A "lie detector" of any mechanism relies on the assumption that there must be some physiologic or behavioral difference in a person telling a lie compared with a person telling the truth. Aside from how there has never been any data to support that assumption (despite how badly people want it to be true), the term "lie" is a human construction. For example, look at Presidents Clinton and Bush. Both were accused of lying. In the case of the former, the statement may have been technically true in a hyper-literal linguistic sense, but designed to deceive. In the case of the latter, the statement turned out to be false, but was believed to be completely true when it was spoken. (Note, I say these things for the sake of argument. I do not claim to know the objective truth for either of these situations, and there's still quibbling about both.)
There is a grain of truth in every lie and a measure of inaccuracy in every truth. The delineation between the two is poorly demarcated and even humans can't agree about specific fringe cases. As any programmer knows, machines are extremely literal, so how can one possibly define a lie well enough for one to detect? Heck, how does a person's own body tell the difference and why would it bother? Short of a mind-reading device, you can't determine intent, and even that fails for some variants of lies (e.g. stating something you think, but do not know, as true). And what of the delusional psychopath whose thoughts aren't reliable in the first place? Or con men who specialize in fooling 3.8 billion years of evolution to detect their kind?
Thankfully, doctors and hospitals monitor disease incidence for any increases that might suggest an epidemic. Researchers also do subgroup analysis to look for links between behaviors/exposures and disease. Other than more people getting punched in the face in public places, I don't recall any change in epidemiology after cell phones became common.
As for diseases with a long latency period, there's no rational explanation for why non-ionizing EM radiation might cause them. OTOH, for all we know cellphones help convert the alpha helices into beta pleated sheets in the PrP(C) protein and in a few years we'll have the zombie apocalypse as a variant of CJD develops in a large percentage of the population. Reality tends to be more boring than that though. (Plus disease susceptibility is a bell curve, so the least resistant people would show symptoms long before most people did.)
Allergies are massively overstated. People commonly mistake known side effects of medications for allergies (e.g. my insomnia medicine makes me drowsy). If a kid happens to catch gastroenteritis, then obviously they're allergic to whatever they just ate. If a baby develops colic (16% of all babies, with more not meeting the strict criteria), then obviously it has a milk allergy. And if someone becomes lactose intolerant while they're sick (lactose digestion is the first thing to go), then clearly that's a permanent condition.
And egg allergies! You wouldn't believe the number of people who refuse vaccinations under that excuse. Realistically, if you can eat a cupcake without going into anaphylactic shock then you aren't allergic to the vaccine. A number of hospitals have made the flu vaccine mandatory for workers. In one they stipulated you either got the shot or wore a N95 mask for the entire flu season, while providing testing and desensitization for those claiming egg allergies. Oddly enough, of the ~10% that were allergic to eggs before, none had a serious reaction when tested.
All that said, allergies today probably are more common. We spend less time outdoors, eat more exotic foods, and have created all manner of strange chemicals. Those that would have perished in childhood a century ago can now live long lives. And now we can explain why people get "that head cold every spring that lasts for 3 or 4 months". (BTW, I didn't make up any of those quotes, and have heard each multiple times.)
1) Buy two USB harddrives and two routers with USB from the "supported hardware" section of this list.
2) Find a geek and have them set it up for you
3) Profit?
Total cost: ~$150 - $400 in equipment, say $200 for a couple hours of labor. While this doesn't meet the "out of the box" requirement, affinity for tinkering is kind of a defining aspect of being a nerd. If that doesn't describe you, I think you asked on the wrong site. (Or maybe I'm wrong, I don't see the slogan "News for Nerds" anymore... Perhaps I'm still in denial about a focus shift.) But, it is inexpensive, uses hardware from well known companies, and such a setup isn't really complicated if you have any business setting up your own backup system in the first place. Personally, I wouldn't trust the reliability nor security of an end-user system I didn't setup and periodically verify, but that's me.
Drop the year and convert the time and you have the US date system. It's big-endian aside from the optional year and am/pm component that are typically omitted in spoken conversation. The European system never made much sense to me, times are big-endian and dates are little-endian.
I suspect the reason the test was held in India is because Indian call centers are deemed "good enough" for technical support. Voice recognition is also "good enough" in the eyes of our corporate overlords. So, some enterprising fellow had the bright idea to see if one could add a voice recognition module to Cleverbot and avoid paying for a call center at all. This was the test to see if it's practical.
The hilarious thing would be if your lab partner did the same thing first, causing your later submission to be detected as plagiarism. (These services retain a copy so they can expand their database, and even non-plagiarists occasionally submit papers to ensure there aren't any false positives.)
Best solution: if you care and he won't comply, stop being roommates
Realistically, have him use a VPN. They aren't expensive (under $40/year), and there are a few good reasons to use them. For you, the VPN would be in his name and your ISP is none the wiser (aside from bandwidth usage) so you can sleep easy. For him, there's a layer of protection (NOT ABSOLUTE), and the compression tends to help your download speed a bit and upload speed quite a bit. (For me on JPEGs: 20 Mbs down / 1.5 Mbs up to 25 / 4 at the cost of +40 ms worst case latency.)
Trouble convincing him? Use a packet sniffer and start teasing him about his interests in porn or something. Probably a better idea (albeit less comical) is to block bittorrent and his favorite websites at the router, thus forcing him to use your suggestion, and granting you a massive credibility boost if he does get sued.
First off, this is a technical news site, so it shouldn't be trying to cater much for "the average individual", there are plenty of layperson news sites that do that. Going that route will drive off the technically adept commentators, which is the only reason anyone reads Slashdot. (IMHO, it seems that Slashdot is going that way... probably some pointy haired boss is forgetting that increasing the userbase will dilute the quality until it reaches a collapsing point as the niche is destroyed.)
Second, "bars" are neither accurate nor precise, but rather 90% marketing. People use a device more if there are more bars (more battery life left, less likely to drop a call, etc.), so they're programmed quite optimistically and not always honestly. If device A shows four bars when device B shows two then people think device A is better, not wrong.
This is probably one of the few examples of the interstate commerce clause actually being used properly rather than just to expand federal government power through convoluted and contrived rationales. Well, aside from the technicality that Amazon has a physical presence in the state.
It's not Ft. Worth, technically we're 17th by some ranking everyone local cites, but by the list you looked at we're 27th, and known for our low cost of living. I'm certain that minimum wage isn't even 'livable' in many places, but my point is that you may need to make sacrifices to live within your means (e.g. you might not be able to afford living in the same town as your parents). In any case, my calculations assume that someone doesn't gain any employable skills over 40 years of full time work and an even greater amount of leisure time. And, like I said, it's based on a minimalist version of my own finances, which have run ~$1,000 per month ($650 rent + electricity being the major difference) over the past three years, so I know there's a fair amount of accuracy in them.
Inaccuracies may result from the fact that I'm a student and in a somewhat uncommon financial situation as a result. By omitting my school expenses (over twice my living expenses) I may have inadvertently understated expenses elsewhere, such as complementary doctor visits and reduced price dental cleanings. OTOH, the reason I live in a $650 + electricity apartment is because it cuts down my morning walk to ~5 minutes, so errors go both ways.
I'll bite. For reference, I live in the 16th largest city in the US (by whichever measure we rank highest), and this is based on my own finances and memory from shopping around. Minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, so if someone works 160 hours per month that's $1160. A downtown studio apartment costs $350 per month, in a new highrise about a block away from the center of downtown, decently low crime area, with all utilities included. To be realistic, I'll assume a person eats the national average of $7 a day, so ~$200 per month. Health insurance for a young, healthy person who doesn't smoke is $40 per month when I checked last week (100% coverage, $5,000 deductible, $3M maximum). Total monthly expenses: ~$600 per month, throw in incidentals for a round $660, leaving $500/month.
$500/month for 40 years with 2% real interest adds up to $367k, 5% to $763k, 10% to $3.2M. So it's quite possible to save significant amounts of money with even a low wage if you live within your means. You just need to understand what your means are, e.g. don't live in NYC, California, the extremely rural town you were born in, or some other high-cost-of-living area, don't have kids you can't afford, don't pick up expensive habits (TV, smoking, bar hopping, etc.), and don't support money sinks like an unneeded car or house. Financial responsibility is a a prerequisite to gaining wealth.
Of course, it's all a moot point as real interest rates have been near zero or negative for pretty much my whole life. Money saved is money lost with that system, but at least people were able to "afford" a massive loan to buy a house. =/ I pity my generation when we approach retirement as we've been living in a system that encourages living on credit.
Except that the nationalized postal services face a lot of competition from private courier firms who aren't hamstrung with government requirements to provide a universal service and can cherry-pick the best routes.
How are they cherry-picking? I've never seen a major courier refuse to deliver a package to a rural destination, even if that entailed a special 90 minute trip for the driver. There's no way that's profitable at ~$5 per package, yet they do it so they have universal coverage. (Not including the times the driver drops packages off at a person's place of work to avoid said trip.) While I could see couriers doing reduced frequency of delivery to unprofitable routes, they all want to deliver for companies like Amazon whom I'm sure demands they deliver everywhere.
Interestingly, the article sticks with generalities and doesn't go into the specifics of where population growth is occurring and what impact it is having. What we don't want is for a less developed nation to be in a zero sum game for resources and have an expanding population. It's also not good if this growth occurs in poor nations, but is supported by highly developed nations, either directly through international aid or indirectly through immigration (e.g. the US's population growth).
Obviously every life is important, but is the increase in productive members of society or in impoverished people needing support? I.e. are they net producers or net consumers of the world's resources? If it's the former then it's cause to celebrate, but if it's the latter then conditions are going to deteriorate for most people, especially said poor.
It's a real threat, but China's problem is their approach. An idea that goes 'viral' can easily damage "social stability" and a government. There are three ways to defend against such attacks.
First, censorship. This is only effective if it's absolute, which isn't practical, and promotes the spontaneous generation of such ideas from within the population, thus ineffective.
Second, the government could be completely open and have no dirty baggage, so they can quickly shoot-down any negative accusations. Obviously this doesn't work in the real world as governments are a necessary evil (unless you're an anarchist, but I won't get into that as the imperative word here is "evil").
Third, give the appearance of a clean, open government and do your own information manipulation to maintain that illusion and drown-out or discredit any ideas to the contrary.
China is a bit unusual as they haven't given up on the first approach and adopted the third like almost every other state. Perhaps they realize that their state couldn't maintain the illusion of an open and clean government by western ideals, and that free flow of information tends to normalize world views, so even the Chinese would start questioning their government.
1300 ft/sec = 410 m/s (per TFA) = 920 mph = 1500 km/h
What's sad is that TFA gives the value in m/s, which is a pretty standard physics unit for velocity, so someone had to 'helpfully' convert it to a rather obscure unit. Aside from bullets (niche usage), ft/sec is used for stuff that's slow, much like ft/year is used for tectonic plates; mph is used for transit speeds, and miles per second for astronomic speeds. Don't convert to a smaller unit just to produce bigger numbers, as they are difficult to visualize. I'm seriously tempted to write a greasemonkey script to do these conversions automatically, it's become a theme for Slashdot...
Well, constant acceleration means that you're nearing light speed fairly quickly, and relativistic effects (time dilation and length contraction) kick in. It's been four years since I studied physics, and haven't used it since, so I'll defer to a better explanation than I could give at the moment.
As for why to travel to stars, it's more a matter of what we might find in the future. Right now, if we were on Alpha Centauri, we would probably know about Jupiter or Saturn, but we'd have no idea the Earth existed, it's too small to wobble the star significantly. There could be tons of Earth-like planets orbiting the hundreds of "nearby" stars. With the human species' instinct to explore and multiply, I have little doubt that we'll reach out to the solar system, and eventually other stars before we meet some Malthusian prediction.
No need to violate the laws of physics, if we knew how to build a ship that constantly accelerated at 1G then it'd only take 6.58 years to get there. OTOH, of course it's impossible with today's technology, just as reaching the moon was 42 years ago, or powered flight 67 years before that. Much like with anything else, "I don't know how to do it" is not equivalent to "it cannot be done", so even faster-than-light travel may well be possible when we have a better understanding of physics.
That's not counting your phone, television, and navigation system. Now, IMHO, the real question is whether the future will trend toward diversification or unification. Will we store all of our data on the net, or carry it all on our hip... Either we'll have cloud-based storage with specialized hardware for interacting with each type of data, or consumers will realize that the only real difference between the aforementioned devices is form factor and software limitations.
On Windows and NTFS I restrict the creation of new folders in the Macromedia directories. That way, my progress in flash games can be saved, but my browsing history/cookies aren't stored for other sites. Here's a quick way to set that:
Afterwards, delete the folders for sites you don't care about. Technically, it looks like stuff is also stored in %APPDATA%\Adobe\...\AssetCache, but I'm not quite sure of what's there so I haven't played with it. Standard Unix Permissions let you accomplish much the same thing with other OSes, but it's not as granular.
Now, if browser makers would get on board with the concept of not saving data (e.g. cache, cookies) to disk except for whitelisted sites, then we wouldn't have so many privacy issues. This seems possible in Firefox, but less so in other browsers. IMHO it should be the default, as it improves security, privacy, consistency, reliability, and performance without sacrificing any significant functionality and only requires user intervention on a handful of commonly used sites.
Electric vehicles perhaps, although then you could just move to taxing tires. AFAIK their degradation is correlated to distance traveled and weight carried. Plus tire wear is probably highly correlated with road wear, which is kinda the point.
I'm a medical student rotating through the ER this month, so I've seen a fair number of gunshot wounds. Yesterday there was a guy who shot himself in the leg with a.45, which shattered his tibia. He didn't even realize he'd been hit for a minute, so I think you are quite overestimating the stopping power of non-lethal wounds. Heck, he said the tetanus shot hurt worse than the bullet (I'm certain the adrenaline had a lot to do with that). OTOH, last week there was another guy that got shot in the good-guy area of the shoulder, but the 9mm hit the subclavian artery and he exsanguinated quite quickly. Now, statistically, you're probably right that being shot in the leg would be non-fatal and would stop your assailant, but, IMHO, if I knew I had just one good chance to stop the guy, I'd vastly favor my own survival over his. Thankfully, I live in a state whose laws will back me up on that. (Hypothetically at least, I don't actually own a gun.)
Now, all of this assumes you're a crack shot with a pistol. IIRC, only 12% of shots fired in such situations hit, and only ~4% do so in a lethal area. And, to throw a bone to the gun control crowd, the vast majority of shootings are accidents or suicide attempts. As for my anecdote-based opinion, the guy shot in the subclavian had gone to his ex-wife's house with a BAC of >.3 and she was the one who called EMS after shooting him in the shoulder. The week prior to my arrival an almost identical situation occurred, but this time the ex-wife was unarmed and was brought to the ER after having been beaten to death with a rock. So, yeah, I'm a fan of the second amendment.
and in the U.S. they're usually ignorant racist rednecks.
While I find your point interesting and without egregious error to my superficial reading, I had to chuckle at that last expression. Few people care about being politically correct to white males in America, but it's a little amusing to call a subgroup of a race racist, especially using a racial slur to do so.
It more likely means that no device will ever draw anywhere close to 100W. Laptops are far more common in the consumer market, and draw something like 20W typically (maybe 50 W under load). I highly doubt manufacturers will beef up the power supplies until such high demand peripherals exist, and such peripherals won't exist until laptops can power them. Classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Plus a lot of people like to keep their printer unplugged from the laptop until they need it, which would be cumbersome if you then have to connect an AC adapter to the laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
A "lie detector" of any mechanism relies on the assumption that there must be some physiologic or behavioral difference in a person telling a lie compared with a person telling the truth. Aside from how there has never been any data to support that assumption (despite how badly people want it to be true), the term "lie" is a human construction. For example, look at Presidents Clinton and Bush. Both were accused of lying. In the case of the former, the statement may have been technically true in a hyper-literal linguistic sense, but designed to deceive. In the case of the latter, the statement turned out to be false, but was believed to be completely true when it was spoken. (Note, I say these things for the sake of argument. I do not claim to know the objective truth for either of these situations, and there's still quibbling about both.)
There is a grain of truth in every lie and a measure of inaccuracy in every truth. The delineation between the two is poorly demarcated and even humans can't agree about specific fringe cases. As any programmer knows, machines are extremely literal, so how can one possibly define a lie well enough for one to detect? Heck, how does a person's own body tell the difference and why would it bother? Short of a mind-reading device, you can't determine intent, and even that fails for some variants of lies (e.g. stating something you think, but do not know, as true). And what of the delusional psychopath whose thoughts aren't reliable in the first place? Or con men who specialize in fooling 3.8 billion years of evolution to detect their kind?
Thankfully, doctors and hospitals monitor disease incidence for any increases that might suggest an epidemic. Researchers also do subgroup analysis to look for links between behaviors/exposures and disease. Other than more people getting punched in the face in public places, I don't recall any change in epidemiology after cell phones became common.
As for diseases with a long latency period, there's no rational explanation for why non-ionizing EM radiation might cause them. OTOH, for all we know cellphones help convert the alpha helices into beta pleated sheets in the PrP(C) protein and in a few years we'll have the zombie apocalypse as a variant of CJD develops in a large percentage of the population. Reality tends to be more boring than that though. (Plus disease susceptibility is a bell curve, so the least resistant people would show symptoms long before most people did.)
Allergies are massively overstated. People commonly mistake known side effects of medications for allergies (e.g. my insomnia medicine makes me drowsy). If a kid happens to catch gastroenteritis, then obviously they're allergic to whatever they just ate. If a baby develops colic (16% of all babies, with more not meeting the strict criteria), then obviously it has a milk allergy. And if someone becomes lactose intolerant while they're sick (lactose digestion is the first thing to go), then clearly that's a permanent condition.
And egg allergies! You wouldn't believe the number of people who refuse vaccinations under that excuse. Realistically, if you can eat a cupcake without going into anaphylactic shock then you aren't allergic to the vaccine. A number of hospitals have made the flu vaccine mandatory for workers. In one they stipulated you either got the shot or wore a N95 mask for the entire flu season, while providing testing and desensitization for those claiming egg allergies. Oddly enough, of the ~10% that were allergic to eggs before, none had a serious reaction when tested.
All that said, allergies today probably are more common. We spend less time outdoors, eat more exotic foods, and have created all manner of strange chemicals. Those that would have perished in childhood a century ago can now live long lives. And now we can explain why people get "that head cold every spring that lasts for 3 or 4 months". (BTW, I didn't make up any of those quotes, and have heard each multiple times.)
1) Buy two USB harddrives and two routers with USB from the "supported hardware" section of this list.
2) Find a geek and have them set it up for you
3) Profit?
Total cost: ~$150 - $400 in equipment, say $200 for a couple hours of labor. While this doesn't meet the "out of the box" requirement, affinity for tinkering is kind of a defining aspect of being a nerd. If that doesn't describe you, I think you asked on the wrong site. (Or maybe I'm wrong, I don't see the slogan "News for Nerds" anymore... Perhaps I'm still in denial about a focus shift.) But, it is inexpensive, uses hardware from well known companies, and such a setup isn't really complicated if you have any business setting up your own backup system in the first place. Personally, I wouldn't trust the reliability nor security of an end-user system I didn't setup and periodically verify, but that's me.
Drop the year and convert the time and you have the US date system. It's big-endian aside from the optional year and am/pm component that are typically omitted in spoken conversation. The European system never made much sense to me, times are big-endian and dates are little-endian.
I suspect the reason the test was held in India is because Indian call centers are deemed "good enough" for technical support. Voice recognition is also "good enough" in the eyes of our corporate overlords. So, some enterprising fellow had the bright idea to see if one could add a voice recognition module to Cleverbot and avoid paying for a call center at all. This was the test to see if it's practical.
The hilarious thing would be if your lab partner did the same thing first, causing your later submission to be detected as plagiarism. (These services retain a copy so they can expand their database, and even non-plagiarists occasionally submit papers to ensure there aren't any false positives.)
Best solution: if you care and he won't comply, stop being roommates
Realistically, have him use a VPN. They aren't expensive (under $40/year), and there are a few good reasons to use them. For you, the VPN would be in his name and your ISP is none the wiser (aside from bandwidth usage) so you can sleep easy. For him, there's a layer of protection (NOT ABSOLUTE), and the compression tends to help your download speed a bit and upload speed quite a bit. (For me on JPEGs: 20 Mbs down / 1.5 Mbs up to 25 / 4 at the cost of +40 ms worst case latency.)
Trouble convincing him? Use a packet sniffer and start teasing him about his interests in porn or something. Probably a better idea (albeit less comical) is to block bittorrent and his favorite websites at the router, thus forcing him to use your suggestion, and granting you a massive credibility boost if he does get sued.
First off, this is a technical news site, so it shouldn't be trying to cater much for "the average individual", there are plenty of layperson news sites that do that. Going that route will drive off the technically adept commentators, which is the only reason anyone reads Slashdot. (IMHO, it seems that Slashdot is going that way... probably some pointy haired boss is forgetting that increasing the userbase will dilute the quality until it reaches a collapsing point as the niche is destroyed.)
Second, "bars" are neither accurate nor precise, but rather 90% marketing. People use a device more if there are more bars (more battery life left, less likely to drop a call, etc.), so they're programmed quite optimistically and not always honestly. If device A shows four bars when device B shows two then people think device A is better, not wrong.
This is probably one of the few examples of the interstate commerce clause actually being used properly rather than just to expand federal government power through convoluted and contrived rationales. Well, aside from the technicality that Amazon has a physical presence in the state.
It's not Ft. Worth, technically we're 17th by some ranking everyone local cites, but by the list you looked at we're 27th, and known for our low cost of living. I'm certain that minimum wage isn't even 'livable' in many places, but my point is that you may need to make sacrifices to live within your means (e.g. you might not be able to afford living in the same town as your parents). In any case, my calculations assume that someone doesn't gain any employable skills over 40 years of full time work and an even greater amount of leisure time. And, like I said, it's based on a minimalist version of my own finances, which have run ~$1,000 per month ($650 rent + electricity being the major difference) over the past three years, so I know there's a fair amount of accuracy in them.
Inaccuracies may result from the fact that I'm a student and in a somewhat uncommon financial situation as a result. By omitting my school expenses (over twice my living expenses) I may have inadvertently understated expenses elsewhere, such as complementary doctor visits and reduced price dental cleanings. OTOH, the reason I live in a $650 + electricity apartment is because it cuts down my morning walk to ~5 minutes, so errors go both ways.
I'll bite. For reference, I live in the 16th largest city in the US (by whichever measure we rank highest), and this is based on my own finances and memory from shopping around. Minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, so if someone works 160 hours per month that's $1160. A downtown studio apartment costs $350 per month, in a new highrise about a block away from the center of downtown, decently low crime area, with all utilities included. To be realistic, I'll assume a person eats the national average of $7 a day, so ~$200 per month. Health insurance for a young, healthy person who doesn't smoke is $40 per month when I checked last week (100% coverage, $5,000 deductible, $3M maximum). Total monthly expenses: ~$600 per month, throw in incidentals for a round $660, leaving $500/month.
$500/month for 40 years with 2% real interest adds up to $367k, 5% to $763k, 10% to $3.2M. So it's quite possible to save significant amounts of money with even a low wage if you live within your means. You just need to understand what your means are, e.g. don't live in NYC, California, the extremely rural town you were born in, or some other high-cost-of-living area, don't have kids you can't afford, don't pick up expensive habits (TV, smoking, bar hopping, etc.), and don't support money sinks like an unneeded car or house. Financial responsibility is a a prerequisite to gaining wealth.
Of course, it's all a moot point as real interest rates have been near zero or negative for pretty much my whole life. Money saved is money lost with that system, but at least people were able to "afford" a massive loan to buy a house. =/ I pity my generation when we approach retirement as we've been living in a system that encourages living on credit.
Except that the nationalized postal services face a lot of competition from private courier firms who aren't hamstrung with government requirements to provide a universal service and can cherry-pick the best routes.
How are they cherry-picking? I've never seen a major courier refuse to deliver a package to a rural destination, even if that entailed a special 90 minute trip for the driver. There's no way that's profitable at ~$5 per package, yet they do it so they have universal coverage. (Not including the times the driver drops packages off at a person's place of work to avoid said trip.) While I could see couriers doing reduced frequency of delivery to unprofitable routes, they all want to deliver for companies like Amazon whom I'm sure demands they deliver everywhere.
Interestingly, the article sticks with generalities and doesn't go into the specifics of where population growth is occurring and what impact it is having. What we don't want is for a less developed nation to be in a zero sum game for resources and have an expanding population. It's also not good if this growth occurs in poor nations, but is supported by highly developed nations, either directly through international aid or indirectly through immigration (e.g. the US's population growth).
Obviously every life is important, but is the increase in productive members of society or in impoverished people needing support? I.e. are they net producers or net consumers of the world's resources? If it's the former then it's cause to celebrate, but if it's the latter then conditions are going to deteriorate for most people, especially said poor.
China is a bit unusual as they haven't given up on the first approach and adopted the third like almost every other state. Perhaps they realize that their state couldn't maintain the illusion of an open and clean government by western ideals, and that free flow of information tends to normalize world views, so even the Chinese would start questioning their government.
1300 ft/sec = 410 m/s (per TFA) = 920 mph = 1500 km/h
What's sad is that TFA gives the value in m/s, which is a pretty standard physics unit for velocity, so someone had to 'helpfully' convert it to a rather obscure unit. Aside from bullets (niche usage), ft/sec is used for stuff that's slow, much like ft/year is used for tectonic plates; mph is used for transit speeds, and miles per second for astronomic speeds. Don't convert to a smaller unit just to produce bigger numbers, as they are difficult to visualize. I'm seriously tempted to write a greasemonkey script to do these conversions automatically, it's become a theme for Slashdot...
Well, constant acceleration means that you're nearing light speed fairly quickly, and relativistic effects (time dilation and length contraction) kick in. It's been four years since I studied physics, and haven't used it since, so I'll defer to a better explanation than I could give at the moment.
As for why to travel to stars, it's more a matter of what we might find in the future. Right now, if we were on Alpha Centauri, we would probably know about Jupiter or Saturn, but we'd have no idea the Earth existed, it's too small to wobble the star significantly. There could be tons of Earth-like planets orbiting the hundreds of "nearby" stars. With the human species' instinct to explore and multiply, I have little doubt that we'll reach out to the solar system, and eventually other stars before we meet some Malthusian prediction.
No need to violate the laws of physics, if we knew how to build a ship that constantly accelerated at 1G then it'd only take 6.58 years to get there. OTOH, of course it's impossible with today's technology, just as reaching the moon was 42 years ago, or powered flight 67 years before that. Much like with anything else, "I don't know how to do it" is not equivalent to "it cannot be done", so even faster-than-light travel may well be possible when we have a better understanding of physics.
That's not counting your phone, television, and navigation system. Now, IMHO, the real question is whether the future will trend toward diversification or unification. Will we store all of our data on the net, or carry it all on our hip... Either we'll have cloud-based storage with specialized hardware for interacting with each type of data, or consumers will realize that the only real difference between the aforementioned devices is form factor and software limitations.
On Windows and NTFS I restrict the creation of new folders in the Macromedia directories. That way, my progress in flash games can be saved, but my browsing history/cookies aren't stored for other sites. Here's a quick way to set that:
/Deny Everyone:(NP)(AD) /Deny Everyone:(NP)(AD)
icacls "%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\*"
icacls "%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys"
Afterwards, delete the folders for sites you don't care about. Technically, it looks like stuff is also stored in %APPDATA%\Adobe\...\AssetCache, but I'm not quite sure of what's there so I haven't played with it. Standard Unix Permissions let you accomplish much the same thing with other OSes, but it's not as granular.
Now, if browser makers would get on board with the concept of not saving data (e.g. cache, cookies) to disk except for whitelisted sites, then we wouldn't have so many privacy issues. This seems possible in Firefox, but less so in other browsers. IMHO it should be the default, as it improves security, privacy, consistency, reliability, and performance without sacrificing any significant functionality and only requires user intervention on a handful of commonly used sites.
Not so much freedom of speech as freedom of assembly. Either way it's a first amendment issue.
Electric vehicles perhaps, although then you could just move to taxing tires. AFAIK their degradation is correlated to distance traveled and weight carried. Plus tire wear is probably highly correlated with road wear, which is kinda the point.
I'm a medical student rotating through the ER this month, so I've seen a fair number of gunshot wounds. Yesterday there was a guy who shot himself in the leg with a .45, which shattered his tibia. He didn't even realize he'd been hit for a minute, so I think you are quite overestimating the stopping power of non-lethal wounds. Heck, he said the tetanus shot hurt worse than the bullet (I'm certain the adrenaline had a lot to do with that). OTOH, last week there was another guy that got shot in the good-guy area of the shoulder, but the 9mm hit the subclavian artery and he exsanguinated quite quickly. Now, statistically, you're probably right that being shot in the leg would be non-fatal and would stop your assailant, but, IMHO, if I knew I had just one good chance to stop the guy, I'd vastly favor my own survival over his. Thankfully, I live in a state whose laws will back me up on that. (Hypothetically at least, I don't actually own a gun.)
Now, all of this assumes you're a crack shot with a pistol. IIRC, only 12% of shots fired in such situations hit, and only ~4% do so in a lethal area. And, to throw a bone to the gun control crowd, the vast majority of shootings are accidents or suicide attempts. As for my anecdote-based opinion, the guy shot in the subclavian had gone to his ex-wife's house with a BAC of >.3 and she was the one who called EMS after shooting him in the shoulder. The week prior to my arrival an almost identical situation occurred, but this time the ex-wife was unarmed and was brought to the ER after having been beaten to death with a rock. So, yeah, I'm a fan of the second amendment.
and in the U.S. they're usually ignorant racist rednecks.
While I find your point interesting and without egregious error to my superficial reading, I had to chuckle at that last expression. Few people care about being politically correct to white males in America, but it's a little amusing to call a subgroup of a race racist, especially using a racial slur to do so.
It more likely means that no device will ever draw anywhere close to 100W. Laptops are far more common in the consumer market, and draw something like 20W typically (maybe 50 W under load). I highly doubt manufacturers will beef up the power supplies until such high demand peripherals exist, and such peripherals won't exist until laptops can power them. Classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Plus a lot of people like to keep their printer unplugged from the laptop until they need it, which would be cumbersome if you then have to connect an AC adapter to the laptop.