I respectfully submit that you miss the point of the market. The market is the ultimate democratic expression of the people, even more so than the vote. When people vote at the ballot box, if they vote there, they are pledging nothing more than a cross on a piece of paper. But if they vote at the store, they are pledging a certain portion of time that they invested of their life. They worked to achieve that which they vote with. To say that the free hand "chokes" the will of the people is a moral misnomer. When you argue against free markets, really, you are succumbing to your own totalitarianistic desire to impose your view of the world upon people by fiat.
At an abstract level, the idea of energy independence is a good one. I see it right up there with manufacturing independence, technological independence, steel independence, agricultural independence and food independence. On some level, I think that anyone that buys any kind of foreign product is some kind of a traitor, because I grew in the Rust Belt. I pay a little bit more for an American car and put up with the plastic dash because I know that's just the best we can do right now. But should we ban all foreign cars? No I don't. It's undemocratic.
I would rather see it stigmatized to buy a foreign product of any kind in the United States. Perhaps we should view consumers of any foreign product with a certain level of disgust. Perhaps we should culturally encourage the vandalism of foreign cars and other foreign made products. Perhaps we could encourage employing zoning tricks and other rules by local governments to drive out stores that peddle foreign goods.
I don't see a reduction in fossil fuel burning as the answer to atmospheric carbon management. We should probably have some sort of a baseline, and, for strategic reasons, reduce the global temperature and starve out most of our geopolitical rivals by shortening the growing season.
Still, when it comes down to it, there's the possiblity of a massive climate change with the oceans rising, hurricanes more frequent, storms more violent, planet getting warming, and the other, the thrill of driving 0-60 in under 5 seconds. If you ever drove a 2004/2005 Pontiac GTO, you would surely come to the same conclusion as I - the polar bears are going to have to find a new place to live! Maybe when all that land under the glaciers frees up, they can use that to build zoos for them or something.
I actually support most of what Bush has done in terms of a national energy policy, except for one big mistake. We invaded the 2nd largest oil producing nation in the world and gasoline is $2.17 a gallon where I live! What's up with that?
I think the market is being successful, The real problem is, right now there is too much oil and natural gas for alternative schemes to take effect. If I recall, some of the centerpieces of Jimmy Carter's energy schemes were based on technology that simply was not available yet, or technology that was doomed. Carter was clearly a nuclear advocate but after TMI his entire energy strategy was essentially destroyed.
There's plenty of fingers to point at everyone. I like to think the environmental movement is irrationally opposed to nuclear power and that has severely damaged our energy portfolio and crippled efforts to create a fuels infrastructure based more on nuclear produced but liquid stored energy (such as H2 or ethanol or some sort of synthetic fuel).
However, as someone who works in the energy sector, I certainly can accede to your point that the sector stuffed with a bunch of short sighted and lazy moronic politicos more interested in covering their rears for their past mistakes than in making technological advances.
Rocked my world. I loved that Sea Battle game and I wound up extending it. And the old computer magazines, like Compute!, Creative Computing, etc, that, gasp, all actually had -programs- in them.
The argument is not flawed at all. The oil in ANWR is worth nearly a trillion dollars now. The recovery costs are with today's technologies. It's simple math - dollars in versus dollars out. I understand the physics of energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but, the recovery tipping point that you indicate is far, far down the future, otherwise, we would in fact have a lot more windmills now.
As to your second point, oil is a product that can be synthesized. Once getting oil out of the ground becomes untenable, then, there is plenty of coal that can be converted to liquids and that happens profitably around $50/bbl. Indeed, the Chinese are building a massive coal to liquids plant as we speak, and even in the USA, some more adventurish speculators are building smaller coal to liquids plants.
The problem is that the investment community does not believe yet that we have reached peak oil, and are wildly concerned that the moment they invest in alternative or synthetic energies, OPEC will merely turn up the spikot and everyone will take a bath, as was the case in the late 1980s through the 1990s. But if we have reached peak oil - and, I think we both can agree we have, then, alternative energy and coal to liquids are going to be the future of the United States energy picture, well that, and nuclear power.
Oil prices are rising and so the economically recoverable part of ANWR rises along with it. So let's say there is 15 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered for $25 / bbl. I'll certainly give you that Saudi Arabia can pump it out for a buck, but, if oil is $75/bbl, and thus, I get 50 x 15 billion bucks in pure profit. Last time I checked, that's a f--- load of money.
Elk are not worth nearly a trillion dollars. Drill ANWR now.
No, I actually like the C approach, because the devilish detail is where is the buffer. If you are using a memory managed language, fine for most dumb LOB applications, then, the string = string1 + string2 is fine. C# and Java work much the same way. But, if you are doing something performance critical, you have to do the C route. Or C++.
Everyone is like a $1 this or a $1 that, as if $1 are water. If $1 are so cheap, then someone come click on my blog and donate them to me. $1 is expensive! Besides, you figure that we'll all be making $5 an hour by the end of our lives, as wages level out world wide. So, hang onto them Washingtons now!
If you weren't so busy twiddling your uber desktop we wouldn't be sitting here with dumbed down kernels trying to get sound to work as well as Windows 95 did. Let's see you make a kernel that has the gui in it, the sound subsystem in it, and have a real feature rich kernel ala Microsoft. Or, you can make the arguments about simplicity and elegance in your own work and respect that others might make the same in theirs.
90% of the people that use KDE have fallen under the stupid spell that having 20 half-arsed features is better than one feature that is both to the point and works. KDE is like having super hard shoes with a quality hatch at the bottom of the car and Gnome is like having a car with brakes.
In Gnome, when you change your desktop's appearance, it changes immediately. KDE gives you a bazillion options with a preview that is not nearly so effective. This is an enormously difficult problem to solve and Gnome did it, but KDE did not.
Similarly, Gnome's control panel for its desktop is clear and covers the basics. KDE's control panel is an unorganized bunch of slop, a bunch of directors without a script throwing things into a play, and what you see is the nauseum of what you get.
And, do I even have to mention how childish KDE is with their gay "K*" naming convention? Last time I checked, there are far more letters in the Alphabet than K. It makes the whole desktop look, well, stupid. "Konquerer" as a web browser. These guys can't even spell and they are going to "Konquer". Come on.
Losers.
The KDE team should focus on enhancing KDevelop and let the Gnome people handle the user experience.
Usually, if you are borrowing an idea, you would write: "Now our system has XYZ feature that the other guy's have". But, no, what they do is say that they've added this feature, giving the impression that they've invented it.
My shareware app does 64 bit files but that's on Windows and I'm always passing around a LARGE_INTEGER, which is really nothing more than an __int64 with a union for getting at each 32 bit piece.
AMD64 is not just about having 64 bit instructions and registers, its also about having more registers. But, be that as it may, 64 bits is not unreasonable for browsers. If AMD64 Firefox actually worked, then, I would theoretically be able to download files more than 2GB, which includes things like Linux DVD ISOs, assuming they wrote it certain way and made no 32 bit x86 assumptions about int and long and so forth.
Who's bone-headed idea was it to put the future of our elections and our system of government in the hands of an entity who is lazy to make a profit? I mean, if you can't make a voting system worth buying, then, why should even invest our time in you!!!!! Linux is worth paying for and it is a business, regardless of whether it is open source or not.
You guys are out of your mind if you think a man that takes off years of his life to travel to every god forsaken section of first his state and then his country in order to meet people and beg for money can somehow be called an "introvert".
Instead of taxing the fuel with some socialist nonsense, let's cut to the chase and privatize the atmosphere. The world is always complaining that the United States is wrecking the air, so obviously, this means that the United States already owns the atmosphere and can proceed to sell it.
The atmosphere would be broken up into digital parcels, each of which would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. To spur the growth of American jobs, only an American company could be allowed to purchase an air lot. However, companies could sell the lots or break them up and sell them as they would real estate.
To emit or take anything from the atmosphere, you as an individual would need to purchase atmospheric rights. Generally, this would be done at birth so you wouldn't have to worry about it. But, we could do it prior to birth and just forcibly abort any fetus whose mother did not secure breathing rights for at say, 6 months. For the genuinely destitute but still useful people, we might have some sort of an aid program so that the able bodied could breath if they are down on their luck. But the riff raff would be bred out of existence.
Nations that refused to pay breathing rights to the American companies would be exterminated. We would need to develop larger atomic bombs and reconsider 10MT+ weapons, genetically engineered virii, as all would be a legitimate means of dealing with all these third world atmospheric freeloaders.
No, I'm one of those people that simply don't trust world leaders when they say the USA is an enemy. It has nothing to do with America's "master of the world", and it has everything to do with Chirac and others of his ilk blaming America for their own domestic problems.
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I respectfully submit that you miss the point of the market. The market is the ultimate democratic expression of the people, even more so than the vote. When people vote at the ballot box, if they vote there, they are pledging nothing more than a cross on a piece of paper. But if they vote at the store, they are pledging a certain portion of time that they invested of their life. They worked to achieve that which they vote with. To say that the free hand "chokes" the will of the people is a moral misnomer. When you argue against free markets, really, you are succumbing to your own totalitarianistic desire to impose your view of the world upon people by fiat.
At an abstract level, the idea of energy independence is a good one. I see it right up there with manufacturing independence, technological independence, steel independence, agricultural independence and food independence. On some level, I think that anyone that buys any kind of foreign product is some kind of a traitor, because I grew in the Rust Belt. I pay a little bit more for an American car and put up with the plastic dash because I know that's just the best we can do right now. But should we ban all foreign cars? No I don't. It's undemocratic.
I would rather see it stigmatized to buy a foreign product of any kind in the United States. Perhaps we should view consumers of any foreign product with a certain level of disgust. Perhaps we should culturally encourage the vandalism of foreign cars and other foreign made products. Perhaps we could encourage employing zoning tricks and other rules by local governments to drive out stores that peddle foreign goods.
I don't see a reduction in fossil fuel burning as the answer to atmospheric carbon management. We should probably have some sort of a baseline, and, for strategic reasons, reduce the global temperature and starve out most of our geopolitical rivals by shortening the growing season.
Still, when it comes down to it, there's the possiblity of a massive climate change with the oceans rising, hurricanes more frequent, storms more violent, planet getting warming, and the other, the thrill of driving 0-60 in under 5 seconds. If you ever drove a 2004/2005 Pontiac GTO, you would surely come to the same conclusion as I - the polar bears are going to have to find a new place to live! Maybe when all that land under the glaciers frees up, they can use that to build zoos for them or something.
I actually support most of what Bush has done in terms of a national energy policy, except for one big mistake. We invaded the 2nd largest oil producing nation in the world and gasoline is $2.17 a gallon where I live! What's up with that?
I've heard that teflon coating of bullets makes it easier for them to pass through kevlar fibers.
Pick a theme with the colors that you want, what's more simple than that!
I think the market is being successful, The real problem is, right now there is too much oil and natural gas for alternative schemes to take effect. If I recall, some of the centerpieces of Jimmy Carter's energy schemes were based on technology that simply was not available yet, or technology that was doomed. Carter was clearly a nuclear advocate but after TMI his entire energy strategy was essentially destroyed.
There's plenty of fingers to point at everyone. I like to think the environmental movement is irrationally opposed to nuclear power and that has severely damaged our energy portfolio and crippled efforts to create a fuels infrastructure based more on nuclear produced but liquid stored energy (such as H2 or ethanol or some sort of synthetic fuel).
However, as someone who works in the energy sector, I certainly can accede to your point that the sector stuffed with a bunch of short sighted and lazy moronic politicos more interested in covering their rears for their past mistakes than in making technological advances.
And I have z e r o love for Exxon Mobil.
Rocked my world. I loved that Sea Battle game and I wound up extending it. And the old computer magazines, like Compute!, Creative Computing, etc, that, gasp, all actually had -programs- in them.
The argument is not flawed at all. The oil in ANWR is worth nearly a trillion dollars now. The recovery costs are with today's technologies. It's simple math - dollars in versus dollars out. I understand the physics of energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but, the recovery tipping point that you indicate is far, far down the future, otherwise, we would in fact have a lot more windmills now.
As to your second point, oil is a product that can be synthesized. Once getting oil out of the ground becomes untenable, then, there is plenty of coal that can be converted to liquids and that happens profitably around $50/bbl. Indeed, the Chinese are building a massive coal to liquids plant as we speak, and even in the USA, some more adventurish speculators are building smaller coal to liquids plants.
The problem is that the investment community does not believe yet that we have reached peak oil, and are wildly concerned that the moment they invest in alternative or synthetic energies, OPEC will merely turn up the spikot and everyone will take a bath, as was the case in the late 1980s through the 1990s. But if we have reached peak oil - and, I think we both can agree we have, then, alternative energy and coal to liquids are going to be the future of the United States energy picture, well that, and nuclear power.
Oil prices are rising and so the economically recoverable part of ANWR rises along with it. So let's say there is 15 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered for $25 / bbl. I'll certainly give you that Saudi Arabia can pump it out for a buck, but, if oil is $75/bbl, and thus, I get 50 x 15 billion bucks in pure profit. Last time I checked, that's a f--- load of money.
Elk are not worth nearly a trillion dollars. Drill ANWR now.
In Windows 3.5, the graphics subsystem was outside of the kernal, then they moved it in for 4.0, and now, they are undoing that.
No, I actually like the C approach, because the devilish detail is where is the buffer. If you are using a memory managed language, fine for most dumb LOB applications, then, the string = string1 + string2 is fine. C# and Java work much the same way. But, if you are doing something performance critical, you have to do the C route. Or C++.
That's my point exactly.
To really do this right, you would have to, in C, do something like:
char *addstrings( char *src, char *src2 )
{
int l1;
buffer = malloc( (l1 = strlen( src )) + strlen( src2 ) );
strcpy( buffer, src );
strcpy( buffer + l1, src2 );
return buffer;
}
And, you would still have to remember to free buffer.
The knock on C is strings.
sprintf( buffer, "hello %s\n", somevariable );
is less intuitive than
mystring = "hello " + somevariable;
And from there, one can further infer that the knock on C is any arbitrarily complex collection.
Everyone is like a $1 this or a $1 that, as if $1 are water. If $1 are so cheap, then someone come click on my blog and donate them to me. $1 is expensive! Besides, you figure that we'll all be making $5 an hour by the end of our lives, as wages level out world wide. So, hang onto them Washingtons now!
Whereas denigrating something by calling it "gay" is the height of maturity.
Immature, yes. But in the Kase of KDE, it is also Kwite True!
If you weren't so busy twiddling your uber desktop we wouldn't be sitting here with dumbed down kernels trying to get sound to work as well as Windows 95 did. Let's see you make a kernel that has the gui in it, the sound subsystem in it, and have a real feature rich kernel ala Microsoft. Or, you can make the arguments about simplicity and elegance in your own work and respect that others might make the same in theirs.
90% of the people that use KDE have fallen under the stupid spell that having 20 half-arsed features is better than one feature that is both to the point and works. KDE is like having super hard shoes with a quality hatch at the bottom of the car and Gnome is like having a car with brakes.
In Gnome, when you change your desktop's appearance, it changes immediately. KDE gives you a bazillion options with a preview that is not nearly so effective. This is an enormously difficult problem to solve and Gnome did it, but KDE did not.
Similarly, Gnome's control panel for its desktop is clear and covers the basics. KDE's control panel is an unorganized bunch of slop, a bunch of directors without a script throwing things into a play, and what you see is the nauseum of what you get.
And, do I even have to mention how childish KDE is with their gay "K*" naming convention? Last time I checked, there are far more letters in the Alphabet than K. It makes the whole desktop look, well, stupid. "Konquerer" as a web browser. These guys can't even spell and they are going to "Konquer". Come on.
Losers.
The KDE team should focus on enhancing KDevelop and let the Gnome people handle the user experience.
No way dude, it's pounds and stones and tons for me until I die.
Usually, if you are borrowing an idea, you would write: "Now our system has XYZ feature that the other guy's have". But, no, what they do is say that they've added this feature, giving the impression that they've invented it.
My shareware app does 64 bit files but that's on Windows and I'm always passing around a LARGE_INTEGER, which is really nothing more than an __int64 with a union for getting at each 32 bit piece.
AMD64 is not just about having 64 bit instructions and registers, its also about having more registers. But, be that as it may, 64 bits is not unreasonable for browsers. If AMD64 Firefox actually worked, then, I would theoretically be able to download files more than 2GB, which includes things like Linux DVD ISOs, assuming they wrote it certain way and made no 32 bit x86 assumptions about int and long and so forth.
Come on guys, give us 64 bits! Do we dare risk a build from source?
Who's bone-headed idea was it to put the future of our elections and our system of government in the hands of an entity who is lazy to make a profit? I mean, if you can't make a voting system worth buying, then, why should even invest our time in you!!!!! Linux is worth paying for and it is a business, regardless of whether it is open source or not.
Ah but you are wrong:
2 1/content_426856.htm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-03/
You guys are out of your mind if you think a man that takes off years of his life to travel to every god forsaken section of first his state and then his country in order to meet people and beg for money can somehow be called an "introvert".
Instead of taxing the fuel with some socialist nonsense, let's cut to the chase and privatize the atmosphere. The world is always complaining that the United States is wrecking the air, so obviously, this means that the United States already owns the atmosphere and can proceed to sell it.
The atmosphere would be broken up into digital parcels, each of which would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. To spur the growth of American jobs, only an American company could be allowed to purchase an air lot. However, companies could sell the lots or break them up and sell them as they would real estate.
To emit or take anything from the atmosphere, you as an individual would need to purchase atmospheric rights. Generally, this would be done at birth so you wouldn't have to worry about it. But, we could do it prior to birth and just forcibly abort any fetus whose mother did not secure breathing rights for at say, 6 months. For the genuinely destitute but still useful people, we might have some sort of an aid program so that the able bodied could breath if they are down on their luck. But the riff raff would be bred out of existence.
Nations that refused to pay breathing rights to the American companies would be exterminated. We would need to develop larger atomic bombs and reconsider 10MT+ weapons, genetically engineered virii, as all would be a legitimate means of dealing with all these third world atmospheric freeloaders.
No, I'm one of those people that simply don't trust world leaders when they say the USA is an enemy. It has nothing to do with America's "master of the world", and it has everything to do with Chirac and others of his ilk blaming America for their own domestic problems.