This makes sense if it is applied as a mulch, allowing the desired plant to grow while preventing weeds and other invasive plants. There's plenty of other similar products on the marked made from a variety of materials from plastic to woven fiber to paper. However, I'm suspicious of the claim that the product works if you place it at the bottom of the pot. How is this going to prevent weeds?

I don't know what city you live in, but $8.33 for a movie is unheard of where I am. You're looking at around $10 for a ticket. That's $240 for a year of movie tickets for two people. Throw in gas and an occasional soda, popcorn, or snack at theater and you've easily paid for that $300 TV.

Always moving manufacturing to the location that has the lowest labor costs is bad for a bunch of reasons.

First, it isn't sustainable. There are a finite number of places with cheap labor. Once a place has been exploited for some period of time, the labor will eventually become expensive enough to force labor somewhere else. Eventually, you'll run out of places to shift the manufacturing to and you'll have to find some other way to cut costs.

Second, it sets up a boom and bust cycle. Manufacturing is great while it lasts. It provides comparably high wage jobs for comparably easy work requiring little education. However, it doesn't last. Since manufacturing will always move to where the labor is cheapest, the bubble will eventually burst and the factories will be closed and moved to the next cheap labor market.

Third, it has terrible consequences for the environment. Since the people making pennies a day to manufacture this stuff are too poor to buy it, it has to be shipped half way around the world to the markets where it will be sold. Not only do we have to ship stuff all over the world, but the pollution controls in the areas where the labor is cheap are usually much lower than the rest of the world. This is the hidden cost of this strategy that will be coming due very soon.

Fourth, it has terrible consequences for the people in the factories. Similar to the lax environmental regulations enjoyed by these manufacturing operations, there are also very lax workplace safety and worker protection laws.

For a long time, we have enjoyed cheap products at the expense of the environment and of the poor in developing countries. The seeds we have sewn are now starting to sprout. Our own economic well being is crumbling.

Additionally, there is a strong ethical argument against protectionism. "Buy American" is essentially a racist statement. You're implying that the value of an American is higher than that of someone from another country by saying that it's better to protect industries in this country to protect the jobs. At some point, we've got to start calling out "Buy American" for the racist statement that it is.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "Buy American." Honda and Toyota have manufacturing plants in America. Is it "buying American" when you purchase a car manufactured at one of these plants? I'd argue that it is. All other things being equal, I see nothing wrong with "Buy American." It isn't really that much different than the "Buy Local" movement that is popular across the country, especially here in Vermont.

Buying products that are made/grown in closer proximity to you has many advantages:
* Lower transportation costs & less pollution
* Keeps the money you're spending in the local economy
* Helps to secure employment for local people
* Encourages cohesion in the local community

Obviously, the scale of "local" depends on the situation, but I don't see why at least some of the benefits don't scale up to the national level. What is wrong with wanting to improve the economic situation in the neighborhood/town/city/state/country where you live? You do, after all, live there. You need to have a job. A steady income. Services like fresh water, sewer, police, hospitals, etc.

Now that same company comes out and produces the 360 with its notoriously high failure rate. And it's wasn't down to the complexity of the design. The red ring of death was due to parts and material failures. Scratched discs were again down to a substandard component. Now we have a loose video chip problem.

This is NOT down to design. These issues are trivial to fix if only Microsoft was willing to pay the money. The fact is, they're not. These errors all exist because Microsoft is cutting costs across the board on 360 manufacturing. For every error that is found, you can be sure that three more lurk beneath the surface as a result of substandard parts, components and assembly line procedures.

So, you're saying it didn't fail because of poor design but because they designed it to be inexpensive to manufacture? That sounds to me like bad design. They didn't design it to stand up to normal use and instead designed it to save a few pennies here and there during the manufacturing and assembly process. Sounds like a classic example of a poorly chosen design trade-off where quality is sacrificed to save costs. Now it is coming back to bite them.

What's the point of this? The judge already instructs jurors not to discuss the trial or do any research. How is "don not discuss the trial" any different from "do not discuss the trial on the internet"? Do we really have to ban discussion of the trial via every different means of communication? How is this really enforceable, anyway?

When I was called up for jury duty last summer, I had to surrender my cell phone before going through the metal detector. I think other electronics were prohibited as well. Seems like this would be pretty simple to stop by a small rules change at the court house. Just ban cell phones and similar devices.

I'm generally opposed to this sort of stuff, but this particular application doesn't seem so bad. Uninsured motorists are a problem for everyone. If you're going to drive a car, you should have a license and your car should be registered, insured, and inspected according to state laws. Yes, this makes money for repair shops, insurance companies, state government, and the police. However, all of this is important for having safe roads and keeping down the cost of insurance.

I dunno that I agree. I mean, what's really the difference between a map that's "1 unit big" with 16 players and a map that's "2 units big" with 32 players? The density of players on the map is about the same. Yeah, there's potentially a bigger variety of players, but how much does that really add? I guess playing on a larger map is nice, and you do need more players to be sure that you don't spend most of your time just looking for somebody to shoot at, but are there any other benefits? After all, we are talking about a shooter. You don't do much but shoot at things that move and shoot back at you.

Quake 1 came out 13 years ago, most of what has come out since then isn't all that different. Better graphics sure, but the recipe is the same, the worlds are still 3D, multiplayer support has actually gotten worse - we've gone from 24 to 32 players being fine in Quake/QW CTF down to 8 - 16 being the average in a lot of games nowadays.

I generally agree with your post, but more players doesn't necessarily make for better gameplay. I recall plenty of times playing Quake, 10 years ago, that the map was over saturated with players and you'd essentially get fragged as soon as you spawned. It was basically a giant cluster-f**k when the player count got too high. In my opinion, it is more fun to have to hunt a little for somebody to kill rather than having players everywhere you look.

Google knows all: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1331625/McDonalds-admits-using-beef-fat-for-vegetarian-french-fries.html

According to the article, the restaurant locations fry in vegetable oil, but the fries were partially fried in animal fat before they are frozen and shipped out to the restaurants.

The fast-food chain had maintained for more than a decade that only vegetable oil was used in the hope of appealing to vegetarians and religious groups who do not eat beef products. Yesterday's apology triggered a violent protest by Hindus in India.

The American company, which has served more than 200 billion portions of french fries around the world, confessed to a method of using beef fat to partly fry chips before they are sent to restaurants. They are then frozen and refried on the premises using vegetable oil.

You must be new here...

Here's an interesting effect discovered by a group of Iranian physicists at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran (it's not often we hear from these guys).

Aside from the actual scientific content of the article, I found this lead quote to be interesting with many subtle and not so subtle implications. Discuss.

What you forgot to mention is the wind farm you're talking about was built over 30 years ago and uses outdated technology. The multitude of smaller turbines turn faster and are much more dangerous to birds than today's larger, more efficient, and slower turning turbines. In fact, the older turbines are being slowly replaced with newer ones to produce more electricity for less money while also killing fewer birds.

From the Wikipedia article you linked:

Considered largely obsolete, these numerous small turbines are being gradually replaced with much larger and more cost-effective units. The small turbines are dangerous to various raptors that hunt California Ground Squirrels in the area. 1300 raptors are killed annually. Among them are 70 golden eagles that are federally protected. In total, 4700 birds are killed annually.[2] The larger units turn more slowly and, being elevated higher, are less hazardous to the local wildlife.