This is what worries me - How many things in nature have been IMPROVED through human involvement?
Well, the food is certainly better now.... the meat is better cooked than raw, and the fruits and vegetables have been bred for centuries and now they're delicious. You should have seen the semi-edible crap that people subsisted on a few millenia ago.
Just enforce property rights. If party A polluting can be proven to harm party B, the party can receive civil and possibly criminal penalties. (e.g. if I dump toxic sludge on your lawn.)
That's the easy case. The hard part is avoiding the tragedy of the commons -- for example, if it was profitable (for some reason) for a person to pour one cup of poison into the ocean, and therefore everybody did so, and now the oceans are poisoned and all the fish are dead, who do the fishermen sue? Each indvidual person could just say "well *I* didn't do it, I only poured one cup of poison. One cup of poison could not by itself kill all the fish in the ocean, therefore I'm innocent".
And yet, the oceans have been poisoned and the fish are dead. That's not an acceptable result.
If the globe warms (or cools, or the problem de jour), markets will naturally adjust and people will move.
I think you meant to say, "markets will naturally adjust and people will suffer and die, and that I don't see any problems with that".
A tax is a reverse subsidy and will not "let the market decide".
If you mean that it will not "let the market decide to ignore global warming until it's too late and the damage is catastrophic", then yes. That is, in fact, the point. It's a problem that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later, and left to its own devices the market would ignore the problems for as long as possible, because that would maximize profits in the short term. However, it would be much worse for everyone in the long term.
A free market, and protection of property rights is the REAL solution
Please explain how your solution would reduce pollution and global warming emissions. Who owns the atmosphere? Who pays the bills when global warming damage occurs? What prevents company X from maximizing its profits by burning as much coal as possible, secure in the knowledge that the costs will be born by others?
We certainly don't need yet another round of bureaucrats and lobbyists vying for more power, control, and your money.
Unless there is no better solution than that. If the "invisible hand" is going to fix everything, I'd like to know how.
I'm wondering if they can find a way to process Kudzu into ethanol.
Well, you aren't the only person to be thinking along those lines. Hopefully someone will come up with a way to make it practical, and then we'll have solved two problems at once.
I remember back in the Windows days, there were various stability and malware problems that could only be fixed by installing Linux, *BSD or some other high-quality OS [...] basically it was a win-win situation.
Photovolatic power: Why hasn't this followed 'Moores law(sic)' like trends of other silicon based technology? (yeah there's a slashjoke somewhere in that sentence)
Moore's Law is based on the fact that if you can reduce a transistor's size, you can run it faster on less power, and stuff more of them into a given surface area.
Energy production, on the other hand, does not benefit from miniaturization in this way (AFAIK). Solar panel prices have benefitted (and will continue to benefit) from economies of scale due in part to crossover from the computer industry, but not directly from Moore's Law.
Fuel Cells: There should be a fuel cell in every home furnace, water heater and car.
There should be, but first you have to make it cheap enough for mortal humans to buy, and second you've got to find a way to create, transport, and store hydrogen economically.
The people who use Macs tend to use macs because that's what their parent's used.
Really? Most parents I know bought the cheapest PC they could find at Best Buy, and it's still got the original in-store feature decals on it, along with Windows XP, the included freeware and security-ware, and a few dozen pieces of malware. (and it's hard to tell which ones are which).
In any case, I use a Mac because it works reliably (no required OS reinstall every 6 months, like some OS's I could name), it isn't constantly being targetted by malware (yet, anyway), and because I can run Linux, MacOS/X, and Windows on it simultaneously. I've had an 8-processor Mac Pro at work for about a year, and so far it's run like a dream. (tip: get your employer to pay for it:^))
But what If there was a 7 inch (~18cm) spike sticking out of your steering wheel and 100lbs (~45kg) of high explosives attached to both bumpers, would your driving habits change?
Most likely you'd refuse to drive the car... or if the dangers weren't too obvious, you'd forget about them in a week or two.
Of course, none of this would prevent another driver from slamming into you.
You must be a bit behind the times as Qt no longer emulates a native look-and-feel but uses the native widgets of the platform
The above is incorrect. Qt still does all of its own drawing, pixel by pixel. It doesn't use any native widgets (except for things like file dialogs, and even those have non-native counterparts available)
What's new is that in Qt 4.5, Qt doesn't even create a native canvas widget for each Qt widget anymore. As far as the host OS is concerned, every Qt window is just one big flat canvas, with the Qt libraries managing everything that goes on within.
My point is that we really need general AI so as to free robots to learn to perform all sorts of tasks, not just a few domain-specific ones.
Nah, what we really need is a good open-source programmable molecular assembler, so that anybody who owns one can press a button and have it create either (a) food, or (b) another molecular assembler. Once we have one of those, world hunger will be solved in a matter of months.
it surprises me that people cant envision wireless power transfer, and free at that.
I can certainly envision it -- but I can't see how it would be free. After all, that power has to be generated somehow before it can be transferred, and generating power costs money.
It's also not clear how to broadcast power efficiently over long distances. (I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I don't know how you would do it. Narrowcasting power might be done efficiently with a laser, but broadcasting it to everyone? Hmmm)
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
Yes, but wouldn't that CO2/methane have been emitted anyway when the grass decomposed (or burned)? It's not like the mechanical lawn mowers usually sequester the grass clippings at the bottom of the ocean or something... and it's not like the goats produce CO2/methane out of nothing, it comes from the grass.
Hey, don't single out Google! When I worked at Yahoo! in 2006[...]
Hey, don't single out Yahoo!! The company I worked for wanted to save money on goats so they just made eating the landscaping be the "20% time project" for all employees.
I, personally, don't believe health care is a right - it's something you need to earn. And if you don't earn it, then you shouldn't have it. Granted, I think we need a better system than we have right now (maybe start with affordable health care for children and those recently unemployed)
Huh. So which is it, should sick children be given free health care, or should the little shits have to get out and work for a while to earn the right to be treated?
God knows more child labor would be just the jump-start our economy needs, and children who are dying of preventable diseases will probably work even cheaper than most.
Or perhaps you meant only adults should have to work for their health care? What shall we tell those adults who work for $10 an hour, and can't afford both health insurance and food/rent at the same time? Tough luck guys, should've got a white-collar job that paid more? Maybe in another decade or two you'll have worked your way up to a position where you can afford health care, if you live that long?
Besides, if my insurance provider does not give me the coverage I want, I go with another.
And what if none of them will give you the coverage you want, because to do so would not be profitable? The nice thing about government provided health care is that the government is able (and willing) to cover both the profitable people and the not-profitable people.
What do you do when the government doesn't give you the coverage that you want?
Find private coverage? If you can afford it, of course.
Yeah! I want my government deciding if I get care or not because they can make such a better decision that I can make for myself or my children.
If you have the money to buy private care, then you get to decide what care you get. If you don't have that money, the people providing the money will be the ones deciding.
The only question is whether those people will be the government or a private, for-profit corporation. The last twenty years have shown us what kind of decisions private for-profit corporations like to make: they like to maximize their profits, and your health is a distant second in terms of importance.
I want my trip to the doctor to be like a trip to the DMV.
Yeah, me too -- my local DMV is efficient, well run, and gets the job done. Oh yeah, it also isn't constantly trying to rip me off in order to pad its profits.
The Post Office does a pretty damn good job as well. In fact, so does the US military (at least the parts of it that haven't been outsourced to Blackwater and friends)
The need to find newer, faster, and more efficient ways to kill people has always been a phenomenal "mother of invention"
All very true, largely because the military has always had an extremely large budget with which to fund research related to its goals.
Now, imagine what our scientists and engineers could do with that same budget, but also with a directive to use it in the areas that will best help our country. I think we would likely get an even better return on our investment if we were actually trying for those benefits, as opposed to just developing weapons and occasionally finding that the same research happens to have constructive uses as well.
Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, except the USA's war in Irak proved that it cost much more than 10bn to go and kill a few civilians in a small region.
Another example where nuclear power would have provided a much better 'bang for the buck'.
This is what worries me - How many things in nature have been IMPROVED through human involvement?
Well, the food is certainly better now.... the meat is better cooked than raw, and the fruits and vegetables have been bred for centuries and now they're delicious. You should have seen the semi-edible crap that people subsisted on a few millenia ago.
Just enforce property rights. If party A polluting can be proven to harm party B, the party can receive civil and possibly criminal penalties. (e.g. if I dump toxic sludge on your lawn.)
That's the easy case. The hard part is avoiding the tragedy of the commons -- for example, if it was profitable (for some reason) for a person to pour one cup of poison into the ocean, and therefore everybody did so, and now the oceans are poisoned and all the fish are dead, who do the fishermen sue? Each indvidual person could just say "well *I* didn't do it, I only poured one cup of poison. One cup of poison could not by itself kill all the fish in the ocean, therefore I'm innocent".
And yet, the oceans have been poisoned and the fish are dead. That's not an acceptable result.
If the globe warms (or cools, or the problem de jour), markets will naturally adjust and people will move.
I think you meant to say, "markets will naturally adjust and people will suffer and die, and that I don't see any problems with that".
And if so, screw you. You are the problem.
A tax is a reverse subsidy and will not "let the market decide".
If you mean that it will not "let the market decide to ignore global warming until it's too late and the damage is catastrophic", then yes. That is, in fact, the point. It's a problem that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later, and left to its own devices the market would ignore the problems for as long as possible, because that would maximize profits in the short term. However, it would be much worse for everyone in the long term.
A free market, and protection of property rights is the REAL solution
Please explain how your solution would reduce pollution and global warming emissions. Who owns the atmosphere? Who pays the bills when global warming damage occurs? What prevents company X from maximizing its profits by burning as much coal as possible, secure in the knowledge that the costs will be born by others?
We certainly don't need yet another round of bureaucrats and lobbyists vying for more power, control, and your money.
Unless there is no better solution than that. If the "invisible hand" is going to fix everything, I'd like to know how.
I'm wondering if they can find a way to process Kudzu into ethanol.
Well, you aren't the only person to be thinking along those lines. Hopefully someone will come up with a way to make it practical, and then we'll have solved two problems at once.
I remember back in the Windows days, there were various stability and malware problems that could only be fixed by installing Linux, *BSD or some other high-quality OS [...] basically it was a win-win situation.
Sounds like a no-win situation to me.
Photovolatic power: Why hasn't this followed 'Moores law(sic)' like trends of other silicon based technology? (yeah there's a slashjoke somewhere in that sentence)
Moore's Law is based on the fact that if you can reduce a transistor's size, you can run it faster on less power, and stuff more of them into a given surface area.
Energy production, on the other hand, does not benefit from miniaturization in this way (AFAIK). Solar panel prices have benefitted (and will continue to benefit) from economies of scale due in part to crossover from the computer industry, but not directly from Moore's Law.
Fuel Cells: There should be a fuel cell in every home furnace, water heater and car.
There should be, but first you have to make it cheap enough for mortal humans to buy, and second you've got to find a way to create, transport, and store hydrogen economically.
The people who use Macs tend to use macs because that's what their parent's used.
Really? Most parents I know bought the cheapest PC they could find at Best Buy, and it's still got the original in-store feature decals on it, along with Windows XP, the included freeware and security-ware, and a few dozen pieces of malware. (and it's hard to tell which ones are which).
In any case, I use a Mac because it works reliably (no required OS reinstall every 6 months, like some OS's I could name), it isn't constantly being targetted by malware (yet, anyway), and because I can run Linux, MacOS/X, and Windows on it simultaneously. I've had an 8-processor Mac Pro at work for about a year, and so far it's run like a dream. (tip: get your employer to pay for it :^))
What, 42? That's not so difficult. What would be impressive if it could tell us the Ultimate Question.
I asked, but it said it would have to think about it for a while. I'm still waiting...
But what If there was a 7 inch (~18cm) spike sticking out of your steering wheel and 100lbs (~45kg) of high explosives attached to both bumpers, would your driving habits change?
Most likely you'd refuse to drive the car... or if the dangers weren't too obvious, you'd forget about them in a week or two.
Of course, none of this would prevent another driver from slamming into you.
You must be a bit behind the times as Qt no longer emulates a native look-and-feel but uses the native widgets of the platform
The above is incorrect. Qt still does all of its own drawing, pixel by pixel. It doesn't use any native widgets (except for things like file dialogs, and even those have non-native counterparts available)
What's new is that in Qt 4.5, Qt doesn't even create a native canvas widget for each Qt widget anymore. As far as the host OS is concerned, every Qt window is just one big flat canvas, with the Qt libraries managing everything that goes on within.
it says are designed to protect the interests of customers
Hahahaha!
My point is that we really need general AI so as to free robots to learn to perform all sorts of tasks, not just a few domain-specific ones.
Nah, what we really need is a good open-source programmable molecular assembler, so that anybody who owns one can press a button and have it create either (a) food, or (b) another molecular assembler. Once we have one of those, world hunger will be solved in a matter of months.
(As long as we're dreaming....)
it surprises me that people cant envision wireless power transfer, and free at that.
I can certainly envision it -- but I can't see how it would be free. After all, that power has to be generated somehow before it can be transferred, and generating power costs money.
It's also not clear how to broadcast power efficiently over long distances. (I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I don't know how you would do it. Narrowcasting power might be done efficiently with a laser, but broadcasting it to everyone? Hmmm)
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
Yes, but wouldn't that CO2/methane have been emitted anyway when the grass decomposed (or burned)? It's not like the mechanical lawn mowers usually sequester the grass clippings at the bottom of the ocean or something... and it's not like the goats produce CO2/methane out of nothing, it comes from the grass.
So I think it's a wash.
Hey, don't single out Google! When I worked at Yahoo! in 2006[...]
Hey, don't single out Yahoo!! The company I worked for wanted to save money on goats so they just made eating the landscaping be the "20% time project" for all employees.
It cut down on cafeteria costs too.
I am a high priest in the cult of BeOS, and I am frankly incensed that fine operating system was not included in the list.
I strongly suspect that Microsoft strong-armed the authors of the article to keep BeOS off the list, in order to maintain their monopoly.
Thank you.
I've never burned a CD-ROM. Many CDs, but never a CD-ROM.
Well, you haven't been trying hard enough. 20 minutes in the microwave on "high" will get it done nicely.
I, personally, don't believe health care is a right - it's something you need to earn. And if you don't earn it, then you shouldn't have it. Granted, I think we need a better system than we have right now (maybe start with affordable health care for children and those recently unemployed)
Huh. So which is it, should sick children be given free health care, or should the little shits have to get out and work for a while to earn the right to be treated?
God knows more child labor would be just the jump-start our economy needs, and children who are dying of preventable diseases will probably work even cheaper than most.
Or perhaps you meant only adults should have to work for their health care? What shall we tell those adults who work for $10 an hour, and can't afford both health insurance and food/rent at the same time? Tough luck guys, should've got a white-collar job that paid more? Maybe in another decade or two you'll have worked your way up to a position where you can afford health care, if you live that long?
Government health care will lead to a world where "papers please" means you have to show your grocery store receipt!
My God, you're right! That's just what life is like in Canada and Western Europe! It's a total '1984' style totalitarian nightmare!
Oh wait, it's not like that at all. You're just fearmongering and have no idea what you're talking about.
Besides, if my insurance provider does not give me the coverage I want, I go with another.
And what if none of them will give you the coverage you want, because to do so would not be profitable? The nice thing about government provided health care is that the government is able (and willing) to cover both the profitable people and the not-profitable people.
What do you do when the government doesn't give you the coverage that you want?
Find private coverage? If you can afford it, of course.
Yeah! I want my government deciding if I get care or not because they can make such a better decision that I can make for myself or my children.
If you have the money to buy private care, then you get to decide what care you get. If you don't have that money, the people providing the money will be the ones deciding.
The only question is whether those people will be the government or a private, for-profit corporation. The last twenty years have shown us what kind of decisions private for-profit corporations like to make: they like to maximize their profits, and your health is a distant second in terms of importance.
I want my trip to the doctor to be like a trip to the DMV.
Yeah, me too -- my local DMV is efficient, well run, and gets the job done. Oh yeah, it also isn't constantly trying to rip me off in order to pad its profits.
The Post Office does a pretty damn good job as well. In fact, so does the US military (at least the parts of it that haven't been outsourced to Blackwater and friends)
The need to find newer, faster, and more efficient ways to kill people has always been a phenomenal "mother of invention"
All very true, largely because the military has always had an extremely large budget with which to fund research related to its goals.
Now, imagine what our scientists and engineers could do with that same budget, but also with a directive to use it in the areas that will best help our country. I think we would likely get an even better return on our investment if we were actually trying for those benefits, as opposed to just developing weapons and occasionally finding that the same research happens to have constructive uses as well.
I'll assume you're not trolling, and answer your questions as best I can.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
Yes, you can cherry-pick two points on a noisy signal and pretend it's meaningful, but that doesn't make it so. The meaningful indicator is the overall trend, not the year-by-year variations: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-1.htm
Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
Or by cutting the country's deficit by increasing spending?
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
Or by decreasing unemployment by giving illegal immigrants legal status so they can compete for the already limited number of available jobs?
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.