Ok, this is odd. Your criticism is spot-on about Fermi, but also shows you didn't read the paper, where he does indeed address (badly) the concepts of self-replicating probes and the like. He just thinks they are a bad idea. Not infeasable, mind you, just a bad idea so nobody would build them. So yes, it's a very naive study, but you do have to do even such papers the credit of reading before saying they don't consider geometric growth.
The reasoning above is why I believe the Prime-Directive/Zoo thesis is the most likely Fermi answer. That only requires that one intelligent race, the one that controls our neighbourhood, wishes to hide from us the evidence of ETs. The "we've in a virtual universe" answer also meets that requirement.
An AI (being made of software) is a much better colonizer because it can travel as a signal at the speed of light. It just needs something to receive it, implement the virtual machine on which it runs, and then get it enough CPU power to run.
Once you tech civilization even below our level, you will get something to receive it and presuming you design well, the virtual machine implementation should not be hard.
The best way to get enough CPU to run on a backwards planet would be to get a large network of slower primitive computers to run your code. To do that, you would want to come up with a problem they would like to solve using massively parallel computing, and then introduce a program such as a networked screen saver. You would tell the people that by running the program, their CPU would be dedicated to finding traces of alien intelligence in radio signals. Many of them would then run your program when their computers were idle, and you could build up a vast enough network to finally start thinking at a decent speed, rather than the terribly sluggish thinking you have to do before the network is up. You would not even be lying to those who think they are running a search for extraterrestrial intelligence @ home, for they would indeed be assisting in the search for one.
Sites don't violate policies. Only humans violate policies. Until the sites are AIs, anyway.
What the site owner did was run a site that was hackable, and it was hacked to include bad links. I don't know if Google's policy includes "Run a secure site" but if not, the site owner didn't violate it. The black hats did.
Google has worded it in a way that you could accept as true, that the "site" violated policies (at the behest of unauthorized parties) and not me.
Of course, Google's policy of not revealing the algorithms they use to spot search engine spam is regretable, but I understand why they do it. Security through obscurity is always tempting. In this sort of case it may even make sense.
One radical idea suggests one good thing to eliminate would be parking signs, because on-street parking should be abolished, or heavily metered and only allowed at times of very low traffic.
One thing we don't realize is that free and cheap parking are a tremendous subsidy of the private automobile. Not only do cities provide free or cheap street parking to private cars, they also pass laws requiring anybody building buildings to provide "adequate" parking. New homes must have garages by law in many districts, new office buildings large parking structures. In most cases, the parking is free. In many neighbourhoods, the city grants local parking permits to residents to give them free parking while visitors jostle for more limited spaces.
Now if subsidizing the private automobile is what we want, then this makes sense. But if we think we have too much pollution and congestion it doesn't. If people paid the real cost of parking, they would drive less and use transit more. Parking, privately owned, would be reservable from your mobile device, and possibly paid for through it as well. No hunting for parking or blocking traffic to park.
And possibly less need for all the street signs and regulations this thread is about.
Um, I wrote quite explicitly "assuming the price stays the same." You act as though I'm not aware that there will be price changes.
Nobody, however, knows just what those changes will be, or even which direction. To some extent you can mitigate that on the futures market.
But in any event, the price of the wind turbine is likely to remain fairly stable, or even drop. Ditto for PV panels and other alternative energy sources. So the clear path from an economic standpoint would be to buy cheaper power elsewhere, and then if, and only if the price of that got higher than the turbine, go and buy the wind unit -- which is probably even cheaper because higher volumes of sales will lower the price quite a bit.
Of course, then you would correctly also have to judge the risk of grid power dropping back down in price.
The core point remains true. It is close to fraud to call it 9 cents/kwh, if you're selling it.
Now the truth is it may not be fraud because I see this "divide total cost by total kwh" error really, really often. What amazes me is that people who have mortgages (which includes almost anybody installing a solar panel system or wind turbine at their house) continue to fall for it. It may be a deliberate blindness -- I want to believe that my renewable energy system is saving me money. But I was also the first person in the/. crowd to point it out after several hours, too. This crowd should be above average in math skills.
I'm being mean here but there are deliberate blinders going on here, making the vendor, the IEEE spectrum writer and the Slashdot editor forget basic math. The vendor's motive, I understand, but there is no excluse for IEEE writers and slashdot people.
$9,000 for 100,000 khw over 20 years is NOT 9 cents/kwh. Why? Anybody with a mortgage knows that money paid over time is vastly different from money today. The unit presumably delivers 5,000 khw per year or about 13.7 khw per day. So at 7% interest, that's 16.7 cents/kwh, which is more than just round-off error.
And frankly, for the vendor to say it's 9 cents is very close to fraud. The power plants don't amortize without considering the time value of money when they work out the costs.
Another way to think about it. Put the $9,000 in the stock market. Historical rate of return is about 10%. That means you would pull out $900 per year -- while still keeping the principal intact, except for inflation. At California's 13 cents/khw from the grid, that buys you 6900khw, assuming the price stays even. Your wind turnbine gets you only 5000khw. It doesn't pay for itself in 20 years, it never, ever pays for itself, no matter how long it lasts. And you still have the principal when you are done.
I'm all for renewable energy. But I hate it when people also for renewable energy either get stupid or just plain lie to make it seem better than it is.
Since if you pay for this flight, and it only goes up 63 miles and back down, it would only accrue the typical minimum 500 mile most airlines give on short flights.
Now if you were going into orbit, it would be worth paying for because you would earn enough miles for another trip right there. You go a lot of miles on any orbital flight.
(In fact, it is amusing to point out that while the airline industry likes to point out that air travel is far safer than car travel in terms of deaths per passenger mile, the space shuttle is even better -- even though it's killed one out of every 15 people to go up in it.)
One useful feature of Mozilla is "profiles" You can create alternate user profiles, with their own set of passwords, cookies, history, and proxy. So set up one profile to use your anonymizing proxy and give it a distinctive theme, so that you can be clear about when you are doing anonymous surfing and when you are doing direct surfing.
Then keep one window available with the anonymous browser and use it when you want to be private. Keep others around when you want the speed of direct connection.
There are various figures, but most studies conclude that trains get no better than twice the energy efficiency (BTUs per passenger mile) of air travel or cars. A DoE study in 2003 rated planes, trains and automobiles as almost all exactly the same in BTU/passenger mile.
But rail requires a huge expenditure in dedicated land. Land that is has a train roll over it often quite infrequently in the USA, and requires expensive crossings. Trains can only go where rails go.
Planes require just the airport, and planes can go, if there's demand, nonstop from any airport to any airport, far faster. If we didn't put all the security requirements on planes, and had quick trains from the downtowns to the airports which clear you and whisk you right onto your plane, nobody would dream of comparing the downtown-to-downtown times -- the plane would win handily on all but the shortest of routes.
The energy efficiency of course depends on how loaded the vehicles are, a lot of factors can affect that.
Overhead electric trains are more efficient, and so are newer plane designs.
As I blogged yesterday, you don't need to get half the electoral votes to make this work. Since the electoral vote and popular vote are likely to differ only in a very close election in the modern world, all you need is a small set of "opposite" safe states from the alternate sides to get enough to compensate for any likely difference. That could be just a few states.
Of course if you do get 270 votes in your compact, you can do anything at all, including instituting preferential ballots, forcing the other states to follow along if they want to be counted. In theory a set of states with 270 votes could just say, "Listen, we're going to elect the President amongst ourselves. What the rest of you do is irrelevant" though it would get a challenge.
I got a chance to review this article before publication and in my commentary on the draft version I point out not only that Metcalfe's law is wrong, but that often any positive law is wrong, because in many cases, particularly mailing lists, the value of the network eventually starts dropping as the size increases, due to noise and excess signal.
That's why may people prefer smaller mailing lists to larger communities, and in fact some topics simply can't be handled properly in large groups, even with moderators.
Over 1 million people are killed in automobile accidents each year globally, 43,000 in the USA. Far more are injured or maimed.
Estimates for the costs of crashes range from 10 to 30 cents/mile, factoring in everything -- health, repairs, suffering -- which is more than the cost of gasoline or depreciation.
It's now down to an engineering problem to build self-driving, crash-avoiding cars. It's the largest preventable cause of suffering and death we have.
The CPU chip is the main draw of power now, and to help this they've worked hard to make the chip draw less power when its idling. It's not just wear and tear on the fan. In places with expensive electrictiy, like California, the power bill for a machine can be the most expensive component. The most extreme chips draw as much as 70w on full, I think, which is 600 kwh a year, at the incremental 19 cent cost in California that's over $100 per year.
There is a terrible irony in the idea of people burning vast amounts of electricity like this in the effort to deal with global warming.
I would be interested to hear stories about whether you can really do this at Serverbeach. It is what they advertise, but lots of ISPs advertise bandwidth numbers they really don't deliver on. The people who are buying bandwidth professionally for file delivery are paying more than this, and I think there's a reason for it. 2000gb is a sustained 6 megabits (plus they are giving you a server included in this price) and the people who sell truly saturatable megabits in quantity do not sell you 6 of them, plus a server for $139/month.
Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel? That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company. Price out saturated megabits, figure how many you need for peak load, and tell me where the nickel comes from.
Bittorrent makes use of the otherwise generally unused upstream found in user broadband connections. With a large cloud, users gravitate to exchanging with people to whom they have the best connections (ie. local). All of this is spare bandwidth that would otherwise go unused. (Remote connections compete with other uses however, as do direct downloads.)
That's not true. There are many free SDKs available from Microsoft for Windows. Microsoft claims no copyright interest in the programs people code using those APIs, and again, I believe we would be up in arms if they did.
But this is, if you think about it, a pretty radical doctrine in software. Certainly if Microsoft, or anybody else who generated a header file or API, tried to claim a copyright interest in programs written to that API, the world, and most of all the free software community, would be up in arms. You should not use a doctrine you would not accept from others.
I must say I have always been bothered by the suggestion that writing code to a particular API (such as that of a kernel) could be considered a derivative work under copyright. If I write to the Windows API, have I careated a derivative work of Windows, to be owned by Microsoft?
If you do static linking of some GPL code with your code, then it's not just a derivative work, you are actually including somebody else's code and must get their permission. But static linking is of course less and less common. Modules that call libraries are only bound to the libraries at runtime today. Code is written to APIs but bound at runtime.
This is thus a "loophole" in the GPL, turning it into the LGPL in some interpretations, and to fight that, we see this interpretation that just writing code to an API, making use of the API definition found in header files, makes you a derivative work. I don't think this is a good interpretation for a free software movement to be pushing, even if it means some loopholes.
Oh, they probably did laugh a bit harder at Bush's routine, after all there is no reason to be afraid to laugh when the President is making fun of himself.
But no, the audio was way quieter than say, what you would set for a show studio audience, such as the Colbert Report.
While it wasn't Colbert at his best, it was funny stuff, and that crowd has been drinking and is in a good mood and ready to laugh. It was definitely set lower than what you would expect for a comedy routine. Remember this is CSPAN, they mostly do lectures and congressional hearings where the audience is not important.
Actually, I watch The Colbert Report fairly regularly, and I don't think he was as funny in this as he is on the show. The audience was laughing (the C-Span audio does not provide the audience at fairly high volume) though I would agree it probably wasn't as strong as the time I went to the correspondent's dinner during the Clinton years when Al Franken roasted Clinton. Franken dug pretty hard at Clinton for a democratic comic. ("You're going to take some hits," I remember him saying to the President.)
This seems to happen a lot. You get somebody who has to be funny every night and does a good job, and then you give a big job, like this dinner or the Oscars with lots of time to prepare, and it doesn't seem like they do as well. Happened to Jon Stewart, to David Letterman and many others. Is it because of expectations? Or pressure?
Anyway, watch the show for the real Colbert. The main thing that's interesting about this routine is that Bush is there taking it in, not entirely happy. But as I said, the time I got to go there were icy stares from Hilary at Franken's Whitewater jokes.
Instead of buying this, you could buy a regular car and take the $18,000 you saved and buy carbon credits. $18,000 of carbon credits in the USA, which has an underpriced market because laws don't create demand, would offset the burning of, I kid you not, close to one MILLION gallons of gasoline. Yup, enough to take an 8mpg hummer and drive it around the Earth over 300 times!
So buying one of these is like driving a Hummer almost 8 million miles. Doesn't seem so good.
At the more expensive price for European credits ($13 per metric tonne CO2) it's still like driving the Hummer for a million miles.
How can it be that dramatic? The genius of pollution credits is they move the money spent on emissions reduction to where it can be done most efficiently. You can cut emissions by buying an expensive electric car, sure, but somebody else can do it far more cheaply by improving the output of a factory, or putting up a wind farm, or planting a grove of trees -- which are all things that allow people to sell these credits.
Now you may not like the credits, or think the numbers should be different, but the numbers in this case are so off the scale that there's no way that you will do a better job of helping the environment, at least today, with this sort of tech. At best you can feel good while being a gross polluter, and hope you're encouraging a market so that they eventually become cheaper and a thus more efficient way to reduce emissions.
The EFF does not have a "losing record." Please stop repeating this. That was what appeared to be a hoax posting in the Register for some reason picked up in slashdot. It was simply made up. The hoax cited some lost cases that were not EFF cases. The EFF has a record of many significant victories, check out the web site. Of course the EFF does not win all the time, if we did it would mean we were being far too cautious in chosing what to defend, but please stop repeating this "losing record" stuff.
Well, the Olympics are of course in theory not for the viewers, but the TV coverage is.
One of the problems is that races against the clock, best time at the end wins, are not the best TV. Not nearly the drama of races where people are competing at the same tme. Snowboardcross (and to some extent parallel slalom snowboarding) have the race element that makes for good TV. And hockey, curling also can make good TV because you are seeing the real competition directly. Curling is rare in Olympic sports because it is a game with a moderate amount of strategy as well as having good control of individual shots. The thing that turns people off curling is that it can be slow at times. Like baseball, sometime the slowness is tense and delicious, other times it's boring.
Having MythTV on the other hand makes curling great. You can play at 2x and still hear the commentary, or smooth 3x to watch the less important parts of the ends really fast. Makes a good game for TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, this is odd. Your criticism is spot-on about Fermi, but also shows you didn't read the paper, where he does indeed address (badly) the concepts of self-replicating probes and the like. He just thinks they are a bad idea. Not infeasable, mind you, just a bad idea so nobody would build them. So yes, it's a very naive study, but you do have to do even such papers the credit of reading before saying they don't consider geometric growth.
The reasoning above is why I believe the Prime-Directive/Zoo thesis is the most likely Fermi answer. That only requires that one intelligent race, the one that controls our neighbourhood, wishes to hide from us the evidence of ETs. The "we've in a virtual universe" answer also meets that requirement.
An AI (being made of software) is a much better colonizer because it can travel as a signal at the speed of light. It just needs something to receive it, implement the virtual machine on which it runs, and then get it enough CPU power to run.
Once you tech civilization even below our level, you will get something to receive it and presuming you design well, the virtual machine implementation should not be hard.
The best way to get enough CPU to run on a backwards planet would be to get a large network of slower primitive computers to run your code. To do that, you would want to come up with a problem they would like to solve using massively parallel computing, and then introduce a program such as a networked screen saver. You would tell the people that by running the program, their CPU would be dedicated to finding traces of alien intelligence in radio signals. Many of them would then run your program when their computers were idle, and you could build up a vast enough network to finally start thinking at a decent speed, rather than the terribly sluggish thinking you have to do before the network is up. You would not even be lying to those who think they are running a search for extraterrestrial intelligence @ home, for they would indeed be assisting in the search for one.
Sites don't violate policies. Only humans violate policies. Until the sites are AIs, anyway.
What the site owner did was run a site that was hackable, and it was hacked to include bad links. I don't know if Google's policy includes "Run a secure site" but if not, the site owner didn't violate it. The black hats did.
Google has worded it in a way that you could accept as true, that the "site" violated policies (at the behest of unauthorized parties) and not me.
Of course, Google's policy of not revealing the algorithms they use to spot search engine spam is regretable, but I understand why they do it. Security through obscurity is always tempting. In this sort of case it may even make sense.
One radical idea suggests one good thing to eliminate would be parking signs, because on-street parking should be abolished, or heavily metered and only allowed at times of very low traffic.
One thing we don't realize is that free and cheap parking are a tremendous subsidy of the private automobile. Not only do cities provide free or cheap street parking to private cars, they also pass laws requiring anybody building buildings to provide "adequate" parking. New homes must have garages by law in many districts, new office buildings large parking structures. In most cases, the parking is free. In many neighbourhoods, the city grants local parking permits to residents to give them free parking while visitors jostle for more limited spaces.
Now if subsidizing the private automobile is what we want, then this makes sense. But if we think we have too much pollution and congestion it doesn't. If people paid the real cost of parking, they would drive less and use transit more. Parking, privately owned, would be reservable from your mobile device, and possibly paid for through it as well. No hunting for parking or blocking traffic to park.
And possibly less need for all the street signs and regulations this thread is about.
When will folks be making .debs?
Um, I wrote quite explicitly "assuming the price stays the same." You act as though I'm not aware that there will be price changes.
/. crowd to point it out after several hours, too. This crowd should be above average in math skills.
Nobody, however, knows just what those changes will be, or even which direction. To some extent you can mitigate that on the futures market.
But in any event, the price of the wind turbine is likely to remain fairly stable, or even drop. Ditto for PV panels and other alternative energy sources. So the clear path from an economic standpoint would be to buy cheaper power elsewhere, and then if, and only if the price of that got higher than the turbine, go and buy the wind unit -- which is probably even cheaper because higher volumes of sales will lower the price quite a bit.
Of course, then you would correctly also have to judge the risk of grid power dropping back down in price.
The core point remains true. It is close to fraud to call it 9 cents/kwh, if you're selling it.
Now the truth is it may not be fraud because I see this "divide total cost by total kwh" error really, really often. What amazes me is that people who have mortgages (which includes almost anybody installing a solar panel system or wind turbine at their house) continue to fall for it. It may be a deliberate blindness -- I want to believe that my renewable energy system is saving me money. But I was also the first person in the
I'm being mean here but there are deliberate blinders going on here, making the vendor, the IEEE spectrum writer and the Slashdot editor forget basic math. The vendor's motive, I understand, but there is no excluse for IEEE writers and slashdot people.
$9,000 for 100,000 khw over 20 years is NOT 9 cents/kwh. Why? Anybody with a mortgage knows that money paid over time is vastly different from money today. The unit presumably delivers 5,000 khw per year or about 13.7 khw per day. So at 7% interest, that's 16.7 cents/kwh, which is more than just round-off error.
And frankly, for the vendor to say it's 9 cents is very close to fraud. The power plants don't amortize without considering the time value of money when they work out the costs.
Another way to think about it. Put the $9,000 in the stock market. Historical rate of return is about 10%. That means you would pull out $900 per year -- while still keeping the principal intact, except for inflation. At California's 13 cents/khw from the grid, that buys you 6900khw, assuming the price stays even. Your wind turnbine gets you only 5000khw. It doesn't pay for itself in 20 years, it never, ever pays for itself, no matter how long it lasts. And you still have the principal when you are done.
I'm all for renewable energy. But I hate it when people also for renewable energy either get stupid or just plain lie to make it seem better than it is.
Since if you pay for this flight, and it only goes up 63 miles and back down, it would only accrue the typical minimum 500 mile most airlines give on short flights.
Now if you were going into orbit, it would be worth paying for because you would earn enough miles for another trip right there. You go a lot of miles on any orbital flight.
(In fact, it is amusing to point out that while the airline industry likes to point out that air travel is far safer than car travel in terms of deaths per passenger mile, the space shuttle is even better -- even though it's killed one out of every 15 people to go up in it.)
One useful feature of Mozilla is "profiles" You can create alternate user profiles, with their own set of passwords, cookies, history, and proxy. So set up one profile to use your anonymizing proxy and give it a distinctive theme, so that you can be clear about when you are doing anonymous surfing and when you are doing direct surfing.
Then keep one window available with the anonymous browser and use it when you want to be private. Keep others around when you want the speed of direct connection.
There are various figures, but most studies conclude that trains get no better than twice the energy efficiency (BTUs per passenger mile) of air travel or cars. A DoE study in 2003 rated planes, trains and automobiles as almost all exactly the same in BTU/passenger mile.
But rail requires a huge expenditure in dedicated land. Land that is has a train roll over it often quite infrequently in the USA, and requires expensive crossings. Trains can only go where rails go.
Planes require just the airport, and planes can go, if there's demand, nonstop from any airport to any airport, far faster. If we didn't put all the security requirements on planes, and had quick trains from the downtowns to the airports which clear you and whisk you right onto your plane, nobody would dream of comparing the downtown-to-downtown times -- the plane would win handily on all but the shortest of routes.
The energy efficiency of course depends on how loaded the vehicles are, a lot of factors can affect that.
Overhead electric trains are more efficient, and so are newer plane designs.
As I blogged yesterday, you don't need to get half the electoral votes to make this work. Since
the electoral vote and popular vote are likely to differ only in a very close election in the modern world, all you need is a small set
of "opposite" safe states from the alternate sides to get enough to compensate for any likely difference. That could be just a few states.
Of course if you do get 270 votes in your compact, you can do anything at all, including instituting preferential ballots, forcing the other states to follow along if they want to be counted. In theory a set of states with 270 votes could just say, "Listen, we're going to elect the President amongst ourselves. What the rest of you do is irrelevant" though it would get a challenge.
I got a chance to review this article before publication and in my commentary on the draft version I point out not only that Metcalfe's law is wrong, but that often any positive law is wrong, because in many cases, particularly mailing lists, the value of the network eventually starts dropping as the size increases, due to noise and excess signal.
That's why may people prefer smaller mailing lists to larger communities, and in fact some topics simply can't be handled properly in large groups, even with moderators.
Over 1 million people are killed in automobile accidents each year globally, 43,000 in the USA. Far more are injured or maimed.
Estimates for the costs of crashes range from 10 to 30 cents/mile, factoring in everything -- health, repairs, suffering -- which is more than the cost of gasoline or depreciation.
It's now down to an engineering problem to build self-driving, crash-avoiding cars. It's the largest preventable cause of suffering and death we have.
The CPU chip is the main draw of power now, and to help this they've worked hard to make the chip draw less power when its idling. It's not just wear and tear on the fan. In places with expensive electrictiy, like California, the power bill for a machine can be the most expensive component. The most extreme chips draw as much as 70w on full, I think, which is 600 kwh a year, at the incremental 19 cent cost in California that's over $100 per year.
There is a terrible irony in the idea of people burning vast amounts of electricity like this in the effort to deal with global warming.
I would be interested to hear stories about whether you can really do this at Serverbeach. It is what they advertise, but lots of ISPs advertise bandwidth numbers they really don't deliver on. The people who are buying bandwidth professionally for file delivery are paying more than this, and I think there's a reason for it. 2000gb is a sustained 6 megabits (plus they are giving you a server included in this price) and the people who sell truly saturatable megabits in quantity do not sell you 6 of them, plus a server for $139/month.
Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel?
That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.
Price out saturated megabits, figure how many you need for peak load, and tell me where the nickel comes from.
Bittorrent makes use of the otherwise generally unused upstream found in user broadband connections. With a large
cloud, users gravitate to exchanging with people to whom they have the best connections (ie. local). All of this
is spare bandwidth that would otherwise go unused. (Remote connections compete with other uses however, as do direct
downloads.)
How is the Register going to write an article pretending the EFF regularly loses out of this one?
That's not true. There are many free SDKs available from Microsoft for Windows. Microsoft claims no copyright interest in the programs people code using those APIs, and again, I believe we would be up in arms if they did.
But this is, if you think about it, a pretty radical doctrine in software. Certainly if Microsoft, or anybody else who generated a header file or API, tried to claim a copyright interest in programs written to that API, the world, and most of all the free software community, would be up in arms. You should not use a doctrine you would not accept from others.
I must say I have always been bothered by the suggestion that writing code to a particular API (such as that of a kernel) could be considered a derivative work under copyright. If I write to the Windows API, have I careated a derivative work of Windows, to be owned by Microsoft?
If you do static linking of some GPL code with your code, then it's not just a derivative work, you are actually including somebody else's code and must get their permission. But static linking is of course less and less common. Modules that call libraries are only bound to the libraries at runtime today. Code is written to APIs but bound at runtime.
This is thus a "loophole" in the GPL, turning it into the LGPL in some interpretations, and to fight that, we see this interpretation that just writing code to an API, making use of the API definition found in header files, makes you a derivative work. I don't think this is a good interpretation for a free software movement to be pushing, even if it means some loopholes.
Oh, they probably did laugh a bit harder at Bush's routine, after all there is no reason to be afraid to laugh when the President is making fun of himself.
But no, the audio was way quieter than say, what you would set for a show studio audience, such as the Colbert Report.
While it wasn't Colbert at his best, it was funny stuff, and that crowd has been drinking and is in a good mood and ready to laugh. It was definitely set lower than what you would expect for a comedy routine. Remember this is CSPAN, they mostly do lectures and congressional hearings where the audience is not important.
Actually, I watch The Colbert Report fairly regularly, and I don't think he was as funny in this as he is on the show. The audience was laughing (the C-Span audio does not provide the audience at fairly high volume) though I would agree it probably wasn't as strong as the time I went to the correspondent's dinner during the Clinton years when Al Franken roasted Clinton. Franken dug pretty hard at Clinton for a democratic comic. ("You're going to take some hits," I remember him saying to the President.)
This seems to happen a lot. You get somebody who has to be funny every night and does a good job, and then you give a big job, like this dinner or the Oscars with lots of time to prepare, and it doesn't seem like they do as well. Happened to Jon Stewart, to David Letterman and many others. Is it because of expectations? Or pressure?
Anyway, watch the show for the real Colbert. The main thing that's interesting about this routine is that Bush is there taking it in, not entirely happy. But as I said, the time I got to go there were icy stares from Hilary at Franken's Whitewater jokes.
Instead of buying this, you could buy a regular car and take the $18,000 you saved and buy carbon credits. $18,000 of carbon credits in the USA, which has an underpriced market because laws don't create demand, would offset the burning of, I kid you not, close to one MILLION gallons of gasoline. Yup, enough to take an 8mpg hummer and drive it around the Earth over 300 times!
So buying one of these is like driving a Hummer almost 8 million miles. Doesn't seem so good.
At the more expensive price for European credits ($13 per metric tonne CO2) it's still like driving the Hummer for a million miles.
How can it be that dramatic? The genius of pollution credits is they move the money spent on emissions reduction to where it can be done most efficiently. You can cut emissions by buying an expensive electric car, sure, but somebody else can do it far more cheaply by improving the output of a factory, or putting up a wind farm, or planting a grove of trees -- which are all things that allow people to sell these credits.
Now you may not like the credits, or think the numbers should be different, but the numbers in this case are so off the scale that there's no way that you will do a better job of helping the environment, at least today, with this sort of tech. At best you can feel good while being a gross polluter, and hope you're encouraging a market so that they eventually become cheaper and a thus more efficient way to reduce emissions.
The EFF does not have a "losing record." Please stop repeating this. That was what appeared to be a hoax posting in the Register for some reason picked up in slashdot. It was simply made up. The hoax cited some lost cases that were not EFF cases. The EFF has a record of many significant victories, check out the web site. Of course the EFF does not win all the time, if we did it would mean we were being far too cautious in chosing what to defend, but please stop repeating this "losing record" stuff.
Well, the Olympics are of course in theory not for the viewers, but the TV coverage is.
One of the problems is that races against the clock, best time at the end wins, are not the best TV. Not nearly the drama of races where people are competing at the same tme. Snowboardcross (and to some extent parallel slalom snowboarding) have the race element that makes for good TV. And hockey, curling also can make good TV because you are seeing the real competition directly. Curling is rare in Olympic sports because it is a game with a moderate amount of strategy as well as having good control of individual shots. The thing that turns people off curling is that it can be slow at times. Like baseball, sometime the slowness is tense and delicious, other times it's boring.
Having MythTV on the other hand makes curling great. You can play at 2x and still hear the commentary, or smooth 3x to watch the less important parts of the ends really fast. Makes a good game for TV.