Isn't this ultimately what this kind of service (d)evolves into?

It seems kind of contradictory to hang the TV production model in the A&S museum, where people will complain about how simplistic the model is without understanding the nature of a TV model (ie, not meant to be seen other than in controlled TV shots on 1960s standard def television).

The TV model should be restored as closely as possible to its TV version and then put in the Smithsonian wing that houses various forms of Americana so that it can be a proper historical relic.

Then they should build a new model of the Enterprise with all the detail people have come to expect for A&S.

Not sure if this matters, but I remember reading someplace that one of the "benefits" of the plague is that it drove up the cost of labor which ended up having a positive impact for ordinary people.

It seems dangerous to me -- I don't text while I drive, but I've futzed with my phone to make a call or change some settings and even that seems like it could easily cause problems.

That being said, not a day goes by that I'm driving that I don't see one or more people texting and driving and yet from 2006 to 2011, fatal motor vehicle crashes went down in the US every year.

If texting is as dangerous ("think of the children", "we have to do something", etc) as its made out to be and as prevalent as it seems to be, why are motor vehicle fatalities going down? Shouldn't the "epidemic" of texting be pushing them up, especially if its so dangerous?

in the way that they like to mention how it has a new processor. since uh, there's not that much to mention about the iphone6 except nfc.

Not much except a much larger screen size, which is obviously the big new feature for iPhone users.

The smartphone as a concept across any brand hasn't done anything new and different since the iPhone first came out. It's all been incrementalism -- faster CPUs, more pixels, bigger screens, faster wifi, etc.

No, I want an iBag with a 12" retina display on the bag!

I think there's a lot of value in looking at how to use hydrogen generated with renewables, especially when the source like solar or wind is capable of generating when the power isn't needed. During those periods the efficiency of energy conversion to hydrogen almost seems like it shouldn't matter because the energy is essentially free -- we can generate it but don't have any other use for it.

Please do tell me about these Soviet-style communist economies which have flourished and persisted with the growth and wealth accumulation.

Helium exists in the atmosphere not because of the helium reserve, but because the planet constantly outgasses it. It's a product of the radioactive decay chains within the planet.

And if it costs $7 a liter, you better believe people will consume it a *lot* slower. Mainly recapture, but also less frivolous usage.

It's an important difference.

Fox News is a right-wing punditry operation. They spin everything that happens in a light that promotes the viewpoints of US right-wing policy. If right-wingers are in power, they spin to the government's favor, and otherwise spin against the government.

RT is a literal government propaganda outlet. They have a story of what they want to tell people happened (regardless of whether it did or not), and tell people that it happened, to the point of routinely hiring actors as interview subjects. (side note: the Russia media really needs to get a larger acting pool, though... it's funny but sad when the same actor claims to be several different people for different stations in the same week).

If you see something inflamatory claimed on Fox, it's almost certainly spun. Possibly outright false, but unlikely - generally just highly spun. If you see something inflammatory claimed on RT, it's almost certainly false. Possibly just heavily spun, but generally willfully outright false.

Example: Fox News will pick random true stories from around the country, overplay them, and tell you that there's a War on Christmas. RT will hire a woman to play a refugee from Slavyansk to weepingly tell you that the Ukranian army is crucifying children in the town square to torture their mothers before killing them.

Well, I have to say, I've noticed something about Russia, and also about most (but not all) of the other former USSR states: the exact same sort of thing has kept happening under capitalism. Things like injecting a mother of a dead soldier with a tranquilizer on-camera when she spoke up during a press conference on the Kursk disaster, assassinating dissidents with polonium, arresting and outright assassinating journalists, sham trials to sieze assets either for the state or for Putin allies, heavy media censorship and the requirement for all major blogs to register as media outlets, elections so rigged that Chechnya went 99.59% for "The Butcher of Grozny", and on and on. It's no different today.

So, basically, the presence of these things says nothing about communism; it says that Russia has a history of strongmen leaders who confiscate peoples' belongings, outlaw dissent, condemn people without fair trials, and so forth. And when you look at these third world communist states, you usually find that their third world capitalist brethren rarely behave any better.

I think that communism, at least in its pure form, is terrible as economic policy. But one can easily run the risk of over-conflating.

I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.

It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.

Why not a diesel generator on board to charge the batteries? 30 miles doesn't seem adequate for most bus lines around here -- I figure most local busses run a route end-end of about 12 miles in about 2 hours, so a single bus could likely run the route 4 times in a shift.

The busses could be charged at the bus garage overnight and a generator consuming way less fuel than an engine could be used to extend the battery runtime. Kohler says their 20kw diesel generator uses about 2 gph at 100% load.

Helium balloons are a minor part of the overall picture. The overwhelming majority of uses are industrial, such as cryogenics. The problem is that they don't recover it. If you want to make a big impact on the helium consumption rate, hard drives is pretty much one of the least effective places you could focus - focus on industrial recovery.

Note that humans will never "run out" of helium. Even if we assume that space-based resource extraction becomes realistic, one can always refrigerate it out of the atmosphere. Or more accurately, refrigerate everything else out and leave the helium behind. There's only a tiny bit in the atmosphere, but for important uses it'll remain a possibility. I saw page that says that neon is $2 per liter. If you're refrigerating neon out of the atmosphere, pretty much all that's left is helium, so you're co-producing it, at a ratio of 3.5 to 1. If we assume that helium demand vastly outpaces neon demand, then the helium cost would be $7 per liter. And maybe less in mass production.

That's not really an absurd price for many uses - such as hard drives. On the other hand, it's dramatically more than today's prices at about $0.005 per liter! You're not going to be making helium blimps at $7 per liter. But if industry learns how to recapture and reuse, they should manage.

(Of course, humans probably wouldn't have to resort to helium extraction from the atmosphere for centuries, pretty much any gas coming out of the ground will be richer in helium than the air)

It means my iPhone 6 Plus order won't be backordered forever and I'll get it right away.

The Galaxy Note is the only Android I've ever been interested in, but then only for its size. The 6 Plus is only .2" -- sorry, 5.55555556 Ã-- 10^-5 American football fields -- smaller than a Note.

Now I can have an iPhone in the Note size, which is what I wanted all along.