telchar

This is with the caveat that the inventors had a close association with GM, who presumably could have altered the design of the engines to be compatible with ethanol gas if they chose to. The profit from the patented additive was incentive for them to not make those changes, presumably helping to ensure the other fuel producers couldn't use a different additive.

This is a significantly underappreciated cause of the student debt crisis. People love to harp on overpaid or unneeded administrators and buildings but they are largely unaware of how much state budget cuts have contributed to rising tuition. My public alma mater gets well under 10% of their funding from the state at this point.

I think GP means to say, it's not about the technology's past, but about its future. ICE is last century because its future is diminishing as this century unfolds. Electrics are on the rise and presumably will be the replacement to ICE. Thus they're not a last-century technology even if they were invented in the 19th.

I don't think people in this thread are insisting on a downloadable package. Just that the algorithm published in the write-up accurately describe the work that was actually done to achieve the stated results. If even that threshold can't be met, IMO the authors are polluting the literature with bad work.

I think the shame of it is that 95% of most TOS's are as you said, essentially harmless or nearly harmless boilerplate. My concern is more about privacy policies which could in many cases be very short if user privacy is being respected.

In either case, if I'm presented with pages upon pages of small font #888888 text, I defensively assume these is something nefarious hidden there (e.g. "we don't share any of your data with anyone except our 3rd party affiliates, marketing partners, your nosy relatives, people who claim to be law enforcement, anyone who wants to connect to our open s3 buckets, etc.")

I would hope there could at least be standardized agreements developed so that I could decide which I'm okay with or not and have enough companies using them to make it worth the effort to read once. I'm thinking of various flavors of FOSS or CC licenses as an idea template.

How do you feel about a 30 page TOS and privacy policy being necessary to use said app? Something of that length tells me that the company likely wants to get a lot of data from me. Reading it is hardly necessary with the way these are typically written to be as friendly to whatever the company wants to do as possible.

This is why I have never used the Bluetooth features on my QC35s. They're mostly dumb headphones to me since I won't accept their user agreement. This seems counterproductive for the company, unless they simply don't care about user privacy and expect users to roll over.

Starship is very similar to the shuttle in that it will be a reused second stage carrying humans and/or cargo (humans optional unlike Shuttle). Hopefully unlike shuttle it will be able to be reflown without extensive, expensive refurbishment.

I've already held that opinion of Google products for some time after seeing what a ghost town Sites and Docs are, and the shutdowns of Reader, G+, Wave, etc. At best it seems that you can count on a product silently losing support for years as a hint that you should migrate.

Not to mention you wouldn't need photoshop anymore to give the models unrealistic proportions. Adopt this system and proudly declare that you don't photoshop the models! Like fat-free soda.

Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before that is feasible.

That's the most succinct explanation of privacy I've seen. I'm going to have to crib that line.

That paper makes a good case against its own conclusion, and little case for it. Some choice quotes:

"there are endless examples of this type of “evergreening"

"With a surprisingly large number of expensive “evergreened” drugs, one need look no further than the person in the mirror (and his or her doctor) if one wishes to avoid paying a much higher price for essentially the same medicine."

"Pharmaceutical companies, it seems, have been very successful in convincing consumers and doctors that the newer version is worth the extra cost."

The author is suggesting that there's no problem because consumers can in theory avoid the problem, but as he points out, they don't. Evergreening is a very prevalent and effective strategy to separate patients from their money.

What, you've never heard of debt?

There are only a few companies in each of the industries you mentioned while there are millions of workers. There is already huge asymmetry in power and organization. You completely gloss over that fact.

When I was small we learned the inverted pyramid model of news, that the most important information should be at the top (the headline) and succeeding content should be ordered primarily in descending order of information significance.

Did this change at some point? Or is this just tabloid practices infecting journalism in the era of maximizing clicks? I find the old model infinitely better especially as people tend not to read past headlines in most cases.

This is very noticeable if you watch someone wash a fuzzy blanket bought from Walmart. It seems like half the blanket goes down the drain after the first wash.

I think that view neglects the costs of the fossil fuel infrastructure. At some point gas stations are going to start closing for lack of customers. That time is a while off yet, but all of the existing stations are not going to be able to be supported by say, half as many ICE cars. Convenience will go down and at some point prices may go up as the existing infrastructure is paid for by fewer stations and less fuel. At the same time electrics will continue getting better, cheaper and more convenient. This could provide an extra push.

It sounds like the book had the exact opposite effect on you as was intended. Why do you think that was?

I think it's even better if the slides are posted prior to the lecture so that interested students can make their notes annotations on the slides - this allows them to fill in trouble spots while not having to copy down all the material (I find it distracting to try to rush to copy everything down, personally).

With respect, this is nonsensical. This A or B abstraction is pretty useless when something can be both A and B. An obvious example is the corporation: this is (according to the current SCOTUS) a person with most of the rights of natural persons yet can and indeed, must be owned.

I would guess that the issue here is some mix of your not understanding the legal nuance here (as you allude to) and the law around it itself being incoherent. I don't claim to understand the laws here myself, but then the legal concept of a person is very tortured anyway.

Microsoft has been there for a while now. In this way I think Google is the new Microsoft.

And it's owned by Rupert Murdoch. Enough said, really.

I don't know where you got 1965: clearly they just labeled 1990 as 1980. And truncated scales, clearly marked, are not a cardinal sin. They can be used to mislead but I see nothing wrong with the way they were used here. Cutting it off in 2010 is the bigger issue, I think.

The important point is that animal agriculture is calorically inefficient, so much more land has to be used than if people could substitute plant-based food sources for animal-based. Much of plant agriculture today is only necessary to feed animals. Some animals could probably still be fed with plant agriculture byproducts if little to no land were directly used only for raising animals, but far fewer than are currently raised.

And many grasslands that cannot be sustainably be used for crops could be returned to wilderness rather than plant agriculture, if we were to increase caloric efficiency of food production. They probably should be, in fact. This doesn't preclude some animals being raised, but if we don't greatly reduce the amount of land used for raising animals, deforestation, desertification and other harms will continue to degrade ecosystems.

That's not really true. The UMLS has a large graph of marked up medical domain knowledge that can be used. It's not as specific as one might want for developing an AI autodoc, but it's quite a bit better than what is available in most fields. It's actually quite similar to what one can derive from Wikipedia.

Better to leave natural habitat on that land rather than clear-cutting forest for grazing land, as happens so much these days and in the past. Better food production efficiency means less forest razed which is a significant win.

I agree, Pelennor Fields left me very dissatisfied. And Faramir's character assassination was also a really unnecessary departure from the story.

I downvoted to discourage low-effort posts. I don't want to see this place turn into Imgur where most comments are just links to gify or youtube.

That's one way of looking at it. Alternately, and just as valid if not more so, they're duty bound to do what's best for their constituents.

Ideally, that aligns with the wishes of the constituents, but the constituents may be ignorant, misinformed, or willing to cut off their nose to spite their neighbor. Arguably the main reason to have representatives vs direct democracy is that the constituents' wishes should not always dictate law and policy.

Does accidental damage count?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/americas/mexico-gasoline-expl...

Edit: only the ignition was accidental, the puncturing was intentional