is intended to bring down the cost of the drivetrain package through production volume, while subsidizing development for the sedan.
Not for a million years, no. Pretty sure the Earth is capable of that. Come back when you've got nine nine's probability of success on 10 billion years, and we'll talk =)
Just to play devils advocate, there was a situation only a few years ago where a hip manufacturer failed to re-validate its manufacturing process after an equipment change. They ended up shipping contaminated hips (thin veneer of lubricant from the machine), an entire batch of which all failed catastrophically.
I'm a fan of tort reform too, and I agree that (many but not all) of these prices are somewhat artificially inflated, but all of that exhaustive testing needs to happen. Unfortunately, in our system, the medical companies also play the Fight Club Insurance Adjuster game, instead of "doing the right thing" the first time, and a crippling lawsuit is just about the only thing on the other side of the scales.
My BS is Bioengineering (Materials), but I've been a physics teacher since I graduated, so I'm a little rusty. Take this with the requisite grain of salt =)
You're right, if you could just replace the whole femur, you'd eliminate the loading biocompatibility problems. The problem is that the femur as-a-whole is part of a complex and interconnected system, and would be many orders of magnitude more difficult to replace than the head alone. That tendons-and-cartilage problem is much, much harder than it sounds.
For starters, the top of the femur isn't connected to any muscles or ligaments, so we don't have to worry about reattaching them. Once the head of the femur is dislocated from the hip socket, the socket is replaced by a bioengineered version, and the top of the femur is cut off and replaced. The new ball/socket joint is reconnected, and the muscles naturally fold back around it.
Sounds simple, but this by itself is one of the most traumatic "routine" operations in the book. It's a massive, multi-hour undertaking, and requires a lot of blood and a lot of elbow grease. Removing the entire femur, while preserving all of the soft tissue around it, would be unimaginably difficult by comparison.
To replace the whole femur, all of the tendons and ligaments attached to the lower femur would have to be removed. Attaching them to a bioengineered substrate may be difficult or impossible. These aren't trivial connections, either. They're attached to the strongest muscles on your body, so they are subject to the most extreme forces in the body--hundreds if not thousands of PSI during heavy exertion (running, jumping, etc).
Titanium, in particular, would be a great candidate for a whole-bone replacement, if all it had to do was be a "mechanical" member. But getting the body to integrate with titanium--which you'd need, to keep those ligaments attached--is insidiously hard. One of the reasons why this new material is exciting is because the body integrates it much differently, by using it as a frame for normal growth (filling in the holes in the artificial bone with natural bone). Titanium is treated differently--the body effectively walls it off with a special type of soft tissue. It's "biocompatible" only in the sense that it doesn't provoke any kind of dangerous immune response; it is not a good substrate for normal tissue growth. Very, very few materials are, and most of them are highly engineered plastics with special protein coatings.
You also can't easily engineer a "half" replacement for the knee--knee replacements replace both sides of the joint. So, now you're chopping up the top of the tibia to provide a mate for your artificial femur. Which leads you right back to the same kind of problem.
Hip replacements used to be much worse than they are now; the mechanics have improved by leaps and bounds. They've gotten to the point where most people who need one (elderly, >60 yrs) will ONLY need one during their lives; it's younger athletes (Bo Jackson) and rheumatoid arthritis sufferers who have the bulk of their life ahead of them who are in danger of needing multiple rounds of replacement.
Right. All levity aside, this could be a revolutionary medical step. Artificial bone is one of the most challenging materials science problems going, and has been for decades.
When an artificial hip, or other load-bearing bone implant, has a higher modulus than bone (and they invariably do), they cause the load to be transmitted unevenly to the bone. The artificial hip is on a pin that goes down into the marrow on the top of the femur. In natural loading, each segment of bone (taken from top to bottom) is loaded equally in compression. With an artificial hip implanted, some of the force is transmitted directly to a deeper part of the femur. The top of the bone is loaded less heavily than it would have been under natural circumstances?
Who cares? Your bones do. They're dynamic. When they're unloaded, they break down. So now, by unloading the top of the femur, you've given your body permission to dissolve it. Now your hip implant is bare, and only being held by its tip--fractures are the final result. This is why a hip replacement has a "lifespan" of only a few years--young people who have hips replaced have to go get new ones at some point, and have to lose a chunk of femur each time.
Things have probably improved since I was an engineering undergrad discussing these problems (~8 yrs ago), but those are the big issues. I'm going to be really curious to read more about this.
There wasn't much left after their counterparts handed massive portions of the country over to government in the name of domestic security that is no more secure than it ever was.
People willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither, etc. Wait... what was your point?
I like technology-as-art projects, but it'd be much cooler if these things actually *were* powered by bug juice--that is, more like bug powered 75% of the time, with a battery backup or a solar panel (or both) for those days when all the flies have already been eaten--rather than just being combination clock-and-bug-zappers. I'd be interested to see their average power production vs. power consumption.
It was probably deleted because it's misleading and completely uninformative.
"Hummer" is a badge that was created by GM and AM General for civilian HMMWVs (which are made by AM General). It was used for some GM-designed trucks that AM General built.
Selling the "Hummer" badge doesn't mean a damned thing to GM China or to the US Army. AM General is completely independent of GM. It would be nice if somebody would explain their relationship to the newly divorced Hummer, but that "missing paragraph" was nothing but fluff and nonsense.
Yes, those are real-world examples of problems that aren't as big as you think they are. Both of your real-world examples are trivial geology problems.
For starters, we are well aware of where the geological faults are, and we have a pretty good handle on what parts of the continental bedrock are going to be around for the next million years or so. We also know where the water tables are and aren't. This isn't the 19th century; we have the continent mapped out, in layers, as deep as it gets. We know where the permeable and impermeable layers are. Mining in hard rock isn't a new science. The real cost of an effective place to sequester these materials isn't in the physical cost--it's generally in the social costs (fighting "NIMBY" mentality, etc).
Second, the waste from fission doesn't have to be as scary as it currently is. Again, the Europeans and the Japanese are trucking this stuff all around the world without mishap, and they're boiling it down to quantities that are small enough to make storage easy. The longest-lived byproducts are almost always the ones that reprocessing eliminates, leaving waste that requires storage on the order of thousands of years, rather than millions, which takes a lot of the geological concerns away.
The final product can be vitrified (turned into glass) to make a solid, non-leachable, durable material that will last essentially indefinitely. In the event that the geology does change, and water gets in on it, it's still safe for the active life of the waste.
Now, I'm not trying to say that fission waste isn't nasty, or that it's "easy" to deal with (of course it's not), but it is definitely NOT the boogeyman that people make it out to be. Remember, we're talking about the waste from modern facilities, and handling it with modern, mature technology. This is a far cry from the nasty cocktails of cold-war experimental stuff at Hanford that they're still trying to figure out a way to get rid of.
Our chemical industries routinely deal with products that are many times more acutely dangerous, and present just as big of a threat (if not greater) to the environment, including the problems of long-term sequestering and disastrous leaching. The only reason why we get hysterical about fission waste is because (right or wrong) we've got a knee-jerk overreaction to anything nuclear.
Y is invariably a social engineering problem, not a physical engineering problem, based on fear born of ignorance and mistrust. The fact is that if we can otherwise store cubic miles of assorted dangerous industrial trash, we can certainly store cubic meters of nuclear waste.
Tell me, what are the half lives of other assorted industrial wastes like dioxins? Of mercury? Of the radioisotopes in coal smoke? Of the tailings from any large mining venture?
What is the half-life of fly-ash?
That argument is asinine in this case, because every comparable industrial process produces waste which must be also be sequestered, and which must also be prevented from leaking into aquifers, etc. The point is that nuclear waste (with pragmatic management) produces a smaller volume than other comparable processes.
The same thing that the Japanese and the Europeans do--reprocess it into the smallest possible quantities, and securely bury what's left. The volume of waste that this requires you to bury is inconsequentially small compared to the amount of solid waste (ash) you have to dispose of when you burn coal.
Same here in Arizona; freeways are built from concrete, and then a layer of rubberized asphalt is paved over it. Until a few years ago, most of the freeways were bare concrete; IIRC one of the major reasons for the asphalt was to reduce traffic noise.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't go with the tornado-through-the-junkyard analogy, but sexual reproduction is an acquired and beneficial trait, not a requirement for evolution. Gene-swapping speeds the process and increases the chance for viable improvements; however, simple asexual reproduction over millions of generations can accomplish a huge amount of change *if* there are selective pressures on the population.
In fact, you could say the same thing about starting with a monoculture (all members of the population have same initial genetics, say, from cloning). With sexual reproduction, you'll get new genetic material spread more quickly through the population, but you still need some mutations to generate diversity, and then you need selective pressure to make a "changed" offspring more viable than its peers.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Rage, hysteria, and I think you actually got some flecks of spittle on me through the internet!
I quipped that developing good and useful software would be the same as fighting Microsoft.
Motive aside, they are the same thing. If you make better and more useful software than MS does, people will use it (Firefox over IE, iTunes over WMP).
In conclusion: NO U
Same thing.
1. the US is much bigger than Europe,
European Union:
1.7 M sq mi
500 M people
United States
3.7 M sq miles
280 M people
Oh, and WITHOUT the unserviced arctic wastes of Alaska:
3.1 M sq mi
So a "European" cell provider like T-Mobile realistically covers 2/3 the area of the US. Wow, what an advantage for them. And somehow they manage to cover the US as well, without collapsing upon themselves in a singularity.
with multiple overlapping jurisdictions
Are you smoking crack? The US has *one* jurisdiction that regulates cellular communications: the whole damn thing, by way of the FCC. Cellular service doesn't come under nearly the same local regulation that a landline company comes under, because cellular services are not granted local monopolies.
The Europeans were the ones at a disadvantage, thanks to their "multiple jurisdictions," and they managed to hammer out universal guidelines.
Seriously, do you think that a French cellphone on Orange (T-Mobile) suddenly stops working when you cross the border to the UK or Germany?
Because much like my phone hasn't died at the state line since about 1998, pan-European cell phone companies cover the whole continent through their own networks or through agreements with other regional providers.
You're right on one account: it's not "evil" corporations. It's corporations that are optimized for the regulatory environment that we have here in the states. If we did the simple things that the European regulators have already done, like mandating unlocked phones, our corporations would optimize for THOSE conditions and continue making billions of bucks. Ta-da.
DERP
In one corner we've got a global powerhouse of a company that commands 10% US market share (shipments) of personal computers, with even better numbers if you look at laptops only, and a huge share of the smartphone market. That's about 6 million computers per year. Oh, and their OS has no problems dealing with Windows-centric networks and filesystems, and is POSIX-Certified. On top of that, major software houses produce software for the Mac OS, in addition to Apple's in-house software which (in some cases, like Shake) is recognized as some of the best in the industry.
In the other, we've got the defunct today, not-quite-dead tomorrow zombie remains of a corporation that was cool but probably didn't ship that many computers in its HISTORY. Oh, and their OS really *is* a niche OS--it's has no developers, no compatibility, and nothing special to recommend it over anything else.
derp derp derp yeah, questioning the relevance of Amiga is "just" like questioning the relevance of Apple. If you want to try that line of reasoning, you should pick a better target for your angst: drop some trash-talk on FreeDOS, or Minix. I was going to throw in VMS, but then I realized that I actually use VMS all the time and people are paid to use VMS. Amiga, not so much.
But I'll still have to have the disk in to play the game, right? I'm thinking that if I still have to get up, dig around for a disk, switch disks, etc., I'm not really saving myself any time by installing to my HD. Maybe the loading screens are a little faster, but it's not going to fix framerate issues during big fights or anything.
It still seems like a feature without a purpose. The whole reason for doing "disk installs" on a modded console is so that you can have all of your games instantly playable, without switching disks.
Color me stupid if I'm missing something, but WTF is the point of installing regular, disk-based 360 games on the HD? You're STILL required to have the disk in if you want to play the game, and when I installed Fallout 3 on my HD I didn't notice any great gains in loading time. I might as well keep that space free for DLC and other downloaded games (full versions of which are starting to appear on the online store).
Except for being the guy who briefed the Apollo astronauts. And writing the book(s) on exobiology. And a bunch of other stuff that you haven't heard about, because you haven't cared to look.
Read again. I was rebutting OP's suggestion that the Tesla loan is for "building cars outside of the US" and "stimulating the UK." OP made no distinction between the Tesla loan and the Fisker loan, and in fact painted them with the same broad brush. In this case, completely unfairly to Tesla.
I didn't make any claims about Fiskar, because I don't know much about it. But I do know that OP was wrong in their characterization of Tesla, and that's what I was pointing out.
Tesla got a loan to develop a sedan (from the ground up) that they will produce in the US.
They currently sell a Lotus Elise-based sports car, because (as a start up) they couldn't afford to develop both the drivetrain AND the rest of the car. It was more efficient for them to source the body/frame from Lotus.
Not only that, but the current generation sports car that Tesla's selling is intended to bring down the cost of the drivetrain package through production volume, while subsidizing development for the sedan.
THE MORE YOU KNOOOW~
Wow. And I thought that seeing my Realtor® include the ® after their title in all of their emails to me was annoying.
Not for a million years, no. Pretty sure the Earth is capable of that. Come back when you've got nine nine's probability of success on 10 billion years, and we'll talk =)
Just to play devils advocate, there was a situation only a few years ago where a hip manufacturer failed to re-validate its manufacturing process after an equipment change. They ended up shipping contaminated hips (thin veneer of lubricant from the machine), an entire batch of which all failed catastrophically.
I'm a fan of tort reform too, and I agree that (many but not all) of these prices are somewhat artificially inflated, but all of that exhaustive testing needs to happen. Unfortunately, in our system, the medical companies also play the Fight Club Insurance Adjuster game, instead of "doing the right thing" the first time, and a crippling lawsuit is just about the only thing on the other side of the scales.
My BS is Bioengineering (Materials), but I've been a physics teacher since I graduated, so I'm a little rusty. Take this with the requisite grain of salt =)
You're right, if you could just replace the whole femur, you'd eliminate the loading biocompatibility problems. The problem is that the femur as-a-whole is part of a complex and interconnected system, and would be many orders of magnitude more difficult to replace than the head alone. That tendons-and-cartilage problem is much, much harder than it sounds.
For starters, the top of the femur isn't connected to any muscles or ligaments, so we don't have to worry about reattaching them. Once the head of the femur is dislocated from the hip socket, the socket is replaced by a bioengineered version, and the top of the femur is cut off and replaced. The new ball/socket joint is reconnected, and the muscles naturally fold back around it.
Sounds simple, but this by itself is one of the most traumatic "routine" operations in the book. It's a massive, multi-hour undertaking, and requires a lot of blood and a lot of elbow grease. Removing the entire femur, while preserving all of the soft tissue around it, would be unimaginably difficult by comparison.
To replace the whole femur, all of the tendons and ligaments attached to the lower femur would have to be removed. Attaching them to a bioengineered substrate may be difficult or impossible. These aren't trivial connections, either. They're attached to the strongest muscles on your body, so they are subject to the most extreme forces in the body--hundreds if not thousands of PSI during heavy exertion (running, jumping, etc).
Titanium, in particular, would be a great candidate for a whole-bone replacement, if all it had to do was be a "mechanical" member. But getting the body to integrate with titanium--which you'd need, to keep those ligaments attached--is insidiously hard. One of the reasons why this new material is exciting is because the body integrates it much differently, by using it as a frame for normal growth (filling in the holes in the artificial bone with natural bone). Titanium is treated differently--the body effectively walls it off with a special type of soft tissue. It's "biocompatible" only in the sense that it doesn't provoke any kind of dangerous immune response; it is not a good substrate for normal tissue growth. Very, very few materials are, and most of them are highly engineered plastics with special protein coatings.
You also can't easily engineer a "half" replacement for the knee--knee replacements replace both sides of the joint. So, now you're chopping up the top of the tibia to provide a mate for your artificial femur. Which leads you right back to the same kind of problem.
Hip replacements used to be much worse than they are now; the mechanics have improved by leaps and bounds. They've gotten to the point where most people who need one (elderly, >60 yrs) will ONLY need one during their lives; it's younger athletes (Bo Jackson) and rheumatoid arthritis sufferers who have the bulk of their life ahead of them who are in danger of needing multiple rounds of replacement.
Right. All levity aside, this could be a revolutionary medical step. Artificial bone is one of the most challenging materials science problems going, and has been for decades.
When an artificial hip, or other load-bearing bone implant, has a higher modulus than bone (and they invariably do), they cause the load to be transmitted unevenly to the bone. The artificial hip is on a pin that goes down into the marrow on the top of the femur. In natural loading, each segment of bone (taken from top to bottom) is loaded equally in compression. With an artificial hip implanted, some of the force is transmitted directly to a deeper part of the femur. The top of the bone is loaded less heavily than it would have been under natural circumstances?
Who cares? Your bones do. They're dynamic. When they're unloaded, they break down. So now, by unloading the top of the femur, you've given your body permission to dissolve it. Now your hip implant is bare, and only being held by its tip--fractures are the final result. This is why a hip replacement has a "lifespan" of only a few years--young people who have hips replaced have to go get new ones at some point, and have to lose a chunk of femur each time.
Things have probably improved since I was an engineering undergrad discussing these problems (~8 yrs ago), but those are the big issues. I'm going to be really curious to read more about this.
There wasn't much left after their counterparts handed massive portions of the country over to government in the name of domestic security that is no more secure than it ever was.
People willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither, etc. Wait... what was your point?
1997 called, they want their tired joke about everybody on the internets speaking "1337" back.
I figured it was too good to be true:
Although, for now, the robots rely on mains power, Auger believes they could become truly self-sufficient.
I like technology-as-art projects, but it'd be much cooler if these things actually *were* powered by bug juice--that is, more like bug powered 75% of the time, with a battery backup or a solar panel (or both) for those days when all the flies have already been eaten--rather than just being combination clock-and-bug-zappers. I'd be interested to see their average power production vs. power consumption.
It was probably deleted because it's misleading and completely uninformative.
"Hummer" is a badge that was created by GM and AM General for civilian HMMWVs (which are made by AM General). It was used for some GM-designed trucks that AM General built.
Selling the "Hummer" badge doesn't mean a damned thing to GM China or to the US Army. AM General is completely independent of GM. It would be nice if somebody would explain their relationship to the newly divorced Hummer, but that "missing paragraph" was nothing but fluff and nonsense.
Yes, those are real-world examples of problems that aren't as big as you think they are. Both of your real-world examples are trivial geology problems.
For starters, we are well aware of where the geological faults are, and we have a pretty good handle on what parts of the continental bedrock are going to be around for the next million years or so. We also know where the water tables are and aren't. This isn't the 19th century; we have the continent mapped out, in layers, as deep as it gets. We know where the permeable and impermeable layers are. Mining in hard rock isn't a new science. The real cost of an effective place to sequester these materials isn't in the physical cost--it's generally in the social costs (fighting "NIMBY" mentality, etc).
Second, the waste from fission doesn't have to be as scary as it currently is. Again, the Europeans and the Japanese are trucking this stuff all around the world without mishap, and they're boiling it down to quantities that are small enough to make storage easy. The longest-lived byproducts are almost always the ones that reprocessing eliminates, leaving waste that requires storage on the order of thousands of years, rather than millions, which takes a lot of the geological concerns away.
The final product can be vitrified (turned into glass) to make a solid, non-leachable, durable material that will last essentially indefinitely. In the event that the geology does change, and water gets in on it, it's still safe for the active life of the waste.
Now, I'm not trying to say that fission waste isn't nasty, or that it's "easy" to deal with (of course it's not), but it is definitely NOT the boogeyman that people make it out to be. Remember, we're talking about the waste from modern facilities, and handling it with modern, mature technology. This is a far cry from the nasty cocktails of cold-war experimental stuff at Hanford that they're still trying to figure out a way to get rid of.
Our chemical industries routinely deal with products that are many times more acutely dangerous, and present just as big of a threat (if not greater) to the environment, including the problems of long-term sequestering and disastrous leaching. The only reason why we get hysterical about fission waste is because (right or wrong) we've got a knee-jerk overreaction to anything nuclear.
Y is invariably a social engineering problem, not a physical engineering problem, based on fear born of ignorance and mistrust. The fact is that if we can otherwise store cubic miles of assorted dangerous industrial trash, we can certainly store cubic meters of nuclear waste.
Tell me, what are the half lives of other assorted industrial wastes like dioxins? Of mercury? Of the radioisotopes in coal smoke? Of the tailings from any large mining venture?
What is the half-life of fly-ash?
That argument is asinine in this case, because every comparable industrial process produces waste which must be also be sequestered, and which must also be prevented from leaking into aquifers, etc. The point is that nuclear waste (with pragmatic management) produces a smaller volume than other comparable processes.
The same thing that the Japanese and the Europeans do--reprocess it into the smallest possible quantities, and securely bury what's left. The volume of waste that this requires you to bury is inconsequentially small compared to the amount of solid waste (ash) you have to dispose of when you burn coal.
Same here in Arizona; freeways are built from concrete, and then a layer of rubberized asphalt is paved over it. Until a few years ago, most of the freeways were bare concrete; IIRC one of the major reasons for the asphalt was to reduce traffic noise.
Well put!
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't go with the tornado-through-the-junkyard analogy, but sexual reproduction is an acquired and beneficial trait, not a requirement for evolution. Gene-swapping speeds the process and increases the chance for viable improvements; however, simple asexual reproduction over millions of generations can accomplish a huge amount of change *if* there are selective pressures on the population.
In fact, you could say the same thing about starting with a monoculture (all members of the population have same initial genetics, say, from cloning). With sexual reproduction, you'll get new genetic material spread more quickly through the population, but you still need some mutations to generate diversity, and then you need selective pressure to make a "changed" offspring more viable than its peers.