So I think might be more of an effort to get people used to carrying around remotely readable RFID chips carrying their ID.
I already carry around a RFID in a work ID, that I have to touch to scanners to open certain doors, and two of my credit cards have RFID for some "insta-pay" feature I never use. I have tried stacking my credit cards with my work ID and scanning into a locked door at work. Sometimes it works sometimes it fails, but without the credit cards RFID tags the job ID always works. So I'm wondering if having a small card with several RFID tags on it to slip inside your passport would act as an effective scrambler vs remote reading of your passport info.
The presidential race probably won't have as many problems. The polls are predicting an Obama shut-out.
I seem to recall that that media predictions were a major contributor to Gore losing the election in 2000. Never stop running until the race is completely over.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed but law enforcement, military, and other forced based branches of government are rather fond of things that can hurt non-compliant humans.
Why use a heavy metal box to stop the cosmic rays or solar flare protons? They are both positively charged.
Just put a positive charge around the computer box, and negative charge around a few "lightning rods" a few feet away and let magnetic forces do the rest. You don't have to stop the high energy particles, you just have to convince them to miss the few square inches of delicate electronics. Launch weight radiation shielding is something that NASA is going to have to tackle soon enough anyway if we ever want to leave our magnetosphere for more than about a week. Why not test it on a modern Hubble CPU, while keeping the remaining legacy chip as a back up?
This is hardly an erosion of rights. You have a choice--you don't have to use the subway or go to the baseball game or when you do go, don't carry bags. An inconvenience, yes, but not a loss of rights.
I live in NYC, and to say "don't use the subway" is tantamount to saying "don't drive on public roads". The use of the subways is economically unavoidable for most non-rich NYC residents. Daily use of cabs or having a car (and a place to park it) in the city require a fair amount of wealth. The subways are partly funded with tax money, the ball parks are partly funded with government money. They are public spaces. They should not be Constitution Free Zones. I don't object to bomb sniffing dogs hanging out near the subway turnstyles, I appreciate that the NYPD makes a real effort to protect such a likely bomb target. But the bag searches turning up small amounts of pot, or previously open alcohol bottles or other non-terrorism causes for arrest is inevitable. Sure, anyone getting caught for a non-terrorist offense was still breaking a law in the first place, but then the same logic would extend to allow search checkpoints everywhere across America. A significant number of terrorist attacks have been made by driving a car full of explosives into a crowded environment. How would you feel about having your car searched when you went to the grocery store or the mall or to pick up you kids from school? This is definitely an erosion of Rights, one with a justification but an erosion none the less.
They need to have the chips hardened for radiation. I'm not sure what the process entails
I would hope it involves putting the everything in a radiation shielded box. I could see how smaller chip architectures might be more susceptible to radiation, but a decade is enough time to figure that out and use exterior shielding instead of hardening. Sure that might be much more difficult, but if you can't handle difficult don't work at NASA. Of course with a Hubble sized budget, there is no excuse for not having several back-up sets of the non-custom parts that might not be available in a few years. Computer components had exhibited that high turn over rate for plenty of time before Hubble launched.
Do you really want to live in a place where there's such a thing as "a perfectly legal stop to verify documentation"? That's not the America I grew up in.
Try here and here. I build custom automation for for a living. Find a waterjet company in your area and have them make your custom stuff. If you want to get really artistic or detailed you might have to buy your own machine shop equipment. However with the tanking economy, they can be had cheap.
Making that whole system *secure*, otoh, is almost impossible,
Making a human and machine readable, voter verified, printout is far from impossible in fact it's simple. Safely getting Paper ballots from the voting locations to a central polling place is simple. Counting the human and machine verifiable ballots with a high degree of accuracy is simple. Now making a e-voting system that is obtuse and vague enough that elections can be skewed with a good sot at deniablity and a complete lack of papaer trail? That's difficult. There have been dozen of high security, low cost/technology, handicapped accessible solutions proposed here on Slashdot. It is quiet obvious that a secure voting system isn't the actual priority, when these systems are purchased. It stands to logic that there is instead a different priority. I have to wonder what that priority would be, that doesn't qualify as treason.
The same idea apply to sailing open water, yet I have seen boats run right into buoys and over other boats' anchor lines. I've seen sailors lock the wheel and then run below decks to grab something, leaving the boat going full speed with no one at the wheel. In open water, I frequently lock the wheel (I stay on deck) and eat a sandwich or apply sunscreen or whatever. On open water at times it can be difficult to remember to look up every fifteen seconds, getting sidetracked is easy. There is a salty saying "There's three types of sailors: those who've gone aground; those who haven't, but are going to; and liars." The danger isn't in the featureless open space, it's near the destinations, navigation points, and obstacles. That's where the degree of attention required changes more quickly than is often accounted for. Everyone gets used to a big open space and they lose the focus to avoid the easiest obstacles, that's why I sited such common driver distractions as putting on make up, talking on the phone, and yelling at the kids in the back. Drivers do these things now, with something that demands as much attention as highway driving, and I think that a less demanding environment would exacerbate these behaviors and habits, making those drivers completely unaware of when they were entering a situation that demanded more attention. Compare your own level of focus between driving on a long straight stretch of road vs a winding road.
this type of vehicle isn't the lay driver who wants a "flying car" to dodge traffic and be cool
I should hope that anything that flys, regardless of how popular it becomes, still requires a pilots license and that the skill needed to attain such a license remain quite high. Lay drivers manage to kill 43,443 people in 2007. I don't want to see what the statistics would be if people were text, putting on makeup, eating, yelling at the kids in the backseat, playing with the radio, fighting off sleep, etc. while flying a plane. Sure, there is more open space in the sky than on the road, but with how many drivers act that's just giving them more rope to hang themselves with.
Fuel economy of airplanes vs ground transport is another rant entirely.
Most of the energy of a rocket is used to gain speed, not altitude.
So what about an anchored ariel platform, suspended by balloons at say 10km, used as one end of a very large slingshot? All done up in high steampunk style of course. What could go wrong?
"Perhaps the biggest impact on many players' quality of life will come from free server transfers from select high- or low-population servers to select mid-population ones."
I hope the patch also raises the target server population somewhat. I like the game and the open RvR but usually it's five-vs-five or less on the open RvR battlefield. I'd like to see the open RvR havinglarger battles than the scenarios. For anyone not playing Warhammer, open RvR is pvp zones that have capturable assets and quests in them and blend nicely with the regular PvE zones and the game world in general. Scenarios are instanced battles in small isolated areas not accessible from the rest of the game world.
Anyway, god forbid they keep dangerous people in jail. I mean, that's what it's for, right?
Only in the most extreme cases is that the primary function of prison. Yes those people who have committed certain crimes need to be separated from society, but then they need to be rehabilitated so that they can become functioning members of society. This second, more important function is all to often overlooked or neglected. If you doubt that rehabilitation is the more important aspect of imprisonment, consider the logical extreme: If it were possible to fully rehabilitate a offending criminal to where they were a safe and highly productive member of society in one minute, through the injection of some nanotechnological miracle, would society as a whole be better off if that person was working, paying taxes and providing a product, or would society as a whole be better off if that person were sitting in an expensive ($19k a year) concrete room for years at a time? We have a problem with repeat offenders because so very little is done in the prison system to actually address why the inmate committed the crime in the first place. Society treats prison as a place to throw criminal away like toxic waste, and within prison walls, life is about fear, control, and aggression; hardly an environment where you would expect someone to undergo a positive transformation. It is natural to offer a victim of a crime sympathy and support, and it is natural from the perspective of the victim to view the criminal in a black and white demonizing way. But in the course of sympathizing with the victim, society should not allow it's penal system to share that demonized view of the inmate. All humans are complex creatures with many factors effecting they way they act in society, even the criminals. The function of the penal system should be to address those factors that lead the criminal to commit the crime. I'm not saying that we should baby inmates. To the contrary I'm saying we should expect, and demand, much more from them. Simply doin' time, lifting weights, and managing to not get stabbed should not be enough to get out, but a clear path out of prison and crime should be apparent and pursued. If you just want to make the person who did the crime vanish, just put a bullet through the head of anyone past the first offense. If you want a deterrent for future crime or a need for revenge, then bring back lashings in the public square. But if you are going to house and feed and sequester away a person for years because of a crime they committed, then at least make that time and process constructive. If not for the sake of the person who did the crime, then for the sake of society and it's ever rising incarceration rates.
Anything built to be affordable will end up being rent controlled, at a huge loss to the landlord. Why take the risk? Either build luxury apartments or don't build at all.
While that argument might hold water for someone building rental units, it is meaningless for building condos with the intent to sell, not rent. The financial crisis wasn't trigger by people failing to pay their rent, it's about an artificially high barrier to property ownership.
A word on the "evils" of rent control: I'm renting a non-luxury non-rent controlled or stabilized apt right now. My last apt wasn't luxury or rent stabilized either, and my rent went up 48% in three years because my neighborhood gentrified. So I had to move (and pay a broker for the privilege). Rent control isn't the huge loss that landlord try to hack it up to be, if the building is turning a profit when they build it, it will be turning a profit ten years down the line even if the apts are rent controlled, because the landlord's mortgage didn't go up and the rent control with keep property taxes down, what the landlords are whining about is that they can't maximize their profits (and boot out long time tenets) with every neighborhood gentrification wave, there is a big difference between making a modest profit and taking a loss, and no landlords are actually taking a loss on buildings with rent controlled apts. Added to that,rent stabilization doesn't apply to anything built since '84.
On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more competitive, which could lead to a higher employment rate. So it's really a two-sided problem.
On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more lopsided, which could lead to a higher amount of wealth concentration. Sure the employment rate might be higher, but the employment rate on a slave plantation was 100%, that didn't make it a great place to work. High wages and lower wealth concentration make for a strong middle class; which leads to lower crime, better education, and better economic diversification. Take a look at life in countries or even US cities without a middle class, that's where "lower wages for economic competitiveness" leads. Sure maybe the GDP would go up, but if 90% of the population is getting less take home pay to make that happen, why is that touted as a good thing? Even the elites who profit more would have to live with higher crime and more social tension. If you want that move to Sao Paulo or Mexico City.
There's nothing wrong with somebody wanting an extra room or two to start a family, a home business or private study.
The other question is: Was there an option to buying a McMansion? Are there enough smaller affordable homes in non-shitty school districts to house the working class? No, but no builders wanted to build the affordable homes because they weren't as profitable as McMansions and the banks were willing to make the loans, so they were able to have potential customers for the oversized houses. The median price of any housing with under an hour commute time to NYC is $450K. The median income in NYC is about $48K, so that's ten years wages before tax for just somewhere to raise your family. Yet every new construction project I see is luxury apartments. Back in 2000 the median price was just $148K and the median income was about $40k. So housing was about 3.7 time annual income just eight years ago, and now it is 10 times annual income. The banks offered people the possibility to be in unimaginable debt, and people need somewhere to live, so they got in over their heads, because the only other option was to up root their young family and hope that life was affordable somewhere else. That's not always an option personally speaking, NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in. I'm 33 and I make over twice the median annual income, yet the only housing I can afford to buy would be a 600 sq ft studio apt. A $300k studio costs $1750 a month mortgage plus a $650 maintaince fee, and would only be getting one room. Two bedroom apts start at about $500K, so now that's $2917 a month mortgage and an $800 maintaince fee, for 1100 sq ft that's a 45 min subway commute to midtown. So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
... again. I love solar power, and I realize that it progresses in small increments. But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made. Black silicon have twice the sensitivity to light that regular silicon does, which is great news for digital cameras and night vision scopes. I might be great news for solar power, but tell me about it once you have a working prototype with a noteworthy efficiency improvement.
I thinking about your question I realized that my conception of "Earth like" carries an implication that the planet could be usefully colonized by humans. I think much beyond 1.2G it would be terribly difficult to get anything done. I could probably get up out of a chair and walk across a room at 2G but I certainly couldn't build anything substantial. Yes I know I first qualified "earth like" with lichen habitability but would there be any point in seeding a 3G planet with lichen, knowing that humans could never go there? The more I think about what "earth like" implies to me, the stricter my definition becomes. However to say a planet is like Earth, inspires a lot of excitement and hope, so it needs to used sparingly and only when appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
So I think might be more of an effort to get people used to carrying around remotely readable RFID chips carrying their ID.
I already carry around a RFID in a work ID, that I have to touch to scanners to open certain doors, and two of my credit cards have RFID for some "insta-pay" feature I never use. I have tried stacking my credit cards with my work ID and scanning into a locked door at work. Sometimes it works sometimes it fails, but without the credit cards RFID tags the job ID always works. So I'm wondering if having a small card with several RFID tags on it to slip inside your passport would act as an effective scrambler vs remote reading of your passport info.
The presidential race probably won't have as many problems. The polls are predicting an Obama shut-out.
I seem to recall that that media predictions were a major contributor to Gore losing the election in 2000. Never stop running until the race is completely over.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed but law enforcement, military, and other forced based branches of government are rather fond of things that can hurt non-compliant humans.
Why use a heavy metal box to stop the cosmic rays or solar flare protons? They are both positively charged. Just put a positive charge around the computer box, and negative charge around a few "lightning rods" a few feet away and let magnetic forces do the rest. You don't have to stop the high energy particles, you just have to convince them to miss the few square inches of delicate electronics. Launch weight radiation shielding is something that NASA is going to have to tackle soon enough anyway if we ever want to leave our magnetosphere for more than about a week. Why not test it on a modern Hubble CPU, while keeping the remaining legacy chip as a back up?
This is hardly an erosion of rights. You have a choice--you don't have to use the subway or go to the baseball game or when you do go, don't carry bags. An inconvenience, yes, but not a loss of rights.
I live in NYC, and to say "don't use the subway" is tantamount to saying "don't drive on public roads". The use of the subways is economically unavoidable for most non-rich NYC residents. Daily use of cabs or having a car (and a place to park it) in the city require a fair amount of wealth. The subways are partly funded with tax money, the ball parks are partly funded with government money. They are public spaces. They should not be Constitution Free Zones. I don't object to bomb sniffing dogs hanging out near the subway turnstyles, I appreciate that the NYPD makes a real effort to protect such a likely bomb target. But the bag searches turning up small amounts of pot, or previously open alcohol bottles or other non-terrorism causes for arrest is inevitable. Sure, anyone getting caught for a non-terrorist offense was still breaking a law in the first place, but then the same logic would extend to allow search checkpoints everywhere across America. A significant number of terrorist attacks have been made by driving a car full of explosives into a crowded environment. How would you feel about having your car searched when you went to the grocery store or the mall or to pick up you kids from school? This is definitely an erosion of Rights, one with a justification but an erosion none the less.
They need to have the chips hardened for radiation. I'm not sure what the process entails
I would hope it involves putting the everything in a radiation shielded box. I could see how smaller chip architectures might be more susceptible to radiation, but a decade is enough time to figure that out and use exterior shielding instead of hardening. Sure that might be much more difficult, but if you can't handle difficult don't work at NASA. Of course with a Hubble sized budget, there is no excuse for not having several back-up sets of the non-custom parts that might not be available in a few years. Computer components had exhibited that high turn over rate for plenty of time before Hubble launched.
Do you really want to live in a place where there's such a thing as "a perfectly legal stop to verify documentation"? That's not the America I grew up in.
Currently in New York City it is law that cops can stop you and search "backpacks or other large containers". The Second Amendment for years http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_3_52/ai_59243533>has only been The First Amendment can be restricted at the pleasure of politicians to avoid uncomfortable press in cities across America since the invention of the "First Amendment Zone"
Maybe that's what Governor Palin means when she says small towns are more pro-America, she means they are still protected by the Constitution.
Try here and here. I build custom automation for for a living. Find a waterjet company in your area and have them make your custom stuff. If you want to get really artistic or detailed you might have to buy your own machine shop equipment. However with the tanking economy, they can be had cheap.
Making that whole system *secure*, otoh, is almost impossible,
Making a human and machine readable, voter verified, printout is far from impossible in fact it's simple. Safely getting Paper ballots from the voting locations to a central polling place is simple. Counting the human and machine verifiable ballots with a high degree of accuracy is simple.
Now making a e-voting system that is obtuse and vague enough that elections can be skewed with a good sot at deniablity and a complete lack of papaer trail? That's difficult.
There have been dozen of high security, low cost/technology, handicapped accessible solutions proposed here on Slashdot. It is quiet obvious that a secure voting system isn't the actual priority, when these systems are purchased. It stands to logic that there is instead a different priority. I have to wonder what that priority would be, that doesn't qualify as treason.
It's not the final blow of a stonecutters hammer that breaks the stone, it's the dozens of blows before.
Who holds back the electric car? Who made Steve Gutenberg a star?
The same idea apply to sailing open water, yet I have seen boats run right into buoys and over other boats' anchor lines. I've seen sailors lock the wheel and then run below decks to grab something, leaving the boat going full speed with no one at the wheel. In open water, I frequently lock the wheel (I stay on deck) and eat a sandwich or apply sunscreen or whatever. On open water at times it can be difficult to remember to look up every fifteen seconds, getting sidetracked is easy. There is a salty saying "There's three types of sailors: those who've gone aground; those who haven't, but are going to; and liars." The danger isn't in the featureless open space, it's near the destinations, navigation points, and obstacles. That's where the degree of attention required changes more quickly than is often accounted for. Everyone gets used to a big open space and they lose the focus to avoid the easiest obstacles, that's why I sited such common driver distractions as putting on make up, talking on the phone, and yelling at the kids in the back. Drivers do these things now, with something that demands as much attention as highway driving, and I think that a less demanding environment would exacerbate these behaviors and habits, making those drivers completely unaware of when they were entering a situation that demanded more attention. Compare your own level of focus between driving on a long straight stretch of road vs a winding road.
this type of vehicle isn't the lay driver who wants a "flying car" to dodge traffic and be cool
I should hope that anything that flys, regardless of how popular it becomes, still requires a pilots license and that the skill needed to attain such a license remain quite high. Lay drivers manage to kill 43,443 people in 2007. I don't want to see what the statistics would be if people were text, putting on makeup, eating, yelling at the kids in the backseat, playing with the radio, fighting off sleep, etc. while flying a plane. Sure, there is more open space in the sky than on the road, but with how many drivers act that's just giving them more rope to hang themselves with.
Fuel economy of airplanes vs ground transport is another rant entirely.
Most of the energy of a rocket is used to gain speed, not altitude.
So what about an anchored ariel platform, suspended by balloons at say 10km, used as one end of a very large slingshot? All done up in high steampunk style of course. What could go wrong?
"Perhaps the biggest impact on many players' quality of life will come from free server transfers from select high- or low-population servers to select mid-population ones."
I hope the patch also raises the target server population somewhat. I like the game and the open RvR but usually it's five-vs-five or less on the open RvR battlefield. I'd like to see the open RvR havinglarger battles than the scenarios. For anyone not playing Warhammer, open RvR is pvp zones that have capturable assets and quests in them and blend nicely with the regular PvE zones and the game world in general. Scenarios are instanced battles in small isolated areas not accessible from the rest of the game world.
well that will either be very good or very bad at mitgating lightning stikes if they ever make a tether for a space elevator out of this stuff.
Is even that strength to weight enough for a tether?
Wasn't it in Stephenson's "Diamond Age" that all nanotech had to be chemically inert and had to decompose within a limited time period?
How can you put a comma, where one makes no sense?
HoiPolli is William Shatner's slashdot account. Shatner can put commas where mere mortals fear to punctuate.
Anyway, god forbid they keep dangerous people in jail. I mean, that's what it's for, right?
Only in the most extreme cases is that the primary function of prison. Yes those people who have committed certain crimes need to be separated from society, but then they need to be rehabilitated so that they can become functioning members of society. This second, more important function is all to often overlooked or neglected. If you doubt that rehabilitation is the more important aspect of imprisonment, consider the logical extreme: If it were possible to fully rehabilitate a offending criminal to where they were a safe and highly productive member of society in one minute, through the injection of some nanotechnological miracle, would society as a whole be better off if that person was working, paying taxes and providing a product, or would society as a whole be better off if that person were sitting in an expensive ($19k a year) concrete room for years at a time?
We have a problem with repeat offenders because so very little is done in the prison system to actually address why the inmate committed the crime in the first place. Society treats prison as a place to throw criminal away like toxic waste, and within prison walls, life is about fear, control, and aggression; hardly an environment where you would expect someone to undergo a positive transformation. It is natural to offer a victim of a crime sympathy and support, and it is natural from the perspective of the victim to view the criminal in a black and white demonizing way. But in the course of sympathizing with the victim, society should not allow it's penal system to share that demonized view of the inmate. All humans are complex creatures with many factors effecting they way they act in society, even the criminals. The function of the penal system should be to address those factors that lead the criminal to commit the crime. I'm not saying that we should baby inmates. To the contrary I'm saying we should expect, and demand, much more from them. Simply doin' time, lifting weights, and managing to not get stabbed should not be enough to get out, but a clear path out of prison and crime should be apparent and pursued.
If you just want to make the person who did the crime vanish, just put a bullet through the head of anyone past the first offense. If you want a deterrent for future crime or a need for revenge, then bring back lashings in the public square. But if you are going to house and feed and sequester away a person for years because of a crime they committed, then at least make that time and process constructive. If not for the sake of the person who did the crime, then for the sake of society and it's ever rising incarceration rates.
We subcontract out all other tasks we can't do efficiently to people who can, why not power generation?
Trans-Continental voltage drop is bitch.
Anything built to be affordable will end up being rent controlled, at a huge loss to the landlord. Why take the risk? Either build luxury apartments or don't build at all.
While that argument might hold water for someone building rental units, it is meaningless for building condos with the intent to sell, not rent. The financial crisis wasn't trigger by people failing to pay their rent, it's about an artificially high barrier to property ownership.
A word on the "evils" of rent control:
I'm renting a non-luxury non-rent controlled or stabilized apt right now. My last apt wasn't luxury or rent stabilized either, and my rent went up 48% in three years because my neighborhood gentrified. So I had to move (and pay a broker for the privilege). Rent control isn't the huge loss that landlord try to hack it up to be, if the building is turning a profit when they build it, it will be turning a profit ten years down the line even if the apts are rent controlled, because the landlord's mortgage didn't go up and the rent control with keep property taxes down, what the landlords are whining about is that they can't maximize their profits (and boot out long time tenets) with every neighborhood gentrification wave, there is a big difference between making a modest profit and taking a loss, and no landlords are actually taking a loss on buildings with rent controlled apts. Added to that,rent stabilization doesn't apply to anything built since '84.
On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more competitive, which could lead to a higher employment rate. So it's really a two-sided problem.
On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more lopsided, which could lead to a higher amount of wealth concentration.
Sure the employment rate might be higher, but the employment rate on a slave plantation was 100%, that didn't make it a great place to work. High wages and lower wealth concentration make for a strong middle class; which leads to lower crime, better education, and better economic diversification. Take a look at life in countries or even US cities without a middle class, that's where "lower wages for economic competitiveness" leads. Sure maybe the GDP would go up, but if 90% of the population is getting less take home pay to make that happen, why is that touted as a good thing? Even the elites who profit more would have to live with higher crime and more social tension. If you want that move to Sao Paulo or Mexico City.
There's nothing wrong with somebody wanting an extra room or two to start a family, a home business or private study.
The other question is: Was there an option to buying a McMansion? Are there enough smaller affordable homes in non-shitty school districts to house the working class? No, but no builders wanted to build the affordable homes because they weren't as profitable as McMansions and the banks were willing to make the loans, so they were able to have potential customers for the oversized houses. The median price of any housing with under an hour commute time to NYC is $450K. The median income in NYC is about $48K, so that's ten years wages before tax for just somewhere to raise your family. Yet every new construction project I see is luxury apartments. Back in 2000 the median price was just $148K and the median income was about $40k. So housing was about 3.7 time annual income just eight years ago, and now it is 10 times annual income. The banks offered people the possibility to be in unimaginable debt, and people need somewhere to live, so they got in over their heads, because the only other option was to up root their young family and hope that life was affordable somewhere else. That's not always an option personally speaking, NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in. I'm 33 and I make over twice the median annual income, yet the only housing I can afford to buy would be a 600 sq ft studio apt. A $300k studio costs $1750 a month mortgage plus a $650 maintaince fee, and would only be getting one room. Two bedroom apts start at about $500K, so now that's $2917 a month mortgage and an $800 maintaince fee, for 1100 sq ft that's a 45 min subway commute to midtown. So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
... again. I love solar power, and I realize that it progresses in small increments. But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made. Black silicon have twice the sensitivity to light that regular silicon does, which is great news for digital cameras and night vision scopes. I might be great news for solar power, but tell me about it once you have a working prototype with a noteworthy efficiency improvement.
I thinking about your question I realized that my conception of "Earth like" carries an implication that the planet could be usefully colonized by humans. I think much beyond 1.2G it would be terribly difficult to get anything done. I could probably get up out of a chair and walk across a room at 2G but I certainly couldn't build anything substantial. Yes I know I first qualified "earth like" with lichen habitability but would there be any point in seeding a 3G planet with lichen, knowing that humans could never go there? The more I think about what "earth like" implies to me, the stricter my definition becomes. However to say a planet is like Earth, inspires a lot of excitement and hope, so it needs to used sparingly and only when appropriate.