There's lots of things about the global system which suck, unfortunately. Here's the worst for a small business: You have to file for a patent in every market you want to sell in. There's the PCT patents ("international"), but they don't really protect you; they basically just extend the deadline until you need to file in individual countries. Going international with a patent can easily cost over $100k. That's not much for a company like Microsoft, but for a small business, it can be a killer.
Software patents have been slowly dying for years; most people at Slashdot seem to not have noticed. Nowadays, it's very hard to get a patent on an algorithm. If you want to get a "software" patent nowadays, you have to be really roundabout and portray your software more as linkages between different human and hardware elements. And the software aspects will be the most vulnerable to being struck down.
Patenting something like the GIF encoding algorithm nowadays would be extremely difficult.
As a small business owner myself, the funding changes will. The huge costs and absurd backlogs are easily handled by big businesses with their own legal departments and deep pockets for building up patent thickets and getting their patents expedited, but it's much harder for the small fish to get a piece.
To benefit small business owners versus big business owners, you need:
* Lower filing/defense costs
* Shorter backlogs
* Greater tolerance for filing errors (a big established company is less likely to make them)
* Stricter standards for review when it comes to originality, prior art, etc (as a general rule, small businesses thrive on radical changes, while big businesses thrive on incremental changes)
However, there are some things in there that they're proposing which will absolutely not help small businesses: switching from "first to invent" to "first to file", for one. Again, the deep pockets and legal departments of large corporations make getting "first to file" much easier for them. They're also getting rid of the one-year grace period after disclosure which, yeah, while it brings us into sync with the rest of the world, but was always a huge boon to small inventors (it really ought to be *longer*). The grace period gives you time to shop your idea around, determine whether there's a good business opportunity, raise investment, etc, and *then* file.
I'm an environmentalist, and I'm big on solar, wind, and geothermal, like 95%+ of people who would tag themselves similarly. QED, you have been disproven.
FYI, most of the people opposing big projects -- let's say, Cape Wind -- are not environmental groups, although they hide under that guise. Cape Wind was mainly opposed by wealthy landowners afraid it would lower their property values.
Who? Which serious players are you talking about doubling energy costs? That's absolutely *not* a recommendation of the IPCC. The analyses on various proposed solutions are all rather low cost.
As for renewables in China: Link. China is pushing harder on them than we are. So pointing to the third world as a reason why we shouldn't do anything is a total cop out.
That said, I think there's not as much distance between our views as it initially looked. I'll take it that you're for investment into clean technologies and don't mind small costs in order to clean up, and you can take it from me that I don't support (nor does any *serious* proposal) locking the doors on our nation's coal plants tomorrow, or anything of that nature. Quite to the contrast, as per Europe, I don't expect to see *any* coal plant "shutdowns" (apart from aging) any time soon. What I hope to see is the cessation of new coal plant construction, and existing plants slowly turn themselves from baseload into supplimental power (mainly running during daylight hours and summer), and then only being phased out at end of life.
Meh, I shuold porff raed. *Lead* is the lower carbon process, not lead-acid. And it should be mentioned that there is some coke burned the refining of lead, but a fraction as much as with iron.
I guess it seems reasonable to me because even if you made the burning of any fossil fuel in the United States illegal tomorrow, there's still 150 or so years worth of CO2 in the atmosphere,
I just heard the logic train whiz by.
"Why should I quit smoking? I've already got 15 years of smoking under my belt!" "Why should I stop working with asbestos? I've already done it for 15 years." "Why should I stop huffing paint thinner? I've already done it 15 times." "Why should I put out the fire in my hair? It's already been on fire for 15 seconds."
If you acknowledge that something is a problem, then you Stop Doing It. Whether you've already done it, and whether your previous actions have consequences, is absolutely no reason to keep doing it and making the consequences worse
and the developing world is still going to be building coal fired plants for the next couple of decades at a pretty aggressive clip
Which is why we need to stop being an *obstacle* in climate treaties, and negotiate something fair to everyone. Which is why we need to put forth the (proportionally tiny) amounts of money needed to nurture the technology to get the costs down so that they become the cheapest tech. Which is why we should support international trade agreements which factor into account the environmental consequences of product manufacture (which, BTW, would boost domestic industry).
FYI: even these developing nations are taking pretty major stands against climate change. China is building the world's biggest wind farm, the world's biggest solar plant, building a huge electric train network, has started instituting bans in a number of major cities against gas guzzlers, and so on. This is everyone's problem. Even Saudi Arabia is going big on solar.
It seems more reasonable to me to do everything you can to grow the economy
We're talking about things like 2 cent feed-in tarrifs and having coal plants actually pay for the health consequences of their non-carbon emissions. It's absurd that you act like such things are going to bankrupt the global economy or that they're "doubling energy costs" Nobody is talking about doubling energy costs (at least nobody seriously involved in the debate here). I refer you to the IPCC AR4 analysis of the economic costs of proposed mitigation strategies.
it is my opinion that our fate (whatever that may be) is more or less sealed
What's been done is more or less sealed. What we haven't yet done is not. Most effects are closer to exponential than linear.
That's great...so why can't they provide raw, unprocessed data that shows it to be so?
Please tell me what data you find yourself unable to get.
Whenever I look at any raw temperature dataset, I just can't see the 'warming trend' they're claiming.
Please tell me what data you're looking at.
Especially since all of the the projected side effects are things that have happened and hurt us often in the past, and will happen in the future
[[citation needed]]
I still think we, as a people, can be ever so much more effective by focusing on mitigation of potential side-effects
Okay. Mitigate ocean acidification. Mitigate the polar shift and increasing kinks to the jet stream (read: severe weather, especially during winter). Mitigate the loss of 1-2m vertical from *all* our coastline this century. Mitigate an additional 1-2m added to all storm surges. Mitigate the loss of 30% of Florida within a couple centuries. Mitigate overseas places with worse problems and a fraction as much GDP to deal with them. Mitigate seasonal loss of water in desert southwest areas that are already using more water than they can sustain.
Mitigation is a far more difficult, if not impossible task, when you actually get down to it.
Nobody is asking that mitigation capacity be removed, anyway. Seriously, how much money do you think is being talked about here? We're talking about things like a couple cents per kWh for feed-in tarrifs on a temporary basis until cost reductions -- which have been ongoing, and will likely continue for quite some time -- no longer call for them. We're calling for things like making coal plants actually pay for the health costs of their pollution. We're calling for tens of billions per year -- a tenth of a percent of our economy -- to be put into research. We're talking about a long term energy strategy. Things of that nature, all of which will have huge secondary benefits down the line ("status quo" does not create technology revolutions). But we're asking that they start *now* and *definitively*, because delay and uncertainty are killers in the market.
Ever calculate the carbon offsets for creating, transporting and using the electricity to power that lawnmower?
Why should I do it when the DOE already has (for cars; lawnmowers makes for an even more stark comparison, due to their lower gasoline efficiency)? Plus, our grid gets cleaner every year, while oil gets dirtier every year.
(which, by the way, will need more carbon offset credits to recycle come end of life),
1) I prefer corded lawnmowers (they make both). My view is, you wouldn't use a battery powered vacuum cleaner, would you? But to each their own.
2) The whole battery issue is pure, unadulterated garbage. *Every* part of *every* device, whether gasoline or electric, has a cost associated with it. Anyone who just chooses the battery to obsess over is deliberately distorting the issue. Batteries are not magical devices which for some mystical reason have exponentially more carbon costs associated with their creation and usage.
Let's look at different types of batteries. The three main types you'll see these days are lead-acid (they suck, but they're cheap) and li-ion. Lead-acid is a very simple ore to produce. It doesn't need to be smelted (smelting being the high-carbon process used to produce steel); it's simply sintered (heated in conjunction with various fluxing agents). Beyond that, lead acid batteries are *the* most widely recycled item on the planet. Almost every single lead-acid battery in this country is recycled, which further saves on energy costs. So the comparison of a lead-acid battery to an internal combustion engine, as far as *car
1) What is wrong with hydrocarbon-driven peaking, where needed? The point is not ideological purity; the point is getting our carbon emissions down. And it that equals geographically-distributed wind + solar + NG where needed for peaking..... so? What matters is that the coal comes off the grid and most of the energy comes from low or no carbon sources.
2) Conventional hydro is more than sufficient for peaking in the west, although in some places you need to uprate plants (but that's pretty cheap).
3) Storage can also act as peaking. At present, the most cost effective method is pumped hydro, which only adds 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour. It's so cheap that it's already extensively used in China -- not to balance out supply variation, but to balance out *demand* variation. I would not be surprised at all to find direct electrochemical or electrostatic energy storage dominating in 2-3 decades.
4) EGS/SWEGS can also act as peaking, or baseload.
But I'll jot down a note that you'd much rather make fun of your ideological foes with straw men than sit down to a serious debate.
How is that reasonable? Yes, we *could* get struck by a meteor. But the odds of that happening any time soon are extremely small. Meteors big enough to cause large local or global extinction events are on the order of once every several tens of millions of years. Equivalently devastating volcanic disasters are more common, but not *that* much more common. Stars are generally amazingly stable until they near their death (I'd be happy to dig up some papers for you on this if you'd like), with interdecadal variations in output typically being a fraction of a percent and larger variations occuring only over extremely long timescales. There are plenty of other sources of climate forcing as well, mind you -- a notable one you left out is Milankovitch cycles, based on the procession of the Earth, which is the initial driver of ice age cycles (although they're amplified significantly by atmospheric feedbacks). But we're talking about a bunch of effects that are either very slow or very unlikely, versus something that 97-98% of active publishing climate scientists say is happening now. So how exactly are those situations comparable?
If starving kids is a tangible and heartbreaking issue for you, then why do you care not about amplifying the rates of both severe drought events and severe flooding events? Severe flooding events is an especially significant concern, and there's already a solid, peer-reviewed linkage to our current rate of flooding events (global atmospheric water vapor has increased in line with predictions, the rate of major rain events has increased in line with the increased water vapor ratio, and of course major rain events are the cause of the majority of flood events).
BTW, the kids shouldn't be neurotic about daddy's lawnmower so much because it's emitting CO2, but because those things have almost no pollution controls and the exhaust they emit is horrible for the mower's health. Unless you like breathing carcinogens and neurotoxins...
Ever used an electric lawnmower? I love mine, and even if bizarro world happened, all science was inverted, and gasoline was shown to nurture unicorns while electricity made baby Jesus cry, I'd have trouble giving it up. It's quieter, lighter, stops and starts almost instantly just by holding down a lever, doesn't coat my lawn in soot, doesn't make me breathe in exhaust, I never have to mess with oil, etc, and it cuts better than my old gas mower.
SWEGS seems far more likely than that. 1MW per unit (~800 homes). Renewable. Baseload. No proliferation, safety, or environmental risks. Use virtually anywhere in the world.
Sounds like you and I are in the same boat here. The only difference is I'm actually taking steps -- however long of shots they are -- to become a candidate in such experimental procedures. I actually spoke to someone from this university a year or so ago (they referred me to some places in the US who are doing research).
It's hard for someone who doesn't want to have children and/or is fertile to understand what it's like. The current plan is for my partner -- if she can stay off her anticonvulsants and get off her antidepressants -- to carry a child for us (some major "if"s). But just knowing how I felt just having my sister pregnant in the same town, I know that'll be really hard for me. The only thing that makes me happy about it is knowing that we'll end up with a child.
The upper vagina, at least. The upper vagina and the uterus form from the Müllerian duct. The lower vagina forms from the urogenital sinus. The boundary between the two is the hymen.
Trivia: In men, the Mullerian duct degenerates to a tiny structure attached to the prostate and wrapped around the urethra, called the "prostatic utricle". It contracts during orgasm just the same as in women.
So you're not for forcing infertility on people via the water supply, but you are for forcing infertility on people by banning medical procedures used to fix them, correct? Hmm, surely there's a reason for this dischordance. Is your reasoning because of cost-effectiveness? It's certainly be a lot more cost-effective of a way to reduce the population to do so by injecting birth control into the water supply.
And then why are one in every 5,000 women born without a uterus, then?
FYI: If you just let children with genetic diseases die, would not the same apply there?
That's the problem with the logic presented: the argument that we should be just letting genetic diseases die argues that we should let children with genetic diseases die, but *not* ban treatment for women who don't have a uterus.
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of things about the global system which suck, unfortunately. Here's the worst for a small business: You have to file for a patent in every market you want to sell in. There's the PCT patents ("international"), but they don't really protect you; they basically just extend the deadline until you need to file in individual countries. Going international with a patent can easily cost over $100k. That's not much for a company like Microsoft, but for a small business, it can be a killer.
Software patents have been slowly dying for years; most people at Slashdot seem to not have noticed. Nowadays, it's very hard to get a patent on an algorithm. If you want to get a "software" patent nowadays, you have to be really roundabout and portray your software more as linkages between different human and hardware elements. And the software aspects will be the most vulnerable to being struck down.
Patenting something like the GIF encoding algorithm nowadays would be extremely difficult.
As a small business owner myself, the funding changes will. The huge costs and absurd backlogs are easily handled by big businesses with their own legal departments and deep pockets for building up patent thickets and getting their patents expedited, but it's much harder for the small fish to get a piece.
To benefit small business owners versus big business owners, you need:
* Lower filing/defense costs
* Shorter backlogs
* Greater tolerance for filing errors (a big established company is less likely to make them)
* Stricter standards for review when it comes to originality, prior art, etc (as a general rule, small businesses thrive on radical changes, while big businesses thrive on incremental changes)
However, there are some things in there that they're proposing which will absolutely not help small businesses: switching from "first to invent" to "first to file", for one. Again, the deep pockets and legal departments of large corporations make getting "first to file" much easier for them. They're also getting rid of the one-year grace period after disclosure which, yeah, while it brings us into sync with the rest of the world, but was always a huge boon to small inventors (it really ought to be *longer*). The grace period gives you time to shop your idea around, determine whether there's a good business opportunity, raise investment, etc, and *then* file.
I'm an environmentalist, and I'm big on solar, wind, and geothermal, like 95%+ of people who would tag themselves similarly.
QED, you have been disproven.
FYI, most of the people opposing big projects -- let's say, Cape Wind -- are not environmental groups, although they hide under that guise. Cape Wind was mainly opposed by wealthy landowners afraid it would lower their property values.
Who? Which serious players are you talking about doubling energy costs? That's absolutely *not* a recommendation of the IPCC. The analyses on various proposed solutions are all rather low cost.
As for renewables in China: Link. China is pushing harder on them than we are. So pointing to the third world as a reason why we shouldn't do anything is a total cop out.
That said, I think there's not as much distance between our views as it initially looked. I'll take it that you're for investment into clean technologies and don't mind small costs in order to clean up, and you can take it from me that I don't support (nor does any *serious* proposal) locking the doors on our nation's coal plants tomorrow, or anything of that nature. Quite to the contrast, as per Europe, I don't expect to see *any* coal plant "shutdowns" (apart from aging) any time soon. What I hope to see is the cessation of new coal plant construction, and existing plants slowly turn themselves from baseload into supplimental power (mainly running during daylight hours and summer), and then only being phased out at end of life.
Meh, I shuold porff raed. *Lead* is the lower carbon process, not lead-acid. And it should be mentioned that there is some coke burned the refining of lead, but a fraction as much as with iron.
I just heard the logic train whiz by.
"Why should I quit smoking? I've already got 15 years of smoking under my belt!"
"Why should I stop working with asbestos? I've already done it for 15 years."
"Why should I stop huffing paint thinner? I've already done it 15 times."
"Why should I put out the fire in my hair? It's already been on fire for 15 seconds."
If you acknowledge that something is a problem, then you Stop Doing It. Whether you've already done it, and whether your previous actions have consequences, is absolutely no reason to keep doing it and making the consequences worse
Which is why we need to stop being an *obstacle* in climate treaties, and negotiate something fair to everyone. Which is why we need to put forth the (proportionally tiny) amounts of money needed to nurture the technology to get the costs down so that they become the cheapest tech. Which is why we should support international trade agreements which factor into account the environmental consequences of product manufacture (which, BTW, would boost domestic industry).
FYI: even these developing nations are taking pretty major stands against climate change. China is building the world's biggest wind farm, the world's biggest solar plant, building a huge electric train network, has started instituting bans in a number of major cities against gas guzzlers, and so on. This is everyone's problem. Even Saudi Arabia is going big on solar.
We're talking about things like 2 cent feed-in tarrifs and having coal plants actually pay for the health consequences of their non-carbon emissions. It's absurd that you act like such things are going to bankrupt the global economy or that they're "doubling energy costs" Nobody is talking about doubling energy costs (at least nobody seriously involved in the debate here). I refer you to the IPCC AR4 analysis of the economic costs of proposed mitigation strategies.
What's been done is more or less sealed. What we haven't yet done is not. Most effects are closer to exponential than linear.
Please tell me what data you find yourself unable to get.
Please tell me what data you're looking at.
[[citation needed]]
Okay. Mitigate ocean acidification. Mitigate the polar shift and increasing kinks to the jet stream (read: severe weather, especially during winter). Mitigate the loss of 1-2m vertical from *all* our coastline this century. Mitigate an additional 1-2m added to all storm surges. Mitigate the loss of 30% of Florida within a couple centuries. Mitigate overseas places with worse problems and a fraction as much GDP to deal with them. Mitigate seasonal loss of water in desert southwest areas that are already using more water than they can sustain.
Mitigation is a far more difficult, if not impossible task, when you actually get down to it.
Nobody is asking that mitigation capacity be removed, anyway. Seriously, how much money do you think is being talked about here? We're talking about things like a couple cents per kWh for feed-in tarrifs on a temporary basis until cost reductions -- which have been ongoing, and will likely continue for quite some time -- no longer call for them. We're calling for things like making coal plants actually pay for the health costs of their pollution. We're calling for tens of billions per year -- a tenth of a percent of our economy -- to be put into research. We're talking about a long term energy strategy. Things of that nature, all of which will have huge secondary benefits down the line ("status quo" does not create technology revolutions). But we're asking that they start *now* and *definitively*, because delay and uncertainty are killers in the market.
Why should I do it when the DOE already has (for cars; lawnmowers makes for an even more stark comparison, due to their lower gasoline efficiency)? Plus, our grid gets cleaner every year, while oil gets dirtier every year.
1) I prefer corded lawnmowers (they make both). My view is, you wouldn't use a battery powered vacuum cleaner, would you? But to each their own.
2) The whole battery issue is pure, unadulterated garbage. *Every* part of *every* device, whether gasoline or electric, has a cost associated with it. Anyone who just chooses the battery to obsess over is deliberately distorting the issue. Batteries are not magical devices which for some mystical reason have exponentially more carbon costs associated with their creation and usage.
Let's look at different types of batteries. The three main types you'll see these days are lead-acid (they suck, but they're cheap) and li-ion. Lead-acid is a very simple ore to produce. It doesn't need to be smelted (smelting being the high-carbon process used to produce steel); it's simply sintered (heated in conjunction with various fluxing agents). Beyond that, lead acid batteries are *the* most widely recycled item on the planet. Almost every single lead-acid battery in this country is recycled, which further saves on energy costs. So the comparison of a lead-acid battery to an internal combustion engine, as far as *car
1) What is wrong with hydrocarbon-driven peaking, where needed? The point is not ideological purity; the point is getting our carbon emissions down. And it that equals geographically-distributed wind + solar + NG where needed for peaking..... so? What matters is that the coal comes off the grid and most of the energy comes from low or no carbon sources.
2) Conventional hydro is more than sufficient for peaking in the west, although in some places you need to uprate plants (but that's pretty cheap).
3) Storage can also act as peaking. At present, the most cost effective method is pumped hydro, which only adds 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour. It's so cheap that it's already extensively used in China -- not to balance out supply variation, but to balance out *demand* variation. I would not be surprised at all to find direct electrochemical or electrostatic energy storage dominating in 2-3 decades.
4) EGS/SWEGS can also act as peaking, or baseload.
But I'll jot down a note that you'd much rather make fun of your ideological foes with straw men than sit down to a serious debate.
How is that reasonable? Yes, we *could* get struck by a meteor. But the odds of that happening any time soon are extremely small. Meteors big enough to cause large local or global extinction events are on the order of once every several tens of millions of years. Equivalently devastating volcanic disasters are more common, but not *that* much more common. Stars are generally amazingly stable until they near their death (I'd be happy to dig up some papers for you on this if you'd like), with interdecadal variations in output typically being a fraction of a percent and larger variations occuring only over extremely long timescales. There are plenty of other sources of climate forcing as well, mind you -- a notable one you left out is Milankovitch cycles, based on the procession of the Earth, which is the initial driver of ice age cycles (although they're amplified significantly by atmospheric feedbacks). But we're talking about a bunch of effects that are either very slow or very unlikely, versus something that 97-98% of active publishing climate scientists say is happening now. So how exactly are those situations comparable?
If starving kids is a tangible and heartbreaking issue for you, then why do you care not about amplifying the rates of both severe drought events and severe flooding events? Severe flooding events is an especially significant concern, and there's already a solid, peer-reviewed linkage to our current rate of flooding events (global atmospheric water vapor has increased in line with predictions, the rate of major rain events has increased in line with the increased water vapor ratio, and of course major rain events are the cause of the majority of flood events).
BTW, the kids shouldn't be neurotic about daddy's lawnmower so much because it's emitting CO2, but because those things have almost no pollution controls and the exhaust they emit is horrible for the mower's health. Unless you like breathing carcinogens and neurotoxins...
Ever used an electric lawnmower? I love mine, and even if bizarro world happened, all science was inverted, and gasoline was shown to nurture unicorns while electricity made baby Jesus cry, I'd have trouble giving it up. It's quieter, lighter, stops and starts almost instantly just by holding down a lever, doesn't coat my lawn in soot, doesn't make me breathe in exhaust, I never have to mess with oil, etc, and it cuts better than my old gas mower.
Who is proposing that we not have a reliable power grid? Do you know what a peaking plant is?
SWEGS seems far more likely than that. 1MW per unit (~800 homes). Renewable. Baseload. No proliferation, safety, or environmental risks. Use virtually anywhere in the world.
Precisely. Anthropogenic global warming cannot exist if the average voter doesn't believe in it. ~97-98% of active, publishing climate scientists be damned; they're not a majority of the electorate.
It's just like how God exists if you can't fathom the concept of living in a universe without a God.
(Conditional on them growing up to have the sort of dark sense of humor to appreciate that sort of thing, of course ;) )
Bravo. Bravo. :) Right after the also excellent, "What do you mean, 'They blew it up'? Who's "They"?!"
I heard a rumor that the Falcon 9 hires illegal immigrants to choke it in the shower.
You can get vaginal reconstruction to replace the upper vagina for intercourse.
Banning fertility treatments because of hypothesized (not actual) genetic reasons is *also* eugenics.
Sounds like you and I are in the same boat here. The only difference is I'm actually taking steps -- however long of shots they are -- to become a candidate in such experimental procedures. I actually spoke to someone from this university a year or so ago (they referred me to some places in the US who are doing research).
It's hard for someone who doesn't want to have children and/or is fertile to understand what it's like. The current plan is for my partner -- if she can stay off her anticonvulsants and get off her antidepressants -- to carry a child for us (some major "if"s). But just knowing how I felt just having my sister pregnant in the same town, I know that'll be really hard for me. The only thing that makes me happy about it is knowing that we'll end up with a child.
You made me smile :)
If I ever have the chance to have such a procedure, I'll definitely tell that to my child.
Artificial uteruses do not exist, and it's not the same bonding experience.
At least no matter what, I'll be able to help breastfeed. Domperidone is an amazing drug.
The upper vagina, at least. The upper vagina and the uterus form from the Müllerian duct. The lower vagina forms from the urogenital sinus. The boundary between the two is the hymen.
Trivia: In men, the Mullerian duct degenerates to a tiny structure attached to the prostate and wrapped around the urethra, called the "prostatic utricle". It contracts during orgasm just the same as in women.
So you're not for forcing infertility on people via the water supply, but you are for forcing infertility on people by banning medical procedures used to fix them, correct? Hmm, surely there's a reason for this dischordance. Is your reasoning because of cost-effectiveness? It's certainly be a lot more cost-effective of a way to reduce the population to do so by injecting birth control into the water supply.
Excuse me, but where did I make an assessment of their gender?
And then why are one in every 5,000 women born without a uterus, then?
FYI: If you just let children with genetic diseases die, would not the same apply there?
That's the problem with the logic presented: the argument that we should be just letting genetic diseases die argues that we should let children with genetic diseases die, but *not* ban treatment for women who don't have a uterus.