Yeah, that all sounds terribly rational - until you look around at the results - which is FUBAR in almost every category of human experience today. Which means it isn't rational at all - it's rationalizing. Humans are not rational, we cannot be rational and we never will be rational. I never claim to be rational but simply to try to be so and I no very well that I fail (or simply don't care) a lot more often than I succeed (actually I can never truly succeed but simply have the irrational belief that I did). We cannot know everything and if we're right it's only by blind chance or due to a very simple problem.
At the same time we often act rationally once you consider the whole picture and being nice is not rational. After all you first need to define what rational is as it is an irrelevant and worthless concept on it's own. I can claim everything is true by simply saying that what I want to prove is an axiom (thus true by definition).
I simply choose to accept to some extent (not rationally, simply part of who I am) that the current way things are is fine. It's not optimal, by most standards it not great but it's practical and good enough. I could try to fight it but I'd still be a bad person by a hundred other (more important) standards. Changing it is more or less impossible as any different system is probably going to be worse. At least I have yet to see anything which has a chance of working much better.
But you're willing to blame Africa's problems on the West. Good luck making that argument up in Washington and on Wall Street. You'll get the exact same argument you just made - "there's a reason things are a certain way and we shouldn't change it."
It's all self-centered crap. First of all your proving my statement, if the west wanted to then they could fix africa quite quickly. Imagine if all the money we spent on entertainment and pointless material goods instead went to helping other people? In addition a large part of the reason Africa is a hell hole is because the west never cared enough in the past to keep it from being such.
Secondly they're more likely to really mean "we don't care" and "we won't gain much benefit form helping in the short term so why bother." It's not crap, it's perfectly rational selfishness as Africa has so little of an effect on them so that it doesn't matter to them. Millions die each year and most of us don't care. Some of us care but even those are willing to only sacrifice minuscule part of their own happiness to fix it.
Humans are selfish by design and that shows in everything we do. Evolution is by definition selfishness as you want your genes to be passed on more than some other guys. The other guy wants the same thing of course so one of you won't be happy in the end.
Couldn't prove it by your post. It sounds to me more of the usual "I'm better than you because I'm oh so much nicer than you and I understand so much more than you and you're wrong and I'm right." That's what most arguments boil down to. I never claim to be right, I simply state what I belive right now and act as if it right (how else can one act?).
Anyway my bloody point is that by flowery hippie standards I'm NOT nice, almost no one in the world is. We're all selfish and don't care at all if someone else is suffering as long as they don't effect us. The difference is that I ADMIT that this is human nature and that I am bound by it irrevocably.
In the time we both wasted on this topic we could have probably saved a dozen lives by donating money or working for a charity of some kind. Yet neither one of us seems to care enough to do so.
I'd like things to be different but I see no way for them to be and any changes would have to be gradual. I also see no point in fighting things futilely and then not having the strength to fight when it actually matters. Especially when doing so is more likely to make things worse than it is to make things better.
Good luck with that. It went nowhere with me. You think I care? I argue online to enhance my own world view, I don't care if you agree with me or don't. Actually I prefer if you don't and argue against me.
Also, while you're perfectly fine to do whatever you want when you do that you can't complain when those choices make your life more difficult. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it doesn't exist and just because you want to ignore it doesn't mean it has to let itself be ignored.
Like I said before, society is the way it is and if you can't deal with it then that's your problem. If you want the problems that result to go away then you need to change your behavior not expect society to change how it behaves. You may not like it, you may not understand it and you can even try to change it but you can't simply ignore it and expect things to work magically. Well you can ignore it but as I said before it's your own fault when you reap the consequences so don't complain.
Well they tried using steam to keep it liquid while doing maintenance on the reactors while in dock but that also apparently failed. It seems that once the lead solidified there was no easy way to remelt it short of taking the whole reactor apart.
but as you say this is probably a solvable problem although it seems like one that would cause quite a bit of extra complications for such a system.
Your entire attitude is called "bending over for the corporation".
We get Enron from shit like that. No, my view is that there are good and bad ways to deal with situations. Screaming about it on a blog under your own name goes in the bad category. If nothing else you're probably wrong and simply have made a false picture in your head based on limited information.
No, it isn't. The problem is precisely with society being unable to get along with people who question its basic premises - usually correctly. People who question such things usually only think they are correct. In reality they aren't, they simply are incapable of understanding that there is a reason things are a certain way and that changing it makes things worse in reality. It's like a computer scientists claiming their new algorithm is always superior as it runs in O(n) times compared to O(n^2) but not realizing that his memory usage is O(n^5) compared to O(n).
The problem is precisely with chimpanzees who are so obsessed with how they are perceived by everyone else that they ruthlessly attack anyone different than themselves, usually under the exact guise you put out - that it's all about "compromise" and "getting along".
Bullshit. So you do this by ruthlessly attacking the people who you perceive as different from yourself in this belief?
See I believe in rationality and moderation not baseless illogical beliefs, I find most people who zealously believe in ANY idea to be illogical and quite silly. I look at the reason for things and realize there almost always is one. Nothing is black and white, everything has tradeoffs and evils.
It's about survival. And the bulk of the human species is about fucking each other over in the name of survival - while making survival actually more difficult - while sugar-coating it with "morality", "ethics", "democracy", and other content-less concepts. Actually no, most of what we do is in the name of passing on our genes with survival being somewhat secondary. Also such behavior has gotten us quite far and there are very good reasons for it. For example:
I'll take my chances outside that bullshit. You have a computer and spend how much money a week? How many people in Africa are starving to death because of YOUR selfishness?
You live in western society and take advantage of its fruits for your own survival and happiness. Those fruits come at the cost of billions of other people and their continual misery.
Apparently you don't really want to take your chances outside it all.
That is one of the things that Zed mentioned in his rant about Kevin Clark, how he and Zed were at odds with controlling access to the main Utu repository, and Kevin accidentally proved Zed to be right, when he (Kevin) accidentally wiped the configure file for the whole project. I'd say that's some serious irony for you. There were probably many good reasons for why Kevin wanted things his way. Likewise there were probably equally many examples of where Zed's idea was wrong but of course h conveniently forgets to mention those. No one is ever right and often no solution is perfect or close to it. If you can't understand or deal with that reality then that is your shortcoming not anyone else's.
The proper thing is to accept your defeats and simply move on, deal with it as best you can and don't dwell on it. Arguing on petty things will waste a hundred times more time than you'd save by using a better solution. Instead use that time to make whatever solution is implemented as good as it possible can be. Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, if you're right enough times then people will realize it but if you also rub their faces in it or they'll resent you instead of admire you for it.
You can be Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Ada Augusta all rolled into one. But if you are surrounded by idiots, none of your big ideas are going to go anywhere, no matter how good they are. But hey, at least you're 'collaborating'. It's quite easy to go anywhere you want with idiots, a lot easier than it is with stubborn intelligent people actually. Of course it requires you to have social skills and know how to deal with people. You need skills such as admitting your own mistakes and shortcomings, delegating work, finding what others do well and letting them do it, figuring out what your supervisors wants and giving it to them, giving credit to people and so on. Everyone knows how to do something and few people are totally worthless but the trick is to realize that. If you can't get over the fact that they're not as intelligent as you, don't hold the same values as you or don't always agree with you then that is once again your failing not theirs.
Having said this, my favourite candidate for coolant is molten-lead. Like sodium you don't have to pressurise it, it doesn't react with water or air, it won't boil even if you overheat teh ractor so much that the steel melts, and it is an excellent radiation shield against gamma-radiation. Main issue is corrosion, but 20+ years of research has produced alloys that are very stable in molten lead, so you could expect comercial plants using it within a deacde or two. The soviets tried that in submarines. Apparently it lead to some great quandaries among the crew as they debated between the risk of dying from the reactor failing critically and the risk of spending 20 years in siberia for turning it off (due to the whole cooling system now being solid metal if they did so and that making it impossible to turn the reactor back on).
You can say whatever you want but don't complain when the consequences that result kick you in the ass. For example he is perfectly free to post the blog post he did but every potential future employer is at the same time free to not hire him as a result (since it portrays him as a total a-hole that can't deal with people).
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language. There are massive costs associated with moving to a new language in any decently sized company, from lack of developers who know it, lack of developers in the company who know it, lack of internal libraries for it, lack of internal company support and so on. So yeah you either get a working product in Java or a half assed product in language X written by people who have no idea how to use language X bad have to remake the wheel 55 thousand times due to lack of pre-existing libraries.
I'm somehow tempted to believe this was submitted by someone who doesn't like Zed and wants to make sure he never ever gets a job in the future with any half-decent company.
More companies are deathly confounded by "let's get along" managers who believe teamwork and tolerance are more important than actual good work. No they value actual good work, the actual good work of the whole company not of one self-centered asshole. Life is about compromises and being able to deal with people different from you, if you can't deal with that reality then the problem is you not the rest of society.
Zed would have railed against the open secrets that allowed the tiger escape at the San Francisco zoo, and then he'd have been fired or reprimanded for not being politically and socially correct in his approach. No if he worked for the zoo he'd have been fired for giving public statements when he did not have the authority to (which can and does cause all sorts of problems for a company).
There are 4 models: 4gb (+sd slot), 30gb, 80gb and 160gb. They go up in price (and slightly in physical size) as the capacity goes up and the 30gb is the closest in price to the nokia.
Slavery is still slavery. It cannot be "reformed". It must be abolished. Then I take it you are actually advocating full and unlimited communism. After all property rights are also slavery, if I want to use your car then it is slavery for you to not let me do so. Likewise if I'm hungry I should simply be able to take some food from the store even if I knowingly don't do anything for society (ie: I'm a lazy bum).
Copyright is like everythign else a social construct designed to make it easier for someone to profit from that they do. If you want something to complain about then complain about absurd patent laws as those are infinitely more harmful, there is by definition no GPL for patents (ie: you can write a gpl version of windows from scratch but if it's patented then even independent implementations infringe).
As for abolishign copyrights, why do you care? Well? If you think the GPL is so great then it shouldn't matter, after all society will naturally move towards it since it's better.
And remember to throw some royalties into the RIAA kitty if you plan on singing Aud Lang Syne tonight. Why would you sing that, if you believe in a lack of copyrights you should do just that. Don't listen to anything but truly free (ie: GPL) music or you're a hypocrite. If you illegally download music for example then you're simpyl admitting that GPL is failing in the area of music.
I'd like to know how you came up with that as I'm finding lasers to easily be under 2 cents, down to 1 cent per page (for toner) with a $150 printer. That's just the manufacturer's yield numbers and I believe inkjets also waste ink due to cleaning and clogging and so on.
No, it's much much worse because: 1. I KNOW update services get back executables and I can take the expected precautions. Something which is supposed to simply send data back I do not ASSUME also executes random commands from a server, that's just utterly baffling and stupid and counter-intuitive. 2. I either run update programs manually or I have them only automatically tell me there are updates. Updates are NOT installed automatically and it is unlikely that I would miss a hack of the windows servers. 3. Update systems likely have many precautions in place to prevent them being hacked from causing a big problem. Someone who writes this sort of idiotic user tracking system I don't expect to bother with such things.
Re:Shouldn't this have been the default assumption
on
Saturn's Rings Are Ancient
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
1. Rings are as I understand it in general unstable or were thought to be so, given a relatively short amount of time (millions of years for large planets) they will break up. 2. Saturn's rings have particle ranging from mm to many meters in size. 3. You are complaining of a million years being short yet at the same time expect us to see changes that would take millions of years to happen? Are you drunk or simply insane. 4. Life on earth is billions of years old, our own primate ancestors were around millions of years ago. 5. You know fuck this, you're a bloody arm-chair physicist who knows jack shit, can't even think with the smallest amount of rationality and lacks the intelligence to comprehend either of those. Your own infinitesimal ego needs constant life support to even exist and so your are forced to delude yourself into believing you know better than those who spend their lifetimes on a subject.
As government grants need justification in order to be granted, the needed incentive is built into the system. Government grants are downright scams in certain areas with a horribly corrupt system. In other words you want a very inefficient agency with lax oversight to control all of this? God forbid someone like Caltech is able to choose what sort of research it wants itself without the government controlling everything. After all only the government can ever know what is good research and what the people want and it's NEVER wrong.
Essentially, Caltech does not need to be run like a free market business to get things done because it (theoretically) already gets its bills paid by the government. If it can sell the research it makes Caltech can make say 50% more money compared to federal grants. It can then create say 50% more research by investing this money internally. Long term it comes out to doubling it's funding comapred to government grants alone.
So you want everyone's taxes to increase to counteract this loss in money from non-government sources?
What's the point of federal funding in the first place if the goal is simply to produce marketable research? First of all the government often pays for things it wants itself such as nice new weapons that current technology is not yet capable of providing (see DARPA or NASA). Second of all capitalism is not perfect thus the "generally" part and paying for basic research is not something capitalism does that well. You can consider the government to be investing money by paying for research while trusting capitalism to help out.
The government can in theory pay less to have something developed by not also buying the results outright but simply the ability to freely use the results itself (as the university can finance the rest itself due to it's potential future worth). This is slightly akin to paying someone partially in stock instead of cash.
Let's say the government wants a shiny new fighter jet. It can on one hand pay 100% of the R&A costs and production costs at $100 billion total for the full run then release the (non-classified) results to the public. It can on the other hand pay $50 billion but let the company own the resulting technology which it then incorporates into it's civilian planes. I'm sure you'd be bitching about the government wasting money if it went with the first option.
OK, CalTech owns part of earthmine and JPL is at CalTech. That's fine, but didn't tax dollars pay for the technology developed at JPL? IANAL, but it *used* to be that federally-funded research needed to be made available to everyone - not licensed in perpetuity to a private company. When did this change? The US is based on the idea that capitalism is generally a good thing, if you disagree I recommend you move somewhere else because American culture just isn't for you.
So Caltech sells this technology to a private company which means it gets a cut of the profits. So the goverment's original funding has now helped generate a steady income source for caltech and the technology is still out there. So now the goverment's future grants can, for example, now be smaller since Caltech has a larger amount of private income. Likewise this is also an incentive for Caltech to continue producing usable technology if the grants don't decrease. After all if it had to give it away for free it has little incentive to make their work more generally applicable (they gain nothing from it).
The green one is NOT glowing and it even says it's an ordinary cat that's simply reflecting the green light. I'd say RTFA but is likely a purposefully done misguiding picture for which the article writers should be kicked for.
The red one seems to be the real deal as it only glows where it's fur doesn't block the skin. Granted it glows rather weakly but that may be simply because it's fur is not white (or doesn't appear to be) so it doesn't reflect the glow as much as say white mice would.
Christ, as others have said please tell us where you went to school so we can avoid it like the plague. Even my middle school wouldn't accept wikipedia or any other encyclopedia as a source. The point of encyclopedias is to use them as a starting point not as an actual source of information. Actually I can't remember writing a paper where wikipedia would have been of any use as a source given how it provides so little in-depth information.
other major nuclear power. Which includes Japan, Australia, Europe, Canada, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and possibly a few others which together cover something like 70% of the world's population and even more of it's wealth. Other nations can buy the fuel from those countries later on if they want to. It'll be like OPEC but in reverse.
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Good point. I need to think more before I post such things.
At the same time we often act rationally once you consider the whole picture and being nice is not rational. After all you first need to define what rational is as it is an irrelevant and worthless concept on it's own. I can claim everything is true by simply saying that what I want to prove is an axiom (thus true by definition).
I simply choose to accept to some extent (not rationally, simply part of who I am) that the current way things are is fine. It's not optimal, by most standards it not great but it's practical and good enough. I could try to fight it but I'd still be a bad person by a hundred other (more important) standards. Changing it is more or less impossible as any different system is probably going to be worse. At least I have yet to see anything which has a chance of working much better. But you're willing to blame Africa's problems on the West. Good luck making that argument up in Washington and on Wall Street. You'll get the exact same argument you just made - "there's a reason things are a certain way and we shouldn't change it."
It's all self-centered crap. First of all your proving my statement, if the west wanted to then they could fix africa quite quickly. Imagine if all the money we spent on entertainment and pointless material goods instead went to helping other people? In addition a large part of the reason Africa is a hell hole is because the west never cared enough in the past to keep it from being such.
Secondly they're more likely to really mean "we don't care" and "we won't gain much benefit form helping in the short term so why bother." It's not crap, it's perfectly rational selfishness as Africa has so little of an effect on them so that it doesn't matter to them. Millions die each year and most of us don't care. Some of us care but even those are willing to only sacrifice minuscule part of their own happiness to fix it.
Humans are selfish by design and that shows in everything we do. Evolution is by definition selfishness as you want your genes to be passed on more than some other guys. The other guy wants the same thing of course so one of you won't be happy in the end. Couldn't prove it by your post. It sounds to me more of the usual "I'm better than you because I'm oh so much nicer than you and I understand so much more than you and you're wrong and I'm right." That's what most arguments boil down to. I never claim to be right, I simply state what I belive right now and act as if it right (how else can one act?).
Anyway my bloody point is that by flowery hippie standards I'm NOT nice, almost no one in the world is. We're all selfish and don't care at all if someone else is suffering as long as they don't effect us. The difference is that I ADMIT that this is human nature and that I am bound by it irrevocably.
In the time we both wasted on this topic we could have probably saved a dozen lives by donating money or working for a charity of some kind. Yet neither one of us seems to care enough to do so.
I'd like things to be different but I see no way for them to be and any changes would have to be gradual. I also see no point in fighting things futilely and then not having the strength to fight when it actually matters. Especially when doing so is more likely to make things worse than it is to make things better. Good luck with that. It went nowhere with me. You think I care? I argue online to enhance my own world view, I don't care if you agree with me or don't. Actually I prefer if you don't and argue against me.
Also, while you're perfectly fine to do whatever you want when you do that you can't complain when those choices make your life more difficult. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it doesn't exist and just because you want to ignore it doesn't mean it has to let itself be ignored.
Like I said before, society is the way it is and if you can't deal with it then that's your problem. If you want the problems that result to go away then you need to change your behavior not expect society to change how it behaves. You may not like it, you may not understand it and you can even try to change it but you can't simply ignore it and expect things to work magically. Well you can ignore it but as I said before it's your own fault when you reap the consequences so don't complain.
Well they tried using steam to keep it liquid while doing maintenance on the reactors while in dock but that also apparently failed. It seems that once the lead solidified there was no easy way to remelt it short of taking the whole reactor apart.
but as you say this is probably a solvable problem although it seems like one that would cause quite a bit of extra complications for such a system.
We get Enron from shit like that. No, my view is that there are good and bad ways to deal with situations. Screaming about it on a blog under your own name goes in the bad category. If nothing else you're probably wrong and simply have made a false picture in your head based on limited information. No, it isn't. The problem is precisely with society being unable to get along with people who question its basic premises - usually correctly. People who question such things usually only think they are correct. In reality they aren't, they simply are incapable of understanding that there is a reason things are a certain way and that changing it makes things worse in reality. It's like a computer scientists claiming their new algorithm is always superior as it runs in O(n) times compared to O(n^2) but not realizing that his memory usage is O(n^5) compared to O(n). The problem is precisely with chimpanzees who are so obsessed with how they are perceived by everyone else that they ruthlessly attack anyone different than themselves, usually under the exact guise you put out - that it's all about "compromise" and "getting along".
Bullshit. So you do this by ruthlessly attacking the people who you perceive as different from yourself in this belief?
See I believe in rationality and moderation not baseless illogical beliefs, I find most people who zealously believe in ANY idea to be illogical and quite silly. I look at the reason for things and realize there almost always is one. Nothing is black and white, everything has tradeoffs and evils. It's about survival. And the bulk of the human species is about fucking each other over in the name of survival - while making survival actually more difficult - while sugar-coating it with "morality", "ethics", "democracy", and other content-less concepts. Actually no, most of what we do is in the name of passing on our genes with survival being somewhat secondary. Also such behavior has gotten us quite far and there are very good reasons for it. For example: I'll take my chances outside that bullshit. You have a computer and spend how much money a week? How many people in Africa are starving to death because of YOUR selfishness?
You live in western society and take advantage of its fruits for your own survival and happiness. Those fruits come at the cost of billions of other people and their continual misery.
Apparently you don't really want to take your chances outside it all.
The proper thing is to accept your defeats and simply move on, deal with it as best you can and don't dwell on it. Arguing on petty things will waste a hundred times more time than you'd save by using a better solution. Instead use that time to make whatever solution is implemented as good as it possible can be. Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, if you're right enough times then people will realize it but if you also rub their faces in it or they'll resent you instead of admire you for it. You can be Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Ada Augusta all rolled into one. But if you are surrounded by idiots, none of your big ideas are going to go anywhere, no matter how good they are. But hey, at least you're 'collaborating'. It's quite easy to go anywhere you want with idiots, a lot easier than it is with stubborn intelligent people actually. Of course it requires you to have social skills and know how to deal with people. You need skills such as admitting your own mistakes and shortcomings, delegating work, finding what others do well and letting them do it, figuring out what your supervisors wants and giving it to them, giving credit to people and so on. Everyone knows how to do something and few people are totally worthless but the trick is to realize that. If you can't get over the fact that they're not as intelligent as you, don't hold the same values as you or don't always agree with you then that is once again your failing not theirs.
You can say whatever you want but don't complain when the consequences that result kick you in the ass. For example he is perfectly free to post the blog post he did but every potential future employer is at the same time free to not hire him as a result (since it portrays him as a total a-hole that can't deal with people).
I'm somehow tempted to believe this was submitted by someone who doesn't like Zed and wants to make sure he never ever gets a job in the future with any half-decent company.
There are 4 models: 4gb (+sd slot), 30gb, 80gb and 160gb. They go up in price (and slightly in physical size) as the capacity goes up and the 30gb is the closest in price to the nokia.
And once you add in the cost of those sd cards (16gb ones seems amazingly expensive) you are paying a lot more than you would for the archos.
Copyright is like everythign else a social construct designed to make it easier for someone to profit from that they do. If you want something to complain about then complain about absurd patent laws as those are infinitely more harmful, there is by definition no GPL for patents (ie: you can write a gpl version of windows from scratch but if it's patented then even independent implementations infringe).
As for abolishign copyrights, why do you care? Well? If you think the GPL is so great then it shouldn't matter, after all society will naturally move towards it since it's better. And remember to throw some royalties into the RIAA kitty if you plan on singing Aud Lang Syne tonight. Why would you sing that, if you believe in a lack of copyrights you should do just that. Don't listen to anything but truly free (ie: GPL) music or you're a hypocrite. If you illegally download music for example then you're simpyl admitting that GPL is failing in the area of music.
But in a free world Nintendo is also free to never sell any more Wiis or games for them to stores which sell above it's "suggested price."
I'd like to know how you came up with that as I'm finding lasers to easily be under 2 cents, down to 1 cent per page (for toner) with a $150 printer. That's just the manufacturer's yield numbers and I believe inkjets also waste ink due to cleaning and clogging and so on.
No, it's much much worse because:
1. I KNOW update services get back executables and I can take the expected precautions. Something which is supposed to simply send data back I do not ASSUME also executes random commands from a server, that's just utterly baffling and stupid and counter-intuitive.
2. I either run update programs manually or I have them only automatically tell me there are updates. Updates are NOT installed automatically and it is unlikely that I would miss a hack of the windows servers.
3. Update systems likely have many precautions in place to prevent them being hacked from causing a big problem. Someone who writes this sort of idiotic user tracking system I don't expect to bother with such things.
1. Rings are as I understand it in general unstable or were thought to be so, given a relatively short amount of time (millions of years for large planets) they will break up.
2. Saturn's rings have particle ranging from mm to many meters in size.
3. You are complaining of a million years being short yet at the same time expect us to see changes that would take millions of years to happen? Are you drunk or simply insane.
4. Life on earth is billions of years old, our own primate ancestors were around millions of years ago.
5. You know fuck this, you're a bloody arm-chair physicist who knows jack shit, can't even think with the smallest amount of rationality and lacks the intelligence to comprehend either of those. Your own infinitesimal ego needs constant life support to even exist and so your are forced to delude yourself into believing you know better than those who spend their lifetimes on a subject.
So you want everyone's taxes to increase to counteract this loss in money from non-government sources?
The government can in theory pay less to have something developed by not also buying the results outright but simply the ability to freely use the results itself (as the university can finance the rest itself due to it's potential future worth). This is slightly akin to paying someone partially in stock instead of cash.
Let's say the government wants a shiny new fighter jet. It can on one hand pay 100% of the R&A costs and production costs at $100 billion total for the full run then release the (non-classified) results to the public. It can on the other hand pay $50 billion but let the company own the resulting technology which it then incorporates into it's civilian planes. I'm sure you'd be bitching about the government wasting money if it went with the first option.
So Caltech sells this technology to a private company which means it gets a cut of the profits. So the goverment's original funding has now helped generate a steady income source for caltech and the technology is still out there. So now the goverment's future grants can, for example, now be smaller since Caltech has a larger amount of private income. Likewise this is also an incentive for Caltech to continue producing usable technology if the grants don't decrease. After all if it had to give it away for free it has little incentive to make their work more generally applicable (they gain nothing from it).
To add to what the other reply said, here is a picture of glowing mice:
http://www.forbes.com/2001/07/26/0726gfp.html
Even the relatively short hair of the mice blocks out almost all of the glow.
The green one is NOT glowing and it even says it's an ordinary cat that's simply reflecting the green light. I'd say RTFA but is likely a purposefully done misguiding picture for which the article writers should be kicked for.
The red one seems to be the real deal as it only glows where it's fur doesn't block the skin. Granted it glows rather weakly but that may be simply because it's fur is not white (or doesn't appear to be) so it doesn't reflect the glow as much as say white mice would.
Christ, as others have said please tell us where you went to school so we can avoid it like the plague. Even my middle school wouldn't accept wikipedia or any other encyclopedia as a source. The point of encyclopedias is to use them as a starting point not as an actual source of information. Actually I can't remember writing a paper where wikipedia would have been of any use as a source given how it provides so little in-depth information.