I recently had a though about how society values women and sex... Totally unrelated to TFA...

Consider that a large percentage of women used to die in childbirth. Also that sex causes pregnancy. Therefore sex causes women to die.

Natural conclusions (for people of the time) are that sex is bad, or that women are flawed / weak / worthless. Both of these we see in some prominent value systems from the past.

Happily, unwanted pregnancy and death in childbirth are way down from historical levels. Presuming the politicians don't screw up health care and access to birth control perhaps we can outgrow these attitudes about sex and women also.

This is pretty sweet. I'll bet you could get all sorts of insight about a life in this fashion. But what are the chances that (the average) someone will be able to gather this data and run the analysis and then keep the resulting insight under their own control? What are the chances that this data could be used by a person to improve their quality of life, as opposed to used by a corporation to more effectively vacuum up the money and utility people shed?

Well, anything you plug into the wall will use the electrical grid as an antenna. If your car doesn't plug in it's got an advantage over your computer.

Man, I stretch every morning. I stretch my achillies and hamstrings, and lower back. I had some issues with plantar fasciitis, and the stretching has really helped there. I don't know that it would help to prevent injury, I do it to maintain flexibility. So I say it's not a con. =)

Faster that which porsche 911?

http://www.zeroto60times.com/Porsche-0-60-mph-Times.html

Faster than any Pre1990 Porsche? Yes, I guess so. That would be pretty impressive if it were 1990. Really, 4.4s is still very impressive, for any car. But...

1993 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 0-60 mph 4.3 Quarter mile 12.5
1995 Porsche 911 Turbo 0-60 mph 3.8 Quarter mile 12.3
1997 Porsche 911 Turbo 0-60 mph 3.6 Quarter mile 12.1
1997 Porsche RUF CTR-2 0-60 mph 3.4 Quarter mile11.2
2011 Porsche 911 Turbo S 0-60 mph 2.9 Quarter Mile 10.6

There are a lot of Porsche 911 variants out there. A large fraction of the modern ones list sub 4.4s times.

(0-60 times often have largeish error bars)

BTW, you have that exactly backwards.

hmmm I'm not sure he does? Consider:

At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential
This is your own statement, and (without checking your actual #) it's true, because water is so heavy (massive). But change your depth 30 ft in the atmosphere and there is relatively little pressure difference. You can go up and down in an elevator all day and you won't explode. This is because air is so light (lacking mass).

The GP's point - I think - is that if you have a 30 foot tall underwater structure filled with pressurized gas, the pressure created by the water will be (by your number) 14psi greater at the bottom part than at the top part. But because the gas pressure differential is much less variant by depth the gas pressure at the top is the same as at the bottom. So you actually have to worry about blowing out the top of your open-on-the-bottom underwater highrise. There goes the whole 0 psi differential idea, but in the opposite direction one might expect. Maybe an easier problem to deal with (if you keep your structure squat), but still something to make sure the engineers account for.

Unless I've got it all wrong?

In all fairness, there is a heck of a lot more value in software than in hardware.

You know why? Artificial scarcity. The more America decides to make it's economy around software, the more software patents we're going to need to set up and defend. Don't Copy That Floppy! I've got a patent on 1-click checkout nobody else can do it! Get used that, if you want an economy based on software.

And in other news, this is one of the very very rare piece of wisdom to make it up the front page of slashdot in a long time.

This is a terrible idea. Manufacturing requires tooling and raw materials. And at the end is a physical thing that needs to be sent to wherever it is needed. And that all got sent overseas! All software needs is a computer. Oh, sure, and the knowledge to program it. The USA has an advantage there today, but there's no reason for it to persist. We have a head start over the Chinese, but they're not stupid. They'll have to transition from their cheap labor model to a well-educated labor model to become a software power. That's coming.

Easier than trying to control ideas (which is all software is anyway), would be to abandon the free trade that has moved out all our manufacturing anyway. Objects are easier to control than ideas. Taxes on imports would bring manufacturing back, and would also cut the power of international corporations over our government. It would be a huge change, and not an easy one. I think we'd be healthier for it though.