If you don't propose to do anything about it, what purpose is served by being bothered by it?
If you want to assert that it's a flagrant violation of "secure in their persons and effects..." I won't disagree with you, but I would bet that the Supreme Court would.
I'm sorry, but sometimes climate change in the past has occurred with extreme rapidity. I'll admit that this usually caused massive extinction events, but you still have the rapid climate change.
Look up the Deccan Traps for one example. Most of the other events are less well documented, but there is good evidence that sudden climate change has happened several times during the history of the Earth.
Well, volcanoes have been around for a long time, and they don't only release CO2.
OTOH, it's worth noting that those higher levels probably weren't continuous. Generally they get there when the volcanoes are being more active than usual, and then weather away over a few centuries or millenia.
Another thing to consider is that there weren't any mammals around then. Still, the dinosauria were probably warm-blooded. (Birds are, after all.) And so, probably, were the Therapsids. But it's worth noticing that the monotremes still have very incomplete homeothermism. And much of this life may have originated in Antarctica. (Well, passed throguh it.) So it isn't clear how much life that can survive at current temperatures could also survive at the specified higher temperatures. (I may be getting my geographic periods confused here, though.)
The basic point, however, is that the Earth probably isn't in any danger. Probably not even land living chordate life is in danger. But this doesn't mean that humanity can expect to survive such a drastic change in the environment. And even if humanity can, it's really dubious that any of the forms we currently call civilization can. Bushmen (both Kalahari and Austrailian aborigines) may well be the best adapted to this "brave new world". Or perhaps some polynesians can resurrect their ancestral knowledge. (The old islands may disappear, but rising sea levels should create brand new ones. And small islands tend to have automatic temperature control.)
Indeed. One thing to consider is the amount of pollution created during the manufacture of a new car. This alone makes buying a new Prius (or Volt or...) a bad environmental decision. I'm also dubious about the electric car battery recycling, and that WILL be needed.
That said, I'll probably need to replace my vehicle in a few years, and that's when I'll look closely at the tradeoffs. For now, the pollution cost of replacing the car early is worse than continuing to use it. OTOH, I'm still getting nearly 30 mpg. (It used to be better, but it was more significant when I drove more.)
Methane is only worse in the short term. Of course the methane decomposed into CO2 and H2O, so even long term it makes things worse...unless your problem is drought.
I doubt your claim of consistency. I grant that the effects that you describe exist, but I expect different years will produce different patterns. I think you have accurately described the average change.
P.S.: While I think you have accurately described the average change, I'm not convinced that no additional factors will be noticed, and assume increased significance, in the future. E.g., after all the ocean ice has melted, oceanic currents may re-route themselves. Or there may be other changes.
Caution, I'm not an expert in this field. However, to the gp, any short and simple explanation will be a lie.
I'm not convinced it's that simple. I think the level of CO2 may have already risen to the point where the atmosphere is almost totally opaque at the wavelengths that CO2 blocks, at which point an increase in CO2 ceases to cause in increase in temperature, because it's already blocked that spectral hole solit. At this point Methane may be more significant. And, for that matter, various sulfates, which act as coolants by blocking insolation.
It's also true that temperatures changes are spread around unevenly. What you observe in one locality doesn't have much in the way of global implications. (Or rather, it does, but it only makes sense in a larger context.)
So you may have been cold this last year, but I sure haven't. This is one of the milder winters I can remember, and spring has already started turning into summer. The newspapers are calling last year the driest on record. (I haven't checked. This may be hyperbole.) Wildfires have already started in places where they don't traditionally occur until late summer or autumn.
But guess what? MY experience is also local. It also doesn't mean anything globally until you fit it into the larger context. And there's no simple way to do this. Even the experts argue about the exact meaning of each change, and aren't certain.
Ok. Where do you plant these trees? It has to be somewhere that isn't already forest, or there's no net gain. And it has to be somewhere that has sufficient soil and water available for the trees to live. And you need to continue doing this to counteract the continued use of coal and oil.
And the trees are only strong carbon consumers while they are growing. So you'll need to log them off periodically, and store the wood somewhere where it won't get burned.
It's not that I don't think what you are recommending is a good idea, it's that I can't imagine it being done at a sufficiently large scale.
If you want more recent packages, the use testing or Sid. You can even install packages from experimental. But your system will be less stable. (My general experience is that once or twice during a period when testing is developing towards stable, the system will be borked. So I maintain a separate partition that has Debian stable on it.)
That said, even Debian testing isn't really a bleeding edge as some distros. But it's the one I chose. (I'll probably switch to Debian stable VERY soon, as a new testing fork is often quite bumpy as they dump in all the things that weren't quite good enough for the recently released stable.)
My path to Debian started with Red Hat Professional, a currentlly discontinued version. I am still upset with the way they cancelled it without warning or reasonable alternative. I was very reluctant to switch to Debian then (I think it was Potato) because installation was an all day chore. So I tried several others, but finally picked Debian, because I could install it to act as I chose. Mandrake had too much magic smoke, and SuSE had too much documentation that was only in German. I forget what the other versions were that I tried around that time. Since then I've occasionally tested some other version, but have always returned to Debian. (There was one version that claimed to install within MSWind, but it wouldn't work with MSWind95, and I wasn't about to upgrade.)
These days my main complaint about Linux is that Wine still won't run MSWind95 applications well, or sometimes at all. And I can't run Civilization III. And you will notice that that is only very peripherally about Linux.
IIUC, while any that we can detect are pointed in our direction, there's a lot of halo around the core of the emission. We generally pick things up from that halo, but the core would be a lot more intense. If it were pointed right at us, that would mean that the most intense portion of the beam was pointed at us. There isn't much spread, but the signal has been spreading out slowly for many light-years. (Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Pick your incident to get your answer.) Even a laser spreads given that much distance. If there's no other reason, then there's bumpy space around stars, and variations in the galactic magnetic field.
So, yeah, unless they're very close we can't detect them unless they're pointed at us. But the directionality is sufficient that at sufficient distance there's a sufficient spread that most of the space where the signal can be detected is relatively weak compared to the central part of the beam.
OTOH, this is just "IIUC". I could be wrong. But I don't think so.
I disagree. I will, however, admit that SOME implementations of water-marking are worse ins SEVERAL ways than SOME implementations of DRM.
Consider, however, that watermarking should not prevent someone 20-50 years from now from reading & displaying the file. In that sense it is much less bad, in almost all implementations. (The ones that aren't less bad in that way contain some other feature that would properly be called either encryption or DRM.)
I don't think you've done a good analysis of the flaws of the "plurality rules" electoral system. Consider, e.g., that the main effect of Ralph Nader running was to get an anti-consumer candidate elected. (He, in effect, even acknowledged that he knew that this would be the most probable effect. But that was after the election, and may have been a "sour grapes" attempt to put the best face on losing. What he said was, basically, "things have to get bad enough before they'll get better, so I did my part in making them get worse quickly". Don't believe those quotes, as that's only a very loose paraphrase.)
Most of the people I know have not been in favor of the increased intrusion of federal policing. The politicians *have* been in favor of it, by and large, but this does not necessarily reflect the intent or desire of their constituents.
It is, however, quite difficult to support someone better if they aren't on the ballot. And, given a plurality rules, rather than a majority rules, system nobody decent will bother to run. (You need to be somewhat psychotic to put yourself into a contest where you don't have any reasonable chance of winning, and can only drain the funds and votes of those who support you, and nearly guarantee that someone who doesn't support what you nominally support will win.) Now in a majority rules system, such as instant runoff voting, this would not apply, and decent candidates would be much more willing to run without the support of one of the two major parties.
I will agree that freedom is being rapidly eroded, but you are not putting the blame where it should properly be allocated. On the plurality wins voting system.
Perhaps. I've considered that a few times. But I've also considered that the reason so many people feel that was is the number of betrayals they've experienced during their lifetime.
OTOH, I'm aware that every "most powerful country" I know enough about, from Rome on, was also full of those betrayals. And most of the time it yielded a citizenry that wouldn't trust the government. Less powerful countries often have relatively honest and honorable governments. (Often, not, by any means, always. And only relatively.)
My guess is that centers of power attract those psychotically enamored of control. And these people can be trusted only to do what they feel will yield them more power and control.
It's true, but incomplete. In practice ANY centralized power operates so as to make itself immune to punishment for misdeeds, whether accidental or intentional. And MOST centralized powers become occupied by decision makers intent on increasing their power.
Capitalism makes it possible to increase your power and wealth by benefiting your fellow man, but it doesn't make that the only way to increase your power and wealth. Not that what we have is capitalism, any more than what the Russians or Chinese had was communism. Or any more than the Democrats want to do as the voters decide. The name is not the thing.
Note that the corporation was a feudal invention, intended to increase the power of a kind of low level nobility that didn't own much land, but did control a city. I believe the first was called "The Lord Mayor and Corporation of London", though I'd have to check that to be sure.
Also the "Limited Liability Corporation" is not the only possible kind of corporation, and, indeed, was not the original kind of corporation. Corporations have existed under Feudalism, Monarchy, "Democracy", "Communism", dictatorships, and even, I believe, under theocracies. They don't all serve the same purposes, and they don't all have the same constraints. IIRC, originally in the US corporate charters were only good for a restricted amount of time.
So don't badmouth all corporations because the currently powerful ones are abusive, and don't praise them because some are socially useful. It's a cross product of the regulatory environment and the ethics of the managers. I don't really like Red Hat, but they have done much good work, and being a publicly traded corporation hasn't stopped that. I'm not sure that being the dominant Linux corporation, however, isn't causing them to become intolerably arrogant, however. But that's not being a corporation, that's being an entrenched power.
Sorry. This chages a default, but it doesn't take away options. OTOH, it would be a perfect occasion to ADD an option. And that's the appropriate way to have handled this.
If showing the password is controlled by a check box or menu option, then you have added an option. If you just change "always hide the password" to "always show the password" you haven't removed an option. You've just changed a default.
But I agree(?) that what they should have done is to add an option.
Yes. I'd make the defalut the other way, but it should definitely be user selectable. Different circumstances call for different options, but I don't think making the initial password entry unreadable is a good choice in most circumstances.
Actually, for my setup I'd prefer that it almost always be readable, as there is no "caps lock on" indicator on my keyboard, and I rarely need to worry about shoulder surfers. (As in probably less than once a year.) But I have certainly observed other circumstances where that could be a concern.
OTOH, perhaps a default "password unreadable" is reasonable. Most people will never change the default, and won't think about the problem unless they do. But it should definitely be user selectable.
Actually, in 1990 it would be reasonable. There weren't any acceptable open standards. (On Linux I ended up doing my word processing in HTML with a text editor. Truely lousy.) These days there are several reasonable choices, but rtf is probably the most widely available. Most end users don't like to use markup languages, and few documents are worth the effort of Tex.
I suppose you could say that in 1990 it would be better to just ask for text documents...but that wasn't very good either, if you needed special characters. And formatting text documents can be a real drag.
(FWIW, I'm still not satisfied with OpenOffice indexing. I haven't checked the LibreOffice indexing recently, but from a glance it looked about the same. From my point of view the best word processor, except for a few major flaws, was MSWord 5.1a for the Macintosh. Everything since then has been inferior. This is largely because I really liked the markup I could use for indexing in that system, and it fixed a huge number of problems from earlier versions. Probably, of course, I've forgotten numerous bad features, but I really like being able to turn-on visible markup chars and add them in or edit them by hand, and then turn them off to see how it will appear.)
They do. Lithium batteries can only be charged a finite number of times. Then they need to be recycled or discarded (haxardous waste). But the recycling isn't perfect, and much of the Lithium is lost in each cycle. (This will probably improve as the cost of Lithium goes up as it becomes scarser.)
There AREN'T any unlimited resources. Pretending that there are is foolish. The most nearly unlimited are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Silicon is also fairly common. A few others. We are still at the start of building our technologies mainly aroujnd CHION, but note that that's what ALL biochemistry is based on. We don't have very much else in our bodies. Some iron, some calcium, but we use CHON wereever we can.
But we have an existence proof that very sophisticated things can be done with a sufficiently developed technology based mainly around CHON. And that same proof is reasonable grounds for supposing that it doesn't suffice . That heafty traces of some other elements will be needed for special functions (like Oxygen transport or rigid support members).
That said, it's quite plausible that some environments will require other components. But those need to be minimized, because thery are more expensive to acquire.
My personal expectation is that some development of graphene will enable rechargable capacitors that can hold a very large charge for a very long time, and release it either rapidly or slowly. But it may be awhile before this becomes available.
I'm not sure of the source of the methyl cathlates, but the rest are fossil fuels, at least the ones of concern. Burning wood is carbon neutral, as is burning anything that's based around stuff that plants or microbes extracted from the air during your lifetime. (Oil may be made from fossilized microbes, but it's still a fossil fuel. And IIRC fossa just means coming from the rocks [well, dug up]. Same as petro- only that means rock rather than dug.)
And if you think that when things get desperate, people will head into space, I think you are foolishly optimistic about human nature. What people will do instead is fight to the last bit over who gets to live in the most habitable areas.
There IS no clean renewable energy. There is cleaner more durable sources of energy.
E.g., Windmills slow the rotation of the earth. (IIRC they also push the moon further out in it's orbit.) So do tidal motors. They *may* be cleaner than some other source of energy, but they aren't clean in any absolute sense. Proponents of nuclear energy actually believe that this is a cleaner source of energy. In one sense, they are right. Any energy extracted from fission reactor decreases that long-term average level of polution of the planet by radiation. Some reactor designs (which haven't yet been built) claim to burn the radioactive fuel until ALL the high level radioisotopes have been consumed. I'm not convinced, but it's not totally implausible.
OTOH, some sources of energy are seriously polluting. Oil, coal, and methane all fit this criteria at the moment. But do note that after a few centuries the warmer planet will probably seem a better choice to those who are living there...and that selection of species could well include humans. It's true that the equatorial belt would probably become uninhabitable, but the zones that are currently temperate probably won't get any warmer than the tropics do today. Or at least not much warmer. Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, and Greenland will probably be quite comfortable. (The southern hemisphere doesn't have very much land that close to the Antarctic, so it may well have considerably fewer inhabitants. Unless, of course, Antarctica itself thaws.) One doesn't know how far the sea levels will rise, but it's fairly safe to say that none of the coastal cities will remain habitable.
I really doubt that we could find enough carbon fuels to turn the Earth into a second Venus, but it's not totally beyond the bounds of speculation.
So there IS more than one answer. We may just like the eventual results of the other answers less than we currently like avoiding carbon based fuels.
The key here, of course, is the word "eventually". People have a VERY strong tendency to discount future costs, and the futher off it is, the more they discount it. This isn't totally unreasonable. The future, by it's very nature, is uncertain. If you don't see it as uncertain, then you are deluding yourself. And differnt people have a different sense of the future. Some people have a hard time resisting having an extra helping of food, even though they know they are already overweight. I think this may well be an analogous phenomena.
That's only reasonable if you include all costs, including externalities. And if you include those, there are going to be LOTS of arguments about how to figure which externality. E.g., a company that dumps a pollutant in the river which will degrade to harmlessness in 10 days will have a different estimate of the externality cost than the city downstream that is using the river as a water supply. And these two entities may be in different countries, which won't necessarily figure costs the same way.
Then there's atmospheric pollution. China is suffering drastic pollution problems, but they aren't limited to China, and in fact are polluting the air in the US, all the way across the Pacific. But the US is also dumping out air pollutants that are polluting the air in Europe.
Figuring out who to charge how much is a nightmare, which is ONE of the reasons that no serious attempt has been made to charge many groups for their externalities.
Then there's coal/oil/etc. where you can figure an amount of pollution at the source, but the total pollution depends on how the product is used. If the oil, e.g., is used to make plastic, then it doesn't end up as CO2, but it does fill up the garbage heaps. So you can't justly charge to producer with the cost of how it may be used, even though you know that most of it will be burned.
Then there's the matter of subsidies. Every energy producing company has LOTS of government subsidies, but often they aren't called that. They are called other things, like accelerated depreciation, or mineral leases on government land. (You may be surprised to find that the government owns the mineral rights on the land under your house. This isn't always true, but it often is. And don't expect any reasonable "just compensation" if the government decides to lease those mineral rights to some company that then procedes destructively.)
We tend to hear about energy subsidies to "green industries", but that's because they are new. We don't hear about the long established and traditional ones.
Then there are foreign corporations. If they cause trouble they will often write off their local assets, and don't expect the government where they are local to enforce any judgements against them. A particular example that comes to mind us Union Carbide in Bhopal, India. Only a few locals were ever "brought to justice", and they were probably basically scapegoats. US management could not be extradited, despite violating numerous laws resulting in a large number of people dead and injured.
N.B.: This isn't all green/carbon-fuel, but they all impace the green/carbon-fuels concern. If increase in CO2 caused a rise in ocean level, and an island becomes uninhabitable, the residents don't receive ANY compensation from ANYONE. So this never gets figured into the cost of gas or methane. But it should be. If all those externalities were figured in, then a reasonable argument could be made based on cost. As they aren't, it feels more like power politics than reasoned argumentation.
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What do you propose is to be done about it?
If you don't propose to do anything about it, what purpose is served by being bothered by it?
If you want to assert that it's a flagrant violation of "secure in their persons and effects..." I won't disagree with you, but I would bet that the Supreme Court would.
I'm sorry, but sometimes climate change in the past has occurred with extreme rapidity. I'll admit that this usually caused massive extinction events, but you still have the rapid climate change.
Look up the Deccan Traps for one example. Most of the other events are less well documented, but there is good evidence that sudden climate change has happened several times during the history of the Earth.
Well, volcanoes have been around for a long time, and they don't only release CO2.
OTOH, it's worth noting that those higher levels probably weren't continuous. Generally they get there when the volcanoes are being more active than usual, and then weather away over a few centuries or millenia.
Another thing to consider is that there weren't any mammals around then. Still, the dinosauria were probably warm-blooded. (Birds are, after all.) And so, probably, were the Therapsids. But it's worth noticing that the monotremes still have very incomplete homeothermism. And much of this life may have originated in Antarctica. (Well, passed throguh it.) So it isn't clear how much life that can survive at current temperatures could also survive at the specified higher temperatures. (I may be getting my geographic periods confused here, though.)
The basic point, however, is that the Earth probably isn't in any danger. Probably not even land living chordate life is in danger. But this doesn't mean that humanity can expect to survive such a drastic change in the environment. And even if humanity can, it's really dubious that any of the forms we currently call civilization can. Bushmen (both Kalahari and Austrailian aborigines) may well be the best adapted to this "brave new world". Or perhaps some polynesians can resurrect their ancestral knowledge. (The old islands may disappear, but rising sea levels should create brand new ones. And small islands tend to have automatic temperature control.)
I doubt that we will release enough CO2 to turn Earth into another Venus, which is what you seem to be suggesting on a second reading.
Indeed. One thing to consider is the amount of pollution created during the manufacture of a new car. This alone makes buying a new Prius (or Volt or...) a bad environmental decision. I'm also dubious about the electric car battery recycling, and that WILL be needed.
That said, I'll probably need to replace my vehicle in a few years, and that's when I'll look closely at the tradeoffs. For now, the pollution cost of replacing the car early is worse than continuing to use it. OTOH, I'm still getting nearly 30 mpg. (It used to be better, but it was more significant when I drove more.)
Methane is only worse in the short term. Of course the methane decomposed into CO2 and H2O, so even long term it makes things worse...unless your problem is drought.
I doubt your claim of consistency. I grant that the effects that you describe exist, but I expect different years will produce different patterns. I think you have accurately described the average change.
P.S.: While I think you have accurately described the average change, I'm not convinced that no additional factors will be noticed, and assume increased significance, in the future. E.g., after all the ocean ice has melted, oceanic currents may re-route themselves. Or there may be other changes.
Caution, I'm not an expert in this field. However, to the gp, any short and simple explanation will be a lie.
I'm not convinced it's that simple. I think the level of CO2 may have already risen to the point where the atmosphere is almost totally opaque at the wavelengths that CO2 blocks, at which point an increase in CO2 ceases to cause in increase in temperature, because it's already blocked that spectral hole solit. At this point Methane may be more significant. And, for that matter, various sulfates, which act as coolants by blocking insolation.
It's also true that temperatures changes are spread around unevenly. What you observe in one locality doesn't have much in the way of global implications. (Or rather, it does, but it only makes sense in a larger context.)
So you may have been cold this last year, but I sure haven't. This is one of the milder winters I can remember, and spring has already started turning into summer. The newspapers are calling last year the driest on record. (I haven't checked. This may be hyperbole.) Wildfires have already started in places where they don't traditionally occur until late summer or autumn.
But guess what? MY experience is also local. It also doesn't mean anything globally until you fit it into the larger context. And there's no simple way to do this. Even the experts argue about the exact meaning of each change, and aren't certain.
Any short and simple explanation will be a lie.
Ok. Where do you plant these trees? It has to be somewhere that isn't already forest, or there's no net gain. And it has to be somewhere that has sufficient soil and water available for the trees to live. And you need to continue doing this to counteract the continued use of coal and oil.
And the trees are only strong carbon consumers while they are growing. So you'll need to log them off periodically, and store the wood somewhere where it won't get burned.
It's not that I don't think what you are recommending is a good idea, it's that I can't imagine it being done at a sufficiently large scale.
If you want more recent packages, the use testing or Sid. You can even install packages from experimental. But your system will be less stable. (My general experience is that once or twice during a period when testing is developing towards stable, the system will be borked. So I maintain a separate partition that has Debian stable on it.)
That said, even Debian testing isn't really a bleeding edge as some distros. But it's the one I chose. (I'll probably switch to Debian stable VERY soon, as a new testing fork is often quite bumpy as they dump in all the things that weren't quite good enough for the recently released stable.)
My path to Debian started with Red Hat Professional, a currentlly discontinued version. I am still upset with the way they cancelled it without warning or reasonable alternative. I was very reluctant to switch to Debian then (I think it was Potato) because installation was an all day chore. So I tried several others, but finally picked Debian, because I could install it to act as I chose. Mandrake had too much magic smoke, and SuSE had too much documentation that was only in German. I forget what the other versions were that I tried around that time. Since then I've occasionally tested some other version, but have always returned to Debian. (There was one version that claimed to install within MSWind, but it wouldn't work with MSWind95, and I wasn't about to upgrade.)
These days my main complaint about Linux is that Wine still won't run MSWind95 applications well, or sometimes at all. And I can't run Civilization III. And you will notice that that is only very peripherally about Linux.
IIUC, while any that we can detect are pointed in our direction, there's a lot of halo around the core of the emission. We generally pick things up from that halo, but the core would be a lot more intense. If it were pointed right at us, that would mean that the most intense portion of the beam was pointed at us. There isn't much spread, but the signal has been spreading out slowly for many light-years. (Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Pick your incident to get your answer.) Even a laser spreads given that much distance. If there's no other reason, then there's bumpy space around stars, and variations in the galactic magnetic field.
So, yeah, unless they're very close we can't detect them unless they're pointed at us. But the directionality is sufficient that at sufficient distance there's a sufficient spread that most of the space where the signal can be detected is relatively weak compared to the central part of the beam.
OTOH, this is just "IIUC". I could be wrong. But I don't think so.
I disagree. I will, however, admit that SOME implementations of water-marking are worse ins SEVERAL ways than SOME implementations of DRM.
Consider, however, that watermarking should not prevent someone 20-50 years from now from reading & displaying the file. In that sense it is much less bad, in almost all implementations. (The ones that aren't less bad in that way contain some other feature that would properly be called either encryption or DRM.)
I don't think you've done a good analysis of the flaws of the "plurality rules" electoral system. Consider, e.g., that the main effect of Ralph Nader running was to get an anti-consumer candidate elected. (He, in effect, even acknowledged that he knew that this would be the most probable effect. But that was after the election, and may have been a "sour grapes" attempt to put the best face on losing. What he said was, basically, "things have to get bad enough before they'll get better, so I did my part in making them get worse quickly". Don't believe those quotes, as that's only a very loose paraphrase.)
Most of the people I know have not been in favor of the increased intrusion of federal policing. The politicians *have* been in favor of it, by and large, but this does not necessarily reflect the intent or desire of their constituents.
It is, however, quite difficult to support someone better if they aren't on the ballot. And, given a plurality rules, rather than a majority rules, system nobody decent will bother to run. (You need to be somewhat psychotic to put yourself into a contest where you don't have any reasonable chance of winning, and can only drain the funds and votes of those who support you, and nearly guarantee that someone who doesn't support what you nominally support will win.) Now in a majority rules system, such as instant runoff voting, this would not apply, and decent candidates would be much more willing to run without the support of one of the two major parties.
I will agree that freedom is being rapidly eroded, but you are not putting the blame where it should properly be allocated. On the plurality wins voting system.
"Homeland Security" does always make me think of "Geheim Staats Polizei".
Perhaps. I've considered that a few times. But I've also considered that the reason so many people feel that was is the number of betrayals they've experienced during their lifetime.
OTOH, I'm aware that every "most powerful country" I know enough about, from Rome on, was also full of those betrayals. And most of the time it yielded a citizenry that wouldn't trust the government. Less powerful countries often have relatively honest and honorable governments. (Often, not, by any means, always. And only relatively.)
My guess is that centers of power attract those psychotically enamored of control. And these people can be trusted only to do what they feel will yield them more power and control.
It's true, but incomplete. In practice ANY centralized power operates so as to make itself immune to punishment for misdeeds, whether accidental or intentional. And MOST centralized powers become occupied by decision makers intent on increasing their power.
Capitalism makes it possible to increase your power and wealth by benefiting your fellow man, but it doesn't make that the only way to increase your power and wealth. Not that what we have is capitalism, any more than what the Russians or Chinese had was communism. Or any more than the Democrats want to do as the voters decide. The name is not the thing.
Note that the corporation was a feudal invention, intended to increase the power of a kind of low level nobility that didn't own much land, but did control a city. I believe the first was called "The Lord Mayor and Corporation of London", though I'd have to check that to be sure.
Also the "Limited Liability Corporation" is not the only possible kind of corporation, and, indeed, was not the original kind of corporation. Corporations have existed under Feudalism, Monarchy, "Democracy", "Communism", dictatorships, and even, I believe, under theocracies. They don't all serve the same purposes, and they don't all have the same constraints. IIRC, originally in the US corporate charters were only good for a restricted amount of time.
So don't badmouth all corporations because the currently powerful ones are abusive, and don't praise them because some are socially useful. It's a cross product of the regulatory environment and the ethics of the managers. I don't really like Red Hat, but they have done much good work, and being a publicly traded corporation hasn't stopped that. I'm not sure that being the dominant Linux corporation, however, isn't causing them to become intolerably arrogant, however. But that's not being a corporation, that's being an entrenched power.
Sorry. This chages a default, but it doesn't take away options. OTOH, it would be a perfect occasion to ADD an option. And that's the appropriate way to have handled this.
If showing the password is controlled by a check box or menu option, then you have added an option. If you just change "always hide the password" to "always show the password" you haven't removed an option. You've just changed a default.
But I agree(?) that what they should have done is to add an option.
Yes. I'd make the defalut the other way, but it should definitely be user selectable. Different circumstances call for different options, but I don't think making the initial password entry unreadable is a good choice in most circumstances.
Actually, for my setup I'd prefer that it almost always be readable, as there is no "caps lock on" indicator on my keyboard, and I rarely need to worry about shoulder surfers. (As in probably less than once a year.) But I have certainly observed other circumstances where that could be a concern.
OTOH, perhaps a default "password unreadable" is reasonable. Most people will never change the default, and won't think about the problem unless they do. But it should definitely be user selectable.
Actually, in 1990 it would be reasonable. There weren't any acceptable open standards. (On Linux I ended up doing my word processing in HTML with a text editor. Truely lousy.) These days there are several reasonable choices, but rtf is probably the most widely available. Most end users don't like to use markup languages, and few documents are worth the effort of Tex.
I suppose you could say that in 1990 it would be better to just ask for text documents...but that wasn't very good either, if you needed special characters. And formatting text documents can be a real drag.
(FWIW, I'm still not satisfied with OpenOffice indexing. I haven't checked the LibreOffice indexing recently, but from a glance it looked about the same. From my point of view the best word processor, except for a few major flaws, was MSWord 5.1a for the Macintosh. Everything since then has been inferior. This is largely because I really liked the markup I could use for indexing in that system, and it fixed a huge number of problems from earlier versions. Probably, of course, I've forgotten numerous bad features, but I really like being able to turn-on visible markup chars and add them in or edit them by hand, and then turn them off to see how it will appear.)
In the US it exists, and is called "latches" or something like that. But it requires lots of work from a skilled lawyer to use.
They do. Lithium batteries can only be charged a finite number of times. Then they need to be recycled or discarded (haxardous waste). But the recycling isn't perfect, and much of the Lithium is lost in each cycle. (This will probably improve as the cost of Lithium goes up as it becomes scarser.)
There AREN'T any unlimited resources. Pretending that there are is foolish. The most nearly unlimited are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Silicon is also fairly common. A few others. We are still at the start of building our technologies mainly aroujnd CHION, but note that that's what ALL biochemistry is based on. We don't have very much else in our bodies. Some iron, some calcium, but we use CHON wereever we can.
But we have an existence proof that very sophisticated things can be done with a sufficiently developed technology based mainly around CHON. And that same proof is reasonable grounds for supposing that it doesn't suffice . That heafty traces of some other elements will be needed for special functions (like Oxygen transport or rigid support members).
That said, it's quite plausible that some environments will require other components. But those need to be minimized, because thery are more expensive to acquire.
My personal expectation is that some development of graphene will enable rechargable capacitors that can hold a very large charge for a very long time, and release it either rapidly or slowly. But it may be awhile before this becomes available.
I'm not sure of the source of the methyl cathlates, but the rest are fossil fuels, at least the ones of concern. Burning wood is carbon neutral, as is burning anything that's based around stuff that plants or microbes extracted from the air during your lifetime. (Oil may be made from fossilized microbes, but it's still a fossil fuel. And IIRC fossa just means coming from the rocks [well, dug up]. Same as petro- only that means rock rather than dug.)
And if you think that when things get desperate, people will head into space, I think you are foolishly optimistic about human nature. What people will do instead is fight to the last bit over who gets to live in the most habitable areas.
There IS no clean renewable energy. There is cleaner more durable sources of energy.
E.g., Windmills slow the rotation of the earth. (IIRC they also push the moon further out in it's orbit.) So do tidal motors. They *may* be cleaner than some other source of energy, but they aren't clean in any absolute sense. Proponents of nuclear energy actually believe that this is a cleaner source of energy. In one sense, they are right. Any energy extracted from fission reactor decreases that long-term average level of polution of the planet by radiation. Some reactor designs (which haven't yet been built) claim to burn the radioactive fuel until ALL the high level radioisotopes have been consumed. I'm not convinced, but it's not totally implausible.
OTOH, some sources of energy are seriously polluting. Oil, coal, and methane all fit this criteria at the moment. But do note that after a few centuries the warmer planet will probably seem a better choice to those who are living there...and that selection of species could well include humans. It's true that the equatorial belt would probably become uninhabitable, but the zones that are currently temperate probably won't get any warmer than the tropics do today. Or at least not much warmer. Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, and Greenland will probably be quite comfortable. (The southern hemisphere doesn't have very much land that close to the Antarctic, so it may well have considerably fewer inhabitants. Unless, of course, Antarctica itself thaws.) One doesn't know how far the sea levels will rise, but it's fairly safe to say that none of the coastal cities will remain habitable.
I really doubt that we could find enough carbon fuels to turn the Earth into a second Venus, but it's not totally beyond the bounds of speculation.
So there IS more than one answer. We may just like the eventual results of the other answers less than we currently like avoiding carbon based fuels.
The key here, of course, is the word "eventually". People have a VERY strong tendency to discount future costs, and the futher off it is, the more they discount it. This isn't totally unreasonable. The future, by it's very nature, is uncertain. If you don't see it as uncertain, then you are deluding yourself. And differnt people have a different sense of the future. Some people have a hard time resisting having an extra helping of food, even though they know they are already overweight. I think this may well be an analogous phenomena.
That's only reasonable if you include all costs, including externalities. And if you include those, there are going to be LOTS of arguments about how to figure which externality.
E.g., a company that dumps a pollutant in the river which will degrade to harmlessness in 10 days will have a different estimate of the externality cost than the city downstream that is using the river as a water supply. And these two entities may be in different countries, which won't necessarily figure costs the same way.
Then there's atmospheric pollution. China is suffering drastic pollution problems, but they aren't limited to China, and in fact are polluting the air in the US, all the way across the Pacific. But the US is also dumping out air pollutants that are polluting the air in Europe.
Figuring out who to charge how much is a nightmare, which is ONE of the reasons that no serious attempt has been made to charge many groups for their externalities.
Then there's coal/oil/etc. where you can figure an amount of pollution at the source, but the total pollution depends on how the product is used. If the oil, e.g., is used to make plastic, then it doesn't end up as CO2, but it does fill up the garbage heaps. So you can't justly charge to producer with the cost of how it may be used, even though you know that most of it will be burned.
Then there's the matter of subsidies. Every energy producing company has LOTS of government subsidies, but often they aren't called that. They are called other things, like accelerated depreciation, or mineral leases on government land. (You may be surprised to find that the government owns the mineral rights on the land under your house. This isn't always true, but it often is. And don't expect any reasonable "just compensation" if the government decides to lease those mineral rights to some company that then procedes destructively.)
We tend to hear about energy subsidies to "green industries", but that's because they are new. We don't hear about the long established and traditional ones.
Then there are foreign corporations. If they cause trouble they will often write off their local assets, and don't expect the government where they are local to enforce any judgements against them. A particular example that comes to mind us Union Carbide in Bhopal, India. Only a few locals were ever "brought to justice", and they were probably basically scapegoats. US management could not be extradited, despite violating numerous laws resulting in a large number of people dead and injured.
N.B.: This isn't all green/carbon-fuel, but they all impace the green/carbon-fuels concern. If increase in CO2 caused a rise in ocean level, and an island becomes uninhabitable, the residents don't receive ANY compensation from ANYONE. So this never gets figured into the cost of gas or methane. But it should be. If all those externalities were figured in, then a reasonable argument could be made based on cost. As they aren't, it feels more like power politics than reasoned argumentation.