The final scene is far and away my favorite. Gene Wilder has said that it was hard for him to do, screaming at young Peter Ostrum like that, but I think he managed to pull it off brilliantly. Credit also has to be given to Jack Albertson throughout the film, but also in that scene, where he showed Grandpa Joe's seething rage (watch his eyes during "You're an inhuman monster!") at Wonka's treatment of Charlie, and in so doing clearly delineated the difference between the world-view of an adult and the honest childhood innocence of Charlie, and also the delicate world between them where Willy Wonka exists.
Incidentally, if you don't have the 30th Anniversary Edition, it's well worth picking up for the commentary by the now-grown actors who played the winners, as well as the separate interview with Gene Wilder.
The last three links are essentially the same story.
That said, virtually all of those stories are disingenuous at least in part. They harp on Bush's removal of a US signature on the Kyoto Protocol, which shouldn't have been signed in the first place since it was never going to get past the Senate anyway.
The first one pretty clearly states that the emissions would continue be reduced, albeit over a longer time span. In addition, the mercury discharge of 48 tons per year seems to me to be a rather small amount. Yes, mercury sticks around in the food chain for a while, but we're talking about six grams per person in the US per year, dropping to about three grams per year in 2010.
(BTW, these are the first ever mercury emission standards for power plants. Clinton never put any in place, nor did the senior Bush, nor Carter, nor Reagan, nor Ford. Clinton proposed the 90% cuts in December 2000, after Congress had adjourned its session, and so they were never even voted on, much less enacted. Suggesting that Bush is somehow opening the spigot on power plant emissions is entirely off the mark.)
All of the other graphs show cuts in the allowed emissions, and those translate to the need for more efficient scrubbing as time goes on, as the absolute amount is capped while the population -- and presumably its transportation and power needs -- will continue to grow. You can argue that the cuts don't go far enough, but the proposals don't allow the overall caps to grow.
As for drilling in ANWR, I've not really been in favor of it in general, but it has nothing to do with caribou. It has more to do with the uncertainty. There have only been a tiny handful of test wells drilled, and there's not a lot of solid evidence that there is much oil available there. It may well be there, in which case a pipeline to the south will almost certainly be required. By the time that's finished, whatever it can provide -- unless it's a Saudi-sized field -- is probably going to be the proverbial drop in the bucket, and I think switching petroleum- and natural-gas-based plants off and moving to nuclear energy is a better long-term investment.
However, if it does turn out that there's economically retreivable oil there, it's not like the land is going to be dotted with thousands of towers. Oil pumps now are often multiple-bore operations, with one facility handling a half-dozen or more drill holes going off at what sometimes seem to be odd angles. Animals live, feed, and breed around the existing operations, and significant leaks are pretty rare. I worked for an oil company that had operations up there, and the people that work the sites are very protective of the surrounding areas. They live there, too, and often for long periods of time, and don't like to see it spoiled by spills.
More than 60% are corporate, but they are for small installations, supplementing the grid feed. Larger installations tend to be one-off setups that require custom manufacturing as they're mirror-based.
But even if a company did want to build a GW-class plant, it would take years just to ramp up the production facilities, and that's assuming that the appropriate materials are in reasonable supply (I'm not altogether sure what's used in PV manufacture).
The long-term payoff is actually normal. Most plants are amortized over ten or more years, no matter what their power source.
The problem is more often one of logistics. A single 1000MW photovoltaic solar plant would require nine times the domestic US output of the entire PV industry, and cost (without factoring scaling) about $2.8 billion just for those arrays alone (based on 110MW equivalent shipping in 2003 for a sales volume of $308 million). Amorized over 20 years, that results in a cost of about 1.6 cents per kW-hr, though additional expenses for the rest of the construction, not to mention staffing requirements, would increase that, and I'm not quite sure how long PV arrays last, so it may not be possible to amortize it out that far.
We tried that in 1986. It was a spectacular failure, as the number of people trying to get in jumped dramatically once the program was announced, even though immigrants had to prove that they'd been here for a certain amount of time (I think it was four years) before they could be considered for the family program. I partially agree with the grandparent -- we should be seeking out illegals, but it should be to deport them. There are between 8 million and 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, and more than three million of them are in California alone. Note that California's population is about 33 million or so, meaning that one in ten California residents are here illegally.
In the first half of June, a small group of a dozen border patrol agents managed to round up 400 illegal immigrants in a relatively small area of Southern California. Even though they were stopped by direct order of DHS Undersecretary for Immigration Asa Hutchinson, this had a chilling effect on the local illegal immigrant population -- many of them fled the area. If they'd been able to keep up that pace for a year, they could have rounded up nearly 10,000 illegals for deportation. Imagine what a dedicated branch of, say, a thousand agents combined with a tripling of the agents on the border and in the ports could do. Low-end unemployment and construction unemployment would virtually disappear in a few years, to be replaced by people who are less of a burden on the system as it is.
From a strictly legal viewpoint, most weren't. The vast majority of them, in fact, were following the spirit of the rules as intended. Only a few were manipulating the market, but they were the ones that swung things wildly out of control. Looking back, they were also the ones that largely wrote the laws. I blame the government of the time when the laws were passed for the fiasco, as well as Gray Davis (governor during the manufactured crisis) for his deeply flawed, panicked handling of the process, signing billions of dollars worth of secret long-term contracts behind closed doors for power.
If anything, this showed one of the main reasons that the grid needs a massive overhaul. Excess power in the north of the state can't be transmitted to the south of the state, and vice versa, because of a bottleneck in the middle. I would gladly see such investments go tax-free to encourage them to get done. At the same time, I also encourage all those that can afford it to install solar power systems to minimize such future events, at least at a very localized level.
What's more, there are obvious alternatives, such as wind, solar, and simply conservation. Yes, they cost more money.
A lot more than many people realize. I just went looking, and the total US production of photovoltaic cells in 2003 was a mere 110MW-equivalent, with a shipped value of $308 million. At these prices, a 1000MW plant would cost about $2.8 billion for just the photovoltaics. Even presuming the cost could be cut in half, that would be a very expensive outlay when including the significant land and construction costs, and require nine times the entire domestic photovoltaic output just for one plant. Solar collector production is even more abysmal, being about an eighth the size of the PV market.
The biggest problem I see with the alternative power sources is that they have the downside of being enormous in terms of land size. There's a solar power plant near Kramer Junction, CA, in the Mojave Desert. It produces about 150MW, but takes up more than 1000 acres. In comparison, San Onofre Nuclear Power Generating Station maintains two active reactors out of the original three (Reactor 1 reached its end-of-life in 1992 and was decommissioned), producing a combined 2000MW on 84 acres. That makes the current reactors, space-wise, 28 times more efficient than the KJ solar plant (or 42 times more efficient if all three reactors could be running), and newer reactors can be made even smaller for similar output.
Long-term costs might be able to even things out, but when factoring in reliability and the need for backup power in those cases, I'm not sure it's worth it for large-scale generation, and may be best used as supplemental power.
It took a LOT of human error and some really odd mechanical problems to reach a partial meltdown status, which was fully contained (save possibly for a small amount of steam) by the reactor vessel. There was a release of krypton gas later on that was intentional and harmless.
What happened was a series of errors largely caused by humans getting used to seeing anomalies in the TMI-2 reactor (TMI-1 has since its inception been a model of efficiency and reliability) and not wanting to deal with the NRC being notified all the time. This led to:
A partial blockage of pipes in the cooling system, which through human error led to a full blockage
A steam release valve automatically opening to vent pressure from the reactor vessel
Control rods being automatically lowered into position when cooling water was no longer available in sufficient amounts
A false indicator light showing the steam release valve being closed when it was open, releasing too much pressure and allowing the cooling water to boil off
Pumps being automatically activated to provide more cooling water when the system senses that pressure levels have dropped too much
Human operators, used to the pumps engaging automatically for no reason, turning them off to prevent the vessel being flooded, something they were supposed to avoid
The remaining cooling water boiling off and venting through the still-open (and still-indicated closed) release valve
Eventual realization that the release valve could be stuck open, and engagement of a manual valve to prevent further steam escape
Further eventual realization that the reactor could be short of water, and the re-activation of cooling pumps
Of course, by this time (five hours later), much of the fuel had melted and pooled at the bottom of the reactor. The final activation of the pumps provided coolant in time to prevent a breach of the bottom of the reactor vessel, but by all indications I've seen, even that was still a few hours away. TMI wasn't anything even close to a Chernobyl though many self-described environmentalists would like to portray it as such, and many of the reactions to TMI were the result of guesswork, bad estimation, poor communications between officials, and the press being misinformed and then not provided correct information.
The more I read about it, the more certain I am that nuclear power is the safer way to go because of all of the bad things that went wrong and still resulted in no one getting hurt. It was a painful slap of the hand for the operators and the NRC, but it resulted in some important oversight issues being raised, and such accidents are much less likely as a result. The final result, aside from the loss of public trust in nuclear power, really was just the deactivation of TMI-2.
The problem is that "back yard" in this case often means "anywhere within the surrounding 100 miles" which effectively negates the entire country, because what isn't within 100 miles of the population centers is considered wilderness or rural areas that must be protected.
California's "deregulation" was also deeply flawed. The power "failures" were a result of a handful of electricity marketers manipulating the market and making it look like there wouldn't be enough power (Enron traders were a big part of this). The investigations started then are still going, and there have been recent announcements of traders being charged with some pretty serious felonies for their market manipulations.
An enormous part of the problem is that the utility companies were required to sell off a significant portion of their power plants. It was said that this would remove their leverage against the customer and force them to go with cheaper outside electricity. What ended up happening was that it removed their leverage against outside buyers and forced them to go with more expensive outside electricity as a result of the broken energy trading market.
I wasn't entirely clear in my own post. I was referring more to the generally eastern part of Europe, almost from Poland directly south and over from that line. It is my experience that while they are accomodating, they are also fiercely proud of key aspects of their culture, such that while they may crave Britney and Eminem and eat up the latest perceived fashion styles, there are some parts such as language that will likely never go away, at least not in our lifetimes. Part of that is escaping from the cultural drudgery that was communist rule; I still find it fascinating that they managed to keep hold of their identities no matter how much Moscow tried to crush them.
More prosperous nations like Germany, France, and Spain have their own identities and are less willing to cede them to American interests and ideas. They're fairly set in their ways and hard to change course just because something looks shiny -- much like Americans.
I suspect that has more to do with the fact that the US has more power plants and vehicles than any other nation. The grid could use an overhaul, though. I wonder how much of the loss could be remediated with new infrastructure. It might be worth it to make such upgrades tax-free. Emissions from inidividual vehicles are generally down -- in California, the state government is struggling with lower gasoline tax revenues than expected because of the expanding use of fuel-efficient cars.
It would be most interesting to see comparisons of various pollutants (COx, NOx, SO2, O3, etc) in cities around the world. I see them here and there (Los Angeles or Houston in the US, Shanghai or Beijing in China, sometimes Tokyo or London), but I've not seen a large-scale, top 100-population city pollution list.
Grammar and spelling match their speaking patterns. If someone uses "y'all" and similar patterns then I consider them to be writing with a Southern accent.
I cut some people some slack if it looks like they might be relatively new, but we have some people who have been in the country for 20+ years and still write with an accent. I rarely take things up with them directly unless they get something horrendously wrong, but it still makes me wince.
They've grown in bits and pieces over the years, so their network is a pretty random hodgepodge of servers, routers, and switches from many companies running several OSes (I know someone who worked there for a while -- interesting learning environment), and they do still have a userbase of somewhere around 30 million in a several locations. They need plenty of people. Even with 20,000 people, that's 1500 members for each person. It sounds on the surface like a respectable ratio.
How you speak -- and write -- affects others' perceptions of you. When you write a report or an e-mail, you don't always know who will be reading it along the way. particularly in larger organizations. The county government for which I work has 16,000 employees, 14,000 of them with e-mail accounts. I see e-mails from other IT departments on a fairly routine basis, and some of them are simply painful to read. They may have aced their CCIE exam, but if I don't already know them then I may not take them to be so bright if they don't know basic grammar like where to capitalize and where to put periods and commas (overuse of which are probably the most common non-spelling error I see). Pretty much everyone is using Outlook 2002 or 2003, and the vast majority of them are using Word as their e-mail editor, so they really have little excuse as the checks are turned on by default.
I've offered to buy a couple of grammar manuals for the department, but no one seems to be interested, and no one with purchasing power will authorize it through normal channels.
What's the status on the solar tower that was to be built in SA? I thought that was a pretty neat idea, and last I heard the developers had managed to secure initial funding for it, as well as government support.
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming. We can't simply refuse to do anything because the one proposed solution is not fair. As one of the world's most advanced nations, it's our responsibility to do everything within our power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, starting in our own country.
Please help in getting the hardcore greens and the NIMBYs to stop filing lawsuits blocking construction of nuclear reactors. That will go a long way towards reducing the CO2 output of the US. The combustion of coal, oil, and methane in electricity production in the US in 2002 released 2,249 million tons of CO2, not to mention the various other things that are released (particularly by coal) like sulfur dioxides, NOx gases, and of course thorium and uranium. I know the filter technology does a pretty decent job of things, but some of this stuff still gets out. Total US CO2 output in 2002 was 5796 million tons -- meaning 39% of our output is from the electrical sector alone.
Imagine what the world reaction would be if in, say, 20 years, we managed to cut our output by 25% or more just by switching off of combustibles. We might even be able to do a lot more if we could get natural gas heating to be more expensive than electrical heating (it's quite the reverse at the moment, though with natural gas becoming so popular, it might change soon on its own). I'm still undecided on global warming, as the evidence may be there but the most reliable evidence is still relatively short-term and weather systems have patterns of their own that can really screw with observations. But I figure that there are other issues -- like pollution of rivers and streams, as well as various political nightmares -- that might be solved by switching so much of our infrastructure over to fuels we can find domestically.
Do they love Americans, or the money that Americans bring with them?
I'm not being sarcastic -- it's a serious question. Many countries love Americans as much for what they're willing to spend as they do for their attitudes. I've known Americans who have gone abroad and bought things for a tenth to half the price they might pay inside the US, and know they paid too much as far as the locals were concerned, but they don't mind because they still got a deal compared to normal prices and the merchant was happy to make some extra money.
Their server division buys most if not all of its parts from other companies, excepting perhaps the PPC chips. Cases, CPUs, memory, video chips, and most likely even motherboards are manufactured by other companies, who probably also have a more direct hand in design than does IBM, which may only do oversight engineering such as reviewing final designs to ensure there are no significant bottlenecks or thermal build points.
Many of the microbes that live in hotter environments (like thermal plumes in the ocean) don't perish, but instead go dormant when in much colder waters (like common room temperature). Microbes from Mars may have a very different problem: that of thermal expansion of whatever is inside of them. Temps on Mars get "warm" when they're near 0 degrees C, and "cold" is around 150 below. If whatever their insides are made up of expands too much, we may be examining a bunch of burst cells rather than active life.
Slashdot Mirror
The final scene is far and away my favorite. Gene Wilder has said that it was hard for him to do, screaming at young Peter Ostrum like that, but I think he managed to pull it off brilliantly. Credit also has to be given to Jack Albertson throughout the film, but also in that scene, where he showed Grandpa Joe's seething rage (watch his eyes during "You're an inhuman monster!") at Wonka's treatment of Charlie, and in so doing clearly delineated the difference between the world-view of an adult and the honest childhood innocence of Charlie, and also the delicate world between them where Willy Wonka exists.
Incidentally, if you don't have the 30th Anniversary Edition, it's well worth picking up for the commentary by the now-grown actors who played the winners, as well as the separate interview with Gene Wilder.
The book is fictional?
:)
I could have sworn I read it years ago...
The last three links are essentially the same story.
That said, virtually all of those stories are disingenuous at least in part. They harp on Bush's removal of a US signature on the Kyoto Protocol, which shouldn't have been signed in the first place since it was never going to get past the Senate anyway.
The first one pretty clearly states that the emissions would continue be reduced, albeit over a longer time span. In addition, the mercury discharge of 48 tons per year seems to me to be a rather small amount. Yes, mercury sticks around in the food chain for a while, but we're talking about six grams per person in the US per year, dropping to about three grams per year in 2010.
(BTW, these are the first ever mercury emission standards for power plants. Clinton never put any in place, nor did the senior Bush, nor Carter, nor Reagan, nor Ford. Clinton proposed the 90% cuts in December 2000, after Congress had adjourned its session, and so they were never even voted on, much less enacted. Suggesting that Bush is somehow opening the spigot on power plant emissions is entirely off the mark.)
All of the other graphs show cuts in the allowed emissions, and those translate to the need for more efficient scrubbing as time goes on, as the absolute amount is capped while the population -- and presumably its transportation and power needs -- will continue to grow. You can argue that the cuts don't go far enough, but the proposals don't allow the overall caps to grow.
As for drilling in ANWR, I've not really been in favor of it in general, but it has nothing to do with caribou. It has more to do with the uncertainty. There have only been a tiny handful of test wells drilled, and there's not a lot of solid evidence that there is much oil available there. It may well be there, in which case a pipeline to the south will almost certainly be required. By the time that's finished, whatever it can provide -- unless it's a Saudi-sized field -- is probably going to be the proverbial drop in the bucket, and I think switching petroleum- and natural-gas-based plants off and moving to nuclear energy is a better long-term investment.
However, if it does turn out that there's economically retreivable oil there, it's not like the land is going to be dotted with thousands of towers. Oil pumps now are often multiple-bore operations, with one facility handling a half-dozen or more drill holes going off at what sometimes seem to be odd angles. Animals live, feed, and breed around the existing operations, and significant leaks are pretty rare. I worked for an oil company that had operations up there, and the people that work the sites are very protective of the surrounding areas. They live there, too, and often for long periods of time, and don't like to see it spoiled by spills.
More than 60% are corporate, but they are for small installations, supplementing the grid feed. Larger installations tend to be one-off setups that require custom manufacturing as they're mirror-based.
But even if a company did want to build a GW-class plant, it would take years just to ramp up the production facilities, and that's assuming that the appropriate materials are in reasonable supply (I'm not altogether sure what's used in PV manufacture).
The long-term payoff is actually normal. Most plants are amortized over ten or more years, no matter what their power source.
The problem is more often one of logistics. A single 1000MW photovoltaic solar plant would require nine times the domestic US output of the entire PV industry, and cost (without factoring scaling) about $2.8 billion just for those arrays alone (based on 110MW equivalent shipping in 2003 for a sales volume of $308 million). Amorized over 20 years, that results in a cost of about 1.6 cents per kW-hr, though additional expenses for the rest of the construction, not to mention staffing requirements, would increase that, and I'm not quite sure how long PV arrays last, so it may not be possible to amortize it out that far.
Can you provide the bill number(s) or titles of the proposed bills? I'd like to read up on what changes are being debated.
We tried that in 1986. It was a spectacular failure, as the number of people trying to get in jumped dramatically once the program was announced, even though immigrants had to prove that they'd been here for a certain amount of time (I think it was four years) before they could be considered for the family program. I partially agree with the grandparent -- we should be seeking out illegals, but it should be to deport them. There are between 8 million and 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, and more than three million of them are in California alone. Note that California's population is about 33 million or so, meaning that one in ten California residents are here illegally.
In the first half of June, a small group of a dozen border patrol agents managed to round up 400 illegal immigrants in a relatively small area of Southern California. Even though they were stopped by direct order of DHS Undersecretary for Immigration Asa Hutchinson, this had a chilling effect on the local illegal immigrant population -- many of them fled the area. If they'd been able to keep up that pace for a year, they could have rounded up nearly 10,000 illegals for deportation. Imagine what a dedicated branch of, say, a thousand agents combined with a tripling of the agents on the border and in the ports could do. Low-end unemployment and construction unemployment would virtually disappear in a few years, to be replaced by people who are less of a burden on the system as it is.
From a strictly legal viewpoint, most weren't. The vast majority of them, in fact, were following the spirit of the rules as intended. Only a few were manipulating the market, but they were the ones that swung things wildly out of control. Looking back, they were also the ones that largely wrote the laws. I blame the government of the time when the laws were passed for the fiasco, as well as Gray Davis (governor during the manufactured crisis) for his deeply flawed, panicked handling of the process, signing billions of dollars worth of secret long-term contracts behind closed doors for power.
If anything, this showed one of the main reasons that the grid needs a massive overhaul. Excess power in the north of the state can't be transmitted to the south of the state, and vice versa, because of a bottleneck in the middle. I would gladly see such investments go tax-free to encourage them to get done. At the same time, I also encourage all those that can afford it to install solar power systems to minimize such future events, at least at a very localized level.
What's more, there are obvious alternatives, such as wind, solar, and simply conservation. Yes, they cost more money.
A lot more than many people realize. I just went looking, and the total US production of photovoltaic cells in 2003 was a mere 110MW-equivalent, with a shipped value of $308 million. At these prices, a 1000MW plant would cost about $2.8 billion for just the photovoltaics. Even presuming the cost could be cut in half, that would be a very expensive outlay when including the significant land and construction costs, and require nine times the entire domestic photovoltaic output just for one plant. Solar collector production is even more abysmal, being about an eighth the size of the PV market.
The biggest problem I see with the alternative power sources is that they have the downside of being enormous in terms of land size. There's a solar power plant near Kramer Junction, CA, in the Mojave Desert. It produces about 150MW, but takes up more than 1000 acres. In comparison, San Onofre Nuclear Power Generating Station maintains two active reactors out of the original three (Reactor 1 reached its end-of-life in 1992 and was decommissioned), producing a combined 2000MW on 84 acres. That makes the current reactors, space-wise, 28 times more efficient than the KJ solar plant (or 42 times more efficient if all three reactors could be running), and newer reactors can be made even smaller for similar output.
Long-term costs might be able to even things out, but when factoring in reliability and the need for backup power in those cases, I'm not sure it's worth it for large-scale generation, and may be best used as supplemental power.
What happened was a series of errors largely caused by humans getting used to seeing anomalies in the TMI-2 reactor (TMI-1 has since its inception been a model of efficiency and reliability) and not wanting to deal with the NRC being notified all the time. This led to:
- A partial blockage of pipes in the cooling system, which through human error led to a full blockage
- A steam release valve automatically opening to vent pressure from the reactor vessel
- Control rods being automatically lowered into position when cooling water was no longer available in sufficient amounts
- A false indicator light showing the steam release valve being closed when it was open, releasing too much pressure and allowing the cooling water to boil off
- Pumps being automatically activated to provide more cooling water when the system senses that pressure levels have dropped too much
- Human operators, used to the pumps engaging automatically for no reason, turning them off to prevent the vessel being flooded, something they were supposed to avoid
- The remaining cooling water boiling off and venting through the still-open (and still-indicated closed) release valve
- Eventual realization that the release valve could be stuck open, and engagement of a manual valve to prevent further steam escape
- Further eventual realization that the reactor could be short of water, and the re-activation of cooling pumps
Of course, by this time (five hours later), much of the fuel had melted and pooled at the bottom of the reactor. The final activation of the pumps provided coolant in time to prevent a breach of the bottom of the reactor vessel, but by all indications I've seen, even that was still a few hours away. TMI wasn't anything even close to a Chernobyl though many self-described environmentalists would like to portray it as such, and many of the reactions to TMI were the result of guesswork, bad estimation, poor communications between officials, and the press being misinformed and then not provided correct information.The more I read about it, the more certain I am that nuclear power is the safer way to go because of all of the bad things that went wrong and still resulted in no one getting hurt. It was a painful slap of the hand for the operators and the NRC, but it resulted in some important oversight issues being raised, and such accidents are much less likely as a result. The final result, aside from the loss of public trust in nuclear power, really was just the deactivation of TMI-2.
The problem is that "back yard" in this case often means "anywhere within the surrounding 100 miles" which effectively negates the entire country, because what isn't within 100 miles of the population centers is considered wilderness or rural areas that must be protected.
:)
And Klaxons don't really honk...
California's "deregulation" was also deeply flawed. The power "failures" were a result of a handful of electricity marketers manipulating the market and making it look like there wouldn't be enough power (Enron traders were a big part of this). The investigations started then are still going, and there have been recent announcements of traders being charged with some pretty serious felonies for their market manipulations.
An enormous part of the problem is that the utility companies were required to sell off a significant portion of their power plants. It was said that this would remove their leverage against the customer and force them to go with cheaper outside electricity. What ended up happening was that it removed their leverage against outside buyers and forced them to go with more expensive outside electricity as a result of the broken energy trading market.
I wasn't entirely clear in my own post. I was referring more to the generally eastern part of Europe, almost from Poland directly south and over from that line. It is my experience that while they are accomodating, they are also fiercely proud of key aspects of their culture, such that while they may crave Britney and Eminem and eat up the latest perceived fashion styles, there are some parts such as language that will likely never go away, at least not in our lifetimes. Part of that is escaping from the cultural drudgery that was communist rule; I still find it fascinating that they managed to keep hold of their identities no matter how much Moscow tried to crush them.
More prosperous nations like Germany, France, and Spain have their own identities and are less willing to cede them to American interests and ideas. They're fairly set in their ways and hard to change course just because something looks shiny -- much like Americans.
I suspect that has more to do with the fact that the US has more power plants and vehicles than any other nation. The grid could use an overhaul, though. I wonder how much of the loss could be remediated with new infrastructure. It might be worth it to make such upgrades tax-free. Emissions from inidividual vehicles are generally down -- in California, the state government is struggling with lower gasoline tax revenues than expected because of the expanding use of fuel-efficient cars.
It would be most interesting to see comparisons of various pollutants (COx, NOx, SO2, O3, etc) in cities around the world. I see them here and there (Los Angeles or Houston in the US, Shanghai or Beijing in China, sometimes Tokyo or London), but I've not seen a large-scale, top 100-population city pollution list.
Cancel that. There's a post below with clearer instructions, and it did work for me.
Not for me. Firefox 1.0 and XP SP2. I even refreshed the page a couple of times.
Grammar and spelling match their speaking patterns. If someone uses "y'all" and similar patterns then I consider them to be writing with a Southern accent.
I cut some people some slack if it looks like they might be relatively new, but we have some people who have been in the country for 20+ years and still write with an accent. I rarely take things up with them directly unless they get something horrendously wrong, but it still makes me wince.
They've grown in bits and pieces over the years, so their network is a pretty random hodgepodge of servers, routers, and switches from many companies running several OSes (I know someone who worked there for a while -- interesting learning environment), and they do still have a userbase of somewhere around 30 million in a several locations. They need plenty of people. Even with 20,000 people, that's 1500 members for each person. It sounds on the surface like a respectable ratio.
How you speak -- and write -- affects others' perceptions of you. When you write a report or an e-mail, you don't always know who will be reading it along the way. particularly in larger organizations. The county government for which I work has 16,000 employees, 14,000 of them with e-mail accounts. I see e-mails from other IT departments on a fairly routine basis, and some of them are simply painful to read. They may have aced their CCIE exam, but if I don't already know them then I may not take them to be so bright if they don't know basic grammar like where to capitalize and where to put periods and commas (overuse of which are probably the most common non-spelling error I see). Pretty much everyone is using Outlook 2002 or 2003, and the vast majority of them are using Word as their e-mail editor, so they really have little excuse as the checks are turned on by default.
I've offered to buy a couple of grammar manuals for the department, but no one seems to be interested, and no one with purchasing power will authorize it through normal channels.
What's the status on the solar tower that was to be built in SA? I thought that was a pretty neat idea, and last I heard the developers had managed to secure initial funding for it, as well as government support.
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming. We can't simply refuse to do anything because the one proposed solution is not fair. As one of the world's most advanced nations, it's our responsibility to do everything within our power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, starting in our own country.
Please help in getting the hardcore greens and the NIMBYs to stop filing lawsuits blocking construction of nuclear reactors. That will go a long way towards reducing the CO2 output of the US. The combustion of coal, oil, and methane in electricity production in the US in 2002 released 2,249 million tons of CO2, not to mention the various other things that are released (particularly by coal) like sulfur dioxides, NOx gases, and of course thorium and uranium. I know the filter technology does a pretty decent job of things, but some of this stuff still gets out. Total US CO2 output in 2002 was 5796 million tons -- meaning 39% of our output is from the electrical sector alone.
Imagine what the world reaction would be if in, say, 20 years, we managed to cut our output by 25% or more just by switching off of combustibles. We might even be able to do a lot more if we could get natural gas heating to be more expensive than electrical heating (it's quite the reverse at the moment, though with natural gas becoming so popular, it might change soon on its own). I'm still undecided on global warming, as the evidence may be there but the most reliable evidence is still relatively short-term and weather systems have patterns of their own that can really screw with observations. But I figure that there are other issues -- like pollution of rivers and streams, as well as various political nightmares -- that might be solved by switching so much of our infrastructure over to fuels we can find domestically.
Do they love Americans, or the money that Americans bring with them?
I'm not being sarcastic -- it's a serious question. Many countries love Americans as much for what they're willing to spend as they do for their attitudes. I've known Americans who have gone abroad and bought things for a tenth to half the price they might pay inside the US, and know they paid too much as far as the locals were concerned, but they don't mind because they still got a deal compared to normal prices and the merchant was happy to make some extra money.
Their server division buys most if not all of its parts from other companies, excepting perhaps the PPC chips. Cases, CPUs, memory, video chips, and most likely even motherboards are manufactured by other companies, who probably also have a more direct hand in design than does IBM, which may only do oversight engineering such as reviewing final designs to ensure there are no significant bottlenecks or thermal build points.
Many of the microbes that live in hotter environments (like thermal plumes in the ocean) don't perish, but instead go dormant when in much colder waters (like common room temperature). Microbes from Mars may have a very different problem: that of thermal expansion of whatever is inside of them. Temps on Mars get "warm" when they're near 0 degrees C, and "cold" is around 150 below. If whatever their insides are made up of expands too much, we may be examining a bunch of burst cells rather than active life.