The microgrid idea is attractive, and would work. Unfortunately, it appears inherently more expensive and less efficient. This would make it an extremely hard sell. It also decreased central control, so the govt. wouldn't be attracted to it, even if they didn't actually put up roadblocks.
You did oversimplify. There's really no sense in talking about the "extent to which we are contributing" because of various positive feedback loops. I suppose that if you just say "we are a major contributor to global warming" you would on safe ground, but anything finer than that an things get really complicated. Even this article talked about how a warmer ocean causes increased release of methane....which causes a warmer ocean...which... (Well, the article didn't expressly mention that this was a loop. And only one of many.) Fortunately there are also some negative feedback loops...but they don't appear to be as strong. Or perhaps they're just slower. If deformation of the earth's crust (by melting the glaciers that acted as weights holding it down) sets off a chain of volcanos, then we may end up dealing with a global cooling problem.
FWIW, the drying out of western North America has caused deformation of the earth's crust in that area, as the weight of the water has been removed. It's only about (IIRC) 6cm/year, but volcanos have been active in the US west coast that had long been dormant. Probably a coincidence, but do look up the "Deccan Tapps". And remember that we can't yet predict volcanos or earthquakes.
It's true that most distros are committed to using systemd. That doesn't make it a good choice, and it was often a very narrow vote that approved it, because that are lots of things to hate about systemd. Also, a large number of people don't really trust the lead developer. And.... well, there are a large number of things not to like about it.
I'll probably wait to decide that I won't have anything to do with it for awhile, though. Perhaps it won't turn out to be as much of a blivet as it looks like. But in the meantime I'm going to be checking out alternatives. Just in case. If it's as bad as some have reported, I may be switching to some flavor of BSD.
It actually did need more than just streamlining, e.g. it needed to use multiple processors if available. But systemd seems "a bridge too far". OTOH, I prever grub over either lilo or grub2. Grub gave me enough control and was easy enough to understand for the simple features I wanted to use. Grub2 is inintelligible, and all the readable files say "warning: This file will be automatically overwritten". And lilo didn't give me any control over what what happening.
I'm not deep into systems administration, and I don't want to be. OTOH, I do want to configure my own system to do what *I* want. And what I want is often not what the designers of the software expect, even though it's well within the range of things handled by the software. So I dislike systems that are either too automagic or too inflexible. Systemd is, from all reports, too automagic, and simultaneously too inflexible. So I'm seriously thinking about switching to Gentoo or Slackware. Or even one of the BSDs, though I don't know enough to even guess which one. (I have a desktop orientation, not a server or minimalist orientation, but I need to do some server style jobs. Most Linux systems will handle this easily, but I think that some BSD systmes are too heavily oriented towards server setups.)
The Yellowstone Supervolcano wouldn't split the Earth apart at its seams any more than any of the other reasonable scenarios would. Even the collision that created the moon didn't do that. It might, however, kill off most people in the North American continent. And solve global warming at the same time.
The thing is, there's no real way to predict when, or if, it will go off again. There's some magma filling chambers under it, which has some people worried, but nobody knows whether or not its really significant.
No, most life on earth will survive any reasonable global warming scenario. Civilization surviving is much less certain. So while it wouldn't directly kill us, it might result, indirectly, in 90% of humanity dying. Not, repeat, *not* 90% of life on Earth...unless it resulted in all-out warfare between the mega-powers. All-out nuclear warfare could do that, I suppose.
6 is a bit strong for a foreshock, isn't it? I'm not quite sure.
Clearly it means the stress has shifted to another part of the fault, but is there any reason to believe that the next stress point will be as energetic? The fault I really worry about is the Hayward fault.
Local ground conditions are extremely important in fault shaking transmission. It sounds like it was a lot stronger where you were that is was where I live in Oakland, though perhaps other places in Oakland felt more of a shock.
I think the last time the New Madrid fault went the estimate of the strength was over 9. You might not be there to enjoy the new beachfront.
OTOH, that fault doesn't go very often. You might be lucky for the rest of this century. But the longer it waits, the stronger the quake. (I'm hoping that slips along parallel faults nearby have defused the Hayward fault, but nobody know for sure.) The New Madrid is one that doesn't have that kind of pressure relief available. And it tends to lock in place while pressure builds up, before giving an explosive release. But it only seems to release every few centuries.
I think they're overstating it, but...different locations, even close together, can feel very different. I didn't quite sleep through it, but close. I wasn't even sure it was an earthquake. Still, I'd have guessed that it was around 3 at my location...and that's a factor of 10 difference.
OTOH, we also didn't get any damage from Loma Prieta, where other places nearby did, O my did they. So it depends a lot on your subsurface.
I wish that wasn't a good point. I know that there are many things that are considered human rights violations in many countries that are common in the US. But do remember that EVERY country lies to it's citizens so that they will think that its better than it is. And there is no real agreement as to what is a human rights violation.
In that case I have to agree with you. That doesn't make the general argument valid, though. You are arguing that because a known generic with known characteristics is safe, an unknown drug should also be allowed. I've got to disagree.
OTOH, you can point to a multitude of cases where the system of regulations was abused. And in many cases I'll say, yes, that was clearly abuse. But your original statement vastly oversimplifies the case.
FWIW, many drugs have been re-licensed by removing a compbination of some drug with asprin, and replacing it with the same drug combined with acetiminophin. That means the new drug doesn't work as well for me, as I don't get much relief from acetiminophin, but the older formulation is no longer available. I consider THAT abuse of the system, even though they can cite new studies that qualify the new formulation. I'm rather convinced that they made the change purely to maintain the non-generic status of their drug. This, to me, is clearly abuse of the system, even though the new formulation may be as effective for many people.
So I'm not defending the current system, which I consider quite abused. (I also have my doubts about ANY system where the people that approve drugs as safe, or disapprove them as unsafe, will be the people who benefit by selling them.)
Even if it did, the "fair use" arguement is always a gamble. There's a good chance you'll lose, even if you think it's clearly fair use, because there's not good definition of what it means, so the judge has to decide how he feels.
FWIW, you may need to look in a mirror. (I'm assuming that you are the same poster with a similar message above.) Some people may chose which service to use or which company to buy from based on price. Not everyone is such a person. I used to prefer Apple to MS, switched to MS reluctantly when it made it easier to use it with work, and then switched back to Apple over an MS license change. Then Apple tried to sneak in an equivalent license change on a security patch. Then I switched to Linux. Cost didn't enter into it. Convenience pointed in the other direction. (At the time Linux didn't have a decent word processor, and I had to use the Netscape HTML editor as the best available alternative for a couple of years. [Yes, I could have used Lyx, but word processing wasn't the job, it was a sideline to the job. Besides, Lyx [or TEX?] didn't understand what a paragraph was, or how to wrap a line. I didn't need something fancy, I needed something easy to use, with a bold, italic, and underline. A table of contents and an index would have been really appreciated, but they weren't available in something that was easy.) Commercial software that I bought during that time always died quickly as Linux kept changing, but when the source code was available it could usually be recompiled. I sure didn't make the change for either convenince or to save money...though over the years it's ended up giving me both.
What they're getting is customers who don't complain to them.
No matter how angry I am with a company, I rarely bother to tell them, because they'll just ignore me. Instead I tell other people, who may, or may not, ignore me. If I feel endangered with a suit, I'll complain anonymously...but more frequently, because I'll be rather sure that fewer people are paying attention. Usualy, however, I'll attempt to phrase my complaint in a way that while clear, is non-actionable.
OTOH, this doesn't really help deal with a monopoly situation.
What you're ignoring is that the support for free software is often better than the support for commercial software. That in many cases free software is more responsive to consumers desire for functionality than is commercial software.
OTOH, as projects get larger and older they tend to become less responsive, whether commercial or free. So there's something else going on. Call is "Standard Social Structure" or some such. Developers of a project that's been going a long time tend to feel that they are the ones who know what the project should do. Perhaps this is all we need to explain Gnome3 and KDE4 (though KDE has finally gotten KDE4 to be almost as good as KDE3 was--of course, now they're pushing KDE5).
It's not a cost vs. quality issue, since quality seems to generally decline over time (after a peak is reached) whether payment is involved or not.
I think the whole thing is down to monopoly effects. Where the monopoly is felt to be stronger, the effect is stronger.
FWIW, I have generally been more satisfied with Free Software than I ever was with Commercial software. I didn't switch because of money, I switched because of licensing, but the Free Software licensing meant that there were fewer barriers to entry to competing products. The result was that generally I've been more satisfied. (OTOH, I haven't been using commercial software during the intervening years, I've only heard the screams of rage and agony....but there have been several of those in the Free Software community, too.)
That said, in niche markets commercial software is often better, or at least becomes of usable quality more quickly. My wife is appalled at the state of music score editing software available for Linux. Yes, I can do nearly anything with Frescobaldi and Lilypond that could be done with Finale, but SHE can't do it. She's not a programmer, and the user interface is, in her opinion, unusably terrible. She needs to be able to adjust the size of note heads, to control the placement of line breaks, and to write pieces of music more than one page long. With some programs she can do some of those things. There's no program with a, to her, usable interface, that will let her do all of them. But neither Finale nor Sibelius make a version for Linux. And I won't agree to the licenses offered by MS and Apple. So she's quite unhappy, and I'm not totally happy either, as I don't really enjoy typesetting music.
But do note that this is a niche market. Niche markets act differently than do mainstream markets. LibreOffice is, to my mind, as close to a decent word processor as is MSWord. Neither is perfect. (Though do note that my experience with MSWord dates to the version of 1999. It may currently be either better or worse...or both.)
So. They don't know what was taken. They don't know who was compromised. All they know is that they were hacked, and various information COULD have been taken.
Yi! That's not enough information for anyone to make any decision based on anything but level of paranoia. They could at least have said whether it was historic records or only current accounts.
OTOH, I don't think I've ever paid UPS with anything but cash.
Charlie Stross predicted that if the independence referendum passed, there would be some military bases leased to Britain (England?) on a long term lease. Of course, he's not a politician, but to me that sounds quite plausible.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know. But Wikipedia is not a reliable source to quote. Too many ediots* with an axe to grind keep modifying too many articles.
* I couldn't decide whether to write idiots or editors.
He's probably expecting that if we were sure about it we'd call it a law. He's ignoring the game-rule of science that says you should never be sure anything is correct. All you can do is prove things wrong. And if there's no way to test whether it's wrong it's meaningless. (This is not the same as, and does not imply, "if there's no additional way to test whether it's wrong it's meaningless.")
You're being silly. There are good reasons that the clouds of hydrogen couldn't (easily) cool, and they remain true today. Of course these days the clouds are "polluted" with various heavy elements which radiate well and allow the clouds to cool relatively easily. (Even under current condition radiative cooling is rather inefficient.) Hydrogen just has a hard time radiating. It can, a little bit, but not very well. If the cloud is too hot, there aren't any bound electrons, so you don't even get the current (poor) radiation that hydrogen can provide, because radiative cooling depends on an electron slipping from an excited state to a non-excited state, and emitting a photon in the process.
Well, that's the current theory, but I still have trouble accepting dark matter. Perhaps they'll actually find some soon. It *does* fit with the math, so it's easy to understand why it's been proposed and believed in, but "believed in" feels more appropriate for religion than for science. I'll grant that it's the best current theory, but until they actually catch some, or explain why they can't in a convincing way, I'm going to remain iffy about it.
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The microgrid idea is attractive, and would work. Unfortunately, it appears inherently more expensive and less efficient. This would make it an extremely hard sell. It also decreased central control, so the govt. wouldn't be attracted to it, even if they didn't actually put up roadblocks.
You did oversimplify. There's really no sense in talking about the "extent to which we are contributing" because of various positive feedback loops. I suppose that if you just say "we are a major contributor to global warming" you would on safe ground, but anything finer than that an things get really complicated. Even this article talked about how a warmer ocean causes increased release of methane....which causes a warmer ocean...which... (Well, the article didn't expressly mention that this was a loop. And only one of many.) Fortunately there are also some negative feedback loops...but they don't appear to be as strong. Or perhaps they're just slower. If deformation of the earth's crust (by melting the glaciers that acted as weights holding it down) sets off a chain of volcanos, then we may end up dealing with a global cooling problem.
FWIW, the drying out of western North America has caused deformation of the earth's crust in that area, as the weight of the water has been removed. It's only about (IIRC) 6cm/year, but volcanos have been active in the US west coast that had long been dormant. Probably a coincidence, but do look up the "Deccan Tapps". And remember that we can't yet predict volcanos or earthquakes.
It's true that most distros are committed to using systemd. That doesn't make it a good choice, and it was often a very narrow vote that approved it, because that are lots of things to hate about systemd. Also, a large number of people don't really trust the lead developer. And .... well, there are a large number of things not to like about it.
I'll probably wait to decide that I won't have anything to do with it for awhile, though. Perhaps it won't turn out to be as much of a blivet as it looks like. But in the meantime I'm going to be checking out alternatives. Just in case. If it's as bad as some have reported, I may be switching to some flavor of BSD.
It actually did need more than just streamlining, e.g. it needed to use multiple processors if available. But systemd seems "a bridge too far". OTOH, I prever grub over either lilo or grub2. Grub gave me enough control and was easy enough to understand for the simple features I wanted to use. Grub2 is inintelligible, and all the readable files say "warning: This file will be automatically overwritten". And lilo didn't give me any control over what what happening.
I'm not deep into systems administration, and I don't want to be. OTOH, I do want to configure my own system to do what *I* want. And what I want is often not what the designers of the software expect, even though it's well within the range of things handled by the software. So I dislike systems that are either too automagic or too inflexible. Systemd is, from all reports, too automagic, and simultaneously too inflexible. So I'm seriously thinking about switching to Gentoo or Slackware. Or even one of the BSDs, though I don't know enough to even guess which one. (I have a desktop orientation, not a server or minimalist orientation, but I need to do some server style jobs. Most Linux systems will handle this easily, but I think that some BSD systmes are too heavily oriented towards server setups.)
The Yellowstone Supervolcano wouldn't split the Earth apart at its seams any more than any of the other reasonable scenarios would. Even the collision that created the moon didn't do that. It might, however, kill off most people in the North American continent. And solve global warming at the same time.
The thing is, there's no real way to predict when, or if, it will go off again. There's some magma filling chambers under it, which has some people worried, but nobody knows whether or not its really significant.
No, most life on earth will survive any reasonable global warming scenario. Civilization surviving is much less certain. So while it wouldn't directly kill us, it might result, indirectly, in 90% of humanity dying. Not, repeat, *not* 90% of life on Earth...unless it resulted in all-out warfare between the mega-powers. All-out nuclear warfare could do that, I suppose.
6 is a bit strong for a foreshock, isn't it? I'm not quite sure.
Clearly it means the stress has shifted to another part of the fault, but is there any reason to believe that the next stress point will be as energetic? The fault I really worry about is the Hayward fault.
Local ground conditions are extremely important in fault shaking transmission. It sounds like it was a lot stronger where you were that is was where I live in Oakland, though perhaps other places in Oakland felt more of a shock.
I think the last time the New Madrid fault went the estimate of the strength was over 9. You might not be there to enjoy the new beachfront.
OTOH, that fault doesn't go very often. You might be lucky for the rest of this century. But the longer it waits, the stronger the quake. (I'm hoping that slips along parallel faults nearby have defused the Hayward fault, but nobody know for sure.) The New Madrid is one that doesn't have that kind of pressure relief available. And it tends to lock in place while pressure builds up, before giving an explosive release. But it only seems to release every few centuries.
I think they're overstating it, but...different locations, even close together, can feel very different. I didn't quite sleep through it, but close. I wasn't even sure it was an earthquake. Still, I'd have guessed that it was around 3 at my location...and that's a factor of 10 difference.
OTOH, we also didn't get any damage from Loma Prieta, where other places nearby did, O my did they. So it depends a lot on your subsurface.
No, not really.
I wish that wasn't a good point. I know that there are many things that are considered human rights violations in many countries that are common in the US. But do remember that EVERY country lies to it's citizens so that they will think that its better than it is. And there is no real agreement as to what is a human rights violation.
In that case I have to agree with you. That doesn't make the general argument valid, though. You are arguing that because a known generic with known characteristics is safe, an unknown drug should also be allowed. I've got to disagree.
OTOH, you can point to a multitude of cases where the system of regulations was abused. And in many cases I'll say, yes, that was clearly abuse. But your original statement vastly oversimplifies the case.
FWIW, many drugs have been re-licensed by removing a compbination of some drug with asprin, and replacing it with the same drug combined with acetiminophin. That means the new drug doesn't work as well for me, as I don't get much relief from acetiminophin, but the older formulation is no longer available. I consider THAT abuse of the system, even though they can cite new studies that qualify the new formulation. I'm rather convinced that they made the change purely to maintain the non-generic status of their drug. This, to me, is clearly abuse of the system, even though the new formulation may be as effective for many people.
So I'm not defending the current system, which I consider quite abused. (I also have my doubts about ANY system where the people that approve drugs as safe, or disapprove them as unsafe, will be the people who benefit by selling them.)
Even if it did, the "fair use" arguement is always a gamble. There's a good chance you'll lose, even if you think it's clearly fair use, because there's not good definition of what it means, so the judge has to decide how he feels.
If they find "slow, heavy, neutrinos", then I'll believe them. Now I just think it makes sense to look.
FWIW, you may need to look in a mirror. (I'm assuming that you are the same poster with a similar message above.) Some people may chose which service to use or which company to buy from based on price. Not everyone is such a person. I used to prefer Apple to MS, switched to MS reluctantly when it made it easier to use it with work, and then switched back to Apple over an MS license change. Then Apple tried to sneak in an equivalent license change on a security patch. Then I switched to Linux. Cost didn't enter into it. Convenience pointed in the other direction. (At the time Linux didn't have a decent word processor, and I had to use the Netscape HTML editor as the best available alternative for a couple of years. [Yes, I could have used Lyx, but word processing wasn't the job, it was a sideline to the job. Besides, Lyx [or TEX?] didn't understand what a paragraph was, or how to wrap a line. I didn't need something fancy, I needed something easy to use, with a bold, italic, and underline. A table of contents and an index would have been really appreciated, but they weren't available in something that was easy.) Commercial software that I bought during that time always died quickly as Linux kept changing, but when the source code was available it could usually be recompiled. I sure didn't make the change for either convenince or to save money...though over the years it's ended up giving me both.
They didn't do it intentionally, but they did do it because of criminally illegal negligence. They were let off easy for some strange reason.
What they're getting is customers who don't complain to them.
No matter how angry I am with a company, I rarely bother to tell them, because they'll just ignore me. Instead I tell other people, who may, or may not, ignore me. If I feel endangered with a suit, I'll complain anonymously...but more frequently, because I'll be rather sure that fewer people are paying attention. Usualy, however, I'll attempt to phrase my complaint in a way that while clear, is non-actionable.
OTOH, this doesn't really help deal with a monopoly situation.
What you're ignoring is that the support for free software is often better than the support for commercial software. That in many cases free software is more responsive to consumers desire for functionality than is commercial software.
OTOH, as projects get larger and older they tend to become less responsive, whether commercial or free. So there's something else going on. Call is "Standard Social Structure" or some such. Developers of a project that's been going a long time tend to feel that they are the ones who know what the project should do. Perhaps this is all we need to explain Gnome3 and KDE4 (though KDE has finally gotten KDE4 to be almost as good as KDE3 was--of course, now they're pushing KDE5).
It's not a cost vs. quality issue, since quality seems to generally decline over time (after a peak is reached) whether payment is involved or not.
I think the whole thing is down to monopoly effects. Where the monopoly is felt to be stronger, the effect is stronger.
FWIW, I have generally been more satisfied with Free Software than I ever was with Commercial software. I didn't switch because of money, I switched because of licensing, but the Free Software licensing meant that there were fewer barriers to entry to competing products. The result was that generally I've been more satisfied. (OTOH, I haven't been using commercial software during the intervening years, I've only heard the screams of rage and agony....but there have been several of those in the Free Software community, too.)
That said, in niche markets commercial software is often better, or at least becomes of usable quality more quickly. My wife is appalled at the state of music score editing software available for Linux. Yes, I can do nearly anything with Frescobaldi and Lilypond that could be done with Finale, but SHE can't do it. She's not a programmer, and the user interface is, in her opinion, unusably terrible. She needs to be able to adjust the size of note heads, to control the placement of line breaks, and to write pieces of music more than one page long. With some programs she can do some of those things. There's no program with a, to her, usable interface, that will let her do all of them. But neither Finale nor Sibelius make a version for Linux. And I won't agree to the licenses offered by MS and Apple. So she's quite unhappy, and I'm not totally happy either, as I don't really enjoy typesetting music.
But do note that this is a niche market. Niche markets act differently than do mainstream markets. LibreOffice is, to my mind, as close to a decent word processor as is MSWord. Neither is perfect. (Though do note that my experience with MSWord dates to the version of 1999. It may currently be either better or worse...or both.)
So. They don't know what was taken. They don't know who was compromised. All they know is that they were hacked, and various information COULD have been taken.
Yi! That's not enough information for anyone to make any decision based on anything but level of paranoia. They could at least have said whether it was historic records or only current accounts.
OTOH, I don't think I've ever paid UPS with anything but cash.
Charlie Stross predicted that if the independence referendum passed, there would be some military bases leased to Britain (England?) on a long term lease. Of course, he's not a politician, but to me that sounds quite plausible.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know. But Wikipedia is not a reliable source to quote. Too many ediots* with an axe to grind keep modifying too many articles.
* I couldn't decide whether to write idiots or editors.
He's probably expecting that if we were sure about it we'd call it a law. He's ignoring the game-rule of science that says you should never be sure anything is correct. All you can do is prove things wrong. And if there's no way to test whether it's wrong it's meaningless. (This is not the same as, and does not imply, "if there's no additional way to test whether it's wrong it's meaningless.")
You're being silly. There are good reasons that the clouds of hydrogen couldn't (easily) cool, and they remain true today. Of course these days the clouds are "polluted" with various heavy elements which radiate well and allow the clouds to cool relatively easily. (Even under current condition radiative cooling is rather inefficient.) Hydrogen just has a hard time radiating. It can, a little bit, but not very well. If the cloud is too hot, there aren't any bound electrons, so you don't even get the current (poor) radiation that hydrogen can provide, because radiative cooling depends on an electron slipping from an excited state to a non-excited state, and emitting a photon in the process.
I trust you don't want me to go on.
Well, that's the current theory, but I still have trouble accepting dark matter. Perhaps they'll actually find some soon. It *does* fit with the math, so it's easy to understand why it's been proposed and believed in, but "believed in" feels more appropriate for religion than for science. I'll grant that it's the best current theory, but until they actually catch some, or explain why they can't in a convincing way, I'm going to remain iffy about it.