Politically Incorrect as it may be to point out, clearly there are significant and consistent physical differences between races and these differences are inherited, like the fact that only black people are prone to sickle cell anaemia. The mechanism for this must be in the DNA.
We're getting pretty far off topic here but this is as good a jumping off point as any to a wider discussion. It's also a good place to discuss our prejudices without flinging accusations of racism at each other. For example your assertion that only black people are prone to sickle cell anaemia is informed by prejudice (even if you don't consider yourself to be prejudiced) due to the simple fact that white people can get sickle cell anaemia too.
As far as diseases go sickle cell is fascinating. If I remember my high school biology correctly sickle cell is indeed genetic and caused by a mutated recessive gene which regulates how blood is formed. It is pretty rare in the United States, only about 1% of all white people and 2% of all black people have it and I suspect that it is this tiny difference which causes it to be much more common among blacks (while still quite rare overall) which has created the perception that only blacks get sickle cell. The other thing that feeds this perception is that sickle cell is quite common in some parts of Africa because it confers a degree of protection from malaria. So here you have two diseases one genetic and another biotic which are feeding on each other and we see this with our ape brains and try to draw conclusions from that; sometimes we draw the right conclusion and sometimes we draw the wrong one.
I think that private industry will kill a number of astronauts. But those astronauts will die taking chances to advance the state of the art, and die knowing the risks and having decided that they were worth the risk, just like so many aviation pioneers did in the twentieth century.
The space shuttle killed 14 astronauts, including at least one civilian school teacher. They died going into Low Earth Orbit, a place where hundreds of their fellow astronauts went during the shuttle's 30 year history. Ultimately, if space travel is to progress it has to have its own Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart followed by its own DC3. In other words space travel has to be commercialized in order to become commonplace.
Let NASA do what it does best - build robots and design missions that push the envelope of human knowledge and explore the frontier of space. If money can be made in Low Earth Orbit, someone will build the space ships to go there. And then they'll follow NASA's lead if the price is right. But ultimately, if NASA's role must be to push the envelope and not to stay put in Low Earth Orbit.
very few people will be swayed to a tablet with no software for $50. HP has a steep climb ahead.
You underestimate the cheapness of the average gadget buyer. That $50 discount will likely turn into $100 discount in short order and with lower prices come more buyers and with more devices out there come more developer interest. And with more developer interest will come more apps.
Unless of course HP changes the developer framework yet again as they did for the Touchpad and continues to discourage developers. That's HP's real problem. They need to pick an API and stick to it.
Hardware makers love tablets because the profit margins on them are nice and fat compared to other devices. Plus there are all the expensive accessories, the Bluetooth keyboard, the special cases, the stand for when you get tired of holding them up. You wind up paying $400-500 for the tablet and another $300 for accessories. Netbooks by contrast are dirt cheap and don't need a lot of expensive accessories beyond what you would normally get for any other laptop. So it is only natural that companies will chase after the more profitable market.
In fairness, most of us were on 56K, 28.8K, or even 14.4K modems in the 1990s. Now that broadband is fairly common and cloud computing is starting to become viable, an Active Desktop concept like Webian might actually have a chance to succeed. In the meantime, we'll try to muddle through with ChromeOS and JoliCloud and phone OSes which rely heavily on serverside support.
Destroying a potato field... WHAT'S NEXT??? This is just more evidence of how badly we need the Patriot Act.
You can laugh but until we get super intelligent potatoes which can uproot themselves and travel closer to water in times of drought, we'll have never-ending famine.
I still have a some of the free Google Profile business cards that Google gave away to promote this when it first came out. I thought it was a pretty cool way to control the information that appeared when someone googled you. And the reason why I thought that was because it was pretty much how Google sold it.
I still play Diablo II as well. The varied characters and their diverse skill trees make for high degree of re-playability. And it looks like Diablo III's characters and their skills will be just as diverse. I'm already salivating over the Demon Hunter.
Nuclear sounds good in theory but in practice there are problems, long-term residual ones. NIMBY is a term that can be an excuse to not take responsibility, it can also be used to dismiss real concerns. Just ask those who have actually, not theoretically, mined it. For example: the damage to humans and groundwater from nuclear mining in New Mexico
Ultimately, any form of energy production will have its inherent risks and we as a society have to choose if the benefits outweigh the risks. The risks are of oil are varied and diverse and coal is not much better and in some ways worse. The risks of solar, wind, and even nuclear energy pale by comparison. We won't solve our problems by picking winners and losers but by investing in a wide variety of alternatives rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket.
I personally like the promise of Thorium nuclear power but I'm skeptical of its lofty promises. I doubt if we'll know for sure how practical it is until billions of dollars have been poured into it and dozens of plants are in operation. That's just the nature of our energy hungry culture.
A lot of it is due to residual fear of any kind of nuclear energy and chronic NIMBYism. Everybody wants cheap energy but no one wants a power plant anywhere near their home. Most people have no idea when thorium is or of its benefits over traditional nuclear energy. This runs into a basic human fear of change. Oil has worked for America for a hundred years and Americans have grown emotionally attached to their gas guzzlers and have rewarded oil companies with the kind of wealth and political influence that make them a force in Washington.
Add a fundamental lack of will and rampant political cowardice and you have a formula for Chinese domination of the "green" industries of the future.
1. Get billions of dollars from government to build a launch vehicle for NASA. 2. Get billions more due to cost overruns. 3. Develop mechanical problems which will cost billions more to fix. 4. Project is deemed to expensive and gets canceled by government. 5. Take launch vehicle private so you can resell it back to NASA for billions more. 6. No question marks here. Just profit.
What's with the exotic asteroid names? Just once, I'd love to see them name an extraterrestrial body "Bob". I can see the headlines now: "Bob threatens impact with Earth". Much less scary than "Apophis threatens to wipe out all life on planet!".
I like this idea. It opens up so many possibilities for impact remediation mission names. For example, Cometary and asteroidal Orbital adjustment Under Controlled Hazards (COUCH). I'm already picturing the headline: Scientists prepare COUCH for Bob to crash on.
I seem to recall a movement by Rush Limbaugh to get his listeners to vote for Hilary Clinton (whom he regarded as unelectable) in Democratic primaries. It clearly didn't work but this kind of strategic voting is hardly new. The difference is that with the Balkinization of the Internet and other forms of mass media, it seems to become easier to organize these movements with every election cycle. Ultimately, it all feels pretty pointless as the "base" of each party will tend to vote for more extreme candidates (usually the same candidates which the activists on the other side will regard as unelectable) on each side anyway.
"Unelectable" people have a tendency to become electable as you hear more and more about them without really listening to what they are actually saying. Ronald Reagan was underestimated by Jimmy Carter before trouncing him on election day. Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican Congress and shot to new heights of popularity. George W. Bush was generally regarded as a rube while getting elected to two terms and getting his way on most issues.
If your computer can run XP, it can run Jolicloud. The kid probably lives on the web anyway and Jolicloud apps are mostly web apps. So load Jolicloud alongside Windows, so he can see that it's possible to be a geek without being being loyal to any one platform, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Maybe the term "planet" has just outlived its usefulness. It's an overly broad and difficult to define category of celestial objects. Maybe it's time to invent some new nomenclature. I give you our new solar system:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars will now be known as Rocky Planetary Objects (RoPOs).
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will henceforth be known as Large Gaseous Objects (LaGOs).
Any objects which are smaller than Mercury but large enough to compress itself into a sphere will now be called Quasi-planetary Small Objects (QuaSOs).
Don't forget the real reason that they wanted to change the definition in the first place: current theory predicts that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of bodies in the outer solar system with basically the same composition and orbit as pluto, and only slightly smaller. There would be no logical reason to exclude those hundreds of bodies from the list of planets without also excluding Pluto, since there is little qualitative difference between them.
This has always bothered me. So what if we end up with hundreds or even thousands of planets? The planets of the inner solar system are vastly different (not to mention much smaller) from the Gas Giant planets. Yet there seems to be no great urge on the part of astronomers to create a new category to keep them separate from each other.
Actually, you might be surprised at how many Windows laptops support rotating the screen with ctrl + alt + arrow keys. It's the one real upside to Intel's GMA integrated graphics. This can actually be pretty useful for reading long, narrow web pages on small netbooks. It almost feels like you're holding a book—a heavy, very hot book.
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We're getting pretty far off topic here but this is as good a jumping off point as any to a wider discussion. It's also a good place to discuss our prejudices without flinging accusations of racism at each other. For example your assertion that only black people are prone to sickle cell anaemia is informed by prejudice (even if you don't consider yourself to be prejudiced) due to the simple fact that white people can get sickle cell anaemia too.
As far as diseases go sickle cell is fascinating. If I remember my high school biology correctly sickle cell is indeed genetic and caused by a mutated recessive gene which regulates how blood is formed. It is pretty rare in the United States, only about 1% of all white people and 2% of all black people have it and I suspect that it is this tiny difference which causes it to be much more common among blacks (while still quite rare overall) which has created the perception that only blacks get sickle cell. The other thing that feeds this perception is that sickle cell is quite common in some parts of Africa because it confers a degree of protection from malaria. So here you have two diseases one genetic and another biotic which are feeding on each other and we see this with our ape brains and try to draw conclusions from that; sometimes we draw the right conclusion and sometimes we draw the wrong one.
The space shuttle killed 14 astronauts, including at least one civilian school teacher. They died going into Low Earth Orbit, a place where hundreds of their fellow astronauts went during the shuttle's 30 year history. Ultimately, if space travel is to progress it has to have its own Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart followed by its own DC3. In other words space travel has to be commercialized in order to become commonplace.
Let NASA do what it does best - build robots and design missions that push the envelope of human knowledge and explore the frontier of space. If money can be made in Low Earth Orbit, someone will build the space ships to go there. And then they'll follow NASA's lead if the price is right. But ultimately, if NASA's role must be to push the envelope and not to stay put in Low Earth Orbit.
You underestimate the cheapness of the average gadget buyer. That $50 discount will likely turn into $100 discount in short order and with lower prices come more buyers and with more devices out there come more developer interest. And with more developer interest will come more apps.
Unless of course HP changes the developer framework yet again as they did for the Touchpad and continues to discourage developers. That's HP's real problem. They need to pick an API and stick to it.
They seem to have stolen less than the bankers themselves.
Hardware makers love tablets because the profit margins on them are nice and fat compared to other devices. Plus there are all the expensive accessories, the Bluetooth keyboard, the special cases, the stand for when you get tired of holding them up. You wind up paying $400-500 for the tablet and another $300 for accessories. Netbooks by contrast are dirt cheap and don't need a lot of expensive accessories beyond what you would normally get for any other laptop. So it is only natural that companies will chase after the more profitable market.
In fairness, most of us were on 56K, 28.8K, or even 14.4K modems in the 1990s. Now that broadband is fairly common and cloud computing is starting to become viable, an Active Desktop concept like Webian might actually have a chance to succeed. In the meantime, we'll try to muddle through with ChromeOS and JoliCloud and phone OSes which rely heavily on serverside support.
Correct. goatse has a new home apparently.
You can laugh but until we get super intelligent potatoes which can uproot themselves and travel closer to water in times of drought, we'll have never-ending famine.
I still have a some of the free Google Profile business cards that Google gave away to promote this when it first came out. I thought it was a pretty cool way to control the information that appeared when someone googled you. And the reason why I thought that was because it was pretty much how Google sold it.
I still play Diablo II as well. The varied characters and their diverse skill trees make for high degree of re-playability. And it looks like Diablo III's characters and their skills will be just as diverse. I'm already salivating over the Demon Hunter.
There's no greater opportunity to change the world than when you crash its economy and demand bailout money to save it.
As opposed to damage to humans and groundwater from drilling for "clean" natural gas.
Or from mountaintop removal for "safer" coal mining.
Or the risks associated with more traditional coal mining.
And finally there's the somewhat controversial issue of carbon dioxide emissions from coal and oil.
Ultimately, any form of energy production will have its inherent risks and we as a society have to choose if the benefits outweigh the risks. The risks are of oil are varied and diverse and coal is not much better and in some ways worse. The risks of solar, wind, and even nuclear energy pale by comparison. We won't solve our problems by picking winners and losers but by investing in a wide variety of alternatives rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket.
I personally like the promise of Thorium nuclear power but I'm skeptical of its lofty promises. I doubt if we'll know for sure how practical it is until billions of dollars have been poured into it and dozens of plants are in operation. That's just the nature of our energy hungry culture.
A lot of it is due to residual fear of any kind of nuclear energy and chronic NIMBYism. Everybody wants cheap energy but no one wants a power plant anywhere near their home. Most people have no idea when thorium is or of its benefits over traditional nuclear energy. This runs into a basic human fear of change. Oil has worked for America for a hundred years and Americans have grown emotionally attached to their gas guzzlers and have rewarded oil companies with the kind of wealth and political influence that make them a force in Washington.
Add a fundamental lack of will and rampant political cowardice and you have a formula for Chinese domination of the "green" industries of the future.
1. Get billions of dollars from government to build a launch vehicle for NASA.
2. Get billions more due to cost overruns.
3. Develop mechanical problems which will cost billions more to fix.
4. Project is deemed to expensive and gets canceled by government.
5. Take launch vehicle private so you can resell it back to NASA for billions more.
6. No question marks here. Just profit.
I like this idea. It opens up so many possibilities for impact remediation mission names. For example, Cometary and asteroidal Orbital adjustment Under Controlled Hazards (COUCH). I'm already picturing the headline: Scientists prepare COUCH for Bob to crash on.
I seem to recall a movement by Rush Limbaugh to get his listeners to vote for Hilary Clinton (whom he regarded as unelectable) in Democratic primaries. It clearly didn't work but this kind of strategic voting is hardly new. The difference is that with the Balkinization of the Internet and other forms of mass media, it seems to become easier to organize these movements with every election cycle. Ultimately, it all feels pretty pointless as the "base" of each party will tend to vote for more extreme candidates (usually the same candidates which the activists on the other side will regard as unelectable) on each side anyway.
I thought Capitalism was where you lose a trillion dollars betting on Credit Default Swaps and get bailed out by the government.
"Unelectable" people have a tendency to become electable as you hear more and more about them without really listening to what they are actually saying. Ronald Reagan was underestimated by Jimmy Carter before trouncing him on election day. Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican Congress and shot to new heights of popularity. George W. Bush was generally regarded as a rube while getting elected to two terms and getting his way on most issues.
If your computer can run XP, it can run Jolicloud. The kid probably lives on the web anyway and Jolicloud apps are mostly web apps. So load Jolicloud alongside Windows, so he can see that it's possible to be a geek without being being loyal to any one platform, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Damn autocorrect. Bust them. It creates a digital paper trail for when the Feds bust them.
Digital paper trail for when the Feds busy them.
We could call them Dwarf Brown Dwarfs. Or since they are after all giant gasbags, Politicians.
Maybe the term "planet" has just outlived its usefulness. It's an overly broad and difficult to define category of celestial objects. Maybe it's time to invent some new nomenclature. I give you our new solar system:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars will now be known as Rocky Planetary Objects (RoPOs).
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will henceforth be known as Large Gaseous Objects (LaGOs).
Any objects which are smaller than Mercury but large enough to compress itself into a sphere will now be called Quasi-planetary Small Objects (QuaSOs).
You're welcome IAU.
This has always bothered me. So what if we end up with hundreds or even thousands of planets? The planets of the inner solar system are vastly different (not to mention much smaller) from the Gas Giant planets. Yet there seems to be no great urge on the part of astronomers to create a new category to keep them separate from each other.
Actually, you might be surprised at how many Windows laptops support rotating the screen with ctrl + alt + arrow keys. It's the one real upside to Intel's GMA integrated graphics. This can actually be pretty useful for reading long, narrow web pages on small netbooks. It almost feels like you're holding a book—a heavy, very hot book.