The term plastic covers many materials. The ones made from hydrocarbons - polyethylene, polypropylene etc are gradually attacked by bacteria. If they are very thin as in plastic bags they are short lived. it is a little lighter than water, so it floats and gets the cross links broken by UV light unless filled with something heacvy, clay, TiO2 etc and might sink.
These are not long lived, nor are they hard, the scraping tongues with erode them, and a few cyles = gone.

If you replace one or more Hydrogen with fluorine or chlorine you get items that are not metabolized by any complex organism, however bacteris can colonize them and they remove an atom at a time, so they eventually go away.
https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=...

These are all soft so the scraping of tiny teeth turns them into small particles and the bacteria get at them.

One big problem with small particles is their lack of nutrition, so the small animal wastes energy to gnaw it and gets nothing back. Too many small particles and they starve to death via metabolic losses. People can starve on some foods that take more energy to digest then they yield.

Recently microspheres for cosmetics have been released into the water and they get through filtration plants = starvation again for the small fly if there are too many.

The rise of biodegradable layers has helps plastic go away sooner, if we made bags from starch film, if would be eaten in weeks in the sea

Arrrgh, typos breed like flies with machines that that both present a tiny view and finish words for you...

typo, should be Feynman in my RP

! Interesting what Nobel prize-winning physicists do in their spare time. !

This tells the tail of an inquiring mind that turns it's focus on many things. He reminds me of Fenman, among many similar Nobel Laureates, whose curiosity was not limited by a 9-5 mentality, but was active 24/7.

It is this quality that produces the Nobels...

If the UN is any example, an independent ICAAN will turn into the corrupt instrument of the nations that compose it and will control the new ICANN and then a new regime will levy taxes on the users - and these taxes, which they will call fees, will be spent uncoltrollably to creat an edifice like the UN, 200% corrupt. THE US congress is similarly corrupt, as we see by the FVV and Internet lobbyists.

I do not know how this can be prevented, apart by not letting it fall into the control of these crooks.

That said, ICANN is already a little crooked...

oops, here are all 4 pages as an album

http://imgur.com/a/utF2P#0

They are all images, so you will have to type the links.

http://i.imgur.com/pxx6QB3.jpg

yes, hidden in plain sight...

that is why I directed it upwards, to minimize street level light.
If it gets popular, so many will have them....

Just buy some invisible IR light units, and shine them into the camera eyes of any spying device. Placed outside on the window ledge with a slight up angle, they will not illuminate anything on the ground, but anyone who wants to peer into your widows with night vision (NV) will find the bright IR lamps will desense their NV.
These are often used to hinder attacking enemies with NV goggles, although this has developed into a spy vs counter spy among the various national forces that use NV.

At first this will happen, but then judges will request a fee bond from these numbered companies, which will pay the fees to the winner if the troll loses.

Well, If you build a new house in Toronto as part of a development you are forced to pay an infrastructure fee = huge cost. If you build on an existing infill lot it is a lot less, and cheapest is if you buy a house, tear it down and build a new one.
This process can take years because it is part of a scheme to increase housing costs

People seem to feel that money spent on exploration has no valuable return! Yet they spend countless billions on food stamps and welfare, yet these also have no tangible return.
They lose sight of the fact that 99% of the money spent on exploration is for the purchase of items made on earth and represents the labor expended to produce whatever item.

Take gold - it is free in the earth, but we pay the miners to drill, dig, break rocks, extract etc, and ever stage is almost totally for wages to deal with a raw material. Same for wood products, fibers. plastics, metals etc.

Research means we pay thousands of people to do intellectually challenging and technically difficult tasks to gain knowledge. Welfare and food stamps means we pay millions of people to sit on their bums and do nothing. Welfare and food stamps are a $$ sink. Sure they allow people to live without effort, without intellectual challenge, yet why do we spend more and more to grow this welfare and food stamp industry? We have given excess voting power to non-productive elements of society. In Roman times, only citizens of the city of Rome had the vote - none in the others could vote, to get these few votes, the voters were bribed by the senators (the only politicians of the age) with food and entertainment, which came to be called "Bread and Circuses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The huge empire of Rome declined and fell due to various forms of mismanagement and some say, lead in the wine? The USA is not immune to this.
If the research that underpinned all the gains the USA and the world have made in the past 100 years is not continued, we will decline into a morass of welfare grubs. It might take a while, but the decline has begun and will accelerate. We need both democrats and republicans to be isolated from the lack of a private ballot.
We thing that seeing how a politicians votes gives us accountability - it does not, it gives the lobbyist accountability - he sees his bribes at work.

We need to break this pathway. Can we? The politicians have grown used to their well feathered nests and will peck at the hands of those who want to change things.

True, the speed trap mentality will never die. It might have to be state run via data base access as the cams take the pix. The old manual method can co-exist with it?
but perhaps voter outrage will help with this

On the basis that the directing mind of the car pays for the transgressions, a small fine , in the $10-15 area is not worth fighting, yet it will act as a coercive pressure to cause that mind to limit the motion of the car to be within limits. Of course, andone can make their robotic car exceed a limit - unless these limirs are hard wired in, with location data and the settings of these limits in all dirveable areas is also hard wired in or acessable from a central data base via the computer to adapt to time and other changes (like no left turn from 4:30 to 6:30 PM, Mon to Fri).

We know that all modern cars can have their chips accessed to change the performance curves to accelerate quicker. The OEM chip is patterened for conformity with emission limits. We know it is illegal to change them. We also see the brisk sales of 'modded' chips and programmers to 'mod' these chips. We also know that the police are not equipped to easily inspect a car to determine if it has been modded, and so these mods excape the law. Will driverless cars also get modded, to go faster, make left turns at all hours, or whatever? One might expect a power on self test would stop this, but, if the test procedure has been hacked - what then? We will then need anti-hacker laws and sealed boxes to control this aberrant behaviour, or have we reached the millenium and none of us will do this in the future? I expect a sealed data unit will deter most, but some will fiddle.