In that case, DVD will win. Seriously, only a few top producers like Hustler, Playboy and such appriciate HDTV, because they got the means to hire real beauties. Your average porn actress does *not* look more attractive in HDTV. The porn industry jumped all over DVD primarily because of random access. No more rewind/forward, easy looping, play at quarter/half speed and so on. Porn does not need to be watched in a linear, start-to-end fashion. What does HDTV bring to porn producers? Honestly, only much higher demands on them. But with HDTV cams at $1600 (Sony HDR-HC1) and dropping, perhaps it'll happen anyway. But I don't think the porn industry will lead it
I have to agree on this one.
Furthermore, as i see it, the only possible benefict that moving to a new format can give to the porn industry is "high definition content". This might be a real benefict for the part of the industry that concentrates on showing naked physically perfect women - aka softcore - (or maybe not if they rely on the technology to disguise the imperfections) but what value does it add to the part of the industry that concentrates on the action - aka hardcore. After all, most hardcore movies are hardly known for the grandeur of the scenarios (or the depth of the stories, or the quality of the acting of their casting)
If you think back to the change from videotapes to DVDs, you can see clear beneficts to the industry:
A DVD (in a standaard DVD box) will use 1/2 the space of a videotape. This means you can store and transport twice the number of DVDs than videotapes.
Manufacturing of DVDs is cheaper and more reliable. It can be easilly outsourced and also scales up more easilly (pay another 200$, get 1000 DVDs more)
DVDs (as long as packed in DVD boxes) are less likelly to get damaged on transport, especially due to external factors such as strong magnetic fields
Lets also not forget that resistance to damage on transport and size (and weight) are also relevant for mail delivery
As i see it, none of these new technologies seems to bring any comparable beneficts for a business model such as the one from the porn industry.
Obvious beneficts for the traditional film industry, such as getting their customers to (again) buy their personal film library in another format, are hardly applicable to the porn industry - there is hardly a hot market for a new edition of "Debbie Does Dalas"
Around here, leaving usually means a 1 month notice period, and in all the places i worked in, people always work until the last day except if having have some vacation days left and wanting to take them (non-used vacation days are redeemed for money when one leaves).
Even more important, in the vast majority of places i've worked in the company will do a goodbye party for you.
In my last position, even though i now work as a freelancer, after i decided i wasn't going to accept anymore extensions to my contract and on my last day in, they still did a goodbye party for me and gave me a bottle of Cognac as a goodbye present.
I've seen it happen for others, so i ain't been getting goodbye parties 'cause they're happy that I am leaving;)
Reading above that what happened to the OI is a "usual" behaviour and part of the POF just makes me want to ask - "What the fuck kind of sick employer-employee relation do you guys have there?"
If you read the article you will see that the possibility of a terrorist attack to take down the Internet was considered low because:
It doesn't kill people - thus it's not good at generating terror
Taking down communication infrastructure reduces the flow of information about the attack itself, thus reducing the spread of the [feeling of] terror
Putting things another way, if you aim is to induce the strongest and most widespread terror in the target population, then taking down the Internet is not worth the effort.
Except of course, if your target population is composed mostly of geeks... but then again one could just target Slashdot to spread the terror.
I feel like an old man (and i'm only 32) saying this, but here goes...
Well, if programming is just a source of income for you, then the effort you put into it, and thus the quality of your code, probably won't be as good as the code produced by someone else, to whom programming is a hobby or a passion. In other words, if you actually enjoy programming, you will likely be a better programmer than someone who doesn't.
Two points:
Motivaded, gifted programmers can make technically superior solutions. Unfortunately technically superior solutions do not mean that the application actually does what the users need it to do. The truth is, the quality of the code by itself will not make a project successful if other things are not up to the same standaards. Code quality is only a real measure of technical prowness in the beginning of one's career - later more is expected from you than just being a good coder. Also note that coding by itself is easilly outsourced.
If you code all your life it gets progressivelly more boring. One is faced again and again with the same problems, only in different situations. In this case you either go into analysis or another senior (semi-technical) position (and thus start working on the other things that make a project successful - though doing little or no coding), or you get more and more specialized in an specific area of programming (to justify you career progress, meaning increasing salary and responsibilities), or you stagnate in your career (eventually being replaced by a 20 y.o. equally gifted coder than can do 80h/week), or you go into management (no comment here;) )
So yeah, either you stop being a pure coder and keep the enthusiasm (there are always new challenges if you don't limit yourself), or you keep doing the same thing over and over and it looses much of it's appeal, or you have a goldfish-like memory and every new project looks fresh and new for you even if you did something very similar in countless previous projects.
Sorry to disapoint you, but programming is like other professional occupations, either you are not driven to do the best you can, go as far as you can and keep trying to see what's beyond the next hill (in which case how did you ever became a good coder), or you outgrow what got you into it to begin with (coding) or you get progressivelly more bored doing it.
Instead of telephoning some company and making believe ur their service provider to try and get the root password for some machine, one sends an email disguised as a legit email from a company with which a target company's employee has a commercial relation. Said email contains as payload an agent program which can be used to gather information/control the machine.
This is more powerfull than old style social engineering, both because you directly get an agent running on a machine inside the target company's network and because the list of potential targets is bigger than just "the person's that have passwords to the company's servers"
Pick up your mobile phone and go to a quiet corner.
Actually do this anytime your talking on your mobile, confidential/private call or not, that way nobody will notice when you actually DO go out to talk privately
Also mastering the art of smoothly changing subjects when somebody walks in is very usefull:
You (on the phone): Tell me what you're wearing She: I have my black silk negligee on.. You: If i was there i would pull the straps, slowly let it fall down and then... *somebody walks in* You:... would have a mechanic check it out. You never know when a car starts making funny noises - you might end up with an expensive to fix problem.
Just keep in mind that if you make a development team completely out of inexperienced/little-experience programmers you'll end up paying for it over and over again.
Programmers which are inexperience or have little experience, are cheap because they make lots of mistakes (after all they're still learning). Even then most gifted ones are unaware of how, in the middle/long term, an application evolves in a real-life environment.
Expect hard to change applications, strange bugs, costly to bugfix applications, essential knowledge about the implementation that leaves when the developer leaves and fastly increasing in entropy in the code base(*) (and thus fastly increasing maintenance costs and number of bugs). Expect to have to rewrite the application from scratch after a couple of years.
My recomendation: Get at least one very experience designer/developer (possibly even a technical architect) and give that person technical lead. This person will then set and enforce technical standaards, work environment standaards and documentation standaards; do the technical analysis of the requirements; create the top level design and make or approve lower level designs; act as a coach to the less experienced developers; estimate man-hour costs for implementations.
(*)Increased entropy in the code base: if the application's design is not well ballanced and/or not properly maintained or documented, each bugfix/extension is basically a hack. As time goes by and more hacks pile on top of each other the code becomes more and more complex (known in the trade as spaghetti code), prone to break in unexpected places when small changes are done to it and to randomly exhibit more and more strange bugs. This means increasing costs associated with maintenance and extension of the application. Eventually it becomes cheaper to just scrap it and start anew.
I've been copying ringtones to my mobile for years now.
The mobile i got 5 or 6 years ago could only transfer files with a special cable that cost half the price of the phone (never did came around to actually get the cable). Later i found that i could do it with IR too.
The next one (about 3 years ago) could do it via IR and bluetooth.
Latest one (got it 10 months ago) has bluetooth and comes with a cable to connect to a PC plus a CD-Rom with an application for synchronizing your mobile with you PC.
All of these mobile phones were reasonably priced, mainstream models (no special organizer/mobile combos or whatever).
Maybe it's because of the widespread adoption of GSM, and throat-cutting competition between manufacturers and consequent wide availability of models!??
Although i agree with your points i find that your sugestions are simplistic and you are missing "Step 3 - Allow your Geeks to clearly communicate those ideas". After all, the inputs for Step 1 don't come out of thin air.
For any application that outlives their creator's career period in that position/company, new people will be constantly cycled through all the steps as the application needs to be fixed or extended. This makes it important to leave things set for the "next generation". This part of the process is actually what the original poster is asking about IMHO.
In complex systems, reading the code to find out the architecture of the system is the last resource option - simply put, no mater how fast your printers or how big/abundant your screens, going through tens of thousands of lines of code is a very inneficient way to figure out how a complicated application works.
Even in smaller sized applications, code reading to figure out the design is a slow and error prone process - if you ever been faced with having to do short fixes on somebody else's (undocumented) application and later having the chance to become familiar with it, you will find that your first couple of fixes probably didn't quite fit the design of the application (ie, they look like hacks). Any application that gets fixed/extended by several unconnected developers will tend to become unmaintaineable spaghetti. This can often be avoided with a simple design document, often just 2 or 3 graphics and a couple of lines of text. Similarly, some simple code and code-documentation standaards enforced in Step 3 will really increase the efficiency of Step 1.
It all boils down to: - Do we trust AOL and Yahoo to be honest in this sort of thing. - Do we trust that AOL and Yahoo have the technical capability to effectivelly detect both reported and not yet reported forms of spyware.
I would say it's a mix of: - Too many way off project plans & impossible deadlines, leading to programmers doing rush jobs of implementations & bug filled late-night coding sessions. This is a management problem. - Inexperienced programmers. - Prima Donna programmers that do things "their way" which "requires no documentation" because it's so "obvious", without even considering that other programmers that will have to create extensions to their code or have to produce applications interacting with that code are not omniscient or mind-readers and cannot guess out of thin air "the right way to use/extend it".
Proper error handling, proper design and proper documentation (especially on software that's supposed to be used by other software) are the sort of practices that should be followed to minimize this kind of things.
In my experience, following or not this kind of good practices is quite independent of the programming language used.
Indeed. Causing a *NON FATAL* explosion in a country that imprisoned as many as 2.5 million political prisoners in Gulags at one time, and is estimated to have murdered upwards of 60 MILLION of its own citizens. Terrorism?
Terrorism is an act of mayhem designed to terrorize. This did not.
Sabotage? Yes. Act of war? Probably. Terrorism? Not even close.
Your statement is just a display of anti-American rhetoric with no basis in reality.
So how would you feel if it was the other way around, if the Soviet Union had caused such an explosion in US soil?
I reckon the original poster just reacted in a strong way due to the way he feels when people are killed for no reason. The nationality of said people (or indeed the behavious of the government on the country in question) do not make it less of a shamefull act.
By the way, were did you get the NON FATAL information from?
Just recently i've been faced with such a kind of manager: - Some sales guy got moved to project management and given a baddly defined (the requirements document was a joke and nobody noticed it before i came in), short budget project to do. - First project meeting and he comes out with "We're going to have to do long nights on this one" - My response: "Do you know i'm a freelancer and get paid by the hour?"
Somehow, even though the project overran the budget (2 or 3 times), i never got asked to work extra (and payed) hours......
My theory: - Making developers work over-hours is how bad managers (try to) compensate for their poor management skills (bad planning, skipping of requirements analysis, not saying NO when they should, no prioritizing, ignoring how client dependencies affect deadlines, etc, etc, etc) and keep projects within the budge.
It will only happen when said managers have something to win (free out of budget hours) but nothing to loose (if a developer leaves or gets sick one can always blame it on the developer himself).
When those extra hours DO come out of the budget, then (strangelly;) ), there is no need for overworking anymore.
Overwork is what has kept hordes of incompetent low/mid-level managers employed in this industry...
The rise of free newspapers (for example, here in Holland you can get them on the train station, 2 types, free of charge) has certainly impacted the traditional model newspapers
Lack of time and the wide availability of entertainment options is also an issue. The little time i have left on the evenings is already split over competing "consumers" (gaming, television, books, friends, family,...) - reading a daily newspaper would require a very significant slice of the little time available and eat into the time for everything else.
Personally i read a weekly magazine and that's all i have time for. If i use public transportation i'll read a free newspaper, but that's because in that case i'll have 1/2h idle time on my hands and, for the price i don't actually loose nothing if i don't have the time to or feel like reading all of it.
Reading your post, it almost seems like there are no costs to global warming. Maybe we'll all just get beter tans or such.......
Strangely enough, in my sources of information the subject of rising ocean levels comes up very often when taling of global warming.
I'm amazed that you have missed the all too often cited chain of events of: Rising global temperatures -> Melting of land-based ice caps -> Rising ocean levels
If you need costs, just consider the costs of having (or trying to avaid having) most costal cities under several meters of water (or even whole countries) Not to mention agricultural land (river deltas are both very fertile and at low altitude).
Then there's the small point that higher ocean temperatures increase the average strenght of tropical storms... you know, those little weather disturbances with human names...
To top it all up, there is a possibility that higher ocean temperatures will cause the North Atlantic Current to stop, which would strongly decrease the temperatures in Europe - not exactly what the infrastructure around here is prepared to coupe with.
It's hardly suprising that many are alarmed with the fact that the politicians (and apparently a big segment of the population in general) of the nation in the world that polutes more per-capita have for years now actively attacked what nowadays is a scientify consensus, have put all sorts of roadblocks on a global attempt to solve a global problem and thrown-up smoke curtains (voluntary carbon trading schemes, sure...) in the misguided belive that by not making poluters pay for poluting they're defending their industry.
Personally i've been boycoting Sony for years now - due to them both owning a recording label and their behaviour in relation to IP and Copyright, i simply don't buy anything AT ALL from Sony - I don't trust them not to sneak "crippleware" functionality into their products, so i ain't buying from them.
If SanDisk is investing in developing technology that "reduces value" for their customers, i reckon i don't want to do business with them - no point in aquiring products from them just to find they have reduced functionality when compared to competing products.
Same logic applies to any other company that tries to take features away from their customers. (Ever since copy protected CDs came out i stopped buying them)
Vote with your wallet people - instead of just bitching and moaning while at the end of the day still putting your money in their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree on this one.
Furthermore, as i see it, the only possible benefict that moving to a new format can give to the porn industry is "high definition content". This might be a real benefict for the part of the industry that concentrates on showing naked physically perfect women - aka softcore - (or maybe not if they rely on the technology to disguise the imperfections) but what value does it add to the part of the industry that concentrates on the action - aka hardcore. After all, most hardcore movies are hardly known for the grandeur of the scenarios (or the depth of the stories, or the quality of the acting of their casting)
If you think back to the change from videotapes to DVDs, you can see clear beneficts to the industry:
As i see it, none of these new technologies seems to bring any comparable beneficts for a business model such as the one from the porn industry.
Obvious beneficts for the traditional film industry, such as getting their customers to (again) buy their personal film library in another format, are hardly applicable to the porn industry - there is hardly a hot market for a new edition of "Debbie Does Dalas"
And here's my version that will break the copyright of every artist that ever added a silent track to a CD:
for(i=0;irandom()*10000;i++)
{
printf(" ");
}
Aarrgh, shiver me timbers!
This reminds me of something a virtual radio commentator that you hear when playing a recent game says:
"Remember, you shouldn't wistle the tunes you hear on the radio because it breaks the author's copyright. Wistling is killing the music industry!"
Just because one has terminal metastatic cancer doesn't mean one is going to die from it.
I mean, you can die because you're run over by a car, fall from a tall building, choke on a fishbone or many more reasons other than the cancer.
Most certain not in Holland.
;)
Around here, leaving usually means a 1 month notice period, and in all the places i worked in, people always work until the last day except if having have some vacation days left and wanting to take them (non-used vacation days are redeemed for money when one leaves).
Even more important, in the vast majority of places i've worked in the company will do a goodbye party for you.
In my last position, even though i now work as a freelancer, after i decided i wasn't going to accept anymore extensions to my contract and on my last day in, they still did a goodbye party for me and gave me a bottle of Cognac as a goodbye present.
I've seen it happen for others, so i ain't been getting goodbye parties 'cause they're happy that I am leaving
Reading above that what happened to the OI is a "usual" behaviour and part of the POF just makes me want to ask - "What the fuck kind of sick employer-employee relation do you guys have there?"
Putting things another way, if you aim is to induce the strongest and most widespread terror in the target population, then taking down the Internet is not worth the effort.
Except of course, if your target population is composed mostly of geeks
Well, if programming is just a source of income for you, then the effort you put into it, and thus the quality of your code, probably won't be as good as the code produced by someone else, to whom programming is a hobby or a passion. In other words, if you actually enjoy programming, you will likely be a better programmer than someone who doesn't.
Two points:
So yeah, either you stop being a pure coder and keep the enthusiasm (there are always new challenges if you don't limit yourself), or you keep doing the same thing over and over and it looses much of it's appeal, or you have a goldfish-like memory and every new project looks fresh and new for you even if you did something very similar in countless previous projects.
Sorry to disapoint you, but programming is like other professional occupations, either you are not driven to do the best you can, go as far as you can and keep trying to see what's beyond the next hill (in which case how did you ever became a good coder), or you outgrow what got you into it to begin with (coding) or you get progressivelly more bored doing it.
Still, there's always open source
Spear-phishing = social engineering via e-mail
Instead of telephoning some company and making believe ur their service provider to try and get the root password for some machine, one sends an email disguised as a legit email from a company with which a target company's employee has a commercial relation. Said email contains as payload an agent program which can be used to gather information/control the machine.
This is more powerfull than old style social engineering, both because you directly get an agent running on a machine inside the target company's network and because the list of potential targets is bigger than just "the person's that have passwords to the company's servers"
Methinks ur just jealous ;)
Pick up your mobile phone and go to a quiet corner.
.. ... ... would have a mechanic check it out. You never know when a car starts making funny noises - you might end up with an expensive to fix problem.
Actually do this anytime your talking on your mobile, confidential/private call or not, that way nobody will notice when you actually DO go out to talk privately
Also mastering the art of smoothly changing subjects when somebody walks in is very usefull:
You (on the phone): Tell me what you're wearing
She: I have my black silk negligee on
You: If i was there i would pull the straps, slowly let it fall down and then
*somebody walks in*
You:
Just keep in mind that if you make a development team completely out of inexperienced/little-experience programmers you'll end up paying for it over and over again.
Programmers which are inexperience or have little experience, are cheap because they make lots of mistakes (after all they're still learning). Even then most gifted ones are unaware of how, in the middle/long term, an application evolves in a real-life environment.
Expect hard to change applications, strange bugs, costly to bugfix applications, essential knowledge about the implementation that leaves when the developer leaves and fastly increasing in entropy in the code base(*) (and thus fastly increasing maintenance costs and number of bugs). Expect to have to rewrite the application from scratch after a couple of years.
My recomendation: Get at least one very experience designer/developer (possibly even a technical architect) and give that person technical lead. This person will then set and enforce technical standaards, work environment standaards and documentation standaards; do the technical analysis of the requirements; create the top level design and make or approve lower level designs; act as a coach to the less experienced developers; estimate man-hour costs for implementations.
(*)Increased entropy in the code base: if the application's design is not well ballanced and/or not properly maintained or documented, each bugfix/extension is basically a hack. As time goes by and more hacks pile on top of each other the code becomes more and more complex (known in the trade as spaghetti code), prone to break in unexpected places when small changes are done to it and to randomly exhibit more and more strange bugs. This means increasing costs associated with maintenance and extension of the application. Eventually it becomes cheaper to just scrap it and start anew.
These are the same guys that believe that lobbying to create laws to protect intelectual property (DCMA) is a good thing.
One can hardly expect them to consider the technology arena as holy and untouchable.
Basically they only care about the bottom line - they'll do whatever it takes as long as they don't loose money by doing it it.
I've been copying ringtones to my mobile for years now.
The mobile i got 5 or 6 years ago could only transfer files with a special cable that cost half the price of the phone (never did came around to actually get the cable). Later i found that i could do it with IR too.
The next one (about 3 years ago) could do it via IR and bluetooth.
Latest one (got it 10 months ago) has bluetooth and comes with a cable to connect to a PC plus a CD-Rom with an application for synchronizing your mobile with you PC.
All of these mobile phones were reasonably priced, mainstream models (no special organizer/mobile combos or whatever).
Maybe it's because of the widespread adoption of GSM, and throat-cutting competition between manufacturers and consequent wide availability of models!??
Although i agree with your points i find that your sugestions are simplistic and you are missing "Step 3 - Allow your Geeks to clearly communicate those ideas". After all, the inputs for Step 1 don't come out of thin air.
For any application that outlives their creator's career period in that position/company, new people will be constantly cycled through all the steps as the application needs to be fixed or extended. This makes it important to leave things set for the "next generation". This part of the process is actually what the original poster is asking about IMHO.
In complex systems, reading the code to find out the architecture of the system is the last resource option - simply put, no mater how fast your printers or how big/abundant your screens, going through tens of thousands of lines of code is a very inneficient way to figure out how a complicated application works.
Even in smaller sized applications, code reading to figure out the design is a slow and error prone process - if you ever been faced with having to do short fixes on somebody else's (undocumented) application and later having the chance to become familiar with it, you will find that your first couple of fixes probably didn't quite fit the design of the application (ie, they look like hacks). Any application that gets fixed/extended by several unconnected developers will tend to become unmaintaineable spaghetti. This can often be avoided with a simple design document, often just 2 or 3 graphics and a couple of lines of text. Similarly, some simple code and code-documentation standaards enforced in Step 3 will really increase the efficiency of Step 1.
... is only as strong as it weakest link.
It all boils down to:
- Do we trust AOL and Yahoo to be honest in this sort of thing.
- Do we trust that AOL and Yahoo have the technical capability to effectivelly detect both reported and not yet reported forms of spyware.
Everybody know that the real hardcore terrorists store all their private massages in naked pictures using stenography.
... err ... avoid contamination
They need to be thouroughly examined, preferably in a quiet private environment to
I would say it's a mix of:
- Too many way off project plans & impossible deadlines, leading to programmers doing rush jobs of implementations & bug filled late-night coding sessions. This is a management problem.
- Inexperienced programmers.
- Prima Donna programmers that do things "their way" which "requires no documentation" because it's so "obvious", without even considering that other programmers that will have to create extensions to their code or have to produce applications interacting with that code are not omniscient or mind-readers and cannot guess out of thin air "the right way to use/extend it".
Proper error handling, proper design and proper documentation (especially on software that's supposed to be used by other software) are the sort of practices that should be followed to minimize this kind of things.
In my experience, following or not this kind of good practices is quite independent of the programming language used.
Indeed. Causing a *NON FATAL* explosion in a country that imprisoned as many as 2.5 million political prisoners in Gulags at one time, and is estimated to have murdered upwards of 60 MILLION of its own citizens. Terrorism?
Terrorism is an act of mayhem designed to terrorize. This did not.
Sabotage? Yes.
Act of war? Probably.
Terrorism? Not even close.
Your statement is just a display of anti-American rhetoric with no basis in reality.
So how would you feel if it was the other way around, if the Soviet Union had caused such an explosion in US soil?
I reckon the original poster just reacted in a strong way due to the way he feels when people are killed for no reason. The nationality of said people (or indeed the behavious of the government on the country in question) do not make it less of a shamefull act.
By the way, were did you get the NON FATAL information from?
Well said!
......
;) ), there is no need for overworking anymore.
Just recently i've been faced with such a kind of manager:
- Some sales guy got moved to project management and given a baddly defined (the requirements document was a joke and nobody noticed it before i came in), short budget project to do.
- First project meeting and he comes out with "We're going to have to do long nights on this one"
- My response: "Do you know i'm a freelancer and get paid by the hour?"
Somehow, even though the project overran the budget (2 or 3 times), i never got asked to work extra (and payed) hours
My theory:
- Making developers work over-hours is how bad managers (try to) compensate for their poor management skills (bad planning, skipping of requirements analysis, not saying NO when they should, no prioritizing, ignoring how client dependencies affect deadlines, etc, etc, etc) and keep projects within the budge.
It will only happen when said managers have something to win (free out of budget hours) but nothing to loose (if a developer leaves or gets sick one can always blame it on the developer himself).
When those extra hours DO come out of the budget, then (strangelly
Overwork is what has kept hordes of incompetent low/mid-level managers employed in this industry...
Now that it's been adverstised, expect an invasion of people with nicknames like IRuLeZ and 3liT3z, all of them in the age range 5 - 14 *sigh*
And i mean everything and anything from Sony, not only CDs.
It all boils down to:
- Do you trust this company?
I haven't trusted them for the past 4 years so i haven't bought NOTHING AT ALL from Sony. I actively boycot all their products.
Vote with your wallets people, all you have to do is resist the temptation to go all "uuuuh shinny!" whenever Sony puts out some new gadget.
It's not only the Internet.
...) - reading a daily newspaper would require a very significant slice of the little time available and eat into the time for everything else.
The rise of free newspapers (for example, here in Holland you can get them on the train station, 2 types, free of charge) has certainly impacted the traditional model newspapers
Lack of time and the wide availability of entertainment options is also an issue. The little time i have left on the evenings is already split over competing "consumers" (gaming, television, books, friends, family,
Personally i read a weekly magazine and that's all i have time for. If i use public transportation i'll read a free newspaper, but that's because in that case i'll have 1/2h idle time on my hands and, for the price i don't actually loose nothing if i don't have the time to or feel like reading all of it.
Reading your post, it almost seems like there are no costs to global warming. Maybe we'll all just get beter tans or such .......
... you know, those little weather disturbances with human names ...
Strangely enough, in my sources of information the subject of rising ocean levels comes up very often when taling of global warming.
I'm amazed that you have missed the all too often cited chain of events of:
Rising global temperatures -> Melting of land-based ice caps -> Rising ocean levels
If you need costs, just consider the costs of having (or trying to avaid having) most costal cities under several meters of water (or even whole countries)
Not to mention agricultural land (river deltas are both very fertile and at low altitude).
Then there's the small point that higher ocean temperatures increase the average strenght of tropical storms
To top it all up, there is a possibility that higher ocean temperatures will cause the North Atlantic Current to stop, which would strongly decrease the temperatures in Europe - not exactly what the infrastructure around here is prepared to coupe with.
It's hardly suprising that many are alarmed with the fact that the politicians (and apparently a big segment of the population in general) of the nation in the world that polutes more per-capita have for years now actively attacked what nowadays is a scientify consensus, have put all sorts of roadblocks on a global attempt to solve a global problem and thrown-up smoke curtains (voluntary carbon trading schemes, sure...) in the misguided belive that by not making poluters pay for poluting they're defending their industry.
Personally i've been boycoting Sony for years now - due to them both owning a recording label and their behaviour in relation to IP and Copyright, i simply don't buy anything AT ALL from Sony - I don't trust them not to sneak "crippleware" functionality into their products, so i ain't buying from them.
If SanDisk is investing in developing technology that "reduces value" for their customers, i reckon i don't want to do business with them - no point in aquiring products from them just to find they have reduced functionality when compared to competing products.
Same logic applies to any other company that tries to take features away from their customers.
(Ever since copy protected CDs came out i stopped buying them)
Vote with your wallet people - instead of just bitching and moaning while at the end of the day still putting your money in their hands.
This is Slashdot.
;)
Last i checked the fashionable posture du jour was "Google is good".
I just wanted to shake (some) people out of the pre-defined position that "Google are the good ones so they must be right"
Hopefully this will make for a fairer and more rational discussion.
I was also aiming at first post but a troll beat me to it