Let me be more precise:
- If someone wants to give her money for being attractive, for surfing, or for breeding bulldogs, I won't be outraged.
- If nobody wants to give her money for being attractive, for surfing, or for breeding bulldogs, I'm not gonna be outraged either.

I don't disagree at all that sponsoring her could make commercial sense. Being a good surfer can definitely help sell products, just like being hot can, or breeding an artificially designed dog breed can. That still doesn't mean that I see any injustice in somebody not getting paid for being a good surfer, being attractive, or raising bulldogs.

I would be more upset about teachers not getting paid, or developers of renewable energy solutions, or civil rights activists.

Is this Disney's new film strategy? Remake 40-year old movies in an effort to renew copyright?

A generation or two ago I doubt that poor Guatemalans could get fat, regardless of culture, because they simply didn't have access to the surplus energy required. This surplus energy shows up in nitrate fertilizers used for agriculture, powered tools of all sorts, and manufactured goods, like used bicycles.

It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.

A bicycle may seem a simple and primitive device, but just try to build a bicycle chain in your home workshop and you will see that making safety bicycles is possible only in a modern industrial state. It's not surprising that the development of the safety bicycle only barely preceded that of the automobile and the airplane.

The bicimaquina raw material is discarded bicycles from richer people -- nothing wrong with that, it's good, frugal engineering. But it should be borne in mind when plotting the future that hardly used bicycles are not a renewable resource, and require energy and infrastructure to produce.

Bicycling does give one a good appreciation of the value of energy. For example, 125 Watts is a respectable output for a touring cyclist; keep that up for 8 solid hours, and you have one kilowatt-hour. One kW-hr is a day at hard labor. A typical household in the developed world uses the equivalent of the labor of three or four hard-laboring slaves every day.

Of course, those slaves aren't the most efficient. You'll notice that the machines shown all use a direct mechanical drive. They could generate electricity, but that would cost -- multiply a few 90% efficiencies together and pretty soon you're getting nothing done by leg power.

Bicycle drive does allow good power production from human beings, and multi-geared bicycles are adaptable to people of differing strength. Not as much fun as flipping a switch, but easier than turning a crank.

It's plain that cheap fossil fuels won't last forever, indeed they may not last for much longer, and probably will never be available to much of the world at the same level as we currently enjoy in the US or Australia. Will we find ourselves scouring garages and cellars for disused bicycles?

First up, it's not 500 million years. Nuclear waste (typically Plutonium 239) has a half life of around 24000 years, an eyeblink geologically. Even if it wouldn't be too flash for life as we know it for a while, the planet will be fine, and life will recover.

But yeah, there are undeniably problems with nuclear energy, which are addressed in the related video (http://videosift.com/video/Nuclear-energy-is-terrible).

We have essentially 3 choices:

1: ditch our energy rich lifestyle and go back to an agrarian economy with no cars, internet or whatever. This also means ditching lots of really nice stuff, like medical technology (drugs and MRI machines don't grow from pixie dust). Pretty unlikely, IMO.

2: Accept that the eco-system is basically fucked and learn to live with climate change. Depressingly, this is probably the most likely scenario.

3: Invest heavily into other energy sources. And, like it or not, that's got to include some form of nuclear. Renewable (solar, wind, tide) etc, will help, but they won't cover all of our energy needs and they have their own problems. So ideally, it's fusion, but practically, thorium seems the next best bet.

NYTimes article that gives lots of info

"He described himself as an undocumented immigrant who came here at age 14. But in the video he did not say that he has documents that enable him to remain in the country legally. He was part of a wave of immigrants who came to the United States as children who have been granted deportation deferrals and work permits under a 2012 program."

and

Asked why he defined himself as undocumented in the video, Mr. Aca explained his legal uncertainty.

“I’m in the deferred action program, which I have to renew every two years,” he said. “I consider myself an undocumented immigrant still because it could just be taken away from me at any time.”

You do know Battlebots is back on ABC, right? Tonight's is the season finale (not sure if it is getting renewed).

This seems extremely silly when promoted as a potential source of renewable energy.

Interesting science for sure. Lots of new ideas and applications to learn from but..

Solar Energy + Batteries = Best Solution

Or maybe we tackle this from 180 degrees.

As opposed to what is happening, or how likely, we may find common ground on what it is we should actually be doing.

I've already made the suggestion of electric vehicles and fission, fusion or renewables in place of coal as the road away from emissions. Specifically improving li-ion batteries as Tesla is doing is a major step. Researching sodium-oxygen batteries would be even better as they can hold 4-5 times the power and have cheaper materials and recent results have us close to making them viable, so I'd like to see gov money directed there.

For power solar and wind are currently only cost-competitive because the scale is small enough that we get away with treating coal plants like giant batteries covering our baseline. They simply aren't cost effective to scale up for base load yet, and not likely to be for another 10-20 years. We can have a lot of nuclear plants built in that time. With electric cars coming into the picture, we're also going to need that extra electric capacity. I again would strongly encourage more gov money going into French style large scale nuclear power deployment. China's already doing it, even they've had enough of their current coal literally blocking the sun in the sky on them and nuclear is part of their clean air push. We should be encouraging that and following suit out this way.

I also wasn't kidding about Lockheed-Martin's fusion research. A lot of new ideas are out there for fusion confinement plans and Lockheed has publicly declared their intentions to have a demonstration reactor in 5 years time. I'm hopeful, and if that pans out, the roll out of truly cheap and clean power will start in the next decade for the sole reason that fusion under cuts coal for price.

Part of me reason for these measures versus more drastic ones is we need to keep our economies growing because regardless of what we do the next 30 years, the oceans will continue rising that entire time and the mitigation measures we're going to gradually be spending more and more on are gonna required us to have the money to do them.

If anybody's got better suggestions I'm all ears.

...but then I listened to the rest of the album this came from (Battle of the Bands). They're taking a shot at some other popular acts of the day... See tracks like "Surfer Dan" (Beach Boys) and "Buzzsaw". Maybe this song WAS taking a shot at themselves... but out of that context, parody undetected.
I do have some renewed respect for the Turtles, though.

I have solar now, so I'll answer.
Today, if you want battery power at home for storage of solar, wind, even micro hydro generated power, you have one real choice....lead acid batteries.
Pros (compared to lead acid)-At best, lead acids are large, unsightly, need an enclosure, need a charger, have a 1000 cycle life span, need maintenance, can't be frozen or allowed to get too hot, use acid, are expensive to dispose of, and are more expensive than this (better?) technology by almost a factor of 4. I recently replaced my battery bank of just over 1KWH for around $1200-$1400, while he's advertising 10KWH for $3500!
Cons-likely lots of 'rare earth minerals' needed, which cause massive pollution where they're refined (China), unknown rate of failure/fire, other unknown problems, and anti-renewable energy people's heads exploding trying to come up with new reasons that renewable energy sucks.

Straight from the Guardian's current article on the most recent shipwreck in the Med:

The deaths are likely to renew calls from campaigners for Europe to reinstate full-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Last October, the EU opted not to replace the Italian-run Operation Mare Nostrum, which saved about 100,000 lives last year, amid fears that it was encouraging smugglers and migrants to organise more trips to Europe.

What they forgot to mention: Italy would have continued Mare Nostrum if the rest of this bloody EU had bothered to pitch in with a few bucks. The total bill was €114 million per year. Petty cash, by any measure.

The replacement, Frontex's Operation Triton, doesn't even have a mandate to save shipwrecked folks, just to keep them away from EU soil.

European values worthy of yet another Nobel Peace Price, I'd say...

Track Renewal Train has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

related video http://videosift.com/video/Track-Renewal-Train

I think the previous drama over Clarkson have been quite overblown tbh. The slope thing was ignorance from the production as much as it was Clarkson. I'm not convinced he even said nigger, and comedians have made India (and others) the butt of more tasteless jokes without complaint. Frankly, I have found him more disagreeable when it comes to his dismissal of speeding and climate change, attitudes which in my opinion may well have done far more damage than making off-hand remarks about the work ethics of Mexicans.

I think a lot of "Clarkson" is a bit of an act. Likewise with Hamster and May, they are playing caricatures. Unfortunately for Clarkson, I think he ended up caricaturing himself to some degree. It has been difficult to determine where Clarkson the person ended and where Clarkson the personality started. Perhaps even he wasn't sure where the line was.

Anyway, I think the decision to sack him (or rather, not renew his contract) is right. Sadly, because of the previous threats (empty?) to get rid of him following each blunder, Clarkson's dismissal will be seen as a coup rather than the fair application of the same rules we all expect to be judged by.

I'll be interested to see what happens to Top Gear. My guess would be that Clarkson has not been exiled, but suspended for an undisclosed period. I'd start watching the show again if they brought in new hosts, and I'd probably keep watching if the show wasn't quite so blokey with quite such predictable characters making staged goofs every show.

The filament style of 3d Printers are cheap to operate and can be made to nearly any size.

A resin printer needs a photopolymer, something that solidifies when exposed to UV light. They also need a fairly strong projector and lens, which limits their build area.

A filament printer can use a lot of various materials, the most common being PLA (a bioplastic made from renewable plant materials) and ABS. There are many other materials, some are specialty that have an almost rubber like flexibility to them, to a filament that is made from wood and a binder, which results in an printed object that can be sanded and stained. And, since you are moving a print head, the only limitation to the build size is how big you have made your printer.