Reverse Osmosis generates water that is super-saline (not dry salt). Under RCRA, highly concentrated salt-water (like the type that can be produced by mass amounts of reverse-osmosis) is legally classified as a kind of hazardous waste, and for good reason.
Subpixel rendering was invited by IBM in 1988. Windows just brought it to public attention. Furthermore, Mac OS X had subpixel rendering. OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999, and Mac OS 10.0 "cheetah" was released in March 2001. Windows XP was released in October 2001.
Of course, you should also point out that scientists at universities are funded by government grants. It's hard to get those grants if you say something that the politicians don't want you to say.
I'm willing to bet that you've never been to grants.gov in your entire life. I'm also willing to bet you didn't know the application proposals are reviewed and approved by scientists (not politicians). You're probably a non-scientist / non-researcher who's attacking a system you clearly don't know jack about, so you've attempted to compensate for your ignorance by filling in the gaps with your (incorrect) assumptions.
Letting your pets wander around is no more "humane" than letting a toddler run around.
I think this is slightly hyperbolic. A 1 year old cat is much better equipped for survival than a 1 year old human. Otherwise you probably wouldn't be seeing many cats outdoors to begin with. If you don't believe me, consider this experiment: Get an angry pissed off dog and unleash him on a 1-year old cat. The cat may get hurt, but his odds of survival (by fleeing) are actually pretty good. Now get an angry dog and unleash him on a 1-year old baby. The baby's chances of surviving aren't going to be anywhere near the cat's. I don't think comparing a pet to a toddler is fair, they're built too differently.
I would like to say that there are some practicality issues with cats+leashes. Unlike dogs, who let you lead them, every cat I've attempted to "walk around" would always just do his own thing. You can't take a cat on a walk without literally dragging them. Also, wandering cats are common, and territorial. If your cat is leashed in your backyard, and a particularly nasty neighbor's-cat wanders into the yard, your cat being leashed may actually put his health at risk.
Some cats aren't happy as indoor kitties. Some cats aren't safe outdoors. Keeping your pet safe and happy is a balancing act.
Anyway, while a pet-tracking GPS unit isn't going to save anybody's pet after it gets into trouble, it could still be useful. For instance, if you know based on previous-GPS tracks where you cat tends to hang out and travel through, the information would allow you to more efficiently search for where they are if they go missing for a day.
Besides, I think there are fun reasons to slap a GPS on a cat that have nothing to do with trying to ensure their safety. I'd probably do it if I had an outdoor-kitty. (my current cat has to stay indoors for medical reasons).
Believe it or not, there is very good software like Final Cut Pro that is not cross platform.
Another example that more here might be immediately familiar with is WoW. WoW isn't Mac only, but it does have some really nice options that are (like the built-in video recording/compression along with the fact it's able to easily hide cursors and UI from the video without hiding it in-game).
Not to mention I prefer to code on the Mac (Cocoa is fun), and having a Unix OS that is extremely usable is great (can't get that with Windows).
There are indeed things unique to only Windows or Macs. Not often, but they're there. Buying a Mac is cheaper than buying hardware for both platforms.
So you can run absolutely any kind of software you want, avoiding any risk of platform-compatibility problems? It's harder for a PC to run Mac applications than it is for a Mac to run PC applications.
Do better for yourself, the individual, perhaps, but it could also have the very negative impact of intellectual stagnation for the species, causing progress to plateau.
How would any future Einsteins ever be born with a population that refuses to die and make room for new life?
Immortality, even for a sentient species, could be a bad thing in the big picture.
Life doesn't revolve around making the lives of individual organisms comfortable or convenient. It revolves around the ability of the species genes to propagate. Having immortal organisms would actually hinder genetic variation and hurt the species. If an organism did stumble upon an unlimited source of energy, the specie's survival is best served if that organism still eventually dies and it's then the energy source is utilized by offspring, who in turn later die too.
It serves a purpose that's somewhat analogous to Presidential term limits. Evolution and immortality wouldn't mix well.
1) Giving people the choice to eat GM foods is fine, provided that doesn't infringe upon the freedom of people to also eat non-GM foods. Here, the judge indicated that one of his concerns was that the GM crop's pollen could spread into other populations, contaminating them with the non-GM species.
2) On top of infringing the freedoms of different farmers, history has shown that when this occurs, due to the GM company's intellectual property rights on their GM product, they'll sue the non-GM farmer when they find some of their GM product accidentally growing in their field (they actually put marker-genes in product to help them easily identify instances of contamination, which they pass off as theft/intellectual-property violations). This isn't a "what if" scenario. This actually does happen (Monsanto is infamous for it). There's no reason to assume that it wouldn't happen again.
3) Finally, you are actually wrong that human-health isn't a concern in environmental impact assessments. It is very much a factor. Environmental law wasn't originally conceived to "protect the environment". It started because people were pissed that toxic chemicals dumped near them were making them sick. Saving the environment for the sake of the environment can be a concern too (like endangered species), but human-health issues found in an environmental impact statement can kill the project. Have you ever actually studied environmental law?
4) Some GM foods can harm certain people. If you take genes from a nut which some people are allergic to, splice it into a soybean, don't have laws that label GM foods as GM, people allergic to that nut can eat the soybeans and get sick or die. Fresh produce doesn't usually have allergy warnings on it, because you can't normally find "trace amounts of nuts" in your carrots. But genetically engineered crops make this possible, yet we still don't warn people about it. And before you say that isn't a practical problem, I would like to point out that it has: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=soybean+brazil+nut
And you know that this "fry" was spoken of literally as opposed to being a metaphor... how?
1) As problematic as the American justice system can sometimes be, we (thankfully) don't have a habit of frying people on giant skillets. So we can rule out death by frying pan. 2) Despite the electric chair technically being an option in a few states, is almost never used. The prisoner would almost have to request it. Lethal injection is the preference. 3) A common meaning of "fry" could be that he plans to give an especially difficult series of questions during the trial. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with any court proceeding, otherwise your prosecutor is incompetent. 4) While America's laws may be harsher, their laws still don't allow execution for this sort of crime. So... knowing that his life is not in jepordy, why would you believe that this "frying" would be means to avoid extradition?
If you have enough solar energy to make fuel, why not just skip the middle man and put the solar energy straight into the battery of an electric vehicle? It would certainly be more efficient than making fuel.
You can store hydrogen fairly densely and easily by just attaching it to carbon atoms in a roughly 2:1 ratio.
How is that statement any different from saying it's easy to make fossil fuels? Where is the energy for forming these molecular bonds going to come from?
You mean the carbon that, when plotted next to global temperature, shows that increases in temperature lead to increases in C02, but not vice versa?
[Citation Needed] (cite peer reviewed literature, and check its funding to make sure it's not from the private energy sector). You appear to be seriously suggesting that higher temperatures causes more CO2, despite the fact that there's no known mechanism that would support such a thing. On the other hand, there is a known mechanism in which CO2 is opaque to thermal infrared radiation, which does explain the warming trend. And that's without even getting into looking at other things like CO2 sink behavior and oceanic acidification measurements.
Oh, but that's beside the point. Show me the health effects on you of my carbon emission, and you can sue me in court, and anyone else for that matter.
Except you (and every corporation in existence) know that it would be so costly and inefficient to sue thousands of corporations simultaneously for contributing such tiny fractions to the whole of a serious problem, that it becomes financially and judicially prohibitive. Especially when everyone is trying to do it to everyone simultaneously. You can't have everyone in a country suing half of the rest of the population, no matter how good their moral justification is. As inefficient as some would have you believe government is, a tax scheme would be more efficient that the court-costs of everyone suing everyone. And even such a scenario wasn't prohibitively expensive, and we tried to CO2 damages privately in courts, you'd still be operating under the illusion that CO2 wasn't as amazingly mobile as it is, and that proving a set of molecules on this side of the planet didn't originate on the other side (they very well could have). You can't claim damages for simply being wronged, you have to prove the defendant was causally responsible for what happened to you.
No, the problem should and would be solved through privatization.
If that's the case, then why hasn't the current scheme solved it yet?
And no, clonal colonies aren't really a single organism that has been alive for a long time, just because they're still physically connected. By that logic, a woman who's still connected to her child via an umbilical cord, even at 9 months, would register as a single organism.
Sorry but there's something I forgot to add to my previous post:
When you encounter determined criminals who go out of their way to stab someone by making them file blunted knives or make home-made shivs, you make prosecuting them a ton easier. The weapon becomes evidence of premeditation. This allows the judicial system to remove them from society much more successfully.
You're assuming person A is determined to kill person B in all scenarios, by any means necessary. Take for example a crime of passion, in which the person experiences what is technically temporary insanity. They will try to inflict harm (although inflicting death may not be a conscious goal), and will use whatever weapon is convenient at the moment (rather than being able to plan ahead enough to file your knives to points).
Keep in mind, in the UK, guns aren't anywhere near as readily available as they are in the US. So with an utter lack of guns, stabbing with a knife would be the first weapon you default upon. But with nothing but non-pointed knives available, you'll have to default to another less effective weapon (assumably less effective otherwise, you'd have gone for that other weapon first, right?).
Sure you've got flashlights and ballpoint pens, and woodchippers, but those are a helluva lot harder to kill someone with. Repeated blows from flashlights, dull pens, or a wrestling match toward a woodchipper buy the victim much more time and opportunity to get help or get away. A pointed knife entering anywhere into the chest cavity is almost instantly a game-over for them.
You can't just say blunted knives are bad due to worst-case scenarios. A pragmatist should consider the average-case as well. If there is a benefit to be had in average-cases, well, why not do it? Nobody ever claimed blunted knives would make murder nearly impossible, but it's a decent enough handicap.
Slashdot Mirror
Reverse Osmosis generates water that is super-saline (not dry salt). Under RCRA, highly concentrated salt-water (like the type that can be produced by mass amounts of reverse-osmosis) is legally classified as a kind of hazardous waste, and for good reason.
It wan't about whether cell phones cause a huge number of cancers. It's about whether cell phones cause cancer at all, even in small numbers.
Inconclusive != negative result. There's a big difference.
In my Safari and Chrome it works perfectly fine. Are you sure you're not doing something wrong?
I take it you didn't bother clicking the image which your parent-post linked?
lead isn't any more dangerous than aspartame
Quite possibly the most stupid & uninformed claim I've heard all week.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning
Subpixel rendering was invited by IBM in 1988. Windows just brought it to public attention. Furthermore, Mac OS X had subpixel rendering. OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999, and Mac OS 10.0 "cheetah" was released in March 2001. Windows XP was released in October 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
You've been corrected with a citation. Please stop spreading bullcrap. Thank you.
Of course, you should also point out that scientists at universities are funded by government grants. It's hard to get those grants if you say something that the politicians don't want you to say.
I'm willing to bet that you've never been to grants.gov in your entire life. I'm also willing to bet you didn't know the application proposals are reviewed and approved by scientists (not politicians). You're probably a non-scientist / non-researcher who's attacking a system you clearly don't know jack about, so you've attempted to compensate for your ignorance by filling in the gaps with your (incorrect) assumptions.
listen to voices talking to you in your head
Most religious people don't believe that God talks to them, just that he listens.
Anyway, please quote where he said he believes in a voice talking to him. Otherwise you're guilty of a strawman argument.
Letting your pets wander around is no more "humane" than letting a toddler run around.
I think this is slightly hyperbolic. A 1 year old cat is much better equipped for survival than a 1 year old human. Otherwise you probably wouldn't be seeing many cats outdoors to begin with. If you don't believe me, consider this experiment: Get an angry pissed off dog and unleash him on a 1-year old cat. The cat may get hurt, but his odds of survival (by fleeing) are actually pretty good. Now get an angry dog and unleash him on a 1-year old baby. The baby's chances of surviving aren't going to be anywhere near the cat's. I don't think comparing a pet to a toddler is fair, they're built too differently.
I would like to say that there are some practicality issues with cats+leashes. Unlike dogs, who let you lead them, every cat I've attempted to "walk around" would always just do his own thing. You can't take a cat on a walk without literally dragging them. Also, wandering cats are common, and territorial. If your cat is leashed in your backyard, and a particularly nasty neighbor's-cat wanders into the yard, your cat being leashed may actually put his health at risk.
Some cats aren't happy as indoor kitties.
Some cats aren't safe outdoors.
Keeping your pet safe and happy is a balancing act.
Anyway, while a pet-tracking GPS unit isn't going to save anybody's pet after it gets into trouble, it could still be useful. For instance, if you know based on previous-GPS tracks where you cat tends to hang out and travel through, the information would allow you to more efficiently search for where they are if they go missing for a day.
Besides, I think there are fun reasons to slap a GPS on a cat that have nothing to do with trying to ensure their safety. I'd probably do it if I had an outdoor-kitty. (my current cat has to stay indoors for medical reasons).
Believe it or not, there is very good software like Final Cut Pro that is not cross platform.
Another example that more here might be immediately familiar with is WoW. WoW isn't Mac only, but it does have some really nice options that are (like the built-in video recording/compression along with the fact it's able to easily hide cursors and UI from the video without hiding it in-game).
Not to mention I prefer to code on the Mac (Cocoa is fun), and having a Unix OS that is extremely usable is great (can't get that with Windows).
There are indeed things unique to only Windows or Macs. Not often, but they're there. Buying a Mac is cheaper than buying hardware for both platforms.
So you can run absolutely any kind of software you want, avoiding any risk of platform-compatibility problems? It's harder for a PC to run Mac applications than it is for a Mac to run PC applications.
Do better for yourself, the individual, perhaps, but it could also have the very negative impact of intellectual stagnation for the species, causing progress to plateau.
How would any future Einsteins ever be born with a population that refuses to die and make room for new life?
Immortality, even for a sentient species, could be a bad thing in the big picture.
Life doesn't revolve around making the lives of individual organisms comfortable or convenient. It revolves around the ability of the species genes to propagate. Having immortal organisms would actually hinder genetic variation and hurt the species. If an organism did stumble upon an unlimited source of energy, the specie's survival is best served if that organism still eventually dies and it's then the energy source is utilized by offspring, who in turn later die too.
It serves a purpose that's somewhat analogous to Presidential term limits.
Evolution and immortality wouldn't mix well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yWwHYQShj4&fmt=18
1) Giving people the choice to eat GM foods is fine, provided that doesn't infringe upon the freedom of people to also eat non-GM foods. Here, the judge indicated that one of his concerns was that the GM crop's pollen could spread into other populations, contaminating them with the non-GM species.
2) On top of infringing the freedoms of different farmers, history has shown that when this occurs, due to the GM company's intellectual property rights on their GM product, they'll sue the non-GM farmer when they find some of their GM product accidentally growing in their field (they actually put marker-genes in product to help them easily identify instances of contamination, which they pass off as theft/intellectual-property violations). This isn't a "what if" scenario. This actually does happen (Monsanto is infamous for it). There's no reason to assume that it wouldn't happen again.
3) Finally, you are actually wrong that human-health isn't a concern in environmental impact assessments. It is very much a factor. Environmental law wasn't originally conceived to "protect the environment". It started because people were pissed that toxic chemicals dumped near them were making them sick. Saving the environment for the sake of the environment can be a concern too (like endangered species), but human-health issues found in an environmental impact statement can kill the project. Have you ever actually studied environmental law?
4) Some GM foods can harm certain people. If you take genes from a nut which some people are allergic to, splice it into a soybean, don't have laws that label GM foods as GM, people allergic to that nut can eat the soybeans and get sick or die. Fresh produce doesn't usually have allergy warnings on it, because you can't normally find "trace amounts of nuts" in your carrots. But genetically engineered crops make this possible, yet we still don't warn people about it.
And before you say that isn't a practical problem, I would like to point out that it has: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=soybean+brazil+nut
And you know that this "fry" was spoken of literally as opposed to being a metaphor ... how?
1) As problematic as the American justice system can sometimes be, we (thankfully) don't have a habit of frying people on giant skillets. So we can rule out death by frying pan.
2) Despite the electric chair technically being an option in a few states, is almost never used. The prisoner would almost have to request it. Lethal injection is the preference.
3) A common meaning of "fry" could be that he plans to give an especially difficult series of questions during the trial. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with any court proceeding, otherwise your prosecutor is incompetent.
4) While America's laws may be harsher, their laws still don't allow execution for this sort of crime. So... knowing that his life is not in jepordy, why would you believe that this "frying" would be means to avoid extradition?
If you have enough solar energy to make fuel, why not just skip the middle man and put the solar energy straight into the battery of an electric vehicle? It would certainly be more efficient than making fuel.
Believe it or not, when I posted that response, the parent was modded "Interesting" (by more than one person).
I've actually had to correct people who think that simply manufacturing fuel can a sustainable solution.
You can store hydrogen fairly densely and easily by just attaching it to carbon atoms in a roughly 2:1 ratio.
How is that statement any different from saying it's easy to make fossil fuels?
Where is the energy for forming these molecular bonds going to come from?
Whew, good to know that I wasn't the only one who had this pop into their head after reading the title.
TraxusTraxusTraxus!
You mean the carbon that, when plotted next to global temperature, shows that increases in temperature lead to increases in C02, but not vice versa?
[Citation Needed] (cite peer reviewed literature, and check its funding to make sure it's not from the private energy sector). You appear to be seriously suggesting that higher temperatures causes more CO2, despite the fact that there's no known mechanism that would support such a thing. On the other hand, there is a known mechanism in which CO2 is opaque to thermal infrared radiation, which does explain the warming trend. And that's without even getting into looking at other things like CO2 sink behavior and oceanic acidification measurements.
Oh, but that's beside the point. Show me the health effects on you of my carbon emission, and you can sue me in court, and anyone else for that matter.
Except you (and every corporation in existence) know that it would be so costly and inefficient to sue thousands of corporations simultaneously for contributing such tiny fractions to the whole of a serious problem, that it becomes financially and judicially prohibitive. Especially when everyone is trying to do it to everyone simultaneously. You can't have everyone in a country suing half of the rest of the population, no matter how good their moral justification is. As inefficient as some would have you believe government is, a tax scheme would be more efficient that the court-costs of everyone suing everyone.
And even such a scenario wasn't prohibitively expensive, and we tried to CO2 damages privately in courts, you'd still be operating under the illusion that CO2 wasn't as amazingly mobile as it is, and that proving a set of molecules on this side of the planet didn't originate on the other side (they very well could have). You can't claim damages for simply being wronged, you have to prove the defendant was causally responsible for what happened to you.
No, the problem should and would be solved through privatization.
If that's the case, then why hasn't the current scheme solved it yet?
[Citation Needed]
And no, clonal colonies aren't really a single organism that has been alive for a long time, just because they're still physically connected. By that logic, a woman who's still connected to her child via an umbilical cord, even at 9 months, would register as a single organism.
Sorry but there's something I forgot to add to my previous post:
When you encounter determined criminals who go out of their way to stab someone by making them file blunted knives or make home-made shivs, you make prosecuting them a ton easier. The weapon becomes evidence of premeditation. This allows the judicial system to remove them from society much more successfully.
You're assuming person A is determined to kill person B in all scenarios, by any means necessary. Take for example a crime of passion, in which the person experiences what is technically temporary insanity. They will try to inflict harm (although inflicting death may not be a conscious goal), and will use whatever weapon is convenient at the moment (rather than being able to plan ahead enough to file your knives to points).
Keep in mind, in the UK, guns aren't anywhere near as readily available as they are in the US. So with an utter lack of guns, stabbing with a knife would be the first weapon you default upon. But with nothing but non-pointed knives available, you'll have to default to another less effective weapon (assumably less effective otherwise, you'd have gone for that other weapon first, right?).
Sure you've got flashlights and ballpoint pens, and woodchippers, but those are a helluva lot harder to kill someone with. Repeated blows from flashlights, dull pens, or a wrestling match toward a woodchipper buy the victim much more time and opportunity to get help or get away. A pointed knife entering anywhere into the chest cavity is almost instantly a game-over for them.
You can't just say blunted knives are bad due to worst-case scenarios. A pragmatist should consider the average-case as well. If there is a benefit to be had in average-cases, well, why not do it? Nobody ever claimed blunted knives would make murder nearly impossible, but it's a decent enough handicap.