In order for an ocean to form, the plates on either side need to have somewhere to move to. That requires not only the local rift dynamics but also a shift in all the surrounding plates so they "get out of the way". I don't know of any evidence that this is happening. If others do, I'd be happy to have references.

Similarly, the nearby Red Sea was able to start spreading because the plate to the north was being subducted near Iran. But since that subduction has likely stopped, it's questionable whether the Red Sea will continue spreading into anything much bigger than it is today.

Devon

Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years.

Dividends are alive and well where I live. I haven't looked at the US market in a while but I thought it was only the tech stocks that weren't paying dividends.

Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.

Without dividends, the earnings simply stay in the company itself instead of being paid to you. They don't vanish. Look at it this way... image the company doesn't pay them to you but instead puts them in a company bank account. The price of the stock must rise because the assets on the books are now higher than last year and, as a stockholder, you own a portion of those assets. You make it sound like the earnings will cease to exist if they aren't paid as dividends. But they still do exit. They're just in the company (which you own) instead of in your bank account (which you own). And if you trust the company enough to buy their stock in the first place, then you probably aren't going to mind if they hold on to your dividends. This simplifies your taxes and allows them to use the money when opportunities arise to make the company still stronger and further increase the company value.

Devon

I don't download the files or keep logs or anything like that. But I do have the watch to give me some feedback when I'm slacking off or pushing too much. It helps keep me in line. But the most interesting part for me has been getting more familiar with how my body works -- noticing that my heart rate is 5-10 beats higher in hot weather (due to vasodilation as the body tries to cool) or how it varies as I run inclines. I've gotten to the point where I can pretty much tell you what my heart rate is just by paying attention to breathing stress. Having that feel for how the body reacts has helped me with other things like pacing myself while backpacking, scuba diving in high currents, etc. More awareness is generally a plus.

Devon

Switzerland's been in Schengen for about a year now. But, yes, even before that there were plenty of places where it was hard to notice where the border was.

Devon

I'm surprised how many people here see Wave as a Twitter or Facebook. (This is Slashdot, right?) I see Wave primarily as a tool for collaborative development. Want to build a gamma ray spectrometer? Get a few like minded people together and create a Wave to organize the project. When I'm mulling over a project I already organize my thoughts in a tree structure just like Wave does. Though it's usually just in a text file with indentation to highlight the various branches of thought. I'd love to be able to do that with a Wave where I could have a group of people do this and also add multi-media, collapse ideas and add summaries, or view the history of the development process. That I can see other people's changes as they make them is just eye-candy to me.

Devon

It doesn't work on me. I don't own a TV, don't listen to the radio, do use ad blocking on the internet, and the few magazines I read aren't ad supported (for which I happily pay more). The only time I ever see ads is in public transportation or on the street and they're mostly for things that don't interest me. I don't recognize logos and can't sing jingles. I rarely go shopping and only with a list of exactly what I want - purchases are never spur of the moment. Since my tastes in books and music are so odd, I spend a lot of time having to search for the things I want (I have to do a lot of special orders) and rarely buy anything that would be popular enough to be advertised. I do enjoy a "normal" movie now and then, though, so I will go through the trailers to decide what I want to see. I guess you could call those ads. But since I go looking for them, it doesn't really fit the discussion here. Some of us really do live our own lives.

Devon

They're rare because it's seldom that a team finds itself in that position, not because of the difficulty. Teams lose ground all the time and if a team is starting on the 2 yard line, I'd say a safety really isn't such a difficult thing for the other team to achieve. Contrast that with the opportunity to drive for a touchdown which happens 20-30 times per game but is successful much less often.

Devon

I agree with you about the temperature stuff. But you're just wrong about the football stuff. The points you get do correspond to the difficulty of what you've accomplished pretty well. Just look at the statistics... if, as you suggest, 1 point (extra point) and 3 points (field goal) are the same thing, then why does the former have a much higher success rate than the latter? If you don't like football, just say that. No need to try to justify why your silly sport is less silly than our silly sport.

Devon

It was really great when it started. Just one video after the next with a VJ coming on at the top of the hour to tell you what was coming up. The concept was new and the only bands that made videos were the lesser-knowns. So you were exposed to a lot of new stuff. Best of all there were no commercials back then. I was too young then to know that stuff like that is always ruined with time.

I don't have a problem with last minute hacks to get something to work before a tight deadline. Unexpected behaviors pop up, deadlines are sometimes too optimistic, etc. What really pisses me off is when everyone else (read: management) thinks that that's the end of the line and that we don't need to clean it up in the next release. Basically, this means that the thing that wasn't my fault in the first place will end up biting me again a year down the road. So I usually end up cleaning up stuff like this on the sly.

I actually find your overly expansive view of property rights a lot scarier than anything google is doing.

This from the country where people can put up "POSTED" signs and chase people off their property with shotguns and dogs.

They would be de-energized. But the nutrients would remain. Nutrients are the building blocks needed by photosynthetic organisms to build carbohydrates (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc). So de-energized compost piles would still be good places for plants to grow.

Devon

I agree with most of your "fakes". But it's near impossible to imagine the moon rocks were faked. Geochemists don't just look at the rocks and say "wow, they're gray just like on earth". For starters, radiometric dating shows them to be older than rocks on earth (because the earth recycles). So they would have had to build their own rocks with the proper isotope ratios and not left any other clues while doing so. There is no way someone wouldn't have noticed a fake by now. Especially one made with 1960s technology.

Devon

I think you're right that most creativity comes asynchronously. But I find synchronous collaboration useful because it helps to define the problem and find additional issues that I might not otherwise realize were there. The solutions often then come asynchronously. But distributing the problem is probably better done synchronously to avoid people having wildly different views of what the problem actually is. Something that I have found is often the case in these situations.

Devon

The Phoenix mission used names like Neverland, Wicked Witch, Snow White, and Peter Pan.

Devon