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Comment Re:True to every corporation (Score 1) 548

No, it most certainly is a property of capitalism. Or are you going to try and tell me that trying to gain an advantage by bribing politicians is somehow not a property of capitalism?

If the Federal government were limited per the Founders' intent (most everything handled at the State level), then the Federal politicians wouldn't have the power to grant you your every whim if you handed them a pile of money.

By allowing the Federal government nearly unlimited power to do good, you also allow it nearly unlimited power to do evil.

And guess which side has more money to bribe politicians?

Why does it matter if the bribe-able politicians work on the federal level or the state level? If those powers were given to the states, then the states' politicians would be the ones being bribed. The result is the same.

The libertarian argument that the federal government should be considerably weaker and that state governments should be considerably stronger in its stead makes no sense to me whatsoever. And I live in one of the very wealthy states that would probably benefit from such a change.

Comment Re:Law of thermodynamics violation? (Score 1) 820

It does take around 10 calories' worth of nutrients to make one calorie of meat. But that's because the other nine calories are used in various other metabolic processes important for the animal to live. If you're just growing meat, you don't need most of those metabolic processes to happen.

Animals are very inefficient growers of meat. The idea behind this effort (besides the animal treatment issues) is that we are eventually going to be capable of creating machines that can grow meat much more efficiently than animals can. There's little reason why we can't shoot for very close to 100% meat-growing efficiency.
Power

Submission + - $1/Gallon 'Green Gasoline' Is Earth Day's Big News (popularmechanics.com)

mattnyc99 writes: We've gotten excited here about the startup that claims it can make $1/gallon ethanol out of anything from trash to tires. But we've also seen how cellulosic ethanol is a better option, and how ethanol demand in general is only adding to the worldwide food crisis. So what about $1/gallon gasoline? NSF-funded researchers at UMass Amherst just completed the first direct conversion from cellulose using a new method of hydrocarbon refining, which they claim can be commercialized within 5-10 years and essentially make fuel out of anything that grows. From the article: "We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute liquid fuels. We're using them to power transportation vehicles today, and I think that's what we'll be using in 10 years and in 50 years," Huber says. "And if you want a sustainable liquid transportation fuel, biomass is the only way to go."
Communications

Which Shared Calendar Package Would You Use? 78

Bob McCown asks: "I manage several websites, both internally and externally accessible. Many of them have event calendars or schedulers. We'd like the ability to have these calendars shared, with the ability to modify them by both a web interface, and at the application level (via Sunbird, an Outlook plugin, or something similar). The web side of our system uses an Enterprise Linux distribution that runs Apache. Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites. What's out there that can do this? What have you used before?"

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