It wasn't "invented" two centuries ago. It may have been given a name two centuries ago, but it taps into a deep and primal part of how our brains work. Go to a public swimming pool. Pee into a bucket. Take an eye dropper and put one drop of the pee into the pool. Everyone will rush out of the water, and you'll probably be arrested.

Our brains are wired so that the loosest association with something disgusting continues to disgust us no matter how diluted. People are grossed out at astronauts "drinking recycled pee," even though the reverse osmosis system used generates water cleaner than you can get from any natural spring. And if a minute quantity of something bad is disgusting, then it's not that far a leap to start thinking that a minute quantity of something good can be helpful.

They're starting to address this. I was shopping for a parabolic wifi antenna recently. Amazon lumps the reviews for 4 different types (different dBi) with 2 different connectors together even though they're all very different products. If you scroll down to the reviews, you'll see above each review is what specific product the reviewer purchased - dBi and connector type.

This is why we have to turn them into public utilities and abolish all exclusive franchising.

Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn and we would still be stuck on 56 kbps data speeds. (CDMA automatically divides bandwidth between all users who are actually using data at that moment. GSM is time-slotted, and each device gets a timeslice whether or not they actually use it to transmit data.) Nearly all 3G GSM data implementations used wideband CDMA (which is why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GSM phone - they had to have two different radios for voice and data, while CDMA phones did both with a single radio). 4G LTE uses bandwidth-sharing technology very similar to CDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes), and its development would've taken several years longer without CDMA to lay down the groundwork, if people had even believed it was viable without real-life trials among millions of users.

Public utilities are good when the technology has pretty much peaked and is stable - the best solution has been found, and there aren't any improvements on the horizon. Long distance electrical transmission initially had people advocating both AC and DC as superior. It turned out high voltage AC as the most effective way to transmit power over long distances, so that standard won out. Nothing better has been found in a century so that's a good service to turn into a utility - the optimal solution has probably been found. Likewise, cable TV/Internet is getting to that point. Initially there was lots of uncertainty about how best to hook up houses and subnet the network, so lots of different cable companies tried different things. But now pretty much everyone is using the same solution (it's even been standardized as DOCSIS), and the only looming future improvement is fiber to the home. So the Cable industry should probably be turned into a public utility soon.

But Cellular is still a rapidly developing industry with lots of technological innovations still being made. Turning it into a public utility would be the worst thing you could do to it.

If you want to fix Cellular, prohibit vertical integration. A company can own towers but can't provide service. A company can provide service but they can't own towers or make phones. A company can make phones but can't own towers or provide service. Then make it so you can buy any phone and subscribe to any service provider (as long as the phone supports their technology). The service providers would lease time on different tower networks. If a manufacturer made a good phone, people would buy it without regard for whether or not a carrier sold it. If a tower company put together a good network, lots of service providers would contract with them. And if a carrier had good plans, people would subscribe to them. None of the current BS where a carrier basically leverages their advantage in tower network into restrictions on phone interoperability and plan selection.

Because medallions create an artificial scarcity of taxis. And in any market, artificial scarcity creates cartels, which reduce competition and benefit no one but a tiny, well-connected minority of owners (and their paid-off politicians) at the expense of pretty much everyone else, including the consumers as well as the labor.

Medallions done properly create a scarcity of taxis in proportion to the scarcity of roads. There is insufficient roadage to support everyone who could potentially want to drive a taxi to make a little extra money on the side. You end up with gridlock, which counteracts any productivity gains that might be generated by having more taxis. So yes the scarcity is artificial, but it's done because it's the lesser of two evils. The other problems that arise out of the medallions, you try to address via other means.

Individuals are effectively taxed on profit via deductions and graduated income tax. A certain amount of income is assumed to be dedicated to necessary expenses like food, shelter, and clothing (at least in some states). Since the requirements for each person to live are pretty much the same, the same standard deduction works for every person. Further reductions in income taxes are made based on how many dependents (children) you're supporting.

The same method doesn't work for businesses because they vary so much in expenses they incur to operate. But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).

Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation." Either you can tax businesses and therefore businesses deserve representation in government. Or you recognize that a business is just a group of people working together, and those people are already taxed and can vote, so it doesn't make sense to tax them more just because they've decided to work together, and therefore a businesses does not deserve representation in government.

(Some business taxes make sense. But these are generally taxes to recoup regulatory costs like excise taxes on vehicles, or to encourage/discourage certain behaviors like pollution taxes.)

Because it used to be Google didn't have a Korean keyboard for Android, and rather than direct customers in their home country to download a 3rd party one from the Play store, they decided to make one themselves that they trusted. That was one of the early advantages of Android over iOS - you could replace the keyboard if you didn't like the default one. Eventually they began adding extra features and keys to support features that were only in their phones.

That's how innovation happens. It's not exclusive to the lab of a single company whose only claim to fame is that they own the OS. Everyone in the world comes up with different ideas, and the better ones get borrowed/stolen by everyone else including the company who owns the OS. Most manufacturers and carriers licensed or came up with their own version of Swype long before Google added it to Android.

It's not. it's what, 55% fructose, 45% sucrose -- whereas table sugar is a 50/50 split?

Where did you get the idea that you can take a food, completely ignore the body's metabolism, list its component molecules, and declare parity? It's a complete stretch, and so it's completely wrong. This is 1982-era reasoning.

The ratio of fructose and glucose in HFCS is similar to a lot of fruits. Grapes are probably the closest, at 54% fructose, 46% glucose; and honey at 56% fructose, 44% glucose. So if HFCS is bad for you, then so are grapes and honey. And if you're trying to paint fructose as the bad guy, then you should be horrified to know that apples, pears, and watermelon have an even higher fraction of fructose.

The problem isn't HFCS per se. It's that we eat too much damn sugar (in all forms).

Are you sure its radiation hasn't killed anyone? I've seen several "news" articles that claim a death toll of over 10,000 spread across the pacific, including thousands in California.

Part of the problem is that a large segment of the public thinks we live in a radiation-free environment and so incorrectly attribute all new cancers to nuclear accidents. The reality is that outside of about a hundred km of Fukushima, the vast majority of your radiation dose is from natural sources. In fact the people who fled Japan because they feared radiation from Fukushima in most cases subjected themselves to an even greater radiation dose during their airline flight.

If the DJ pays a fee, that should cover all music the DJ plays. The restaurant wouldn't logically have to pay another fee.

Generally it's the venue which pays the fee. The DJ pays to cover his own ass - if he plays the music at a venue which hasn't paid the fees, he can't be sued for his personal copyright infringement. It doesn't shield the venue.

The fee is actually pretty reasonable. For most restaurants it's just a few hundred dollars per year. Though I suppose one could argue that they priced it that low so that restaurants would just pay it rather than raise a fuss about it in court.

20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair spaced 1 arc-minute apart, or two pixels per arc-minute. 210 degrees is 12600 minutes, so this thing would have to be 25200 pixels across a 210 degree field of view in order to be good enough so you can't see the pixels. We're about 1/5th the way there (measured as linear resolution). In terms of apparent pixel size, this thing (24.4 pixels per degree) is roughly equivalent to viewing a 50" 1080p TV from 24 inches away.

Incidentally, this is why I don't mind the increases in phone screen resolution, and why I don't think graphics cards are fast enough yet. Yes the resolution is excessive for use on a phone. But manufacturers are using it as an excuse to fund R&D into higher res screens which will one day be useful for VR overlay displays built into things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. And we're going to need low-power graphics cards to drive those high-resolution screens with virtual 3D images, so there's still a ways to go in improving those as well.

And for those of you saying you're not interested in a VR headset, the biggest impediment to the miniaturization of mobile computers right now is the screen. If you've ever taken apart a tablet or a phone, the electronics mostly fit into a thin PCB about the size of a ball point pen. People want a bigger-than phablet screen on their phones, but they don't want to carry something that big around in their pockets or purses. The obvious solution is to move the screen closer to the eye, like Glass or HoloLens. Then the display can cover the same angular field of view as a HDTV viewed a few feet away, but be much smaller in linear size than even a smartwatch. Moving the screen closer to your eye also increases the effective brightness, reducing the lighting requirement thus allowing you to use it all day with a smaller battery. My guess is this screen size problem will be solved either with VR-style glasses displays, or flexible screens which can roll up into something the size of a pen when not in use.

You choose to live in a place with no water. You have the fifth largest economy in the world. You bail yourselves out of your current self-inflicted disaster - And then yes, you maintain that solution for next time.

To be fair, most of the California infrastructure was built at a time when Colorado River water use by other states was low enough that even though California got what was left over, it was more than enough. What's happened is that (1) other states closer to the source of the Colorado have increased their water use and (2) California's population and water use has increased as well. So no it's not entirely a self-inflicted disaster. Merely a predictable one where population growth outstripped a static amount of water supply, and California just happens to be at the spigot furthest from the source.

As for desalination, reverse osmosis is the cheapest in terms of overall energy cost. But most of desalination's energy requirement is electrical (to power the pressurization pumps). Other desalination methods have thermal energy as the bulk of their energy cost. Well, thermal energy is usually considered a waste product and so is basically free. I've always wondered why we don't kill two birds with one stone. Turn nuclear and fossil fuel power plants into co-generation plants which use seawater for cooling, and divert the resulting steam to heat exchangers which condense it back into fresh water while heating up more seawater.

did the engineers mixed up their metric and standard formulas again?

Technically, Mars Climate Observer wasn't lost due to a metric / imperical foulup. It was lost because someone didn't write down the units on a set of numbers, and someone else assumed (incorrectly) what the units were when they read the numbers. The spacecraft would've been lost just the same if the figures had been written in kilonewtons, and someone had else assumed they were newtons.

This was one of the most basic things drilled into me during my first engineering courses. Always write down your units. A number without units is meaningless (unless it's a dimensionless number). It's actually pretty shameful that not writing down the units for a number was a common enough occurrence with Lockheed/JPL that people would just assume what the units were instead of calling/emailing to confirm.

The capacity factor definition uses 24 hour day. So for day time power generation without storage you would rate PV at 0.29 immediately. Further instead of averaging it over the entire day, you average it over just peak six hours of generation. The number is 0.58, not too far off from coal.

Coal's capacity factor during peak hours is close to 1.0. It only drops down to 0.6 because they shut down the furnaces during the night when demand is low. That's why nuclear's capacity factor is so high - the power generation shuts down too slowly for it to be scaled back every night. So they keep the reactors running 24/7, shutting down only for maintenance.

And if you do the math for angle of the sun (integral of sine from 45 degrees to 135 degrees is sqrt(2/2), or 70.7%), the effective capacity factor for PV solar during the peak 6 generating hours is 0.41, not 0.58. ((.41)*(6 hours) + .(17)*(6 hours) ) / 12 hours = 0.29. 0.58 is what you would get if the entirety of PV solar's power generation throughout the day happened in 6 hours.

Power generated does not equal installed capacity. Power generated = (installed capacity) * (capacity factor).

For the U.S.:

• PV solar's capacity factor is about 0.145 for the country overall. In the desert southwest (where most of the solar installations probably are) it's about 0.18.
• Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.20-0.25.
• Coal's capacity factor is about 0.6.
• Nuclear's capacity factor is about 0.9.

So solar has to have about 40% more installed capacity than wind to generate as much power. It needs almost 4x as much installed capacity as coal to generate a comparable amount of power. And it needs 5.5x as much capacity as nuclear to be comparable. Comparing power generation based on installed capacity is like trying to compare how much food people eat based on the size of their refrigerators.

Even if the insurance companies weren't in cahoots with government, they'd make more money off the transition.

Insurance is the art of predicting the total cost of all accidents, and charging slightly more than that in premiums. When things are stable, you can refine your prediction, do year over year comparisons, and whittle down the margin you're charging in premiums to become more competitive.

When things are in transition, there's greater uncertainty and thus greater risk. You're now trying to hit a moving target, and can't be sure if your estimate was accurate because it was a good estimate, or because you got lucky. So you play it safe and charge more than the worst case scenario you can imagine in terms of payouts. That means the spread between premiums and payouts will increase, not decrease as TFS assumes.