- Article. Solar is getting big. Good news there. Should lead to advances in the field and reduction in cost. Yay! I did find it amusing, given
‘s commentary on the climate there, that Germany is ranked so highly among PV consumers. =) - Article. More braindead assurance that if you kill someone the bomb won’t go off. Deadman switches have been used in suicide bombings before according to the wikipedia article. It’s also shown up in movies. Why do people not consider this? Now, granted, killing someone before they reach their targeted destination (see also the plane that crashed south of pittsburgh on 9/11/01) has benefits, even if they do go boom. But terrorism is rare. Potentially disastrous, but rare. False identification with shoot to kill policies may well be more frequent than accurate identification. Is the tradeoff worth it?
- Opinion article by Friedman. The energy bill gives big handouts to big oil and not much to research on alternatives. Fucking up the free market, in precisely the wrong direction. How incredibly myopic.
- Market Segmentation for airfare. The high spenders, though, will probably find a way to save money.
- Tierney on the drug war. Hmm, excessive zeal in pursuing drug use, including cops fucking up the lives of the innocent. How … novel? Not really.
UK’s perspective on culture clashes with violent sects of Islam in the wake of the London bombings.
- Article. It raises the interesting question of an appropriate response in a civilized society to a miniscule subsubculture that is difficult to identify out of the larger subculture. Not too disimilar in nature to the problem in the Netherlands, several years back. I wonder what they’ve done about that.
- Another article. Similar theme.