Algae Based Biofuels are the Ultimate Answer
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The one type of biofuel that has a realistic potential of having a large impact on climate change is made from salt water algae. The idea would be to farm these algae on land based farms using sea water. The precise nature of the mechanics of the farms is still up for debate. One possibility would be to grow them in transparent pipes or bags. The algae would undergo photosynthesis, fixing CO2 and producing oxygen and sugars. The algae, along with their sugars could be easily refined to make diesel.
Researchers have actually discovered a type of algae that refines into diesel with very little processing. The refined fuel even comes with its own natural octanes!!! The advantages of this system would be that it would not use up arable land, and that it wouldn't consume fresh water. The biomass per acre for algae would be at least an order of magnitude more than the best current biofuels.
The problems with this method are primarily ones of technique. Algae farms would have to act to prevent foreign species from entering the system, and the conditions for growth would have to be maintained. But I do not see any insurmountable obstacles. I strongly believe that if we devote our technological expertise to this problem, we will be able to make it work. This technology has the potential to supply a very large portion of our energy needs.
(I first heard of this from a NASA scientist on the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks)
Do you not see the conflict of interest in this? Do you really believe that most high school students are capable of differentiating a teacher who cannot explain material from a teacher who simply teaches to a high standard and who won't spoon feed his/her students? There is a difference between a genuinely bad teacher and a teacher who expects his students to learn for themselves. Giving students the power to fire their teachers will lead, in my opinion to a system where teachers are afraid to push their students, where they are afraid to give hard tests, and where they are afraid to not all but give the answers to tests out before giving the tests.
I have always thought that if students are treated as consumers, and teachers as service providers, then the market will provide what the typical consumer wants: high grades with as little effort as possible. If teachers are to serve their public service role of training competant citizens, then they must have the power to, at times put pressure on their students.
The models used by the latest generation of business thinkers have been used to justify an unwarranted certainty. Market behavior is above all a psychological phenomenon. Of course there are material constraints, such as supply limitations. But in the end the consumer buys most products for psychological reasons. Investors invest their money for psychological reasons. And psychology is inherently uncertain.
The certainty of business and right wing government leaders led them to make rash decisions. Because their models told them that the economy was going nowhere but up, thanks to Republican "Supply Side" economics, businesses borrowed heavily. Banks became increasingly leveraged, but that was OK, because their models told them that everything would be fine. Never mind that the "boom" was largely an illusion, a result of the excessive borrowing.
I would argue that certainty is often an extremely negative thing. It cuts off debate. It ends thought. When humans have too much certainty, they tend to do very stupid things. In the words of Voltaire, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But compared to water vapor, you know, clouds. It's barely anything.
Your comment is not true. And I doubt you have any real knowledge of the physics behind what you say. Furthermore, I doubt that the person who told you that CO2 was a negligible greenhouse gas has any real knowledge of physics either. The quickest way to refute your argument is to travel to Venus, or at least examine the conditions there. Venus shows in detail what CO2 can do...the temperature there is 800C or more at the surface. And yet Venus began with nearly the same atmospheric composition as the Earth. The main difference is that on Earth, CO2 is fixed and stored by organic processes. While on Venus, the CO2 builds up in the atmosphere.
Or, I can refute you by a physical argument. When thinking about the greenhouse effect, the most important part of the atmosphere is the upper atmosphere, where infrared radiation leaves the Earth for space. In this emitting layer, it is very dry, so water vapor is not a significant greenhouse gas. When we add more CO2 to the atmosphere, it causes infrared photons to be emitted to space from a higher colder layer (the extra CO2 absorbs photons that would have otherwise escaped into space). Since the infrared photons are being emitted from a colder layer in the atmosphere, energy is emitted to space less efficiently. Thus the Earth must reach a higher temperature to reach an energy balance with the Sun.
Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above.
I vaguely remember a prediction with accompanying animation that at some point, there would be so many satellites that they would start to collide, creating a chain reaction that would damage or destroy many satellites. In the end you would have a sphere of debris that would make the particular orbit uninhabitable for new satellites. I doubt this will be the result from the current collision, but this is still worth thinking about.
The House bill also calls for "open access." This phrase can include hugely controversial topics such as net neutrality, which in its most radical version would bar providers from charging different amounts for different kinds of broadband content.
Firstly, note the loaded language, with words like "controversial" and "radical". The bias is obvious. It implies that anyone who would have the audacity to believe that our main information arteries should not be throttled and/or censored is some kind of unrealistic dreamer. Never mind that this openness itself has been the primary reason why the internet has been such a success. Without the internet, we'd be paying exorbitant sums for proprietary services such as AOL. Their bias is short sighted, shallow, and mechanical.
More fundamentally, nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the U.S. lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the U.S.
The idea that competition will solve all of our problems in regards to the internet is a fallacy. Network access will always be a monopoly/duopoly or and oligopoly. The idea that the network business could actually sustain enough market players to allow true competition is laughable. And they know it. Other countries that have better network infrastructures have highly regulated duopolies/oligopolies, with strong enforcement of the regulations. The market players in other countries know that if they abuse their monopoly power, they will be punished. Their apparent bias against net-neutrality indicates they are likely against other regulations too.
I would argue that internet access can be helped by "competition", but that such competition will in actuality be a highly regulated oligarchy. As soon as the regulations disappear, the system will break, and the oligarchy players will show their true colors, charging whatever the market will bear for as bad a service as possible. The Wall Street Journal is hypocritical for promoting competition, when they surely must know that true competition is impossible in this industry.
I think what a lot of us are forgetting here is the importance of the overall structure of pieces of software. The overall design principles in a piece of software are set very early in its life. The decisions made early on about the general structure of the software echo throughout the life of the code. It may be debugged, it may even be rewritten, but if the early decisions about the general design of a program were poor, then it will have consequences, no matter how much debugging or polishing that goes on.
As for examples: Windows...Win95 was made with little thought of network security or the internet, because the original designers didn't consider the internet important...before 1994, for the home computer, the web didn't really exist. Internet/web functionality was later bolted on to windows, but the insecure foundation echoed through many different iterations of Windows. For windows, network security was largely a kluge.
Contrast this with Unix. Unix was used to run mainframe computers, especially at univerities. Unix was from early on a multi-user system that existed in a networked environment. Out of necessity, it was built to be secure and stable. These mainframe computers had to be able to prevent hacker students from running amok with their acounts. Now, with internet being everywhere, Unix is amongst the most secure systems for running networked computers. I would argue that a main reason for this is that Unix systems, from early on were designed with security in mind.
NeXT computers (which later became OS X) were designed early on with an excellent hardware abstraction layer. Basically, NeXT was designed so that the software could operate with limited knowledge of hardware details. The hardware abstraction layer translates requests from the software into instructions for the hardware. And because the software has limited knowledge of the hardware, the hardware may then be changed with little disruption to the software.
I realize that most OS's do this to some extent, but NeXT's version was so good that Apple was able to port OS X from PowerPC CPU's to Intel chips with no significant disruption, something that would be well nigh impossible with a poorly structured OS such as Windows. I argue that the reason for this portability was that NeXT/OS X was designed elegently from the beginning to be independent of hardware.
I believe that NeXT's structural elegance is the real reason that Apple is able to put out a secure and functional operating system with a tenth the staff of Microsoft. I don't buy for a second the argument that Apple has it easy because it doesn't have to deal with as much diverse hardware as Windows. Apple doesn't need as many programmers because the structure of the operating system is elegant and clear. Windows has an inelegant structure that originates from its beginnings as a hacked together system. Microsoft needs a massive staff because the Windows codebase is an ugly beast that can barely be managed (Vista still has the Registry!!!). This is the real reason why Microsoft can't seem to get it right. This is the real reason why it took so long for Vista, and why Vista was so buggy. It isn't about perfection. It's about elegance.
IE7 is set to run in sandbox mode by default. If a user decides to take it out of that by force or installing addons, then I would gather they would be to blame directly or indirectly for the end result. Im not MS fanboy, but can they really be blamed for shoddy coding done by third parties?
Should it even be possible for add-ons to do this? Should we really expect the average user to understand that allowing the add-ons to turn off sandbox mode isn't a good idea? At the very least, if an add-on wishes to turn off sandbox mode, a stern but CLEAR warning should be given to the user, and they should have to supply an administrator password. Of course, since vista bugs users for permission so much, most users would just click through the warning thoughtlessly.
I bought my mother a Mac. When she used to use a PC, she would always get caught by trojans. Now I just tell her to never enter her admin password unless performing updates. Problem solved. Because OS X rarely asks for an admin password, when it does, users know that the program wants to do something serious.
Microsoft creates the environment in which these add-ons run. If that environment is too permissive, allowing add-ons to reach deep into your system, then this is still microsoft's fault. They should only allow the add-ons to play in a very small sandbox with high walls.
Actually, I think that this is a major deal. Bear-Stearns was leveraged something like 25 times, meaning that for every $1 of deposit they borrowed $25. This type of leveraging is rampant in corporate America, and is the real reason why banks are dropping like flies. It is only the banks that kept adequate deposits on hand in comparison to their loans that are stable and prosperous (for example, Canadian banks, that are heavily regulated and were not allowed to over-leverage).
On the consumer side, I am not just talking about credit cards. Consumers have borrowed FAR TOO MUCH ON INFLATED REAL ESTATE. Houses were treated as bank accounts, as if somehow they were worth whatever price was paid, no matter how high. Now we are finding that the real housing values in relation to income are far lower than we thought. The money used to pay inflated prices is gone.
And of course we have the government, which is 11 trillion dollars in debt. Much of that money has been spent buying guns and other fancy/frilly military equipment that has limited economic benefit. Iraq has been a money bonfire, with limited benefits and huge downsides.
This has nothing to do with Reagonomics. The idea behind Reagonomics was to lower the upper tax brackets from 70% down to a flatter rate so that people would be encouraged invest to invest their money and thus create a greater supply of consumer goods. This did exactly what it was supposed to do, as a whole the prices of consumer goods and commodities alike have largely been low, as investors sought the cheapest means of production.
What we have ended up with under Reaganomics is an economy that invests far too much of its money in non-productive consumer goods. Worse still, we buy most of those non-productive consumer goods from offshore factories. The net-result of this has been an economy based largely on the service sector, where an increasingly large sector of workers are employed in Mc-jobs. This is a massive misallocation of our labor force. Huge numbers of otherwise intelligent and capable workers are imprisoned in jobs that only require the intelligence of a twelve-year old. Meanwhile, our best and brightest go to work for huge financial corporations as lawyers and analysts, where their job descriptions can largely described as "gaming the system in favor of the company". Whatever happened to going to work for NASA?
The parent post makes the classic error of many right-wing analysts, of looking mainly at the financial numbers, while failing to acknowledge the reality on the ground.
How's this for a simple explanation for the current crisis: We borrowed too much money and spent it on non-productive consumption. If we had instead spent much of this money on infrastructure, on factories, on railways, then we likely wouldn't be in this mess. The subprime debacle was merely the bolt of lightning that lit the already tinder dry forest.
Sometimes I feel that the educational ideologues in the university education departments are sabotaging the system. Their actions and ideas are in effect lowering standards in the public school system. I'm not sure what their motives are. To raise the level of general achievement? Possibly. To create the impression of increases in achievement through improvements in overt grades. Quite likely. What many education professors don't seem to realize is that when their efforts result in lower educational standards, they are in effect sabotaging the public school system. Parents of brilliant children will go elsewhere, to private schools. And thus our elite, those students who are brilliant and who will become future leaders will be increasingly educated outside the public system. This will in turn lead to a weakening of democracy, as our leaders will not have the broad view of society that public education instills.
I didn't see it mentioned in the summary, but world speed record holder Sam Whittingham's bike was designed by a Bulgarian sculptor, Georgi Georgiev, who is not an engineer. The bike was not designed from computational fluid dynamics, or other modern engineering techniques. The design emerged from the brain of Mr. Georgiev; he designed the bike to "hide from the air", while providing Sam Whittingham with just enough space to pedal comfortably.
I have always been amazed that Sam Whittington and Georgi Georgiev have been able to consistently beat teams with engineers and batteries of computers with advanced aerodynamics software. Mr. Georgiev is something of a genius.
Could you possibly explain how the weather in Queensland is more of a single point of "evidence" than an ice shelf breaking off?
Both are arbitrary anecdotes, which I believe was the parent's original point.
The ice shelf breaking off is more than just a "single point of data" because the forces that caused it have been acting consistently for several years. It takes many years of warming to weaken and melt an ice shelf. The decay of this ice shelf indicates a trend being exhibited at a single point over several years. The trend exhibited at that point is also indicative of a broader trend of arctic warming.
The Queensland temperature for one particular season is not indicative of a trend. It is just the weather for one place during a single season.
The above quote is so absurd that I have to respond. Are you bloody serious?!! ATT never made any money off the transistor?!!!! I'd like to see ATT run its telephone systems without the transistor, or its decendant the microchip! This illustrates a fundamental flaw in business school thinking, that they usually only consider direct profits of self-interested entities, and not the profits of society as a whole.
I would argue that decisions like this are to a large extent the result of a way of thinking specifically associated with business schools and their MBA graduates. It is a type of thinking that looks at the operations of businesses through the lens of a limited set of parameters, as if these parameters can be a substitute for concrete knowledge of the nuts and bolts details of a company's operations. MBA thinking causes managers to close their minds, to limit their decisions to what is immediately measurable and graphable. Extreme adherents to this way of thinking often fail to see the big picture in their business and in the economy.
The best example of this that I can think of occurred during the Mad Cow crisis in the UK a few years ago. In the lead-up to that crisis, MBA manager types were loathe to listen to the warning signs about growing incidents of BSE found in British cattle. They didn't want to act because they feared it would have a drastic impact on their bottom line profits. Although they clearly saw the huge costs of pre-emptive action to deal with the disease, what they failed to see were the costs of inaction. They didn't understand that their inaction would lead to the destruction of the entire British cattle stock. They failed to see that the British meat industry would remain a pariah for many years to come. They failed to balance the huge cost of acting pre-emptively with the destruction of their entire industry as a result of inaction.
Another example occurred when Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard changed that corporation from one of the most creative companies in the world to a commondity PC maker, whose main contribution to the economy is in marketing and distribution. More recently, Maple Leaf foods of Canada has had to institute a massive meat recall, due to Listeria contamination. The contamination was due to its nickel and diming of its quality assurance and sanitation departments. This recall, and the ensuing lawsuits could result in the destruction of the company. All caused because bean counters wanted to save a few dollars on bacterial testing and cleaning.
I am saying what I am because I genuinely believe it. I believe that the people running most of our corporations have little sense of history, of culture, and little sense of what actually makes our economy work. I once had a conversation with an MBA type in which he argued that food was not economically important because it only made up 3% of the Gross Domestic Product. I'd like to see what would happen if he reduced his food budget to zero.
I suspect that DC transmission will have to play a role for long distance transmission. Since all wires (even straight ones) have at least some inductance, AC transmission suffers from voltage reduction over long distances, since the current is constantly changing direction. This is similar to the back-emf observed in motors. The inductive properties of long distance transmission lines are the ultimate limiter of how far energy can be transmitted by AC. Direct current on the other hand virtually eliminates this problem.
I can see long distance high voltage direct current being especially useful in transmitting electricity created by giant solar plants in the southwest desert. The amount of energy hitting the desert around Las Vegas is staggering; and yet when I recently flew out of Las Vegas I couldn't see ANY solar plants (they are easy to see due to their reflectance). Such a waste.
I don't think Cheney could ever be a spider at the center of a giant web of true information. I agree with you that Cheney likely only sees a small fraction of the big picture. However, Cheney and his ilk do have control of the reactions to the bread crumbs of information they receive. If they receive a strong hint about an impending attack, then they can either focus the entire intelligence apparatus at the hint, to "shake the tree to see what falls out", as Richard Clark asserts Bush and co. DIDN'T do, or they can respond in a more tepid and cautious way. Cheney chose the latter path, as evidenced by Richard Clark's (the former had of the American counter-terrorist unit) assertions.
I am not convinced that Cheney knew about the details of what happened. But my unsubstantiated suspicion is that he knew that SOMETHING was going to happen at some point in the near future. I think I can factually assert that Cheney did not put to bear the might of the US intelligence services on these particular terrorists.
I think you are creating a false dichotomy here. Obviously the neocons are on the whole a very stupid bunch, as the execution of the Iraq strategy indicates. I believe that they were firmly convinced that they would be welcomed in Iraq, and that the miraculous hand of the free market would unleash the hidden potential of the Iraqi economy. I believe they were genuinely surprised with the collapse of the Iraqi situation, or else they would likely have sent more troops.
That said, it actually doesn't take that much intelligence to (a) write the Patriot Act to be enacted in case of a serious incident and to plan a grand military campaign to remake the Middle East as indicated here and (b) to deliberately ignore intelligence indicating an impending terrorist attack that would enable the enactment of their planned strategy. Read some of the documents linked to above. Then put yourself in the place of a leader who wants to implement those far reaching policies. It would be very easy to "allow" an attack on US soil, in order to make the enactment of your grand strategy possible.
The idea that these buildings were brought down by explosives is patently absurd. Period. However there is a "conspiracy theory" that is, to me at least, plausable and believable. Namely that Bush/Cheney and the other neocons allowed 9/11 to happen by looking the other way, and by not doing enough to stop it.
It is a well known fact, as outlined in the "Project for a New American Century", that Cheney and the other neocons wanted desparately to go into Iraq. It is also a fact that the Patriot Act had been written several years before 9/11, and was sitting in a drawer, waiting to be enacted. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to me to think that Cheney would allow America to be attacked in a hugely symbolic but ultimately non-devastating way, as a way of pushing the country into Iraq, and of foisting laws like the Patriot Act on congress.
However, I fear that what I propose here will be lumped in with all of the other crackpot conspiracy theories about demolition teams in the twin towers. There is really no compelling evidence to support what I say. Only a strong suspicion based on what was written in the Project for a New American Century document, and observation of how far the neoconservatives seemed willing to go to enact their policies. America under Cheney and his neocon thugs has been a profoundly unsettling place. I often feel that there is a war being waged right under our noses, against freedom and the ideals of American democracy.
I use LaTeX because its output looks better than anything else I've seen on the market. The difference is subtle, but noticable. If you place a LaTeX document side by side with the same text processed by a different system, the LaTeX one is obvious. The reason for this is that the designers of TeX and LaTeX knew about proper typographical conventions. They knew about how to space letters, about line spacing. Looking at a well made LaTeX document is like looking at an elegantly typeset book. You aren't sure exactly why it looks good. But it does.
I've used Framemaker. It isn't bad. It's keystrokes for creating mathematical equations are efficient. However, its output still doesn't have the elegance of LaTeX. LaTeX does things that no other system does. For example, when you put an equation inline with text, it changes the format of the equation to fit in the line. Usually, inline equations don't cause the spacing of the line they are in to change. Try that in Word!
I do agree that tables are a pain to use. But I usually find that once I've made a template, then I don't have to mess with the details later. I use LaTeX to create mathematics exams, and I wouldn't use anything else. Using templates, it is faster than any other tool I have seen.
Apple market share used to be a lot "larger", if you count it as a percentage. However, the computer market back in the 90's was tiny. Today, in terms of shear numbers of computers, the Apple market share is likely far larger than it ever was.
I believe that Apple has nowhere to go but up. They produce a cleaner, simpler and more secure product than MS with a tenth of the employees. They use the same hardware as everyone else. Their margins are huge. If they need to, they can compete at both the high side and the low side of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
The one type of biofuel that has a realistic potential of having a large impact on climate change is made from salt water algae. The idea would be to farm these algae on land based farms using sea water. The precise nature of the mechanics of the farms is still up for debate. One possibility would be to grow them in transparent pipes or bags. The algae would undergo photosynthesis, fixing CO2 and producing oxygen and sugars. The algae, along with their sugars could be easily refined to make diesel.
Researchers have actually discovered a type of algae that refines into diesel with very little processing. The refined fuel even comes with its own natural octanes!!! The advantages of this system would be that it would not use up arable land, and that it wouldn't consume fresh water. The biomass per acre for algae would be at least an order of magnitude more than the best current biofuels.
The problems with this method are primarily ones of technique. Algae farms would have to act to prevent foreign species from entering the system, and the conditions for growth would have to be maintained. But I do not see any insurmountable obstacles. I strongly believe that if we devote our technological expertise to this problem, we will be able to make it work. This technology has the potential to supply a very large portion of our energy needs.
(I first heard of this from a NASA scientist on the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks)
Do you not see the conflict of interest in this? Do you really believe that most high school students are capable of differentiating a teacher who cannot explain material from a teacher who simply teaches to a high standard and who won't spoon feed his/her students? There is a difference between a genuinely bad teacher and a teacher who expects his students to learn for themselves. Giving students the power to fire their teachers will lead, in my opinion to a system where teachers are afraid to push their students, where they are afraid to give hard tests, and where they are afraid to not all but give the answers to tests out before giving the tests.
I have always thought that if students are treated as consumers, and teachers as service providers, then the market will provide what the typical consumer wants: high grades with as little effort as possible. If teachers are to serve their public service role of training competant citizens, then they must have the power to, at times put pressure on their students.
The models used by the latest generation of business thinkers have been used to justify an unwarranted certainty. Market behavior is above all a psychological phenomenon. Of course there are material constraints, such as supply limitations. But in the end the consumer buys most products for psychological reasons. Investors invest their money for psychological reasons. And psychology is inherently uncertain.
The certainty of business and right wing government leaders led them to make rash decisions. Because their models told them that the economy was going nowhere but up, thanks to Republican "Supply Side" economics, businesses borrowed heavily. Banks became increasingly leveraged, but that was OK, because their models told them that everything would be fine. Never mind that the "boom" was largely an illusion, a result of the excessive borrowing.
I would argue that certainty is often an extremely negative thing. It cuts off debate. It ends thought. When humans have too much certainty, they tend to do very stupid things. In the words of Voltaire, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
Your comment is not true. And I doubt you have any real knowledge of the physics behind what you say. Furthermore, I doubt that the person who told you that CO2 was a negligible greenhouse gas has any real knowledge of physics either. The quickest way to refute your argument is to travel to Venus, or at least examine the conditions there. Venus shows in detail what CO2 can do...the temperature there is 800C or more at the surface. And yet Venus began with nearly the same atmospheric composition as the Earth. The main difference is that on Earth, CO2 is fixed and stored by organic processes. While on Venus, the CO2 builds up in the atmosphere.
Or, I can refute you by a physical argument. When thinking about the greenhouse effect, the most important part of the atmosphere is the upper atmosphere, where infrared radiation leaves the Earth for space. In this emitting layer, it is very dry, so water vapor is not a significant greenhouse gas. When we add more CO2 to the atmosphere, it causes infrared photons to be emitted to space from a higher colder layer (the extra CO2 absorbs photons that would have otherwise escaped into space). Since the infrared photons are being emitted from a colder layer in the atmosphere, energy is emitted to space less efficiently. Thus the Earth must reach a higher temperature to reach an energy balance with the Sun.
This sounds like a publicity stunt to me.
To quote TFA:
I vaguely remember a prediction with accompanying animation that at some point, there would be so many satellites that they would start to collide, creating a chain reaction that would damage or destroy many satellites. In the end you would have a sphere of debris that would make the particular orbit uninhabitable for new satellites. I doubt this will be the result from the current collision, but this is still worth thinking about.
From TFA:
Firstly, note the loaded language, with words like "controversial" and "radical". The bias is obvious. It implies that anyone who would have the audacity to believe that our main information arteries should not be throttled and/or censored is some kind of unrealistic dreamer. Never mind that this openness itself has been the primary reason why the internet has been such a success. Without the internet, we'd be paying exorbitant sums for proprietary services such as AOL. Their bias is short sighted, shallow, and mechanical.
The idea that competition will solve all of our problems in regards to the internet is a fallacy. Network access will always be a monopoly/duopoly or and oligopoly. The idea that the network business could actually sustain enough market players to allow true competition is laughable. And they know it. Other countries that have better network infrastructures have highly regulated duopolies/oligopolies, with strong enforcement of the regulations. The market players in other countries know that if they abuse their monopoly power, they will be punished. Their apparent bias against net-neutrality indicates they are likely against other regulations too.
I would argue that internet access can be helped by "competition", but that such competition will in actuality be a highly regulated oligarchy. As soon as the regulations disappear, the system will break, and the oligarchy players will show their true colors, charging whatever the market will bear for as bad a service as possible. The Wall Street Journal is hypocritical for promoting competition, when they surely must know that true competition is impossible in this industry.
I think what a lot of us are forgetting here is the importance of the overall structure of pieces of software. The overall design principles in a piece of software are set very early in its life. The decisions made early on about the general structure of the software echo throughout the life of the code. It may be debugged, it may even be rewritten, but if the early decisions about the general design of a program were poor, then it will have consequences, no matter how much debugging or polishing that goes on.
As for examples: Windows...Win95 was made with little thought of network security or the internet, because the original designers didn't consider the internet important...before 1994, for the home computer, the web didn't really exist. Internet/web functionality was later bolted on to windows, but the insecure foundation echoed through many different iterations of Windows. For windows, network security was largely a kluge.
Contrast this with Unix. Unix was used to run mainframe computers, especially at univerities. Unix was from early on a multi-user system that existed in a networked environment. Out of necessity, it was built to be secure and stable. These mainframe computers had to be able to prevent hacker students from running amok with their acounts. Now, with internet being everywhere, Unix is amongst the most secure systems for running networked computers. I would argue that a main reason for this is that Unix systems, from early on were designed with security in mind.
NeXT computers (which later became OS X) were designed early on with an excellent hardware abstraction layer. Basically, NeXT was designed so that the software could operate with limited knowledge of hardware details. The hardware abstraction layer translates requests from the software into instructions for the hardware. And because the software has limited knowledge of the hardware, the hardware may then be changed with little disruption to the software.
I realize that most OS's do this to some extent, but NeXT's version was so good that Apple was able to port OS X from PowerPC CPU's to Intel chips with no significant disruption, something that would be well nigh impossible with a poorly structured OS such as Windows. I argue that the reason for this portability was that NeXT/OS X was designed elegently from the beginning to be independent of hardware.
I believe that NeXT's structural elegance is the real reason that Apple is able to put out a secure and functional operating system with a tenth the staff of Microsoft. I don't buy for a second the argument that Apple has it easy because it doesn't have to deal with as much diverse hardware as Windows. Apple doesn't need as many programmers because the structure of the operating system is elegant and clear. Windows has an inelegant structure that originates from its beginnings as a hacked together system. Microsoft needs a massive staff because the Windows codebase is an ugly beast that can barely be managed (Vista still has the Registry!!!). This is the real reason why Microsoft can't seem to get it right. This is the real reason why it took so long for Vista, and why Vista was so buggy. It isn't about perfection. It's about elegance.
IE7 is set to run in sandbox mode by default. If a user decides to take it out of that by force or installing addons, then I would gather they would be to blame directly or indirectly for the end result. Im not MS fanboy, but can they really be blamed for shoddy coding done by third parties?
Should it even be possible for add-ons to do this? Should we really expect the average user to understand that allowing the add-ons to turn off sandbox mode isn't a good idea? At the very least, if an add-on wishes to turn off sandbox mode, a stern but CLEAR warning should be given to the user, and they should have to supply an administrator password. Of course, since vista bugs users for permission so much, most users would just click through the warning thoughtlessly.
I bought my mother a Mac. When she used to use a PC, she would always get caught by trojans. Now I just tell her to never enter her admin password unless performing updates. Problem solved. Because OS X rarely asks for an admin password, when it does, users know that the program wants to do something serious.
Microsoft creates the environment in which these add-ons run. If that environment is too permissive, allowing add-ons to reach deep into your system, then this is still microsoft's fault. They should only allow the add-ons to play in a very small sandbox with high walls.
Actually, I think that this is a major deal. Bear-Stearns was leveraged something like 25 times, meaning that for every $1 of deposit they borrowed $25. This type of leveraging is rampant in corporate America, and is the real reason why banks are dropping like flies. It is only the banks that kept adequate deposits on hand in comparison to their loans that are stable and prosperous (for example, Canadian banks, that are heavily regulated and were not allowed to over-leverage).
On the consumer side, I am not just talking about credit cards. Consumers have borrowed FAR TOO MUCH ON INFLATED REAL ESTATE. Houses were treated as bank accounts, as if somehow they were worth whatever price was paid, no matter how high. Now we are finding that the real housing values in relation to income are far lower than we thought. The money used to pay inflated prices is gone.
And of course we have the government, which is 11 trillion dollars in debt. Much of that money has been spent buying guns and other fancy/frilly military equipment that has limited economic benefit. Iraq has been a money bonfire, with limited benefits and huge downsides.
What we have ended up with under Reaganomics is an economy that invests far too much of its money in non-productive consumer goods. Worse still, we buy most of those non-productive consumer goods from offshore factories. The net-result of this has been an economy based largely on the service sector, where an increasingly large sector of workers are employed in Mc-jobs. This is a massive misallocation of our labor force. Huge numbers of otherwise intelligent and capable workers are imprisoned in jobs that only require the intelligence of a twelve-year old. Meanwhile, our best and brightest go to work for huge financial corporations as lawyers and analysts, where their job descriptions can largely described as "gaming the system in favor of the company". Whatever happened to going to work for NASA?
The parent post makes the classic error of many right-wing analysts, of looking mainly at the financial numbers, while failing to acknowledge the reality on the ground.
How's this for a simple explanation for the current crisis: We borrowed too much money and spent it on non-productive consumption. If we had instead spent much of this money on infrastructure, on factories, on railways, then we likely wouldn't be in this mess. The subprime debacle was merely the bolt of lightning that lit the already tinder dry forest.
Sometimes I feel that the educational ideologues in the university education departments are sabotaging the system. Their actions and ideas are in effect lowering standards in the public school system. I'm not sure what their motives are. To raise the level of general achievement? Possibly. To create the impression of increases in achievement through improvements in overt grades. Quite likely. What many education professors don't seem to realize is that when their efforts result in lower educational standards, they are in effect sabotaging the public school system. Parents of brilliant children will go elsewhere, to private schools. And thus our elite, those students who are brilliant and who will become future leaders will be increasingly educated outside the public system. This will in turn lead to a weakening of democracy, as our leaders will not have the broad view of society that public education instills.
I didn't see it mentioned in the summary, but world speed record holder Sam Whittingham's bike was designed by a Bulgarian sculptor, Georgi Georgiev, who is not an engineer. The bike was not designed from computational fluid dynamics, or other modern engineering techniques. The design emerged from the brain of Mr. Georgiev; he designed the bike to "hide from the air", while providing Sam Whittingham with just enough space to pedal comfortably.
I have always been amazed that Sam Whittington and Georgi Georgiev have been able to consistently beat teams with engineers and batteries of computers with advanced aerodynamics software. Mr. Georgiev is something of a genius.
Could you possibly explain how the weather in Queensland is more of a single point of "evidence" than an ice shelf breaking off?
Both are arbitrary anecdotes, which I believe was the parent's original point.
The ice shelf breaking off is more than just a "single point of data" because the forces that caused it have been acting consistently for several years. It takes many years of warming to weaken and melt an ice shelf. The decay of this ice shelf indicates a trend being exhibited at a single point over several years. The trend exhibited at that point is also indicative of a broader trend of arctic warming.
The Queensland temperature for one particular season is not indicative of a trend. It is just the weather for one place during a single season.
The above quote is so absurd that I have to respond. Are you bloody serious?!! ATT never made any money off the transistor?!!!! I'd like to see ATT run its telephone systems without the transistor, or its decendant the microchip! This illustrates a fundamental flaw in business school thinking, that they usually only consider direct profits of self-interested entities, and not the profits of society as a whole.
I would argue that decisions like this are to a large extent the result of a way of thinking specifically associated with business schools and their MBA graduates. It is a type of thinking that looks at the operations of businesses through the lens of a limited set of parameters, as if these parameters can be a substitute for concrete knowledge of the nuts and bolts details of a company's operations. MBA thinking causes managers to close their minds, to limit their decisions to what is immediately measurable and graphable. Extreme adherents to this way of thinking often fail to see the big picture in their business and in the economy.
The best example of this that I can think of occurred during the Mad Cow crisis in the UK a few years ago. In the lead-up to that crisis, MBA manager types were loathe to listen to the warning signs about growing incidents of BSE found in British cattle. They didn't want to act because they feared it would have a drastic impact on their bottom line profits. Although they clearly saw the huge costs of pre-emptive action to deal with the disease, what they failed to see were the costs of inaction. They didn't understand that their inaction would lead to the destruction of the entire British cattle stock. They failed to see that the British meat industry would remain a pariah for many years to come. They failed to balance the huge cost of acting pre-emptively with the destruction of their entire industry as a result of inaction.
Another example occurred when Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard changed that corporation from one of the most creative companies in the world to a commondity PC maker, whose main contribution to the economy is in marketing and distribution. More recently, Maple Leaf foods of Canada has had to institute a massive meat recall, due to Listeria contamination. The contamination was due to its nickel and diming of its quality assurance and sanitation departments. This recall, and the ensuing lawsuits could result in the destruction of the company. All caused because bean counters wanted to save a few dollars on bacterial testing and cleaning.
I am saying what I am because I genuinely believe it. I believe that the people running most of our corporations have little sense of history, of culture, and little sense of what actually makes our economy work. I once had a conversation with an MBA type in which he argued that food was not economically important because it only made up 3% of the Gross Domestic Product. I'd like to see what would happen if he reduced his food budget to zero.
I suspect that DC transmission will have to play a role for long distance transmission. Since all wires (even straight ones) have at least some inductance, AC transmission suffers from voltage reduction over long distances, since the current is constantly changing direction. This is similar to the back-emf observed in motors. The inductive properties of long distance transmission lines are the ultimate limiter of how far energy can be transmitted by AC. Direct current on the other hand virtually eliminates this problem.
I can see long distance high voltage direct current being especially useful in transmitting electricity created by giant solar plants in the southwest desert. The amount of energy hitting the desert around Las Vegas is staggering; and yet when I recently flew out of Las Vegas I couldn't see ANY solar plants (they are easy to see due to their reflectance). Such a waste.
I don't think Cheney could ever be a spider at the center of a giant web of true information. I agree with you that Cheney likely only sees a small fraction of the big picture. However, Cheney and his ilk do have control of the reactions to the bread crumbs of information they receive. If they receive a strong hint about an impending attack, then they can either focus the entire intelligence apparatus at the hint, to "shake the tree to see what falls out", as Richard Clark asserts Bush and co. DIDN'T do, or they can respond in a more tepid and cautious way. Cheney chose the latter path, as evidenced by Richard Clark's (the former had of the American counter-terrorist unit) assertions.
I am not convinced that Cheney knew about the details of what happened. But my unsubstantiated suspicion is that he knew that SOMETHING was going to happen at some point in the near future. I think I can factually assert that Cheney did not put to bear the might of the US intelligence services on these particular terrorists.
I think you are creating a false dichotomy here. Obviously the neocons are on the whole a very stupid bunch, as the execution of the Iraq strategy indicates. I believe that they were firmly convinced that they would be welcomed in Iraq, and that the miraculous hand of the free market would unleash the hidden potential of the Iraqi economy. I believe they were genuinely surprised with the collapse of the Iraqi situation, or else they would likely have sent more troops.
That said, it actually doesn't take that much intelligence to (a) write the Patriot Act to be enacted in case of a serious incident and to plan a grand military campaign to remake the Middle East as indicated here and (b) to deliberately ignore intelligence indicating an impending terrorist attack that would enable the enactment of their planned strategy. Read some of the documents linked to above. Then put yourself in the place of a leader who wants to implement those far reaching policies. It would be very easy to "allow" an attack on US soil, in order to make the enactment of your grand strategy possible.
The idea that these buildings were brought down by explosives is patently absurd. Period. However there is a "conspiracy theory" that is, to me at least, plausable and believable. Namely that Bush/Cheney and the other neocons allowed 9/11 to happen by looking the other way, and by not doing enough to stop it.
It is a well known fact, as outlined in the "Project for a New American Century", that Cheney and the other neocons wanted desparately to go into Iraq. It is also a fact that the Patriot Act had been written several years before 9/11, and was sitting in a drawer, waiting to be enacted. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to me to think that Cheney would allow America to be attacked in a hugely symbolic but ultimately non-devastating way, as a way of pushing the country into Iraq, and of foisting laws like the Patriot Act on congress.
However, I fear that what I propose here will be lumped in with all of the other crackpot conspiracy theories about demolition teams in the twin towers. There is really no compelling evidence to support what I say. Only a strong suspicion based on what was written in the Project for a New American Century document, and observation of how far the neoconservatives seemed willing to go to enact their policies. America under Cheney and his neocon thugs has been a profoundly unsettling place. I often feel that there is a war being waged right under our noses, against freedom and the ideals of American democracy.
I use LaTeX because its output looks better than anything else I've seen on the market. The difference is subtle, but noticable. If you place a LaTeX document side by side with the same text processed by a different system, the LaTeX one is obvious. The reason for this is that the designers of TeX and LaTeX knew about proper typographical conventions. They knew about how to space letters, about line spacing. Looking at a well made LaTeX document is like looking at an elegantly typeset book. You aren't sure exactly why it looks good. But it does.
I've used Framemaker. It isn't bad. It's keystrokes for creating mathematical equations are efficient. However, its output still doesn't have the elegance of LaTeX. LaTeX does things that no other system does. For example, when you put an equation inline with text, it changes the format of the equation to fit in the line. Usually, inline equations don't cause the spacing of the line they are in to change. Try that in Word!
I do agree that tables are a pain to use. But I usually find that once I've made a template, then I don't have to mess with the details later. I use LaTeX to create mathematics exams, and I wouldn't use anything else. Using templates, it is faster than any other tool I have seen.
Apple market share used to be a lot "larger", if you count it as a percentage. However, the computer market back in the 90's was tiny. Today, in terms of shear numbers of computers, the Apple market share is likely far larger than it ever was.
I believe that Apple has nowhere to go but up. They produce a cleaner, simpler and more secure product than MS with a tenth of the employees. They use the same hardware as everyone else. Their margins are huge. If they need to, they can compete at both the high side and the low side of the market.