This phenomenon is of course compounded by the fact that nobody ever looks at the sky anymore, so even things that *aren't* unusual get stuffed into 'UFO' if they happen to be seen. I mean, if you live in a city there's not really a *point*, it's just a big mostly black dome with the moon in it sometimes. I went on vacation recently and was stunned to realize that nobody in my entire family recognized the freaking milky way. Not one of them. I can only imagine what they would have thought if they'd seen an irridium flare or something.
A better question then the fuzzy video is why professional astronomers never see UFO's. The answer, of course, is because they're really good at identifying previously unidentified flying objects, and they have the equipment to take a closer look.
Another question is why an alien spacecraft would have exterior lights if they weren't trying to notify the world of their existence, and if they were trying to notify the world of their existence why they wouldn't just hijack one of our television satellites for five minutes.
If you're one of the 99% of people with cellphones who actually are trying to text in class or the 1% required to answer a phone in case of emergency (as in a job at a fire department), then this doesn't help you. Doesn't hurt either - just have to put the phone in a backpack or alter your uniform slightly in a non-visible way.
And if you're one of the fictional people who really do just have their cell phone for emergencies or use after school, the feature you're looking for is the "power" button.
Once upon a time there was a kid in charge of watching a flock to protect it from wolves. He got bored and cried 'wolf'. Everyone came running, but there was no wolf and the kid laughed at the gullible townspeople. He did this three times. Then one day there really was a wolf. He cried 'wolf' again, but this time nobody responded. Half a dozen sheep - and the boy - were killed.
What's the moral of the story (the real moral, not the 'story for kids' moral)? Don't put someone in charge of your stuff if you don't trust them. Seriously, you should trust them because if you don't they can't do their job properly. Or at *best* the actual people doing it won't like you and may go out of their way to screw you within their contract.
Ugh, why would anyone want to grow human flesh intended for consumption? (And no, I'm not going to LTT75MFA (listen to the 75-minute fucking article).)
If it achieves de-facto monopoly status, it'll be required to not deliberately lock IE out, and it may also be required to not limit access to the underlying API if that would give a significant advantage to google's browser.
But no, it won't be required to completely rewrite its underlying structure such that a windows executable runs on its OS. It also won't be required to go through the "IE for Chrome" bug report list and fix all the ones that don't exist on windows. What a stupid question.
Apple offers a higher quality product for more money. You're never going to get rid of the 'cheap' solution by offering a more expensive one, even if it's better. Chrome, as I understand it, would be free.
Of course, linux as a whole is free as well, and there are even distributions supported by major vendors and *it* hasn't gotten rid of MS, which might have been a better point at which to start. Then again, google has name-recognition on par with MS, and it already has an OS some people use in the form of Andriod. It's possible that if people like Android and it gets on some really popular phones, Google might have a chance at getting a significant market share on Chrome. Or not.
Hrm... I've got three slashdot pages open right now in two windows with a total of 15 extensions and I'm at 103MB memory. So... nope. There's something else going on.
I tend to agree. While you can get far more science per dollar by sticking a person in mars orbit and dropping probes for a few weeks then you can for actually putting a man on mars itself... well there are two problems with that analysis. The first is that even probes that are remote-controlled without the 14 minute lag have a very limited capacity to deal with the unexpected. "Hey look, there's something interesting under that rock! Unfortunately, none of our arms are capable of lifting ten pounds, so there's absolutely nothing we can do." Given the same number of missions rather then the same amount of money, you get more bang for your buck by sticking someone on the surface.
The other reason is the one you already mentioned. While you may get more science for your buck with robots, you get more bucks for your science if you manage to capture public attention. If you tell the public "we're going to put someone in mars orbit and land a robotic probe" they're going to say "why aren't we landing a *person*? We were able to do that half a century ago! What are we paying you for again...?". If you say "we need another billion dollars to accomplish our goal of PUTTING AN AMERICAN ON MARS" they'll say "Cool! Do you take personal checks?" Well, to a certain extent, obviously.
Ubuntu does reasonably well with this. They get the catchy name *and* obvious order by coming up with names associated with a letter, in alphabetical order. Jaunty is more recent then Feisty because "J" comes after "F".
And then they also stick the month and year on as the version number, which I thought was a good idea. 9.04 Jaunty is more recent then 7.04 Feisty because "J" comes after "F" and "April 2009" comes after "April 2007".
And finally you get an "about" page that lists both the name and the number.
Oh yes, the OP mentioned temperature differentials as a seperate point that he didn't understand where the power came from.
And as for hydroelectric... well I'd usually call it "hydroelectric" rather then "gravity", but I suppose it's accurate.
Which also brings to mind the several tidal power generators which are a more sort of secondary gravity power - power from the moon. For that one you have to get *really* technical to say it's solar power, like on the order of nuclear (well, the radioactive molecules that power nuclear were made in the heart of a star, right?) if not worse.
Did you just say gravity is convoluted solar power? Afraid I have to disagree there - to get any power from gravity you have to drop something. To drop something you have to lift it. No net power gained from gravity. So... there wasn't any power to 'come from the sun'.
As for the other things in the OP... windmills have an insignificant effect on wind. Solar panels have an insignificant effect on heat, especially since they're almost never used in a place where they'll give shade to plants or wildlife (the roofs of buildings, the middle of the desert, etc).
You seem confused about the source of energy in a heat exchange. The source of energy here isn't temperature, it's temperature *differential* or entropy. You can't generate energy directly from heat, you have to use it to heat *something* where the thing you're heating (obviously) isn't as hot as the thing doing the heating. So, yes, these do discharge some waste heat back into the ocean, but that's because they're not perfect. (Ideally you'd use the 'warm' water in conjunction with more cold water to produce 'lukewarm' water, and repeat this until there was no difference between the 'warm' water and the 'cold' water, but for the same amount of machinery and overhead it's easier to just use 'hot' and 'cold' again as long as you have unlimited sources of both.)
Honestly, the proper answer is that "atheism" doesn't mean "absolute certainty that god doesn't exist" as many religious people would have you believe.
Personally, I think "I don't have any particular reason to believe that the universe requires a divine creator" plus "I don't see any actual evidence that a divine creator exists" is enough to qualify as atheism. I held the view that I was agnostic for a few months, and my actual views didn't change between then and when I started describing myself as an atheist. Since then I've become more certain, of course, as it became easier to look at the evidence provided by "new atheists" once I lumped myself into the "atheist" category. Almost any "atheist" would admit there's a *chance* that there's a creator deity, but they don't believe in one given no evidence that one *actually* exists.
No. Remember the moon mission? Remember the rocket we strapped to the lander to get it into lunar orbit? Yea, we'd need a bigger one to push the lander actually out of earth orbit. And of course the ISS is larger then the lunar lander. To burn it up in the atmosphere, though... well it needs periodic boosts to *not* burn up in the atmosphere. We of course would like to pick when and where exactly it falls, so there will be a little push at the end, but nowhere what we'd need to get it out of earth orbit.
Besides, why *not* burn it in the atmosphere? Not like it's dangerous when we do it on purpose - satellites burn up entirely and something big like the ISS will end up in a few square miles of open ocean after a few days of warnings. And a space station in sun orbit instead of earth orbit... would be as useful as one lying burnt at the bottom of the pacific. I suppose one at a L4/5 could be useful, but only if we had plans/reasons to visit periodically. No, the most useful place for the ISS is just where it is.
Honestly, NASA probably just wants more money. Space travel is expensive, and we want them to hold the ISS in orbit, go to the moon, and keep launching satellites and whatnot. If they don't have enough money, one of them has to go, as this is a not-so-subtle reminder of.
Well, it's easier to explain then 330. Take a couple who actually don't accept evolution. Add a few who didn't take the poll seriously and/or deliberately screwed with it (even among scientists...). Add a few who aren't actually scientists. And then throw medical doctors (I actually looked at the survey and my brief glance leads me to believe they really did include doctors as scientists, which skews the religious affiliations way out of whack).
Reading further into the study, it seems that "87%" said that life evolved *and* it was natural processes, a further 8% said that life evolved but was guided by god, and only 2% said life has existed since the begging of time in its present form.
*That* I can accept. More then 8% of scientists believe in god, so it's not unreasonably for them to say that any given natural process is guided by god. 2% pure creationists still seems a little on the high side, but I guess it isn't unreasonable for some valid definitions of "scientist" plus the typical "screw with the poll" people that you always end up with in any sort of poll.
As for your deistic opinions... well, it's far more valid then creationism and you're in relatively good company historically, but I've got to wonder *why* you believe in god as a tautology.
If I had to guess, it's "because I've always done so, and everyone else is doing it and I can concoct a scenario where it's not logically inconsistent". But... I haven't heard an honest reason why one would choose to believe in the deistic god over no god at all that wasn't either pre-darwin or "we can't explain this yet, therefore goddidit." I entertained a deistic view briefly, but then I thought "wait, why do I believe an intelligent being that itself isn't the result of evolution created the universe instead of a natural process?" And when I had no answer, I decided that 'atheist' was a better description of my philosophical outlook then 'deist' or 'agnostic'. I don't say "there is absolutely no way a deity created the universe" but I do say "I don't have any reason to prefer a deity over natural explanations, so lacking evidence I choose the simpler answer."
Yea, if we suddenly lost our ability to produce food, this would mean the rich people who can afford the treatment... well they'd still eat because they're rich, actually. Oh, but if we had a worldwide technical Apocalypse... well then people who had this treatment would die more often then others! Which isn't a problem at all since 'who gets this treatment' doesn't include a significant portion of any genetic cross-section.
You do realize this is modifying a living thing's liver, right? It isn't like a modified cold virus that spreads a genetic modification, permanently giving this trait to the entire human race. You don't even pass it on to your kids, since it isn't a modification to eggs or sperm or the cells that produce them.
Also, I'm sure that if someone were able to make a virus that spread genetic changes to the whole population, they'd also probably be able to figure out a way to make it trigger only when you had an amount of fat that was more dangerous then the temporary inability to retain more fat. For example, they could modify fat cells to produce a chemical that when present in sufficient concentrations triggered the gene that made a person breathe out fat as CO2. That would be effectively a cap on how much fat one could retain, which if set at a good level would ensure the ability to retain fat sufficient for survival without retaining so much you die of obesity complications.
Which is something I though of when I was like 12. Evolution never had a need to cap fat retention, since no population has ever had the problem of "I have way too much easy food and I don't get enough exercise" for any length of time. There are all kinds of cascading reactions in the body triggered by certain quantities of proteins, so I can't imagine it'd be more difficult then the delivery mechanism and the change itself...
Yar, I prefer the GW model of skill. You take a week or two to level up, pretty much an extended tutorial and gradual easing into the real game. By that time you also have the best armor and weapons you're going to get. After that to get better you have to... get better. Picking a good personal and team build for what you're doing is certainly a big help and you could argue that the next way to "level up" is just to learn all the skills and mechanics...
But then you get into PvP and you realize that two teams with the exact same weapons, armor, skills, and attributes can still be horribly unequal.
1.) True, and they should certainly consider escape into the wild a certainty.
2.) Factual, but human-modified genes are no more inherently risky then natural mutations - just we do it faster.
3.) Ah ha! I've got you here - we'll just overfish this particular kind. No limits, nothing. Just give them some obvious mark for ease of sorting, and we'll have no problem hunting them to extinction if we must.
Your closing paragraph is the worst. It's wrong to improve our food per acre and food per hour of work? So we should go back to hunter-gatherer where everyone spends every minute of their life getting food? Because everything we've done since then from making farms to mechanical harvesters lets us get more food for more people with fewer resources. I'm afraid your argument just doesn't hold water.
During the video he says he's using less then 1 Mb/s connection speed, though he doesn't say how much he actually has available. On the FAQ page he says the server is 800 miles away, but that he has a 21 ms ping.
It does also seem to me that fullscreen means more bandwidth. All that's going his way is the video, but streaming full-screen video is obviously more bandwidth intensive then streaming a lower resolution.
He crashes into the wall because he's stopped playing, as far as I can tell. I suspect he's using a gamepad or something, because playing mario cart with a mouse just isn't feasible. I assume he set the gamepad down, and then a second or so later we see the mouse going to the "close" button. And I believe that it's only downloading ROM's that's illegal. The emulator itself and using your own ROMs should both be fair use.
Honestly, I like the idea of remote-running programs - I'd assumed that's the way things would end up going as soon as I heard people actually buying netbooks. I think it's something I'll use extensively eventually. Of course, I completely reject the idea of letting someone else host them for me - I suspect eventually people will have home servers plus netbooks or something like that. So I won't be using *this* service, but I don't doubt that I'll eventually be running something like it. Also I'm certain I won't be running photoshop inside flash inside firefox. If this sort of thing gets popular there will be a custom application for it.
The notation for homeopathic dilution is #X where 1/(10^#) is the percent concentration of the "active" ingredient. Typical strengths of 10X or even 100X are so small that they have no effect. In Ziacam, however, the active ingredient is Zinc, and the dilution is 2X. A 1% solution isn't dilute enough to completely discount effects when you're spraying it into your nose several times a day for several weeks.
Basically, zicam only calls itself homeopathic (and it may have other "ingredients" diluted to homeopathic amounts), it isn't *actually* homeopathic. Calling yourself homeopathic when you're not is crazy enough that I had to verify this a few years ago...
The "growth" argument is deeply flawed. The problem... is the birthrate. A.4% annual growth rate implies 4000+ more people being born then dying every *hour* when there's 10 billion people on the planet. To use space expansion to alleviate growth, therefor, you'd have to send thousands of people off every hour of every day... and I don't ever see that happening.
I'll have to agree with cell phones. I normally wouldn't advocate giving one to a kid, but if you're worried about her getting lost, it's probably the best solution.
Sure, you *could* inject a GPS device in her... but seriously? You'd inject a computer that broadcasts her position when there was another solution? No, pick up a cheap cell phone and teach her to use it. You can even have the phone company triangulate the position if she doesn't/can't call for some reason.
A cell phone isn't "perfect" in that she could lose it or have it taken from her, but it's not an invasion of privacy nearly as much as clapping a tracking chip on her like an animal in a wildlife show... Teach her her address, phone number, 911, and such, and then put them all in her phone anyway. Also, maybe teach her which bus to get on? I'm assuming your school system has the same kids on the same bus every day, which I guess might be unmerited but every such system I've seen has had at least consistent numbering...
Slashdot Mirror
Well yes, that's the point. The person who made this thought Obama wasn't socialist *enough*. Or so I'm given to understand.
This phenomenon is of course compounded by the fact that nobody ever looks at the sky anymore, so even things that *aren't* unusual get stuffed into 'UFO' if they happen to be seen. I mean, if you live in a city there's not really a *point*, it's just a big mostly black dome with the moon in it sometimes. I went on vacation recently and was stunned to realize that nobody in my entire family recognized the freaking milky way. Not one of them. I can only imagine what they would have thought if they'd seen an irridium flare or something.
A better question then the fuzzy video is why professional astronomers never see UFO's. The answer, of course, is because they're really good at identifying previously unidentified flying objects, and they have the equipment to take a closer look.
Another question is why an alien spacecraft would have exterior lights if they weren't trying to notify the world of their existence, and if they were trying to notify the world of their existence why they wouldn't just hijack one of our television satellites for five minutes.
If you're one of the 99% of people with cellphones who actually are trying to text in class or the 1% required to answer a phone in case of emergency (as in a job at a fire department), then this doesn't help you. Doesn't hurt either - just have to put the phone in a backpack or alter your uniform slightly in a non-visible way.
And if you're one of the fictional people who really do just have their cell phone for emergencies or use after school, the feature you're looking for is the "power" button.
Once upon a time there was a kid in charge of watching a flock to protect it from wolves. He got bored and cried 'wolf'. Everyone came running, but there was no wolf and the kid laughed at the gullible townspeople. He did this three times. Then one day there really was a wolf. He cried 'wolf' again, but this time nobody responded. Half a dozen sheep - and the boy - were killed.
What's the moral of the story (the real moral, not the 'story for kids' moral)? Don't put someone in charge of your stuff if you don't trust them. Seriously, you should trust them because if you don't they can't do their job properly. Or at *best* the actual people doing it won't like you and may go out of their way to screw you within their contract.
Ugh, why would anyone want to grow human flesh intended for consumption? (And no, I'm not going to LTT75MFA (listen to the 75-minute fucking article).)
If it achieves de-facto monopoly status, it'll be required to not deliberately lock IE out, and it may also be required to not limit access to the underlying API if that would give a significant advantage to google's browser.
But no, it won't be required to completely rewrite its underlying structure such that a windows executable runs on its OS. It also won't be required to go through the "IE for Chrome" bug report list and fix all the ones that don't exist on windows. What a stupid question.
Apple offers a higher quality product for more money. You're never going to get rid of the 'cheap' solution by offering a more expensive one, even if it's better. Chrome, as I understand it, would be free.
Of course, linux as a whole is free as well, and there are even distributions supported by major vendors and *it* hasn't gotten rid of MS, which might have been a better point at which to start. Then again, google has name-recognition on par with MS, and it already has an OS some people use in the form of Andriod. It's possible that if people like Android and it gets on some really popular phones, Google might have a chance at getting a significant market share on Chrome. Or not.
No, no, no. That's an off-site *mirror*, not a backup. Just... hyperdimensional RAID 1.
Hrm... I've got three slashdot pages open right now in two windows with a total of 15 extensions and I'm at 103MB memory. So... nope. There's something else going on.
I tend to agree. While you can get far more science per dollar by sticking a person in mars orbit and dropping probes for a few weeks then you can for actually putting a man on mars itself... well there are two problems with that analysis. The first is that even probes that are remote-controlled without the 14 minute lag have a very limited capacity to deal with the unexpected. "Hey look, there's something interesting under that rock! Unfortunately, none of our arms are capable of lifting ten pounds, so there's absolutely nothing we can do." Given the same number of missions rather then the same amount of money, you get more bang for your buck by sticking someone on the surface.
The other reason is the one you already mentioned. While you may get more science for your buck with robots, you get more bucks for your science if you manage to capture public attention. If you tell the public "we're going to put someone in mars orbit and land a robotic probe" they're going to say "why aren't we landing a *person*? We were able to do that half a century ago! What are we paying you for again...?". If you say "we need another billion dollars to accomplish our goal of PUTTING AN AMERICAN ON MARS" they'll say "Cool! Do you take personal checks?" Well, to a certain extent, obviously.
Ubuntu does reasonably well with this. They get the catchy name *and* obvious order by coming up with names associated with a letter, in alphabetical order. Jaunty is more recent then Feisty because "J" comes after "F".
And then they also stick the month and year on as the version number, which I thought was a good idea. 9.04 Jaunty is more recent then 7.04 Feisty because "J" comes after "F" and "April 2009" comes after "April 2007".
And finally you get an "about" page that lists both the name and the number.
Oh yes, the OP mentioned temperature differentials as a seperate point that he didn't understand where the power came from.
And as for hydroelectric... well I'd usually call it "hydroelectric" rather then "gravity", but I suppose it's accurate.
Which also brings to mind the several tidal power generators which are a more sort of secondary gravity power - power from the moon. For that one you have to get *really* technical to say it's solar power, like on the order of nuclear (well, the radioactive molecules that power nuclear were made in the heart of a star, right?) if not worse.
Did you just say gravity is convoluted solar power? Afraid I have to disagree there - to get any power from gravity you have to drop something. To drop something you have to lift it. No net power gained from gravity. So... there wasn't any power to 'come from the sun'.
As for the other things in the OP... windmills have an insignificant effect on wind. Solar panels have an insignificant effect on heat, especially since they're almost never used in a place where they'll give shade to plants or wildlife (the roofs of buildings, the middle of the desert, etc).
You seem confused about the source of energy in a heat exchange. The source of energy here isn't temperature, it's temperature *differential* or entropy. You can't generate energy directly from heat, you have to use it to heat *something* where the thing you're heating (obviously) isn't as hot as the thing doing the heating. So, yes, these do discharge some waste heat back into the ocean, but that's because they're not perfect. (Ideally you'd use the 'warm' water in conjunction with more cold water to produce 'lukewarm' water, and repeat this until there was no difference between the 'warm' water and the 'cold' water, but for the same amount of machinery and overhead it's easier to just use 'hot' and 'cold' again as long as you have unlimited sources of both.)
Honestly, the proper answer is that "atheism" doesn't mean "absolute certainty that god doesn't exist" as many religious people would have you believe.
Personally, I think "I don't have any particular reason to believe that the universe requires a divine creator" plus "I don't see any actual evidence that a divine creator exists" is enough to qualify as atheism. I held the view that I was agnostic for a few months, and my actual views didn't change between then and when I started describing myself as an atheist. Since then I've become more certain, of course, as it became easier to look at the evidence provided by "new atheists" once I lumped myself into the "atheist" category. Almost any "atheist" would admit there's a *chance* that there's a creator deity, but they don't believe in one given no evidence that one *actually* exists.
"Isn't it feasible to send them into space?"
No. Remember the moon mission? Remember the rocket we strapped to the lander to get it into lunar orbit? Yea, we'd need a bigger one to push the lander actually out of earth orbit. And of course the ISS is larger then the lunar lander. To burn it up in the atmosphere, though... well it needs periodic boosts to *not* burn up in the atmosphere. We of course would like to pick when and where exactly it falls, so there will be a little push at the end, but nowhere what we'd need to get it out of earth orbit.
Besides, why *not* burn it in the atmosphere? Not like it's dangerous when we do it on purpose - satellites burn up entirely and something big like the ISS will end up in a few square miles of open ocean after a few days of warnings. And a space station in sun orbit instead of earth orbit... would be as useful as one lying burnt at the bottom of the pacific. I suppose one at a L4/5 could be useful, but only if we had plans/reasons to visit periodically. No, the most useful place for the ISS is just where it is.
Honestly, NASA probably just wants more money. Space travel is expensive, and we want them to hold the ISS in orbit, go to the moon, and keep launching satellites and whatnot. If they don't have enough money, one of them has to go, as this is a not-so-subtle reminder of.
Well, it's easier to explain then 330. Take a couple who actually don't accept evolution. Add a few who didn't take the poll seriously and/or deliberately screwed with it (even among scientists...). Add a few who aren't actually scientists. And then throw medical doctors (I actually looked at the survey and my brief glance leads me to believe they really did include doctors as scientists, which skews the religious affiliations way out of whack).
Reading further into the study, it seems that "87%" said that life evolved *and* it was natural processes, a further 8% said that life evolved but was guided by god, and only 2% said life has existed since the begging of time in its present form.
*That* I can accept. More then 8% of scientists believe in god, so it's not unreasonably for them to say that any given natural process is guided by god. 2% pure creationists still seems a little on the high side, but I guess it isn't unreasonable for some valid definitions of "scientist" plus the typical "screw with the poll" people that you always end up with in any sort of poll.
As for your deistic opinions... well, it's far more valid then creationism and you're in relatively good company historically, but I've got to wonder *why* you believe in god as a tautology.
If I had to guess, it's "because I've always done so, and everyone else is doing it and I can concoct a scenario where it's not logically inconsistent". But... I haven't heard an honest reason why one would choose to believe in the deistic god over no god at all that wasn't either pre-darwin or "we can't explain this yet, therefore goddidit." I entertained a deistic view briefly, but then I thought "wait, why do I believe an intelligent being that itself isn't the result of evolution created the universe instead of a natural process?" And when I had no answer, I decided that 'atheist' was a better description of my philosophical outlook then 'deist' or 'agnostic'. I don't say "there is absolutely no way a deity created the universe" but I do say "I don't have any reason to prefer a deity over natural explanations, so lacking evidence I choose the simpler answer."
Hrm... I'd like to see exactly how they arrived at *that* number...
They're not counting engineers as scientists, are they?
Yea, if we suddenly lost our ability to produce food, this would mean the rich people who can afford the treatment... well they'd still eat because they're rich, actually. Oh, but if we had a worldwide technical Apocalypse... well then people who had this treatment would die more often then others! Which isn't a problem at all since 'who gets this treatment' doesn't include a significant portion of any genetic cross-section.
You do realize this is modifying a living thing's liver, right? It isn't like a modified cold virus that spreads a genetic modification, permanently giving this trait to the entire human race. You don't even pass it on to your kids, since it isn't a modification to eggs or sperm or the cells that produce them.
Also, I'm sure that if someone were able to make a virus that spread genetic changes to the whole population, they'd also probably be able to figure out a way to make it trigger only when you had an amount of fat that was more dangerous then the temporary inability to retain more fat. For example, they could modify fat cells to produce a chemical that when present in sufficient concentrations triggered the gene that made a person breathe out fat as CO2. That would be effectively a cap on how much fat one could retain, which if set at a good level would ensure the ability to retain fat sufficient for survival without retaining so much you die of obesity complications.
Which is something I though of when I was like 12. Evolution never had a need to cap fat retention, since no population has ever had the problem of "I have way too much easy food and I don't get enough exercise" for any length of time. There are all kinds of cascading reactions in the body triggered by certain quantities of proteins, so I can't imagine it'd be more difficult then the delivery mechanism and the change itself...
Yar, I prefer the GW model of skill. You take a week or two to level up, pretty much an extended tutorial and gradual easing into the real game. By that time you also have the best armor and weapons you're going to get. After that to get better you have to... get better. Picking a good personal and team build for what you're doing is certainly a big help and you could argue that the next way to "level up" is just to learn all the skills and mechanics...
But then you get into PvP and you realize that two teams with the exact same weapons, armor, skills, and attributes can still be horribly unequal.
1.) True, and they should certainly consider escape into the wild a certainty.
2.) Factual, but human-modified genes are no more inherently risky then natural mutations - just we do it faster.
3.) Ah ha! I've got you here - we'll just overfish this particular kind. No limits, nothing. Just give them some obvious mark for ease of sorting, and we'll have no problem hunting them to extinction if we must.
Your closing paragraph is the worst. It's wrong to improve our food per acre and food per hour of work? So we should go back to hunter-gatherer where everyone spends every minute of their life getting food? Because everything we've done since then from making farms to mechanical harvesters lets us get more food for more people with fewer resources. I'm afraid your argument just doesn't hold water.
During the video he says he's using less then 1 Mb/s connection speed, though he doesn't say how much he actually has available. On the FAQ page he says the server is 800 miles away, but that he has a 21 ms ping.
It does also seem to me that fullscreen means more bandwidth. All that's going his way is the video, but streaming full-screen video is obviously more bandwidth intensive then streaming a lower resolution.
He crashes into the wall because he's stopped playing, as far as I can tell. I suspect he's using a gamepad or something, because playing mario cart with a mouse just isn't feasible. I assume he set the gamepad down, and then a second or so later we see the mouse going to the "close" button. And I believe that it's only downloading ROM's that's illegal. The emulator itself and using your own ROMs should both be fair use.
Honestly, I like the idea of remote-running programs - I'd assumed that's the way things would end up going as soon as I heard people actually buying netbooks. I think it's something I'll use extensively eventually. Of course, I completely reject the idea of letting someone else host them for me - I suspect eventually people will have home servers plus netbooks or something like that. So I won't be using *this* service, but I don't doubt that I'll eventually be running something like it. Also I'm certain I won't be running photoshop inside flash inside firefox. If this sort of thing gets popular there will be a custom application for it.
The notation for homeopathic dilution is #X where 1/(10^#) is the percent concentration of the "active" ingredient. Typical strengths of 10X or even 100X are so small that they have no effect. In Ziacam, however, the active ingredient is Zinc, and the dilution is 2X. A 1% solution isn't dilute enough to completely discount effects when you're spraying it into your nose several times a day for several weeks.
Basically, zicam only calls itself homeopathic (and it may have other "ingredients" diluted to homeopathic amounts), it isn't *actually* homeopathic. Calling yourself homeopathic when you're not is crazy enough that I had to verify this a few years ago...
The "growth" argument is deeply flawed. The problem... is the birthrate. A .4% annual growth rate implies 4000+ more people being born then dying every *hour* when there's 10 billion people on the planet. To use space expansion to alleviate growth, therefor, you'd have to send thousands of people off every hour of every day... and I don't ever see that happening.
The other two are better, of course.
I'll have to agree with cell phones. I normally wouldn't advocate giving one to a kid, but if you're worried about her getting lost, it's probably the best solution. Sure, you *could* inject a GPS device in her... but seriously? You'd inject a computer that broadcasts her position when there was another solution? No, pick up a cheap cell phone and teach her to use it. You can even have the phone company triangulate the position if she doesn't/can't call for some reason. A cell phone isn't "perfect" in that she could lose it or have it taken from her, but it's not an invasion of privacy nearly as much as clapping a tracking chip on her like an animal in a wildlife show... Teach her her address, phone number, 911, and such, and then put them all in her phone anyway. Also, maybe teach her which bus to get on? I'm assuming your school system has the same kids on the same bus every day, which I guess might be unmerited but every such system I've seen has had at least consistent numbering...