How does an identical twin raised apart inherit poor education? By being adopted inside US so all schools are equally bad?

A btter critique for these twin studies is that the children "reared apart" are probably mostly reared in a relativety similar environment. Meaning that if you sent identical twins e.g. from the most poor areas of Africa to a good place in US you might get more environment effect then 20%. But still IQ is partly hereditary and the hereditary part about half or more.

12V * 100Ah = 1200Wh = 1,2kWh. If I have a closet full of those that's, maybe 50kWh of energy. It's not enough. A winter night is 16 hours and my house can use 150kWh of energy during that time. (And the solar panels would not work under snow.)

But I'm not in Michigan. Maybe there it would be enough?

According to the article the 50 miles drive is one reason the plant is not competitive against cheap landfills. The garbage trucks need to drive 100 miles with each load.

Here (Finland, Europe) we have pipes that circulate almost boiling water in city and town centers. The plants can be a mile or two away and the losses are not too bad - the pipes are underground and they have a lot of polyurethane around them for insulation. The plants do produce both elecricity and heat.

It may be true that is Michigan it's not cold enough to make something like that worthwhile. Here we can easily have a month of -20C cold and in December days are 8 hours long, so solar just isn't not an option. During that time my house uses about 200kWh of heat a day - and it is well insulated. I am looking at ways to get as much as possible of that 200kWh from something other then electricity.

Wow, they are doing it wrong!

The incineration plant was 50 miles from the city that produces the garbage. The idea is to have the plant so close to the city that you can use the heat to heat houses in the winter. Also, the stuff they take in contains all kinds of stuff that doesn't really burn, the article mentions refrigrerators. Around here we recycle all kinds of stuff (and definately refridgerators) so that what is left in the dumpster burns very well.

And finally, saying that solar is cheaper may be true in the summer, but how will you heat houses in the winter with solar? Only run the plant during nights and winter or whatever are the peak hours. Obviously this will probably make the individual kwh:s even more expensive, but peak hour power is much more valuable when other sources are not enough.

It's meant for the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg. A PDF report at http://www.baltice.org/ shows that the thickest ice during 2011-2012 winter was 50cm.

It's true that as Russia is more and more interested in exploiting the arctic sea, they will need bigger things.

They have a whole website about the current ice breaking situation, but of course, currently there is no ice:
http://baltice.org/
In this report of the winter between 2011 and 2012 the thickest ice in the Gulf of Finland was 50cm near St. Petersburg:
http://portal.liikennevirasto.fi/sivu/www/baltice/BIM_Joint_Annual__2011__2012-1.pdf

Yes, but I'm a little worried that China + India = 2 000 0000 000 people. Japan + South Korea is much less. This time there are more people in the emerging nations than in the developed nations. For the positive end result we in the 1% need to suffer, but in the end survive. If we are wiped out by the competition, the end result may not be as positive.

IMO it would make more sense to use Firefox OS as a runtime on other smart phones. This way you could write a HTML 5 APP and it would work on browsers and in the Firefox OS runtime in any smart phone... sort of like what Java was supposed to be.

Any idea if something like this is actually being done?

Together all these niche phones would have a chance, but if all of them want to have their own app store and walled garden, they will all fail.

Yes, that sounds nice, but it has not been the way Java is developed in years. Java projects use huge amounts of third party libraries all the time. The quality of Java third party libraries from Apache, Google and Spring is really great. IMHO the best thing in Java is that there is a library for everything.

I think this may be quite different from the way .NET applications are developed?

In more recent years some of the libraries have started to "fix" the missing language features in Java. While this is kind of amazing, I think it's the wrong direction. It's better to go to Scala, Clojure or just wait for Java 8.

Now you have n! problems as a developer.

$0.05 worth of free advice to anyone out there:
#1 - _NEVER_ do software development for a large company as an employee. There's too much bullshit, politics, and brain dead process to get anything done. Also, you're nothing but a replaceable part. Go small to mid size, or (better yet) be a contractor. Which brings me to my second point:

#2 - _NEVER_ do software development where your efforts do not generate revenue unless you're taking the job to try and learn something. If the project/organization/whatever isn't making a profit off of every line of code you write, GTFO. Otherwise, you are simply an expense to be fucking MBA'd and "managed" as opposed to a source of revenue. When those goddamned suits look at you, make sure they smile and see dollar signs & black ink.

#3 - Contracting let's you violate rule #1 & #2 for fun and profit. BDC's (Big Dumb Companies) are so fucked up, most competent hands-on developers don't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole. That's where contractors & contracting firms come in. When you're not an employee of BDC, Inc. you get to go work for HotShit consultants LLC. When some project is fucked and some idiot CIOs neck is on the line he'll shell out a metric ass-load of cash to get it fixed. Enter you and your friends as HotShit LLC to come in and do the dirty work. Since you work for HotShit LLC, you're of course not a direct employee of BDC Inc. (or directly involved with the politics and BS thereof ) which fixes rule #1 and most importantly, as a consultant you're putting money in the pocket of HotShit LLC thus fixing rule #2 at the same time. Fun. Profit.

Hmm... That's an extremely nice application of the term "impedance". Sounds like the social counterpart to the Object/Relational impedance miss-match: the Agile/Distributed impedance miss-match. Both would go away if you used the right tool for the job instead of what everyone else uses because that's how business does it.

Nicely put.

Exactly. Part of the reason XP never took off is that it forces business people to confront reality. You can't PowerPoint your way out of a pair of developers standing in front of you explaining that you're the one who needs to decide what the fuck in going to be built right here, right now, and to accept the consequences of supporting it.