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even with fast charging, you aren't gonna want to charge ten times a day
Maybe.
Fast charging + wireless charging + ubiquitous charging stations might make it very practical. For my lifestyle a two-hour battery life with 20-second recharges from just putting my phone on a certain region of my desk, nightstand, car console, etc. would work just fine.
As I recall, the paper from Google said something slightly different. It said they found no increase in failure rate. As a result, Google data centers do run warm: 80F. The employees in data centers wear shorts and t-shirts all the time.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#temperature
On my supposedly "archaic" x86 desktop, I download any Linux distro I feel like using and can use the exact same installer to setup a 5 year old desktop or next month's Haswell.
On my "futuristic" smartphone I have to wade through outdated information on sketchy forums to find the exact set of model-specific voodoo in order to unlock the device. Oh.. and I'm aware that not every ARM device comes locked, I was in the first-wave of Raspberry Pi purchasers. But guess what? Even with my Raspberry Pi I have to hunt down images that are tailor made just to booth with the Pi and stepping off the Raspberry Pi software reservation gets real ugly real fast.
Why is the thought of an unlocked x86 tablet that could host the exact same Linux distro that I feel comfortable with on various other computers be considered some type of evil? Why is the idea of having the ability to install a stock Android with no garbage without having to sift throught 2,000 forum posts dedicated to a specific flavor of smartphone for a specific vendor considered "anti-freedom"?
The problem with printed firearms is that they're plastic. We have no means to detect them. They instantly obsolete our security infrastructure. You can walk onto an airplane with one. You could walk into a courtroom with one. You could walk into the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court with one. That is a major problem.
And banning them will do exactly nothing to address that problem.
A person who would make a gun with the intention of committing murder with it isn't likely to be deterred by a law banning his gun. Actually, that law already exists... the Defense Distributed guy was careful to epoxy a six ounce block of metal to his before fully assembling it into an operable gun, because it's a federal felony to manufacture an undetectable gun.
However, not everyone who uses guns irresponsibly are punished. For example it is legal to have an accessible gun in your house and leave your teenager alone with it.
Is that irresponsible? Depends on the kid. There are many examples of kids using guns to defend themselves and their siblings against home intruders.
What does this story have to offer?
The world is a competitive place, except when it isn't. And why is that, exactly? Why do social insects exist? Why, for that matter, do social mammals exist? We wouldn't even have social networking unless the roots of cooperation in our genetics and culture are nearly as deep (and indispensable) as nature red in tooth and claw.
Competition will never not be present, which provides an excellent enclosed gondola for all the slippery-slopers out there. How nice is that? You can never be entirely wrong arguing that competition will always exist. Safe! Secure! You'll never say anything insightful, either, about how competition self-regulates into ritualized displays of dominance/submission without goring every participant.
The US has plenty of landfill space,
The US in general might have a lot of space, but most counties don't have the money to truck their crap from the coast to the middle of Iowa. As a result, a lot of landfills are indeed filled up, and landfill space is a significant issue. Just ask densely populated areas like the San Francisco bay or Miami what they do with their inert landfill - it's expensive, and they're constantly looking to reduce what gets put into landfills. Not because it's green, but because it's getting to be very expensive.
Styrofoam is as close to inert as we can come up with. I'd happily live on top of a former Styrofoam dump.
Congratulations, you don't have to feed yourself from the land you live on. Not everyone is that lucky. It's also butt ugly to have styrofoam get into everything, and just stay there.
No, the reason that Styrofoam was originally considered bad - the reason we were supposed to stop using it - was that it was blown into foam with CFC's.
Yes, that was one of the original reasons. Now it's bad because it finds its way into the ocean, where it is ingested by all kinds of fish, birds and other critters and killing them off, because it just fills up their stomach. And considering how much we rely on a healthy ocean to feed a good chunk of the world's population, that's almost worse than the CFC issue. The fact that it is inert is a huge issue any place you try to have a healthy ecosystem, whether it is for farming, breeding or just generally we-like-nature purposes.
even though Styrofoam is a better insulator and requires much less energy to make and transport.
Citation needed. Air is actually a better insulator, and the reason why it's cheaper to have a little double-walled cardboard ring in cups.
Every time I hear someone complain about how dumb green or environmentally conscious people are, I find someone who has even less of a clue, has a huge axe to grind and is an asshole about it.
I'd take issue with your characterization of styrofoam. We don't want inert substances in landfills, we want biodegradable ones. Also the use of inert plastics does cause problems, the pacific garbage patch being one example.
It is the basis of property law - the idea that raw land becomes valuable property only after some form of human labour is involved
The basis of property law is utilitarianism. A labor theory fails to explain property speculation, among other things. Property law can more or less be summed up as 'you and who's army?' and having actual armies involved.
In the Star Trek future they have an infinite supply of energy,
No they don't. They have vast amounts by our standards, but not unlimited amounts. IIRC they ultimately rely on 'ordinary' fusion reactors. (While they do use a lot of antimatter, they have to manufacture it, and it's inefficient to do so)
Twenty years ago pocket communicators weren't real.
Twenty years ago was 1993. Cell phones were real, and some models that were small not to fit in your pocket had been out for years, like the Motorola MicroTAC, and the flip phones directly inspired by communicators would come out only a few years later.
I can't help but wonder if you're old, and haven't realized that twenty years ago wasn't so long ago as it sounds (this happens to me all the time), or are young, and don't know what was going on twenty years ago, when hard disks had maybe a few hundred megabytes of capacity, floppies were commonplace, few people had so much as a modem, and the Internet still hadn't quite caught on, although people were beginning to hear about email.
Who gets to decide how much is too much?
Point me to any country where you can identity any small group with sole authority for this kind of decision, and I'll wager they mainly discuss among themselves the problem of too much being not enough. In societies where decisions are reached by a process (in which many people can participate and where chance also plays a significant role) there's at least some potential for antitrust legislation to pass which enacts a ceiling low enough to echo-locate.
Really, America had it right before they repealed the estate tax. It should have been called the hereditary git tax, to remind Americans of what their forefathers were so intent on escaping in the first place. Since when did it become an American value for the children of privilege to cruise through life on daddy's deep pockets without earning it themselves, generation upon generation? Just wondering.
Oh really?
Of the two predictions I listed above (and believe me, climate researchers have made both predictions), I can guarantee that both can't be correct despite how much you claim I hate science. I think even you can say that both predictions can't be correct.
So if you agree that both predictions can't be correct, doesn't that mean that you are rejecting the work of the scientific community? Oh, but SOME of the predictions MIGHT come true one day you say! So the entire scientific community is correct! Yeah, so what, I can predict the winner of the next 10 Superbowls with 100% accuracy using that technique.
Here's a hint: Science is rooted in facts, experiments, and observations. Politicians who want to exert ever more control over peoples' lives are rooted in painting a thin veneer of "fact" over their policies to justify their power grabs as "being for your own good." Any "scientist" who crosses the line has left the realm of science and entered politics. Considering that most climate scientists get a paycheck from the politicians who want a certain outcome to be true, there is an inherent
If Rush Limbaugh is saying that you should judge a what man really believes by his actions and not his empty rhetoric, then he's right.
I thought that being a good scientist meant looking at facts objectively instead of fitting the facts to your predisposed feelings. I guess that must be the "old white guy" science that has fortunately been superseded by collective groupthink.
Yeah, that whole "make a hypothesis" and "experiment to identify data to disprove the hypothesis" schtick is obviously a right-wing propaganda tool made up by young-earth creationist Oil executives!
We need a more "balanced approach*" where all science is correct as long as it starts with the "correct" conclusion that Global Warming is the fault of Evil Republicans and works backwards to the inevitably correct conclusion that all industry should be shipped to China in the name of "fairness" because only Republican CO2 emissions hurt the environment.
* Balanced Approach is an officially approved Obama buzzword.
Etiquette is for those with no breeding; fashion for those with no taste.