It is predictable that few are understanding how big this is. Computer graphics have soaked into entertainment such that people have not yet captured their impact. How is an open movie different from a normal movie? Is the inspiration of the artist dumbed down?
Open entertainment is great for subjects or that happen not to fit the usuall bounds of 44 to 160 minutes. In can also be participatory, allowing viewers to watch scenes over again from different views or with different cuts. Distracted by how things were different in the book? Fix it! Artists learning their art will have the ability to stage and visualize dramatic performances much as musicians can now use high end sequencers and synthesizers to simulate orchestras that follow their lead. And any piece created this way can be tuned and remade more easily than ever.
California has $80 billion in debt, continues to loose about $10 billion per year, bonds are the lowest level of junk there is, and creditors are saying no more. It might be interesting to see if the full $3 billion promised ever gets payed out given that California is about as broke as a state can get.
For all the limitations with how Trek uses Character and Plot to communicate ideas, it has been vastly more effective at engaging the public imagination than Card has been. It would be nice if the public would appreciate good art like the writers he mentions and maybe also the classics even, but they do not. Ordinary people watch television, and that is about it. As such Trek has brought the idea of exuberant exploration of space treated as mankind's new home to a broad audience. In so doing it has inspired large numbers of physicists, astronomers, astronauts, and engineers. While Trek and other offerings (Farscape comes to mind) should be made as well as possible, the most important thing is that this material be available as an alternative to the mind numbing and uninspired crap that dominates popular media.
There is an issue of who might be to blame for whatever happened. Placing any blame on the individuals most directly involved makes a lot of sense, but there might be other options.
Apart from who to blame there is another real issue here. People do as they are trained. People that spend time honing their twitch reflexes, their aiming, and spend lots of time simulating scenarios where violence is the key to any kind of real power or progress should be expected to fall back on that.
In addition to basic training there are other complications. Recent studies suggest judgement centers in the brain do not begin to become fully operational until 18 and continue to develop in their use until 21, suggesting that young people are inherently vulnerable to judgement errors related to risk assessment. Then there is the time constriction effect where having only moments to react brings out base reactions that reason might otherwise have stopped, as noted in the new book Blink.
Perhaps the future of games, especially for youth, might move beyond shooters and toward more social scenarios where virtual work and heroics reap increasing virtual rewards. Games that mix not only learning, but virtue and honor, could become a popular alternative.
Your reply has nothing to do wih the points that I made. My statements began with the qualifier "In some of the most developed metropolitan areas". This does not imply that I was addressing issues for land use in the US as a whole. Furthermore, it does imply that what I said applies only to some of the most developed metropolitan areas. This is not very specific, but it clearly does not apply to most of the continental US which is not considered metropolitan. Additionally, because this is only applied to "some" of metropolitan areas that leaves the possibility that interesting cases such as the New York City metropolitan area or the Houston metropolitian area, just to name two prominent examples, might not fit what I am saying.
Looking at actual data, the USGS shows for example that most metropolitan areas have grown hugely since 1950. This is not necessarily a problem for many which can just continue to grow. However, some metropolitan areas are bounded by natural geological features. For example: coastlines. Coastlines are not that hard to modify or extend, but in general they do represent a kind of abstract bound on development.
One interesting example is the Bay Area. Looking closely at expansion development has gone from clusters of towns around transportation such as big roads and rail lines to continuous sprawl. Once land has been developed it can be redeveloped with what is called "infill development". It can also be cleared. It can only be developed over again if it is first cleared. This seems rather basic, actually. Now if you look at the Bay Area there appear to be chunks of land that are currently available and might be developed. However, close investigation reveals a lot of problems: First are the basic issues. Most of the land currently undeveloped within the bounds of the bay area has remained undeveloped for good reason. San Mateo County, for example, is one of the world leaders in landslides and much of the remaining undeveloped land is prone to devastating land slides. For people who might want to live there, developers who might provide the housing, and insurance companies who might insure the structures there this is an issue. Similarly, much of the currently undeveloped land in Alameda county is also relatively steep and slide prone. There there are other issues, for example water. In the arid west water has value and is an issue. It is possible to exist without a functioning watershed, but actually having an area of land that can absorb rain water, percolate it naturally, and use the results to replenish ground water and provide potable water is extremely valuable. Another issue is wildlife. In some areas paving over everything is not necessarily an issue, but in other ares the presence of endangered species makes that difficult if not preventing that outright. That is one of the factors keeping narrow slices of open space around the bay area.
People who have a shallow understanding of how land works, where water comes from and how valuable it is, and who do not care about endagered species propose to develop remaining open space in densely populated urban areas. This does not make sense because the open space has a real and rather easily demonstrated economic value which is far greater than anything that might be developed on the site. And as if that were not enough, if all of the land here were made available for development the remaining open space would be gone in very short order, likely less than a decade. The only sensible answer for areas that have become dense and built up is to focus on infill development and increasing density where that is acceptable. Sure, development should continue outside metropolitan areas and new metropolitan areas should be constructed. That has absolutely zero bearing on the fact that greenspace in metropolitan areas has a value which far exceeds that of what could be developed there and is at risk of being lost in short order.
You remark that only 30% of New Jersey is developed, b
Stop thinking that these issues are apart from each other! These are two great tastes that go great together: Running low on oil? Just use coal instead, as there is plenty available. Most of that is brown coal and overall the result of transitioning to coal will increase pollutants including carbon dioxide. So the two disasters are not apart from each other at all, but are actually part of the same problem. We consume a lot of energy, most of that with great inefficiency. This is what brings us global warming. Over time these problems will worsen unless solved or mitigated, and increasing costs for oil associated with the peak oil phenomenon are a part of that.
A good example can be seen in the politics of development restrictions. In some of the most developed metropolitan areas there is a serious lack of land available for continued development. Some have pointed out that open space has real value for recreation and watersheds and wildlife and such, and noting that what land is left is often also more difficult to develop have created an movement to preserve open space. Conservatives have proposed that remaining land be opened for development with few limits. In the conservative mindset the potential value of open space is negligible next to the value of developed and urbanized land. This point of view might have some validity, but when one looks at the rate of expansion of metropolitan areas it can be clearly seen that even developing all nearby open space would allow current development patterns to continue for at most a few decades, and probably not even that. So, conservatives are arguing that a potentially vital resource should be squandered even though the downside of restrictions on development are inevitable in rather short order anyway. In short, conservatives care only about a very tiny subset of parameters relating to the short term. Anything outside of their preferred context, percieved history, or a window of time of a small number of years has no value to them.
for a good counter-example, take a look at the Apple Airport Express, which has a combined analogue/optical port on it, and which costs $129 US.
The Apple Airport Express is a dedicated device with many of the components required for a general use computer not present. Bump its price up a few bucks for one of the few features there and it probably won't matter to the overall unit. Getting a design like the Mini right is all about not including things, like the screen for example that before this was announced people were saying Apple could not economically unbundle. There are without doubt many things like this that could be added to the Mini. More connectors, more memory, more wireless, more bundled software and on and on. But then it would not be a Mini, would it?
Perhaps Apple will open up an API for streaming audio to the Express precisely for this purpose.
Apple audio streaming software has been open sourced for a long time. Download QuickTime Streaming Server and you should have all the code you might want to do this.
The submitter states: ... includes Ethernet, Modem, DVI/VGA, 2 x USB, Firewire and Audio connectors (sadly not optical).
This seems like the kind of basic mistake that geeks make. Optical connectors cost more and putting two kinds of connectors which is common when optical are made available costs even more than that and takes up additional space. This unit is not intended to be a machine to please extreme hardware enthusiasts, but a cheap machine that ordinary folks can use. Most people have little if any equipment with optical connectors and would much rather save some money to get a computer that mostly suits their needs. Putting optical connectors on this product would without question be a mistake, raise the cost, and foul the marketing.
What was actually said involved a lot of disclaimers and careful language. Summerizing the remarks as "females naturally bad at math" is just plain wrong.
One of the specific things he pointed out was the way that the work of high level math and science contributors in academia is organized requires a steep committment in time and effort that many women are unwilling to spend. In the corporate world positions have been modified to allow for multiple people to hold onto an important responsibility. There are other kinds of changes that can also be made. Part of the implication here is that the flaws are not with the women who are not reaching the top in these contexts, but with the way the offices and responsibilities themselves are structured and executed.
There is a popular article in the New York Times about this with the title "Harvard Chief Defends His Talk On Women" that goes into significant detail.
There is lots of available information. What matters is being able to bring it together, classify it, and rate it in a trustworthy way. That is the real contribution of participatory media like Slashdot: The processes for reviewing submissions and moderation of discussion enable people to view news and analysis based on readily available criteria instead of getting a digest that was produced for everyone.
Trying to envision a framework that is retaining water and suffering from connective tissue degradation just isn't clarifying this for me. Can you come up with another way of describing this thing like Passport that relates somehow to its function or characteristics?
Enjoy this choice bit from the FAQ: The Statement permits entities to use any option-pricing model that meets the fair value objective in the Statement; however, the Baord believes that lattice models, including the binomial option-pricing model, are capable of more fully reflecting certain characteristics of employee share options.
If you do not know what lattice models and binomial option-pricing models are and how they work, then do you really understand what this change represents? Mandelbrot's new book The (Mis)behavior of Markets has some interesting arguments that these models are poor representations of value based on misunderstandings of how markets determine prices. This is somewhat damning, especially if the problem this is supposed to solve is corporate executives feathering their nests to extremes which is still continuing and increasing.
Actually, underinflation is an extremely common problem with inflatable tires. This reduces mileage, increases noise, and can reduce manuverability and also increase the probability of a rupture. If the design problems with this "tweel" thing can be worked out it might be a superior solution without these risks.
As far as the aerodynamics of exposed ribs go, it seems that the example in the photograph was intended for initial testing of this concept on Segway scooters. If you are driving a Segway fast enough for wind resistance to be a big factor then your clothes and hairstyle will be the first things to check and get under control.
The privilaged generally eat better than the unprivilaged. They generally have less exposure to environmental toxins. They generally have a more education-centric environment growing up.
That is partially true, but the situation is more complex than that. Rich people eat more seafood and tend to end up with unusually elevated levels toxins like mercury and dioxin and end up with correspondingly higher levels of risk for related complications. Rates of breast cancer are dramatically correlated with wealth, the current specific suspect being increased levels of saturated fat in the diets of the wealthy.
The issues with COX-2 inhibitors are also interesting in that the drugs were created in response to observations of tea and other dietary components having a COX-2 inhibition effect combined with reduction of inflammation. The isolated drugs have not behaved exactly as the foods from which they are derived. The same is true of beta carotine which is healthy to eat in food, but appears to cause distruption when isolated and taken orally. Other vitamins also appear to cause problems if taken directly in pure form.
All this leads me to remember that some of my best proofs when studying math in school came from early morning times when I was despirate and tired and poorly fed and just had to find a way. Somehow it seems that for me at least raw motivation is far more important than mental state.
There is a lot of argument about how the Yucca mountain facility will stand up to 10,000 to 100,000 years, but this is an abstract question. Given current environmental degradation it is not clear that the human race will be around in that time frame. More importantly, nuclear waste is currently stored near urban centers in improvised waste storage arrangements. Even if the waste were transported to Yucca mountain in ordinary trains and trucks, which is absolutely not what is being proposed, the result would still be safer than leaving the radioactive waste where it is in facilities that were not meant to last even a century let alone thousands of years.
Breeder reactors might be another approach for handling waste, but they have the same problem of transporting the waste. Also, breeder reactors have spotty safety records. Breeder reactors in both the United States and France have leaked Sodium, and a reactor accident in Japan killed workers and exposed much higher rates of wear than expected which means safety and cost both have to be reexamined.
References to Chernobyl are pretty far off. That reactor and others like it are only found in the Russian Federation because those are the only people crazy enough to build graphite core reactors. Modern designs such as pebble bed reactors have inherently high safety and few failure modes all of which are relatively benign. Graphite core reactors explode if they are run too hot or too cold. Those graphite core reactors that have been built would be shut down in favor of other means for power generation if that were within reach for those who depend on those plants, but bad economic conditions make replacement nearly impossible at this time.
Trust comes with experience. One problem is that people are thinking in terms of large scale change, but even such changes are most likely to come about in small steps. Already vehicles have ABS and electronic traction control systems are increasingly common. The next likely step is systems that help maintain a safe following distance and automatically initiate braking when a collision is about to happen. As these systems become more common they will be honed and become accepted as any other vehicle system. Fully automated driving systems will happen later as a result of many small changes.
The big pay off will be in safety, not speed. Currently around 114 Americans die on the roads every day. To the extent that time is saved it will be by allowing drivers to concentrate on other things like cell phone conversations.
Finally, most automated systems use a "trust but verify" approach. With tax preparation systems it is often possible to enter numbers manually and let the system handle the document only. Similarly, in commercial aircraft there is little that pilots need to do most of the time, but they are they to take control in case there is an incident of some kind. There is every reason to believe that vehicles offering automated control will also have some kind of manual override even if it is limited in some way.
It is true that money has been diverted and carpool and transit schemes have been expensive and have not always worked out, but this is an incomplete picture. Since Loma Prieta, bridges and overpasses throughout the state were reconstructed. This took a lot of effort and money. Also, many rights of way have been boxed in with development or border environmentally sensitive areas. These factors limit continuing roadway development.
The differences between high occupancy vehicle lanes are interesting, but observations and models both show that these lanes get more use than casual observations indicate and this usage is increasing sharply.
Getting rid of the Vehicle License Fee has put pressure on the whole tax system and that indirectly complicates the business of gas tax money being diverted.
It is also worth noting that the remarks in the post about intent ("groups of people decided that they wanted to get Californians...") are way off. The analysis is much more basic than that and publicly avaialble. Trends in housing, employment, and transportation are analyzed to come up with predictions of where people will be moving. Then plans are made to meet people needs using available resources. The idea that it is easy and cheap to just ad more lanes and freeways is simply not supportable, and even basic investigation will confirm that. If the state were not completely broke and also cutting taxes then working out what roads to build and how and who will pay how much would all be a lot easier.
In a general context that may be true, but this is a specific context. That is, the marketing materials for this product identify a specific allergen that is not present in the product. There are a number of common allergens that are highly problematic. Latex is a good example. Hypoallergenic latex alternatives are not expected to be free of all potential allergens, just free of those allergens present in latex. If you have a better word, then it might be readily adopted, but the word hypoallergenic is reasonably descriptive of what is going on.
Although individual cats may produce more or less allergen, there is no relationship between the pet's hair length and allergen production, and no such thing as a non-allergenic breed.
Being loose with qualifications is common, but those who have had the experience of extreme difficulty breathing because of exposure to cat allergens are motivated to be more precise.
Slashdot Mirror
It is predictable that few are understanding how big this is. Computer graphics have soaked into entertainment such that people have not yet captured their impact. How is an open movie different from a normal movie? Is the inspiration of the artist dumbed down?
Open entertainment is great for subjects or that happen not to fit the usuall bounds of 44 to 160 minutes. In can also be participatory, allowing viewers to watch scenes over again from different views or with different cuts. Distracted by how things were different in the book? Fix it! Artists learning their art will have the ability to stage and visualize dramatic performances much as musicians can now use high end sequencers and synthesizers to simulate orchestras that follow their lead. And any piece created this way can be tuned and remade more easily than ever.
California has $80 billion in debt, continues to loose about $10 billion per year, bonds are the lowest level of junk there is, and creditors are saying no more. It might be interesting to see if the full $3 billion promised ever gets payed out given that California is about as broke as a state can get.
For all the limitations with how Trek uses Character and Plot to communicate ideas, it has been vastly more effective at engaging the public imagination than Card has been. It would be nice if the public would appreciate good art like the writers he mentions and maybe also the classics even, but they do not. Ordinary people watch television, and that is about it. As such Trek has brought the idea of exuberant exploration of space treated as mankind's new home to a broad audience. In so doing it has inspired large numbers of physicists, astronomers, astronauts, and engineers. While Trek and other offerings (Farscape comes to mind) should be made as well as possible, the most important thing is that this material be available as an alternative to the mind numbing and uninspired crap that dominates popular media.
There is an issue of who might be to blame for whatever happened. Placing any blame on the individuals most directly involved makes a lot of sense, but there might be other options.
Apart from who to blame there is another real issue here. People do as they are trained. People that spend time honing their twitch reflexes, their aiming, and spend lots of time simulating scenarios where violence is the key to any kind of real power or progress should be expected to fall back on that.
In addition to basic training there are other complications. Recent studies suggest judgement centers in the brain do not begin to become fully operational until 18 and continue to develop in their use until 21, suggesting that young people are inherently vulnerable to judgement errors related to risk assessment. Then there is the time constriction effect where having only moments to react brings out base reactions that reason might otherwise have stopped, as noted in the new book Blink.
Perhaps the future of games, especially for youth, might move beyond shooters and toward more social scenarios where virtual work and heroics reap increasing virtual rewards. Games that mix not only learning, but virtue and honor, could become a popular alternative.
Your reply has nothing to do wih the points that I made. My statements began with the qualifier "In some of the most developed metropolitan areas". This does not imply that I was addressing issues for land use in the US as a whole. Furthermore, it does imply that what I said applies only to some of the most developed metropolitan areas. This is not very specific, but it clearly does not apply to most of the continental US which is not considered metropolitan. Additionally, because this is only applied to "some" of metropolitan areas that leaves the possibility that interesting cases such as the New York City metropolitan area or the Houston metropolitian area, just to name two prominent examples, might not fit what I am saying.
Looking at actual data, the USGS shows for example that most metropolitan areas have grown hugely since 1950. This is not necessarily a problem for many which can just continue to grow. However, some metropolitan areas are bounded by natural geological features. For example: coastlines. Coastlines are not that hard to modify or extend, but in general they do represent a kind of abstract bound on development.
One interesting example is the Bay Area. Looking closely at expansion development has gone from clusters of towns around transportation such as big roads and rail lines to continuous sprawl. Once land has been developed it can be redeveloped with what is called "infill development". It can also be cleared. It can only be developed over again if it is first cleared. This seems rather basic, actually. Now if you look at the Bay Area there appear to be chunks of land that are currently available and might be developed. However, close investigation reveals a lot of problems: First are the basic issues. Most of the land currently undeveloped within the bounds of the bay area has remained undeveloped for good reason. San Mateo County, for example, is one of the world leaders in landslides and much of the remaining undeveloped land is prone to devastating land slides. For people who might want to live there, developers who might provide the housing, and insurance companies who might insure the structures there this is an issue. Similarly, much of the currently undeveloped land in Alameda county is also relatively steep and slide prone. There there are other issues, for example water. In the arid west water has value and is an issue. It is possible to exist without a functioning watershed, but actually having an area of land that can absorb rain water, percolate it naturally, and use the results to replenish ground water and provide potable water is extremely valuable. Another issue is wildlife. In some areas paving over everything is not necessarily an issue, but in other ares the presence of endangered species makes that difficult if not preventing that outright. That is one of the factors keeping narrow slices of open space around the bay area.
People who have a shallow understanding of how land works, where water comes from and how valuable it is, and who do not care about endagered species propose to develop remaining open space in densely populated urban areas. This does not make sense because the open space has a real and rather easily demonstrated economic value which is far greater than anything that might be developed on the site. And as if that were not enough, if all of the land here were made available for development the remaining open space would be gone in very short order, likely less than a decade. The only sensible answer for areas that have become dense and built up is to focus on infill development and increasing density where that is acceptable. Sure, development should continue outside metropolitan areas and new metropolitan areas should be constructed. That has absolutely zero bearing on the fact that greenspace in metropolitan areas has a value which far exceeds that of what could be developed there and is at risk of being lost in short order.
You remark that only 30% of New Jersey is developed, b
Stop thinking that these issues are apart from each other! These are two great tastes that go great together: Running low on oil? Just use coal instead, as there is plenty available. Most of that is brown coal and overall the result of transitioning to coal will increase pollutants including carbon dioxide. So the two disasters are not apart from each other at all, but are actually part of the same problem. We consume a lot of energy, most of that with great inefficiency. This is what brings us global warming. Over time these problems will worsen unless solved or mitigated, and increasing costs for oil associated with the peak oil phenomenon are a part of that.
A good example can be seen in the politics of development restrictions. In some of the most developed metropolitan areas there is a serious lack of land available for continued development. Some have pointed out that open space has real value for recreation and watersheds and wildlife and such, and noting that what land is left is often also more difficult to develop have created an movement to preserve open space. Conservatives have proposed that remaining land be opened for development with few limits. In the conservative mindset the potential value of open space is negligible next to the value of developed and urbanized land. This point of view might have some validity, but when one looks at the rate of expansion of metropolitan areas it can be clearly seen that even developing all nearby open space would allow current development patterns to continue for at most a few decades, and probably not even that. So, conservatives are arguing that a potentially vital resource should be squandered even though the downside of restrictions on development are inevitable in rather short order anyway. In short, conservatives care only about a very tiny subset of parameters relating to the short term. Anything outside of their preferred context, percieved history, or a window of time of a small number of years has no value to them.
The Apple Airport Express is a dedicated device with many of the components required for a general use computer not present. Bump its price up a few bucks for one of the few features there and it probably won't matter to the overall unit. Getting a design like the Mini right is all about not including things, like the screen for example that before this was announced people were saying Apple could not economically unbundle. There are without doubt many things like this that could be added to the Mini. More connectors, more memory, more wireless, more bundled software and on and on. But then it would not be a Mini, would it?
Perhaps Apple will open up an API for streaming audio to the Express precisely for this purpose.Apple audio streaming software has been open sourced for a long time. Download QuickTime Streaming Server and you should have all the code you might want to do this.
This seems like the kind of basic mistake that geeks make. Optical connectors cost more and putting two kinds of connectors which is common when optical are made available costs even more than that and takes up additional space. This unit is not intended to be a machine to please extreme hardware enthusiasts, but a cheap machine that ordinary folks can use. Most people have little if any equipment with optical connectors and would much rather save some money to get a computer that mostly suits their needs. Putting optical connectors on this product would without question be a mistake, raise the cost, and foul the marketing.
What was actually said involved a lot of disclaimers and careful language. Summerizing the remarks as "females naturally bad at math" is just plain wrong.
One of the specific things he pointed out was the way that the work of high level math and science contributors in academia is organized requires a steep committment in time and effort that many women are unwilling to spend. In the corporate world positions have been modified to allow for multiple people to hold onto an important responsibility. There are other kinds of changes that can also be made. Part of the implication here is that the flaws are not with the women who are not reaching the top in these contexts, but with the way the offices and responsibilities themselves are structured and executed.
There is a popular article in the New York Times about this with the title "Harvard Chief Defends His Talk On Women" that goes into significant detail.There is lots of available information. What matters is being able to bring it together, classify it, and rate it in a trustworthy way. That is the real contribution of participatory media like Slashdot: The processes for reviewing submissions and moderation of discussion enable people to view news and analysis based on readily available criteria instead of getting a digest that was produced for everyone.
Trying to envision a framework that is retaining water and suffering from connective tissue degradation just isn't clarifying this for me. Can you come up with another way of describing this thing like Passport that relates somehow to its function or characteristics?
A potentially interesting example not mentioned is Street Fire Sound which has an open source hardware offering.
The Statement permits entities to use any option-pricing model that meets the fair value objective in the Statement; however, the Baord believes that lattice models, including the binomial option-pricing model, are capable of more fully reflecting certain characteristics of employee share options.
If you do not know what lattice models and binomial option-pricing models are and how they work, then do you really understand what this change represents? Mandelbrot's new book The (Mis)behavior of Markets has some interesting arguments that these models are poor representations of value based on misunderstandings of how markets determine prices. This is somewhat damning, especially if the problem this is supposed to solve is corporate executives feathering their nests to extremes which is still continuing and increasing.
Actually, underinflation is an extremely common problem with inflatable tires. This reduces mileage, increases noise, and can reduce manuverability and also increase the probability of a rupture. If the design problems with this "tweel" thing can be worked out it might be a superior solution without these risks.
As far as the aerodynamics of exposed ribs go, it seems that the example in the photograph was intended for initial testing of this concept on Segway scooters. If you are driving a Segway fast enough for wind resistance to be a big factor then your clothes and hairstyle will be the first things to check and get under control.
The privilaged generally eat better than the unprivilaged. They generally have less exposure to environmental toxins. They generally have a more education-centric environment growing up.
That is partially true, but the situation is more complex than that. Rich people eat more seafood and tend to end up with unusually elevated levels toxins like mercury and dioxin and end up with correspondingly higher levels of risk for related complications. Rates of breast cancer are dramatically correlated with wealth, the current specific suspect being increased levels of saturated fat in the diets of the wealthy.
The issues with COX-2 inhibitors are also interesting in that the drugs were created in response to observations of tea and other dietary components having a COX-2 inhibition effect combined with reduction of inflammation. The isolated drugs have not behaved exactly as the foods from which they are derived. The same is true of beta carotine which is healthy to eat in food, but appears to cause distruption when isolated and taken orally. Other vitamins also appear to cause problems if taken directly in pure form.
All this leads me to remember that some of my best proofs when studying math in school came from early morning times when I was despirate and tired and poorly fed and just had to find a way. Somehow it seems that for me at least raw motivation is far more important than mental state.
There is a lot of argument about how the Yucca mountain facility will stand up to 10,000 to 100,000 years, but this is an abstract question. Given current environmental degradation it is not clear that the human race will be around in that time frame. More importantly, nuclear waste is currently stored near urban centers in improvised waste storage arrangements. Even if the waste were transported to Yucca mountain in ordinary trains and trucks, which is absolutely not what is being proposed, the result would still be safer than leaving the radioactive waste where it is in facilities that were not meant to last even a century let alone thousands of years.
Breeder reactors might be another approach for handling waste, but they have the same problem of transporting the waste. Also, breeder reactors have spotty safety records. Breeder reactors in both the United States and France have leaked Sodium, and a reactor accident in Japan killed workers and exposed much higher rates of wear than expected which means safety and cost both have to be reexamined.
References to Chernobyl are pretty far off. That reactor and others like it are only found in the Russian Federation because those are the only people crazy enough to build graphite core reactors. Modern designs such as pebble bed reactors have inherently high safety and few failure modes all of which are relatively benign. Graphite core reactors explode if they are run too hot or too cold. Those graphite core reactors that have been built would be shut down in favor of other means for power generation if that were within reach for those who depend on those plants, but bad economic conditions make replacement nearly impossible at this time.
Trust comes with experience. One problem is that people are thinking in terms of large scale change, but even such changes are most likely to come about in small steps. Already vehicles have ABS and electronic traction control systems are increasingly common. The next likely step is systems that help maintain a safe following distance and automatically initiate braking when a collision is about to happen. As these systems become more common they will be honed and become accepted as any other vehicle system. Fully automated driving systems will happen later as a result of many small changes. The big pay off will be in safety, not speed. Currently around 114 Americans die on the roads every day. To the extent that time is saved it will be by allowing drivers to concentrate on other things like cell phone conversations. Finally, most automated systems use a "trust but verify" approach. With tax preparation systems it is often possible to enter numbers manually and let the system handle the document only. Similarly, in commercial aircraft there is little that pilots need to do most of the time, but they are they to take control in case there is an incident of some kind. There is every reason to believe that vehicles offering automated control will also have some kind of manual override even if it is limited in some way.
It is true that money has been diverted and carpool and transit schemes have been expensive and have not always worked out, but this is an incomplete picture. Since Loma Prieta, bridges and overpasses throughout the state were reconstructed. This took a lot of effort and money. Also, many rights of way have been boxed in with development or border environmentally sensitive areas. These factors limit continuing roadway development. The differences between high occupancy vehicle lanes are interesting, but observations and models both show that these lanes get more use than casual observations indicate and this usage is increasing sharply. Getting rid of the Vehicle License Fee has put pressure on the whole tax system and that indirectly complicates the business of gas tax money being diverted.
It is also worth noting that the remarks in the post about intent ("groups of people decided that they wanted to get Californians...") are way off. The analysis is much more basic than that and publicly avaialble. Trends in housing, employment, and transportation are analyzed to come up with predictions of where people will be moving. Then plans are made to meet people needs using available resources. The idea that it is easy and cheap to just ad more lanes and freeways is simply not supportable, and even basic investigation will confirm that. If the state were not completely broke and also cutting taxes then working out what roads to build and how and who will pay how much would all be a lot easier.
In a general context that may be true, but this is a specific context. That is, the marketing materials for this product identify a specific allergen that is not present in the product. There are a number of common allergens that are highly problematic. Latex is a good example. Hypoallergenic latex alternatives are not expected to be free of all potential allergens, just free of those allergens present in latex. If you have a better word, then it might be readily adopted, but the word hypoallergenic is reasonably descriptive of what is going on.
This is not true, as people with high sensitivity to these allergens can easily demonstrate. The Allergy, Asthma, and Immuninology Associates page on cat allergies sums this up well:
Although individual cats may produce more or less allergen, there is no relationship between the pet's hair length and allergen production, and no such thing as a non-allergenic breed.
Being loose with qualifications is common, but those who have had the experience of extreme difficulty breathing because of exposure to cat allergens are motivated to be more precise.