Well, let's work on the basis that our windfarm actually replaces existing demand, so it's effective- because in essence, it will provide energy, that if not used by one house, will be exported to other houses (as the electric grid works), therefore seriously limiting demand on the existing infrastructure. Basically meaning the power-plant will produce less electricity and therefore emit less carbon (because these guys are good at not wasting their own money when power isn't needed).
Then yeah, I understand simply why people are so against something this easy- but I think that it's not quite errant thinking either. The concept is Reduce what you can, offset what you can't.
That means, I, too, am against the idea that Mr-Everything-Is-Disposable joe drives his SUV alone to work every day in the carpool lane and uses 3 water bottles a day, instead of re-using one.
The difference is simple- in one case, we have somebody like me who does everything in his realistic power to change for the better, and pay a nominal tax to cover the rest. Whereas Waste-a-lot joe has no problem covering his tracks, but he's still using too many resources, and it's unfair. But this argument extends to the gap between the rich and poor now- completely unrelated to carbon emissions.
I'm guessing that if a TAX was mandatory for carbon credits, and was based on real things like gas efficiency and your yearly milage, size of house, number of family members- it would convince everybody to simply reduce what they could, instead of be so wasteful.
But, yes, I think really what these people want is vengence against the people who care-not. The game keeps changing, but their desires don't. I doubt the carbon game will give them much, and it'll move on to hatred of the rich people affording frequent space travel while others are modest and only go to the moon once a year.
Could help that opera is just plainly a better web browser. I will continue using it until it becomes another religion. Then I have to move to the next browser of choice.
Just like IE fanboys, Mac fanboys, and others, I'm sick of firefox fanboys.
No, you buy them so that you do not have to reduce carbon output. No, I buy them because I cannot reduce carbon output any more than I already do.
It's a license only available to those with means. People who scrape by, without even the ability to to replace their carbon emitting vehicles and heating systems, are not going to be able to buy credits. It's true, poor people won't have the means.
Clearly, it's a lot easier and cheaper to hold onto one's trash until a public receptacle is found than to replace one's inefficient fossil-fuel burning devices, which would be required of those who can't buy the indulgences. Ok, bad example. The point was that at least I'm cleaning up after myself.
You can't afford to make major changes; how are you going to afford the carbon credits? Carbon credits for 1 year is cheaper than a new car + solar panels + self-grown food + self-made clothes. Not to mention I wouldn't have time to do all that, if I was also trying to make enough money to pay for all that.
The concept is simple, I donate X amount of money towards X% of something that would ultimately offset my carbon emissions. Say it takes 5 people's yearly donations to build one windmill, and that windmill offsets exactly the amount of carbon those 5 people make, It works out.
The problem is, unless we can verify independently that the results are accurate, I certainly won't trust the results of any election - even without paranoid conspiracy articles!
Not to mention, when the presidential election comes- if there's no paper trail, then the votes will have been counted behind closed doors.
Even if I could review the source code- what assurance do I have that the source code I'm reading is ACTUALLY on the machine?
I know, I sound paranoid too, now. But after the reports of our last two "elections" (or what ever you want to call it), I think it's bout time we put some accountability into effect. Lest we have an incident like last time... "We won't stop until all the votes are counted! " *Somebody whispers into candidate's ear* "Oh, sorry, just kidding, it was electronically tallied, I guess we just plainly lost, despite the 20 point difference from our exit polls."
I just don't know how much faith we can put into highly-tamperable procedure with no paper. There's a lot at stake here, so there'd be much motivation to rig things up.
Heck, if it *accidentally* counted each fifth vote incorrectly, that'd be enough to change an election.
Until we can get something as basic as an election down, everything built on top of it is set to crumble.
You could have some fat freakin legs, and a really fat ass, but you can do ANY cardio excersize to burn it off- thanks to the fact that fat burns evenly throughout your body. An ass excersize will tone your ass better, but that fat will leave your ass at the same rate with or without ass excersize.
I also think another great idea would be to make the surface of a desk the transmitter, that way anyone can walk up and sit a laptop on it and their batteries never die. it would also have the nifty feature of powering you wireless mouse, or even speakers a monitor and a external keyboard on your desk at home with one power line to the wall. But for god's sake, don't touch the desk. *zap*
Since everybody on this topic seems anti-carbon credit, I will provide my 2 cents (on the assumption that at least 1 organization does carbon credits correctly).
I believe carbon credits to be a good thing. First, it shows a sense of responsibility. I don't buy carbon credits to show them off, I buy carbon credits out of a desire to neutralize my carbon.
If I buy enough credits to cover the carbon I emit this year, then I've done more to protect the environtment than you. Period. It's not a license to pollute, think about it- It's a license to clean up after yourself.
Imagine if I decided to throw all my trash on the ground, but I paid someone to pick up after me. It would be a weird habbit, and it wouldn't say much good about me, but at the same time, it would certainly be better than not getting somebody to pick it up- so it shows a sense of responsibility. In the end, my habbits affect nobody at all. My habbits have zero impact on anybody. And that's better than just not doing anything at all.
But another angle people don't look at is this: I just plainly don't make enough money to make major changes in my life. I've switched my lightbulbs and switched to energy efficient heat. In the end, I could afford that because it made my bills go down, so it paid for itself.
But at the job I have, I just can't afford to much else. I HAVE to get to work, and there's no public transportation where I live. I can't afford a more energy efficient car (although I dream about some day getting one). I can't afford solar panels (although I drool at the idea of ridding myself of an electric bill). I can't afford to make the major changes in my life that would really impact my footprint on this earth.
Maybe some day I'll be able to afford it. But now I cannot.
The saying is: Reduce what you can, Offset what you can't. It's not a license to pollute- it's my ability to do something on my budget, instead of nothing at all- Until I can afford to make a difference myself. Part of this is dependent on greener energy and devices becomming available and affordable.
That's what I'm thinking. I think this could be abused. I could create 500 different (boring) mp3s and "copyright" them. Put them up on the net and send a letter to the ISPs and demand they stop the transfers. If they don't I sue.
On the other end of the spectrum, if everybody against this decided to do the same thing, producing more and more content daily, we could most certainly stay ahead of their hardware curve. They'd never be able to keep enough equiptment to filter all that content and check such enormous patterns.
Remember when Stewie was cool and just wanted to take over the world?
Now he's just gay.
And I couldn't stretch anything, my bad. Sorry guys. Back on topic. 2.5 years is pretty short in my opinion. Imagine if 10 years ago you broke into a doc's office and shredded all their paper records. I don't feel that'd go over well...
Very good point! If these infected insects killed off all their prey, they'd have to find something else to suck on- and eventually they'd kill off ALL living things.
On a side note- wasn't dinosaur skin very thick? Last time I checked, mosquitoes are very small... could they even get anything from a dinosaur? I think it'd make more sense if the mosquitoes were providing a building tolerance to all mammals to some dreadful disease that wiped off animals that mosquitoes couldn't bite.
But even here, my logic is flawed, I'm sure there are other mammals with thick skin. So the point that my theory that makes more sense doesn't hold water should really say something about this article.
But frankly, I don't think new diseases would wipe out an entire order of life, all over the world, in all ecological niches, without wiping out other unrelated orders of life. In their hundreds of millions of years of existence, dinos had to fight off insects and diseases that were there before them, it couldn't just wipe them (and just them) off the face of the Earth in such a short time. I agree, it doesn't make sense that they could become as evolved as they already had (from fish, monkeys, what have you) just so a magic virus could appear and kill 'em off.
If these viruses have been around since the dinosaurs- why not since before the dinosaurs?
Did you spend more than $1K? I lost $400 myself, and they say they investigate, but I haven't heard anything.
I suppose if you catch it soon enough you can get your money back (before it's cashed). When I called they just said- Sorry, it's already been cashed, nothing we can do, if you'd like to report fraud, I'll direct you to our fraud dept. They took my report, and that was the last i heard from it.
Easy to sort out- make pagerank based on individual profiles. Using a similar system to netflix's recommendation system- People who rank pages similarly to you ranked this page 8.4/10 for your search criteria.
That way, people who try to abuse the system will only affect other users who tried to abuse the system.
It may be a crime, but no- you cannot chargeback. When they cash it, it's gone. They won't find the person. They probably won't investigate. You're pretty much screwed.
Why are we arguing between two different retail computers? Am I the only one who considers computers to be nothing more than components? I'd save the money, and build it myself.
I've never been a big fan of universal blacklisting. It's a lot like racism.
The problem is simply this: I still have no assurance that it isn't fraud, and as this article says Romanians are dangerous. And I'm an American, you expect me to differentiate between Romania and surrounding countries? If there's one thing you should know, we love us some propaganda- and you are the target. As far as I'm concerned, you're just trying to swindle me out of good judgment so your neighbors can rob me and you can laugh all night long.:P
No but seriously, I feel for you, I just can't do anything about it.
It just doesn't make sense to blindly send a money order to somebody you don't know. It's easy to take the money and leave. You can't put a stop payment on a money order like you can a check. You can chargeback a credit card.
Having too much faith in humanity doesn't make me paranoid in contrast. It just makes you too trusting.
Yeah, it turns out ebay was scammed by a Romanian group that pretended to be anti-scammers. Ebay should've seen the warning sign when the email they received about the matter stated that once they receive the equiptment, they'll send back 10 times the equiptment, plus 8 extra computers for their trouble. tsk tsk, ebay.
A friend of mine did just that last month. He was looking for a guitar, and found a great deal on a nice fender, so he bid on it. Later on he let me know about the auction. The first thing I noticed was the phrase "No Paypal." He only wanted money orders- you know, those things you can't take back once they're sent.
I alerted my friend, but he was too starry-eyed about the price and the product to see what was going on. His defense was that the seller had a good rating. (Nevermind the posibility of a hi-jacked account).
He won the auction, and sent a money order, against my recommendation. A few days later nothing happened, so he contacted the seller to get this: "Uh, your thing you sent wasn't signed, so I can't cash it."
The deal had obviously gone sour.
Interestingly enough, the seller sent back an unsigned money-order and had my friend sign it- send it back, and eventually he got the guitar.
A good example, and a poor lesson for my friend. It had miraculously worked out for him, against the odds. Everything about that deal was shady and I certainly wouldn't have taken part, if it had been me. Unfortunately, it worked out, which hasn't helped do anything but confirm a bad habit. He thinks my advice was bad, and he'll continue doing stupid stuff with his money.
Ah, well. A fool and his money are soon parted, right?
Oh, and about my parent(2 up), flamebait? Come on! It was an honest suggestion. Gimme a break here.
No, I think we covered this in 2007's biggest gaming letdowns, remember?
MyMiniCity can't be both best free game, and biggest letdown... unless, wait.. are you getting more clicks than me? WTF!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! Did a company make products that go well together? Could it be that they were designed for eachother?
Seriously, afterwards, let's launch an antitrust case against playstation because their platform doesn't play wii and xbox games.
Well, let's work on the basis that our windfarm actually replaces existing demand, so it's effective- because in essence, it will provide energy, that if not used by one house, will be exported to other houses (as the electric grid works), therefore seriously limiting demand on the existing infrastructure. Basically meaning the power-plant will produce less electricity and therefore emit less carbon (because these guys are good at not wasting their own money when power isn't needed).
Then yeah, I understand simply why people are so against something this easy- but I think that it's not quite errant thinking either. The concept is Reduce what you can, offset what you can't.
That means, I, too, am against the idea that Mr-Everything-Is-Disposable joe drives his SUV alone to work every day in the carpool lane and uses 3 water bottles a day, instead of re-using one.
The difference is simple- in one case, we have somebody like me who does everything in his realistic power to change for the better, and pay a nominal tax to cover the rest. Whereas Waste-a-lot joe has no problem covering his tracks, but he's still using too many resources, and it's unfair. But this argument extends to the gap between the rich and poor now- completely unrelated to carbon emissions.
I'm guessing that if a TAX was mandatory for carbon credits, and was based on real things like gas efficiency and your yearly milage, size of house, number of family members- it would convince everybody to simply reduce what they could, instead of be so wasteful.
But, yes, I think really what these people want is vengence against the people who care-not. The game keeps changing, but their desires don't. I doubt the carbon game will give them much, and it'll move on to hatred of the rich people affording frequent space travel while others are modest and only go to the moon once a year.
Could help that opera is just plainly a better web browser. I will continue using it until it becomes another religion. Then I have to move to the next browser of choice.
Just like IE fanboys, Mac fanboys, and others, I'm sick of firefox fanboys.
Time for barcode tatoos. Oh wait...
He can't bitch too much, I'm paying him afterall...
Exactly!
The problem is, unless we can verify independently that the results are accurate, I certainly won't trust the results of any election - even without paranoid conspiracy articles!
Not to mention, when the presidential election comes- if there's no paper trail, then the votes will have been counted behind closed doors.
Even if I could review the source code- what assurance do I have that the source code I'm reading is ACTUALLY on the machine?
I know, I sound paranoid too, now. But after the reports of our last two "elections" (or what ever you want to call it), I think it's bout time we put some accountability into effect. Lest we have an incident like last time...
"We won't stop until all the votes are counted! "
*Somebody whispers into candidate's ear*
"Oh, sorry, just kidding, it was electronically tallied, I guess we just plainly lost, despite the 20 point difference from our exit polls."
I just don't know how much faith we can put into highly-tamperable procedure with no paper. There's a lot at stake here, so there'd be much motivation to rig things up.
Heck, if it *accidentally* counted each fifth vote incorrectly, that'd be enough to change an election.
Until we can get something as basic as an election down, everything built on top of it is set to crumble.
Think of it more as burning fat.
You could have some fat freakin legs, and a really fat ass, but you can do ANY cardio excersize to burn it off- thanks to the fact that fat burns evenly throughout your body. An ass excersize will tone your ass better, but that fat will leave your ass at the same rate with or without ass excersize.
Now replace ass with earth, and fat with carbon.
Since everybody on this topic seems anti-carbon credit, I will provide my 2 cents (on the assumption that at least 1 organization does carbon credits correctly).
I believe carbon credits to be a good thing. First, it shows a sense of responsibility. I don't buy carbon credits to show them off, I buy carbon credits out of a desire to neutralize my carbon.
If I buy enough credits to cover the carbon I emit this year, then I've done more to protect the environtment than you. Period. It's not a license to pollute, think about it- It's a license to clean up after yourself.
Imagine if I decided to throw all my trash on the ground, but I paid someone to pick up after me. It would be a weird habbit, and it wouldn't say much good about me, but at the same time, it would certainly be better than not getting somebody to pick it up- so it shows a sense of responsibility. In the end, my habbits affect nobody at all. My habbits have zero impact on anybody. And that's better than just not doing anything at all.
But another angle people don't look at is this: I just plainly don't make enough money to make major changes in my life. I've switched my lightbulbs and switched to energy efficient heat. In the end, I could afford that because it made my bills go down, so it paid for itself.
But at the job I have, I just can't afford to much else. I HAVE to get to work, and there's no public transportation where I live. I can't afford a more energy efficient car (although I dream about some day getting one). I can't afford solar panels (although I drool at the idea of ridding myself of an electric bill). I can't afford to make the major changes in my life that would really impact my footprint on this earth.
Maybe some day I'll be able to afford it. But now I cannot.
The saying is: Reduce what you can, Offset what you can't. It's not a license to pollute- it's my ability to do something on my budget, instead of nothing at all- Until I can afford to make a difference myself. Part of this is dependent on greener energy and devices becomming available and affordable.
That's what I'm thinking.
I think this could be abused.
I could create 500 different (boring) mp3s and "copyright" them. Put them up on the net and send a letter to the ISPs and demand they stop the transfers. If they don't I sue.
On the other end of the spectrum, if everybody against this decided to do the same thing, producing more and more content daily, we could most certainly stay ahead of their hardware curve. They'd never be able to keep enough equiptment to filter all that content and check such enormous patterns.
We must all do our part.
Remember when Stewie was cool and just wanted to take over the world?
Now he's just gay.
And I couldn't stretch anything, my bad. Sorry guys. Back on topic. 2.5 years is pretty short in my opinion. Imagine if 10 years ago you broke into a doc's office and shredded all their paper records. I don't feel that'd go over well...
Or just dangle an oil drenched sack of money on a stick.. he'll show up.
Very good point! If these infected insects killed off all their prey, they'd have to find something else to suck on- and eventually they'd kill off ALL living things.
On a side note- wasn't dinosaur skin very thick? Last time I checked, mosquitoes are very small... could they even get anything from a dinosaur? I think it'd make more sense if the mosquitoes were providing a building tolerance to all mammals to some dreadful disease that wiped off animals that mosquitoes couldn't bite.
But even here, my logic is flawed, I'm sure there are other mammals with thick skin. So the point that my theory that makes more sense doesn't hold water should really say something about this article.
If these viruses have been around since the dinosaurs- why not since before the dinosaurs?
Did you spend more than $1K? I lost $400 myself, and they say they investigate, but I haven't heard anything.
I suppose if you catch it soon enough you can get your money back (before it's cashed). When I called they just said- Sorry, it's already been cashed, nothing we can do, if you'd like to report fraud, I'll direct you to our fraud dept. They took my report, and that was the last i heard from it.
Easy to sort out- make pagerank based on individual profiles. Using a similar system to netflix's recommendation system- People who rank pages similarly to you ranked this page 8.4/10 for your search criteria.
That way, people who try to abuse the system will only affect other users who tried to abuse the system.
He must be talking about that latest Mac operating system that everybody's upset about. Right? You know.. the one that takes 3 hours to copy a file...
It may be a crime, but no- you cannot chargeback. When they cash it, it's gone. They won't find the person. They probably won't investigate. You're pretty much screwed.
Why are we arguing between two different retail computers? Am I the only one who considers computers to be nothing more than components? I'd save the money, and build it myself.
I've never been a big fan of universal blacklisting. It's a lot like racism.
:P
The problem is simply this: I still have no assurance that it isn't fraud, and as this article says Romanians are dangerous. And I'm an American, you expect me to differentiate between Romania and surrounding countries? If there's one thing you should know, we love us some propaganda- and you are the target. As far as I'm concerned, you're just trying to swindle me out of good judgment so your neighbors can rob me and you can laugh all night long.
No but seriously, I feel for you, I just can't do anything about it.
It just doesn't make sense to blindly send a money order to somebody you don't know. It's easy to take the money and leave. You can't put a stop payment on a money order like you can a check. You can chargeback a credit card.
Having too much faith in humanity doesn't make me paranoid in contrast. It just makes you too trusting.
Yeah, it turns out ebay was scammed by a Romanian group that pretended to be anti-scammers. Ebay should've seen the warning sign when the email they received about the matter stated that once they receive the equiptment, they'll send back 10 times the equiptment, plus 8 extra computers for their trouble.
tsk tsk, ebay.
I suppose you're right. I can be idealistic.
A friend of mine did just that last month. He was looking for a guitar, and found a great deal on a nice fender, so he bid on it. Later on he let me know about the auction. The first thing I noticed was the phrase "No Paypal." He only wanted money orders- you know, those things you can't take back once they're sent.
I alerted my friend, but he was too starry-eyed about the price and the product to see what was going on. His defense was that the seller had a good rating. (Nevermind the posibility of a hi-jacked account).
He won the auction, and sent a money order, against my recommendation. A few days later nothing happened, so he contacted the seller to get this: "Uh, your thing you sent wasn't signed, so I can't cash it."
The deal had obviously gone sour.
Interestingly enough, the seller sent back an unsigned money-order and had my friend sign it- send it back, and eventually he got the guitar.
A good example, and a poor lesson for my friend. It had miraculously worked out for him, against the odds. Everything about that deal was shady and I certainly wouldn't have taken part, if it had been me. Unfortunately, it worked out, which hasn't helped do anything but confirm a bad habit. He thinks my advice was bad, and he'll continue doing stupid stuff with his money.
Ah, well. A fool and his money are soon parted, right?
Oh, and about my parent(2 up), flamebait? Come on! It was an honest suggestion. Gimme a break here.
No, I think we covered this in 2007's biggest gaming letdowns, remember?
MyMiniCity can't be both best free game, and biggest letdown... unless, wait.. are you getting more clicks than me? WTF!