it's nice that thought and work are being put in to solar, and all, but putting solar collectors in space is missing out on the other major feature of solar that nuclear can't produce: decentralized generation.
Yeah, back in the 70s when me and all the other "pro-tech" freaks were pushing the Solar Power Sat idea, we ran into this attitude a lot. There was a strong "back to nature" movement going on among the left at the time, and they loved the idea of unplugging from the grid so they could all hide out in the woods or some such.
But at this point, these ideas are waaay out of date. Try looking up "new urbanism" some time... it's generally understood these days that urban living is the greenest way to live, and that means there's no particular advantage to getting "off the grid". And maybe we're better off with what wilderness remains being left as wilderness instead of being converted into some sort of hippie-haven suburbia.
(And I don't want to sound bitter or anything... but if all you bastards had listened to us three decades ago when we tried to push space industrialization, we might have some of these problems solved by now.)
The idea of blocking the sun to maintain the status quo on a climatic system we really don't understand yet, is stupid.
The idea of taking control of the earth's climate does indeed give one pause, but I think we're
stuck. If you buy the idea that the industrial output of greenhouse gases has been modifying the earth's energy balance, you've got to make up you mind what that balance should be, and think about
how you're going to work toward it.
The idea that we can just go "don't mess with mother nature" and we'll all be okay is an interesting religious attitude, but I don't see what it has to do with reality.
Even if we could find a way to reduce industrial C02 emissions to zero tomorrow (a massive build-up of nuclear plants plus radical conservation efforts?), it's not at all clear that that would be enough
to fix the damage that's been done already.
increased CO2 emissions from coal burning that would mandate radical restructuring of global energy technology
As we are all aware, the whole global warming problem presented by rising levels of CO2 is that more energy is trapped here on Earth. So how is trapping more energy from the sun and sending more energy to Earth going to help the problem?
Try thinking this through.
Let's presume we exactly balance energy released by burning coal with energy from the solar power sat system. In either case, we have waste heat that needs to be radiated into space... but in once case we're spewing less of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Got it?
Maybe the solar collector will be directly between the Sun and Earth, thus removing as much incoming solar energy as it is beaming down to our power station.
Correct. One version of this scheme would be to put solar collectors at the L1 point between earth and sun, and attempt to use it as a global warming amelioration system.
But which countries are going to volunteer to give up much of their sunlight?
But once again, I think you're physical picture of the situation is way off. The collectors at L1 are unlikely to cast anything like a solid dark shadow across the earth, and even if they did, what you'd get is a brief artifical "eclipse" every day at noon for the countries lying near the equator.
Whenever one of these web outages happens, I like to point out that this
kind of stuff doesn't happen to usenet, because by design it uses a
distributed back-end architecture, unlike this super-advanced web technology
with central points of failure essentially built-in (unless you do a lot of
fancy dancing to cover the problem).
You know, kind of like "P2P" and "bitorrent" and all that.
But of course, usenet lacks choke-points to insert advertising
-- oh wait, I mean it lacks spam resistance, that's it -- so it is of course doomed to obscurity.
A modern bard could build a lifetime of tales from two regional bus trips.
Yeah, and a modern infectious disease specialist could build a lifetime of case reports from the little critters that get passed around in those things.
Like air travel is any better? Flying is a great way to spend the first week of your vacation
in bed with a virus. (But it's so much faster than taking the train!).
(What we're actually talking about here is class prejudices: air travel still has this vibe of an elite, high class activity, despite all evidence to the contrary...)
The Discussion2 system is almost (but not quite) useless if you use a custom background color in Firefox.
The "floating toolbar" widget is nearly impossible to use, because of what I would guess is a bug in Firefox: if you set the background color, the background color of javascript windows are treated as "transparent".
I continue to use it largely because I hate the way discussion pages are split up in the old system, but I get essentially no benefit from all the floating control panel nonsense... I just set my thresholds way low so I see everything and skim through it manually with some combination of page downs and text searches.
Tip: if you want to "influence public opinion", you need to post in the first thread, where you'll be stuck fighting with the hired jammers, but if you want to have a reasonable discussion, you should skip waaaay down to the beginning of the second thread.
An actually useful feature would be to randomize the default order in which threads are presented to people, so that first posts would stop having any advantage... but actually fixing the real problems seems to be beyond the scope of interest of our slash-masters. (When was the last time slashdot introduced a new idea? Everything they do seems to be imitating features of other sites...).
He and colleagues discovered it [...]
Actually, this shows how great of a scientist Einstein was.
[...]
So whether he agreed with it being real or not, I think he deserves credit for the work he did leading to it.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree.
It could be you need to learn to quote the passage you're responding to, in order to provide the context necessary for clarity.
Einstein wasnt doing the work on EPR to further our knowledge of the universe, or anything like that. he was doing it specifically to discredit quantum physics,
E, P, & R did the original math, and they published it first.
What part of this do you not follow?
I'm honestly waiting for the man to be diagnosed with some form of dementia. It really wouldn't surprise me; especially considering the fact that he seems to be getting worse as time goes on...
We're talking about a man who honestly believes that the software itself has the right to be free. Not that the developers have the right to release open software, that the *software* has the right to be free. That's like saying that the milk in the store has the right to be free.
Or, on the other hand, you could read what the man actually says, rather than relying on this mind-reading fellow here on slashdot.
Is GPL 3 that unreasonable given the behavior of the RIAA and MPAA of recent?
Perhaps not, but is that really the kind of people RMS and the Community(tm) wants to be associated with?
RMS's zealotry crystalized in my mind when back in 2000 or something, he was to give a speech at a college, and he threw a tantrum and pouted until the system used to record and stream the speech to other locations was either switched to use "Free Software" or were turned off, because they used Quicktime. The IT guy replied, "We looked at 'Free Software' alternatives, but nothing currently available can stream both the video and the audio. The audio is not streamed properly." Stallman's response, "Well that will encourage people to fix it!"
Whatever dude. Stallman confirmed his irrelevancy in that moment.
It is not always easy to determine the appropriate trade-off between immediate need and
long term goals.
It is not hard to find examples of people making expedient compromises that lead to long term difficulties (e.g. bitkeeper).
RMS may very well have been irrelevant "in that moment"... but you may be irrelevant in the scheme of history.
The fact that BitKeeper was commercial software is extremely consistent with Linus' views of things -- I don't care about politics, I just want it to work, damn it.
So why didn't he use the BSD license? For that matter, why not just pay to use a commercial unix?
Linus isn't sure what his view of things is, because he's uncomfortable thinking about it...
so on matters of principle he's this weird loose cannon rolling around in different directions.
That saying is used to describe mainly stubborn idiots who only see/do things their way, refusing to listen to anyone else. To me, that descriptions fits like a glove to RMS & pals.
They believe in deciding what they believe, and sticking to their guns. Correct.
Bunch of whingy hypocrites.
Incorrect. It's very difficult to find any instance where RMS or the FSF has behaved inconsistently.
You need to (a) stop mindlessly repeating every smear word you hear (b) do a web search on "freedom 0".
The problem with the Republican party is that they are no longer conservatives.
And the trouble with the Democratic party is that they are.
If they don't get off their ass and do something, if they really run Hillary (a pro-war Democrat) for Pres, I predict 2008 is going to be a third-party candidate mess again.
Part of the beauty of the US is that each state can experiment with different ideas. Ideally, in turn, each state can learn from the successes and mistakes of others. If all states were doing the same thing, then you would potentially miss out on way to do it even better.
I'm inclined to agree with you in principle, but in practice the way this "states rights" business works out is the bastards (my informal name for "the vast right-wing conspiracy", which somewhat ironically should probably include DINOs like Hillary) cry "states rights!" only when it suits them, but when they've got federal muscle under their control, they're not shy about flexing it.
A simple pencil and paper ballot works a lot better.
I'm inclined to agree, unfortunately that would (a) require an admission of failure (b) put some well-connected voting machine businesses out of business.
Well, I suppose you could knock down substantial portions of US cities to build light rail.
Light rail is in fact, fairly easy to drop in any place where roads exist, and only requires bulldozing cities in your over-heated rhetoric.
Of course, besides being kind of dumb,
Your mama.
you also wouldn't have anyone left to ride them.
Unlimited gasoline being a prerequisite for life-as-we-know-it.
If you go to the mid-west, you have "real cities", I suppose,
You have real cities any place that was built before the post-WWII zoning regulations
kicked in, provided they weren't destroyed in an ill-advised attempt at making room
for parking lots and freeways.
it's just that there still isn't good public transit.
I dunno where you've been looking. I lived for a few years in Pocatello, Idaho, and even there I could get around on their bus-lines (and get to work on the commuter busses provided by the INEL site). Getting in and out of town by rail or plane wasn't exactly difficult either. Admittedly, if you didn't
live somewhere like Salt Lake City, it was difficult to go skiing on weekends by riding a bus, and for that sort of thing I resorted to car-pooling.
What is more likely to happen is that the cost of fuel will rise. Correspondingly, the price of goods and services will increase. People will have little choice but to pay the increased costs. Eventually, you may well have more carpooling and public transit.
And what I think would happen is you would nearly instantly get an increase in things like car-pooling (and an avoidance of more-or-less unnecessary trips, of which there are many because of the government-provided
illusory "free" nature of the resources in use -- look up the "traffic evaporation" phenomena some time, and contemplate what that means exactly).
Carbon credits are the same thing: an arbitrary limitation that carries an arbitrary price tag. The *only* thing that would do is make things cost more. We'd still be driving cars, and we'd still have bad public transit, but the general public would just have a lot less money. All of the yahoos that say we should tax the hell out of gasoline ignore this problem, too. You don't make it fixed by making it more expensive, you just give the government more money and slow the economy.
So your opinion is that the law of supply and demand has been repealed? How else can you explain the notion that if it cost more to pollute people won't find ways to pollute less (e.g. by using mass transit in preference to private cars)?
What I think is going on here is that you've got it stuck in your head that suburbia is The Natural Order of Things, and no one in America will ever be induced to abandon their suburban ways no matter how much they have to pay... "you'll pry that gas spigot out of our mouths from our cold dead fingers!"
(The other problem you have, is you've decided a priori that nothing that comes out of the mouth of those left wing whackos can possibly have an ounce of truth to it...)
Yes, many US cities are poorly laid out. There isn't anything that can be done about that now, so we must make due. Making due means buses and lots of personal vehicles for a lot of places.
There's nothing that can be done about it? Absolutely nothing? How about we try revising the zoning laws so that it's not illegal to build real cities?
Now look at population density in North America...pockets of high density, not coincidentally these are the places where mass public transit is the best in NA. But for the most part, NA is not very dense population wise. It is simply prohibitively expensive to implement mass public transit as it has been in parts of europe and india.
Not saying it's impossible, just saying that it really is NOT Just That Easy.
And what I think you're missing is that the low-density areas have essentially been created by
the US government prioritizing highway funding. Suburbia only seems to make sense if you hide a lot of
the costs that make it possible. If you stop hiding the costs, suburbia will at the very least
stop sprawling quite as fast as it is.
Just a little arrogant of Steve there. Amigas, roughly contemporary with the first macs (and in development since before the mac came out, the feature wasn't tacked on at the last minute in response to the mac or something), had excellent multi-typeface and proportional font support.
And what about Apple's Lisa machine? In a lot of ways, the original Mac was just a cheap Lisa.
Slashdot Mirror
bitspotter wrote:
Yeah, back in the 70s when me and all the other "pro-tech" freaks were pushing the Solar Power Sat idea, we ran into this attitude a lot. There was a strong "back to nature" movement going on among the left at the time, and they loved the idea of unplugging from the grid so they could all hide out in the woods or some such.
But at this point, these ideas are waaay out of date. Try looking up "new urbanism" some time... it's generally understood these days that urban living is the greenest way to live, and that means there's no particular advantage to getting "off the grid". And maybe we're better off with what wilderness remains being left as wilderness instead of being converted into some sort of hippie-haven suburbia.
(And I don't want to sound bitter or anything... but if all you bastards had listened to us three decades ago when we tried to push space industrialization, we might have some of these problems solved by now.)
The idea of taking control of the earth's climate does indeed give one pause, but I think we're stuck. If you buy the idea that the industrial output of greenhouse gases has been modifying the earth's energy balance, you've got to make up you mind what that balance should be, and think about how you're going to work toward it.
The idea that we can just go "don't mess with mother nature" and we'll all be okay is an interesting religious attitude, but I don't see what it has to do with reality.
Even if we could find a way to reduce industrial C02 emissions to zero tomorrow (a massive build-up of nuclear plants plus radical conservation efforts?), it's not at all clear that that would be enough to fix the damage that's been done already.
Listen: you don't get cute points on this kind of schtick, what you get is a big flashing sign on your head saying "I AM AN IDIOT".
(Unfortunately, you did get karma out of it, because there are some moderators out there with similar equipment.)
You know, kind of like "P2P" and "bitorrent" and all that.
But of course, usenet lacks choke-points to insert advertising -- oh wait, I mean it lacks spam resistance, that's it -- so it is of course doomed to obscurity.
Like air travel is any better? Flying is a great way to spend the first week of your vacation in bed with a virus. (But it's so much faster than taking the train!).
(What we're actually talking about here is class prejudices: air travel still has this vibe of an elite, high class activity, despite all evidence to the contrary...)
I continue to use it largely because I hate the way discussion pages are split up in the old system, but I get essentially no benefit from all the floating control panel nonsense... I just set my thresholds way low so I see everything and skim through it manually with some combination of page downs and text searches.
Tip: if you want to "influence public opinion", you need to post in the first thread, where you'll be stuck fighting with the hired jammers, but if you want to have a reasonable discussion, you should skip waaaay down to the beginning of the second thread.
An actually useful feature would be to randomize the default order in which threads are presented to people, so that first posts would stop having any advantage... but actually fixing the real problems seems to be beyond the scope of interest of our slash-masters. (When was the last time slashdot introduced a new idea? Everything they do seems to be imitating features of other sites...).
It could be you need to learn to quote the passage you're responding to, in order to provide the context necessary for clarity.
Could we get rid of the pedantic idiots, also?
brunascle wrote:
I'm sorry too. E, P, & R did the original math, and they published it first. What part of this do you not follow?And Linux Torvald's is getting better?
Or, on the other hand, you could read what the man actually says, rather than relying on this mind-reading fellow here on slashdot.
coaxial wrote:
RMS may very well have been irrelevant "in that moment"... but you may be irrelevant in the scheme of history.
"Personally speaking, I think that Stallman has been getting worse about it as time goes on." Uh huh. And Linus Torvalds is getting better?
So why didn't he use the BSD license? For that matter, why not just pay to use a commercial unix?
Linus isn't sure what his view of things is, because he's uncomfortable thinking about it... so on matters of principle he's this weird loose cannon rolling around in different directions.
They believe in deciding what they believe, and sticking to their guns. Correct.
Incorrect. It's very difficult to find any instance where RMS or the FSF has behaved inconsistently. You need to (a) stop mindlessly repeating every smear word you hear (b) do a web search on "freedom 0".
hey! wrote:
And the trouble with the Democratic party is that they are.
If they don't get off their ass and do something, if they really run Hillary (a pro-war Democrat) for Pres, I predict 2008 is going to be a third-party candidate mess again.
benhocking
I'm inclined to agree with you in principle, but in practice the way this "states rights" business works out is the bastards (my informal name for "the vast right-wing conspiracy", which somewhat ironically should probably include DINOs like Hillary) cry "states rights!" only when it suits them, but when they've got federal muscle under their control, they're not shy about flexing it.
I'm inclined to agree, unfortunately that would (a) require an admission of failure (b) put some well-connected voting machine businesses out of business.
Light rail is in fact, fairly easy to drop in any place where roads exist, and only requires bulldozing cities in your over-heated rhetoric.
Your mama.
Unlimited gasoline being a prerequisite for life-as-we-know-it.
You have real cities any place that was built before the post-WWII zoning regulations kicked in, provided they weren't destroyed in an ill-advised attempt at making room for parking lots and freeways.
I dunno where you've been looking. I lived for a few years in Pocatello, Idaho, and even there I could get around on their bus-lines (and get to work on the commuter busses provided by the INEL site). Getting in and out of town by rail or plane wasn't exactly difficult either. Admittedly, if you didn't live somewhere like Salt Lake City, it was difficult to go skiing on weekends by riding a bus, and for that sort of thing I resorted to car-pooling.
And what I think would happen is you would nearly instantly get an increase in things like car-pooling (and an avoidance of more-or-less unnecessary trips, of which there are many because of the government-provided illusory "free" nature of the resources in use -- look up the "traffic evaporation" phenomena some time, and contemplate what that means exactly).
So your opinion is that the law of supply and demand has been repealed? How else can you explain the notion that if it cost more to pollute people won't find ways to pollute less (e.g. by using mass transit in preference to private cars)?
What I think is going on here is that you've got it stuck in your head that suburbia is The Natural Order of Things, and no one in America will ever be induced to abandon their suburban ways no matter how much they have to pay... "you'll pry that gas spigot out of our mouths from our cold dead fingers!"
(The other problem you have, is you've decided a priori that nothing that comes out of the mouth of those left wing whackos can possibly have an ounce of truth to it...)
aaronl wrote:
There's nothing that can be done about it? Absolutely nothing? How about we try revising the zoning laws so that it's not illegal to build real cities?
And what I think you're missing is that the low-density areas have essentially been created by the US government prioritizing highway funding. Suburbia only seems to make sense if you hide a lot of the costs that make it possible. If you stop hiding the costs, suburbia will at the very least stop sprawling quite as fast as it is.
And what about Apple's Lisa machine? In a lot of ways, the original Mac was just a cheap Lisa.