Commenting to remove moderation. Meant to mod this insightful, accidentally clicked redundant.
This is a good point that people often miss. When you implement a policy like the one described, it may make some thing more expensive, but it may also make some other things possible that were not before.
Actually a decrease in the money supply would both cause an increase in secondary lending rates (because money is more scarce and therefore more burdensome to loan) and also in a fractional reserve system like the one you are complaining about could be caused by an increase in the federal funds rate as opposed to a decrease like you claimed. But don't let your complete lack of knowledge regarding monetary policy stop you from opining on something you know nothing about.
For those who actually care, if the central bank decreased interest rates as the parent post suggested, more people would borrow more money and therefore lead to more money creation, not less.
Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.
In addition to this you could do regenerative breaking on these same stretches of tracks to feed power back into the grid when slowing down. Many locomotives already use electrical generators in the wheels (basically just using the motors as generators) as this avoids wear on the wheels and brakes by avoiding the older mechanical brakes. However on long down grades they still have to use the mechanical brakes since they have no way to get rid of the excess energy; the electrical generator brakes just heat up an onboard tank of water which can only take so much heating before they have to fall back to the mechanical brakes.
So basically all of the things you need to do a hybrid system like this are already onboard a modern locomotive, the only thing missing is the wires above the tracks and the thing on top of the locomotive to connect to them. The thing on top would be a very small cost to add, the wires would be a lot more expensive per mile, however you can choose which sections of rail to electrify since you are going for a hybrid approach which lets you only electrify the most beneficial parts of the rail network.
Overall I think it is a very good idea and I am surprised I have not seen it implemented or at least discussed. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like it would work well. I guess the main issue would be the large power surge to the grid from regenerative braking and the huge temporary draw when getting up to speed but it seems like this would be addressable without too much difficulty.
Awesome work. This kind of feedback is exactly what OSM needs to become the best map. Right now there are places where it is better than other maps and places where it is worse, but it does not take very many people deciding to do what you just did to make it the best everywhere.
The different routers update on different schedules, but they generally take at least a day to do so. Redrawing the map to show an update only modifies the local area, whereas updating the routing graph can have large changes. I know work is being done to support incremental updates but I am not sure when this will be supported (and again each routing engine would do it on their own since they all work differently, they just pull down the same data from OSM). I know for OSRM they update once a day by rebuilding the entire routing graph from scratch and then dropping the old graph table and loading in the new one. Building the worldwide routing graph takes like 18 hours so they can only do it once a day currently.
I have noiced the same thing on my skype in the past. I am fine with contributing some p2p bandwidth but wish the program was a bit more upfront about telling you about it.
On a separate but related issue, I used to use netstat for the same kind of thing you did, but now I run a program called nethogs, which is a command line tool a lot like top, but shows bandwidth usage by process in real time in more sane units like kb/s instead of the ugly packet buffer counts netstat uses which are kind of hard to read. It also sorts by bandwidth similar to how top shows the high cpu users on top by default so it is easy to see what the "random process eating your network" is.
If this was a business venture, we would have had our answer years ago and wouldn't need another round of National Science Foundation funding to investigate this, or come up with another model that disagrees with the 20 we already have which are not good enough.
So just to be clear, what you are saying is that the science is in such broad agreement that climate change is real and is man made, that it is not even worth spending more money to research it, right?
Oh yeah, that sweet sweet grant money. Everyone knows scientists who support global warming are all riding around on their private yachts paid for with the grant money they lied in their research to get, whereas the poor defenseless honest scientists who are sceptical of global warming are all broke and starving because no one will pay them a dime.
No need to worry, I have it on good authority from all the libertarians who frequent this site that you can easily move to a more nuclear friendly town. No need to stay in that oppressive communist hellhole where you live now.
The taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio....
It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need at least twelve 'appearances' (attempts at the final test), after preparation averaging 34 months, to pass the examination.
Next time you feel like being a pretentious twat, why don't you just keep it to yourself.
We actually have a wiki page about that exact issue. We have worked on this quite a bit to work out the best way to tag the roads in Africa to handle the huge variety of what they have there. It really makes you appreciate the infrastructure that the developed world has when you see how difficult it would be to travel in these parts of the world.
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been working with WHO, MSF, and Red Cross since the outbreak began in march to map roads and villages in the affected areas. These maps are used by medical teams to move people, medicine, and equipment around, as well as to do "contact tracing" of infected people to see who they might also have infected. The maps are crowdsourced and released under a copyleft license like wikipedia uses. If you want to help out you can check out a task to work on on the HOT task manager and help improve the maps these organizations are using to do their work. There are some instructional videos on the MapGive site run by the US State Department which has donated a bunch of imagery for us to better map the affected areas.
Please take some time to learn how to help with this mapping and help these doctors do what they need to do.
It was a bit clumsily worded. I meant "the opposite of hiding", so I was not saying that you want to do the opposite of hide, not the opposite of what you suggested. In any case, clumsy wording or not, glad to hear that you understood my message and are joining the effort.
Quite the opposite in fact. In my opinion when your government starts making lists of "the bad people" then I think it is your moral duty to make sure you are one of the people on the list. From the recent NSA leaks (this one may not actually be from Snowden, which is interesting) the NSA considers anyone who uses or runs Tor to be an extremist, so apparently I make the list twice; just glad to be doing my part. I also installed PGP and use encryption whenever possible, although that is rare because I only know a few other people using it, and most of the communicating I do with them is on a mailing list anyway so encryption doesn't really work. Still I do what I can to throw up a bit of "chaff" to make their job just that little bit harder.
You posted your comment anonymously (or as anon as you can be on slashdot), but I won't post mine that way. My government knows who I am and what I think and I couldn't be happier. Fuck the motherfuckers.
Wow, way to totally miss the point. I am not even going to bother putting into words why you are wrong since everyone (including probably yourself) knows what was actually meant by that analogy.
So the global average was the warmest on record, and you point out that the US was a bit cool. You think this means that global warming isn't happening (actually you are probably smarter than that you are just trying to trick those that casually read your comment); but actually what this means is that it must have been _crazy hot_ somewhere else to balance out the relatively cool US and still come out as the top temp.
Wow, yet another industry shill posting as AC to spread propaganda. I think you are the 4th or 5th one in this thread.
In answer to your misinformation...
Net Neutrality originally meant: leave the internet alone, it's been working fine for years.
Yep, and it still does mean that. You can claim it means whatever you want, but the people areguing for common carrier status want exactly this, and nothing more.
Then corporations start to throttle back our bandwidth, and instead of the courts charing them with selling a fraud, or deceptive trade practices
I would be very happy to see them do this, unfortunately it would be a tough case to make because they always weasel language into the contract you sign with them saying they can "regulate speed for QOS reasons" and that your speed is "up to" some threshold, etc.
the FCC and Obama come in with a plan to give government control over the internet, and require the ISPs to log your internet activity and just give it to police whenever they ask for it. And of course Mr. Obama and the FCC call this plan "Net Neutrality".
This is just ludicrous. In what way is saying to ISPs "you can't discriminate based on who sends the traffic, you have to treat it all equally" equal to "governemnt control over the internet" in the pejorative sense you are intending for it to mean. I guess the government would have some control as all regulations are a form of control, but that is not what you meant. The people arguing for net neutrality want all players to have the same access to the public internet without large entites paying to prevent their data from getting through, so why would they want the government to do exactly the same thing. You were just trying to scare people into doing what the giant corps want, which is to let them screw their customers over by forcing them to pay for a connection and then pay again to make it not suck. Furthermore, your comment about logging on the internet is pretty funny in light of the Snowden leaks. Why would they need to pass a law to "log the internet" when they have been doing exactly that for years. Just more phony scaremongering to confuse people who are not well informed.
That's right, they gave it the same name, but it has a completely different meaning.
Nope, that was just the big ISPs and their paid shills who post AC on sites like slashdot. Go crawl back into the hole you came out of. To quote Woodie Guthrie "all you facists are bound to lose". You might win on this one and get the two tiered internet your paymasters want, but the people are slowly learning how badly they are being screwed over and eventually they will wake up and take action.
Others are welcome to read the comment to get ideas for what to write but I don't recommend copy-pasting my comment as your own. Write it in your own words and say why it affects you personally. Getting 20 real, independantly written comments with personal stories matters more than getting 100 copy pasted comments. These orgs are used to getting hundreds of identical comments from groups like moveon.org and such which encourage people to "write their representatives, and to make it easy for you here is what to write..." and those are too easy to ignore.
Again with the propaganda. Analogies are useful, but only to a point and your analogy has gone past the point. You are perfectly allowed to pay more to get a bigger pipe or lower latency today; that already exists, just go shopping for bandwidth and you will see many options. What you are not allowed to do is pay more to make sure your competitors have a smaller pipe, or higher latency.
To use your analogy, you are allowed to spend as much as you want and buy as big of an engine as you want, but you are not allowed to spend money to make sure the guy you are racing against has a smaller engine.
I really do wonder what the motivation for all these AC posts is. Are they just misunderstanding the issue and posting anon because they are afraid of being downmodded, or are they paid industry shills whose job is not to win the argument, just to muddy the water enough that people get confused?
Way to repeat the industry propaganda. Net neutrality does not say anything at all about the upgrades you carry out, all it says is that whether or not the upgrades are done, you can't priveledge one customer over another because that person paid you to speed their traffic and slow others.
One of those comments was mine and I encourage others to do the same. The FCC may very well ignore the comments, but the more that there are the more it will show people how corrupt they are. Ignoring 50 comments is one thing, ignoring 650,000 comments is another thing entirely, especially when almost every single one of those comments is opposed to the policy they are proposing.
Make your voice heard, and even if not heard by the FCC, then let it be heard by your fellow citizens that the FCC won't listen to us anymore. Our government is corrupt but most people don't realize the extent to which it is corrupt. This is a good way to show them.
I didn't claim that he was immune from being tracked down, I am well aware of the issues of IP level anonymity vs slashdot just choosing not to display a name which is what the AC parent did. I know the distinction because I run a Tor relay (not an exit node just a relay) and I use Tor myself.
My point was merely that he chose to remain anonymous (at least as well as he was easily able to) while criticising a tool used by others to actully do the same thing.
Whether Tor is used by "bad guys" is beside the point. A report came out today that the NSA's Xkeyscore program flags Tor users and counts them as 'extremists' merely for going to the Tor website, asking for a bridge ip, or searching for tails or reading a particular linux users forum. This puts me on their list of extremists and I am happy to be there. My Tor relay is called "Fuck the NSA" and I am not the only one running a relay called that. Anonymous communication is important and I am not afraid to use my real identity (have a look at my username) to say so.
Lastly, just to be clear, I am not saying that no one should post anonymously; I have defended the AC posting option on this site for exactly the reasons you list. I am merely pointing out the cowardice and hypocrisy of posting anonymously to criticise a tool to actually provide that very ability to people who need it; people whose lives depend on it. Remember that everyone who says Tor should be banned because the bad guys might use it is just choosing to kill one group of people instead of another. Tor saves lives every day in opressive regimes, so banning it does not just make the kiddie fiddlers get hurt, it would also hurt these innocent people. There are better ways to stop the bad guys than making anonymous communication impossible, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a facist. Period.
Although I largely agree with the sentiment you are expressing, there is a similar confusion here as well. I read through the article you linked and what they are talking about transporting is normal crude that has a high paraffin wax compnonent in it. This too, though, is different from the kerogen bearing rocks in the green river shale. There are a couple clues throughout the article that this is what they are talking about, but the most telling is this blurb from the last paragraph...
"For better or worse, Uinta Basin oil and gas production is increasing and expected to double by 2022 to the equivalent of 50 million barrels a year. Much of that growth is expected to come from tar sands and oil shale, which exists in abundance in the basin but has yet to be commercially developed."
Notice that they say that the tar sands there and the shale have yet to be produced commercially. Tar sands (depending on the depth and the oil content) generally can be produced commercially (it is an ugly mess but we can do it) since the job is merely to separate the thick, viscous oil from the sand. The kerogen in the green river shale (and many other shale formations) is a different beast entirely. For tar sand you heat the oil/sand mixture to soften up the oil and separate it out, but the conversion oil has already been done by heat from the earth. With kerogen, you need to heat the kerogen for a period of several years at something like 500 to 1000 degrees (usually done by pumping superheated steam into the ground). Then after this heating process is complete, you separate the oil in a manner similar to tar sands. This extra heating step at the beginning is why this will almost certainly never be used.
Hope this clears up the confusion about these various resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Commenting to remove moderation. Meant to mod this insightful, accidentally clicked redundant.
This is a good point that people often miss. When you implement a policy like the one described, it may make some thing more expensive, but it may also make some other things possible that were not before.
This video is probably the one you were thinking of. Very interesting video.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Actually a decrease in the money supply would both cause an increase in secondary lending rates (because money is more scarce and therefore more burdensome to loan) and also in a fractional reserve system like the one you are complaining about could be caused by an increase in the federal funds rate as opposed to a decrease like you claimed. But don't let your complete lack of knowledge regarding monetary policy stop you from opining on something you know nothing about.
For those who actually care, if the central bank decreased interest rates as the parent post suggested, more people would borrow more money and therefore lead to more money creation, not less.
-AndrewBuck
Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.
In addition to this you could do regenerative breaking on these same stretches of tracks to feed power back into the grid when slowing down. Many locomotives already use electrical generators in the wheels (basically just using the motors as generators) as this avoids wear on the wheels and brakes by avoiding the older mechanical brakes. However on long down grades they still have to use the mechanical brakes since they have no way to get rid of the excess energy; the electrical generator brakes just heat up an onboard tank of water which can only take so much heating before they have to fall back to the mechanical brakes.
So basically all of the things you need to do a hybrid system like this are already onboard a modern locomotive, the only thing missing is the wires above the tracks and the thing on top of the locomotive to connect to them. The thing on top would be a very small cost to add, the wires would be a lot more expensive per mile, however you can choose which sections of rail to electrify since you are going for a hybrid approach which lets you only electrify the most beneficial parts of the rail network.
Overall I think it is a very good idea and I am surprised I have not seen it implemented or at least discussed. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like it would work well. I guess the main issue would be the large power surge to the grid from regenerative braking and the huge temporary draw when getting up to speed but it seems like this would be addressable without too much difficulty.
Awesome work. This kind of feedback is exactly what OSM needs to become the best map. Right now there are places where it is better than other maps and places where it is worse, but it does not take very many people deciding to do what you just did to make it the best everywhere.
-AndrewBuck
The different routers update on different schedules, but they generally take at least a day to do so. Redrawing the map to show an update only modifies the local area, whereas updating the routing graph can have large changes. I know work is being done to support incremental updates but I am not sure when this will be supported (and again each routing engine would do it on their own since they all work differently, they just pull down the same data from OSM). I know for OSRM they update once a day by rebuilding the entire routing graph from scratch and then dropping the old graph table and loading in the new one. Building the worldwide routing graph takes like 18 hours so they can only do it once a day currently.
-AndrewBuck
I have noiced the same thing on my skype in the past. I am fine with contributing some p2p bandwidth but wish the program was a bit more upfront about telling you about it.
On a separate but related issue, I used to use netstat for the same kind of thing you did, but now I run a program called nethogs, which is a command line tool a lot like top, but shows bandwidth usage by process in real time in more sane units like kb/s instead of the ugly packet buffer counts netstat uses which are kind of hard to read. It also sorts by bandwidth similar to how top shows the high cpu users on top by default so it is easy to see what the "random process eating your network" is.
-AndrewBuck
If this was a business venture, we would have had our answer years ago and wouldn't need another round of National Science Foundation funding to investigate this, or come up with another model that disagrees with the 20 we already have which are not good enough.
So just to be clear, what you are saying is that the science is in such broad agreement that climate change is real and is man made, that it is not even worth spending more money to research it, right?
-AndrewBuck
Oh yeah, that sweet sweet grant money. Everyone knows scientists who support global warming are all riding around on their private yachts paid for with the grant money they lied in their research to get, whereas the poor defenseless honest scientists who are sceptical of global warming are all broke and starving because no one will pay them a dime.
-AndrewBuck
No need to worry, I have it on good authority from all the libertarians who frequent this site that you can easily move to a more nuclear friendly town. No need to stay in that oppressive communist hellhole where you live now.
-AndrewBuck
Seems like he might have been referring to this, moron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Here are the relevant bits...
The taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. ...
It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need at least twelve 'appearances' (attempts at the final test), after preparation averaging 34 months, to pass the examination.
Next time you feel like being a pretentious twat, why don't you just keep it to yourself.
-AndrewBuck
We actually have a wiki page about that exact issue. We have worked on this quite a bit to work out the best way to tag the roads in Africa to handle the huge variety of what they have there. It really makes you appreciate the infrastructure that the developed world has when you see how difficult it would be to travel in these parts of the world.
-AndrewBuck
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been working with WHO, MSF, and Red Cross since the outbreak began in march to map roads and villages in the affected areas. These maps are used by medical teams to move people, medicine, and equipment around, as well as to do "contact tracing" of infected people to see who they might also have infected. The maps are crowdsourced and released under a copyleft license like wikipedia uses. If you want to help out you can check out a task to work on on the HOT task manager and help improve the maps these organizations are using to do their work. There are some instructional videos on the MapGive site run by the US State Department which has donated a bunch of imagery for us to better map the affected areas.
Please take some time to learn how to help with this mapping and help these doctors do what they need to do.
-AndrewBuck
It was a bit clumsily worded. I meant "the opposite of hiding", so I was not saying that you want to do the opposite of hide, not the opposite of what you suggested. In any case, clumsy wording or not, glad to hear that you understood my message and are joining the effort.
-AndrewBuck
Quite the opposite in fact. In my opinion when your government starts making lists of "the bad people" then I think it is your moral duty to make sure you are one of the people on the list. From the recent NSA leaks (this one may not actually be from Snowden, which is interesting) the NSA considers anyone who uses or runs Tor to be an extremist, so apparently I make the list twice; just glad to be doing my part. I also installed PGP and use encryption whenever possible, although that is rare because I only know a few other people using it, and most of the communicating I do with them is on a mailing list anyway so encryption doesn't really work. Still I do what I can to throw up a bit of "chaff" to make their job just that little bit harder.
You posted your comment anonymously (or as anon as you can be on slashdot), but I won't post mine that way. My government knows who I am and what I think and I couldn't be happier. Fuck the motherfuckers.
-AndrewBuck
Wow, way to totally miss the point. I am not even going to bother putting into words why you are wrong since everyone (including probably yourself) knows what was actually meant by that analogy.
-AndrewBuck
So the global average was the warmest on record, and you point out that the US was a bit cool. You think this means that global warming isn't happening (actually you are probably smarter than that you are just trying to trick those that casually read your comment); but actually what this means is that it must have been _crazy hot_ somewhere else to balance out the relatively cool US and still come out as the top temp.
-AndrewBuck
Wow, yet another industry shill posting as AC to spread propaganda. I think you are the 4th or 5th one in this thread.
In answer to your misinformation...
Net Neutrality originally meant: leave the internet alone, it's been working fine for years.
Yep, and it still does mean that. You can claim it means whatever you want, but the people areguing for common carrier status want exactly this, and nothing more.
Then corporations start to throttle back our bandwidth, and instead of the courts charing them with selling a fraud, or deceptive trade practices
I would be very happy to see them do this, unfortunately it would be a tough case to make because they always weasel language into the contract you sign with them saying they can "regulate speed for QOS reasons" and that your speed is "up to" some threshold, etc.
the FCC and Obama come in with a plan to give government control over the internet, and require the ISPs to log your internet activity and just give it to police whenever they ask for it. And of course Mr. Obama and the FCC call this plan "Net Neutrality".
This is just ludicrous. In what way is saying to ISPs "you can't discriminate based on who sends the traffic, you have to treat it all equally" equal to "governemnt control over the internet" in the pejorative sense you are intending for it to mean. I guess the government would have some control as all regulations are a form of control, but that is not what you meant. The people arguing for net neutrality want all players to have the same access to the public internet without large entites paying to prevent their data from getting through, so why would they want the government to do exactly the same thing. You were just trying to scare people into doing what the giant corps want, which is to let them screw their customers over by forcing them to pay for a connection and then pay again to make it not suck. Furthermore, your comment about logging on the internet is pretty funny in light of the Snowden leaks. Why would they need to pass a law to "log the internet" when they have been doing exactly that for years. Just more phony scaremongering to confuse people who are not well informed.
That's right, they gave it the same name, but it has a completely different meaning.
Nope, that was just the big ISPs and their paid shills who post AC on sites like slashdot. Go crawl back into the hole you came out of. To quote Woodie Guthrie "all you facists are bound to lose". You might win on this one and get the two tiered internet your paymasters want, but the people are slowly learning how badly they are being screwed over and eventually they will wake up and take action.
-AndrewBuck
Interesting idea sharing your actual comment. Here is mine (link is to a small pdf from the fcc site showing the text of the comment):
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/docum...
Others are welcome to read the comment to get ideas for what to write but I don't recommend copy-pasting my comment as your own. Write it in your own words and say why it affects you personally. Getting 20 real, independantly written comments with personal stories matters more than getting 100 copy pasted comments. These orgs are used to getting hundreds of identical comments from groups like moveon.org and such which encourage people to "write their representatives, and to make it easy for you here is what to write..." and those are too easy to ignore.
-AndrewBuck
Again with the propaganda. Analogies are useful, but only to a point and your analogy has gone past the point. You are perfectly allowed to pay more to get a bigger pipe or lower latency today; that already exists, just go shopping for bandwidth and you will see many options. What you are not allowed to do is pay more to make sure your competitors have a smaller pipe, or higher latency.
To use your analogy, you are allowed to spend as much as you want and buy as big of an engine as you want, but you are not allowed to spend money to make sure the guy you are racing against has a smaller engine.
I really do wonder what the motivation for all these AC posts is. Are they just misunderstanding the issue and posting anon because they are afraid of being downmodded, or are they paid industry shills whose job is not to win the argument, just to muddy the water enough that people get confused?
-AndrewBuck
Way to repeat the industry propaganda. Net neutrality does not say anything at all about the upgrades you carry out, all it says is that whether or not the upgrades are done, you can't priveledge one customer over another because that person paid you to speed their traffic and slow others.
-AndrewBuck
One of those comments was mine and I encourage others to do the same. The FCC may very well ignore the comments, but the more that there are the more it will show people how corrupt they are. Ignoring 50 comments is one thing, ignoring 650,000 comments is another thing entirely, especially when almost every single one of those comments is opposed to the policy they are proposing.
Make your voice heard, and even if not heard by the FCC, then let it be heard by your fellow citizens that the FCC won't listen to us anymore. Our government is corrupt but most people don't realize the extent to which it is corrupt. This is a good way to show them.
-AndrewBuck
I didn't claim that he was immune from being tracked down, I am well aware of the issues of IP level anonymity vs slashdot just choosing not to display a name which is what the AC parent did. I know the distinction because I run a Tor relay (not an exit node just a relay) and I use Tor myself.
My point was merely that he chose to remain anonymous (at least as well as he was easily able to) while criticising a tool used by others to actully do the same thing.
Whether Tor is used by "bad guys" is beside the point. A report came out today that the NSA's Xkeyscore program flags Tor users and counts them as 'extremists' merely for going to the Tor website, asking for a bridge ip, or searching for tails or reading a particular linux users forum. This puts me on their list of extremists and I am happy to be there. My Tor relay is called "Fuck the NSA" and I am not the only one running a relay called that. Anonymous communication is important and I am not afraid to use my real identity (have a look at my username) to say so.
Lastly, just to be clear, I am not saying that no one should post anonymously; I have defended the AC posting option on this site for exactly the reasons you list. I am merely pointing out the cowardice and hypocrisy of posting anonymously to criticise a tool to actually provide that very ability to people who need it; people whose lives depend on it. Remember that everyone who says Tor should be banned because the bad guys might use it is just choosing to kill one group of people instead of another. Tor saves lives every day in opressive regimes, so banning it does not just make the kiddie fiddlers get hurt, it would also hurt these innocent people. There are better ways to stop the bad guys than making anonymous communication impossible, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a facist. Period.
-AndrewBuck
Kind of ironic that you chose to post that comment anonymously, exactly the kind of thing TOR is designed to allow for.
-AndrewBuck
Although I largely agree with the sentiment you are expressing, there is a similar confusion here as well. I read through the article you linked and what they are talking about transporting is normal crude that has a high paraffin wax compnonent in it. This too, though, is different from the kerogen bearing rocks in the green river shale. There are a couple clues throughout the article that this is what they are talking about, but the most telling is this blurb from the last paragraph...
"For better or worse, Uinta Basin oil and gas production is increasing and expected to double by 2022 to the equivalent of 50 million barrels a year. Much of that growth is expected to come from tar sands and oil shale, which exists in abundance in the basin but has yet to be commercially developed."
Notice that they say that the tar sands there and the shale have yet to be produced commercially. Tar sands (depending on the depth and the oil content) generally can be produced commercially (it is an ugly mess but we can do it) since the job is merely to separate the thick, viscous oil from the sand. The kerogen in the green river shale (and many other shale formations) is a different beast entirely. For tar sand you heat the oil/sand mixture to soften up the oil and separate it out, but the conversion oil has already been done by heat from the earth. With kerogen, you need to heat the kerogen for a period of several years at something like 500 to 1000 degrees (usually done by pumping superheated steam into the ground). Then after this heating process is complete, you separate the oil in a manner similar to tar sands. This extra heating step at the beginning is why this will almost certainly never be used.
Hope this clears up the confusion about these various resources.
-AndrewBuck