The dark side of Mercury is a balmy -280F. Hard to retain any meaningful amount of heat when you have no atmosphere. :)

I see we have another liberal scholar. It's probably good you posted AC too, I wouldn't want that drivel associated with any online personality either.

I'm so sick of that BS. If I injure myself, my insurance will kick in and society will not foot any bills. And before you claim insurance is society paying, it is not as the actuaries already charged me a rate for expected claims coverage.

Non free countries force riders to wear helmets. I happen to live in a somewhat free country. You can keep your non free country that tells you what you can and cannot do based around someone's irrational fear of having to provide some medical coverage or whatever. When are those civilized country going to force you to wear protect during casual sex because it might cost society money with maternity leave and delivery fees. That entire line is BS and should never be spouted by anyone intelligent who isn't a greedy bastard more concerned with what they might have to share the cost of then people's freedoms and rights..

In that regard, the analogy fits. But what good is that? If that's the best you can do for an analogy, you may as well give up.

Give up on what? Copyright is only a legal construct too. Like it or not, it's valid and the premise is valid.

Look, if you can't think up a proper analogy for copying bits, don't bother. Analogies are usually garbage and unnecessary, anyway. How about just arguing your damn points without bringing up unrelated junk?

I don't need an analogy for copying bits. I gave a good and accurate analogy concerning the act of conversion which is theft by law. I do not care if you download something, take a CD or DVD from the store or whatever, you are taking it without the legal right to do so and those who would have received compensation normally are entitled to that compensation when you do.

Like I said, your hand waiving is intellectually lazy. I will add that you are doing a poor job at both rebuttal and forwarding any counter points.

Sorry, you missed the sarcasm. My overly subtle point was that this solar crap cooker isn't designed for disaster relief (pun intended) because one of it's major selling points, biochar is close to irrelevant in that context. In other words, you don't sell disease prevention by selling long term fertiliser benefits. Another point being that disaster relief doesn't reliably coincide with near constant sunshine.

You are right, I missed your sarcasm but as I said before, long term fertilizer benefits is nothing more then safe handling of the byproduct. If you compost, you have raw sewage to deal with and disease. With this, you end up with something that can be stored and used or sold to aid in the relief.

On motorcycle protection: Given the trauma causes in 2&3 wheel vehicle accidents, wearing a helmet is the most intelligent thing you can do. I'd personally feel more naked without a helmet & track style protective gear than with a helmet and not a stitch. Wearing one turned a minor accident into something that I walked away from instead of a fatality.

Most people will go their entire life without a single accident on a 2or3 wheeler (3wheelers are actually outlawed here unless you had one from before they were outlawed). A large percentage of those who will, will be little more then dropping the bike at slow speeds. That being said, I agree that a helmet will save lives and mitigate trauma damage, it is just that I was raised not needing to wear one and I'm simply not comfortable wearing one. I ride in jeans, every once in a while a leather jacket, and generally no helmet. Done it for over 30 years, even on the trails as a kid. I like the wind in my hair while cruising. I know the dangers, I just view it like when I skydived, an acceptable risk to get the expected enjoyment.

The guys I ride with don't really have a sign off, but V+

I don't have a link to the actual device used but it is similar to this except the enclosure was optional and therefore a bit smaller.

http://iqgistics.com/gps-solut...

More here
http://www.globalstar.com/shop...

This happened about 2004 or so and my friend was the one who purchased and monitored everything as it was his kid. I don't remember it being 11 inches long but I think it was from the same company as the domain looks awfully familiar.

The net effect is exactly the same, no noticeable loss to you or anyone outside of a legal privilege to collect fees. The analogy fits quite well as your private property only remains yours because of a legal construct. Otherwise I could simply claim it as mine and there would be nothing you could do other than take it from me if you can.

You simply cannot show one so the analogy is adequate to illustrate a concept. BTW, waiving your hands in the air screaming the analogy is bad doesn't address any real implications brought up by it, it's just attempting to dismiss something out of convenience and not because of any sound logic or anything. I can see why you posted AC.

Guideline: when your strongest argument is nitpicking an analogy instead of the concepts presented by it, you are intellectually lazy and you failed.

So, it is your position that BillG & co came up with this system for quick deployment in disaster zones and not as a long term solution? That explains why they push biochar as such a major benefit.

I believe this is one of the reasons or uses behind it. I'm sure it would also be put into use in areas that electricity or power of some sort is difficult and expensive to come by. Remote villages might be one, lands on or near certain habitats that need protection for whatever reasons might be another.

After all, everyone needs biochar right after a major disaster, right?

why would they need biochar after a disaster? What they need is a way to deal with sanitation that isn't going to require a year or more before it can be safely handled by humans without needing specialized equipment or knowledge in order to do it safely. I know what you are thinking, compost is safe, well that's if the organic components are in a compatible proportion and the compost is allowed to properly cultivate, otherwise, it will be a breading ground for illnesses.

Note that I recognise the sanitary advantages, but just doubt that unless they make is smell less than I fear, it will not be widely deployed.

I don't see it being a community center like they are wishing for. And I do think it will smell quite horrid. I shirk at the thought of a bathroom being a public hang out anyways, let alone something like this. But if put out of the way, it would be useful.

People know that riding a motorcycle or a scooter without a helmet/gloves/jacket/adapted footwear is a major health hasard. Yet every year I see the idiots in short sleeves & flip flops tooling around.

Well, I ride without a helmet all the time. It's only a hazard if have an accident and a helmet can introduce it's own set of hazards too. That being said, I specifically choose to not wear a helmet and if I wreck, I am endangering only my life. It's a bit different if you do something and endanger or harm someone else. So going without good sanitation is a bit more like driving drunk where if you screw up, you can involve more then yourself. Others don't like that concept unless they are impaired or drunk themselves so they will tend to mitigate those risks if it is available and expect others to also. That's why almost every country and political subdivision in the world has laws against driving drunk where some have and some do not have laws about riding motorcycles without a helmet.

I am hoping so badly ( hoping, mind you, not really anticipating ) that our lawmakers in Congress will see and craft tax law to encourage the kind of stuff Gates is doing and closing all of these tax advantages of simply rent-seeking and financial churning.

Gates is already using tax law that lawmakers in congress put to work years and years ago specifically for this type of thing.

It's called a foundation and it is a non profit that people can funnel portions of their income into specifically for these purposes. Better yet, it isolates or shelters some of their wealth from threats they personally suffer or could suffer similar to how corporations isolate share holders except the wealth can no longer be used to their personal benefit. And as a registered nonprofit, the income and donations do not get taxed or taxed at reduced rates (see commercial non profits which is a commercial enterprise designed to sustain and benefit a charity) plus the advantage of certain contributions having tax benefits.

No, it isn't. There's a difference between someone who's potentially more vulnerable to a disease because their immune system hasn't been trained to recognize it and someone who's a known, active carrier of a specific disease who is knowingly infecting other people. So no, that isn't at all what I am advocating.

If you can't see the difference between "I refuse to utilize man-made means to boost my immune system" and "I'm going to purposely infect myself with this weaponized biological agent so I can infect others", then there just isn't any hope for you as you lack basic logic and critical thinking skills necessary for the comprehension of this discussion. If you actually believe what you're saying here - and you're not just doing it for effect because you want to make your case or make a point - then let's just stop right now because there's no rationalizing with an irrational person. If you're just trying to make your point, then you should do so in a way which makes sense as it'll carry more weight.

Reducing herd immunity? Not measurably. "Making people get sick and die"? That's patently absurd. No one is making anyone get sick and die. You wouldn't say that an AIDS patient who cannot tolerate vaccinations against diseases is "making people get sick and die", would you? They're compromising herd immunity exactly as much as someone who merely chooses not to get vaccinated. The effect is the same: one less person out of the whole of the "herd" has a potentially better prepared immune system. And in any event, unless the particular individual is actively infected, contagious, and is knowingly interacting with the public under those conditions, there's no case to be made that they're making anyone sick. A healthy person unvaccinated against Influenza who is not infected with Influenza or who is not interacting with other people while they have and are contagious with Influenza is not making ANYONE sick. Get real.

No, it really is. We're talking about a hypothetical person refusing a hypothetical vaccine which may or may not provide any immune system boost for said hypothetical person against said hypothetical disease. That's hypothetical. Even if you reference a specific, real person, a vaccine will only provide a chance of improved immune system response to specific strains of a specific type of pathogen. There's no magic shield that envelopes a vaccinated individual; they simply have a better chance of their immune system being able to quickly respond to and destroy that pathogen upon infection. If their immune system doesn't respond as expected, or if that response is later counteracted by some other factor, or even the slightest of genetic mutations takes place in the pathogen, there's little help from the vaccine. Doesn't mean vaccines are anything less than a godsend for humanity in the fight against pandemics, but there's no guarantee of any level of actual protection or contribution to herd immunity at an individual level. To claim there is is purely speculative and, as previously stated, entirely hypothetical.

I fixed your grossly inaccurate statement for you. An individual who refuses vaccination and subsequently becomes infected with a pathogen is not "allowing themselves to be infected". They didn't ask for the infection; that's just victim-blaming bullshit. "Did you see the way she was dressed refusing vaccinations? She was askin' for it!" Stop it. Just stop it.

And? People die every day. Life is a terminal condition. No one - so far as medical science is concerned - has ever escaped life without eventually dying. People are born, they live, and they die. That's the natural world. Some of them die by animal attacks, some by human attacks, some by accidents, some by gross negligence or stupidity, some because of genetic malfunction, and many because of disease. People die; get over it.

Oh just stop it. You aren't making any decisions about dozens of other people. Those people have to make their own medical decisions. If you don't want to risk being around anyone who hasn't been vaccinated (either by choice, medical necessity, or for any other reason), ask every single person you come into contact with whether they've had their shots and demand documentation. If anyone fails to provide that, leave. Or, if that seems absurd to you (and by God I hope it does), you could simply make smart choices for your own health, do the best you can, and roll the dice. Every time you get out of bed, you're rolling the dice. You don't get to dictate how everyone else lives their lives simply because you want to skew that dice roll in your favor in some futile attempt to postpone your inevitable death.

Deciding against getting vaccinated is not deciding that people will get sick and die. The process of not getting vaccinated does not involve deliberately infecting other people with pathogens. In fact, all it involves is not engaging in a man-made medical practice; allowing nature to take its course. There's nothing - NOTHING - about refusing vaccinations which causes another person to become sick. There isn't some vaccine fairy living in the clouds that shoots someone with the Measles arrow every time someone makes the decision not to get vaccinated. And even if this magic cloud Measles fairy did exist, it STILL isn't the fault of the person refusing the vaccination that the magic cloud fairy infected another person; it's the fairy's fault.

I'm not trying to argue that it's a good idea to avoid vaccinations; I think it's a bad idea. I think it's a fantastic example of how bad most people are at risk assessment in their daily lives and every reason I've heard for why people refuse vaccines has struck me as being based in ignorance and/or absurdities. What I am arguing is that they have every right to make poor decisions about what they do or don't put into their own bodies. By that token, I would argue that if someone wants to drink themselves into a stupor every night, or smoke a joint, or shoot Heroin five nights a week, they should have at it. Destroy your body and your brain if you choose. Two conditions: 1, you're still responsible for anything you do while under the influence of these things. And 2, no public monies supporting your terrible decisions.

People have the right to make what you and I might judge to be poor decisions so long as those decisions do not directly impact the rights of other people. Now you might make a reasonable argument that there's an indirect rise in risk factors for other people because of the decision not to vaccinate, but that isn't violating anyone's rights.

You have no right to protection against the natural world and you certainly have no right to force others to assist you in trying to protect yourself against the natural world.

Yes they worry about it, and for good reason.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

Cholera, typhoid, shigellosis, Ecoli, are just a few of the major medical problems you can get from poor sanitary conditions and if untreated which may be difficult in times of a disaster, you could die from it.

I'm not aware of how that might be absurd.. Unless I misunderstood the meaning of your post.

Why would you used a complex system like this? Because you are not at your summer house and instead in Haiti right after the earth quake where they can bring a bunch of these things in easily and have a more sanitary situation then waiting a year for it to decompose properly. Now exchange Haiti with any other city and any other disaster and you won't have to worry about your kids picking berries and foraging for food from the bush your neighbor shits under.

Well, I guess it will make it easier to display the at the stores. You know, when a kid gets potty trained and you are at the hardware store looking for something to fix your leaky faucet and turn to find Junior is looking for the TP and asking you to help wipe. Now all they need to do is stick it outside for a couple hours.

My question is, how will this smell. I've had the misfortune of having to pour diesel fuel on a pile of shit and burning it before and it wasn't a good experience. And that outhouse was chemically treated to keep the smell down too. I cannot imagine many people wanting to purposely hang out around them.

How does the scientific method get destroyed by religion? I can see it being ignored periodically but not destroyed in the slightest. Very few parts of most religions cross the scientific method and even less conflict with anything produced by it.

You mean the bombing we had knowledge of and didn't prevent in order to allow our entry into WWII?

We could have relaxed our economic policy towards Japan and issued a stern warning instead of going to war with Germany I guess. Well, we did give Japan a stern warning but it didn't work because we demanded the complete withdrawal of all Japanese troops from French Indochina and China. Japan wasn't worried about us until we started clamping down on them economically for their actions in china and surrounding territories and demanding they cease. The US Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, documented in his diary that he had discussions with Roosevelt about how to manipulate Japan "into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves".

Well, that is we could of until Germany attacked the US which we know they had plans for doing but do not know if those plans were simply provisional contingency plans like we keep on regular basis or an actual strategy they were going to implement at some point in time.

Anyways, the point still stands. The D and R mean nothing beside a president's name as shit happens and it gets dealt with. The GP was factually incorrect. Democrats get us into war too. Available evidence and history shows us that we could have avoided an attack on Perl Harbor by the Japanese but didn't really want to. To say Roosevelt was only responding is a little naive.