Actually, it couldn't be lit because you need gravity to have fire; Well, sort of. There's no heat column and thus fire is rather anemic in space. That nice big flaming torch would look really peculiar in space... it would puff out bubbles of plasma that would then float around and extinguish... spewing fine particulate matter and byproduct gas everywhere -- which is, as NASA indicated, dangerous to the crew and equipment.
This is a quite common idiotic attitude, that a fine should be somehow related to the size of
This is a quite common misunderstanding of what the purpose of a fine is: To act as a deterrent. The EPA used to say $50,000 per infraction for dumping hazardous waste into the ocean. The disposal companies then filmed themselves doing it and turned themselves in because it was cheaper than litigation, so they just confessed, paid the fine, and pocketed the difference. This is still happening today... because the cost of properly disposing of that waste is higher than the cost of the fine.
Now, you strawman'd the size of the company. But the size of the fine should be at least the cost of the damage done plus a punitive amount to act as a sufficient deterrent. What I'm saying here is that $500,000 is worth less that the money Google will make off using said personal data, and is thus ineffectual. The punitive amount on top of the calculated amount of profits they could make off the data should be high enough to deter Google from doing it in Brazil again... and thus wasting taxpayer dollars prosecuting them.
I started on Slackware in the 2.0 kernel days. So to be honest, I don't get the fuss. But then, since Slackware is basically the Ikea of distributions, you shouldn't be surprised at my apathy. Page 246: Now that you've hand-coded the boot loader in assembly using nothing more than the provided hair pin and a resistor, let us discuss how to compile the kernel using the provided mismatched header files and the IT Pro's prayer, which goes a little like this: "Dear God... I know I didn't believe in you before I tried installing Linux using this installer... but I do now. Please, just send me a sign. Let it compile. That's all I ask. Dear god, please let it compile... *click*"
Sucks to be "the new guy"; you always get blamed for dumb mistakes by "the experienced guy".
Guy comes into office and finds a letter offering him advice. It says: First time you screw up, blame everything on me. Second time you screw up, sit down and write an advice letter...
As long as even one guy was paid during the "shutdown" (really shutdown theater) to put up Barrycades around open air monuments, and even one guy was paid to imprison foreign tourists in their hotel to prevent them from looking at a monument, then I don't want to hear it.
Fresh from the Department of Bullshit... comes this. First, they're called barricades, and they were put there to keep cars out of certain national monuments, because those places get packed with tourists and require a law enforcement presence so people don't get run over and become speed bumps for the next impatient tourist. Also, with nobody around to watch the tourists... vandalism and people flicking cigarettes into the bush and burning down tens of thousands of acres becomes a very real problem. I don't know if you're aware of this, but tourists are rather destructive, loud, obnoxious... and that's just the international one. The American tourist is a refined form of elemental evil renowned the world over for having lots of money, and not much brains or respect. I feel sorry for the wildlife, honestly. Doubly-so when nobody's there to protect them. Good thing they were barricaded away since there were no babysitters around.
Second... I don't even know on this "imprison foreign tourists" nonsense. That's not just ordinary stupid, that's like weapons grade stupid talking. Seriously, the shit you find on the internet...
The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.
What do you expect? Lawyers ruin everything, including open source. Except, wait, no, actually they don't. Ubuntu is made primarily of open source projects. It's just a pile of packages and standards for organizing the large and growing collection of Linux-related applications and software. They put a sticker on it and say "This particular organization of those things is called Ubuntu."
Well, good news: There's a lot of other things that are pretty much the exact same thing that doesn't have that sticker on it, and you can do whatever you want. Guys, don't let a distribution's "brand identity" trip you up. If they're stupid enough to not engage in reciprocal marketing, move on to the next guys. They're only shooting themselves in the foot when everything else is marked with 50 different distribution badges and names, and Ubuntu isn't on the list. Ubuntu, what's that? Never heard of it. (evil smile)
That was unnecessary and quite possibly equally offensive to members of the real Tea Party (hi there!)
(hops into asbestos flame-retardant suit) (closes the blast doors) This presumes that very many people give a shit that it's offensive to them. Their politics are not just offensive, but dangerously naive, in the opinion of the majority. Their brand of politics managed to shut down the entire government for several weeks because they disagreed with the details of a single law. So mothers with children and their kids went hungry because no food stamps. Government workers were furloughed by the hundreds of thousands... and by furloughed I mean, they just stopped getting paid. And couldn't get unemployment. So no, please... be offensive.
Perhaps your anger (or passion, if you prefer) is supposed to make you more convincing. It only actually makes you appear more malicious and less reasonable. The more important and close-to-home the subject is, the more critical it is not to succumb to such petty temptations.
Well, that and the placebo effect and/or confirmation bias is a well-known trap. But it's one that people don't like getting out of because it's admitting they made a mistake. In this guy's case, he's ignoring the large body of evidence and medical knowledge about asthma. People get it for different reasons; It is a syndrome rather than a disease with only one specific pathology. Some people are triggered by mold, others by pollen, others by stress, still others by certain foods. He has simply, and perhaps quite humanly, attributed all of his problems to the only visible thing in his environment: The wood stove. Because you can't see mold, pollen, stress, or food allergens (well, unless you have a nut allergy or similar. Then it's sortof obvious), but you can see the stove.
Unfortunately, the conversation went off the rails pretty much the moment it hit slashdot; What the EPA is doing is the right thing, which is to reduce particulate count. But when you pair that with eco-radicalism, you get a Utopia error. No matter what the EPA does, some people will say it goes too far, and others not far enough -- and it is this latter category that insists on it either being perfect or go home, because they are emotionally vested in it for one reason or another.. so they put the goal insanely high and then try to defend it.
In truth, I have no problem with regulations on wood stoves to reduce smoke and limit particulate matter -- I simply draw the line at how much money it costs people who rely on it to heat their homes, and at regulations that effectively make it illegal. For example, in San Francisco, you can't burn it on certain days due to air quality... so those people should just freeze to death in the name of environmentalism? Strikes me as a bit harsh.
And even there, in pretty much the worst case scenario: A city with no air movement, in the dead of winter, with a higher than average population density, wood only approaches half of the fine particulate emissions in the area. The other 9 months out of the year, it's the cars, trucks, semis, and industrial equipment laying a choking death cloud over the city. Nobody would ask them to pony up for a $700 catalyzer to shell out every "2 to 6 years" to clean up their act, despite being far larger polluters; And the reason is politics. There's a lot more of them than wood burners. And, bonus round: People who burn wood are generally poor. Poor people can't fight environmental regulations, and trying to would just invoke the "You don't care about others!" argument we've seen here.
And that's really what this is about. Petty politics. Like this guy bitching about his asthma -- it's entitlement, and it lacks credibility.
This brand of environmentalism is a joke. It's a brick shoved in a glove and slapped across your face; You're just failing to understand that environmental regulations like these are just moving the problem. Which I addressed elsewhere, but basically when you tally up the cost of extraction, refinement, and transport, of gas to your home, the total pollution for that cycle is much higher than with wood burning. It's a simple NIMBY: Some people don't like wood smoke. Some of it's justified -- when we pack ourselves in like sardines in suburbia air quality becomes a problem because all of our modern conveniences, while externalizing the pollution that drives them via electric power plants dozens to hundreds of miles away, and oil refineries and rigs thousands of miles away, so that we can live our urban lifestyle, there's still too much of it as-is.
But to say it pollutes more than these externalizing technologies is bullshit. And that's where environmentalism takes a left turn into the absurd: It confuses local cleanliness with global. Whups.
Your inability to READ casts a very different light on all your insane rantings on this story.
Why yes, look at that. The very link I pointed out. How astute of you. Unfortunately, you apparently failed to connect the facts. From TFA: "The regulations limit the amount of 'airborne fine-particle matter' to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The current EPA regulations allow for 15 micrograms in the same amount of air space." From my link (and yours now too): "EPA's mandatory smoke emission limit for wood stoves is 7.5 grams of smoke per hour (g/h) for non-catalytic stoves and 4.1 g/h for catalytic stoves." A microgram is 1/1,000,000 of a gram.
The average home size for the United States is about 200 square meters. To cube it, we need to know the average height of a room, which is 10 feet. That gives us 2,000 cubic meters of space. 15 micrograms x 2000 cubic meters of space gives us an average limit of 30,000 micrograms per hour, per home, or about 137 times more than the limit defined on the EPA's own webpage you quoted for the low-end of 4.1 for catalytic stoves. It's worse for non-catalytics.
Your inabilty to REASON casts a very different light on all your insane rantings on this story.
Your whole post is complete and utter bullshit. Wood smoke is the single largest source of PM air pollution in the Bay Area in the winter, and had been for decades (yes, more than cars). You didn't cite a single source in your post because you can't.
Actually, you didn't cite a single source because You can't. But let's just think about this from a common sense perspective: What percentage of people burn wood on a daily basis for their heating needs, etc.? As in, how many equivalent persons are out there burning wood every day? Let's give it a nice big number, like 5%. That's 1 in 20 home owners. That's pretty much one guy every other block who's right now shoving a log into his house. Absurdly high, but let's run with it. Now... how many people own cars? Okay then. The cars still win, by a lot. This idea of it being the biggest cause of air pollution is the only bullshit I see here.
Now let's break down the bullshit; Winter lasts three months. That's 25% of the year. The other 75%, people aren't burning that much wood. And according to the city's own report on the matter, during the winter, wood burning only accounts for half of a specific class of particulate.
In other words, if you optimize all the variables... you still come out with wood burning only accounting for about 12.5% of particulate matter in what is very close to the worst-case scenario: A city that has poor air circulation, in the winter time, and most of the wood stoves are effectively open-air or similar, and then only using the classification of a very specific size of particulate.
People bitch and moan about the government meddling in their homes, but in this case it's their own fault. We all have to breathe that exhaust.
Actually, we had a double barrel stove. About the simplest damn wood stove you can buy; it's literally two 50 gallon metal drums with some holes poked in it. It was also double-damped. Smoke level? Very low. But the chimney was a full 30 feet. just letting the air circulate around in the second barrel was enough to kill most of the smoke. Still... you have to clean your chimney. We had a chimey fire once. Sounded like a freight train with the reverb on. After that, dad cleaned the chimney more often. My point is... most of this shit about catalytics and dampers, etc., are down to people not knowing how to play with fire. Stupid, I know -- the first thing humanity learned and yet millions every year burn their house down because apparently 4,500 years of human history isn't enough to have learned a few basic lessons.
Here's the thing... with a tall chimney and pushing that air through something like an exhaust... it'll capture most of the "particulate" just because of physics. No expensive rare-earth metals needed... just some grates and a door in your chimney to slide it out of and hose it off every few months.
No. We are not. They're trying to put in a catalytic element, same as they do with cars. These are expensive; Just like your car. It's not a "one time" $700 item, it's a $700 item every 2-6 years. At least. Catalytics decrease efficiency and mean you produce a lot less heat -- you have to burn more fuel to get an equivalent BTU output because it's having to shove all that exhaust through a maze of tiny little tubes.
They also require regular maintenance and cleaning to keep those tubes open... which means you have to let the whole stove cool down, and the cinders burn out. This can take days before such maintenance can be performed, which means removing the catalytic, which means partial disassembly of the stove. It is a significant fire hazard if done incorrectly. And it also completely disallows the possibility of using only wood heat for your home; It basically mandates a secondary heating source, like (wait for it) a propane or natural-gas powered furnace.
And all of this so that you can reduce your particulate output from "15-30 grams per hour" to "2-7 grams per hour". [Source. For comparative purposes, check this link out. The EPA's own study put a wood stove in 1998 at 8.2 grams per hour. This 15-30 grams per hour is less than burning the damn log in open air, which clocks in at 8 grams per hour. If you burned sawdust an oil mixed together, you'd get somewhere around the numbers their crack-smoking analysts came up with.
Also, clearly everyone with asthma has it to an equal degree that you do.
I nearly died about 10 times growing up, and spent a significant portion of my childhood in a hospital. Sooo... I call bullshit. Wood wasn't a problem for me. A lot of other things were.
Footnote: The type of stove we used was a very primitive double-barrel wood stove. It's exactly as the name implies; It's just two barrels stacked, with a pipe between them, and a stack out the top. You start a fire in the bottom one. It was a beautiful thing to stand next to growing up -- back of it would actually glow a faint and deep red... it would radiate heat out fifty feet in every direction. I used to stand there first thing in the morning and cook my backside and legs red just soaking in that delicious heat before I had to go to school. You could throw your sopping-wet snow pants on the top barrel, and in two minutes pull it off and it'd be dry as a bone.. and on fire if you weren't careful. God I loved that thing. Made walking a mile through the snow-covered trail that led to the county road where the bus picked us up every morning (at 6:30am) in the winter bearable. And no, it wasn't up hill both ways, but the wind would cut through any kind of clothing like razors. I'd stand up against a tree to shelter myself until the bus was in sight. I lived in a county where one day the wind chill was reported at -80, but there was no snow fall... so the governor declared the schools would remain open. They had to call a special session of the legislature to override him: Apparently having kids freeze to death in as little as 15 minutes wasn't so cool with them. The new law? -50. And people joke about it being cold in Russia... fuck. They got nothing on the northern Midwest.
On a totally unrelated note, there is one small problem with wood stoves we had; The dog. Damn thing loved the heat it pumped out, but it would go a-wagging it's tail and catch fire. If you've ever smelled burnt dog, then you know the smell of burning wood is heavenly by comparison. Cats at least are smart enough to only catch fire once or twice. Damn dog though... every other week it was flaming lab! Yeesh. #countrybumpkinproblems
Pah. Those of us with asthma aren't Real Americans.
Excuse me, I have asthma. And this bullshit about "particulate" count is just that, bullshit. The reason wood burning stoves are being banned in municipalities is because some people don't like the smell of burning wood, or the lingering smoke... and yes, on some days, it can linger. If everyone in suburbia was burning wood during the winter, we'd look like Shanghai. That's true; But that's not because wood stoves are environmentally unfriendly, but because we've packed ourselves in like sardines to the point where large cities create their own weather patterns; So-called heat oasis.
At an eco-system level, burning wood is better for the environment than the total pollution from extraction,refining, and transport, of natural gas and propane. But at the local level, our high population density makes things rather problematic; Even just near freeways, boulevards, and other high-traffic areas, only certain types of plants can be put there because otherwise they'll die due to the pollution. The air quality in many cities is already too low; So ostensibly, we have to reduce it any way we can, not for environmental reasons per-se, but quality of life. Cars stink. And burning wood would just make the cities stink that much more.
But no, it's wrong to classify this as an environmental issue; It's a by-product of urbanization, and to maintain our cities we have to rely on this expensive and polluting infrastructure -- which puts the pollution outside the cities. We need natural gas, etc., because of urbanization, not because of environmentalism.
I would love to know which gas / propane / electric company bought this rule....
Yeah it's another bullshit EPA rule. Did you know that there are cars that emit about half the pollutants into the atmosphere that current EPA-certified cars do by volume? But they're illegal to sell here because the percentage of certain emissions is too high. In other words, we could do less environmental damage per car with (some) imports, but they're illegal because they won't spend a fortune fitting rare-earth metal infested catalytic converters and other emissions systems that, in reality, don't help the environment much -- but they're super expensive and only a few companies sell them here.
Burning wood is a very efficient way to heat a home. A small home within the arctic circle can keep warming with just a few logs a day; A chord of wood can last them the entire winter; Which is maybe about half of what a single decently mature tree will yield. I used to live on a 30 acre plot of woods growing up in a rural area. We had a furnace to keep the pipes from freezing when we were away for long periods, but the house itself was the size of a barn and was poorly insulated. Even at that, we only needed about 8 logs a day to keep it nice and toasty at 80F. The roof almost never had snow on it unless it was fresh.
We'd go out in the winter with out little plastic sleds (I was 12) and I'd haul down about 20 logs at a time to the truck and load it up... Then help cut it up and leave it out on a tarp to dry in the sun. Two, maybe three dead trees in the winter was all we needed to keep our massive and poorly insulated house cooking all winter. And up here in the northern midwest of the United States, we're at the same latitude as Moscow. It gets cold.
By comparison, to heat our house with propane, we'd need to fill our giant tank up about 5 times during the winter, at the cost of a few thousand dollars. As opposed to the gas and oil for the chainsaw... which cost about $20, and the excercise, which I suppose you could say was paid for in pancakes.
You think about that for a minute now -- all the pollutants we have to burn off, all the electricity we spend, all the labor, and all the extra pollution from transporting it all over the country, to get that propane into the tank... as opposed to just going outside, walking a few hundred feet, and going chop-chop. Those few acres of woods could provide for about ten homes' worth of nearly free heat, and the only pollutant would be carbon. Now think of the average forest fire in California; Think of the hundreds of thousands of trees that go up in flames. California could provide heat for next to nothing to all those homes up along the mountains and keep the ferocity of those forest fires down, by logging the dead trees. Not clear-cut logging like the environmentalists like to showcase... but just the dead trees; Move in on foot, haul them out on sleds.
But they'd rather you buy the dry heat from a propane or natural gas tap... because it's more environmentally friendly?
Dude, if you believe that bullshit cover story, you're smoking the cheap $3 crack. Raw oil comes to us on supertankers, and there are no environmental restrictions on the oil those things burn. They are so dirty you can't bring them up-wind less than fifty miles of a major city because you'd have people hospitalized for asthma attacks. A significant portion of our environmental pollution is from these supertankers, powered by the most unrefined, shitty oil you can imagine... it's black like the night and you can see chunks of particulate floating in the tanks, so big you can grab them with your bare hands.
Environmentalism is a joke... it's just an excuse to let some people get rich at the expense of the rest of us, while making some appeal to the planet that'll fend off the opposition.
But, that said, maybe a breakup and spin-off of non-core divisions is exactly what Microsoft needs. This whole 'chasing Apple/Sony/{$newTechMarket}' thing is slowly killing them.
First, your sed input string syntax is bogus. But more importantly, this has been Microsoft's business strategy since not long after it encorporated: "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish." It isn't killing them in the long term, and analysts only ever look at the short term. I shouldn't have to explain the problem of short term thinking.
Acquiring knowledge has generally been expensive. Libraries cost money for both the building and books. Education costs money, even if it is free to the student.
The internet changed all of that. Acquiring knowledge now costs such a tiny, tiny amount, that we can afford to give it away to every single member of the human race... and we give up very little for the honor of doing so. As a society, we have the privilege of being able to give every single person on this planet free and total access to the collective knowledge of all of the sciences, technology, culture, all of it.
And yet we don't. What does that say about us, as a people?
he internet has been a wonderful resource to make knowledge easier to access, but the infrastructure costs money.
No. Nothing costs money. A cost is something you give up. The cost of a car is all the things you could have gotten instead of the car. People often confuse the value of a thing with the price of a thing, and in a capitalist-driven society, it's hardly a surprise. The infrastructure doesn't cost money, it costs whatever we could have built instead of the infrastructure.
Now, consider all the possible things that we could have built instead of the internet. Instead of giving free knowledge to the world. Can you think of a better way to spend that potentiality? Because I cannot. No sir, your argument does not hold.
By a similar token the need for the NSA is an ugly reality. Not every group or society on the planet is willing to live in peace within their own borders.
The need for an organization that keeps tabs on legitimate threats to our safety and security, yes. The NSA... in its current form, is suboptimal for that task. It has been warped and distorted by political pressure both internal and external into something that is rapidly losing its effectiveness in that capacity. We're building data centers and collecting data, but managing intelligent assets is about more than collection, it's about analytics as well. The NSA has been overburdened with information -- tasked with watching everyone, everywhere.
It's the result of an unprecidented mass-failure of basic cognitive reasoning on the part of our entire governmental superstructure. They overvalue what they don't know, a fallacy known as the ambiguity effect. It's why we spent trillions fighting a war on terror, but we spend a mere fraction of that fighting drunk driving. They also over-value certain types of information -- a person's race, national origin, etc. All this profiling. It's been proven time and time again that the moment you develop a profile for the type of person you're looking for,.. the organization you're fighting will simply select candidates that are outside of that profile. We've created an institutional-sized case of confirmation bias with our security screening procedures. But it gets worse. The NSA is a classic example of information bias... that is, they seek information even when it's irrelevant to the choices presented. Or put another way: They're so focused on gathering more information that they've effectively paralyzed themselves.
And this isn't the first time this has happened, even here in America. All intelligence agencies go through phases where they become complacent and the intelligence feedback cycle goes off the rails, which isn't corrected until a catastrophe. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. Aldrich Ames. "The list goes on and on." After each major shakeup, there's a refocusing and efficiency goes up... for awhile. Until it deteriorates to the point that a new crisis emerges.
There will always be another boogieman in the closet. There will be another 9/11. Another Snowden. Another Pearl Harbor. These things cannot be prevented -- only the illusion that they can be. When we discuss how we wish to combat these yet-unseen and unknown forces, we must be mindful of how we structure our institutions, and what restrictions we pla
No, it's not a footnote - it's a fairy tale. (Well, I guess legends and other fiction could appear in a footnote...)
"In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology." -- Vinton Cerf
"It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available." -- Tim Berners-Lee
"My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers." -- Steve Wozniak
"Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it." -- Linus Torvalds
Shall I continue, or is it sufficiently obvious how wrong you are?
Do you really not see a difference between an experimental, opt-in location system and an international, clandestine spy program?
They're functionally identical. Every phone you buy today has the same basic EULA: All your personal data is ours, to do with as we please. Try going without a cell phone; We're expected to be wired in. Employers want cell phones. Parents want cell phones. There was an article on slashdot talking about wiring in 5 year olds. This is the future; the interconnected society. You want to be a part of society, you have internet, you have a phone -- you're connected.
And pardon me, but considering how pervasive it is, how deeply it's integrated into our lives, and how little protection there is for all of it... an international, clandestine spy program is far better, at least from a human rights standpoint.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Funny story. In the early 90s a new network started being used regularily by hundreds of colleges, science labs, and educational facilities. It had been built up for military purposes as an experiment, but after building a new one, the military turned it over to the academic community. It was a global network, massively redundant, and was initially used to exchange files and e-mail. Researchers quickly developed some simple protocols to allow anyone on the network to exchange information freely with anyone else on the network. A need arose to catalog and organize the rapidly increasing number of nodes on this network, and the information just started pouring in. That network... was called the internet.
It's original inventors hoped that this free and equal peer-based network they had built would be used to share human knowledge across cultures around the world, bringing together millions, and now billions, of people together. They never asked for money. They didn't believe in advertising revenue to support it... the people who built and maintained the network did so not out of greed, or desire for wealth, but because they genuinely believed in one of the foundational principles of science:
Knowledge should be free.
I know today it's just a historical footnote, that greed and the desire for wealth has created not one, but seven of the largest companies on the planet, whose sole business plans are to exploit the free exchange of information by putting up artificial barriers and charging for access to things, while spying on us and abusing the data flow... and that today, we just accept this.
But those of us that built the network remember there are other motivations than greed... some of us still build things for others, because we want them to be free. Because we want them to have knowledge, and information -- because we understood, instinctively, that the biggest advances of the 21st century wasn't going to be in science or technology, but in an expanding concept of what it means to be human. We couldn't put it into those words, not then, but we knew it would be important that this resource remain free and open to all -- that the fastest route to human growth, worldwide, everyone, everywhere, would mean making sure knowledge was equally available. Because knowledge is power... and we knew, from tens of thousands of years of human history, that when you try to hold onto knowledge, to power, it corrupts you. It destroys you. It sucks your soul right out and pours in a neverending need for more... more what? More everything.
And so those of us who were around back then recognize Google, and the NSA, and all these other organizations and governments for what they are: An unnatural restriction on the potential of the human race. They're strangling us with their greed. They're creating the next Dark Age... because the power imbalance between the information-rich and the information-poor is growing, exponentially. And Google is one of the central players.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it couldn't be lit because you need gravity to have fire; Well, sort of. There's no heat column and thus fire is rather anemic in space. That nice big flaming torch would look really peculiar in space... it would puff out bubbles of plasma that would then float around and extinguish... spewing fine particulate matter and byproduct gas everywhere -- which is, as NASA indicated, dangerous to the crew and equipment.
This is a quite common idiotic attitude, that a fine should be somehow related to the size of
This is a quite common misunderstanding of what the purpose of a fine is: To act as a deterrent. The EPA used to say $50,000 per infraction for dumping hazardous waste into the ocean. The disposal companies then filmed themselves doing it and turned themselves in because it was cheaper than litigation, so they just confessed, paid the fine, and pocketed the difference. This is still happening today... because the cost of properly disposing of that waste is higher than the cost of the fine.
Now, you strawman'd the size of the company. But the size of the fine should be at least the cost of the damage done plus a punitive amount to act as a sufficient deterrent. What I'm saying here is that $500,000 is worth less that the money Google will make off using said personal data, and is thus ineffectual. The punitive amount on top of the calculated amount of profits they could make off the data should be high enough to deter Google from doing it in Brazil again... and thus wasting taxpayer dollars prosecuting them.
$500,000? To one of the biggest companies on Earth? They spend more than that on coffee. Go big or go home, Brazil. :)
I started on Slackware in the 2.0 kernel days. So to be honest, I don't get the fuss. But then, since Slackware is basically the Ikea of distributions, you shouldn't be surprised at my apathy. Page 246: Now that you've hand-coded the boot loader in assembly using nothing more than the provided hair pin and a resistor, let us discuss how to compile the kernel using the provided mismatched header files and the IT Pro's prayer, which goes a little like this: "Dear God... I know I didn't believe in you before I tried installing Linux using this installer... but I do now. Please, just send me a sign. Let it compile. That's all I ask. Dear god, please let it compile... *click*"
Sucks to be "the new guy"; you always get blamed for dumb mistakes by "the experienced guy".
Guy comes into office and finds a letter offering him advice. It says: First time you screw up, blame everything on me. Second time you screw up, sit down and write an advice letter...
As long as even one guy was paid during the "shutdown" (really shutdown theater) to put up Barrycades around open air monuments, and even one guy was paid to imprison foreign tourists in their hotel to prevent them from looking at a monument, then I don't want to hear it.
Fresh from the Department of Bullshit... comes this. First, they're called barricades, and they were put there to keep cars out of certain national monuments, because those places get packed with tourists and require a law enforcement presence so people don't get run over and become speed bumps for the next impatient tourist. Also, with nobody around to watch the tourists... vandalism and people flicking cigarettes into the bush and burning down tens of thousands of acres becomes a very real problem. I don't know if you're aware of this, but tourists are rather destructive, loud, obnoxious... and that's just the international one. The American tourist is a refined form of elemental evil renowned the world over for having lots of money, and not much brains or respect. I feel sorry for the wildlife, honestly. Doubly-so when nobody's there to protect them. Good thing they were barricaded away since there were no babysitters around.
Second... I don't even know on this "imprison foreign tourists" nonsense. That's not just ordinary stupid, that's like weapons grade stupid talking. Seriously, the shit you find on the internet...
Your ignorance of politics is striking.
Yeah, reading causes ignorance. True story.
The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.
What do you expect? Lawyers ruin everything, including open source. Except, wait, no, actually they don't. Ubuntu is made primarily of open source projects. It's just a pile of packages and standards for organizing the large and growing collection of Linux-related applications and software. They put a sticker on it and say "This particular organization of those things is called Ubuntu."
Well, good news: There's a lot of other things that are pretty much the exact same thing that doesn't have that sticker on it, and you can do whatever you want. Guys, don't let a distribution's "brand identity" trip you up. If they're stupid enough to not engage in reciprocal marketing, move on to the next guys. They're only shooting themselves in the foot when everything else is marked with 50 different distribution badges and names, and Ubuntu isn't on the list. Ubuntu, what's that? Never heard of it. (evil smile)
That was unnecessary and quite possibly equally offensive to members of the real Tea Party (hi there!)
(hops into asbestos flame-retardant suit) (closes the blast doors) This presumes that very many people give a shit that it's offensive to them. Their politics are not just offensive, but dangerously naive, in the opinion of the majority. Their brand of politics managed to shut down the entire government for several weeks because they disagreed with the details of a single law. So mothers with children and their kids went hungry because no food stamps. Government workers were furloughed by the hundreds of thousands... and by furloughed I mean, they just stopped getting paid. And couldn't get unemployment. So no, please... be offensive.
Perhaps your anger (or passion, if you prefer) is supposed to make you more convincing. It only actually makes you appear more malicious and less reasonable. The more important and close-to-home the subject is, the more critical it is not to succumb to such petty temptations.
Well, that and the placebo effect and/or confirmation bias is a well-known trap. But it's one that people don't like getting out of because it's admitting they made a mistake. In this guy's case, he's ignoring the large body of evidence and medical knowledge about asthma. People get it for different reasons; It is a syndrome rather than a disease with only one specific pathology. Some people are triggered by mold, others by pollen, others by stress, still others by certain foods. He has simply, and perhaps quite humanly, attributed all of his problems to the only visible thing in his environment: The wood stove. Because you can't see mold, pollen, stress, or food allergens (well, unless you have a nut allergy or similar. Then it's sortof obvious), but you can see the stove.
Unfortunately, the conversation went off the rails pretty much the moment it hit slashdot; What the EPA is doing is the right thing, which is to reduce particulate count. But when you pair that with eco-radicalism, you get a Utopia error. No matter what the EPA does, some people will say it goes too far, and others not far enough -- and it is this latter category that insists on it either being perfect or go home, because they are emotionally vested in it for one reason or another.. so they put the goal insanely high and then try to defend it.
In truth, I have no problem with regulations on wood stoves to reduce smoke and limit particulate matter -- I simply draw the line at how much money it costs people who rely on it to heat their homes, and at regulations that effectively make it illegal. For example, in San Francisco, you can't burn it on certain days due to air quality... so those people should just freeze to death in the name of environmentalism? Strikes me as a bit harsh.
And even there, in pretty much the worst case scenario: A city with no air movement, in the dead of winter, with a higher than average population density, wood only approaches half of the fine particulate emissions in the area. The other 9 months out of the year, it's the cars, trucks, semis, and industrial equipment laying a choking death cloud over the city. Nobody would ask them to pony up for a $700 catalyzer to shell out every "2 to 6 years" to clean up their act, despite being far larger polluters; And the reason is politics. There's a lot more of them than wood burners. And, bonus round: People who burn wood are generally poor. Poor people can't fight environmental regulations, and trying to would just invoke the "You don't care about others!" argument we've seen here.
And that's really what this is about. Petty politics. Like this guy bitching about his asthma -- it's entitlement, and it lacks credibility.
Environmentalism isn't a joke, the fact is that
This brand of environmentalism is a joke. It's a brick shoved in a glove and slapped across your face; You're just failing to understand that environmental regulations like these are just moving the problem. Which I addressed elsewhere, but basically when you tally up the cost of extraction, refinement, and transport, of gas to your home, the total pollution for that cycle is much higher than with wood burning. It's a simple NIMBY: Some people don't like wood smoke. Some of it's justified -- when we pack ourselves in like sardines in suburbia air quality becomes a problem because all of our modern conveniences, while externalizing the pollution that drives them via electric power plants dozens to hundreds of miles away, and oil refineries and rigs thousands of miles away, so that we can live our urban lifestyle, there's still too much of it as-is.
But to say it pollutes more than these externalizing technologies is bullshit. And that's where environmentalism takes a left turn into the absurd: It confuses local cleanliness with global. Whups.
Your inability to READ casts a very different light on all your insane rantings on this story.
Why yes, look at that. The very link I pointed out. How astute of you. Unfortunately, you apparently failed to connect the facts. From TFA: "The regulations limit the amount of 'airborne fine-particle matter' to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The current EPA regulations allow for 15 micrograms in the same amount of air space." From my link (and yours now too): "EPA's mandatory smoke emission limit for wood stoves is 7.5 grams of smoke per hour (g/h) for non-catalytic stoves and 4.1 g/h for catalytic stoves." A microgram is 1/1,000,000 of a gram.
The average home size for the United States is about 200 square meters. To cube it, we need to know the average height of a room, which is 10 feet. That gives us 2,000 cubic meters of space. 15 micrograms x 2000 cubic meters of space gives us an average limit of 30,000 micrograms per hour, per home, or about 137 times more than the limit defined on the EPA's own webpage you quoted for the low-end of 4.1 for catalytic stoves. It's worse for non-catalytics.
Your inabilty to REASON casts a very different light on all your insane rantings on this story.
Your whole post is complete and utter bullshit. Wood smoke is the single largest source of PM air pollution in the Bay Area in the winter, and had been for decades (yes, more than cars). You didn't cite a single source in your post because you can't.
Actually, you didn't cite a single source because You can't. But let's just think about this from a common sense perspective: What percentage of people burn wood on a daily basis for their heating needs, etc.? As in, how many equivalent persons are out there burning wood every day? Let's give it a nice big number, like 5%. That's 1 in 20 home owners. That's pretty much one guy every other block who's right now shoving a log into his house. Absurdly high, but let's run with it. Now... how many people own cars? Okay then. The cars still win, by a lot. This idea of it being the biggest cause of air pollution is the only bullshit I see here.
Now let's break down the bullshit; Winter lasts three months. That's 25% of the year. The other 75%, people aren't burning that much wood. And according to the city's own report on the matter, during the winter, wood burning only accounts for half of a specific class of particulate.
In other words, if you optimize all the variables... you still come out with wood burning only accounting for about 12.5% of particulate matter in what is very close to the worst-case scenario: A city that has poor air circulation, in the winter time, and most of the wood stoves are effectively open-air or similar, and then only using the classification of a very specific size of particulate.
Logic, bitch.
People bitch and moan about the government meddling in their homes, but in this case it's their own fault. We all have to breathe that exhaust.
Actually, we had a double barrel stove. About the simplest damn wood stove you can buy; it's literally two 50 gallon metal drums with some holes poked in it. It was also double-damped. Smoke level? Very low. But the chimney was a full 30 feet. just letting the air circulate around in the second barrel was enough to kill most of the smoke. Still... you have to clean your chimney. We had a chimey fire once. Sounded like a freight train with the reverb on. After that, dad cleaned the chimney more often. My point is... most of this shit about catalytics and dampers, etc., are down to people not knowing how to play with fire. Stupid, I know -- the first thing humanity learned and yet millions every year burn their house down because apparently 4,500 years of human history isn't enough to have learned a few basic lessons.
Here's the thing... with a tall chimney and pushing that air through something like an exhaust... it'll capture most of the "particulate" just because of physics. No expensive rare-earth metals needed... just some grates and a door in your chimney to slide it out of and hose it off every few months.
We're only talking about a one-time $700 item,
No. We are not. They're trying to put in a catalytic element, same as they do with cars. These are expensive; Just like your car. It's not a "one time" $700 item, it's a $700 item every 2-6 years. At least. Catalytics decrease efficiency and mean you produce a lot less heat -- you have to burn more fuel to get an equivalent BTU output because it's having to shove all that exhaust through a maze of tiny little tubes.
They also require regular maintenance and cleaning to keep those tubes open... which means you have to let the whole stove cool down, and the cinders burn out. This can take days before such maintenance can be performed, which means removing the catalytic, which means partial disassembly of the stove. It is a significant fire hazard if done incorrectly. And it also completely disallows the possibility of using only wood heat for your home; It basically mandates a secondary heating source, like (wait for it) a propane or natural-gas powered furnace.
And all of this so that you can reduce your particulate output from "15-30 grams per hour" to "2-7 grams per hour". [Source. For comparative purposes, check this link out. The EPA's own study put a wood stove in 1998 at 8.2 grams per hour. This 15-30 grams per hour is less than burning the damn log in open air, which clocks in at 8 grams per hour. If you burned sawdust an oil mixed together, you'd get somewhere around the numbers their crack-smoking analysts came up with.
Also, clearly everyone with asthma has it to an equal degree that you do.
I nearly died about 10 times growing up, and spent a significant portion of my childhood in a hospital. Sooo... I call bullshit. Wood wasn't a problem for me. A lot of other things were.
Footnote: The type of stove we used was a very primitive double-barrel wood stove. It's exactly as the name implies; It's just two barrels stacked, with a pipe between them, and a stack out the top. You start a fire in the bottom one. It was a beautiful thing to stand next to growing up -- back of it would actually glow a faint and deep red... it would radiate heat out fifty feet in every direction. I used to stand there first thing in the morning and cook my backside and legs red just soaking in that delicious heat before I had to go to school. You could throw your sopping-wet snow pants on the top barrel, and in two minutes pull it off and it'd be dry as a bone.. and on fire if you weren't careful. God I loved that thing. Made walking a mile through the snow-covered trail that led to the county road where the bus picked us up every morning (at 6:30am) in the winter bearable. And no, it wasn't up hill both ways, but the wind would cut through any kind of clothing like razors. I'd stand up against a tree to shelter myself until the bus was in sight. I lived in a county where one day the wind chill was reported at -80, but there was no snow fall... so the governor declared the schools would remain open. They had to call a special session of the legislature to override him: Apparently having kids freeze to death in as little as 15 minutes wasn't so cool with them. The new law? -50. And people joke about it being cold in Russia... fuck. They got nothing on the northern Midwest.
On a totally unrelated note, there is one small problem with wood stoves we had; The dog. Damn thing loved the heat it pumped out, but it would go a-wagging it's tail and catch fire. If you've ever smelled burnt dog, then you know the smell of burning wood is heavenly by comparison. Cats at least are smart enough to only catch fire once or twice. Damn dog though... every other week it was flaming lab! Yeesh. #countrybumpkinproblems
Pah. Those of us with asthma aren't Real Americans.
Excuse me, I have asthma. And this bullshit about "particulate" count is just that, bullshit. The reason wood burning stoves are being banned in municipalities is because some people don't like the smell of burning wood, or the lingering smoke... and yes, on some days, it can linger. If everyone in suburbia was burning wood during the winter, we'd look like Shanghai. That's true; But that's not because wood stoves are environmentally unfriendly, but because we've packed ourselves in like sardines to the point where large cities create their own weather patterns; So-called heat oasis.
At an eco-system level, burning wood is better for the environment than the total pollution from extraction,refining, and transport, of natural gas and propane. But at the local level, our high population density makes things rather problematic; Even just near freeways, boulevards, and other high-traffic areas, only certain types of plants can be put there because otherwise they'll die due to the pollution. The air quality in many cities is already too low; So ostensibly, we have to reduce it any way we can, not for environmental reasons per-se, but quality of life. Cars stink. And burning wood would just make the cities stink that much more.
But no, it's wrong to classify this as an environmental issue; It's a by-product of urbanization, and to maintain our cities we have to rely on this expensive and polluting infrastructure -- which puts the pollution outside the cities. We need natural gas, etc., because of urbanization, not because of environmentalism.
I would love to know which gas / propane / electric company bought this rule....
Yeah it's another bullshit EPA rule. Did you know that there are cars that emit about half the pollutants into the atmosphere that current EPA-certified cars do by volume? But they're illegal to sell here because the percentage of certain emissions is too high. In other words, we could do less environmental damage per car with (some) imports, but they're illegal because they won't spend a fortune fitting rare-earth metal infested catalytic converters and other emissions systems that, in reality, don't help the environment much -- but they're super expensive and only a few companies sell them here.
Burning wood is a very efficient way to heat a home. A small home within the arctic circle can keep warming with just a few logs a day; A chord of wood can last them the entire winter; Which is maybe about half of what a single decently mature tree will yield. I used to live on a 30 acre plot of woods growing up in a rural area. We had a furnace to keep the pipes from freezing when we were away for long periods, but the house itself was the size of a barn and was poorly insulated. Even at that, we only needed about 8 logs a day to keep it nice and toasty at 80F. The roof almost never had snow on it unless it was fresh.
We'd go out in the winter with out little plastic sleds (I was 12) and I'd haul down about 20 logs at a time to the truck and load it up... Then help cut it up and leave it out on a tarp to dry in the sun. Two, maybe three dead trees in the winter was all we needed to keep our massive and poorly insulated house cooking all winter. And up here in the northern midwest of the United States, we're at the same latitude as Moscow. It gets cold.
By comparison, to heat our house with propane, we'd need to fill our giant tank up about 5 times during the winter, at the cost of a few thousand dollars. As opposed to the gas and oil for the chainsaw... which cost about $20, and the excercise, which I suppose you could say was paid for in pancakes.
You think about that for a minute now -- all the pollutants we have to burn off, all the electricity we spend, all the labor, and all the extra pollution from transporting it all over the country, to get that propane into the tank... as opposed to just going outside, walking a few hundred feet, and going chop-chop. Those few acres of woods could provide for about ten homes' worth of nearly free heat, and the only pollutant would be carbon. Now think of the average forest fire in California; Think of the hundreds of thousands of trees that go up in flames. California could provide heat for next to nothing to all those homes up along the mountains and keep the ferocity of those forest fires down, by logging the dead trees. Not clear-cut logging like the environmentalists like to showcase... but just the dead trees; Move in on foot, haul them out on sleds.
But they'd rather you buy the dry heat from a propane or natural gas tap... because it's more environmentally friendly?
Dude, if you believe that bullshit cover story, you're smoking the cheap $3 crack. Raw oil comes to us on supertankers, and there are no environmental restrictions on the oil those things burn. They are so dirty you can't bring them up-wind less than fifty miles of a major city because you'd have people hospitalized for asthma attacks. A significant portion of our environmental pollution is from these supertankers, powered by the most unrefined, shitty oil you can imagine... it's black like the night and you can see chunks of particulate floating in the tanks, so big you can grab them with your bare hands.
Environmentalism is a joke... it's just an excuse to let some people get rich at the expense of the rest of us, while making some appeal to the planet that'll fend off the opposition.
So they ripped off one of the plot devices in the reimaged Total Recall, amongst others. Wow. Such originality.
But, that said, maybe a breakup and spin-off of non-core divisions is exactly what Microsoft needs. This whole 'chasing Apple/Sony/{$newTechMarket}' thing is slowly killing them.
First, your sed input string syntax is bogus. But more importantly, this has been Microsoft's business strategy since not long after it encorporated: "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish." It isn't killing them in the long term, and analysts only ever look at the short term. I shouldn't have to explain the problem of short term thinking.
Acquiring knowledge has generally been expensive. Libraries cost money for both the building and books. Education costs money, even if it is free to the student.
The internet changed all of that. Acquiring knowledge now costs such a tiny, tiny amount, that we can afford to give it away to every single member of the human race... and we give up very little for the honor of doing so. As a society, we have the privilege of being able to give every single person on this planet free and total access to the collective knowledge of all of the sciences, technology, culture, all of it.
And yet we don't. What does that say about us, as a people?
he internet has been a wonderful resource to make knowledge easier to access, but the infrastructure costs money.
No. Nothing costs money. A cost is something you give up. The cost of a car is all the things you could have gotten instead of the car. People often confuse the value of a thing with the price of a thing, and in a capitalist-driven society, it's hardly a surprise. The infrastructure doesn't cost money, it costs whatever we could have built instead of the infrastructure.
Now, consider all the possible things that we could have built instead of the internet. Instead of giving free knowledge to the world. Can you think of a better way to spend that potentiality? Because I cannot. No sir, your argument does not hold.
By a similar token the need for the NSA is an ugly reality. Not every group or society on the planet is willing to live in peace within their own borders.
The need for an organization that keeps tabs on legitimate threats to our safety and security, yes. The NSA... in its current form, is suboptimal for that task. It has been warped and distorted by political pressure both internal and external into something that is rapidly losing its effectiveness in that capacity. We're building data centers and collecting data, but managing intelligent assets is about more than collection, it's about analytics as well. The NSA has been overburdened with information -- tasked with watching everyone, everywhere.
It's the result of an unprecidented mass-failure of basic cognitive reasoning on the part of our entire governmental superstructure. They overvalue what they don't know, a fallacy known as the ambiguity effect. It's why we spent trillions fighting a war on terror, but we spend a mere fraction of that fighting drunk driving. They also over-value certain types of information -- a person's race, national origin, etc. All this profiling. It's been proven time and time again that the moment you develop a profile for the type of person you're looking for,.. the organization you're fighting will simply select candidates that are outside of that profile. We've created an institutional-sized case of confirmation bias with our security screening procedures. But it gets worse. The NSA is a classic example of information bias... that is, they seek information even when it's irrelevant to the choices presented. Or put another way: They're so focused on gathering more information that they've effectively paralyzed themselves.
And this isn't the first time this has happened, even here in America. All intelligence agencies go through phases where they become complacent and the intelligence feedback cycle goes off the rails, which isn't corrected until a catastrophe. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. Aldrich Ames. "The list goes on and on." After each major shakeup, there's a refocusing and efficiency goes up... for awhile. Until it deteriorates to the point that a new crisis emerges.
There will always be another boogieman in the closet. There will be another 9/11. Another Snowden. Another Pearl Harbor. These things cannot be prevented -- only the illusion that they can be. When we discuss how we wish to combat these yet-unseen and unknown forces, we must be mindful of how we structure our institutions, and what restrictions we pla
No, it's not a footnote - it's a fairy tale. (Well, I guess legends and other fiction could appear in a footnote...)
"In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology."
-- Vinton Cerf
"It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available."
-- Tim Berners-Lee
"My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers."
-- Steve Wozniak
"Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it."
-- Linus Torvalds
Shall I continue, or is it sufficiently obvious how wrong you are?
Do you really not see a difference between an experimental, opt-in location system and an international, clandestine spy program?
They're functionally identical. Every phone you buy today has the same basic EULA: All your personal data is ours, to do with as we please. Try going without a cell phone; We're expected to be wired in. Employers want cell phones. Parents want cell phones. There was an article on slashdot talking about wiring in 5 year olds. This is the future; the interconnected society. You want to be a part of society, you have internet, you have a phone -- you're connected.
And pardon me, but considering how pervasive it is, how deeply it's integrated into our lives, and how little protection there is for all of it... an international, clandestine spy program is far better, at least from a human rights standpoint.
Or you can not use any Google products. Gmail, google maps, search etc are free so that they can advertise to you and collect data on you.
Funny story. In the early 90s a new network started being used regularily by hundreds of colleges, science labs, and educational facilities. It had been built up for military purposes as an experiment, but after building a new one, the military turned it over to the academic community. It was a global network, massively redundant, and was initially used to exchange files and e-mail. Researchers quickly developed some simple protocols to allow anyone on the network to exchange information freely with anyone else on the network. A need arose to catalog and organize the rapidly increasing number of nodes on this network, and the information just started pouring in. That network... was called the internet.
It's original inventors hoped that this free and equal peer-based network they had built would be used to share human knowledge across cultures around the world, bringing together millions, and now billions, of people together. They never asked for money. They didn't believe in advertising revenue to support it... the people who built and maintained the network did so not out of greed, or desire for wealth, but because they genuinely believed in one of the foundational principles of science:
Knowledge should be free.
I know today it's just a historical footnote, that greed and the desire for wealth has created not one, but seven of the largest companies on the planet, whose sole business plans are to exploit the free exchange of information by putting up artificial barriers and charging for access to things, while spying on us and abusing the data flow... and that today, we just accept this.
But those of us that built the network remember there are other motivations than greed... some of us still build things for others, because we want them to be free. Because we want them to have knowledge, and information -- because we understood, instinctively, that the biggest advances of the 21st century wasn't going to be in science or technology, but in an expanding concept of what it means to be human. We couldn't put it into those words, not then, but we knew it would be important that this resource remain free and open to all -- that the fastest route to human growth, worldwide, everyone, everywhere, would mean making sure knowledge was equally available. Because knowledge is power... and we knew, from tens of thousands of years of human history, that when you try to hold onto knowledge, to power, it corrupts you. It destroys you. It sucks your soul right out and pours in a neverending need for more... more what? More everything.
And so those of us who were around back then recognize Google, and the NSA, and all these other organizations and governments for what they are: An unnatural restriction on the potential of the human race. They're strangling us with their greed. They're creating the next Dark Age... because the power imbalance between the information-rich and the information-poor is growing, exponentially. And Google is one of the central players.
Google... is evil.