best online only

1. http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php
2. http://questionablecontent.net/
3 http://www.smbc-comics.com/
4. http://xkcd.com/

and these two are the best of the newspaper comics

1. http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/nq/ nonsequitur
2. http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/db/ doonesbury

Most issues below have been raised above. Many inaccurately, or incomplete.

Soil v dirt. It is my understanding that to grow anything, all that is needed is something for the roots to grab, and the appropriate chemicals, water and sunlight supplied. True, crop rotation can reduce the chemicals required (Nitrogen a good example, use sub-clover.)

Grain costs. Ethanol can be made from most organic matter. Grains of any type are good producers of ethanol. The production of ethanol for use as a fuel additive certainly appears to have driven up the cost of grains. For instance, look at a graph of "world grain prices" v time. ( http://www.ifpri.org/node/8436 ).

It does seem logical that higher grain costs would correlate very well with the increased starvation of people (especially children, about 6 million per annum) in the poorer parts of the world. (e.g. http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats) There are reports that agricultural areas in third world countries are being bought up and utilized for ethanol production.

Just incidentally, Ethanol has a lower HCV (Higher Calorific Value) than petrol. (approx 30,000 MJ/Kg -v- 45,000 MJ/Kg.) This means that ethanol is only worth ~2/3 as much as petrol as a fuel, because it only does 2/3 the work. So for a (say) 10% mix (E10) the value per gallon or liter should be (0.9 + 2/3*.1)/1 ~ 0.967% of the straight (ULP) price. Or for each $1.00 paid for regular ULP, the price for E10 should be 3.3c less. For a 20% mix, (E20) the cost should be 6.7c per $1.00 less.

So there we have it. If you want to (1) help the farmers, (2) damage your car's engine, and (3) help the environment by (4) killing off millions of children in third world countries, then just vote to increase the mandated amount of ethanol in petrol.

The solution is already in process.

The answer is greater diversity of tuition options, and a professional qualification examining organization.

Tuition options are already happening, e.g.udacity.com

Of course if you want to attend MIT for your tuition, feel free. But the final requirement to work as an engineer and sign off on those suspended concrete slabs or elevator certificates or for an electrician's license is the certificate from the examining organization.

There will still be graduates who pay for university training. And perhaps they will find preference among some employers for their provenance. But some employers will have employees coming up through the ranks, or spot likely talent in interview.

I suspect that the time to choose a career as staff at a university has probably passed.

Some patents are pivotal, like say antibiotics. Or what if somebody discovered a really cheap, quick and accurate test for cancer and charged say $10, 000 for each use for the next 50 years?

As for copyrights, I think its reasonable that I could record and distribute say a concert that I attended without breaching somebody's copyright. As for books, electronic copies could be provided profitably from an author website for less than a dollar. Even without the copyright system, authors and performers would still live well.

The social utility and justification for the introduction of copyright and patent law was to provide an income for the developers of novel or artistic works. That social utility vanishes when the owners of those concessions abuse their position to profit beyond the reasonable recovery of performance or innovation costs.

1. How is this different to having an agent buy the books second hand overseas and having an agent bring them into the US? Because if it is different, then the point of sale must be proven.
2. If point 1 is found not to be different, then this would be a major rewrite of internet sales laws.
3. What about patented pharmaceuticals? I could imagine that big pharma might want some input into reselling of their patented drugs back into the US.
4. Isn't it time we started a political movement to shorten copyright & patent terms, and to reduce rights?

I worked for a living as an employee in engineering and computing for 50 years. During my working life I saved money in a public superannuation corporation so that I need not work when I was too old. So now you feel entitled to rob me of my savings because I "don't work"? Someday maybe you will retire.

Maybe you live in LaLa land. In Australia bosses are finding it cheaper to pay a worker $20, 000 to leave rather than try to sack him for laziness, lateness or even straightout theft.

From what I hear it was nearly as bad in Detroit. Are you in Detroit?

As a consumer I benefit from lower wages in that I can buy cheaper cars and other consumer goods.

As a retired person living on investments I cheer on the profitability of my investments.

I would rather see those low wages go to someone who needs them than to some lazy unionist who has captured the legislative framework and lives it up at my expense.

I know that there are a countable number of trigger event types/styles, and each will have only a countable number of options.

Programming to predict those trigger type/styles would be an interesting problem. Cycling through those options is then a fairly straightforward brute force problem.

However in the final analysis, even if you missed finding the trigger, I don't see the how the actual event would not be detected by the BB test, or even the timing cycles lost test.

And if that coding is discovered, it immediately becomes our trojan.

That is somewhat more elegant than I had anticipated, however (off the cuff) I suspect that those NOOPs might show up in the time log. You appreciate that I assume we have a lot of time and talent that can be applied.

Also I do not believe that a black box "watcher" program on the installed system could be circumvented.

I think that, given a map of the hardware architecture, it should be possible to write a test program that could find addresses not in the specs.

Of course the real problem is the lack of those in power to know bullshitters from talent.

I've had a blog since the 20th century, and am too lazy to write HTML direct, so seamonkey it is. Son in law got me onto Wordpress for a while, but in the long run, it's less secure with all those fancy bits. Caught a virus, and i gave it up.

Admittedly seamonkey has a few bugs, but wtf just have to find a workaround. (one annoying bug is textsize especially on cut&paste.)

So keep up the good work at SM.

There is so much asymmetrical shit going down that I would not trust anything as ambiguous as "military or political prosecution".

I mean all this just to get a witness' statement about a "wardrobe incident" with a condom?

Idiots. Size of Texas means area of asteroid equals area of texas.

So Diameter of asteroid is only about 150 miles. (260,000 / 4 / Pi ) ^ 0.5

Which means mass is overstated by around 200 times.

Jeez. What sorta engineering students are they doing nowadays? USA might as well quit being a superpower right now.

Learn a bit of Engineering.

It costs a few hundred dollars to convert a Gasoline (petrol) engine to use natural gas. A car built for only natural gas would be cleaner and cheaper to run than a gasoline engine, and most probably cost the same and require less maintainence.

Oh sorry. Silly me. If you or any alarmists knew any Engineering you wouldn't be alarmists.

Is it the deniers or the alarmists?

Not that I give a stuff. Even if the world is warming because we use Carbon fuel, does anybody really think that alarmism will stop people from eating and breeding and driving motor cars and airplanes?

Of course what REALLY has the alarmists upset is FRACKING because it will delay PEAK OIL by a century or more.

So if the world warms up, I will turn up the a/c and grow food in glasshouses.