Actually, the hurdles for desert and oceanic wind farms are technical: we still can't transfer that energy efficiently to the consumer. And I'm optimistic about that problem being overcome, which will make deserts a very good place for wind and photovoltaic farms (depending on the local characteristics).

Which is why I specified that I read it at the Linux kernel messages.

I think about "binary gigabytes". I certainly dislike the sound of Gibibytes.

I don't know about hearing, but I have read GiB and MiB at the Linux kernel logs since quite a long time.

You won't con me with rubies. ;)

In other words, you are trolling. Have a nice day with your unproven superiority :)

Take it easy. If Skype has a messaging service that doesn't work (and it will be the new standard client for MSN) it makes sense to complain about it. And, lest you forget, Skype can be used from a computer with no Whatsapp or SMS access.

This said, it seems to work for me (I haven't used on a Lumia though) so it probably is a bug in the version he is using.

An extinction doesn't require the whole range of species being wiped out, but a big enough number of them. I think that a very weakened ozone layer would actually mean that many diurnal species would actually disappear, enough for it to be considered an extinction. Besides, the life forms able to survive this (without artificial means like us) are precisely the niche ones that would take a good time to recolonize the planet. I mean, for most of the living species on the planet, plants (and plancton) are the basis of the trophic chain. And both plants and plancton live basically on the surface. Damage them enough and you will see many species go extinct quite quickly, even nocturnal ones, actually.

I wouldn't suck all the oxygen out but break down the ozone layer. And that doesn't require a GRB that lasts 24 hours. NO2 can be created very quickly by the GRB but it won't degrade as quickly. And having a very weakened ozone layer would mean extinction for many species.

It wouldn't have mattered, because he let the horse run free instead of killing and eating it.

Unless you can invent a way for everything to be free (as in beer), which is another way of saying you think things should appear out of thin air, Swartz's actions amount to reducing the collection of freedoms available of everyone in the entire scientific journal ecosystem.

We have many intellectual works that predate copyright, as probably already know. And you can't conflate ideas with physical objects because there is no shortage of "idea copies": they don't disappear from my mind when you make a copy, so yes, they basically appear out of thin air. Even the originals often do because they appear when you are working on something else.

Hence we are more free under the current copyright system than we would be if people had no way of earning a living under current copyright law.

Non sequitur, sorry. The current copyright system restricts the freedom of the majority for no proven reason in order to provide monetary gain to a minority, and authors are not part of that minority in most cases either. So we have a system that doesn't benefit the general public and benefits very few of the producers. That looks like a net loss of freedom to me.

Really? I kind of remember its being decrypted long ago (something about using the first bytes in the stream as RC4 seed) and the researchers even managed to get to be a supernode and mess around with clients.

Last I checked neurogenesis of any form is literal mind expansion.

Check again, please, because the brain is quite a bit more than the "mind": there are all these neuronal groups dedicated to controlling things like hormonal production, blood pressure and the like that take no part in our conscience of ourselves, ability to predict the environment or other higher-order functions.

And don't bother pulling out the DEA's favorite old studies where they asphyxiated primates to cause mental damage and happened to use marijuana smoke to do it. I've shown a benefit and the default is that the substance is harmless so the net ESTABLISHED result is that the substance is beneficial.

The did that? I didn't know. But once again, I have never asserted that marihuana harms the brain, only that the "mind expansion" argument needs proofs. And I have hardly seen any yet.

Regarding memory, there is evidence that there is a temporary decrease in short term memory capacity on marijuana use but the said impairment is completely reverted upon stopping use. So that does not qualify as long term damage.

That may be true, but since we are discussing "mind expansion" I would follow from your argument that no, marihuana doesn't actually help mind expansion.

Anything you come up with is going to be from addiction clinics which are essentially just profit mills who make serious money pretending marijuana has significant addiction potential. Anything coming from them on the topic is equivalent to listening to the tobacco lobby on the health effects of tobacco. It is biased garbage. More than 30% of the population uses marijuana and addiction research indicates a 30% addiction rate but I've yet to meet a marijuana addict. I have met people who went for treatment for other things who admitted they smoke marijuana and got a checkmark for marijuana addiction on the sheet. I've also known teens whose parents discovered they smoked and admitted them who similarly were listed as marijuana addicts.

I'm not coming up with anything, mind you. If you re-read, I'm using the references you so kindly provided.

I work at a technology firm. I am surrounded by people who mostly have genius level IQ's on a daily basis. Programmers, engineers, scientists, and people in the aerospace industry. Their incidence of smoking marijuana is far far higher than that 30% of the general population. I think I know three guys professionally who don't smoke and dozens if not hundreds who do. There certainly is no evidence of impairment there.

You see no evidence of impairment, which may be true, but it is not the point we are arguing. We are arguing whether marihuana "expands your mind" or not. My experience (basically as anecdotical as yours at your technology firm) doesn't lead me to consider marihuana something that makes people think better (for some values of "better"). Yours leads you to consider that it doesn't make people think worse. At most, both our experiences together might be evidence that it does nothing one way or the other. But for the memory issue you mentioned, of course.

I'm not saying marijuana is harmless. I don't know of much of anything that is. But it is fairly benign as most things go if used in moderation and there is no especially compelling evidence that it damages your brain.

I'm not saying marihuana is harmful either. I'm saying it is not beneficial, as far as I can tell. And, like everything else, in its right dose it can be harmless. But pot smokers don't get marihuana in medically tested doses, as far as I know, so their "moderated level" is actually unknown.

Implying nothing. I'm not denying that cannabinoids induce neurogenesis in other parts of the brain because I know of no studies about it. But this study only concludes effects in the hippocampus and memory-unrelated behaviors. Thus it is insufficient evidence for any kind of "mind expansion", which is what we are talking about.

That's an interesting point. The people I talk about started smoking pot quite soon.