julian, how's life in the embassy, they gave you back your utp cable yet?

"Example: overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit."

Lol, sounds Gordon Gecko is your economics professor. In reality, it costs a huge amount of money to enter a market and build criticial mass and therefore potential competition is stifled and the established players can continue to abuse their (near) monopolies. Have you noticed that there is no real alternative to facebook? Do you really use Bing to find something on the internet (even though google pisses you off with their shitty interface and aggravating "localized results")? Can you name any serious competitors to Amazon?

Throughout human development, monopolies, extreme concentration of capital and profits have been the rule, not the exception. Our few post-war decades were a historical anomaly and we are quickly returning to a pre-war type of society. Don't take my word for it, check the numbers yourself.

it's called gerrymandering I believe. Democracy in the US is absurdly broken, corporate and special interests campaign money, gerrymandering, fillibustering, all degrade the once shining example of democracy that the US once was.

wikileaks is not about free speech, governments need to have a way of communicating securely, this is in the interest of the public. just like you and your wife/gf/bf/whatever don't want each and every discussion about yoru inlaws to be in the open. I don't see why people are so happy about wikileaks, publishing secrets is dangerous to our own security. Add to that that JA threatens to publish information if he is in put in jail; what if he did indeed commit the crimes, does he have the right to have a get out of jail card where others don't? I don't think so...

ehm, have you ever studied ships?

Large ships already have extremely efficient two stroke diesel engines (even over 50% which is extremely high if you consider the carnot max) They also have many devices to recover waste heat.

Propeller designs are already very sophisticated, difficult to improve there.

weight: the weight of the ship is very low relative to the amount of cargo it carries (compared to e.g. a truck). Also, the ship sails at relatively low speeds and mostly in a straight line so acceleration/deceleration losses that increase with mass are not really a factor.

All in all cargo ships are already the most efficient mode of transport on a fuel/cargo weight-distance ratio basis.

I'm not an expert on electro-magnetism but I know a bit about ocean waves. The swell typically has a period in the range of 5-15 seconds depending on location and depth, taking into consideration the wave height you can easily work out that there will be a fair bit of variation/acceleration at the buoy. Also, keep in mind that the waves generally aren't regular waves but part of a seastate that consists of various components with different periods, heights and directions. Personally I don't expect much from this idea, it is too complex and probably too expensive. All I'm saying is that I think that you under-estimate the energy content of waves a bit.

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most governments do have the right to determine what you look at; child porn is illegal in most countries and in some countries regular porn is even illegal.

so, yes, governments already censor other media (what do you think happens when customs find kiddy porn in your luggage?), thus it is to be expected that they try to censor the internet as well.

Off course there's a fine line between censoring and censoring. However, if your government is doing a reasonable job of providing relative free "old" media like tv, print, radio etc. I don't see a reason why they can't be trusted with the internet, there's no reason to be so paranoid.

And let's not focus on the government here, let's focus on the scum that brought this about; the child abusing kiddy porn people. Yes, some people will always find a way to do evil but let's make it as difficult as reasonably possible for them.

sorry, I don't mind ubuntu at all but windows is not all that hard to administer if you set it up right, especially if it's only a single pc. Just install it on a virtual machine on a linux host if necessary so you can restore it from time to time if need be.

Apart from that, the main advantage of windows is that all the "popular" apps and peripherals in the senior citizen crowd (think of, web-browsing, photo viewing, photo-printing, web-cams etc.) are much more readily available for windows than for linux.