I have an idea, why don't you folks check the
words of the woman herself? She's been interviewed
on Democracy Now, and it's available on-line:
Giuliana Sgrena interview on April 27, 2005.
Both transcript in html and a recording is available.
Some highlights, in my opinion:
This was a controlled road they were on, not the usual airport road. (You might reasonably expect embassy traffic on this road, not enemy forces.)
She says that the car was slowing down because they were coming up to a turn, and couldn't be going fast because they'd just gone through water.
She and the person who was killed were both shot from behind (the US story, I gather is they were fired on from in front).
If so that's great, but American society did have to make
that choice (e.g around the time of the TMI scare). So you've
ducked the question.
That was 30 years ago.
Ah yes, the "that's ancient history" defense. A favorite of
people who want to sweep issues under the rug.
Then as now, we have a whole range of
options, which I'm sure you're aware of. You're not presenting
all the options, which is what I take issue with.
And you're still ducking the issue. Let me rephrase
one more time: It is taken as a given that there are things
you favor over using nuclear power. If for some reason, you were
presuaded that those were not viable, and you were reduced to
a lesser of two evils choice between nuclear and coal, which
would you go for?
Nuclear power *is* clean power. And no, the price tag isn't
*really* what's holding back, it's the phobia.
While typing that over and over again may be satisfying, it
doesn't solve nuclear waste disposal problems, which we are still
grappling with as a society.
Well you see, my suspicion is that one of the big reasons we're
still grappling with this is anti-nuclear activists pushing the
"Fear" button. From my point of view, this is setting the house
on fire, then arresting them for being vagrants.
The point that I keep trying to make is that with nuclear
power you get to think about where the waste goes, and
however politically agonizing this choice is for us, at least
we have the choice. With coal power, you don't: you get to
breath it, and if our understanding global warming is
correct, it threatens the entire planet.
I understand your point, and you have made it.
But it won't stop you from ducking it.
It doesn't make
nuclear waste any more appealing to me. You have to admit
radioactive waste with a potential 100,000 year half life is
pretty nasty.
Nasty compared to what? Chemical toxins have an infinite half-life.
I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about the cadmium leaking
out my Ni-Cd batteries.
By the way, another nice thing about radioactives is that they're
really easy to detect with some simple electronics equipment: you
tend to notice leaks pretty quickly.
Are you willing to host a nuclear waste dump in
your community? Are you willing to share the road with nuclear
waste transport vehicles? Few people are. It's not just a matter
of being irrational.
Given a choice between living next to a nuclear facility (either
power plant, or waste storage) and living next to a coal facility
(power plant, or waste storage), I would happily choose to live
next to the nuclear facility. Further, I would claim is that
anyone who has really thought about the matter would make the
same decision.
[... snipping, for once... ]
You may feel like no one listens much to environmentalists
these days, and you might be right, but in the late 60s, early
70s time frame that was not the case. (Note: the EPA was
founded in 1970.)
Again, you're going back 30 years to blame this on
environmentalists. Three decades is a long time to repair a
reputation, and the nuclear power industry has had ample
resources to do it.
Sorry if you're getting tired of hearing about the 1970s, but
this is all actually on-topic. We're talking about Stewart
Brand's take on shifts in thinking among environmentalists,
and his thoughts about where it might go next. History is not
a side-issue here, it's what's really under discussion.
If you're suggestion is that environmentalists don't matter
because they're star has waned, I disagree. Ideologies
matter,
"So then, barring accidents, and presuming
we do something half-way sensible with the
waste, we would then have a shot at (a)
saving kilolife or two, (b) slowing global
warming."
You have to consider when not if and it is
clear we can not bar these accidents but
factor them into the analysis, as well as
the waste.
But we have a chance of eliminating
the accidents: decades of experience with
nuclear power in the US shows that we're
really good at avoiding these kind of
accidents, and it's a not unreasonable
presumption that newer designs would be
still safew.
When you burn coal, you have no hope of
avoiding the loss of kLives. You know
you're going to kill massive numbers of
people. Heigh-ho.
""we do something half-way sensible with the waste""
How long have we had nuclear power? When is this question going
to be answered in a half-way sensible manner? or is it that it is
a problem that has not good answer.
There are all sorts of good answers,
there just aren't any perfect
answers, and that's what people repeatedly
demand of nuclear power.
No other technology is held to this
standard. We lost a few thousand people to
coal-induced lung cancer last year? Well
nothings perfect. About 50 thousand died in
car accidents? Well that's a shame, but
what do you expect?
There is no known container
technology that would contain it for the thousands of years that
the waste will be hot. Nuclear waste will be dangerous for longer
than what has already been recorded human history!
This is melodramatic nonsense. Rule of thumb:
the really hot stuff decays really fast.
If whatever is left over leaks a thousand
years from now, it might actually kill some
people -- but will it kill thousands? Will
it kill more than we kill over several
decades of spewing poison in the air?
What we have done is not create radioactivity with coal but
released it into the atmosphere. Not good and the other gasses
not good. But those are needle pricks compared to what happened
to Chernobl.
Bullshit. Chernobyl -- which has next to
nothing in common with US nuclear technology
-- was quite bad. But what kind of death
estimates from Chernobyl do you really think
are plausible? 20,000? Then an accident
like this is roughly comparable to a couple
of decades of US coal burning. But Chernobyls
don't happen every two decades. They don't
happen to US nuclear plants at all.
Anyway, you're links are noted, and I'll try and
look at them later -- even I can get talked
out on this subject...
Well that's a surprise. Try answering a
simple question: "Which is better, coal
or nuclear?" I will stipulate that there
may be other choices that may be better
than either. If you had to make that
choice, which would you choose?
I don't have to make that choice.
If so that's great, but American society
did have to make that choice (e.g
around the time of the TMI scare). So
you've ducked the question.
The choice I make is, "Do I cheap out and
buy coal and nuclear, or do I spend slightly
more and get clean (solar, wind, hydro)
energy from my supplier?" I made the right
choice and paid a little more. The question
is moot, if you can afford it. I think the
US as a whole can afford to make the same
choice.
Well, this is interesting. I suspect that
you've been sold a load of greenwashing -- a
lot of people would argue that "hydro" isn't
exactly clean, for example -- but we might
hope that I'm being excessively cynical...
Nuclear power *is* clean power. And no, the price tag isn't
*really* what's holding back, it's the phobia.
Ask all those long-haired eco-terrorists in Nevada how clean
nuclear energy is. Yucca Mountain is not what I'd call a clean
solution.
The point that I keep trying to make is that with nuclear power
you get to think about where the waste goes, and however
politically agonizing this choice is for us, at least we have the
choice. With coal power, you don't: you get to breath it, and if
our understanding global warming is correct, it threatens
the entire planet.
These are two totally different magnitudes of threats .
With nuclear waste, you can get leaks -- maybe it's inevitable
you'll get leaks -- but with coal you don't have to worry
about leaks. You know where it's going to go.
With nuclear power you might have a bad accident that'll hurt a
lot of people. With coal power, you don't have to wonder.
If I remember right, the energy budget for the US right now is
supplied by something like 50% coal and 20% nuclear. Why doesn't
anyone demand that those percentages be reversed?
(1) Who care's if an energy source is sustainable? The life
time of a nuclear plant is measured in decades. If you've
got something better you switch to it when it's time to
retire the plant.
I meant sustainable in the sense that it doesn't produce radioactive waste.
Oh, I get it. You meant "sustainable" in a sense that you just
made up for the sake of this argument.
(2) What do you call ignoring the *actual* consequences of
your actions because you insist on utopia or nothing? I
think "irrational" is a good description.
Why exactly am I insisting on utopia? I already buy all my
electric power from clean sources. I use natural gas for heating.
Well perhaps utopian isn't quite the
right word to descibe you personally, but I
think it's a good description of a lot of
the "but why don't we just use sun power?"
gang.
I think you're in denial about the "natural
gas" being clean. It's better than coal --
most things are -- but you're still pumping
out carbon.
And whose fault is that exactly? Who stampeded that mob?
I wish environmentalists had the sway in
this country you attribute to them. If I had
to guess, I'd say Chernobyl and Three Mile
Island had something to do with nuclear's
bad reputation.
You guess correctly, but the public was
already hyped up about nuclear power before
the TMI incident -- it happened on the
weekend that the "China Syndrome" movie was
released, remember? Industrial accidents
typically get a page 3 story that fades the
next day. TMI was a big capital lo
I think Brand included the urban argument because he's 30 years
out of touch. Even in the 70s, Paolo Soleri was pushing
arcologies, which were high-density, low foot print urban
structures. Not that he got anywhere, and suburban sprawl from
Phoenix is now overtaking his utopia.
Well yeah, and if you go back to the 60s you can find Jane
Jacobs (if anyone feels like reading a work of genius,
try "Death and Life of Great American Cities").
And what I'm telling you is that back in the 70s, "New Urbanist"
thinking was by no means prevalent among environmentalists. WBAI
was playing the hell out of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road". There was an anti-tech/back-to-nature sentiment that was
really widespread on college campuses, which I know from first
hand experience (at least as far as SUNY Stony Brook is
concerned).
(Mildly funny story: a bunch of the more hardcore of the
back-to-nature folks from Stony Brook got a chance to spend some
time working on a farm one summer. Evidentally, they discovered
it was really hard work. And they had a hard time taking
orders from the people who knew what they were doing. It took
some time for these sorts of reality checks to sink in.)
Brand may be out-of-date on this one, but I'd say it's more like
by 15 years than 30.
On the other hand, while "environmentalists" our now mostly new
urbanists, there's plenty of people out there in the suburbs who
probably *think* they "care about the environment" but haven't
gotten the word that suburbia is bad news from almost any point
of view.
I don't buy the either/or nature of the nuclear argument.
Well that's a surprise. Try answering a simple question: "Which
is better, coal or nuclear?" I will stipulate that there may be
other choices that may be better than either.
If you had to make that choice, which would you choose?
I live where I have an option of purchasing all my power from
clean sources (solar, hydroelectric, and wind) from
ConEdSolutions, and I do, and I pay more for it. Is it really
that we have to have coal or nuclear, or are we just unwilling to
pay the price of clean power?
Nuclear power *is* clean power.
And no, the price tag isn't *really* what's holding back, it's
the phobia.
Is it irrational to say neither when both are unsustainable
options?
Yeah, probably.
(1) Who care's if an energy source is sustainable? The life time
of a nuclear plant is measured in decades. If you've got
something better you switch to it when it's time to retire the
plant.
(2) What do you call ignoring the *actual* consequences of
your actions because you insist on utopia or nothing?
I think "irrational" is a good description.
Are corporate scientists acting rationally when they
continue pushing a non-solution that the public at large is
overwhelmingly against?
It ain't only only the "corporate" scientists on my side,
but I'll grant you that the mob is on your side.
And whose fault is that exactly? Who stampeded that mob?
The nuclear industry has created its own PR
problem, not environmentalists.
Of the major sources of energy, nuclear power is one of the
safest and cleanest, and has been for decades. And this record
has created a PR problem?
...
well-funded proponents are
using the "environmentalist" label the same way the coporate
right wields the "liberal" smear.
Anyone who disagrees with you must have been bought, eh?
Environmentalists have been saying for 30 years to invest in
renewable energy sources, and the answer is always when it's
profitable.
The one I would give you is that solar energy at the earth's
surface is genuinely extremely diffuse, which makes it difficult
(though I wouldn't go as far as to sa
Doom wrote: "Consider the fact that there is no "coal waste
disposal" problem: you're just expected to breath it. The fact
that nuclear power gives you the option of thinking about what to
do with the waste is something of an advantage."
There is a coal waste problem. Coal produces clunkers and
greenhouse gasses, not a good thing when done to excess like
now. But the CO2 is natural and if not too much can be absorbed
naturally into the ecosystem from where it came.
Radioactive waste is not natural in that it can not easily or
safely be absorbed into the ecosystem. There are not natural
cleaning/re-use systems that we know of for it. So coal is a
much safer choice if not done to excess.. Lets cut down the
amount of energy we use then we can back off that excess.
This is total and complete nonsense.
First point:
Radioactive elements certainly do occur "naturally", that's where
the fuel for the nuclear plants comes from. There is indeed a
"natural cleansing" mechanism for radioactives, it's called
"radioactive decay". The hotter the stuff is, the faster it
decays into something that's not hot.
In comparison, chemically toxic elements never decay.
They have infinite "half-life"s.
Second point:
The emissions from coal plants include far much more crud than
you're aware of, including, for example, a large amount of
radioactives that were trapped inside the coal before it was
burned. Pro-nuclear types like myself are fond of the slogan "if
coal plants had to operate under the same standards as nukes,
they would all be shut down."
Fourth point: It makes very little difference whether a poison is
"natural" or "artificial" (hemlock will kill you about as well as
arsenic). Mainstream scientific opinion regards CO2 emissions as
a severe threat to the survival of the human race. Do we do
something about it?
Fifth point: Coal power is okay if we don't do it to "excess"?
*Any* amount of coal burning that you do *will* kill people.
There is no lower-bound that's "safe". If you scaled back US
energy usage 50%, you could cut out half of our coal burning and
instead of killing thousands with that air pollution, maybe
you're only killing a thousand. But if you doubled the nuclear
capacity at the same time that you cut energy demand in half, you
could completely eliminate the coal burning, and drop air
pollution deaths to zero. So then, barring accidents, and
presuming we do something half-way sensible with the waste, we
would then have a shot at (a) saving kilolife or two, (b) slowing
global warming.
But I guess that's just crazy talk, eh? What kind of mad man
would consider such an irresponsible course just for some silly
reasons like that? Obviously it would be *much* better to think
solar thoughts and keep burning that coal.
Brand's first two assumptions are not necessarily correct. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I've been aware for several years now that the global population is flattening out. I regularly use his argument against racist anti-immigrant Malthusians on the right.
I've been starting to work up a line of argument like that myself. The anti-immigrant (excuse me,
"anti-illegal *INVADERS* from **MEXICO**!") sentiment in the US is getting out of hand.
When I moved to an urban area, I recognized instantly that I was lowering my environmental impact. I do not drive, I take up less land, and I take advantage of economies of scale for shipping and distribution of goods. I also have more options for recycling and co-op purchasing. Environmentalists are opposed largely to suburban sprawl that destroys habitats, wastes water for lawns, and makes mass transit impractical.
Yes, the "new urbanism" sentiment is already pretty well entrenched in environmental thinking -- it's a little puzzling why Brand included this in his big four (my guess would be it's a rhetorical fillip, he wanted one item on the list his core audience already agreed with). This is, however, a pretty good example of a recent shift in environmental thinking... as late as the seventies there were an awful lot of back-to-the-land types around.
Brand writes off environmentalists' opposition to GM crops and nuclear power as romantic, but an environmentalist would just as easily paint his glowing portrait of these technologies as naive scientific idealism.
A point, perhaps.
It's unfortunate that Brand is unwilling to see the highly rational thinking behind environmentalists' opposition to GM and nuclear power.
I have no opinion on the genetically modified foods issue -- it's one I haven't looked into very far, in part because I suspect the fears of it are grossly exaggerated by the environmentalists.
And the reason I tend to feel that way is largely because of their record on the nuclear issue. The actual outcome of the anti-nuclear movement has been to encourage a shift toward coal burning -- I think it would be accurate to characterize this as an "enviornmental disaster". Coal burning kills thousands of people annually in the US alone, and that's before we start worrying about global warming.
Environmentalists continue to duck and cover whenever this is pointed out: "But they *should've * done more solar research, and we should be conserving more!" Yes, we could be doing more work on things like solar, and yeah we could probably be conserving a lot more... but the idea that we're going to *completely* get away from high intensity energy sources is really unlikely, and in any case it's pretty clear that the opposition to nuclear power as opposed to coal is grossly irrational.
"It has long been very frustrating to see environmentalist romantics fly in the face of reason in railing against genetically-modified plants as a possible solution to population pressures, or arguing against nuclear power as a clean energy source."
Well if you ask a scientist if he knows what he is doing especially in his field of study, of course he will tell you he knows what he is doing, but at the same time the process they are involved in is making theories, testing theories, peer review tearing down theories. The process is full of miss steps and rushes to conclusion and backing away when proven wrong or side effects are found.
Which is convienient, because they means we can tell the experts to get lost if they tell us something we don't want to hear. (How do you feel about the fundamentalist christians take on teaching biology, or the corporate conservative view of global warming scenarios?)
When it comes to nuclear power. The nuclear physist or nuclear engineer have the job of finding ways of making it work and they are less involved in the waste products as we have seen. We have large quantities of very hot nuclear waste that have been generated by that clean energy source that no one knows what to do with.
Doh! Waste products, Charlie! Damn, why didn't we think about that?
Or maybe they did think about it, and they figured
it was worth it. Consider the fact that there is not "coal waste disposal" problem: you're just expected to breath it. The fact that nuclear power gives you the option of thinking about what to do with the waste is something of an advantage.
Nuclear Power is simply the best option for the expanding appetite for power throughout the world. There are regional inconsistencies and the entire nuclear industry needs to get with the 21st century but if you want to reduce greenhouse gases this is the way to go. Increasing solar and wind is helpful but will not close the petroleum fired plants.
The petroleum fired plants aren't the main problem, it's the coal burners. Most of the energy generated in the US comes from burning coal, which is a grossly, horribly polluting 18th century technology -- the fact that most enviromentalists can't wrap their brain around this fact is why they deserve the label "romantic"
(actually, "romantic" is charitable).
There's almost nothing really worth talking about in this field except "how fast can we get away from coal burning?". E.g. electric cars are almost complete nonsense: electricity is dirtier than burning gasoline, because electricity is just coal in disguise.
disqualify someone from being an expert on these things
No. The fact he has never studied any of these things is what disqualifies him.
If Brand had a degree in Nuclear Engineering the anti-nuclear types would refuse to listen to him because he must have been corrupted by his association with the industry.
The political economy of the process of IP legislation and
internationalization is critical to consider in this context.
The construction of these policies have to do with the narrow
self-interest of corporate actors and how they are able to sell
their case to political policymakers.
For example, the conversion of IP law from an abstract problem to
a trade issue addressable through the United States Trade
Representative office has allowed the US to pursue the IP agenda
of large corporate actors outside the bounds of IP-related
treaties.
If you are interested, look at this book: Private Power, Public
Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, Susan
Sell [amazon.com]
It's a great in-depth analysis of this topic and very
enlightening for anyone who thinks this debate is somehow easy to
understand.
And you obviously have a deep understanding of "intellectual property" [1] issues, posting links to Amazon...
I have to say, it's a bit mind-numbing -- lots of stuff about GATT and TRIPS and various associations of this and that, and over-all it looks only tangentially on-topic... the question is not why would monopolists try and ram their monopolies down the throat of the entire planet, the question is where the monopolies came from to begin with. Why can the pip-squeak entertainment industry hold the information technology world hostage? Are they better at bribing politicians?
Is there some "quid pro quo" going on, e.g. publicity for political campaigns?
[1] Yeah, I know: someone who really understand intellectual property doesn't call it "property",
but you know what I mean.
Thanks. But even if you were a lawyer I probably still wouldn't take your advice. You're not my lawyer, and even if you were, I'd probably still think twice before assuming you knew what you were talking about.
What is it with all of the "IANAL" disclaimers?
Myself, I don't really expect that there's a bunch of lawyers around handing out legal opinons for free on the net.
Is everyone under the impression that you can get arrested for misrepresentation if you talk about the law without a legal degree?
Anyone who vaguely follows LKML will know that the above is complete
rubbish. Linus is not in the business of marketing, promotion or
starting a revolution. He simply wants to write a great kernel, and
accepts the help of people willing to contribute. End of story.
If you don't like that, please go away and use the Hurd.
Linux's position as Leader of the Free World was more forced upon
him than assumed intentionally, but his relationship to this is
more complicated than you're admitting here. For example, when
he originally took a job with Transmeta, one of his stated
reasons was that he thought it would look bad if he took a job
with a big linux distribution (redhat?), because it would seem as
though he were endorsing that particular distro (and imagine the
endless charges of favoritism that would follow, eh?).
So what happens to your vision of a pragmatic, purely
technically-oriented leader who just wants to "have fun" and
write good code?
(If anyone's interested in this subject, I recommend reading the
Torvalds as-told-to "auto"-bio: "Just For Fun". Torvald's dad
makes RMS look like the CEO of GM, it's no wonder he's got an
aversion to explicit moralisms... but on the other hand you can
also see in his behavior an implicit internalization of what you
might call moral behavior, e.g. an instinct toward genrosity.)
Re:Anyone who uses my product must do as I say...
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Linus Drops BitKeeper
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· Score: 1
Regarding the productivity claim, Torvalds preferred the no-SCM system to CVS. My understanding - stop me if I'm being misleading - is that he seemed to believe that CVS or Subversion would have slowed him down compared to his own system of manually merging the patches; I can't remember the reasons why Arch was not acceptable at the time. On the basis the productivity claim seems valid to me.
At this point it's all handwaving of course, but my gut level feel is that they could've figured out ways to struggle along with, say, subversion, and still gotten a productivity boost -- though perhaps not as big has been claimed for using BK.
Personally, I have a good vibe about "gnu arch" and Tom Lord in general, but I think it was still pretty new back then. Also the performance data I've seen does show that arch is still peculiarly slow in some areas. Anyway, in general I can understand why Torvalds would've been reluctant to dive into using arch back then (but if he had, I bet arch would be a lot better by now, and we'd all be better off).
UNIX wasn't a competitor for Windows; the two products do two different jobs.
When Windows NT hit the market, I think it ws the Unix Review that ran a cover story: "Is Unix Dead?"
No, Unix wasn't serious competition to Windows at that stage -- that's what I'm complaining about. Why wasn't it?
(Now, thankfully, we're getting to a position where unix boxes really can substitute for Windows
for *most* of what people want to do with them.)
We seem to go through this all the time. There are people
who think that "practical", "technical" concerns should
trump everything, and there are other people who talk
about "morality" and "ethics" and so on; but what
the issue always seems to be to me is "short-term" vs "long-term"
thinking. Yeah, you need to survive in the short-term,
but you also need to be going some place worth being in
the long-term. Maybe there's a problem with always
phrasing things as "technical" vs. "moral"... or maybe
there's a problem with people who don't understand
that "morality" is usually a synonym for worrying about
the long term.
But Torvalds also makes some good points. From reading that thread
I linked to, I can see that Linus has a very real, legitimate
problem that only BitKeeper could solve. Read it. He saved hours
or in some cases days of down time -- time that other SCM tools
would have sucked up and wasted.
We don't really know what the situation would've been like if
they'd struggled along with an unencumbered SCM. Some operations
would've been slower, but they probably would've found ways to
deal (over-night batch operations, etc).
I hate to indulge in more remote amateur Torvalds psychoanalysis,
but this strikes me as the real puzzle, where did he get his
absolute hatred of other version control systems? Even the
admittedly clunky CVS has been sucessfully used to manage some
huge software projects (gcc in the open source world; and I've
seen it in use on many large proprietary projects, like Irix and
Netscape).
My theory: he likes simple tools when he can get away with using
them (vi vs emacs, shell vs perl) and started out with an
aversion to source control in general. Then he had to keep
arguing with people pushing for CVS, and he got backed into the
position of being a version control snob, who refused to touch
anything but the Very Best. Then his friend came along and
showed him a nice shiney toy.
Just think: if you were a bottleneck, if data and people were coming
at you at a very fast pace all the time, and if there was tremendous
pressure on you to build a platform that would rival Microsoft, one
coping mechanism is to find tools that increase productivity.
You're coming down on the side of "immediate expediency" in this
debate, but a lot of us are taking a longer term view. You don't
go beserk winning a battle if it risks losing the war.
Re:Anyone who uses my product must do as I say...
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
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· Score: 1
"Too bad Sun didn't think to forbid the use of Solaris to anyone who might be thinking about making a competing product, eh?"
Under the BK license this restriction only exists with the free version, which seems like a reasonable enough compromise unless you're one of those people who expects people to give up their life work for free. True, it's great when people do that, but not everyone is the same.
Reasonable? Well I wouldn't have drank that cool-aid myself, even given the claimed factor of 2 (or was it 3) productivity improvement. (And of course, that factor is comparing BK to no BK, what would it have been for BK comapred to another system?)
And myself, I don't actually think it's reasonable for companies to get too creative about the "agreements" they impose on people (Careful about eating that candy bar before getting a lawyer to read the label! Who knows what's in the fine print.)
(And I actually have my doubts that this BK license stuff would actually apply to someone living in California, which is a "right-to-work" state, and tends to shoot down non-competition clauses.)
"But then, maybe it's too bad that BSD wasn't originally under a GPL license, then Solaris wouldn't have existed,"
But now you're talking crap, since Solaris is based on SVR4, not BSD (SunOS, retroactively known as Solaris 1, was BSD based).
Well you have me there, I did indeed get my the origins of the older SunOS confused with the current Solaris. (Though I could try and skate on a technicality: would Solaris have ever existed without SunOS?)
"Microsoft Windows might have died a well deserved death before Windows NT was out... counter-factuals are fun"
They're not fun when they are misinformed in the way that yours are.
Wrongo. Those are the *most* fun ones.
The rise of MS Windows has little to do with the UNIX situation and it definitely owes very little to free software.
Tell me, did you ever get your hands on a copy of Windows 3.11? Do you remember what an incredible, unbelievable piece-of-crap that was? Microsoft didn't have anything close to a decent product before Windows NT. My claim here is that had it not been for the Unix wars, there would have been a stronger competitor to Windows, and they might not have gotten to the "NT" stage.
Chasing the Pack (and running from it)
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Mapping Google News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What I like about google news is that it's an incredibly easy way of keeping an eye on what has been called the "pack journalism" problem. Just as an example, trying doing a google news search on "Count Every Vote Act": that's consistently turned up less than 100 hits since it was announced. Is there some reason it's not newsworthy? Similarly, when the Ohio recount thing was going down last year, it took *forever* for it to punch through as
a top-level story. Evidentally the pattern is something like a story is dead until the AP Wire runs it, and then a thousand other news "sources"
pick it up.
I've had the thought that it might be cool to implement an anti-news site that would do something like show you links to New York Times stories that have never been referenced by the top page of Google News.
Anyone who uses my product must do as I say...
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
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· Score: 1
It's the double standards about this argument that bother me. If it
was not for proprietary software, the GPL movement and the GNU free
software directory would not exist. The GNU tools were all initially
developed on Solaris and other proprietary operating systems before a
kernel even existed
Too bad Sun didn't think to forbid the use of Solaris to
anyone who might be thinking about making a competing
product, eh?
(But then, maybe it's too bad that BSD wasn't originally
under a GPL license, then Solaris wouldn't have existed,
the unix-wars of the 80s wouldn't have happened,
Microsoft Windows might have died a well deserved
death before Windows NT was out... counter-factuals
are fun.)
Don't forget that on a bike you're supposed to follow all the same
rules as cars...
You mean, I'm supposed to go 20 mph over the speedlimit, sleaze
through stops signs, and terrorize pedestrians in
cross-walks? It's tough, but maybe I can manage it.
I have a hard time with double-parking in the middle of the lane though.
Well, sure... but focusing solely on any one aspect of the problem is
likely to lead to false economies. It is always necessary to look at
the big picture.
Sure, like focusing on spiffy expensive car technology
instead of finding ways to stop using them so much.
Like, for example, saner zoning laws? (Suburbia:
it's not just a bad idea, it's the law.)
Re:Firefox versus Mozilla
on
Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
I realize that this is a little off topic, and apologize.
Can anyone explain, to a longtime Mozilla user, what's the benefit to
changing over to Firefox from Mozilla?
There isn't really a *compelling* reason, if you're happy
with Mozilla, that's cool. Firefox has some little advantages
in the way it does things though, which you might appreciate.
For example, a Control F doesn't pop up a "Find Window" right in front of
the material you were looking at, instead, it creates a
small horizontal bar, just above the title bar (yes,
tiled windows -- a revolution in ui design).
Another thing I like is that when you block popups,
by default Firefox will *tell* you when a popup
has been blocked, once again with a discreet horizontal
bar that appears, rather than with a popup dialog
(imagine having a popup dialog to inform you that the
browser had saved you from seeing a popup window...
wouldn't make a lot of sense, eh?). The idea here is
probably that if a web app isn't working for you
for some reason, it might be that the idiots relied
on being able to do popups, so firefox is giving you
a hint about what's going on. What I like about it though,
is that if I site is trying to hit me with popup
ads, I may think about taking my business elsewhere -- if
they think popup ads are a good idea, they've
probably got other problems, too.
There's probably other stuff, but that should give you
an idea. The firefox UI has a bunch of small improvements,
without any downside -- I never think "boy, I wish
I was using Mozilla right now, they did it much
better in Mozilla".
The biggest irritation I can think of in doing the
switch was the usual installation hassles, e.g.
I had to go hunting around for good themes to use
again (I'm a "Negative Modern" addict myself,
but "Tinyfox" or whatever it's called has it's
advantage -- at last I can reduce the size of those
stupid icons I never use, and get a URL box that's
big enough to do something with even when the window
isn't fully maximized).
(But all that said, at the moment I'm posting with lynx.)
The problem with pricing on text books is the very limited market. Even if Proffessor Plum sells a copy to every student on his course he will only sell ~100 per year. Compare and contrast with the thousends of copies sold of the average novel. Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas. All these force the price up.
Just because students are poor(ish) doesn't mean that they can be excempt from market forces.
Sometime, compare prices on Linus Pauling textbooks. "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" (a classic, practically required reading for the physical sciences) is typically available only in expensive editions. The Pauling books that no one cares about that much, e.g. his text in "Quantum Mechanics" can be bought in very cheap Dover editions.
But wait: the demand is higher for "The Nature of the Chemical Bond"! Shouldn't economies of scale bring down the cost of the book?
It's amazing the way that true believers in free market doctrine can stick to the doctrine in the face of any quantity of real world evidence...
is it an economic theory, or a religion?
Slashdot Mirror
Some highlights, in my opinion:
Ah yes, the "that's ancient history" defense. A favorite of people who want to sweep issues under the rug.
And you're still ducking the issue. Let me rephrase one more time: It is taken as a given that there are things you favor over using nuclear power. If for some reason, you were presuaded that those were not viable, and you were reduced to a lesser of two evils choice between nuclear and coal, which would you go for?
Well you see, my suspicion is that one of the big reasons we're still grappling with this is anti-nuclear activists pushing the "Fear" button. From my point of view, this is setting the house on fire, then arresting them for being vagrants.
But it won't stop you from ducking it.
Nasty compared to what? Chemical toxins have an infinite half-life. I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about the cadmium leaking out my Ni-Cd batteries.
By the way, another nice thing about radioactives is that they're really easy to detect with some simple electronics equipment: you tend to notice leaks pretty quickly.
Given a choice between living next to a nuclear facility (either power plant, or waste storage) and living next to a coal facility (power plant, or waste storage), I would happily choose to live next to the nuclear facility. Further, I would claim is that anyone who has really thought about the matter would make the same decision.
[... snipping, for once ... ]
Sorry if you're getting tired of hearing about the 1970s, but this is all actually on-topic. We're talking about Stewart Brand's take on shifts in thinking among environmentalists, and his thoughts about where it might go next. History is not a side-issue here, it's what's really under discussion.
If you're suggestion is that environmentalists don't matter because they're star has waned, I disagree. Ideologies matter,
When you burn coal, you have no hope of avoiding the loss of kLives. You know you're going to kill massive numbers of people. Heigh-ho.
There are all sorts of good answers, there just aren't any perfect answers, and that's what people repeatedly demand of nuclear power.No other technology is held to this standard. We lost a few thousand people to coal-induced lung cancer last year? Well nothings perfect. About 50 thousand died in car accidents? Well that's a shame, but what do you expect?
This is melodramatic nonsense. Rule of thumb: the really hot stuff decays really fast. If whatever is left over leaks a thousand years from now, it might actually kill some people -- but will it kill thousands? Will it kill more than we kill over several decades of spewing poison in the air? Bullshit. Chernobyl -- which has next to nothing in common with US nuclear technology -- was quite bad. But what kind of death estimates from Chernobyl do you really think are plausible? 20,000? Then an accident like this is roughly comparable to a couple of decades of US coal burning. But Chernobyls don't happen every two decades. They don't happen to US nuclear plants at all.Anyway, you're links are noted, and I'll try and look at them later -- even I can get talked out on this subject...
If so that's great, but American society did have to make that choice (e.g around the time of the TMI scare). So you've ducked the question.
Well, this is interesting. I suspect that you've been sold a load of greenwashing -- a lot of people would argue that "hydro" isn't exactly clean, for example -- but we might hope that I'm being excessively cynical...
The point that I keep trying to make is that with nuclear power you get to think about where the waste goes, and however politically agonizing this choice is for us, at least we have the choice. With coal power, you don't: you get to breath it, and if our understanding global warming is correct, it threatens the entire planet.
These are two totally different magnitudes of threats .
With nuclear waste, you can get leaks -- maybe it's inevitable you'll get leaks -- but with coal you don't have to worry about leaks. You know where it's going to go.
With nuclear power you might have a bad accident that'll hurt a lot of people. With coal power, you don't have to wonder.
If I remember right, the energy budget for the US right now is supplied by something like 50% coal and 20% nuclear. Why doesn't anyone demand that those percentages be reversed?
Oh, I get it. You meant "sustainable" in a sense that you just made up for the sake of this argument.
Well perhaps utopian isn't quite the right word to descibe you personally, but I think it's a good description of a lot of the "but why don't we just use sun power?" gang.
I think you're in denial about the "natural gas" being clean. It's better than coal -- most things are -- but you're still pumping out carbon.
You guess correctly, but the public was already hyped up about nuclear power before the TMI incident -- it happened on the weekend that the "China Syndrome" movie was released, remember? Industrial accidents typically get a page 3 story that fades the next day. TMI was a big capital lo
Well yeah, and if you go back to the 60s you can find Jane Jacobs (if anyone feels like reading a work of genius, try "Death and Life of Great American Cities").
And what I'm telling you is that back in the 70s, "New Urbanist" thinking was by no means prevalent among environmentalists. WBAI was playing the hell out of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". There was an anti-tech/back-to-nature sentiment that was really widespread on college campuses, which I know from first hand experience (at least as far as SUNY Stony Brook is concerned).
(Mildly funny story: a bunch of the more hardcore of the back-to-nature folks from Stony Brook got a chance to spend some time working on a farm one summer. Evidentally, they discovered it was really hard work. And they had a hard time taking orders from the people who knew what they were doing. It took some time for these sorts of reality checks to sink in.)
Brand may be out-of-date on this one, but I'd say it's more like by 15 years than 30.
On the other hand, while "environmentalists" our now mostly new urbanists, there's plenty of people out there in the suburbs who probably *think* they "care about the environment" but haven't gotten the word that suburbia is bad news from almost any point of view.
Well that's a surprise. Try answering a simple question: "Which is better, coal or nuclear?" I will stipulate that there may be other choices that may be better than either. If you had to make that choice, which would you choose?
Nuclear power *is* clean power. And no, the price tag isn't *really* what's holding back, it's the phobia.
Yeah, probably.
(1) Who care's if an energy source is sustainable? The life time of a nuclear plant is measured in decades. If you've got something better you switch to it when it's time to retire the plant.
(2) What do you call ignoring the *actual* consequences of your actions because you insist on utopia or nothing? I think "irrational" is a good description.
It ain't only only the "corporate" scientists on my side, but I'll grant you that the mob is on your side.
And whose fault is that exactly? Who stampeded that mob?
Of the major sources of energy, nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest, and has been for decades. And this record has created a PR problem?
Anyone who disagrees with you must have been bought, eh?
The one I would give you is that solar energy at the earth's surface is genuinely extremely diffuse, which makes it difficult (though I wouldn't go as far as to sa
First point: Radioactive elements certainly do occur "naturally", that's where the fuel for the nuclear plants comes from. There is indeed a "natural cleansing" mechanism for radioactives, it's called "radioactive decay". The hotter the stuff is, the faster it decays into something that's not hot.
In comparison, chemically toxic elements never decay. They have infinite "half-life"s.
Second point: The emissions from coal plants include far much more crud than you're aware of, including, for example, a large amount of radioactives that were trapped inside the coal before it was burned. Pro-nuclear types like myself are fond of the slogan "if coal plants had to operate under the same standards as nukes, they would all be shut down."
Fourth point: It makes very little difference whether a poison is "natural" or "artificial" (hemlock will kill you about as well as arsenic). Mainstream scientific opinion regards CO2 emissions as a severe threat to the survival of the human race. Do we do something about it?
Fifth point: Coal power is okay if we don't do it to "excess"? *Any* amount of coal burning that you do *will* kill people. There is no lower-bound that's "safe". If you scaled back US energy usage 50%, you could cut out half of our coal burning and instead of killing thousands with that air pollution, maybe you're only killing a thousand. But if you doubled the nuclear capacity at the same time that you cut energy demand in half, you could completely eliminate the coal burning, and drop air pollution deaths to zero. So then, barring accidents, and presuming we do something half-way sensible with the waste, we would then have a shot at (a) saving kilolife or two, (b) slowing global warming.
But I guess that's just crazy talk, eh? What kind of mad man would consider such an irresponsible course just for some silly reasons like that? Obviously it would be *much* better to think solar thoughts and keep burning that coal.
And the reason I tend to feel that way is largely because of their record on the nuclear issue. The actual outcome of the anti-nuclear movement has been to encourage a shift toward coal burning -- I think it would be accurate to characterize this as an "enviornmental disaster". Coal burning kills thousands of people annually in the US alone, and that's before we start worrying about global warming.
Environmentalists continue to duck and cover whenever this is pointed out: "But they *should've * done more solar research, and we should be conserving more!" Yes, we could be doing more work on things like solar, and yeah we could probably be conserving a lot more... but the idea that we're going to *completely* get away from high intensity energy sources is really unlikely, and in any case it's pretty clear that the opposition to nuclear power as opposed to coal is grossly irrational.
Or maybe they did think about it, and they figured it was worth it. Consider the fact that there is not "coal waste disposal" problem: you're just expected to breath it. The fact that nuclear power gives you the option of thinking about what to do with the waste is something of an advantage.
A huge pneumatic polymer doo-dad tossed into the ocean? I bet *that'll* last a long time.
(Sun, wind, waves... why doesn't anyone talk about flower power any more?)
There's almost nothing really worth talking about in this field except "how fast can we get away from coal burning?". E.g. electric cars are almost complete nonsense: electricity is dirtier than burning gasoline, because electricity is just coal in disguise.
(Maybe he meant "incontinent"?)
You might consider Barnes & Nobles (hey, at least they're a "blue" corporation, unlike Amazon): Barnes and Nobles: Private Power, Public Law
Alternately you could get it straight from the Cambridge press: Cambridge Press: Private Power, Public Law
They've made the introduction available as a sample chapter: Sample Chapter (PDF): Private Power, Public Law
I have to say, it's a bit mind-numbing -- lots of stuff about GATT and TRIPS and various associations of this and that, and over-all it looks only tangentially on-topic... the question is not why would monopolists try and ram their monopolies down the throat of the entire planet, the question is where the monopolies came from to begin with. Why can the pip-squeak entertainment industry hold the information technology world hostage? Are they better at bribing politicians? Is there some "quid pro quo" going on, e.g. publicity for political campaigns?
[1] Yeah, I know: someone who really understand intellectual property doesn't call it "property", but you know what I mean.
What is it with all of the "IANAL" disclaimers? Myself, I don't really expect that there's a bunch of lawyers around handing out legal opinons for free on the net. Is everyone under the impression that you can get arrested for misrepresentation if you talk about the law without a legal degree?
So what happens to your vision of a pragmatic, purely technically-oriented leader who just wants to "have fun" and write good code?
(If anyone's interested in this subject, I recommend reading the Torvalds as-told-to "auto"-bio: "Just For Fun". Torvald's dad makes RMS look like the CEO of GM, it's no wonder he's got an aversion to explicit moralisms... but on the other hand you can also see in his behavior an implicit internalization of what you might call moral behavior, e.g. an instinct toward genrosity.)
Personally, I have a good vibe about "gnu arch" and Tom Lord in general, but I think it was still pretty new back then. Also the performance data I've seen does show that arch is still peculiarly slow in some areas. Anyway, in general I can understand why Torvalds would've been reluctant to dive into using arch back then (but if he had, I bet arch would be a lot better by now, and we'd all be better off).
When Windows NT hit the market, I think it ws the Unix Review that ran a cover story: "Is Unix Dead?"No, Unix wasn't serious competition to Windows at that stage -- that's what I'm complaining about. Why wasn't it?
(Now, thankfully, we're getting to a position where unix boxes really can substitute for Windows for *most* of what people want to do with them.)
We seem to go through this all the time. There are people who think that "practical", "technical" concerns should trump everything, and there are other people who talk about "morality" and "ethics" and so on; but what the issue always seems to be to me is "short-term" vs "long-term" thinking. Yeah, you need to survive in the short-term, but you also need to be going some place worth being in the long-term. Maybe there's a problem with always phrasing things as "technical" vs. "moral"... or maybe there's a problem with people who don't understand that "morality" is usually a synonym for worrying about the long term.
I hate to indulge in more remote amateur Torvalds psychoanalysis, but this strikes me as the real puzzle, where did he get his absolute hatred of other version control systems? Even the admittedly clunky CVS has been sucessfully used to manage some huge software projects (gcc in the open source world; and I've seen it in use on many large proprietary projects, like Irix and Netscape).
My theory: he likes simple tools when he can get away with using them (vi vs emacs, shell vs perl) and started out with an aversion to source control in general. Then he had to keep arguing with people pushing for CVS, and he got backed into the position of being a version control snob, who refused to touch anything but the Very Best. Then his friend came along and showed him a nice shiney toy.
You're coming down on the side of "immediate expediency" in this debate, but a lot of us are taking a longer term view. You don't go beserk winning a battle if it risks losing the war.And myself, I don't actually think it's reasonable for companies to get too creative about the "agreements" they impose on people (Careful about eating that candy bar before getting a lawyer to read the label! Who knows what's in the fine print.)
(And I actually have my doubts that this BK license stuff would actually apply to someone living in California, which is a "right-to-work" state, and tends to shoot down non-competition clauses.)
Well you have me there, I did indeed get my the origins of the older SunOS confused with the current Solaris. (Though I could try and skate on a technicality: would Solaris have ever existed without SunOS?) Wrongo. Those are the *most* fun ones. Tell me, did you ever get your hands on a copy of Windows 3.11? Do you remember what an incredible, unbelievable piece-of-crap that was? Microsoft didn't have anything close to a decent product before Windows NT. My claim here is that had it not been for the Unix wars, there would have been a stronger competitor to Windows, and they might not have gotten to the "NT" stage.I've had the thought that it might be cool to implement an anti-news site that would do something like show you links to New York Times stories that have never been referenced by the top page of Google News.
(But then, maybe it's too bad that BSD wasn't originally under a GPL license, then Solaris wouldn't have existed, the unix-wars of the 80s wouldn't have happened, Microsoft Windows might have died a well deserved death before Windows NT was out... counter-factuals are fun.)
Like, for example, saner zoning laws? (Suburbia: it's not just a bad idea, it's the law.)
Another thing I like is that when you block popups, by default Firefox will *tell* you when a popup has been blocked, once again with a discreet horizontal bar that appears, rather than with a popup dialog (imagine having a popup dialog to inform you that the browser had saved you from seeing a popup window... wouldn't make a lot of sense, eh?). The idea here is probably that if a web app isn't working for you for some reason, it might be that the idiots relied on being able to do popups, so firefox is giving you a hint about what's going on. What I like about it though, is that if I site is trying to hit me with popup ads, I may think about taking my business elsewhere -- if they think popup ads are a good idea, they've probably got other problems, too.
There's probably other stuff, but that should give you an idea. The firefox UI has a bunch of small improvements, without any downside -- I never think "boy, I wish I was using Mozilla right now, they did it much better in Mozilla".
The biggest irritation I can think of in doing the switch was the usual installation hassles, e.g. I had to go hunting around for good themes to use again (I'm a "Negative Modern" addict myself, but "Tinyfox" or whatever it's called has it's advantage -- at last I can reduce the size of those stupid icons I never use, and get a URL box that's big enough to do something with even when the window isn't fully maximized).
(But all that said, at the moment I'm posting with lynx.)
But wait: the demand is higher for "The Nature of the Chemical Bond"! Shouldn't economies of scale bring down the cost of the book?
It's amazing the way that true believers in free market doctrine can stick to the doctrine in the face of any quantity of real world evidence... is it an economic theory, or a religion?