As pointed out by Lionel Dricot at http://ploum.net/post/the-cost-of-being-convinced, there is a cost of changing your position. A large number of climate deniers have invested themselves in the position they have taken, and unless they can find a benefit to changing their position that outweighs the investment they have made, they are likely to stand firm in their state of denial.

Potentially a far more useful technique, than bashing them over the head with the facts, is to start by having them review the facts surrounding the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and then ask them to provide proposals as to why those levels have changed in the timeframe they have. That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested. (I.e. it's the destruction of the rainforest - what does satellite data show about the circulation of O2 generated in the rainforest? It tends to stay in the area of the rainforests. Volcanoes emit CO2! Have we seen a tremendous increase in volcanic activity in the past century? No. Etc.) Start getting them to invest in looking at possibilities that can be tested, rather than having them try to change their minds based on decisions they have invested in.

Nah, it probably won't work, but it seems to me to be better than trying to sit and debate the topic with people who've come to the table already decided that no matter what the logic of proof that's provided, they are not going to change their position.

Well, you could sell us the oil in your sand, and use the profits as you see fit... :-)

The question you posed was 'What makes you think they are wrong?' in response to the perception that the scientists are squandering research funding, in the example as a $56000 hammer being sold to the military is perceived. That question makes two presumptions, that perhaps the $56000 hammer is fundamentally not squandering, or that scientists are squandering. While the image I had of a $56000 hammer was the idea of a 16 oz claw hammer with a wood handle, I concede that for $56000 one could be considering the entire assemblage of a jackhammer, hoses, compressor, trailer and vehicle to maintain fuel for the compressor, collection of replacement parts for appropriate daily maintenance and present it as a good deal. I can not see the former being anything other than squandering of spending on the military.

As to the idea that the scientists may be squandering research funding, I will concede that the possibility exists that scientists are squandering research funding. My point was that the idea behind providing examples of how the results may be used in practical terms is a way to bring home to the random reader of the news story that this research does have value. You may contest the validity of the specific examples given, either in my wild speculation example, or in the story's example of treating autism or epilepsy, but if you treat the positing of what the research may mean down the road as marketing rather than predictable results, you're going to get to why such suggestions are given.

Original post actually. I agree that knowledge that does not result in practical applications is worth research. As an example a moth's wings are covered in dust, which we don't find on butterflies. Why? What's the advantage that this provides a moth? Pilots know that dust on an aircraft wing has a significant impact on the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing, so there is the possibility that if we understand why a moth's wings are covered in dust, from an aerodynamic perspective, we may be able to develop aircraft wings which perform better in environments where dust is a problem. If the reason for the dust is that when a moth lands some of the dust is scattered onto the surface that it lands on, making it harder to recognize the moth, that might have practical applications in military camouflage. But if we discover that the reason that moths have dust on their wings has nothing to do with aerodynamics, or camouflage, is the research that proves those factors wasted? I don't think so.

The problem is that practical results make for better marketing of research. The Laser had no practical use when it was developed. It was not developed to solve a problem that the developer was working on, it was not developed to fit a niche of technology. For most of a decade we had little practical use for lasers. They didn't have the power needed to be useful in weaponry, and we didn't have the supporting technology to make use of them in sensor systems. Would you say today that the money spent developing the laser was squandered? Basic research is never wasted money. However it's often expensive, and if all you ever want to do is make the next quarter's balance sheet look good, you can't defend it. It's only when you look at the long term (often 30 years or so into the future) that it makes sense to fund basic research.

Yes it is, however scientists and reporters covering science research have no shortage of evidence demonstrating that if they don't provide concrete possible practical applications, the public perception is that scientists are getting research funding that they are squandering in the science equivalent of the $56,000 hammer sold to the military. Now if you want all research that is worth pursuing even if it doesn't lead to any practical applications receive that treatment, I'm pretty sure that there will be a large number of people willing to encourage the lambasting.

...Mike isn't going to be able to go after the 14 year old tweeter for a TOS violation under CFAA, as the TOS at Twitter do not seem to have a minimum age requirement that he would be violating.

As someone on the far side of 40 from the described 14 year old, I have to say that I appreciate that 14 year olds who are opposed to CISPA are aware that this will have an affect on their privacy, and are being vocal about it. It suggests that civic responsibility is recognized as part of one's personal sense of duty to our youth, which suggests that at least someone is paying attention to their school classes, which may be counter to what Mike expects of any of the public, much less the 14 year olds out there. It also suggests that a 14 year old is more aware of the issues involved than this sitting representative. While I think that's a positive reflection on our youth, I think it's a very poor reflection on at least one of our representatives in Congress.

Dude! Be careful with those parenting skills. Parents have been being arrested and their local police departments are trying to get their children taken away from them for doing such dangerous things to children as teaching them to be responsible, and letting them demonstrate those skills. It's a dangerous world out there for parents these days.

There are a few suggestions already, but here are some more.

If your system is doing nvram synchronization of system ram, that means that a suspend to nvram is almost instant, and since the copy from the nvram does not need to go through the disk subsystem on your motherboard (northbridge or sata controller) but can be handled directly by the system memory itself, it can significantly improve boot up time. I don't think it would be instantaneous, but it very well may be within a ping round trip for a web server to come up, process the ping and actually respond, perhaps go back to suspend until there is real traffic to attend to. (Though responding to a ping might be relegated to an improved ethernet controller, why start up the main system for a simple icmp request.) As a result of not having this system on when there is no actual traffic to handle means that you can save power even more than doing dynamic processor clock adjustments.

Alternatively if you are doing write buffering you can reserve a portion of your buffer for boot up system files that can load into memory on a cold start, so you don't have to wait for the hard drive to spin up from cold, and again is faster than plugging a usb3.0 memory stick into a usb port on the computer. Optimize the collection of files to be loaded there and you may be able to get a complete boot off the memory without touching the hard drive.

Extended logging into nvram so that the system can capture what is going on when it can't write/read the hard drive or flash drive because of a problem on the system board.

As prices go down, diskless laptops become completely diskless with apparent instant-on, instant suspend capabilities. Possibly even shutting down the system when there is no I/O happening. (GPUs on video cards could easily take over things like updating the clock on the display, shutting down the display after a cetain period of idle time, or even when sensing the laptop has been closed.)

Write buffering means that storage is journaled without having to do journaling on the hard drive. A side effect is that in a raid5 array if a physical drive fails during a write, you can redistribute what was written, and so long as you maintain two or more physical drives, can rebuild the array contents to maintain redundancy on the off chance that another drive fails before you get the first rebuilt. (something like that is going to take additional coding in the server OS, and means that the raid5 is going to be software rather than hardware based.)

Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

The problem is that the sensor system on a camera is not collecting an image destined for the human brain at a given moment. It's dumping data to best represent the original color spectrum that the human eye is able to sense, across the entire field of view of the sensor. As a result of that you are presented with an image via a screen or print, that allows you to look at any portion of the image and gather the approximate image that the sensor received.

A better question would be why don't we build displays that trigger the color and intensity functionality of the retina and as the eye and head move, the portion of the image that the color sensing rods on your retina are focused on receive the appropriate color stimulation, the portions that are only sensitive to intensity get grayscale levels. As you move your eyes and head, the system recognises where on the display you are looking and sets the correct stimulation levels to allow the mind to perceive that the screen is showing a full color image.

There are two requirements for that to function. The first would be that the display has to be able to detect where your eye is looking. Three cameras at the display should be enough to do that if the displays are planar, for non-planar displays, or huds, a head mounted sensor system of three camera's (and related hardware to sense where the pupil is looking) could provide the needed information. The second requirement would be to map out the user's retina for where color and intensity sensors are, and then apply that information to the portions of the screen that the eyes are looking at.

We are at the point where we could do that without too much difficulty. Well, other than adding another two front facing cameras to screens that have a webcam already. The display driver would have to be updated, and I suspect that most of the medium to high end video cards are capable of the necessary processing.

All that said, this is functionally similar to ray tracing, which has been offered as the 'next great improvement in display technology' for some 20 years. I kind of don't expect we'll see it before we see holographic memory become widely available.

But then again...

...we've switched from calculating rggb values based on attenuated rggb values sensed, to calculating rgb values from sensing cyan (usually a color of reflected light with red subtracted, white+blue ?, white+red ?, and yellow (again reflected white light minus the blue spectral light.)

I can see the resulting files having better print characteristics, if the detectors sense to the levels close to the characteristics of ink used for prints, but I don't think that's going to help at the display the photographer will be using to manipulate the images.

And of course neither variety of photo image capture is comparable to the qualities of light that our rods and cones respond to in our eyes.

Human's have to get out there. Not as entertainment, but because if humans remain exclusively on this rock and in near earth orbits, humans are a sitting duck. The lessons learned in getting humans into low earth orbit, then high earth orbit, then to establish permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, are going to be used to develop longer term programs for human interstellar travel, exploration and in time colonization.

Or we can just develop robots to go out and do that for us and roll over here on earth and give up.

Actually, if you select the 'outdated' hardware correctly, you can do all of that with a used cell phone. Several have HDMI out through an adapter for the USB interface, and some of the latest have wireless video capabilities as well. xbmc has been ported to the Android platform.

Now that's not to say that it's the best solution in anyone's book, but my experience with Raspberry Pi is that it makes a mediocre xbmc interface as a front end to something like MythTv. It is capable, just as a 3/4 ton pickup is capable of hauling more than 5 tons if it's done right, but in my experience it's not really the right tool for the job. The real power of the Raspberry Pi comes in figuring out what you can do with it that no-one else has done. At some point people have made their own dropbox alternative with the platform, which tells me that the system would work well enough as a plug server as well. household environmental management seems like a reasonably trivial thing to work out, though you'll have to create your own vent management system to be able to control air flow for thermal regulation in some cases. I can see someone developing their own home surveying system using poles, hoses and water level sensors, then capturing the property topography and feeding it into their own CAD software to figure out how they want to do building projects, how much earth will have to be moved, where it might go, etc. Then hand off the same Raspberry Pi to their daughter who builds a scanner using nothing more than an led and photo-resistor, and a couple of stepper motors to move the sensor they built. Or use a few rotary encoders and a button to build their own 3d scanner.

Note, I'm not saying that using a Raspberry Pi as an xbmc set top box is a bad idea, just that there are a lot of things that you can do if you get out of the mindset that it's an entertainment device and recognize that it is so much more.