Who wants an automobile analogy? The relevance is terrible; the few points of similarity can rarely get you through a sustained argument or carry your point across. You have to prop it up with "humour" constantly, instead of simply letting the conclusions wander around the empty pastures of people's minds.
No, there's simply no future in the automobile analogy, once Slashdot tries them out and finds how limiting they really are.
It's worth noting that the NATO intervention was at the UN's request, in response to specific UNSC resolutions, not because NATO felt the UN would do nothing. But of course it's also true that the UN peacekeepers obviously should have done something. As Kofi Annan said, "We made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence which, however admirable, was unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia."
I won't pretend to argue that the UN is perfect; my point was more that the US public's perception of them switched from "cautious" to "useless" around that time, which was and is untrue despite their occasional failures. Rather, as Annan said, the UN prefers to err on the side of caution rather than charging in, guns blazing. This is not always the most effective approach, but I still strongly feel it is better to be late in stopping a massacre than to cause one yourself.
For an analogy, which would you rather see - a police force that failed to prevent some crimes due to following procedure, or a mob of vigilantes that occasionally killed far more innocents than guilty?
Inevitable doom isn't the problem; doubtless ecosystems will adapt eventually. Until then, crop failures, population displacement, extreme weather, extinctions and ecosystem disruption on a global scale over the next 50-100+ years are to be expected. What if those trillions in adaptation costs could be reduced or avoided?
And is that opinion based on a fair & accurate assessment of the UN's policies and methods, or is it based on what you've heard through the corporate run media outlets (and the opinions of those who read them)? Are you perchance from the US?
There was a very clear (to many non-US observers at least) rise of anti-UN sentiment in the US, which peaked around that time - a marked change from the decades of generally pro-UN feeling from one of its most important founding members. And it was a very clear sentiment - the UN was seen to be ineffective, dragging its heels, even obstructing what needed to be done.
But the fact is, Hans Blix was right, the UN Weapons Inspection Team was right, and the US-led "Coalition of the Willing" (which, I'm sad to say, my country was also a member of) was wrong. As a result, we saw an illegal, unprovoked invasion that ultimately resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of combatants, and over a hundred thousand collateral civilian deaths.
Point being, there are choices - lots of them. All choices have downsides and upsides, and you have to weigh which is best for you, but the more choices there are, the closer you can get to your ideal situation. Android happens to offer more choices than many, but not using it is also a possible choice.
You still have a choice in phones and their operating systems, yes? What 'shoving' is taking place, exactly? Where is the 'evil' in offering another platform option?
You don't like Android's "free + ads", go try iOS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Mobile etc. Maybe try a less-restrictive app store, or (heaven forbid) just sideload an ad-blocker. Android still offers you those choices too.
The crucial point here is that the car itself told Broder it had only half the needed range to get to the next station (32mi range to travel 61 miles), yet he ceased charging and drove off anyway. This is after nearly running out (again due to undercharging) on the previous leg, so I can't imagine why he felt the car would make it when the stated range was even lower.
That said, the graphs Musk published clearly show the car was over-reporting its expected range by around 20%. If Broder was on the ball, logging his own trip, he might have noticed this and compensated. But not only did he apparently fail to charge at least 20% over, he charged 50% under the needed range, despite nearly running out the day before. The guy is either utterly incompetent at planning a trip (rather a deficiency in a motoring journalist), or he knew full well it would not make it. It's no surprise Musk said he "worked very hard to force our car to stop running".
Whenever I buy duty-free alcohol, I tell them my flight, and they deliver it right to the plane's door. I pick it up when I board the aircraft itself, and thus security checkpoints etc are completely bypassed. Airlines will not allow any old bottles on board, but DO let you bring bottles that are sealed in a duty-free bag with receipt and delivered to the gate, as they come from a trusted source.
You're assuming it's a scam that nobody else seems to know about, but isn't it more likely you just did something wrong?
I agree that nuclear waste is far more controlled than most waste streams (there might be some toxic industries that come close). Nonetheless, my point was that this level of control rarely lasts long enough - particularly in the case of long-lived radioactive waste. People get lax; accidents happen.
Pretty hard line to take on a guy who was a) a kid, b) merely curious, not malicious, c) did no damage, and d) did them (and their customers) a favour by alerting them to a security hole that could be maliciously exploited by the next hacker to drop by.
Some companies (e.g. Epic) actually appreciated the heads-up, and sent him a signed poster in thanks. Your position that he be punished instead, while defensible under a strict interpretation of the law, looks more like a dick move to me. I'd expect a judge would be rather more nuanced.
Your argument is that his actions opened their systems wider, than if he hadn't done anything? Is there any evidence of that being the case here?
If that's not the case, then he still did them a favour by pointing out a hole in their security. Sure there may be others, but now they know about this one. The responsible action would be to close the hole (and thank him), but they could always ignore it and do nothing; they'd be no worse off.
I absolutely understand your point about their attitudes back then. Nonetheless, the war ended some time back, and since then nobody wants to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess. They detected significant uranium, tritium and strontium-90 in the local water 25 years ago, and still nobody's been prepared to clean up the hundreds of square miles of disposal locations.
For all the advantages of nuclear power, *this* is the problem that environmental groups have with it. We know we can make power plants pretty safe, and we can even store the waste pretty safely - if we want to go to the trouble, and if we want to keep checking on the plants, fixing storage leaks, maintaining enough funding etc etc, regardless of what party is in power or how well the economy is doing, for many many decades and even centuries. This is long term stuff.
It's simply human nature to not want to keep dealing with an ongoing problem (applies to any toxic facility). A few decades go by, there's no obvious problems, and vigilance (and funding) wane. We've seen this over and over, when facilities get old enough. And when the inevitable problems do show up, the safety procedures are no longer what they once were. Will they still be enough, or will the locals get hit with a dangerous release? Will that be slightly above background, or will it reach disaster levels? That is where the real risks are, and our track record is not encouraging.
Your front door lock is broken, but you didn't realise it. A passer-by tells you that is broken. Do you blame him for the "damage" to your wallet that comes from fixing it?
Or how about this: You're understandably unhappy that he pushed your door open and poked his head in. He claims he didn't take anything (and given how he volunteered the information about your door, there's no reason to disbelieve him), but are you angry at him that you now feel the need to double-check everything you own, just in case he (or someone else) took something?
LoS only applies to energy weapons, but we know the Rebels have proton torpedos. I'm sure they've invented homing technology too. OK, you could fly an invasion down outside LoS range, but you'd have to enter atmosphere from hundreds of kilometers away (given an earth-like radius), and fly no closer than 30km or so. Those AT-ATs were not exactly fast-moving - 10km/hr tops, so it'd take a few hours to advance.
Self-guided kinetic weapons are easy too, and crowbars/poles with steerable fins don't destabilise easily, but you're right that smaller ones could likely be shot out of the sky. Larger things like asteroids were handy (there was a whole belt of them only minutes away from the star destroyers), and tractor beams exist - I'd find it hard to believe they couldn't toss a couple of those at the base without too much trouble. Heck, a few unmanned TIE fighters set to autopilot would probably do the trick - still better than a slow and risky ground assault. The base wasn't exactly hardened - it was carved out of ice, and kept dropping chunks from the roof at the slightest vibration - and the crucial power generators were completely exposed (!)
But instead of an orbital attack, long-range energy blasts from under the planetary shield, a squadron of atmosphere-capable fighters doing a bombing run, or even a cruise missile, the Empire chose to use their absolute-slowest ground-attack vehicles, thus giving the Rebels plenty of time to escape - even the ones with engine trouble. Anyone would think the Empire was deliberately letting them get away (again)...
Had a similar problem; couldn't figure out why I kept getting surprising compiler errors in some of my perfectly legal loops. Even more surprisingly, I got similar errors in some basic expressions, despite identical expressions using different variables compiling just fine.
Surprise was no longer adequate, and I had to resort to astonishment when I found a colleague had #defined the letter "r" to a constant.
I think the Empire State Building is an excellent example of how you can dramatically reduce insulation & efficiency improvement costs by simply doing them at the right time - alongside a building refit.
Insulating etc without waiting might still be worth it, though payoff would certainly be longer. Would depend on the building no doubt. But in other cases, a building refit is an excellent opportunity to insulate and redesign to avoid future energy costs.
Your link suggested heating & cooling accounted for 43% of residential and 24% of commercial energy use; I wouldn't call that a "very small fraction".
But I agree, there's no hope of getting energy consumption down by anything close to 90%. Insulation certainly helps, but not nearly that much. Demand will increase for a long time yet, I expect. However, emissions depend on generation methods, as well as consumption. Carbon-neutral generation is a separate question, but can potentially reduce emissions to virtually zero (if we got off fossil fuels altogether).
True, this is the easiest stuff, but still well & truly worth doing. And with redesigning of the interior spaces and more thorough refits, you can bring this up to 70-80%.
Obviously NYC isn't going to be rebuilt overnight, but most buildings need a thorough refit every few decades, so by 2050 the large majority could be done. If you redesign the interior with energy efficiency in mind, and do it during a normal, scheduled refit, the incremental cost is kept low but the savings can be huge.
Just to be clear - the full refit cost a lot, but the incremental added cost of improving energy efficiency had a three-year payoff. Timing the efficiency upgrades to be done in conjunction with necessary building refits can save a lot of money.
Nice diagram, though it's 39 quadrillion BTUs, not 39%. Still, 40% of $280B total electricity cost would be $39B annually; a pretty significant savings. But it's more than that, because thermal efficiencies result in a lot of savings from gas & oil heating too.
But it's unrelated to the issue of fossil fuels. Efficiency gains reduce and delay the impact of CO2 emissions, but transitioning our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels will still have to happen sooner or later, even if only to maintain supply.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you dig up that link? It's comedy gold! Successfully nailed every denialist cliche I could think of.
I'm gonna have to add this "Nongovernmental Planel (sic) on Climate Change" to my Humour feed for my morning chuckle.
Who wants an automobile analogy? The relevance is terrible; the few points of similarity can rarely get you through a sustained argument or carry your point across. You have to prop it up with "humour" constantly, instead of simply letting the conclusions wander around the empty pastures of people's minds.
No, there's simply no future in the automobile analogy, once Slashdot tries them out and finds how limiting they really are.
Obligatory analogy: the difference between a contract with your signature on it, and a contract with your DNA on it.
Biometrics are not authentication in themselves, but can still be useful as the identity component of two- or three-factor authentication.
It's worth noting that the NATO intervention was at the UN's request, in response to specific UNSC resolutions, not because NATO felt the UN would do nothing. But of course it's also true that the UN peacekeepers obviously should have done something. As Kofi Annan said, "We made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence which, however admirable, was unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia."
I won't pretend to argue that the UN is perfect; my point was more that the US public's perception of them switched from "cautious" to "useless" around that time, which was and is untrue despite their occasional failures. Rather, as Annan said, the UN prefers to err on the side of caution rather than charging in, guns blazing. This is not always the most effective approach, but I still strongly feel it is better to be late in stopping a massacre than to cause one yourself.
For an analogy, which would you rather see - a police force that failed to prevent some crimes due to following procedure, or a mob of vigilantes that occasionally killed far more innocents than guilty?
Inevitable doom isn't the problem; doubtless ecosystems will adapt eventually. Until then, crop failures, population displacement, extreme weather, extinctions and ecosystem disruption on a global scale over the next 50-100+ years are to be expected. What if those trillions in adaptation costs could be reduced or avoided?
And is that opinion based on a fair & accurate assessment of the UN's policies and methods, or is it based on what you've heard through the corporate run media outlets (and the opinions of those who read them)? Are you perchance from the US?
There was a very clear (to many non-US observers at least) rise of anti-UN sentiment in the US, which peaked around that time - a marked change from the decades of generally pro-UN feeling from one of its most important founding members. And it was a very clear sentiment - the UN was seen to be ineffective, dragging its heels, even obstructing what needed to be done.
But the fact is, Hans Blix was right, the UN Weapons Inspection Team was right, and the US-led "Coalition of the Willing" (which, I'm sad to say, my country was also a member of) was wrong. As a result, we saw an illegal, unprovoked invasion that ultimately resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of combatants, and over a hundred thousand collateral civilian deaths.
Why bother hiring expensive celebrity astroturfers when your hacker sweatshop can get the same result for 1/20th the cost?
You get the occasional 'Need to post this by 8:20' slips, but hey, you get what you pay for.
Then sideload. It's pretty damn easy.
Point being, there are choices - lots of them. All choices have downsides and upsides, and you have to weigh which is best for you, but the more choices there are, the closer you can get to your ideal situation. Android happens to offer more choices than many, but not using it is also a possible choice.
You still have a choice in phones and their operating systems, yes? What 'shoving' is taking place, exactly? Where is the 'evil' in offering another platform option?
You don't like Android's "free + ads", go try iOS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Mobile etc. Maybe try a less-restrictive app store, or (heaven forbid) just sideload an ad-blocker. Android still offers you those choices too.
The crucial point here is that the car itself told Broder it had only half the needed range to get to the next station (32mi range to travel 61 miles), yet he ceased charging and drove off anyway. This is after nearly running out (again due to undercharging) on the previous leg, so I can't imagine why he felt the car would make it when the stated range was even lower.
That said, the graphs Musk published clearly show the car was over-reporting its expected range by around 20%. If Broder was on the ball, logging his own trip, he might have noticed this and compensated. But not only did he apparently fail to charge at least 20% over, he charged 50% under the needed range, despite nearly running out the day before. The guy is either utterly incompetent at planning a trip (rather a deficiency in a motoring journalist), or he knew full well it would not make it. It's no surprise Musk said he "worked very hard to force our car to stop running".
Whenever I buy duty-free alcohol, I tell them my flight, and they deliver it right to the plane's door. I pick it up when I board the aircraft itself, and thus security checkpoints etc are completely bypassed. Airlines will not allow any old bottles on board, but DO let you bring bottles that are sealed in a duty-free bag with receipt and delivered to the gate, as they come from a trusted source.
You're assuming it's a scam that nobody else seems to know about, but isn't it more likely you just did something wrong?
Not only is it a flammable liquid, but it takes a single second to turn the empty bottle into a deadly edged weapon.
They took a tiny pair of pliers that I'd forgotten about, but they're still fine with me bringing the vodka.
I agree that nuclear waste is far more controlled than most waste streams (there might be some toxic industries that come close). Nonetheless, my point was that this level of control rarely lasts long enough - particularly in the case of long-lived radioactive waste. People get lax; accidents happen.
Pretty hard line to take on a guy who was a) a kid, b) merely curious, not malicious, c) did no damage, and d) did them (and their customers) a favour by alerting them to a security hole that could be maliciously exploited by the next hacker to drop by.
Some companies (e.g. Epic) actually appreciated the heads-up, and sent him a signed poster in thanks. Your position that he be punished instead, while defensible under a strict interpretation of the law, looks more like a dick move to me. I'd expect a judge would be rather more nuanced.
Your argument is that his actions opened their systems wider, than if he hadn't done anything? Is there any evidence of that being the case here?
If that's not the case, then he still did them a favour by pointing out a hole in their security. Sure there may be others, but now they know about this one. The responsible action would be to close the hole (and thank him), but they could always ignore it and do nothing; they'd be no worse off.
I absolutely understand your point about their attitudes back then. Nonetheless, the war ended some time back, and since then nobody wants to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess. They detected significant uranium, tritium and strontium-90 in the local water 25 years ago, and still nobody's been prepared to clean up the hundreds of square miles of disposal locations.
For all the advantages of nuclear power, *this* is the problem that environmental groups have with it. We know we can make power plants pretty safe, and we can even store the waste pretty safely - if we want to go to the trouble, and if we want to keep checking on the plants, fixing storage leaks, maintaining enough funding etc etc, regardless of what party is in power or how well the economy is doing, for many many decades and even centuries. This is long term stuff.
It's simply human nature to not want to keep dealing with an ongoing problem (applies to any toxic facility). A few decades go by, there's no obvious problems, and vigilance (and funding) wane. We've seen this over and over, when facilities get old enough. And when the inevitable problems do show up, the safety procedures are no longer what they once were. Will they still be enough, or will the locals get hit with a dangerous release? Will that be slightly above background, or will it reach disaster levels? That is where the real risks are, and our track record is not encouraging.
Your front door lock is broken, but you didn't realise it. A passer-by tells you that is broken. Do you blame him for the "damage" to your wallet that comes from fixing it?
Or how about this: You're understandably unhappy that he pushed your door open and poked his head in. He claims he didn't take anything (and given how he volunteered the information about your door, there's no reason to disbelieve him), but are you angry at him that you now feel the need to double-check everything you own, just in case he (or someone else) took something?
LoS only applies to energy weapons, but we know the Rebels have proton torpedos. I'm sure they've invented homing technology too. OK, you could fly an invasion down outside LoS range, but you'd have to enter atmosphere from hundreds of kilometers away (given an earth-like radius), and fly no closer than 30km or so. Those AT-ATs were not exactly fast-moving - 10km/hr tops, so it'd take a few hours to advance.
Self-guided kinetic weapons are easy too, and crowbars/poles with steerable fins don't destabilise easily, but you're right that smaller ones could likely be shot out of the sky. Larger things like asteroids were handy (there was a whole belt of them only minutes away from the star destroyers), and tractor beams exist - I'd find it hard to believe they couldn't toss a couple of those at the base without too much trouble. Heck, a few unmanned TIE fighters set to autopilot would probably do the trick - still better than a slow and risky ground assault. The base wasn't exactly hardened - it was carved out of ice, and kept dropping chunks from the roof at the slightest vibration - and the crucial power generators were completely exposed (!)
But instead of an orbital attack, long-range energy blasts from under the planetary shield, a squadron of atmosphere-capable fighters doing a bombing run, or even a cruise missile, the Empire chose to use their absolute-slowest ground-attack vehicles, thus giving the Rebels plenty of time to escape - even the ones with engine trouble. Anyone would think the Empire was deliberately letting them get away (again)...
Had a similar problem; couldn't figure out why I kept getting surprising compiler errors in some of my perfectly legal loops. Even more surprisingly, I got similar errors in some basic expressions, despite identical expressions using different variables compiling just fine.
Surprise was no longer adequate, and I had to resort to astonishment when I found a colleague had #defined the letter "r" to a constant.
I think the Empire State Building is an excellent example of how you can dramatically reduce insulation & efficiency improvement costs by simply doing them at the right time - alongside a building refit.
Insulating etc without waiting might still be worth it, though payoff would certainly be longer. Would depend on the building no doubt. But in other cases, a building refit is an excellent opportunity to insulate and redesign to avoid future energy costs.
Here you go. Sad, but way over-politicised, unfortunately.
Your link suggested heating & cooling accounted for 43% of residential and 24% of commercial energy use; I wouldn't call that a "very small fraction".
But I agree, there's no hope of getting energy consumption down by anything close to 90%. Insulation certainly helps, but not nearly that much. Demand will increase for a long time yet, I expect. However, emissions depend on generation methods, as well as consumption. Carbon-neutral generation is a separate question, but can potentially reduce emissions to virtually zero (if we got off fossil fuels altogether).
True, this is the easiest stuff, but still well & truly worth doing. And with redesigning of the interior spaces and more thorough refits, you can bring this up to 70-80%.
Obviously NYC isn't going to be rebuilt overnight, but most buildings need a thorough refit every few decades, so by 2050 the large majority could be done. If you redesign the interior with energy efficiency in mind, and do it during a normal, scheduled refit, the incremental cost is kept low but the savings can be huge.
Just to be clear - the full refit cost a lot, but the incremental added cost of improving energy efficiency had a three-year payoff. Timing the efficiency upgrades to be done in conjunction with necessary building refits can save a lot of money.
Nice diagram, though it's 39 quadrillion BTUs, not 39%. Still, 40% of $280B total electricity cost would be $39B annually; a pretty significant savings. But it's more than that, because thermal efficiencies result in a lot of savings from gas & oil heating too.
But it's unrelated to the issue of fossil fuels. Efficiency gains reduce and delay the impact of CO2 emissions, but transitioning our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels will still have to happen sooner or later, even if only to maintain supply.