The problem with this is the entire world would have entered a global depression to teach the bankers a point. Most people would rather spare them their 'lesson', regulate them better, and prevent a world depression.

I'm not talking about during the bubble (if I was talking about bubble to recession, oil dropped from 130 to 35, so I would have said it dropped 75%). What I'm talking about was post-bubble-popping to realization-of-recession. Which was about a 40% drop. With something as inelastic as oil, a 3-5% drop in demand leads to a 40% drop in price.

And what you're saying about speculation is a natural side effect of an inelastic supply - or perhaps "slowly elastic" is the better description. When it takes a long time to increase supply and short periods of time for demand to change, it *necessitates* speculation.

I agree with you that energy prices should "tax" high energy users. I'd say one of the biggest things holding this back are older people on fixed income that can't afford capital investment in their homes to make them more energy efficient, but suffer through high energy bills every year.

When push comes to shove this one made it though because most people don't really care about using CFLs or incandescent, and nobody cares deeply about it. If we can knock a meaningful percent off our energy usage without seriously upsetting people, politicians will do it. Can't blame them.

As a side-note, I'm not sure about the math since it's an ad slogan, but I live in NYC and they had posters up for a while that said:
"If every New Yorker switched to CFL's it would save enough energy to power the MTA."

The subway and buses alone get about 7 million people a day to their jobs - and that's not even counting the massively popular above ground commuter trains. This is a measurable amount of energy we're talking about...

Energy supply is very inelastic, which means small changes in demand can be reflected by LARGE changes in price.

It should never be underestimated what a small change in energy demand can do to raise/lower prices (for all of us). Remember when the recession hit, and energy demand went down a few percent, and oil prices shot down 40%?

Also - thinking of each consumer making their own choice only affecting themselves is not accurate when you're in a market where your neighbors poor choices make it significantly more expensive for everyone.

Security, stability, plethora of truly free applications...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster. Hell half the reason I dislike windows so much these days is the UI, I just work faster on my fully-customized linux machine.

Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons. I've seen no such arguments for MorphOS.

Apple's invested good money in chips that decode h.264 in hardware. Their chips get something like 2-3x better battery life decoding h264 in hardware than they do in software. So yes - Apple *does* have a stake in h264 staying dominant.

What exactly isn't true about apple not allowing you to run programs that do things they don't want you to do? They don't want you using google voice, so they don't let google put an app up (aka they don't let you run it). They have a long history of trying to brick peoples devices who get through apples protection - why do that if it was all about the "user experience"? If someone willingly opted out of the user experience, why is apple deliberately destroying that persons user experience to preserve the "user experience"? Take your time responding, I realize you're very busy drinking koolaid these days.

"AT ALL."???

How is "you're not allowed to run programs that do things we don't want you to do" not being controlled "AT ALL"? Please let's not pretend like this is just porn. They rejected a satire app a few months ago, as has been widely publicized. The rejected the google voice app - and you can bet your ass it's not because it would "limit the iphone experience". Google apps are very high quality. The reason they did it is because you're 100% wrong, they DO want to control what you do while using their products. They want to COMPLETELY control what you do - they deny you from doing anything they don't want you to do, that's COMPLETE control, the very opposite of your claim.

Actually when you have a mostly-open marketplace and you ban certain messages from being communicated there - that's the very definition of censorship.

You obscure the argument by introducing the concept of 'publication', which implies selectivity in the first place. A place that houses public offerings is more like a forum than a 'publication' - censoring those offerings by their content is certainly censorship.

Dear God this is psuedointellectual.

RTFA - the virus isn't even the thing splitting the water, it's basically just acting as a source to channel sunlight onto the Iridium compound which splits the water. The transition metal compounds that can split water have been around for years (check JACS, you'll find dozens of articles), the thing that keeps this whole thing so far from being feasible is how expensive those compounds are in comparison to the energy they allow you to generate.

The only "story" about this "story" is how computer nerds always easily find ways to convince themselves they're smarter than specialized scientists in other fields after reading a dumbed down summary of a paper.

I'm not sure what capitalist society you're talking about, but you need to visit some inner-city schools and spend some time in those neighborhoods and tell me about how children born there have the ability to create their own happiness. Then think how it'd be one hundred times worse if schools were fully private, as libertarianism deteriorates the situation.

I'm not quite sure how the progress of ones life being dependent on the wealth of their parents is giving the individual the ability to create their own happiness... Libertarians are every bit as much out of touch with the realities of society as communists are.

As many philosophers have spelled out over time, the only way to fairly consider a social system is to imagine a system where you were randomly reborn tomorrow as anyone inside that system, and the one where you're most likely to live a good life is the fairest system. If you're honest with yourself you'll realize in a completely libertarian system 90% of people will be miserable, as the intelligent people take everything they can out of the system and hold it for their own. In a totally socialist system 99% of people will be miserable because it denies the basics of human motivation and everyone suffers. In a pragmatic system that combines the two (something libertarians fail to grasp), the most people are able to live good lives. The hard part is where to draw that line. Never trust an idealist, they're blinded by their own self-certainty. The hypocrisy of your post is you complain of the idealistic liberals who think they're smarter than you, when your own post stinks of self-certainty and idealism.

"Safe" might be a little strong, but it certainly is a reasonable assertion that if someone who generally shows very good resistance to the seasonal flu strains gets the flu, there's an increased probability it's a significant mutation to the flu. Since we know of a significant mutation flying around this year...