Oh yes I take ITER as good news, but it still leaves us 20 - 40 years from a... well I wanted to write a commercial fusion plant, however that might be a trifle optimistic.

Lets say we are at best 20-40 years from a functional prototype of a commercialy viable plant.

ITER is very much a test, any way you bend it. DEMO is waiting for ITERs outcome. Of course ITER will work, tokamaks have operated since the 1960s, that is like claiming a rocket will almost certainly fly. Yet we still stand in awe when it does.

It took 50 years from Einsteins nearly blind-guess prediction of a physical phenomenon to fission power plants. 50 years from the Orvilles hops to jet passenger planes. 58 years from Ciolkovskys crazy drawings to a man in space. In my grandfathers lifetime we went from horse-drawn carriages to the SR-71.
In my lifetime we have gone from landing on the moon to almost maybe landing there again some time.

We are slowing down or the going is getting more difficult.

Gotta get the under carriage washed...

3rd world country..check. This was not just one manufacturing defect. Clearly the main flywheel that grips the cables broke free from the gear box, but electrical sensors failed (door operation when in motion) and emergency brakes which trigger when wheels on the carriage spin to fast (ie not based on a computer triggering system) all failed or never existed to begin with.

Looks like a pretty wide carriage way but facing up to traversing lights (never mind power lines etc) at speed would be freaky. +1 kudos to the pilot.

If the current Greek proposal is actually the one being published just about everywhere, they might as well sign it in the replica of Marshal Foch's carriage in Compiègne. It's even worse than the one they had their referendum on.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Jamie Galbraith substantiated AEP's claim that the referendum was horseshit to begin with.

They screwed the pooch, even I'd agree to that if they were to accept this unconditional surrender. The anti-austerity movement on the left would be compromised to such a degree, leaving only the anti-EU forces of the right credible in their opposition to austerity. The recession cult will have their permanent austerity -- and the bigots will have their revival of nationalism.

If they didn't sabotage the video, your questions would have been answered. The pin would not have been picked up by the pin carriage and thus swept into the chute resulting in a strike.

Probably part of a production deal - cheap flights and freight carriage during movie production in exchange for a high profile marketing piece.

Your video, Passengers tilt train carriage to free man trapped in gap, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 26 Badge!

What?! The consequence was a direct result of his actions. If I lie down on the road in front of a car, I expect to get run over. That's a natural consequence of lying down on a surface designed for the carriage of motor vehicles.

Your analogy of a cop shooting someone for pickpocketing makes no sense; no-one made the conscious decision to run over him. If he picked someone's pocket, and in attempting to get away ran out onto the road and got hit by car I'd feel the same, because running out onto a road without looking is stupid and dangerous and likely to result in serious injury, just like throwing yourself on the road in front of a car.

This is telecoms double dipping.

People pay for access to the internet, as do content providers. That is already happening right now...right now.

The new proposed laws will allow telecoms to charge for CONTENT over that access.

You may have paid hefty sums of money for a 100mbit upload speed, but that doesnt give you 100mbps transit through their network....or so they say.

Its bullshit, this is their way of saying...ok, youve only paid for the ACCESS segment of the internet, if you want CARRIAGE then you have to pay us again.

Its garbage, these costs have already been factored into your access fees from day zero, and now they just want more...and if you dont pay it, well fuck you.

Aha! I thought Vincent Clortho sounded familiar. It's from one of my all time favorite movies - Ghostbusters. Louis, played by Rick Moranis, was possessed by the Keymaster Vinz Clortho. Here's a bit of the script from IMDB.

Louis: [Louis, as the possessed Keymaster Vinz Clortho, runs out of Central Park, scaring a married couple] I am the Keymaster! The Destructor is coming. Gozer the Traveler, the Destroyer.
[Louis pants and sniffs, then notices a horse carriage; horse neighs]
Louis: Gatekeeper.
[Walk over towards the horse]
Louis: I am Vinz, Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer. Volguus Zildrohar, Lord of the Sebouillia. Are you the Gatekeeper?
Coachman: Hey, he pulls the wagon, I made the deals. You want a ride?
[the possessed Louis growls at the coachman with his red-glowing eyes]
Louis: [to the horse] Wait for the sign. Then our prisoners will be released.
[Runs amok, scaring bystanders; yelling]
Louis: You will perish in flame, you and all your kind! Gatekeeper!
Coachman: What an asshole.

It's the wheels that cut into stone and leave deep wheel ruts in less solid surfaces, but his point that you don't get the distinctive modern rubber tyred vehicle look stands... the horse path between the wheel ruts would stop grass growing in exactly the way that any other walked on grass doesn't grow.

If you have a look at these photos you'll see what marks you would expect from horse drawn carriages:

http://equineclub.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/third-quarter-electives-week-2012/

I also found some older photos:
http://www.kakitches.com/movies-tv-shows/oregon-trail-wagon-train.html

My favorite is the woman in the striped shirt who is up there causing shit goes to get her baby carriage at timestamp 4:00.

So she left her baby in the carriage to go pick a fight.

I'm surprised nobody was shouting World Star at this trashfest.

You forgot to answer the following:

1. Have you ever taken the human test and exclaimed on the internet that results are inconclusive?
2. Have you ever poked fun at something poking fun at science?
3. Have you ever gotten worked up over parody because it wasn't quite logical?
4. Have you ever claimed your intellectual superiority using your Videosift handle alone?
5. Have you ever started a sentence with a space after a carriage return?
6. Have you ever started a sentence with "..." after a carriage return?
7. Have you ever had the gayest Boba Fett avatar EVER?

You don't need high speed internet either, technically (I do, but I am a robot). Technically, you don't need a lot of things, it is all pretty much arbitrary when you talk in those terms. When you make people have to sign up for certain rights via some sort of process, it is the beginning of a real erosion of rights. I'll even meet people half way to say if you want to be in public areas with a gun, some kind of permit is needed like cars...I don't like it, but Ill give you that. But as long as I am not using it to commit crimes, your right to restrict my behavior is over...period. It might be that freedom comes with a hefty prices of dead people, innocent people, innocent people that we could of protected with ever increasing restrictions of social liberties. I mean, look at Saudi Arabia, lower murder rates than even some European countries of pretty good order. But they live in a totalitarian dictatorship, and I am not trying to make a scarecrow argument about totalitarian dictatorships and whatnot, what I am trying to say is people dying isn't the only important metric when talking about rights to do things.


It might be true that more people will die with lacks gun laws, it might be true that more people die because of lacks drug lacks, lots of things might be true about how freedom serves to make economics weak, countries less secure, more prone to internal strife and faction, it might be true that the seeds of freedom and the ability to self regulate cause harms that extend beyond ones self. Even so, I still don't think a better framework exists for conducting ourselves that doesn't cripple and stifle people who have done no wrong. If the price for a drunk driver is abolition, the price of a murder disarmament, the price of wreck less driving horse drawn carriage, then we have failed to address the underlying problem and snub out freedoms ability to creatively deal with complex social challenges via the creative process of problem solving.

I think history has shown that any attempts to snub out action instead of guide it fail miserably. Gun control starts and ends with people, not laws, I suggest we start there. Starting neighborhood gun responsibility programs, safety education for youths, ect...whatever, I don't know, I can't pretend to know what is the best way to address the complex issue of gun control for every community, the point is that is their bag, it can be done without force given the context of the USA. Not every country has that luxury, children roaming the streets with AK-47s is not a real problem in this country, nor would it be if gun control laws were more lacks. We do have problems, I don't want there to be any mistake about that, but I don't think the solution is wholesale elimination of thing that only CAN be dangerous, I mean, anything can be dangerous, ask the folks in Oklahoma about ammonia nitrate...you don't even need a licence to buy that stuff.

Point is, the world is dangerous, and I think freedom allows for a certain amount of that danger to exist. It is the price we pay. We should look to the unwritten code that manages us, the code of culture and community.

"The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace."

Pericles' Funeral Oration from the Peloponnesian War