Keep spent fuel rods offsite, and have saner backup generator configurations.
Also, why is there not a giant extension cord that runs to a mile outside (Obviously not literally that, but you get my point.) that someone can drive up and plug a big generator into to run the pumps? What was this nonsense about running power cables in there? Hell, why couldn't the pumps run off the grid?
This is 2011. We should not have problems getting electrical power somewhere!
And note that in the US, we appear to have less battery backup time than the Japan did.
I want someone to sit down and actually define, step-by-step, what happens one of the nuke plants has to be shut down, and then what happens if part of that step fails, and then what happens if the next part fails, etc.
Because it really looks like, in Japan, no one bothered to actually do that. 'Plant shuts down, we use battery backups until we start the generators.' 'And if the generators are damaged.' 'Uh...we have no plan.'
And, meanwhile, despite all that, I think less than five people have died, and while a few hundred more might eventually get cancer, it's still much much much safer than coal.
My main goal is sufficient power to run the air conditioning during the day which is 50% of my power load 5 months a year when my power runs up to a little over 150 per month. (so hoped savings $385)
Buy a DC window air conditioner, stick it in a window hooked to a solar panel, and turn it to 'very cold', and leave it running all the time. (You probably want to do this in an unused room, and leave the door open.)
Trying to run an existing AC air conditioner partially off solar panels loses a lot of energy in conversion.
Mind you, the thing I'd really like to do is convert all of the lighting circuits in my house to DC. If I replaced all of my CFLs with LEDs and fed them directly from a couple of lead-acid batteries then a relatively small solar panel would cover the entire lighting system quite easily. It will probably take a couple of years for LEDs with a nice spectrum to drop in price to affordable levels though.
What I'd like to see is homes constructed this way, with a parallel DC electrical system for different parts. The lights would probably be the only 'exposed' part, but there could be a DC water heater and DC air conditioning right now.
Actually, instead of a DC water heater, what could be done is small 5 gallon water heater before the main one, that just runs solely off solar. If you currently had solar power, your main water heater will be getting hot water supplied to it, which obviously means it doesn't have to heat anything up itself, whereas if you didn't, your main heater would work fine.
Same thing can be done with AC and heat pumping. If you have extra solar power, and it's winter, you just have a solar powered heat pump running all the time, essentially storing solar energy as heat in the house. And same with AC in the summer. I'm sure we could all live with an extra few degrees of climate control, especially if we're one of those people who try to save energy with our climate control normally. That heat pump wouldn't even be the 'same' system as the other one, it would be something designed to run off erratic DC, doing whatever it can with whatever it gets. You just need to share a blower. (Or not even use the vent system, just dump it in the middle of the house.)
If we stop trying to convert solar power to 'normal' power, and instead use it lessen the load of a few specific things, we'd be much better off. The only time it should turn to AC is if we don't need it anymore and dump it on the grid.
If we can build hydro, we should, as it is easier to deal any problems, and a heck of a lot cheaper. And wind. And geothermal. But all those have limited locations they can go.
And then, until we actually invent solar power that can supply everything we need, it's nuclear. It's much safer.
We should be sticking solar panels on roofs and stuff, despite what that page says, though. People falling off roofs is a general problem, and is not much increased by people installing solar panels, and isn't increased at all by installing them on new houses, which obviously are going to have people on the roof regardless.
However, while we're nearing the point where they could mostly power a well-designed house they were on, we're still nowhere near enough to run industry from them, which is what everyone forgets when talking about 'solar power'.
That article is just retarded. Your eyes cannot converge or focus at distances past 30 feet. Actual depth perception only reached to 30 feet, anything beyond that is your brain making it up.
And if you have to focus at 10 feet, you're sitting too damn close to the movie screen.
Our brain thinks nothing is further away than 'slightly beyond the treetops' when seeing things above us. Maybe 300 feet or so.
So we see the moon there, and our brain says it's basically size and distance of a two-story house at the end of a longish street, maybe. Or a football goalpost from the other end.
But the horizon...we actually know roughly how far that is. We can see trees there, and they are microscopic.
Put the moon there, behind those trees or mountains or buildings or whatever, and the moon is now huge.
This technology fools the eye into thinking that objects are close while the actual image is still distant.
That is an absurd complaint for 3D movies in the theater.
Why? Because we only use the convergence of our eyes and focal length of our pupils for distances less than 30 feet.
Looking at stuff beyond that, our focus is completely 'relaxed' and our eyes are parallel. We have no actual depth perception past that, we're just inventing it from the size of objects and their location on the ground.
This is one of the reasons people prefer to sit at the distance they do in a theater. Sitting closer is tiring for the eyes, not just because they can't see the whole screen at once, but because the eyes keep trying to focus past the screen, and then back to it.
And, no, the 3D effect can only make things further away from the screen, not closer. It can't trick your eyes into focusing 10 feet away or whatever. The whole 'popping out of the screen' is just because we mentally think of the screen as a window where the actual stuff in it is at a distance.
I see a page cache from grida.no, which is not the fucking UN. The UN is not in Norway. In fact, going to grida.no clearly says ' Established in 1989 by the Government of Norway as a Norwegian Foundation'. They just collaborate with the United Nations Environment Programme.
On that page, I literally see this text: 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis. It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.'
Yes, that does say 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'...in no context whatsoever.
So, in short, we've got something not produced by the UN, on a non-UN page, that says as some sort of image subtitle, 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'
Yeah, boy, the 'UN' sure got that one wrong, didn't they?
Hilariously, if you follow the links, they talk about how the island that the 'UN' said would have problems now have more people on them, which is a) not actually disproving anything about people fleeing them, just that people are being born faster, and, BTW, you can be a climate refugee, have your house destroyed, and still being the county, duh, and b) appear to have a total of one or two million people, so it would seem rather insane for anyone to predict that 50 million people would leave them.
Or just run sftp from your ftp server, instead of your ssh server.
Proftpd, for example, can do sftp, using exactly the same users and paths you set up for the FTP part of it. (Which you can, if you wish, turn off.) I suspect other ftp servers can do the same.
And you don't need another IP...what you do is you put file transfer on port 22, and then you move normal ssh to another IP.
If you're using virtual FTP users, like I use of the form user@example.com for FTP access which si used for websites, this is better for security anyway. Morons with dictionary attacks won't even come close.
Everyone who has actual ssh access will need to use port 122 or wherever you moved ssh to, but anyone who is granted command access to the server should know how to change the port in their client! And people who just have file copy access just click 'SFTP' and it works.
I'm not saying it's easier than WebDAV, just that using your existing ssh setup for sftp is not the best plan. Use your existing ftp setup instead.
I find your assertation that HTTP servers have to maintain more state and are heavier than scp servers insane.
Do you actually know how either of those protocols work? HTTP servers don't maintain ANY state, at all. The protocol is literally: Open a TCP connection, send a single line with a file path, send a newline, get some headers, a newline, and the file. That's it. A full featured HTTP server can be implemented with a 15 line shell script run from inetd.
It is much lighter weight than scp could ever dream of, mainly because it doesn't have to negotiate an encrypted connection. Of course, you can negoiate an encrypted connection...and HTTP is still more lightweight because scp keeps track of directories as it copies, so, strictly speaking, it is 'heavier' and keeps more 'state'. (Although supporting recursive copy from the server, instead of requiring the clients to request, is obviously a useful feature. But if we get into 'useful features' HTTP comes out ahead, so you argued exactly the opposite.)
You think all HTTP servers are like apache, but perhaps you should learn that that the most common implimentation of a protocol is not always the most lightweight. In fact, it's almost never the most lightweight.
Growing trees and cutting them down and printing books from them removes CO2 from the air. And I will point out that every book printed is using using waste wood from lumber operations, and/or trees specifically grown to to make paper from. No one's wandering around forests cutting down existing trees for paper. Worrying about 'cutting down trees' is like worrying about 'cutting down corn'...I don't think we're going to run out of corn.
Granted, shipping books puts a tiny amount of CO2 back in, but I assure you it's a net loss of CO2. Unless you run around burning the books when finished with them, or putting them in compost heaps, every book on a shelf is a net environmental win.
Ereaders save on shipping, a little, although it's worth pointing out that ereaders are almost all shipped from overseas, whereas books tend to be printed in the same country as they're sold. So ereaders have 'a month on a container ship from China' added to shipping.
And ereaders require petroleum product, and metals, and all sorts of toxic processes and stuff. Books just get bleached a little, but they've been reducing the level of toxins by that for the last few decades to almost nothing, and being printed in first world countries instead of assembled in China limits the amount of damage they can do.
Specifically, interior walls aren't insulated anywhere that the airspace is connected. If you have an air vent in one room, and an air intake in another, I promise those rooms aren't insulated from each other, that would be stupid.
The only 'interior' walls that are insulated are between two 'different' places, like the wall between the house and a garage, or the wall between two condos. Those are really 'exterior' walls that happen to be inside.
And any walls that started out as exterior but are now inside have insulation in them by accident, obviously.
...you guys know that all you had to do was log out of your EA account inside Dragon Age and you could play, right?
I managed to figure that out without even looking online.
The real problem was people attempting to install, as I believe they couldn't activate their copy.
But I started Dragon Age, tried to load a game, got a message about DLC's not being activated on my account, so I, duh, just logged out, and hey, tada, I could load my game. (Yes, with all the content.)
You got lucky, if you'd bought it on Saturday you'd have spent four days going "Why the fuck did I just waste $39 on this piece of shit?"
Strangely, I was affected by that error. All it did was mean I couldn't be logged into my EA account within the Dragon Age while playing the game, because it said my DLCs were invalid. So I had to log out in Dragon Age, which doesn't really do anything except not record achievements and stuff until I logged back in, at which point it updated.
A trivial issue, so trivial I hadn't even looked into it. In fact, I wasn't even aware it was fixed yet until you posted, but I just tested and it's working fine now.
Perhaps it was different if people hadn't already installed it yet.
Hang on? You bought a game you don't like because it was only $10? Hmm. Give me a minute, I need to go write some really bad $10 games...
Um, no, like I said, I bought a game that was 'eh' because it was only $10. Do you not know what 'eh' means? It means 'so-so' or 'not that impressive'.
Yes, I will spend $10 for 60 hours of moderate entertainment. It's a hell of a better deal than a movie ticket, which is $10 for 2 hours of, usually, just moderate entertainment.
I still 'steal' TV shows, simply because I don't want to stream them.
I'm not getting out of bed between each TV show, somehow navigating using my shitty TV to the page in Hulu, and watching them in their idiotic interface with absurd pauses and crappy quality.
So I'm basically the same as you. I pirate because of convenience. Give me a damn place to buy movies or DVD seasons of TV shows, let me download shows for free with commercials like people can watch over the air, and I wouldn't pirate anything. They can even have DRM, as long as it plays in XMBC still.
They don't do that, so fuck them. Maybe they could just give out a file with a thirty second car commercial and I could promise to watch that every time I downloaded TV instead of watched on Hulu.
And it's the same with Steam. Hey, look, I can buy a game without driving fifty miles, or waiting for UPS to show up. So, guess what? I do buy them. Wow, deep.
And, hell, what actually made me stop pirating is that game store 50 miles away, which didn't exist 6 years ago. Now I could actually find games, instead of downloading, wow. But I buy even more now.
How does the developer determine whether the customer's version of the product (a mod, no less) is legitimate or pirated?
The only way to buy it via Steam, and hence it just checks Steam.
2. Is this method a 100% foolproof way to detect a pirated copy?
Currently, but I'm sure someone will crack it.
3. Could a false positive ever be detected, flagging a legitimate customer as a pirate?
You already have to be correctly logged into Steam to run whatever copy of the Source engine (Usually Half-Life) in the first place, so you'd have to postulate a fairly weird situation where you could somehow launch Half-Life correctly, and then Half-Life 'forgot' who you were when it tried to launch the mod.
Basically, folks, this isn't some 'copy detection'. There was no copy detection, the code to detect a pirated copy is the mod just asking Steam if it's legal. That's it.
And if Steam doesn't think your Steam games are legal, then you've got bigger problems than this mod.
Could a cracked game executable, modified content files, or lack of Internet connection ever flag a user as a pirate?
A cracked game executable almost certainly will, but despite the justification about 'bad disks' you're about to talk about, this is Steam. There are no disks.
By banning every single person who complains of this from his forums, he may be inadvertently banning users with legitimate problems.
Erm, you said that strangely. The users do have a legitimate problem...the game doesn't work! However, those uers are pirates, and he doesn't give a flying fuck if the game doesn't work for them.
What you mean is 'he may be inadvertently banning legitimate users'. Which he's not, because there is a Steam ID listed in the error, and he checks to make sure that Steam ID hasn't bought the game before banning them.
He's run across three people who got the error despite having a legit purchase, which he managed to fix by having them restart Steam and the game. They were in some weird buggy mode that would have run into some other error eventually...having an error popup because Steam is being weird is probably a good thing, and much easier to diagnose than waiting for things to go weird. (He should probably have that solution suggested in the fake error message if people are going to get it.)
If Steam failed, then the game wouldn't run at all, which has nothing at all to do with what Gary's mod did.
If Steam doesn't know you own a game, you're pretty fucked to start with. The situation you've invented in your head doesn't happen. Either the games work, or you're not logged into your account, or all of Steam is broken.
However, this was a mod to the Source engine, not a game, and hence it was actually possible to copy the files into place if you legitimately owned some other Source game. (All of which require Steam.)
This mod just checked the Steam API to see if you owned that mod, and instead of crashing out with a piracy message, decided to crash with a nonsensical message instead.
And, as I said, if the Steam API isn't working, then Half-Life, or whatever game, is broken to start with.
Basically, this isn't any 'added' DRM. This is using the existing DRM system, which you already have to be authorized in (to run whatever game you have Gary's mod installed in) in the first place.
Yes, I've pirated stuff that I wasn't sure how much I was willing to pay for it. Some stuff I was willing to pay that price, and I bought it and some stuff, no, not really, and I uninstalled it. (Although them I sometimes buy it later if the price drops.)
There are 'legit' reasons to pirate, and it's somewhat understandable to a certain level, but people need to ask themselves a question: Are you ever planning on buy any of your games? Do you actually own, say, 80% of the games you have installed? Are you really just 'testing' things, or getting things you really and honestly can't afford? (1)
Or do you download software, install it, play it, archive it, install it later, get hours of enjoyment from it, and never buy a damn thing, ever? Have you ever pirated a ten dollar game? If all pirated software was to vanish, what would you have left? Anything?
There are different levels of lawbreaking. There are people who make lawbreaking a career, who always break the law, and then there are people who sometimes break the law to save some money, but generally follow it. Which are you, people who defend 'some' piracy, and what sort of behavior are you defending?
1)I've been tempted to pirate Sims 3, because the goddamn thing is like $160 with the expansions. Seriously, I can't afford that, no one can. Who the hell is buying that game? I guess I'm supposed to buy it in pieces, but that's annoying enough even when the pieces are separate, with the Sims, you really have to start over with new families for each expansion, because there's extra stuff you want to do.
And I don't know why anyone 'deserves' having them at release, either. If you don't have a lot of money, buy them a year later.
I just bought Dragon Age 1, and, guess what? It still plays fine, and it came with the expansion and all the DLCs for $39.
Heck, while I was there, I bought KOTOR1 for $10, a game that I had pirated years ago to see if I liked it, and I was 'eh', so I decided not to buy it. But $10...look, if you can't afford that, you probably shouldn't be in the hobby of playing new games. Get an old copy of NWN2 and play free modules for it.
Any system where they can and do (even if it's only one person, that's one person too many) ban people (stealing their entire libraries from them) for a forum post is unacceptable.
Steam didn't do that, you idjit. Bioware did that. Or EA, depending on who you ask.
Then I guess all the "secret war spending" shouldn't be mentioned either since it's not officially "part of the the budget."
All war spending is from general revenue, hence increases the general revenue deficit.
You're debating semantics -- a tax is a tax and an expense is an expense.
I didn't say social security wasn't a tax and an expense. I said the tax and the expense are separate from everything else, and hence no money created by altering those can help the general revenue deficit.
Just because they divide it up into separate taxes of a damned government form doesn't somehow make it "not part of the budget".
But it does mean it can't be used to help the general revenue budget deficit.
Look at the White House's own web page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget) and you'll see gigantic pictoral blocks clearly showing Social Security and Medicare as part of the budget.
I'll see a lot of fucking stupid shit if I go with how the White House frames things.
So stop lying to yourself -- if I, average joe tax payer, am paying X dollars in income tax and Y dollars in social security/medicare taxes, the government could _very easily_ raise my income tax by Y dollars, eliminate my social security/medicare taxes, eliminate both programs, and use the dollars for something else.
The government could do a lot of things. And if it did those things, we could talk about them.
However, what you describe is not called 'reducing Social Security spending'. 'Reducing Social Security spending' will not reduce the deficit.
What you just described is called 'Reducing Social Security spending, reducing the collection of Social Security taxes, and inventing a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit'.
And you'll notice the thing that reduces the deficit, aka, ' inventing a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit' is completely unconnected to social security in any way, and could happen regardless of the first thing two things. We could 'Order pizza, watch a movie, and invent a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit', and we'd end up in the exact same place, deficit-wise.
Hell, we could increase social security spending, increase social security taxes, and invent a new tax and use that to reduce the deficit.
Because social security, and income tax, are both (very different) taxes on income, you think your comment makes more sense than proposing to order a pizza. It does not. If you want to propose higher taxes on income to reduce the deficit, I'm with you. Do not pretend that has the slightest thing to do with social security.
. Obviously if you do something to social security, or just order a pizza and watch a movie, and also raise income taxes at the same time, the deficit will be altered, but I'm pretty certain you're the one trying to argue semantics there, very poorly. I said X wouldn't result in Z, and you find a Y that does result in Z and propose doing it at the same time as X, doesn't suddenly make X now result in Z. It doesn't matter that X sorta kinda looks like Y in your head, they're not the same thing.
I repeat: Nothing anyone does to social security can even slightly alter the deficit
It's a sorta like the same way that you might think you have money in the bank, but in reality the only way you're getting back money you put in the bank is if the bank robs liquor stores.
Or something like that. It's perfectly ethical to argue that the government should steal the money it borrowed from social security, with no justification at all. Because the people making the arguments are sociopaths, and having a responsible part of the government that pays for itself is just silly. Poor people paid into and now want the money back, means that there's hey, poor people have some money, how can we take it from them?
Goddamn. Fucking. Sociopaths.
In reality, the only way social security benefits are going to be paid out over the next 30 years is
with either vastly higher taxes, huge cuts to other spending in the government, or limitations placed on what social security benefits are payed.
No, in reality, the way social security benefits are going to be paid out over the next 20 years is they will just be paid out. After that, or hopefully earlier, there will need to be a slightly change in social security tax, easily done by removing the income cap.
That is what is actually going to happen, assuming sociopaths like you don't manage to convince people there's imaginary problem you've invented exists and get them to break social security. This isn't some debatable, optional thing. Social security is not part of the budget, it is not voted on each year, they do not 'decide' whether or not to pay it back.
Now, while all this is going on, the actual budget situation will get even worse off as it can no longer borrow from social security, and in fact has to pay off what it owes.
But it cannot not do that. To keep the money, to not pay it back like you imagine, requires passing a new law, a 'Destroy social security' law, which would be utterly impossible to pass.
'Herp derp. If you pass laws destroying social security there won't be any social security'. No shit, Sherlock. Now fuck off.
You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion.
Mathematical mistakes are not important. What is important is not actually talking about adding bananas to fix our damn apple shortage.
I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point.
So, essentially, what you want to do is repeal social security, but then pass a law adding back the social security taxes that people pay.
So, to put it another way, you want to raise taxes on the lowest income brackets under the guise of 'cutting entitlements'. That is either your plan, or you haven't thought this through at all, haven't actually sat down and thought about the actual words you are saying.
Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.
No, the Social Security administration says they will have more expenses than income at that point, and start using the money they've saved over the last half dozen decades. Social security actually will run out of money in about 2030.
And that has absolutely no bearing on anything, at all. The fact an self-funded program might run out of money means we need to fix it at some time, or do something about it, or even end it, but it UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES means we can somehow 'save money' by reducing it. That money, and actual government spending money that we can spend to pay down the debt, are not the same money.
You are attempting to save money by bitching about how much the neighbor's spend. The neighbors who are living within their means, and will be for several more decades, and oh, by the way, you're borrowing money, interest free, from to kept your incredibly unbalanced house in order.
Everyone who even mentions social security in the same breath as getting the budget under control should be utterly ignored in any discussion at all, because social security is not part of the fucking budget. This is constant FUCKING INSANE LIE that the media refuse to call people on.
It is utterly insane. It is not something that can be debated, it is not something that there are valid points of view on. We collect social security taxes independent of the budget, and spend social security money independent of the budget. Nothing it does can impact the budget, but the right wing and morons who believe them have conflated the hypothetical future social security budget problem with our actual real general budget problem, and managed to utterly dupe people like you into thinking those issues are related.
Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?
Maintenance costs don't include operating costs or any development costs, so that's not very relevant. Nor does it include training or manpower or the actual nuclear support system required to keep the bombers armed.
However, you are correct, I was thinking total operating costs (the aircraft development alone was $60 billion.) over the last decade, but put yearly because I halfway changed the comparison. We spend about $2 billion a year on those stupid things that we can't use.
$203 billion is closer to the amount that we spend each year on our wars.
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Keep spent fuel rods offsite, and have saner backup generator configurations.
Also, why is there not a giant extension cord that runs to a mile outside (Obviously not literally that, but you get my point.) that someone can drive up and plug a big generator into to run the pumps? What was this nonsense about running power cables in there? Hell, why couldn't the pumps run off the grid?
This is 2011. We should not have problems getting electrical power somewhere!
And note that in the US, we appear to have less battery backup time than the Japan did.
I want someone to sit down and actually define, step-by-step, what happens one of the nuke plants has to be shut down, and then what happens if part of that step fails, and then what happens if the next part fails, etc.
Because it really looks like, in Japan, no one bothered to actually do that. 'Plant shuts down, we use battery backups until we start the generators.' 'And if the generators are damaged.' 'Uh...we have no plan.'
And, meanwhile, despite all that, I think less than five people have died, and while a few hundred more might eventually get cancer, it's still much much much safer than coal.
My main goal is sufficient power to run the air conditioning during the day which is 50% of my power load 5 months a year when my power runs up to a little over 150 per month. (so hoped savings $385)
Buy a DC window air conditioner, stick it in a window hooked to a solar panel, and turn it to 'very cold', and leave it running all the time. (You probably want to do this in an unused room, and leave the door open.)
Trying to run an existing AC air conditioner partially off solar panels loses a lot of energy in conversion.
Mind you, the thing I'd really like to do is convert all of the lighting circuits in my house to DC. If I replaced all of my CFLs with LEDs and fed them directly from a couple of lead-acid batteries then a relatively small solar panel would cover the entire lighting system quite easily. It will probably take a couple of years for LEDs with a nice spectrum to drop in price to affordable levels though.
What I'd like to see is homes constructed this way, with a parallel DC electrical system for different parts. The lights would probably be the only 'exposed' part, but there could be a DC water heater and DC air conditioning right now.
Actually, instead of a DC water heater, what could be done is small 5 gallon water heater before the main one, that just runs solely off solar. If you currently had solar power, your main water heater will be getting hot water supplied to it, which obviously means it doesn't have to heat anything up itself, whereas if you didn't, your main heater would work fine.
Same thing can be done with AC and heat pumping. If you have extra solar power, and it's winter, you just have a solar powered heat pump running all the time, essentially storing solar energy as heat in the house. And same with AC in the summer. I'm sure we could all live with an extra few degrees of climate control, especially if we're one of those people who try to save energy with our climate control normally. That heat pump wouldn't even be the 'same' system as the other one, it would be something designed to run off erratic DC, doing whatever it can with whatever it gets. You just need to share a blower. (Or not even use the vent system, just dump it in the middle of the house.)
If we stop trying to convert solar power to 'normal' power, and instead use it lessen the load of a few specific things, we'd be much better off. The only time it should turn to AC is if we don't need it anymore and dump it on the grid.
Exactly.
If we can build hydro, we should, as it is easier to deal any problems, and a heck of a lot cheaper. And wind. And geothermal. But all those have limited locations they can go.
And then, until we actually invent solar power that can supply everything we need, it's nuclear. It's much safer.
We should be sticking solar panels on roofs and stuff, despite what that page says, though. People falling off roofs is a general problem, and is not much increased by people installing solar panels, and isn't increased at all by installing them on new houses, which obviously are going to have people on the roof regardless.
However, while we're nearing the point where they could mostly power a well-designed house they were on, we're still nowhere near enough to run industry from them, which is what everyone forgets when talking about 'solar power'.
That article is just retarded. Your eyes cannot converge or focus at distances past 30 feet. Actual depth perception only reached to 30 feet, anything beyond that is your brain making it up.
And if you have to focus at 10 feet, you're sitting too damn close to the movie screen.
The weirdest thing is the damn moon.
Our brain thinks nothing is further away than 'slightly beyond the treetops' when seeing things above us. Maybe 300 feet or so.
So we see the moon there, and our brain says it's basically size and distance of a two-story house at the end of a longish street, maybe. Or a football goalpost from the other end.
But the horizon...we actually know roughly how far that is. We can see trees there, and they are microscopic.
Put the moon there, behind those trees or mountains or buildings or whatever, and the moon is now huge.
This technology fools the eye into thinking that objects are close while the actual image is still distant.
That is an absurd complaint for 3D movies in the theater.
Why? Because we only use the convergence of our eyes and focal length of our pupils for distances less than 30 feet.
Looking at stuff beyond that, our focus is completely 'relaxed' and our eyes are parallel. We have no actual depth perception past that, we're just inventing it from the size of objects and their location on the ground.
This is one of the reasons people prefer to sit at the distance they do in a theater. Sitting closer is tiring for the eyes, not just because they can't see the whole screen at once, but because the eyes keep trying to focus past the screen, and then back to it.
And, no, the 3D effect can only make things further away from the screen, not closer. It can't trick your eyes into focusing 10 feet away or whatever. The whole 'popping out of the screen' is just because we mentally think of the screen as a window where the actual stuff in it is at a distance.
I see a page cache from grida.no, which is not the fucking UN. The UN is not in Norway. In fact, going to grida.no clearly says ' Established in 1989 by the Government of Norway as a Norwegian Foundation'. They just collaborate with the United Nations Environment Programme.
On that page, I literally see this text: 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis. It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.'
Yes, that does say 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'...in no context whatsoever.
So, in short, we've got something not produced by the UN, on a non-UN page, that says as some sort of image subtitle, 'Fifty million climate refugees by 2010.'
Yeah, boy, the 'UN' sure got that one wrong, didn't they?
Hilariously, if you follow the links, they talk about how the island that the 'UN' said would have problems now have more people on them, which is a) not actually disproving anything about people fleeing them, just that people are being born faster, and, BTW, you can be a climate refugee, have your house destroyed, and still being the county, duh, and b) appear to have a total of one or two million people, so it would seem rather insane for anyone to predict that 50 million people would leave them.
Except that SFTP doesn't 'use a tunnel' at all.
Or just run sftp from your ftp server, instead of your ssh server.
Proftpd, for example, can do sftp, using exactly the same users and paths you set up for the FTP part of it. (Which you can, if you wish, turn off.) I suspect other ftp servers can do the same.
And you don't need another IP...what you do is you put file transfer on port 22, and then you move normal ssh to another IP.
If you're using virtual FTP users, like I use of the form user@example.com for FTP access which si used for websites, this is better for security anyway. Morons with dictionary attacks won't even come close.
Everyone who has actual ssh access will need to use port 122 or wherever you moved ssh to, but anyone who is granted command access to the server should know how to change the port in their client! And people who just have file copy access just click 'SFTP' and it works.
I'm not saying it's easier than WebDAV, just that using your existing ssh setup for sftp is not the best plan. Use your existing ftp setup instead.
I find your assertation that HTTP servers have to maintain more state and are heavier than scp servers insane.
Do you actually know how either of those protocols work? HTTP servers don't maintain ANY state, at all. The protocol is literally: Open a TCP connection, send a single line with a file path, send a newline, get some headers, a newline, and the file. That's it. A full featured HTTP server can be implemented with a 15 line shell script run from inetd.
It is much lighter weight than scp could ever dream of, mainly because it doesn't have to negotiate an encrypted connection. Of course, you can negoiate an encrypted connection...and HTTP is still more lightweight because scp keeps track of directories as it copies, so, strictly speaking, it is 'heavier' and keeps more 'state'. (Although supporting recursive copy from the server, instead of requiring the clients to request, is obviously a useful feature. But if we get into 'useful features' HTTP comes out ahead, so you argued exactly the opposite.)
You think all HTTP servers are like apache, but perhaps you should learn that that the most common implimentation of a protocol is not always the most lightweight. In fact, it's almost never the most lightweight.
There is also the environmental cost of the physical store. There is the land cleared for the store front.
'Land cleared' is not 'pollution'.
The electricity for the lights, cash registrars, office equipment.
Because the ereader system is magical. It's not like they're running servers somewhere, or using cell phone towers and wiring which take electricity.
There is the light and noise pollution.
While that is annoying, it not actual pollution.
There is the environmental cost of the employees who work there. They eat stuff, use the restroom, breath out CO2, and create trash.
Right, we should do the alternative: Put the workers to death.
Because they're going to do those things no matter where they work.
they save environment and everything
Uh, no, you have that backwards.
Growing trees and cutting them down and printing books from them removes CO2 from the air. And I will point out that every book printed is using using waste wood from lumber operations, and/or trees specifically grown to to make paper from. No one's wandering around forests cutting down existing trees for paper. Worrying about 'cutting down trees' is like worrying about 'cutting down corn'...I don't think we're going to run out of corn.
Granted, shipping books puts a tiny amount of CO2 back in, but I assure you it's a net loss of CO2. Unless you run around burning the books when finished with them, or putting them in compost heaps, every book on a shelf is a net environmental win.
Ereaders save on shipping, a little, although it's worth pointing out that ereaders are almost all shipped from overseas, whereas books tend to be printed in the same country as they're sold. So ereaders have 'a month on a container ship from China' added to shipping.
And ereaders require petroleum product, and metals, and all sorts of toxic processes and stuff. Books just get bleached a little, but they've been reducing the level of toxins by that for the last few decades to almost nothing, and being printed in first world countries instead of assembled in China limits the amount of damage they can do.
Specifically, interior walls aren't insulated anywhere that the airspace is connected. If you have an air vent in one room, and an air intake in another, I promise those rooms aren't insulated from each other, that would be stupid.
The only 'interior' walls that are insulated are between two 'different' places, like the wall between the house and a garage, or the wall between two condos. Those are really 'exterior' walls that happen to be inside.
And any walls that started out as exterior but are now inside have insulation in them by accident, obviously.
...you guys know that all you had to do was log out of your EA account inside Dragon Age and you could play, right?
I managed to figure that out without even looking online.
The real problem was people attempting to install, as I believe they couldn't activate their copy.
But I started Dragon Age, tried to load a game, got a message about DLC's not being activated on my account, so I, duh, just logged out, and hey, tada, I could load my game. (Yes, with all the content.)
You got lucky, if you'd bought it on Saturday you'd have spent four days going "Why the fuck did I just waste $39 on this piece of shit?"
Strangely, I was affected by that error. All it did was mean I couldn't be logged into my EA account within the Dragon Age while playing the game, because it said my DLCs were invalid. So I had to log out in Dragon Age, which doesn't really do anything except not record achievements and stuff until I logged back in, at which point it updated.
A trivial issue, so trivial I hadn't even looked into it. In fact, I wasn't even aware it was fixed yet until you posted, but I just tested and it's working fine now.
Perhaps it was different if people hadn't already installed it yet.
Hang on? You bought a game you don't like because it was only $10? Hmm. Give me a minute, I need to go write some really bad $10 games...
Um, no, like I said, I bought a game that was 'eh' because it was only $10. Do you not know what 'eh' means? It means 'so-so' or 'not that impressive'.
Yes, I will spend $10 for 60 hours of moderate entertainment. It's a hell of a better deal than a movie ticket, which is $10 for 2 hours of, usually, just moderate entertainment.
I still 'steal' TV shows, simply because I don't want to stream them.
I'm not getting out of bed between each TV show, somehow navigating using my shitty TV to the page in Hulu, and watching them in their idiotic interface with absurd pauses and crappy quality.
So I'm basically the same as you. I pirate because of convenience. Give me a damn place to buy movies or DVD seasons of TV shows, let me download shows for free with commercials like people can watch over the air, and I wouldn't pirate anything. They can even have DRM, as long as it plays in XMBC still.
They don't do that, so fuck them. Maybe they could just give out a file with a thirty second car commercial and I could promise to watch that every time I downloaded TV instead of watched on Hulu.
And it's the same with Steam. Hey, look, I can buy a game without driving fifty miles, or waiting for UPS to show up. So, guess what? I do buy them. Wow, deep.
And, hell, what actually made me stop pirating is that game store 50 miles away, which didn't exist 6 years ago. Now I could actually find games, instead of downloading, wow. But I buy even more now.
Also, buy Usenet Explorer. It's well worth it.
How does the developer determine whether the customer's version of the product (a mod, no less) is legitimate or pirated?
The only way to buy it via Steam, and hence it just checks Steam.
2. Is this method a 100% foolproof way to detect a pirated copy?
Currently, but I'm sure someone will crack it.
3. Could a false positive ever be detected, flagging a legitimate customer as a pirate?
You already have to be correctly logged into Steam to run whatever copy of the Source engine (Usually Half-Life) in the first place, so you'd have to postulate a fairly weird situation where you could somehow launch Half-Life correctly, and then Half-Life 'forgot' who you were when it tried to launch the mod.
Basically, folks, this isn't some 'copy detection'. There was no copy detection, the code to detect a pirated copy is the mod just asking Steam if it's legal. That's it.
And if Steam doesn't think your Steam games are legal, then you've got bigger problems than this mod.
Could a cracked game executable, modified content files, or lack of Internet connection ever flag a user as a pirate?
A cracked game executable almost certainly will, but despite the justification about 'bad disks' you're about to talk about, this is Steam. There are no disks.
By banning every single person who complains of this from his forums, he may be inadvertently banning users with legitimate problems.
Erm, you said that strangely. The users do have a legitimate problem...the game doesn't work! However, those uers are pirates, and he doesn't give a flying fuck if the game doesn't work for them.
What you mean is 'he may be inadvertently banning legitimate users'. Which he's not, because there is a Steam ID listed in the error, and he checks to make sure that Steam ID hasn't bought the game before banning them.
He's run across three people who got the error despite having a legit purchase, which he managed to fix by having them restart Steam and the game. They were in some weird buggy mode that would have run into some other error eventually...having an error popup because Steam is being weird is probably a good thing, and much easier to diagnose than waiting for things to go weird. (He should probably have that solution suggested in the fake error message if people are going to get it.)
If Steam failed, then the game wouldn't run at all, which has nothing at all to do with what Gary's mod did.
If Steam doesn't know you own a game, you're pretty fucked to start with. The situation you've invented in your head doesn't happen. Either the games work, or you're not logged into your account, or all of Steam is broken.
However, this was a mod to the Source engine, not a game, and hence it was actually possible to copy the files into place if you legitimately owned some other Source game. (All of which require Steam.)
This mod just checked the Steam API to see if you owned that mod, and instead of crashing out with a piracy message, decided to crash with a nonsensical message instead.
And, as I said, if the Steam API isn't working, then Half-Life, or whatever game, is broken to start with.
Basically, this isn't any 'added' DRM. This is using the existing DRM system, which you already have to be authorized in (to run whatever game you have Gary's mod installed in) in the first place.
Yes, I've pirated stuff that I wasn't sure how much I was willing to pay for it. Some stuff I was willing to pay that price, and I bought it and some stuff, no, not really, and I uninstalled it. (Although them I sometimes buy it later if the price drops.)
There are 'legit' reasons to pirate, and it's somewhat understandable to a certain level, but people need to ask themselves a question: Are you ever planning on buy any of your games? Do you actually own, say, 80% of the games you have installed? Are you really just 'testing' things, or getting things you really and honestly can't afford? (1)
Or do you download software, install it, play it, archive it, install it later, get hours of enjoyment from it, and never buy a damn thing, ever? Have you ever pirated a ten dollar game? If all pirated software was to vanish, what would you have left? Anything?
There are different levels of lawbreaking. There are people who make lawbreaking a career, who always break the law, and then there are people who sometimes break the law to save some money, but generally follow it. Which are you, people who defend 'some' piracy, and what sort of behavior are you defending?
1)I've been tempted to pirate Sims 3, because the goddamn thing is like $160 with the expansions. Seriously, I can't afford that, no one can. Who the hell is buying that game? I guess I'm supposed to buy it in pieces, but that's annoying enough even when the pieces are separate, with the Sims, you really have to start over with new families for each expansion, because there's extra stuff you want to do.
And I don't know why anyone 'deserves' having them at release, either. If you don't have a lot of money, buy them a year later.
I just bought Dragon Age 1, and, guess what? It still plays fine, and it came with the expansion and all the DLCs for $39.
Heck, while I was there, I bought KOTOR1 for $10, a game that I had pirated years ago to see if I liked it, and I was 'eh', so I decided not to buy it. But $10...look, if you can't afford that, you probably shouldn't be in the hobby of playing new games. Get an old copy of NWN2 and play free modules for it.
Any system where they can and do (even if it's only one person, that's one person too many) ban people (stealing their entire libraries from them) for a forum post is unacceptable.
Steam didn't do that, you idjit. Bioware did that. Or EA, depending on who you ask.
Steam didn't have anything to do with it.
Then I guess all the "secret war spending" shouldn't be mentioned either since it's not officially "part of the the budget."
All war spending is from general revenue, hence increases the general revenue deficit.
You're debating semantics -- a tax is a tax and an expense is an expense.
I didn't say social security wasn't a tax and an expense. I said the tax and the expense are separate from everything else, and hence no money created by altering those can help the general revenue deficit.
Just because they divide it up into separate taxes of a damned government form doesn't somehow make it "not part of the budget".
But it does mean it can't be used to help the general revenue budget deficit.
Look at the White House's own web page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget) and you'll see gigantic pictoral blocks clearly showing Social Security and Medicare as part of the budget.
I'll see a lot of fucking stupid shit if I go with how the White House frames things.
So stop lying to yourself -- if I, average joe tax payer, am paying X dollars in income tax and Y dollars in social security/medicare taxes, the government could _very easily_ raise my income tax by Y dollars, eliminate my social security/medicare taxes, eliminate both programs, and use the dollars for something else.
The government could do a lot of things. And if it did those things, we could talk about them.
However, what you describe is not called 'reducing Social Security spending'. 'Reducing Social Security spending' will not reduce the deficit.
What you just described is called 'Reducing Social Security spending, reducing the collection of Social Security taxes, and inventing a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit'.
And you'll notice the thing that reduces the deficit, aka, ' inventing a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit' is completely unconnected to social security in any way, and could happen regardless of the first thing two things. We could 'Order pizza, watch a movie, and invent a new tax and using that to to reduce the deficit', and we'd end up in the exact same place, deficit-wise.
Hell, we could increase social security spending, increase social security taxes, and invent a new tax and use that to reduce the deficit.
Because social security, and income tax, are both (very different) taxes on income, you think your comment makes more sense than proposing to order a pizza. It does not. If you want to propose higher taxes on income to reduce the deficit, I'm with you. Do not pretend that has the slightest thing to do with social security.
. Obviously if you do something to social security, or just order a pizza and watch a movie, and also raise income taxes at the same time, the deficit will be altered, but I'm pretty certain you're the one trying to argue semantics there, very poorly. I said X wouldn't result in Z, and you find a Y that does result in Z and propose doing it at the same time as X, doesn't suddenly make X now result in Z. It doesn't matter that X sorta kinda looks like Y in your head, they're not the same thing.
I repeat: Nothing anyone does to social security can even slightly alter the deficit
It's a sorta like the same way that you might think you have money in the bank, but in reality the only way you're getting back money you put in the bank is if the bank robs liquor stores.
Or something like that. It's perfectly ethical to argue that the government should steal the money it borrowed from social security, with no justification at all. Because the people making the arguments are sociopaths, and having a responsible part of the government that pays for itself is just silly. Poor people paid into and now want the money back, means that there's hey, poor people have some money, how can we take it from them?
Goddamn. Fucking. Sociopaths.
In reality, the only way social security benefits are going to be paid out over the next 30 years is with either vastly higher taxes, huge cuts to other spending in the government, or limitations placed on what social security benefits are payed.
No, in reality, the way social security benefits are going to be paid out over the next 20 years is they will just be paid out. After that, or hopefully earlier, there will need to be a slightly change in social security tax, easily done by removing the income cap.
That is what is actually going to happen, assuming sociopaths like you don't manage to convince people there's imaginary problem you've invented exists and get them to break social security. This isn't some debatable, optional thing. Social security is not part of the budget, it is not voted on each year, they do not 'decide' whether or not to pay it back.
Now, while all this is going on, the actual budget situation will get even worse off as it can no longer borrow from social security, and in fact has to pay off what it owes.
But it cannot not do that. To keep the money, to not pay it back like you imagine, requires passing a new law, a 'Destroy social security' law, which would be utterly impossible to pass.
'Herp derp. If you pass laws destroying social security there won't be any social security'. No shit, Sherlock. Now fuck off.
You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion.
Mathematical mistakes are not important. What is important is not actually talking about adding bananas to fix our damn apple shortage.
I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point.
So, essentially, what you want to do is repeal social security, but then pass a law adding back the social security taxes that people pay.
So, to put it another way, you want to raise taxes on the lowest income brackets under the guise of 'cutting entitlements'. That is either your plan, or you haven't thought this through at all, haven't actually sat down and thought about the actual words you are saying.
Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.
No, the Social Security administration says they will have more expenses than income at that point, and start using the money they've saved over the last half dozen decades. Social security actually will run out of money in about 2030.
And that has absolutely no bearing on anything, at all. The fact an self-funded program might run out of money means we need to fix it at some time, or do something about it, or even end it, but it UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES means we can somehow 'save money' by reducing it. That money, and actual government spending money that we can spend to pay down the debt, are not the same money.
You are attempting to save money by bitching about how much the neighbor's spend. The neighbors who are living within their means, and will be for several more decades, and oh, by the way, you're borrowing money, interest free, from to kept your incredibly unbalanced house in order.
Everyone who even mentions social security in the same breath as getting the budget under control should be utterly ignored in any discussion at all, because social security is not part of the fucking budget. This is constant FUCKING INSANE LIE that the media refuse to call people on.
It is utterly insane. It is not something that can be debated, it is not something that there are valid points of view on. We collect social security taxes independent of the budget, and spend social security money independent of the budget. Nothing it does can impact the budget, but the right wing and morons who believe them have conflated the hypothetical future social security budget problem with our actual real general budget problem, and managed to utterly dupe people like you into thinking those issues are related.
Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?
Maintenance costs don't include operating costs or any development costs, so that's not very relevant. Nor does it include training or manpower or the actual nuclear support system required to keep the bombers armed.
However, you are correct, I was thinking total operating costs (the aircraft development alone was $60 billion.) over the last decade, but put yearly because I halfway changed the comparison. We spend about $2 billion a year on those stupid things that we can't use.
$203 billion is closer to the amount that we spend each year on our wars.