So this is it then, we've accepted that when the grizzled wild eyed man comes from the bowls of some mega corp and screams; "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!" That he will then add, with no change in tempo; "...And as a result, we'd like to offer our customers a 30% discount on burgers."

We're all on board with this because if we don't upsell everyone's dog, at all times, we don't get any burgers, even if they are made of grandma.

OK, so it's kind of like Crossover Games -- it creates a wrapper with everything that an app (game) needs from an OS, but doesn't require the entire OS.

You are basically then allocating memory and feeding tasks to the wrapper without expending resources you don't need. To describe what it can and cannot do, all you can say is; "it depends."

Is that about right?

That's if you accept what the Corporate PR said about the Exxon Valdez -- and you ignore the 1000x incidents like this that get no press.

The on solar incident that is killing birds also doesn't have the "unknown unknowns' there aren't that many unintended consequences down the line.

The Valdez spill continues to have SOME ecological impact. It also wasn't cause by a drunken sea captain - that was the cover story that they adopted and likely the captain got compensated for. The COMPANY POLICY was that they turned off all the radar and sonar systems that they PROMISED the Inuit that they would have on to protect the wild life. The Inuit went for protection of wildlife, over levying a large toll on this profit making venture.

Exxon saved money paying for the trial and underpaying and stalling the payouts -- some people just died of old age waiting to collect. Having to pay for all the safety procedures was more expensive than a guaranteed cataclysm.

I just wanted to point that out while all the pro oil and pro nuclear people gloat about extrapolating bird deaths that someone admitted to vs. bird deaths that PR agencies are never going to admit to. We pay trillions to a military to procure oil profits and we will be paying for 2000 years to safeguard mothballed nuclear plants and so I'm going to debate people on "cost of Kilowatt" when all the stats are lies and damn lies that we compare our apples and oranges to.

We do not really know the cost of most of these dirty fuels, but we do hear a lot of happy talk about it and comparisons to "worst case scenarios" for alternative energy. Birds killed by concentrated light -- I'm so surprised! Put up some fake owls on poles -- impact reduced.

My guess is the metal fatigue is being cause by radiation. Mars does not have the atmosphere and magnetosphere of Earth (no news flash here). So maybe it's just a case where cosmic radiation causes metal fatigue and we didn't know that -- or perhaps it's SPECIFIC to the type of allow being used.

"knee jerking white knight mangina useful idiots swooping in"

Nobody would call you a hater -- to your face, within range of your shotgun which is reasonably attached to the gun rack on the side of your laptop. Nobody.

Since I'm on the internet, I'll just say; "it's a private website, and they can have any stupid policy they want." Just saying. Just calmly saying with no anti or pro intent. I'm putting down my pen -- it's just a pen.

I'm backing away from my keyboard now. Slowly.

> However I would really hope the actual dangerous stuff isn't on the same network that allows any sort of internet access.

You spelled Nuclear correctly, but if you want the DOH (Department Of Hope), it's down the hall between the DOWT (Department Of Wishful Thinking) and OMGTWB (Oh My God-That Went Boom!)

No, there is a "nearly free" lunch if you are a multinational corporation or an executive attached to one.

The REAL average tax rate of fortune 500 companies is 13%. That's what Mitt Romney pays -- well, the income we KNOW about.

The last stat I looked at showed that the government paid around 52% of all medical expenses. And administrative costs at hospitals were around 42%.

What should we learn from this? In the US our cost is about twice to four times as much for healthcare as other civilized countries. More than half of this money is just going into the pockets of insurance companies, drug companies (charging more here than they do abroad and drugs that cost pennies to cows cost dollars to humans). HMOs and Hospitals. There are middle men in the equation.

The blame is getting spread around, but it's all about who gets the money. And it isn't the doctors or the patients -- the people actually involved.

We already have paid more than enough for Universal Health care, but there are corporations and wealthy that have removed their money from the system and there are fat cats making the money and getting us to look to blame the wrong parites. Why would they want to SOLVE this situation -- the FREE LUNCH is working out great for a lot of people with a lot of money.

It doesn't "chill the speech" of the young or ignorant -- but it sure scares me out of posting REAL THOUGHTS attached to Facebook.

Anything can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion so anonymous = freedom in the information age.

I couldn't agree more. In an insane world, the sane blogger must appear as a troll!

Huffingtonpost.com forced a policy change that required a Facebook login. I don't want my opinions to tag me, like my credit rating. Eventually, if I've got any opinions that don't follow the "common and popular" I can create a self-reinforcing negative reputation.

Having what you really think follow you isn't good for being employed. And being unemployed isn't good for a credit rating. And a bad credit rating means insurance costs more. It's a really effective way to make dissidents "non persons" over time.

Anonymity on the internet is the last refuge of Democracy. If we cannot protest and voice our complaints anonymously -- then the only people who will get good reputations and jobs will be those that agree with the status quo.

I think the greatest speed limitation now is our "computing dimensions" -- we are still using binary logic in the computer. For instance, if we moved to optical computing -- sure the structures would get larger, and there are density issues, but if you can create a binary logic gate for each color, your "dimension" of computing is limited only by the frequencies you can discern. You add massive parallelism.

Now if we can move from binary logic at the same time, more computing work can get done per cpu cycle. In this case, the main limitation is coming up with a new computer logic to accommodate more than an off/on state.

And for data storage, holographic also is less "dense" than current hard drives, but you can add angles, and so more data can be stored in the same location.

I remember seeing a news story about a train conductor who "took marijuana and caused a deadly crash." They also mentioned, almost as a footnote near the end of the story that there were nearly 24 empty Miller Lite beer cans.

So I think we can't rule out something else that could have caused the malady.

But if this is 1/700,000 -- you are below the danger level of side effects to Aspirin.
Peanuts are legal and they can potentially kill more people.

Now we might put a warning label so people can look for the side effects, but this doesn't seem like a threat above "slipping on rubber ducky". Other than paranoia, this is about the third time I've heard of a person almost destroyed by MJ. There are many legal things that are far more dangerous.

If you have a trillion cameras all operating in sequence such that they are triggered exactly so one activates a trillionth of a second after the other, than you've got exactly the same information via speed of light as just one camera. The only question is how much light each device is sampling. The shorter the time window, the more sensitive the measurement of light.

But I don't see any problem with speed of light; you are just sampling what hits the sensor at a faster rate.

I'm just wondering who would sit around for a few weeks to watch a humming bird beat its wings a few times. We need some hyperbolic metaphors so we can comprehend how fast this is...

But I have to admit that if my intentions were ever good, I wasn't actually marketing anymore. I'm glad that he's apologetic, but he was in marketing. You don't swing a pitchfork in Hell and pretend you don't work there.

The "racial differences" for athletic ability are also incredibly over rated. You take anyone and start them on a program of wind sprints from the age of 4 and they are going to do better than the average couch potato. So if we try and factor out "given the same situation" then there is a minor difference -- we have only factored for the "rate of improvement given certain inputs." We don't know what "peak ability is" because most of us don't ever approach our peak.

If I'd stayed a book worm recluse like I was when I was ten, and I saw the only value in this world as "being smart", I'd be very, very educated as far as books are concerned.

It's not that we can't find a CLEAR difference with tests, but there are so many cultural differences that make the difference on athletic performance and intelligence it makes the other points moot. A few studies with adoption notwithstanding.

The genetics between humans other than a few aboriginal groups, is so minor as to be inconsequential. It's not like we are talking about Poodles and Retrievers. It's exactly like "all humans are poodles" and we are arguing superiority based on hair style.

One day our kids will be learning twice as much as they do today. New techniques and possibly modifications will be employed. Any on of the kids from 200 years in the future would put people today in the dust. So maybe we need to find better educational techniques based on culture, and let kids gravitate towards what works best.

The main problem I have with these IQ debates is; we don't cover all forms of intelligence, and we use the results as excuses to not do our best. I think that's why some people are so "PC" about the issue -- because every group "on top" in human history has tried to make arguments for why the people on top are naturally superior.

For instance; The royalty probably had higher IQ's than the average peasantry in medieval Europe and likely because of diet.
Some poles used to do IQ tests before people could vote, and the questions were entirely designed to be easy for a caucasian.

There is a difference, but I don't think people should be surpassed that others get upset, or that people call make valid points of larger differences in opportunity, and more recent "environmental history." What we think is "genetic IQ" may more likely be adaptive genes which can change one generation to the next. For instance, if your parents were weight lifters -- you might be better at lifting weights as certain genes are turned on. I expect we will see a lot more real science backing up the notion that humans and other animals that have to adapt to wildly changing conditions, can have massive changes in genetics based on recent family history.