Domain: southoftheclouds.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to southoftheclouds.net.
Comments · 22
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Re:Equally fanatical conviction
If you would like to take the wind out of their sails, I suggest helping to solve the problem constructively. Then there's no motivation to accept destructive solution.
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Corrected link
Bad link, sorry. Can't edit, too bad. Here's the correct link.
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Re:Mirrors
The expense would be incredible. I think this solution is much more feasible, because it leverages the ecosystem, employing cheap labor (phytoplankton) to do the work for us.
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Re:not that far off
Teller (yes, "father of the fusion bomb" Teller) proposed this back in the 60s. I think the "Geritol" solution is more practical and less disruptive. See this link for numbers.
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Re:Don't agree with global warming
I propose fixing the problem by technical means, and provide numbers to back up the feasibility of the project, here. If you want to take the wind out of the sails of the Luddites, please consider contributing your energies to solving the problem.
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Re:Don't agree with global warming
If you would like to know what EPA scientists calculate to be the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 surplus, in relation to natural sources and sinks, you can find a link in this short article. If you wish to help solve the problem, please consider collaborating on the organization and engineering effort.
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Re:Don't agree with global warming
The EPA reported linked from this page provides a high-quality estimate of the relationship between sources, sinks, annual surplus, and anthropogenic sources.
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Re:Don't agree with global warming
If you actually wish to improve your daughter's fate, I suggest that you join me in working on organizing a practical effort to solve the problem by direct engineering action.
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Re:This is not an American issue
I'm proposing to save the world. Or at least save the lives of the people who would otherwise die of the ancilliary effects of anthropogenic carbon emissions. A little encouragement could go a long way.
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Re:This is not an American issue
Better yet, sanction India and China and Brazil. However, supressing the economic growth of disadvantaged societies is a cruelly selfish thing to do. Better still, just solve the problem, and forego the necessity of sanctioning or waging war on anybody.
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Re:On The Plus Side ...
I disbelieve a faith in the market's ability to correct ecological catastrophe. More often, economic incentives to technological change are inimical to ecological gradualism. That's why I'm beating the pulpit for a direct, conscious effort to solve the problem of global warming. It would cost less than a moon shot.
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Re:Uhh, FYI it goes both ways
better yet, have some corporation lay down the cash and fix the problem of global warming. i think that exxon-mobil alone could do it, if they had the will. check the numbers if you don't believe me.
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By way of counterexample...
I'm an evangelical Christian, and I seriously considered assassinating Bush during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Liberation, in order to prevent war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I also am urgently advocating solving the problem of global warming due to anthropogenic carbon surplus. If you can spare a billion dollars a year, please consider solving the problem. I'm more than happy to collaborate with heathens to save all of our children from malnutrition and disease. -
Re:Actually we are probably at 4
Considering the threat to the food supply by the synergy of climate change and the end of abundant petroleum, I think nuclear war is essentially inevitable, as national leaders panic at the prospect of being removed from power by social disorder. That's why I am doing my best, as the opportunity arises, to advocate solving the problem by technical means, which appears to be both possible and economically feasible.
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No need for Genocide just yet
As an alternative to killing several billion people (probably in a war orchestrated for the purpose, or by means of a genetically tailored virus developed under the sponsorship of a wealthy person who has affection for his or her offspring), I would suggest instead just solving the problem of excess anthropogenic carbon emissions. That will result in much less disruption and destruction, and less impediment to human technological progress -- which, I would remind prospective producers of genocide, is much more likely to extend your life than will merely eliminating the competition.
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Re:You got some stuff wrong there, chief
There's nothing "safe" about cutting emissions. Much of the food we eat could not be produced or delivered without substantial emissions using currently economic technologies. Waiting for economic technologies to change is a losing proposition. The only feasible solution is to directly address the problem by fixing carbon.
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Re:Not just Americans.
However, the rich are much more likely to survive climatic upheaval than are the poor. Still, I wouldn't go waging a pre-emptive strike on the Riviera just yet. All it would take is one wealthy donor to resolve the problem of global warming due to anthropogenic carbon surplus.
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Re:Another plausible perspective
I would hardly consider it inevitable, since it is technically and economically feasible to fix enough carbon to offset anthropogenic sources. Assuming that you can raise one billion dollars a year for the purpose, that is.
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Re:do they care?
You don't need to change your lifestyle in order to solve the problem of global warming. You just need to find a way to spend about 17 cents per living human per day. Check my numbers if you don't believe me.
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Re:do they care?
I would not trouble with governments. The task of resolving global warming can be managed by private initiative. I estimate the total cost at $US 1 billion annually, at this link.
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Re:Oil sands in Canada?
Left out the link by mistake, sorry.
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Start with a scalable pipe
Cheap scalability means load balancing over commodity components, which you can add quickly to a set for linear scaling. The first challenge is where the client traffic comes in the door. If you can't them in, you can't serve them. When you add commodity components, you reduce MTF, so your configuration needs to
do dynamic-failover and rebalancing.
The best way I know to scale your front door is to start with two netfilter firewalls sharing a MAC, and getting load balance by MAC layer filtering rules. It's pretty easy to plug in additional firewall transit capacity and to script-in failover using a heartbeat daemon. You can do firewalls in failover pairs more quickly and easily than you can do odd-numbered rings, but both are quite doable by relatively straightforward scripting and configuration.
I strongly recommend against breaking your traffic into categories, like static pages, etc., and balancing load by moving different categories to different servers. If you do that, you end up with way too much hardware underloaded, and way to much hardware overloaded, and either no failover provisioning, or else a very complex failover configuration. Instead, make the individual servers identical, and cheap. Just add more clones to the pack as needed, and keep the traffic balanced.
By this time you're starting to see my basic approach to scalable commodity 'nix clusters. See this lame ASCII art for detail. It amounts to a series of independently scalable layers,
Firewalling, app serving, db caching, db serving.
The memcached layer is indicated if you have a lot of read-only db traffic.
These nodes are cheap, don't even really need hard drives. You could boot them
off of CD or off the network, diskless. They hold as much RAM as possible.
The number of MC servers required depends strongly on how much RAM each can hold
but the amount of RAM required per DB node depends on the characteristics of your
application DB traffic.
I'd rather install a memcached server and keep a hot DB spare than try to maintain
transparent failover on a DB cluster. Coherence requirements complicate the performance curves when you have multiple DBs accepting write operations, which can lead to unpleasant surprises. Delay scaling your DB cluster as long as you can.