You should have seen how badly the member website for Microsoft Certified Professionals crapped out when I tried getting in. The error message actually displayed a Guid.
Wow, Microsoft help is already terrible enough. MSDN right now is such a mishmash, that, when I took the survey to improve MSDN, the survey itself crashed. Like, I don't even bother with Microsoft.com anymore, or msdn.microsoft.com. They broke F1 == Help in Visual Studio... what more incompetence do you need?
It might be about time we found a way for the first world to invest in the third world, the reality of our lifestyle is that we have plundered a significant amount of resources from those countries so whilst it may only be a stop-gap activity addressing deforestation (a carbon sponge - so to speak) maybe what we need to do to address secondary issues that aren't directly manifest from carbon emission and tertiary issues that come from those. For example, in Australia, the Koori's (our aboriginals) are paid to manage the bush for carbon credit's. The irony is that they burn it - something they have been doing for 10's of thousands of years.
Alright. As an American I'm a little less generous about transferring money to the third world because we are seeing a lot of the negative effects of free trade. The USA is already transferring over a trillion dollars a year to the developing world thanks to its probably unhealthy appetite for consumer goods. Every Walmart in the USA seems to exist to construct another skyscraper in China or tech center in India. Manufacturing is very large in the American psyche - we're a hands on people and losing that is sapping our national confidence. I'm writing this, actually, as a Neocon Bush Republican, and I think that, if we in the USA are coming down against free trade and third world reconstruction, then, its pretty reasonable to assume that a larger world engagement for the USA is politically dead. One look at all of the candidates will affirm this. Democrats are all talking up "Fair Trade", and Republicans are largely silent.
Ok so maybe it's not THE answer for your region, what about something that is appropriate for your area, like paying for cabling infrastructure where geothermal is available, or solar that responds better to the wavelengths of light in your region. I don't know, but where I am it's stinking hot and sunny, what if we made a surplus and your region traded our region for infrastructure investment - then we both win. Nuclear power doesn't live up to the hype because you only just get over half the Full Power Years over the life of the reactor due to engineering issues.
Well, I think coal really sucks. On the other hand, I'm still loving my nukes. However, I think a realistic picture is that where we have one or two sources of energy now, we're going to have many in the future. There's not going to be just solar (in various flavors) or just electric cars or just biodiesel or just nuclear or just ethanol. There's going to be a wide range of solutions and I think that's really key to understanding how the world energy market is going to shape up. It's like the transition away from freon - Dupont once took out full page ads saying that there is no single replacement chemical.
Well the substantial difference is we are developing our capability to extract energy directly from the environment as opposed to extracting it from the past. Oil and coal came from a time where there was significantly more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plant growth reflected that. If we are dumb enough as a species to think that there are no consequences for our activities and we can't adapt, well we probably aren't the fittest to survive
Well, humanity will survive. Humanity did make it through a couple of ice ages, the black death, and so forth, so, this climate change is really a drop in the bucket compared to what our species has been through. Now, a few billion people might die off and we may have a bunch of wars and revert to a feudalistic paternalistic society, but Darwin was evidentally a chauvinist - the human population growth rate increases as women's rights decrease. The real danger here, is not so much changing climate, but, planting in the dwindling resource message so much that people might actually just choose war, knowing that, if they kill a bunch of other people, there will be more stuff for them.
I think we are smart enough, but right now it's X/Y generation thinking versus establishment think
Implementation of carbon credits will force the coal (and perhaps oil) industries to deal with their externalities. In the production of coal power the coal industry doesn't have to account for dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. I think all companies should deal with their externalities, but getting the carbon emitters to deal with CO2 would be a good start. The scam component is that whilst carbon credits manage CO2 they don't manage CFC's...
There's other ways to get that without a transfer tax to enrich the third world at the expense of the first. If you want to manage CO2 emissions, then, just cap them in the same way we cap sulfur in diesel. There's no need for this trading system. There's been study after study that says dollar per dollar, you are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get very little greenhouse reduction. I mean, to put it bluntly - if we can have a law that says crack is illegal and you have to jump through some legal hoops to get cold medicine, than, you can classify emissions the same way.
What's so hard about the simple, brute force approach?
I just have to point out here that the reason to manage C02 is to manage greenhouse gases. The nuclear industry is a heavy greenhouse gas emitter. CO2 and CFC's are emitted in the enrichment phase. In America the nuclear industry is the number 1 emitter of CFC's into the atmosphere and CFC's are 20,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2
Well, the reason is, you aren't doing enrichment with nuclear power to run the centrifuges / gasification (whichever process you have), and, you are doing way too much enrichment. If we reprocessed used fuel rods, we'd have a lot less to do.
And, in any case, you have to do total sequestration and atmospheric management anyway. Any climate solution on the table that doesn't have sequestration in it isn't serious, and that's ultimately where government has to spend the money. After all, even if humanity does get its own emissions into some absurd notion of a "balance", which, at least we hopefully define the ideal mix as that which benefits the USA the most, we're still going to be hosed if some magma uplift suddenly melts a bunch of hydrates in the ocean, or we suddenly discover a new kind of soil bacteria has emerged. Paying a bunch of people in Butfustan to not use gasoline or to grow lots of trees isn't going to cut it. It's really a job for the Army Corp of Engineers. If the earth is a submarine or a spaceship, we have to treat it like one, and manage everything.
And honestly, would you really trust the CO2 sequestration of the third world anyway?
The reason they do attract funding is because the economics of solar look good without it, but key technological issues can't be addresses without the heavy lifting government subsidies can provide, which is why solar doesn't live up to the hype
Solar doesn't live up to the hype in the northeast because it is too cloudy. You would see panels rated at say, 10kw, peak out at 5kw, and average maybe somewhere between 1 and.1 kw. This isn't a function of the efficiency of the panel - that's already factored into its rating. It's a function of how much light falls on it. There just isn't enough, for the kind of buildings that we build. As you said it yourself, when we burn fossil fuels, we burn a lot of stored energy, and that's energy that took millions of years to store.
The thing that worries me the most, though, is that, we don't seem to be asking if solar power is not trading one tipping point for another. The concern about global warming is not the total amount of greenhouse gases produced by man versus the total amount of greenhouse gasses on the earth - it's actually a pretty small percentage. It's that, we've kicked a system into a new state and have no idea what the feedback effects are. In that sense, solar and geothermal and other methods of power collection that grab it from the climate seem to be just introducing new problems. I mean, s
AS a working fluid in submarine nuclear reactors. I thought that the whole problem was, that when the system stopped, well, you would have just a big hunk of salt. SO, you couldn't ever really turn it off, or you would have to buy a new reactor.
Sounds like an awesome book
on
Linux Firewalls
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm completely clueless about how Linux firewalls work. Is this suitable for noobies or is there an O'Reilly title out there for me?
You don't even believe in global warming, you hypocrite! You put down environmentalists left and right, yet here you trot out vague environmental threats to justify your position. I'm not an engineer either, but I understand far more about these things than you do.
Actually, now you are guilty of the crime of over simplification. I believe that it doesn't matter whether or not CO2 is causing the planet to warm or not warm, but that, we do have to manage the level. We already manage the water levels of lakes and rivers, the fertilizer level in soils, and it only seems silly to not do that with the atmosphere.
Where I differ with environmentalists is in outlook. CO2 transfer credits, I believe, are a scam that won't accomplish anything. If you want to really manage CO2, then, we need to reduce emissions, and that means a massive federal nuclear power plant scheme, putting out a coal mine fire in China (do google that one, its quite interesting), and probably switch over everyone to electric cars of some kind, and also, we need to have active sequestration. I'm not against solar power per se, but, in the solar projects I've been with, (I write monitoring software), it just doesn't live up to its hype in the northeastern USA.
You don't think anyone even thought about how much water this would take? That's only like the most obvious question to ask
Well, obviously the scientists in Norway that built the road mapped it out. However, the idiot that read the article about a success in Norway and posted it in slashdot obviously didn't think about that in the context of the USA. And why should he or she? They only post hypy stuff like that to get us to argue about it, so they can get more money. It worked.
I've figured you out. There is a reason you won't let an argument die. There's a reason you post idiotic trash
Actually, I'm just genuinely smarter than everyone else, and, I'm only trying to save you from yourselves!
The only reason you do it is to try to make yourself look smart, but that only works at places like digg where the audience are idiots too. Here, people see shit like that and they laugh at you.
I don't really care about "here". I'm not writing to persuade the unpersuadable - everyone here thinks they are a genius and they yell past each other more than communicate. I'm writing to appeal to a right wing audience for a political campaign in the future. If I have a good track record of battling the liberals online, then, I get good political points from them. It doesn't matter if I win.
And, in that vein, let's ask some harder questions about this, since you've thought it through. Let's do it one state, say, Delaware.
a) Where exactly are you going to do this, because the major interstate, I95, is an overpass, where all the buildings are in Wilmington.
b) How far away can a building be from the road to get some heat benefit?
c) Where's the electricity coming from for the pumps.
d) How much water and what kind are going into the ground. Do you have computer models that accurately predict what might happen to the acquifer? Will this impact the Chesapeake or the Delaware River? Or even the Christina River?
Barney it up to 10,000 feet. The whole point of your plan is that, all you smart people screwed up the atmosphere with the last energy project(s), and now you want us dumb people to let you use the ground instead for a new energy project. We don't even know what's going on in the atmosphere, and now you are going to make the rash claim that underground has no impact?
The proposal is so ridiculous, that the one who is absurd is you for even suggesting that we build such a monster.
I love how you say my arguments are unconvincing. Which ones? You refute nothing I've said. You have no idea of the scales involved. You are not an engineer. You are not trained in economics, nor in civil planning. You show your ignorance in everything you write. You make assumptions and treat them like they are self evidently true.
Let's see. Every engineer, civil planner and economist said that it was ok to build massive coal fired plants, give everyone a car, and pave over a bunch of the planet with superhighways. As a result, we've had rampant lead contamination, particulate emissions, and now global warming. We the people listened to you prop yourself up like Gods in order for you to build your fancy stuff, and endured as you called us idiots for merely suggesting the utmost in caution, and the result was an entirely screwed up planet because of YOUR ARROGANCE. Having completely wrecked the earth's atmosphere, you now want me to trust with you the water, using really, the same arguments. "We're so smart", you say. But, I'm looking at your track record, and you really aren't. Tell me engineer, what's the CO2 content in Hawaii, this year, from all of these wonders you built.
Fourth, that's not the point. We can easily use runoff from the roads, which is already contaminated and unfit for other uses. We can continue to use this source to replace any losses, and again, you have no idea of the magnitude.
You just spout words without understanding or any attempt at honest communication, just to try to sway people to your beliefs. It's disgusting to watch, like a retarded chimp flinging poo at passers by.
The arguments you've made are unconvincing. I'm sorry. I'd rather have a million people call me stupid than be just another fanboi. In the end, I am completely right.
The GP would have us believe that we can take a solution that works for the tiny country of Norway and do it to the entire United States. That's absurd. Really, where are you going to get the water in the west? Hint - its a desert.
But even in the Northeast US, I don't think this one has been thought through. First we go from getting a lot of water from existing sources, and now, we're talking about collecting rainwater. That's all fine, but I thought we needed that rainwater to go back into the ground and replenish acquifers. Oh, and by the way, the original article has them pumping water into the ground to manage its temperature. They put water into the ground in Ohio already and they've found that there's environmental consequences of doing that as well - it's one of the reasons why you don't see geothermal everywhere.
But think about it, again, from a common sense level. All we're really doing is talking about exchanging the exploitation of one resource, for another, and I just don't think the implications have been thought through at all.
I'm certainly no environmentalist, and in fact, I think most of it is crap, but I'd certainly be proud to stand with them and block any proposal to turn every American highway into a water exchange heat pump until the proposals for doing so have actually been thoroughly studied, piloted in different geographic areas, and really, really understood. What you people are advocating is the kind of "let's just get 'er done" madness that screwed the world up to begin with. Call me stupid as much as you want, but I'm not hopping on board that train.
Interestingly, not one point you made had any relation to freedoms - only to the circuses used to conceal the theft of those freedoms from the populace. You're right, a sufficiently entertained populace won't care about freedoms very much, and that's exactly the problem. Complacency
That's absurd. Having physical posessions is one of the highest forms of freedom you can have. It says that you are able to manipulate the universe around you in ways that you see fit. In the USA, a citizen can travel wherever he or she wants, own just about anything he or she sees, say whatever he or she wants... really, the issue is, there's enough freedom for most people right now that the state doesn't affect them all that much. If you want to talk about where freedoms are lost, most people will tend to identify with the right wing because left wing causes tend to impact a wider range of people - taxes, environmental compliance, desegregation, and so on. And, the left, conversely, would point out that the poor in this country, despite having far more wealth in absolute terms than most others on the planet, are less free because they simply can't do certain things. Like a poor person isn't going to be able to fly around too much, buy property, and so on.
Prosperity and freedom are not the same thing
No they are not, but usually, prosperity implies more freedom because prosperity means some wealth, and wealth means power. Freedom is only the right of individuals to have their own power.
But I guess the question is, what is it that you are not allowed to do in the USA, that you would like to do. I would like to be able to fly model rockets without a bunch of FAA crap.
So let them be stupid. It's not worth fighting about. Let one of its neighbors benefit greatly from OLPC and start reaping some other benefits from it that Nigeria pissed all over
I think Nigeria might in some ways be better off, by developing their own indigenous computing industry. Look at what the Chinese are doing. They basically are using protectionism, gradually decreasing, to build up their own indigenous manufacturing, and it worked.
ork and money went into creating Unicode alone, just one tiny component/aspect of such a system? It's mammoth, and all free to use, and yet when last did you hear one "thank you"
And, why does Nigeria need Unicode, any more than most Americans need something more than ASCII.
Basically, the idea of OLPC is that we'll just flood Africa with a bunch of practically free notebooks using massive economies of scale.
When you do that, you basically destroy any chance of a tech industry emerging in Africa, because, there's not going to be any indigenous computer manufacturing. It's always fun to look at free trade and say, geez, look at what the third world is doing to the USA, but, sometimes, you have to look the other way around.
Most of us are born into a world where overwhelmingly concentrated government power has ruled our entire lives, and we find it difficult if not impossible to imagine a world without it.
No, the reality is that we are so damned free that we don't even realize it. We are so rich, we don't even realize how much of what we have. Really, a look at what people are buying in media should tell you everything about the state of mind of the American people. Sure, if you ask any American what's going on in the world, they'll say the economy sucks, but, the reality is, most Americans have food, a place to live, some way to get intoxicated, music to listen to, and probably at least one car. So, sucks is a relative thing any more. The embarrassing truth about the media obsession with the likes of Britney Spears, is that America is so damned rich that Britney really is all most people have to worry about. Sure, the sky may fall in any of ten different ways, but America is a country with a deeply religious heritage in a faith where the sky has been about to fall for two thousand years, but hasn't. Just because scientists have now joined the chorus of religious nuts and homeless people in telling we Yankees that the end is nigh doesn't make it any more believable.
(which it isn't, as you're numbers assume 100% increase or more each year)
No, my numbers factor in annual maintenance costs. You can't just look at the cost of a hard drive. You have to look at the annual cost of getting a service of storage in $/GB. I chose an online storage provider to see the costs, and used their largest bulk rate for enterprise level storage services. I would expect that businesses will actually pay even more than this, as, they won't have the economies of scale to match what a storage provider can do. However, the existence of businesses charging a certain rate for a storage service is perhaps the best idea of its genuine cost.
Second, your numbers assume that there are no offsetting benefits, which again isn't accurate.
It's very accurate, particularly, since you have not given any yourself!
Third, your definition of welfare is incorrect. I agree that storing much of this email is probably a waste of time and money, but that doesn't make it "welfare".
Welfare is transfer payments from a productive end to an unproductive end. Therefor, mandating email storage is as much welfare as a railroad being required to pay to have a fireman (guy that shovels coal), on a diesel engine.
Yes, the construction costs will be high, but that's what a lifecycle cost analysis is for.
Sometimes common sense should apply and there's none in this plan.
a) Huge capital costs for construction. You need new asphalt for all the replacement roadways, and THEN, you need all of the materials for whatever you are carrying the water in. Then you have to transport it to whoever is going to use this heat.
b) Bad allocation of resources. One of the most pressing needs in any part of the world, even the United States, is for fresh water. So, you are going to tell everyone that you are going to divert millions of gallons of water that could be used for drinking and irrigation, to carrying heat. There's going to be annual losses and they are going to be massive.
We don't have a complete enough picture of the effects of data storage requirements. First, they may have some economic benefits. Second, it seems unlikely that the costs are so massive that they have any serious impact on bottom-line product development. Third, welfare would imply that there was no productive benefit caused by these "computer people", which we know is untrue
Assuming a cost of $2 per gigabyte year, based on a rough quote from An online storage service, then, we're really talking about is a sunk cost of at least 55 billion dollars a year to store this data, and to what productive end? You are talking about spending 50 billion dollars, a year, or, to put it another way, a trillion dollars over 20 years, to store a bunch of old emails, solely because it might be worth something. Truth be told, the actual cost of this would probably be more like around 100 billion a year, if not more, because you are going to need a lot of services to ensure that the data is properly searchable, has established program practices and audit trails, and so forth. So, we're basically talking about as much as we're spending on the War in Iraq, just to keep junk email around. I'm not seeing the utility. This is welfare, pure and simple, a ton of money for no benefit.
The single biggest reason that steam locomotives lost out to diesels was because of the added cost of handling all of the water to boil. So, if we're going to run water under every road in the USA, forgetting for a moment that it would cost a ton of money and accomplish little in return, we may as well throw up a few water towers too for the old steam locomotives.
How do you figure that storage needs driving the increase in disk capacities and creating jobs is "a huge drain on the economy"?
We wouldn't need to store the data except for government intervention. So, instead of companies investing in their actual products, such as making better cars and airplanes, they are investing in something that adds no value to the product whatsover. The result is a transferrance of wealth to computer people but without any consumer benefit. In other words, its welfare for computer people.
So now, SOX and new discovery rules have created welfare for programmers. What value is all of this e-mail? The bulk of it is worthless and the cost of this is a huge drain on the economy. How many disk drives does it take to store 27 Ebs, and how many people will it take to manage it all?
ng of a misnomer, then, given the presence of the word 'able' in 'inalienable.' But there you go. But you're fundamentally correct; the rights we have essentially only boil down to the ones we're willing to defend, and if my observations of most Americans is correct, they wouldn't defend ANY ONE of their rights if someone shoved them in a pit for the rest of their lives.
Well, fortunately, your observations are not correct. Americans defend their right to freedom of expression, freedom of religion, right to keep and bear arms, right to private property and right to do whatever they want with that property.
These are completely uncorrelated psychological conditions...psychologists and sociologists have proven this.
What else could they prove? There's too much poliics in such statements to do any meaningful science on the topic. Everything is about aligning human knowledge to the star trek vision. Hell, we take "All Men are Created Equal" as a statement of faith, but you can't prove that.
Slashdot Mirror
I started smoking when I was old enough to know better, and quitting is absolutely brutal.
You should have seen how badly the member website for Microsoft Certified Professionals crapped out when I tried getting in. The error message actually displayed a Guid.
That's just too funny.
Wow, Microsoft help is already terrible enough. MSDN right now is such a mishmash, that, when I took the survey to improve MSDN, the survey itself crashed. Like, I don't even bother with Microsoft.com anymore, or msdn.microsoft.com. They broke F1 == Help in Visual Studio... what more incompetence do you need?
It might be about time we found a way for the first world to invest in the third world, the reality of our lifestyle is that we have plundered a significant amount of resources from those countries so whilst it may only be a stop-gap activity addressing deforestation (a carbon sponge - so to speak) maybe what we need to do to address secondary issues that aren't directly manifest from carbon emission and tertiary issues that come from those. For example, in Australia, the Koori's (our aboriginals) are paid to manage the bush for carbon credit's. The irony is that they burn it - something they have been doing for 10's of thousands of years.
Alright. As an American I'm a little less generous about transferring money to the third world because we are seeing a lot of the negative effects of free trade. The USA is already transferring over a trillion dollars a year to the developing world thanks to its probably unhealthy appetite for consumer goods. Every Walmart in the USA seems to exist to construct another skyscraper in China or tech center in India. Manufacturing is very large in the American psyche - we're a hands on people and losing that is sapping our national confidence. I'm writing this, actually, as a Neocon Bush Republican, and I think that, if we in the USA are coming down against free trade and third world reconstruction, then, its pretty reasonable to assume that a larger world engagement for the USA is politically dead. One look at all of the candidates will affirm this. Democrats are all talking up "Fair Trade", and Republicans are largely silent.
Ok so maybe it's not THE answer for your region, what about something that is appropriate for your area, like paying for cabling infrastructure where geothermal is available, or solar that responds better to the wavelengths of light in your region. I don't know, but where I am it's stinking hot and sunny, what if we made a surplus and your region traded our region for infrastructure investment - then we both win. Nuclear power doesn't live up to the hype because you only just get over half the Full Power Years over the life of the reactor due to engineering issues.
Well, I think coal really sucks. On the other hand, I'm still loving my nukes. However, I think a realistic picture is that where we have one or two sources of energy now, we're going to have many in the future. There's not going to be just solar (in various flavors) or just electric cars or just biodiesel or just nuclear or just ethanol. There's going to be a wide range of solutions and I think that's really key to understanding how the world energy market is going to shape up. It's like the transition away from freon - Dupont once took out full page ads saying that there is no single replacement chemical.
Well the substantial difference is we are developing our capability to extract energy directly from the environment as opposed to extracting it from the past. Oil and coal came from a time where there was significantly more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plant growth reflected that. If we are dumb enough as a species to think that there are no consequences for our activities and we can't adapt, well we probably aren't the fittest to survive
Well, humanity will survive. Humanity did make it through a couple of ice ages, the black death, and so forth, so, this climate change is really a drop in the bucket compared to what our species has been through. Now, a few billion people might die off and we may have a bunch of wars and revert to a feudalistic paternalistic society, but Darwin was evidentally a chauvinist - the human population growth rate increases as women's rights decrease. The real danger here, is not so much changing climate, but, planting in the dwindling resource message so much that people might actually just choose war, knowing that, if they kill a bunch of other people, there will be more stuff for them.
I think we are smart enough, but right now it's X/Y generation thinking versus establishment think
Implementation of carbon credits will force the coal (and perhaps oil) industries to deal with their externalities. In the production of coal power the coal industry doesn't have to account for dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. I think all companies should deal with their externalities, but getting the carbon emitters to deal with CO2 would be a good start. The scam component is that whilst carbon credits manage CO2 they don't manage CFC's...
.1 kw. This isn't a function of the efficiency of the panel - that's already factored into its rating. It's a function of how much light falls on it. There just isn't enough, for the kind of buildings that we build. As you said it yourself, when we burn fossil fuels, we burn a lot of stored energy, and that's energy that took millions of years to store.
There's other ways to get that without a transfer tax to enrich the third world at the expense of the first. If you want to manage CO2 emissions, then, just cap them in the same way we cap sulfur in diesel. There's no need for this trading system. There's been study after study that says dollar per dollar, you are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get very little greenhouse reduction. I mean, to put it bluntly - if we can have a law that says crack is illegal and you have to jump through some legal hoops to get cold medicine, than, you can classify emissions the same way.
What's so hard about the simple, brute force approach?
I just have to point out here that the reason to manage C02 is to manage greenhouse gases. The nuclear industry is a heavy greenhouse gas emitter. CO2 and CFC's are emitted in the enrichment phase. In America the nuclear industry is the number 1 emitter of CFC's into the atmosphere and CFC's are 20,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2
Well, the reason is, you aren't doing enrichment with nuclear power to run the centrifuges / gasification (whichever process you have), and, you are doing way too much enrichment. If we reprocessed used fuel rods, we'd have a lot less to do.
And, in any case, you have to do total sequestration and atmospheric management anyway. Any climate solution on the table that doesn't have sequestration in it isn't serious, and that's ultimately where government has to spend the money. After all, even if humanity does get its own emissions into some absurd notion of a "balance", which, at least we hopefully define the ideal mix as that which benefits the USA the most, we're still going to be hosed if some magma uplift suddenly melts a bunch of hydrates in the ocean, or we suddenly discover a new kind of soil bacteria has emerged. Paying a bunch of people in Butfustan to not use gasoline or to grow lots of trees isn't going to cut it. It's really a job for the Army Corp of Engineers. If the earth is a submarine or a spaceship, we have to treat it like one, and manage everything.
And honestly, would you really trust the CO2 sequestration of the third world anyway?
The reason they do attract funding is because the economics of solar look good without it, but key technological issues can't be addresses without the heavy lifting government subsidies can provide, which is why solar doesn't live up to the hype
Solar doesn't live up to the hype in the northeast because it is too cloudy. You would see panels rated at say, 10kw, peak out at 5kw, and average maybe somewhere between 1 and
The thing that worries me the most, though, is that, we don't seem to be asking if solar power is not trading one tipping point for another. The concern about global warming is not the total amount of greenhouse gases produced by man versus the total amount of greenhouse gasses on the earth - it's actually a pretty small percentage. It's that, we've kicked a system into a new state and have no idea what the feedback effects are. In that sense, solar and geothermal and other methods of power collection that grab it from the climate seem to be just introducing new problems. I mean, s
AS a working fluid in submarine nuclear reactors. I thought that the whole problem was, that when the system stopped, well, you would have just a big hunk of salt. SO, you couldn't ever really turn it off, or you would have to buy a new reactor.
I'm completely clueless about how Linux firewalls work. Is this suitable for noobies or is there an O'Reilly title out there for me?
Would be the easiest way to make a few billion bucks that I've ever heard of.
You don't even believe in global warming, you hypocrite! You put down environmentalists left and right, yet here you trot out vague environmental threats to justify your position. I'm not an engineer either, but I understand far more about these things than you do.
Actually, now you are guilty of the crime of over simplification. I believe that it doesn't matter whether or not CO2 is causing the planet to warm or not warm, but that, we do have to manage the level. We already manage the water levels of lakes and rivers, the fertilizer level in soils, and it only seems silly to not do that with the atmosphere.
Where I differ with environmentalists is in outlook. CO2 transfer credits, I believe, are a scam that won't accomplish anything. If you want to really manage CO2, then, we need to reduce emissions, and that means a massive federal nuclear power plant scheme, putting out a coal mine fire in China (do google that one, its quite interesting), and probably switch over everyone to electric cars of some kind, and also, we need to have active sequestration. I'm not against solar power per se, but, in the solar projects I've been with, (I write monitoring software), it just doesn't live up to its hype in the northeastern USA.
You don't think anyone even thought about how much water this would take? That's only like the most obvious question to ask
Well, obviously the scientists in Norway that built the road mapped it out. However, the idiot that read the article about a success in Norway and posted it in slashdot obviously didn't think about that in the context of the USA. And why should he or she? They only post hypy stuff like that to get us to argue about it, so they can get more money. It worked.
I've figured you out. There is a reason you won't let an argument die. There's a reason you post idiotic trash
Actually, I'm just genuinely smarter than everyone else, and, I'm only trying to save you from yourselves!
The only reason you do it is to try to make yourself look smart, but that only works at places like digg where the audience are idiots too. Here, people see shit like that and they laugh at you.
I don't really care about "here". I'm not writing to persuade the unpersuadable - everyone here thinks they are a genius and they yell past each other more than communicate. I'm writing to appeal to a right wing audience for a political campaign in the future. If I have a good track record of battling the liberals online, then, I get good political points from them. It doesn't matter if I win.
And, in that vein, let's ask some harder questions about this, since you've thought it through. Let's do it one state, say, Delaware.
a) Where exactly are you going to do this, because the major interstate, I95, is an overpass, where all the buildings are in Wilmington.
b) How far away can a building be from the road to get some heat benefit?
c) Where's the electricity coming from for the pumps.
d) How much water and what kind are going into the ground. Do you have computer models that accurately predict what might happen to the acquifer? Will this impact the Chesapeake or the Delaware River? Or even the Christina River?
Barney it up to 10,000 feet. The whole point of your plan is that, all you smart people screwed up the atmosphere with the last energy project(s), and now you want us dumb people to let you use the ground instead for a new energy project. We don't even know what's going on in the atmosphere, and now you are going to make the rash claim that underground has no impact?
The proposal is so ridiculous, that the one who is absurd is you for even suggesting that we build such a monster.
I love how you say my arguments are unconvincing. Which ones? You refute nothing I've said. You have no idea of the scales involved. You are not an engineer. You are not trained in economics, nor in civil planning. You show your ignorance in everything you write. You make assumptions and treat them like they are self evidently true.
Let's see. Every engineer, civil planner and economist said that it was ok to build massive coal fired plants, give everyone a car, and pave over a bunch of the planet with superhighways. As a result, we've had rampant lead contamination, particulate emissions, and now global warming. We the people listened to you prop yourself up like Gods in order for you to build your fancy stuff, and endured as you called us idiots for merely suggesting the utmost in caution, and the result was an entirely screwed up planet because of YOUR ARROGANCE. Having completely wrecked the earth's atmosphere, you now want me to trust with you the water, using really, the same arguments. "We're so smart", you say. But, I'm looking at your track record, and you really aren't. Tell me engineer, what's the CO2 content in Hawaii, this year, from all of these wonders you built.
Defense rests.
Fourth, that's not the point. We can easily use runoff from the roads, which is already contaminated and unfit for other uses. We can continue to use this source to replace any losses, and again, you have no idea of the magnitude.
You just spout words without understanding or any attempt at honest communication, just to try to sway people to your beliefs. It's disgusting to watch, like a retarded chimp flinging poo at passers by.
The arguments you've made are unconvincing. I'm sorry. I'd rather have a million people call me stupid than be just another fanboi. In the end, I am completely right.
The GP would have us believe that we can take a solution that works for the tiny country of Norway and do it to the entire United States. That's absurd. Really, where are you going to get the water in the west? Hint - its a desert.
But even in the Northeast US, I don't think this one has been thought through. First we go from getting a lot of water from existing sources, and now, we're talking about collecting rainwater. That's all fine, but I thought we needed that rainwater to go back into the ground and replenish acquifers. Oh, and by the way, the original article has them pumping water into the ground to manage its temperature. They put water into the ground in Ohio already and they've found that there's environmental consequences of doing that as well - it's one of the reasons why you don't see geothermal everywhere.
But think about it, again, from a common sense level. All we're really doing is talking about exchanging the exploitation of one resource, for another, and I just don't think the implications have been thought through at all.
I'm certainly no environmentalist, and in fact, I think most of it is crap, but I'd certainly be proud to stand with them and block any proposal to turn every American highway into a water exchange heat pump until the proposals for doing so have actually been thoroughly studied, piloted in different geographic areas, and really, really understood. What you people are advocating is the kind of "let's just get 'er done" madness that screwed the world up to begin with. Call me stupid as much as you want, but I'm not hopping on board that train.
Interestingly, not one point you made had any relation to freedoms - only to the circuses used to conceal the theft of those freedoms from the populace. You're right, a sufficiently entertained populace won't care about freedoms very much, and that's exactly the problem. Complacency
That's absurd. Having physical posessions is one of the highest forms of freedom you can have. It says that you are able to manipulate the universe around you in ways that you see fit. In the USA, a citizen can travel wherever he or she wants, own just about anything he or she sees, say whatever he or she wants... really, the issue is, there's enough freedom for most people right now that the state doesn't affect them all that much. If you want to talk about where freedoms are lost, most people will tend to identify with the right wing because left wing causes tend to impact a wider range of people - taxes, environmental compliance, desegregation, and so on. And, the left, conversely, would point out that the poor in this country, despite having far more wealth in absolute terms than most others on the planet, are less free because they simply can't do certain things. Like a poor person isn't going to be able to fly around too much, buy property, and so on.
Prosperity and freedom are not the same thing
No they are not, but usually, prosperity implies more freedom because prosperity means some wealth, and wealth means power. Freedom is only the right of individuals to have their own power.
But I guess the question is, what is it that you are not allowed to do in the USA, that you would like to do. I would like to be able to fly model rockets without a bunch of FAA crap.
So let them be stupid. It's not worth fighting about. Let one of its neighbors benefit greatly from OLPC and start reaping some other benefits from it that Nigeria pissed all over
I think Nigeria might in some ways be better off, by developing their own indigenous computing industry. Look at what the Chinese are doing. They basically are using protectionism, gradually decreasing, to build up their own indigenous manufacturing, and it worked.
ork and money went into creating Unicode alone, just one tiny component/aspect of such a system? It's mammoth, and all free to use, and yet when last did you hear one "thank you"
And, why does Nigeria need Unicode, any more than most Americans need something more than ASCII.
Basically, the idea of OLPC is that we'll just flood Africa with a bunch of practically free notebooks using massive economies of scale.
When you do that, you basically destroy any chance of a tech industry emerging in Africa, because, there's not going to be any indigenous computer manufacturing. It's always fun to look at free trade and say, geez, look at what the third world is doing to the USA, but, sometimes, you have to look the other way around.
Most of us are born into a world where overwhelmingly concentrated government power has ruled our entire lives, and we find it difficult if not impossible to imagine a world without it.
No, the reality is that we are so damned free that we don't even realize it. We are so rich, we don't even realize how much of what we have. Really, a look at what people are buying in media should tell you everything about the state of mind of the American people. Sure, if you ask any American what's going on in the world, they'll say the economy sucks, but, the reality is, most Americans have food, a place to live, some way to get intoxicated, music to listen to, and probably at least one car. So, sucks is a relative thing any more. The embarrassing truth about the media obsession with the likes of Britney Spears, is that America is so damned rich that Britney really is all most people have to worry about. Sure, the sky may fall in any of ten different ways, but America is a country with a deeply religious heritage in a faith where the sky has been about to fall for two thousand years, but hasn't. Just because scientists have now joined the chorus of religious nuts and homeless people in telling we Yankees that the end is nigh doesn't make it any more believable.
(which it isn't, as you're numbers assume 100% increase or more each year)
No, my numbers factor in annual maintenance costs. You can't just look at the cost of a hard drive. You have to look at the annual cost of getting a service of storage in $/GB. I chose an online storage provider to see the costs, and used their largest bulk rate for enterprise level storage services. I would expect that businesses will actually pay even more than this, as, they won't have the economies of scale to match what a storage provider can do. However, the existence of businesses charging a certain rate for a storage service is perhaps the best idea of its genuine cost.
Second, your numbers assume that there are no offsetting benefits, which again isn't accurate.
It's very accurate, particularly, since you have not given any yourself!
Third, your definition of welfare is incorrect. I agree that storing much of this email is probably a waste of time and money, but that doesn't make it "welfare".
Welfare is transfer payments from a productive end to an unproductive end. Therefor, mandating email storage is as much welfare as a railroad being required to pay to have a fireman (guy that shovels coal), on a diesel engine.
Yes, the construction costs will be high, but that's what a lifecycle cost analysis is for.
Sometimes common sense should apply and there's none in this plan.
a) Huge capital costs for construction. You need new asphalt for all the replacement roadways, and THEN, you need all of the materials for whatever you are carrying the water in. Then you have to transport it to whoever is going to use this heat.
b) Bad allocation of resources. One of the most pressing needs in any part of the world, even the United States, is for fresh water. So, you are going to tell everyone that you are going to divert millions of gallons of water that could be used for drinking and irrigation, to carrying heat. There's going to be annual losses and they are going to be massive.
We don't have a complete enough picture of the effects of data storage requirements. First, they may have some economic benefits. Second, it seems unlikely that the costs are so massive that they have any serious impact on bottom-line product development. Third, welfare would imply that there was no productive benefit caused by these "computer people", which we know is untrue
Assuming a cost of $2 per gigabyte year, based on a rough quote from An online storage service, then, we're really talking about is a sunk cost of at least 55 billion dollars a year to store this data, and to what productive end? You are talking about spending 50 billion dollars, a year, or, to put it another way, a trillion dollars over 20 years, to store a bunch of old emails, solely because it might be worth something. Truth be told, the actual cost of this would probably be more like around 100 billion a year, if not more, because you are going to need a lot of services to ensure that the data is properly searchable, has established program practices and audit trails, and so forth. So, we're basically talking about as much as we're spending on the War in Iraq, just to keep junk email around. I'm not seeing the utility. This is welfare, pure and simple, a ton of money for no benefit.
The single biggest reason that steam locomotives lost out to diesels was because of the added cost of handling all of the water to boil. So, if we're going to run water under every road in the USA, forgetting for a moment that it would cost a ton of money and accomplish little in return, we may as well throw up a few water towers too for the old steam locomotives.
How do you figure that storage needs driving the increase in disk capacities and creating jobs is "a huge drain on the economy"?
We wouldn't need to store the data except for government intervention. So, instead of companies investing in their actual products, such as making better cars and airplanes, they are investing in something that adds no value to the product whatsover. The result is a transferrance of wealth to computer people but without any consumer benefit. In other words, its welfare for computer people.
So now, SOX and new discovery rules have created welfare for programmers. What value is all of this e-mail? The bulk of it is worthless and the cost of this is a huge drain on the economy. How many disk drives does it take to store 27 Ebs, and how many people will it take to manage it all?
ng of a misnomer, then, given the presence of the word 'able' in 'inalienable.' But there you go. But you're fundamentally correct; the rights we have essentially only boil down to the ones we're willing to defend, and if my observations of most Americans is correct, they wouldn't defend ANY ONE of their rights if someone shoved them in a pit for the rest of their lives.
Well, fortunately, your observations are not correct. Americans defend their right to freedom of expression, freedom of religion, right to keep and bear arms, right to private property and right to do whatever they want with that property.
These are completely uncorrelated psychological conditions...psychologists and sociologists have proven this.
What else could they prove? There's too much poliics in such statements to do any meaningful science on the topic. Everything is about aligning human knowledge to the star trek vision. Hell, we take "All Men are Created Equal" as a statement of faith, but you can't prove that.