If every new car sold came with a certificate that an acre of trees was planted and maintained somewhere, cars would be responsible for slowing and then reversing the Greenhouse
I like the idea, I really do, but I wonder what is to keep the carbon that the trees sucked up from getting released back into the atmosphere when the wood burns or decomposes?
It seems to me that if the problem is vast quantities of CO2 being pumped from underground into the atmosphere, then the solution would need to pump even larger quantitites of CO2 back out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere permanently. Unless you're planning on burying the grown trees or something.... ?
Protecting the windmills will add a lot to the cost of generating power.
I don't think it will. All the wind farm owners need to do is hide a $500 GPS beacon inside each piece of at-risk equipment. Once that's done, all they need to do is track its signal -- if it starts to move away from the windmill site for no known reason, they send out the Coast Guard to catch the thief before he makes it back to land. Once that happens a few times, the other thieves will realize that windmill theft is a losing proposition and stop trying... at which point the ongoing security costs drop to nearly zero.
[criminals] only need to succeed once to disrupt power for a long time.
Again, I don't think that is the case. Stealing parts from a windmill disrupts only the power generated from that one windmill. A typical wind farm will contain thousands of windmills; a thief would have to be able to steal parts from hundreds of them before the loss of power became a significant problem.
Okay, let's assume that your figure is correct, and there is something worth $20k at the top of each windmill.
What is the cost (in time and equipment) of boating 200 miles out into the ocean, safely removing a two-ton box of copper from the top of an operating 300 foot tall windmill, and hauling it back to your secret hideout? Let's call that cost M.
Now, what is the cost of getting caught stealing that box? Include fines, jail time, loss of equipment, etc. Let's call that cost N.
Finally, what is the probability of getting caught? Let's call that probability P. When calculating P, keep in mind that the owners of the windmill will have hours of incriminating video of you pulling up to the windmill, taking the equipment, and sailing away again, and that there are few places to hide in the open ocean.
Given all of the above, the average profit a thief can expect to make from stealing a $20k box from a windmill is: 20,000-(M+(P*N)). If that value turns out to be less than zero (or not significantly more than zero), then no rational thief is going to bother trying to steal it. (of course there might be irrational thieves, but they will merely serve as cautionary examples to everyone else when they get caught and/or fail to make much profit).
Put another way.... life finds a way, if and only if there is a way. When something is impractical or impossible, that something doesn't happen.
I want to hear a little about whether mass tapping of wind power would alter climate by sapping winds of their energy?
The effect would be much less than the effect of NOT developing wind power (i.e. the climate-changing effect of continuing to burn fossil fuels instead)
talk about single point of failure. [...] they'd just have to target a broad swath
Well, which is it? A single point of failure, or a broad swath? Or perhaps you've figured out a way by which Dr. Evil could target thousands of sites simultaneously?
In any case, it's not like anybody is suggesting that we shut down all non-wind power sources in the foreseeable future. So you'll have your 'heterogenous solution'.
Large valuable floating masses of copper and other metals in international waters. Either lightly guarded-- or a large ongoing cost for security
Anyone trying to steal several hundred tons of metal is going to find themselves closely monitored by the cameras at the wind farm, and arrested long before they make it to shore.
It's not like you can just pick up a 50 ton windmill, strap it to the back of your speed boat, and make it to Zanzibar by dusk. You'd need lots of big, heavy equipment, which means that your (attempted) escape would be very slow.
Unfortunately being somewhat fickle it doesn't always do that and when it doesn't you need backup generators
The odds that the wind is blowing somewhere are pretty damned close to 100%. So the trick is to have wind farms in many locations, not just one.
Once you've done that, you can use wind farms to back up wind farms, to a large extent. You'd still want some non-wind energy available, but you don't need anywhere near the 100% redundancy you envisioned.
A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory.
The theory of evolution is just as well established as any other scientific theory that is taught in public schools, and should be treated the same way as the others.
When high school science classes start encouraging kids to question the existence of gravity, or to look for alternative explanations for electricity, then we can talk about casting doubt on evolution as well. But to single evolution out for special treatment because certain idiots feel that it threatens their personal superstitions is to condone ignorance -- which is not what science classes are meant to do.
Yes it will, you just have to hack around the DRM a bit and be careful about what hardware you install it on.
The problem is, the big draw for MacOS/X is that it's supposed to "just work" without the user having to futz around with anything. Once the user has to mess around trying to get things to work, it's not much more attractive than just using Windows.
So, hacking MacOS/X onto a non-Apple computer is a non-starter for most of the people MacOS/X is targetted at.
About the one-button mouse: Apple's "Mighty Mouse," introduced in 2005, has no visible button, but can be configured in software to have 1, 2 or 3 buttons.
Alas, it never really worked right in 2-button mode. Specifically, if you have your index finger resting on the left side of the mouse, and press the right side of the mouse, it registers as a left-click rather than a right click. So you have to remember to lift your finger(s) off the left side of the mouse before right clicking every time. It drove me batty.
Yeah, and what if it started suddenly raining knives from the sky! Think of the children!
To be fair, in the wake of AIG, Madoff, etc, it's not surprising that people don't place large amount of trust in the private sector's ability to not screw things up royally. And the public has seen what can happen when nuclear power gets screwed up.
There are billions of people on this planet that would like to use half as much energy as an average American, and no amount of wind or solar is going to deliver that.
That's a silly thing to say. Clearly there is an amount of wind or solar production that would deliver that. It might be more than you think is practical to build, but that doesn't mean that the amount needed is infinite.
Alternative energy sources will be developed when and if they are technologically realistic and financially profitable, and no politician can change that.
Back in the 1970's, wide-scale computer networking was not technologically realistic or financially profitable. Despite that, the US government "poured more taxpayer money down the networking rat-hole", developed the technology to the point where it was realistic and financially profitable, then released the results for the rest of the country to use. The result was the Internet you are using right now. The model works, so your skepticism is unwarranted.
Also, new alternatives open up as the price goes up, such as the tar sands in Canada
True, but by definition the new, more expensive alternatives can only provide us with more expensive gas. Eventually the cost of procuring new gas becomes high enough that it's not worth procuring it at all, since the alternatives are cheaper.
And of course there is also the cost of global warming that has yet to be factored in. Even if gas can be somehow obtained cheaply in the future, the cost of burning that gasoline may be too high. (e.g. for every $1 of gas you put in your car, $10 of damage to coastal cities is incurred... etc)
Long compile times, in my experience, give an opportunity to nip off for a coffee or a cigarette, both of which tend to lead to greater productivity because you actually interact with co-workers.
Oh c'mon, who're you trying to kid? Long compile times give everyone here an excuse to read Slashdot on company time.
However, if they were made to develop the software on boxes that met the minimum recommended spec. for their operating system, they'd have to give some thought to making the code run efficiently.
The problem with giving a developer a slow machine is that it makes development slow. If a recompile of my code takes 5 times longer, that means I can recompile 5 times less during the day. Slow recompiles means there is less time for experimenting and testing with various options, and in the end, the code quality suffers.
If you had said that the testing/QA department should be running on minimum spec machines, I would totally agree with you. But upgrading to an 8-core development machine made me much more productive than I was on my previous dual core machine.
Yeah, that's a huge market. And it's full of customers with deep pockets!
What makes you so sure it's not? I bet it's pretty common for a company to have an in-house app that was custom-written for them back in the day, which works fine for them. Ten years later, they still want to run that app, but they can no longer easily find hardware that supports the OS the app was written for. So now their choice is either re-write the app from scratch (an expensive and risky project; the people who wrote the original version are long gone of course) or spend $70/seat on a virtualization product to keep the original program running. For a company with thousands of seats, that would be a major opportunity for VMWare or Parallels or whomever to make a large amount of money.
Yeah, it's nice to attack McAfee, but what is YOUR alternative?
"Stay the hell away from Windows" works for me. (or if I absolutely must run Windows, I run it in a VM and give it as little access to the network as I can get away with)
So person C should have just as much vested interest in person A as person B does?
Nope... but person C does have a (small) vested interest in the health of persons A and B (and everyone else), if only because person C lives in a society that depends on the vast majority of people being healthy in order to function.
I'm telling you that I can take care of my own family because I'm a better judge of what should be done for my family than you are. Nor do I want to take care of your family because it's none of my business, for better or worse.
Nope again... you can take of your own family because you have the resources to do so. If you do not have the resources to take care of them, you will not be able to, no matter how good a judge you are of what "should be done". It's my opinion that it's better for you, me, and everyone else, to make sure that everyone has access to quality health care, even if they have "pre-existing conditions" and/or can't afford to pay a lot of money for health insurance.
Really? You have no relationships other than financial ones? No parents, children, or loved ones who benefit from your presence in their lives as a healthy human being?
If that's true, you have my condolensces, but I don't think you are a representative case that we should base our health care policy around.
Slashdot Mirror
If every new car sold came with a certificate that an acre of trees was planted and maintained somewhere, cars would be responsible for slowing and then reversing the Greenhouse
I like the idea, I really do, but I wonder what is to keep the carbon that the trees sucked up from getting released back into the atmosphere when the wood burns or decomposes?
It seems to me that if the problem is vast quantities of CO2 being pumped from underground into the atmosphere, then the solution would need to pump even larger quantitites of CO2 back out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere permanently. Unless you're planning on burying the grown trees or something.... ?
Protecting the windmills will add a lot to the cost of generating power.
I don't think it will. All the wind farm owners need to do is hide a $500 GPS beacon inside each piece of at-risk equipment. Once that's done, all they need to do is track its signal -- if it starts to move away from the windmill site for no known reason, they send out the Coast Guard to catch the thief before he makes it back to land. Once that happens a few times, the other thieves will realize that windmill theft is a losing proposition and stop trying ... at which point the ongoing security costs drop to nearly zero.
[criminals] only need to succeed once to disrupt power for a long time.
Again, I don't think that is the case. Stealing parts from a windmill disrupts only the power generated from that one windmill. A typical wind farm will contain thousands of windmills; a thief would have to be able to steal parts from hundreds of them before the loss of power became a significant problem.
The only thing he'll get done is to ruin the economy and make his buddies rich.
That "mission" was accomplished already, before Obama even took office.
Okay, let's assume that your figure is correct, and there is something worth $20k at the top of each windmill.
What is the cost (in time and equipment) of boating 200 miles out into the ocean, safely removing a two-ton box of copper from the top of an operating 300 foot tall windmill, and hauling it back to your secret hideout? Let's call that cost M.
Now, what is the cost of getting caught stealing that box? Include fines, jail time, loss of equipment, etc. Let's call that cost N.
Finally, what is the probability of getting caught? Let's call that probability P. When calculating P, keep in mind that the owners of the windmill will have hours of incriminating video of you pulling up to the windmill, taking the equipment, and sailing away again, and that there are few places to hide in the open ocean.
Given all of the above, the average profit a thief can expect to make from stealing a $20k box from a windmill is: 20,000-(M+(P*N)). If that value turns out to be less than zero (or not significantly more than zero), then no rational thief is going to bother trying to steal it. (of course there might be irrational thieves, but they will merely serve as cautionary examples to everyone else when they get caught and/or fail to make much profit).
Put another way.... life finds a way, if and only if there is a way. When something is impractical or impossible, that something doesn't happen.
I want to hear a little about whether mass tapping of wind power would alter climate by sapping winds of their energy?
The effect would be much less than the effect of NOT developing wind power (i.e. the climate-changing effect of continuing to burn fossil fuels instead)
talk about single point of failure. [...] they'd just have to target a broad swath
Well, which is it? A single point of failure, or a broad swath? Or perhaps you've figured out a way by which Dr. Evil could target thousands of sites simultaneously?
In any case, it's not like anybody is suggesting that we shut down all non-wind power sources in the foreseeable future. So you'll have your 'heterogenous solution'.
Large valuable floating masses of copper and other metals in international waters. Either lightly guarded-- or a large ongoing cost for security
Anyone trying to steal several hundred tons of metal is going to find themselves closely monitored by the cameras at the wind farm, and arrested long before they make it to shore.
It's not like you can just pick up a 50 ton windmill, strap it to the back of your speed boat, and make it to Zanzibar by dusk. You'd need lots of big, heavy equipment, which means that your (attempted) escape would be very slow.
Unfortunately being somewhat fickle it doesn't always do that and when it doesn't you need backup generators
The odds that the wind is blowing somewhere are pretty damned close to 100%. So the trick is to have wind farms in many locations, not just one.
Once you've done that, you can use wind farms to back up wind farms, to a large extent. You'd still want some non-wind energy available, but you don't need anywhere near the 100% redundancy you envisioned.
Of course the downside of using your portal gun to infinitely extend the duration of your slide is that you will quickly set your ass on fire.
Best part is, maybe both parties will stop arguing about the whole issue
Hahahahahaha! Man, you are hilarious. :^)
A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory.
The theory of evolution is just as well established as any other scientific theory that is taught in public schools, and should be treated the same way as the others.
When high school science classes start encouraging kids to question the existence of gravity, or to look for alternative explanations for electricity, then we can talk about casting doubt on evolution as well. But to single evolution out for special treatment because certain idiots feel that it threatens their personal superstitions is to condone ignorance -- which is not what science classes are meant to do.
Yes it will, you just have to hack around the DRM a bit and be careful about what hardware you install it on.
The problem is, the big draw for MacOS/X is that it's supposed to "just work" without the user having to futz around with anything. Once the user has to mess around trying to get things to work, it's not much more attractive than just using Windows.
So, hacking MacOS/X onto a non-Apple computer is a non-starter for most of the people MacOS/X is targetted at.
About the one-button mouse: Apple's "Mighty Mouse," introduced in 2005, has no visible button, but can be configured in software to have 1, 2 or 3 buttons.
Alas, it never really worked right in 2-button mode. Specifically, if you have your index finger resting on the left side of the mouse, and press the right side of the mouse, it registers as a left-click rather than a right click. So you have to remember to lift your finger(s) off the left side of the mouse before right clicking every time. It drove me batty.
Yeah, and what if it started suddenly raining knives from the sky! Think of the children!
To be fair, in the wake of AIG, Madoff, etc, it's not surprising that people don't place large amount of trust in the private sector's ability to not screw things up royally. And the public has seen what can happen when nuclear power gets screwed up.
There are billions of people on this planet that would like to use half as much energy as an average American, and no amount of wind or solar is going to deliver that.
That's a silly thing to say. Clearly there is an amount of wind or solar production that would deliver that. It might be more than you think is practical to build, but that doesn't mean that the amount needed is infinite.
Alternative energy sources will be developed when and if they are technologically realistic and financially profitable, and no politician can change that.
Back in the 1970's, wide-scale computer networking was not technologically realistic or financially profitable. Despite that, the US government "poured more taxpayer money down the networking rat-hole", developed the technology to the point where it was realistic and financially profitable, then released the results for the rest of the country to use. The result was the Internet you are using right now. The model works, so your skepticism is unwarranted.
Also, new alternatives open up as the price goes up, such as the tar sands in Canada
True, but by definition the new, more expensive alternatives can only provide us with more expensive gas. Eventually the cost of procuring new gas becomes high enough that it's not worth procuring it at all, since the alternatives are cheaper.
And of course there is also the cost of global warming that has yet to be factored in. Even if gas can be somehow obtained cheaply in the future, the cost of burning that gasoline may be too high. (e.g. for every $1 of gas you put in your car, $10 of damage to coastal cities is incurred... etc)
There were many editors on the book, but unfortunately, they weren't actually allowed to do anything. I mean nothing.
If an editor is denied write access to the book, is he still an editor?
Long compile times, in my experience, give an opportunity to nip off for a coffee or a cigarette, both of which tend to lead to greater productivity because you actually interact with co-workers.
Oh c'mon, who're you trying to kid? Long compile times give everyone here an excuse to read Slashdot on company time.
However, if they were made to develop the software on boxes that met the minimum recommended spec. for their operating system, they'd have to give some thought to making the code run efficiently.
The problem with giving a developer a slow machine is that it makes development slow. If a recompile of my code takes 5 times longer, that means I can recompile 5 times less during the day. Slow recompiles means there is less time for experimenting and testing with various options, and in the end, the code quality suffers.
If you had said that the testing/QA department should be running on minimum spec machines, I would totally agree with you. But upgrading to an 8-core development machine made me much more productive than I was on my previous dual core machine.
Yeah, that's a huge market. And it's full of customers with deep pockets!
What makes you so sure it's not? I bet it's pretty common for a company to have an in-house app that was custom-written for them back in the day, which works fine for them. Ten years later, they still want to run that app, but they can no longer easily find hardware that supports the OS the app was written for. So now their choice is either re-write the app from scratch (an expensive and risky project; the people who wrote the original version are long gone of course) or spend $70/seat on a virtualization product to keep the original program running. For a company with thousands of seats, that would be a major opportunity for VMWare or Parallels or whomever to make a large amount of money.
Yeah, it's nice to attack McAfee, but what is YOUR alternative?
"Stay the hell away from Windows" works for me. (or if I absolutely must run Windows, I run it in a VM and give it as little access to the network as I can get away with)
So person C should have just as much vested interest in person A as person B does?
Nope... but person C does have a (small) vested interest in the health of persons A and B (and everyone else), if only because person C lives in a society that depends on the vast majority of people being healthy in order to function.
I'm telling you that I can take care of my own family because I'm a better judge of what should be done for my family than you are. Nor do I want to take care of your family because it's none of my business, for better or worse.
Nope again... you can take of your own family because you have the resources to do so. If you do not have the resources to take care of them, you will not be able to, no matter how good a judge you are of what "should be done". It's my opinion that it's better for you, me, and everyone else, to make sure that everyone has access to quality health care, even if they have "pre-existing conditions" and/or can't afford to pay a lot of money for health insurance.
Really? You have no relationships other than financial ones? No parents, children, or loved ones who benefit from your presence in their lives as a healthy human being?
If that's true, you have my condolensces, but I don't think you are a representative case that we should base our health care policy around.
Source ?
It's Windows, you're not allowed to see the source.