tell me, I read (yes) the Daily Mail article, read the linked one to the Independant and then submitted with the DM one as it was better, even though it had been sourced from the other paper's site.

Though samzenpus did a good job rewriting my "na, they'll never accept it" sub, he really shouldn't have lost that link :(

Last I checked, neither the House nor the Senate had made a vote asking Clinton to fuck her, so no.

First point: Of course not, but until we have a perfect liquid democracy, it is the closest thing we have, and for the moment, like it or not, it is the modus operandi of our western societies. So taking into account the realities of our lives, it has been decided.

Second point: Of course there will always be discussion in a multi-valued society. In every democratic decision, there's also a minority whose opinion did not win the day, and we allow them to continue voicing it.

Not at all. I know both customers who do this and shops that had this problem and went belly up (very likely not just because of it, but it contributed).

Your examples are bad examples and they miss the point. We're talking about small, personal book stores, and you come with Best Buy and Fry.

I love cash. You can have it when you pry it from my col... wait... not quite. But for me to stop using cash, you have to make electronic cash work first. That means three things that are absolute requirements and I will not ever negotiate:

1. It is anonymous and untraceable, at least for any practical purposes.
2. It is as fast and easy to use as taking a bill from my wallet. If your e-cash solution takes more than about 5-10 seconds for a simple payment, it is too slow. I'm talking start-to-finish, including everything I have to do, the recipient has to do, and your system has to do.
3. It works between two private individuals who meet in the middle of nowhere and don't have Internet at that moment.

As long as even one of these conditions is not met, I will have to carry cash around me anyways, and if I have cash with me, I will use it wherever I can.

It is better to have variety of money types.

Come on. The article is a joke. " A chess facilitator brain implant would be wired between perception and cognition. You would just look at the board and know if it is checkmate." Did the original poster not realize this?

It has been. The french government is democratically elected.

It gets this property from its fine surface structure, which is a forest of tubes. Incoming light has to be reflected many times before it gets back out, so a black material is effectively made even less reflective. It's the optical-scale version of the pointed absorbers used in anechoic chambers.

It probably is not going to retain its blackness when exposed to water, dirt, or wear. Superhydrophobic coatings such as Never Wet have the same problem - they work because they're composed of tiny points, so droplets of liquid don't have a surface they can grab. But after some wear, the effect stops working. (See any of the many "NeverWet fails" videos on YouTube.)

This is likely to be great for protected environments, such as inside optical systems. It should be useful for optical sensors in space, too. But it's probably an inherently fragile surface. That limits its uses. (The "stronger than steel" probably refers to the individual carbon nanotubes, not the bulk material.)

This s a problem with a lot of surface chemistry stuff touted as "nanomaterials". They have interesting surface properties, but the surfaces are fragile, because they're some very thin surface layer with an unusual structure. If you protect that structure with some coating, you lose the effect.

I would even argue that as long as the students who did most of the work have their name listed as first author, there is nothing wrong with this arrangement. I dropped out of my master's program after the first semester because I was being pushed to publish, but wasn't being plugged into any research existing programs. Every "unique" idea that I thought of turned out to have already been studied exhaustively back in the 70's or earlier. All the favorite students in the grad program were people who ignored this inconvientent fact and managed to get rehashed bullshit accepted into conferences.

Several years later I went back to school at a large state U that plugged me into the work they were doing, showed me what the state of the art was and where there were gaps that hadn't been researched in detail. Without building off the ideas of my advisor I would have never been able to do meaningfull research that progressed the state of the art, and would have had nothing worth publishing. He deserved to have his name on my papers.

They are getting 99% of the academic tail, too.

I was thinking of heatsinks - conduct better than copper (no doubt cheaper once manufacturing gets sorted out) and your shiny copper heatpipes will be replaced with not-shiny black ones that you can't see.

The said telescopes would be suitable for this, particularly expensive ones they put in space.

1% Elitism is EVERYWHERE.

yeah yeah, just look at the pictures, no need to read the stories of Nigerian princes being allowed to remain in the UK after scamming little old ladies of their life savings, because it would violate their human right to a family life.

The market doesn't shrink. The market is the number of exchanged goods. The market doesn't care if there are 200 merchants or 250 merchants. What changes is the distribution of goods and merchants, and when the number of merchants is very low and their concentration of market power high, we get into situations (oligopoly, monopoly) that we do not want because we know they are bad.

For the past 20 years, when I go to a bookstore and I want a book they don't have, they could almost always order it and have it for me the next day.

I'm not talking about a perfect equilibrium. I'm talking about the simple fact that if your country has one region with 50% unemployment rates and one region where employers can't find workers, your whole country will destabilze.

Of course there will always be differences. But if they get too extreme, the consequences are much higher and much more expensive then the costs of some small interventions.

I never said anything like that and my arguments are completely unrelated to technical or other progress. So please burn the strawman somewhere else.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2012/11/27/civil_war_who_would_come_out_on_top_if_the_united_states_all_declared_war.html