(never met a ceo that I didn't have to count my hands after I shook his.)
I have. His name was Dave Packard. Back when HP was a real company they used to have company picnics and sometimes he'd come out to the Colorado picnic and help cook hot dogs. He didn't NEED to cook hot dogs, but it gave him a chance to talk to everyone, including the people whose jobs consisted of winding transformers or running the sheet metal stamps... back when HP actually MADE stuff.
Of course, he was proud of the fact that as CEO he made less than five times the starting salary of an engineer, because he felt it was his duty to the company that employed him to put money back into the company rather than into his pocket.
Flying boats have the distinct advantage of a really awesome ability to crash-land gracefully in areas that have a lot of water. They, along with floatplanes, also do a pretty good job landing in snow. In comparison, a Learjet sucks in both water and snow landings, but excels at landing on level paved 5000 foot long runways... of which there are about 6 in the entire state of Alaska.
Give me a flying boat any day of the week in scary terrain, thanks.
Show me the enzyme which can convert carbon dioxide and water to hydrocarbon fuel, instead... right now we need the whole organism to do it, it'd be a lot simpler if it was just one enzyme.
Enzymes are like UNIX: one tool to solve one problem. You're asking for a Windows solution. One of the many benefits of having enzymes that only catalyze one or possibly two steps in a reaction is that they're much easier to regulate, individually and as a system, since you can use feedback and feedforward, based on the concentration of the reactants and products, so you can get a system that works like a manufacturing kanban system. Another benefit is that small enzymes are easier to make and last longer than a huge giant macroenzyme that can do a bunch of steps all in one. It might also be nice to have enzymes that can each operate at optimal efficiency, which might require batch processing or linking the enzymes to sequential parts of a flow process, so you can have local variations in chemistry and temperature to get them to work better. There might also be some diffusion-limiting problems with macroenzymes, but I'd have to do more reading about that.
Yes, it's a hassle, but if we engineer bacteria to dump useful enzymes out into solution using the same pathways they currently use to dump proteins useful to them out into solution, it's not SUCH a hassle.
However, with all that said, plants and bacteria convert carbon dioxide into complex carbon chains all the time, and the pathways they use are quite well-understood. It's neat to hear about a new pathway, but it's not much of a surprise.
If Helium rises because it is less dense, would it be possible to force a balloon open, using some sort of supports, and end up with essentially a balloon filled with nothing, and thus able to rise? Or is this beyond current material science?
I tried to calculate this a couple years ago, and using metal with an excellent strength/weight ratio -- Aermet 310 -- and a spherical model with stiffening ribs, I couldn't find any viable solution: no matter how large the diameter of the sphere, the weight of the metal required to contain the vacuum against the external air pressure was greater than the vessel buoyancy, and I went up into kilometer-radius ranges.
I didn't try it with composites because that's a lot harder to make valid design assumptions, and frankly my mathematics skills are rubbish, but I'd be interested in hearing anyone else's data on this.
If you're interested in reading a 1980's review of efforts to make lighter-than-air lifting bodies, airships, and combinations of them, one of my favorite books is John McPhee's "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed", which goes into considerable detail about the development of a blended-body lighter-than-air airfoil, but also discusses the use of blimps and dirigibles in the 1940's and 1950's. He's got some great stuff in there about their icing capabilities, too: airplanes fall out of the sky with 3 cm of ice over their wings, while US Navy blimps were able to survive ten times that amount of ice during ice storms that stopped all other East Coast transport. (Apparently the main problem with picking up 30 cm of ice, besides them heading downwards in a gentle manner, was that it would sheet off asymmetrically and the airship would have handling problems until a bunch more fell off the other side.)
Shipping them costs roughly 35 dollars each way, so consider what it's worth to you. I could get you a service manual and operational test manual as a pdf if you think you're up for poking around yourself. (stay away from the video section, although you have to get in there with a screwdriver and pry under a rubber seal to actually contact the high voltage section.)
The 9450 -- well, all the 9400's -- have several voltage rails and rely on one being correct to bring up all the remaining ones. If that one's not quite in spec, the other ones will go wandering (which can actually damage a lot of stuff.) My guess is that reseating the processor card (it has a big fat 68020 on it), timebase card, and both the channel amplifier cards is likely to fix it, but if those don't the power supply group is the next most likely. I am making the assumption that what you mean by power cycles/boot is that you turn it on and the fans come on, but you don't hear the relays clicking or see the lights start blinking.
But, yeah, I'd take a look at it. If it still runs accurately when it comes up, it's almost certainly something simple and easy to fix, and I have a 9450 to compare it to. (The -A is almost identical.) I'd be glad to do my best to walk you through repair by email, because shipping's so expensive, but if you'd prefer I'd be willing to try to fix it too.
I have a sort of side-business buying LeCroy 9400-series oscilloscopes off ebay, fixing them, and reselling them. They're great machines and you can find operator and service manuals, and you can get yourself a 400MHz scope for under $400. Likewise, the older Tektronix scopes, like the 2465, are truly excellent and in the same general bandwidth range.
One reason I mention these is because newer scopes, particularly the Tek 3000-series, while incredibly useful because of their size, weight, and connectivity (they have a linux-based OS that includes a webserver so you can plug one in with a cat5 and control it from your desk remotely: pure awesome!) are just about impossible to repair. Everything, *everything* is in custom silicon. On a LeCroy you can swap out the input amps if you burn one, swap out the timebase card or the A/D cards for each channel. It's like working with an old PC, as opposed to an ipod.
Also, budget for probes. Get probes rated for at least 1.5 times the scope's bandwidth: usually people ship probes that have the same bandwidth as the scope's max, but the spec on them actually means they're at something like -3dB and pretty fuzzy at that bandwidth. I got 500's for my 350mhz scope and they're beautiful. A lot of people sell broken probes and I've found, in the three I've purchased, that in every case it was a broken solderjoint where the probe cable met the board that attaches to the scope BNC. I reflowed it (no added solder for fear it'd mess with the tuning) and got three new probes for cheap.
There are people selling vintage scopes on ebay that have NIST certification, if that's important to you, but you can also get it independently certified if you need it. Newark.com has cal services, to my surprise. (They're who we use at work.)
I personally dislike Yokogawa scopes because their interface doesn't make sense to me. I can sit down at an Agilent or Tek or LeCroy and get it to do what I want pretty quickly (digital LeCroys are weird about horizontal offset) but Yokogawas I spend a lot of time reading the manual. But they're nicely engineered.
The USB scopes I've used were disappointments to me: the $ per mhz isn't competitive with a used scope, and they're typically pretty tied to the company software, which might not do what you want.
Did you read her paper? She might be a raw food eating english major but she's doing better statistical analysis than people who are paid to do so. You don't need a PhD in math to do science any more than you need a PhD in computer science to be a programmer.
I recently saw the travelling King Tutankhamen exhibit and got to reading a bit about their technology. Besides being able to organize and motivate well enough to build the Great Pyramid, which required cutting, transporting, and installing twelve 3 ton blocks per hour, every hour, for 20 years, they knew about prime and perfect numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, first-order linear equations, and summing linear and arithmetic sequences. They knew about pi and calculated it to about five digits, and could calculate the surface area of hemispheres and the volume of frustrums, which means they could do integral calculus (although they didn't realize that's what they were doing.)
I'll see your out-of-our-league smart pretty physicist, and raise you an out-of-our-league smart pretty biologist/statistician. On the one hand, le sigh, but on the other hand, it's wonderful that such people exist.
So the gasoline engine is just a huge heavy lump of metal it has to drag around wasting it's range....
Yes, just like the air conditioner and the heater and the radio and the bumpers and the windshield. There are lots of features cars have that are only sometimes necessary or useful and waste fuel the rest of the time.
Do people not understand that bell curves describe populations not outcomes? When you take a driver's license test you pass or fail, you don't get an A or a C. If everyone who takes the driver's test answers enough questions correctly, then everyone passes. There's no bell curve to a driver's license test. There's no intrinsic reason that educational test results have to result in a normal distribution.
My grandmother wanted her dream car so my granddad bought her a 1961 Olds Starfire with the high-performance engine, which at the time was one of the classiest domestic cars that existed. She got it in bright pink. She loved it. Five years later when they went to trade it in on a newer car, the salesman said it was in perfect shape, low mileage, and over the Blue Book value, but because of the color he'd only give her $1000 less than the Blue Book value, which was roughly a 50% price cut. She was incredibly offended, so they declined to trade it in, and tried to sell it on their own. They advertised it for a year and ended up selling it for even less than the salesman had offered, to a guy who said he was going to get it repainted.
This reminds me of one of the IT guys where I work. When I was tasked with setting up a new server for my research group, he loaned me a screwdriver...and it was pink. He said he had held on to it since the early 80s, because nobody wanted a pink screwdriver.
I dated a woman who is a brilliant mechanical engineer. She'd painted pink stripes on all of her tools using nail polish for exactly this reason. Utterly identifiable, and nobody but her would be caught dead using them.
Likewise I have friends riding high-end titanium bike frames that they've covered in duct tape and spraypaint, and nobody messes with them, preferring to steal beautiful mid-range Bianchis and the like.
BTW, if you get out the OM-1, be sure and check the foam light seals on the back. I have a 1977 version and the foam is decaying severely. and bear in mind that you can't get the batteries for the meter any more - they make some replacements but most of them don't put out the right voltage.
I've made a couple replacement battery packs for these, using a quite small silver battery with very carefully selected germanium diodes to get the right voltage; it's possible to fit the combination of the battery and diode into the same form factor as the old mercury or other batteries. You need to get your voltage right to within about 50mV to make the meter accurate, but cheap diodes have enough variation you can manage this. (I'm not yet sure how their precision holds up long-term, however.)
In fact, it will likely be less detrimental than alcohol, and that's already legal.
A lot of people get belligerent and violent when drunk. I'd rather have them stoned. For the rest of us normal people, I don't know why the government would or even should care if I have a drink or a couple of puffs of pot. They should just mind their own business and go find something useful to occupy themselves with. To be frank I think the illicit market for dealing in contraband is far more detrimental than the contraband itself - at least for things like booze and pot. People get killed in turf wars to control the illicit trade and to show off their third-world peasant machismo, not from smoking pot.
“I have never seen two people on pot get in a fight because it is fucking IMPOSSIBLE. "Hey, buddy!" "Hey, what?" "Ummmmmmm...." End of argument.” -- Bill Hicks.
the right, especially the religious right, that excels at propogating misinformation.
Perhaps because religion left or right excels at propagating misinformation?
I think it's more likely that you tend to trust people who are in your church, so you're biased to believe what they say even when it's something about which they're probably not an expert.
Jon Krakauer wrote about this in "Under The Banner Of Heaven", about how effective scammers were in the Mormon church, once they got themselves established as Good Mormons.
And, really, this is just a False Negative problem: if you can get yourself past a security barrier through social engineering, you can do a lot of damage.
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
I get frustrated by statements like this.
I'm pro-nuclear: I took classes to become a nuclear power plant operator, once long ago, and if someone were willing to let me put a TRIGA-sized power-producing reactor in my back yard I'd jump at the chance if I got free power out of it.
With that said: most of the people who oppose nuclear power aren't stupid. They just have a faulty set of data from which they're making judgments.
If you believe that the potential failure mode of a process is completely unacceptable, then it's perfectly logical to be dead set against that process. Think of a Hindu trying to convince an atheist to jump off a cliff, because, the Hindu says, if it doesn't work you'll just come back as something else, so what's the risk? The atheist, however, considers the failure mode completely unacceptable, and will, rightly, refuse the gamble.
Same thing with many opponents of nuclear power. They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe. Under those circumstances, flat-out opposition is a reasonable position.
As we've recently read on slashdot, trying to use facts to change their minds *probably* won't work.
But calling them anti-braincell *certainly* won't.
Imagine a dystopic future where the cruel masterminds that rule our society steal ideas from science fiction writers to aid them in their domination of mankind.
Yeah -- someone should write a science fiction piece about that as a warning.
The whole point of *good* science fiction is to issue a warning to the world about what will happen to us all if we don't act now to stop whatever issue the writer is writing about. Scifi that presents a good future is escapism. Scifi that extrapolates our current trends and demonstrates the catastrophe that will ensue, is great literature, and from the standpoint of its potential worth to our culture, it's probably the greatest literature we have.
I'm just waiting for the "Android: Hold it any way you want!" ad campaign.
You know, if you combined that with a visual of a scantily clad woman, you could hit two pro-Android bullet points with one ad campaign. That'd probably be effective.
I know a guy who plays in two bands. (well, more than that but we're concentrating on the main two.) One is an indie band you've never heard of. The other is on the radio pretty regularly -- I don't think I can go two days without hearing one of their songs, for like the last ten years.
Neither one makes any money, according to their labels. Yet, the indie band drives around in the bass player's van and sleeps in my basement when they're in town, while the other band -- that doesn't make any money, according to their label -- drives around in a tour bus and stays at the nice hotel, and gets flown by private jet to Europe when they tour there.
There are major benefits to having record label backing, even if you're (supposedly) not making any money.
It is Never a good idea to buy anything new. The only reason to do it is to placate emotion. This applies to Furniture, cars, and for god's sake yes, electronics.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one: used toothbrushes suck. So do used condoms.
While I'm at it: I bought a new car once, because at the time I was flush with money. While I'm not sure it was a great buying decision, that car is still my primary driver, 12 years later, and the only work I've had to do on it is (religiously) changing the oil, tires, and standard maintenance. When I amortize the original purchase price and subsequent maintenance costs over its lifetime so far, it's been cheaper than the legion of used cars with dubious previous maintenance I'd purchased previously. As it happens, the cost that makes a new car (to me) a financially unappealing decision is actually insurance, because it's based on the car's value, so buying a used car means you don't have to pay insurance on that first year's value.
"Caution: Do not attempt this maneuver if the temperature is below 0C/32F!"
You joke, but a friend here in Colorado had his Bridgestone bicycle frame crack, and when he talked to Bridgestone about their so-called lifetime warranty they said that riding the bike in below-freezing temperatures voided the warranty.
Soon thereafter they stopped selling bikes in the US, so there's a somewhat happy ending to the story.
Slashdot Mirror
(never met a ceo that I didn't have to count my hands after I shook his.)
I have. His name was Dave Packard. Back when HP was a real company they used to have company picnics and sometimes he'd come out to the Colorado picnic and help cook hot dogs. He didn't NEED to cook hot dogs, but it gave him a chance to talk to everyone, including the people whose jobs consisted of winding transformers or running the sheet metal stamps... back when HP actually MADE stuff.
Of course, he was proud of the fact that as CEO he made less than five times the starting salary of an engineer, because he felt it was his duty to the company that employed him to put money back into the company rather than into his pocket.
Give me a flying boat any day of the week in scary terrain, thanks.
Show me the enzyme which can convert carbon dioxide and water to hydrocarbon fuel, instead... right now we need the whole organism to do it, it'd be a lot simpler if it was just one enzyme.
Enzymes are like UNIX: one tool to solve one problem. You're asking for a Windows solution. One of the many benefits of having enzymes that only catalyze one or possibly two steps in a reaction is that they're much easier to regulate, individually and as a system, since you can use feedback and feedforward, based on the concentration of the reactants and products, so you can get a system that works like a manufacturing kanban system. Another benefit is that small enzymes are easier to make and last longer than a huge giant macroenzyme that can do a bunch of steps all in one. It might also be nice to have enzymes that can each operate at optimal efficiency, which might require batch processing or linking the enzymes to sequential parts of a flow process, so you can have local variations in chemistry and temperature to get them to work better. There might also be some diffusion-limiting problems with macroenzymes, but I'd have to do more reading about that.
Yes, it's a hassle, but if we engineer bacteria to dump useful enzymes out into solution using the same pathways they currently use to dump proteins useful to them out into solution, it's not SUCH a hassle.
However, with all that said, plants and bacteria convert carbon dioxide into complex carbon chains all the time, and the pathways they use are quite well-understood. It's neat to hear about a new pathway, but it's not much of a surprise.
If Helium rises because it is less dense, would it be possible to force a balloon open, using some sort of supports, and end up with essentially a balloon filled with nothing, and thus able to rise? Or is this beyond current material science?
I tried to calculate this a couple years ago, and using metal with an excellent strength/weight ratio -- Aermet 310 -- and a spherical model with stiffening ribs, I couldn't find any viable solution: no matter how large the diameter of the sphere, the weight of the metal required to contain the vacuum against the external air pressure was greater than the vessel buoyancy, and I went up into kilometer-radius ranges.
I didn't try it with composites because that's a lot harder to make valid design assumptions, and frankly my mathematics skills are rubbish, but I'd be interested in hearing anyone else's data on this.
If you're interested in reading a 1980's review of efforts to make lighter-than-air lifting bodies, airships, and combinations of them, one of my favorite books is John McPhee's "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed", which goes into considerable detail about the development of a blended-body lighter-than-air airfoil, but also discusses the use of blimps and dirigibles in the 1940's and 1950's. He's got some great stuff in there about their icing capabilities, too: airplanes fall out of the sky with 3 cm of ice over their wings, while US Navy blimps were able to survive ten times that amount of ice during ice storms that stopped all other East Coast transport. (Apparently the main problem with picking up 30 cm of ice, besides them heading downwards in a gentle manner, was that it would sheet off asymmetrically and the airship would have handling problems until a bunch more fell off the other side.)
The 9450 -- well, all the 9400's -- have several voltage rails and rely on one being correct to bring up all the remaining ones. If that one's not quite in spec, the other ones will go wandering (which can actually damage a lot of stuff.) My guess is that reseating the processor card (it has a big fat 68020 on it), timebase card, and both the channel amplifier cards is likely to fix it, but if those don't the power supply group is the next most likely. I am making the assumption that what you mean by power cycles/boot is that you turn it on and the fans come on, but you don't hear the relays clicking or see the lights start blinking.
But, yeah, I'd take a look at it. If it still runs accurately when it comes up, it's almost certainly something simple and easy to fix, and I have a 9450 to compare it to. (The -A is almost identical.) I'd be glad to do my best to walk you through repair by email, because shipping's so expensive, but if you'd prefer I'd be willing to try to fix it too.
One reason I mention these is because newer scopes, particularly the Tek 3000-series, while incredibly useful because of their size, weight, and connectivity (they have a linux-based OS that includes a webserver so you can plug one in with a cat5 and control it from your desk remotely: pure awesome!) are just about impossible to repair. Everything, *everything* is in custom silicon. On a LeCroy you can swap out the input amps if you burn one, swap out the timebase card or the A/D cards for each channel. It's like working with an old PC, as opposed to an ipod.
Also, budget for probes. Get probes rated for at least 1.5 times the scope's bandwidth: usually people ship probes that have the same bandwidth as the scope's max, but the spec on them actually means they're at something like -3dB and pretty fuzzy at that bandwidth. I got 500's for my 350mhz scope and they're beautiful. A lot of people sell broken probes and I've found, in the three I've purchased, that in every case it was a broken solderjoint where the probe cable met the board that attaches to the scope BNC. I reflowed it (no added solder for fear it'd mess with the tuning) and got three new probes for cheap.
There are people selling vintage scopes on ebay that have NIST certification, if that's important to you, but you can also get it independently certified if you need it. Newark.com has cal services, to my surprise. (They're who we use at work.)
I personally dislike Yokogawa scopes because their interface doesn't make sense to me. I can sit down at an Agilent or Tek or LeCroy and get it to do what I want pretty quickly (digital LeCroys are weird about horizontal offset) but Yokogawas I spend a lot of time reading the manual. But they're nicely engineered.
The USB scopes I've used were disappointments to me: the $ per mhz isn't competitive with a used scope, and they're typically pretty tied to the company software, which might not do what you want.
Did you read her paper? She might be a raw food eating english major but she's doing better statistical analysis than people who are paid to do so. You don't need a PhD in math to do science any more than you need a PhD in computer science to be a programmer.
I recently saw the travelling King Tutankhamen exhibit and got to reading a bit about their technology. Besides being able to organize and motivate well enough to build the Great Pyramid, which required cutting, transporting, and installing twelve 3 ton blocks per hour, every hour, for 20 years, they knew about prime and perfect numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, first-order linear equations, and summing linear and arithmetic sequences. They knew about pi and calculated it to about five digits, and could calculate the surface area of hemispheres and the volume of frustrums, which means they could do integral calculus (although they didn't realize that's what they were doing.)
I'll see your out-of-our-league smart pretty physicist, and raise you an out-of-our-league smart pretty biologist/statistician. On the one hand, le sigh, but on the other hand, it's wonderful that such people exist.
So the gasoline engine is just a huge heavy lump of metal it has to drag around wasting it's range ....
Yes, just like the air conditioner and the heater and the radio and the bumpers and the windshield. There are lots of features cars have that are only sometimes necessary or useful and waste fuel the rest of the time.
Do people not understand that bell curves describe populations not outcomes? When you take a driver's license test you pass or fail, you don't get an A or a C. If everyone who takes the driver's test answers enough questions correctly, then everyone passes. There's no bell curve to a driver's license test. There's no intrinsic reason that educational test results have to result in a normal distribution.
My grandmother wanted her dream car so my granddad bought her a 1961 Olds Starfire with the high-performance engine, which at the time was one of the classiest domestic cars that existed. She got it in bright pink. She loved it. Five years later when they went to trade it in on a newer car, the salesman said it was in perfect shape, low mileage, and over the Blue Book value, but because of the color he'd only give her $1000 less than the Blue Book value, which was roughly a 50% price cut. She was incredibly offended, so they declined to trade it in, and tried to sell it on their own. They advertised it for a year and ended up selling it for even less than the salesman had offered, to a guy who said he was going to get it repainted.
This reminds me of one of the IT guys where I work. When I was tasked with setting up a new server for my research group, he loaned me a screwdriver...and it was pink. He said he had held on to it since the early 80s, because nobody wanted a pink screwdriver.
I dated a woman who is a brilliant mechanical engineer. She'd painted pink stripes on all of her tools using nail polish for exactly this reason. Utterly identifiable, and nobody but her would be caught dead using them.
Likewise I have friends riding high-end titanium bike frames that they've covered in duct tape and spraypaint, and nobody messes with them, preferring to steal beautiful mid-range Bianchis and the like.
Fluff is not just Idols, it is news that doesn't upset you.
To paraphrase a great 19th century British newspaperman: news is what someone is trying to censor. Everything else is entertainment.
BTW, if you get out the OM-1, be sure and check the foam light seals on the back. I have a 1977 version and the foam is decaying severely. and bear in mind that you can't get the batteries for the meter any more - they make some replacements but most of them don't put out the right voltage.
I've made a couple replacement battery packs for these, using a quite small silver battery with very carefully selected germanium diodes to get the right voltage; it's possible to fit the combination of the battery and diode into the same form factor as the old mercury or other batteries. You need to get your voltage right to within about 50mV to make the meter accurate, but cheap diodes have enough variation you can manage this. (I'm not yet sure how their precision holds up long-term, however.)
In fact, it will likely be less detrimental than alcohol, and that's already legal.
A lot of people get belligerent and violent when drunk. I'd rather have them stoned. For the rest of us normal people, I don't know why the government would or even should care if I have a drink or a couple of puffs of pot. They should just mind their own business and go find something useful to occupy themselves with. To be frank I think the illicit market for dealing in contraband is far more detrimental than the contraband itself - at least for things like booze and pot. People get killed in turf wars to control the illicit trade and to show off their third-world peasant machismo, not from smoking pot.
“I have never seen two people on pot get in a fight because it is fucking IMPOSSIBLE. "Hey, buddy!" "Hey, what?" "Ummmmmmm...." End of argument.” -- Bill Hicks.
Among many, many other great Hicks quotes.
the right, especially the religious right, that excels at propogating misinformation.
Perhaps because religion left or right excels at propagating misinformation?
I think it's more likely that you tend to trust people who are in your church, so you're biased to believe what they say even when it's something about which they're probably not an expert.
Jon Krakauer wrote about this in "Under The Banner Of Heaven", about how effective scammers were in the Mormon church, once they got themselves established as Good Mormons.
And, really, this is just a False Negative problem: if you can get yourself past a security barrier through social engineering, you can do a lot of damage.
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
I get frustrated by statements like this.
I'm pro-nuclear: I took classes to become a nuclear power plant operator, once long ago, and if someone were willing to let me put a TRIGA-sized power-producing reactor in my back yard I'd jump at the chance if I got free power out of it.
With that said: most of the people who oppose nuclear power aren't stupid. They just have a faulty set of data from which they're making judgments.
If you believe that the potential failure mode of a process is completely unacceptable, then it's perfectly logical to be dead set against that process. Think of a Hindu trying to convince an atheist to jump off a cliff, because, the Hindu says, if it doesn't work you'll just come back as something else, so what's the risk? The atheist, however, considers the failure mode completely unacceptable, and will, rightly, refuse the gamble.
Same thing with many opponents of nuclear power. They're not dumb, they just think a nuclear accident is an epic catastrophe. Under those circumstances, flat-out opposition is a reasonable position.
As we've recently read on slashdot, trying to use facts to change their minds *probably* won't work.
But calling them anti-braincell *certainly* won't.
Whoosh.
Imagine a dystopic future where the cruel masterminds that rule our society steal ideas from science fiction writers to aid them in their domination of mankind.
Yeah -- someone should write a science fiction piece about that as a warning.
Owait we just did.
See how this works?
... you're giving them ideas!
The whole point of *good* science fiction is to issue a warning to the world about what will happen to us all if we don't act now to stop whatever issue the writer is writing about. Scifi that presents a good future is escapism. Scifi that extrapolates our current trends and demonstrates the catastrophe that will ensue, is great literature, and from the standpoint of its potential worth to our culture, it's probably the greatest literature we have.
I'm just waiting for the "Android: Hold it any way you want!" ad campaign.
You know, if you combined that with a visual of a scantily clad woman, you could hit two pro-Android bullet points with one ad campaign. That'd probably be effective.
Neither one makes any money, according to their labels. Yet, the indie band drives around in the bass player's van and sleeps in my basement when they're in town, while the other band -- that doesn't make any money, according to their label -- drives around in a tour bus and stays at the nice hotel, and gets flown by private jet to Europe when they tour there.
There are major benefits to having record label backing, even if you're (supposedly) not making any money.
It is Never a good idea to buy anything new. The only reason to do it is to placate emotion. This applies to Furniture, cars, and for god's sake yes, electronics.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one: used toothbrushes suck. So do used condoms.
While I'm at it: I bought a new car once, because at the time I was flush with money. While I'm not sure it was a great buying decision, that car is still my primary driver, 12 years later, and the only work I've had to do on it is (religiously) changing the oil, tires, and standard maintenance. When I amortize the original purchase price and subsequent maintenance costs over its lifetime so far, it's been cheaper than the legion of used cars with dubious previous maintenance I'd purchased previously. As it happens, the cost that makes a new car (to me) a financially unappealing decision is actually insurance, because it's based on the car's value, so buying a used car means you don't have to pay insurance on that first year's value.
"Caution: Do not attempt this maneuver if the temperature is below 0C/32F!"
You joke, but a friend here in Colorado had his Bridgestone bicycle frame crack, and when he talked to Bridgestone about their so-called lifetime warranty they said that riding the bike in below-freezing temperatures voided the warranty.
Soon thereafter they stopped selling bikes in the US, so there's a somewhat happy ending to the story.