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Comment Re:Can't we just 3D print it? (Score 2) 248

Nanotechnology, as I understand it, is about building entire machines out of atoms, on a nanoscale. This would allow us to interact with the world in a completely different way, for instance, physically ripping bacteria apart instead of trying to kill them with chemicals. So a cell phone doesn't fit the description: even though transistors can be measured in nanometers, the whole CPU, let alone the cell phone, is far beyond the nanoscale.

I'm not an expert. You could just read about it on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology

Comment Re:Who the fuck says Amerindian? (Score 1) 319

The word exists and is in use.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amerindian
"a specialist word, esp in linguistics and anthropology, for American Indian"

http://www.le-dictionnaire.com/definition.php?mot=Amerindien
"relatif aux Indiens d'Amérique"

2 580 000 results for Amerindian (English)
1 330 000 results for Amerindiens (French)
957 000 results for Amerindi (Italian)
881 000 results for Amerindios (Spanish / Portuguese)

Comment You must live in a really weird place. (Score 1) 419

Around here 100 mbit optic fiber is the default internet connection that comes with your cable and you can access their TV channels from "the cloud", so every iPad is now a portable TV.
Thanks to the joys of "FON" (http://corp.fon.com), if you allow your wifi router to resell unused bandwidth, you can have free wifi anywhere in the country, so long as you stumble upon a FON link. And they're everywhere.
But apart from that, we do have flat-rate everything, including 3G, to the extent that some non-TV-watching people prefer to buy 3G access for their laptop instead of a normal internet connection.

Comment Join the army (Score 1) 789

You get a free gun and a free trip to a remote place? Get a boat and try to live off the sea? North Korea? :)
There was a corrupt politician here in Portugal who fled to the other end of Brazil, to a small town practically in the Amazon. People all know each other and notice you arriving. Any place hooked up to the global media is essentially the same place where you are right now. Your picture will end up in the newspapers. Buy a farm house in an absurdly isolated place, and you'll still have a paper trail.

Comment Good luck getting the fuel for it. (Score 5, Insightful) 381

I thought the whole car thing was dying because we're running out of oil.
Can you build a UAV that carries a whole person AND a stack of lithium batteries?
Mass transit is still the way to go whether you're flying or not.
See, for instance, London's new Cable Car. I live in a hilly place and I can't for the life of me imagine why nobody thought it would be useful to simply go from hill to hill.

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/modalpages/23828.aspx

Comment Bipolar people are not psychopaths (Score 2) 266

And they hate everything all the time, as a result of passive-aggressiveness during the depressive phases, or mere aggressiveness and grandiosity on the manic ones, or simply a tendency to hyperbolize their description of the world based on their own extreme feelings and disinhibition. They will also, of course, get into angry arguments.

Comment Are these people insane? (Score 3, Insightful) 394

There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology?
The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.

I can find out precisely when a building was built, sold, and how many times it was repaired, just by visiting the online city hall archives.
Not only that, I can get a map of my city for every century, and then some. Everything that ever happened here since God knows when. Like 1850 or so? I can get a list of all the people that lived in any given place since the 16th century, when the Church started keeping track of baptismal records. Online.

Why would things ever stop being archived and kept track of? Seriously. Are we going to have a nuclear war or something?
The whole archive would probably fit on a USB pen drive. Making 1000 copies every year would be a rounding error on the city's budget.

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