I agree, there are definitely sites like the one you linked to that can get an idea across with visuals / media / flash / whatever that would be impossible or drastically less efficient with pure text.

To me, uBlock Origin or Adblock with Element Hiding Helper is capable of finding a happy medium around 90% of the time.

I like Dilbert. Up until about a year or so ago, there was a URL to go to a page that had the latest comic with simple links to back/forward navigation. No comments or other extraneous stuff. Then Scott Adams did a site redesign and added a fuckload of ads, a "blog" about Adams' political opinions that I don't give 2 shits about, social media links, tags, comments, a star rating, and a "BUY" button. If I'm not running my browser maximized, all that crap pushes the single bit of content that I actually DO want (the comic image) so far out of frame that I have to scroll down to see it. F that.

uBlock itself takes care of the ads. Everything else that annoys me is gone by using the "element picker", which filters out sections or bits of HTML that I can choose. So now, when I visit dilbert.com I get the 3 most recent comic images with a title/date line and *nothing* else.

Videosift isn't immune on my PC either. The "social panel" for each video? Gone. Facebook "likebox"? Gone.

I've run into a few pages that detect custom filtering in a way similar to ad blocking detection. Sometimes, I can just select those "warning" elements and hide them -- especially if they are in a floating frame that simply loads on top of the actual page content. Sometimes those warnings actually prevent the page content from loading. Something from wired did that recently. I haven't clicked through to a wired article since.

Truth be told, I don't have a problem with airlines over booking flights. The ONLY condition I would place on it, which I had wrongly thought was already the case, is that they must find volunteers if the flight ends up with too many passengers. Sorry, but if you paid for a ticket and your at the boarding terminal the airline doesn't get to just abandon the contract. They should be required to continue offering larger and larger incentives to volunteer until somebody does. Being able to just boot paying customers for no reason except that the airline screwed up while trying to maximize profit isn't acceptable. Make it volunteer only and the airlines have to balance what people are willing to pay to skip the flight against the profit from overbooking.

Monsanto is like Microsoft... they are these hulking titans of their respective industries, who work as hard as they can to stay ahead of the game, sometimes through questionable activities. However, their contributions on the whole are incredible, driving generations of progress in their respective fields through investment, research, and release of progressively more useful tools (on the whole).

There is a similar debate regarding pharmaceutical companies and their profiteering from the invention of life saving drugs... its easy to paint a company as a 'bad guy' for charging large amounts of money for medicine that a person needs to live. But is it the company's responsibility to forgo shareholder profits in order to maximally help more people with their drug, or is it the spectrum of regulations imposed by a representative government that should be entrusted with that responsibility?

GMO agriculture products that are drought tolerant, flood tolerant, self pollenating, etc etc, will likely save our buns in the next 100 years. If anything we should be doubling down on how much effort we put into GMO production and selection, to help drive a technological boom in that industry before we've mismanaged ourselves into a crisis.

I think we may have slightly different terminology.

Neoliberalism is a term I take to mean something much wider, nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism as you would see it (I'm presuming you're American?). It encompasses neoconservatism to mean a purist laissez faire globalist capitalism that seeks to maximize profit without regard to such human weaknesses as morality or emotion as far as is possible and that uses politics as a means to that end or if that fails coercion or worse.

No, I'm not a huge fan of it.

It became obvious that the calculations supporting the idea of nuclear winter were fudged. Same with climate change -- I'm not saying that it does not exist, just that there is a strong and pervasive incentive to maximize hysteria without regard to science or facts, which leads, eventually, to climate fatigue.

Climate change will be remembered as one of the more striking popular delusions or madnesses of crowds.

Pretty tenuous to call this an experiment... What hypothesis were they testing, that people watch and share exciting content? That video editing technology is fairly advanced by now but certainly not flawless?

They seem to start off with some media criticism - 'how much of the news should you believe -' but then lose that trail since A) all of their videos were questioned and called out by many as fake, and B) everybody already knows that the 'news' section of the show is over when the anchors are just reacting to fun videos they found online.

I'm fine with this video being an example of well scripted VFX to maximize virality for virtality's sake, but it's pretty goofy to call it an experiment. The best part was the cameo by TV's Frank.

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

I love civil liberties.

I wish the 'float all boats' rhetoric was as taken to heart as its claimed to be.

In that regard, negatively invoking the NRA requires some cognitive dissonance. NRA members are regular people, and they're all around. 1/3 of U.S. homes are armed. The NRA guards those people's rights. That's why the NRA is so strong.

Civil liberties also includes the freedom of expression. That's at odds with curtailing anti-<name a group> rhetoric.

I'm all for maximal civil liberties. But folks need to realize that it involves letting others live their lives in a way that you might not like - and that you might be living a life that others don't like.

I'm ok with that. But there are a lot of people that can't stand other people going about their own business in a disapproved of manner. And there are a lot of people that can't stand being disliked (even when left alone). These sorts of people inevitably cause problems when they feel compelled to do something about how other people live.

-scheherazade

The legal responsibility of Apple (along with all publicly traded corporations) is to maximize shareholder profits. If they act against those interests, then their management is liable, acting illegally, and susceptible to lawsuits.

That's the law and their "patriotic" duty. Their manufacture of popular products is the way they have gone about doing just that.

In China, by contrast, Apple has no problem unlocking phones or complying with the Chinese rulers' requests. But in the US, why should they comply if they don't have to (and it's their legal duty to act on behalf of their stock holders' interests)? They have already said that if they lose their legal battle, they will comply with whatever legal requirements. It would still be their duty to use any and all loopholes at their disposal to act in service to their shareholders' best interests, however they see fit. It's the State's problem to deal with such muddles, if the law is what it is. Not Apple's.

It's the same as with Apple's avoidance of taxes. Apple has the legal (and ethical) responsibility to avoid paying taxes however the law permits them to do so, and to not pay unnecessarily more than they have to do so. Again, they have that legal responsibility towards their shareholders.

The tax code, for anyone who looks it, is completely arbitrary. There is no "right" amount or percentage that anyone person or group "should" be taxed or is "fair" to be taxed. Such amounts are arbitrary and certainly not determined by some user's preference on videosift. (This is why videosift has no say in how much anyone pays in taxes or what the tax code actually says.)

The first thing you need to understand is the suspension doesn't use springs or shock absorbers. The whole thing is linear electric motors on each control arm. (Great huge solenoids) The suspension moves up and down independent of weight or inertia. It works fast enough that it starts to compensate for bumps BEFORE the tires hit the bump.

This system has more in common with a 1965 Impala with hydraulic rams bouncing in a parking lot than a conventional car suspension.

For the most part, it scans the road ahead.
See a dip down? Extend the wheel.
See a bump up? Retract the wheel.

I'm fairly certain the ollie was manually instigated by the driver.
Much like hitting the turbo boost on K.I.T.T. it's just a button and the computer does the jump.

Press button:
Retract the wheels, starting with the front. (to maximize suspension travel)
Push down hard on front, then rear wheels. (Launch car up)
Retract front then rear wheels. (tuck the wheels up)
*car passes over 2x4*
Push down on front, then rear wheels.(ready for touchdown)
*tires hit pavement*
Retract front, then rear, wheels slowly to absorb impact.

Awesome! Thanks for the link, I had missed that one.

About the only way to improve on that would be if Mythbusters or somebody did a large amount sliced thin to maximize surface area, built a cage sturdy enough to keep it submerged, and then filmed it (underwater) in ultra high-speed...

Cool -- I vividly remember my High School Chemistry class demonstration on this, with a pea-sized bit zipping around the surface of the water.

I want to see a big brick of it (1kg or so) in a similarly breakable but enclosing container and held 10m or so underwater in a lake (or something) by a wire mesh cage. Would chopping it up into smaller pieces to maximize the surface area increase the effect? Or would the violence of the reaction make cavitation / hydrogen bubbles that push the water out of way and make the reaction happen in multiple phases as the water gets pushed away and returns?

Not just TPP.. TTIP is the same but for Atlantic countries, EU - USA. They both also have clauses that prohibits boycotting or giving out negative reviews, anything that may cause loss of profit. They also have parts dedicated to copyright, denying free-for-use and to demanding the highest prison times for anyone sharing anything, denying the rights for stripping DRM from material you own...

I would be here the whole day if i would type each and every ridiculous thing those two "trade agreements" have but essentially they both deny independent nations to make ANY laws that may cause loss of PROJECTED profits.. Not just loss of profits but profits they might lose in the future..

And the court that solves these problems.. wait for it.. is independent jury with three private sector lawyers, no rights to defend nor to be even present, decisions are all secret. In practice three guys selected by corporations make a decision based on the evidence presented by corporations... It is sick and twisted "trade agreement" that is designed to maximize profits, to strip away environmental laws, regulations, worker rights, demands that nation HAS to privatize all of it's services if any corporation so wishes or face the "court"..

Come on *Canada get your shit together. Bunch of fuckin' savages

I am however interested in knowing what kicked off a pre game team wide brawl.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Key members of a Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH) franchise have been suspended until the end of the 2016-17 playoffs following a hot-tempered brawl during the pre-game warmup on Sunday.

The Laval Predators, who play in the infamously fight-happy LNAH, were involved in a melee before the puck drop on a game against the St-Georges Cool-FM.

Predators co-owner Eric Lajeunesse, CEO Lucien Paquette and assistant coach Dannick Lessard all received two-season bans on Tuesday.

The eight-team, Quebec-based LNAH, which is considered a "low-level professional league", is known for its outrageous behaviour, with footage of a bizarre on-ice scene going viral seemingly every other month.

Other supplemental discipline, announced on Wednesday, include:

LAVAL: Maxime Bouchard and Clint Butler (suspended for remainder of season/playoffs); Steven Oligny (7 games); Joe Rullier and Chris Cloutier (6 games); Philippe Pepin (5 games); Jonathan Oligny (4 games)

ST-GEORGES: Yannick Dallaire (3 games); Alexandre Gauthier and Jean-Michel Biron (2 games)

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Hockey/2015/01/14/22180411.html

Lasers have a pretty amazing attribute where you can use a wavelength that is only absorbed by certain materials, leaving all other materials entirely untouched by the photons (as they have a very high reflectivity or transmission index for the wavelength).

No idea whats going on with this system, but its possible they are using a colour that is optimised for maximal paint absorption (heats up the paint the most), whilst at the same time maximal metal reflection (doesnt transfer any energy into the metal).

Source: telecom engineer (I work with lasers...)