That won't actually work unless you are willing to have the government just take huge amounts of land away from folks in the desert regions to build these massive solar generators.
Are you seriously suggesting that we don't have enough undeveloped land in the desert to build a significant number of solar plants? Really?
So right now it looks like we're sticking with coal or going nuclear...which would you prefer?
Talk about false dichotomies! We don't need to choose between "nuclear or coal". Why are we extending nuclear plant lifetimes in California and not planning to replace them with solar thermal? Why aren't we making use of our vast wind resources across the country? Why aren't we building more than a couple solar thermal plants?
I agree that in some areas nuclear probably still makes some sense and we should be pursuing it as a medium-term solution, just recognize that it's much more expensive. Most large population and industry centers have other massive sources of untapped energy nearby and we would be wise to tap into them.
We (the western world) pushed for massive nuclear power plants to get energy independence. If we made a similar push for renewables, we'd have more energy than we'd know what to do with.
I'm glad you read it all:). I almost put a disclaimer up top, but I always felt that was rather tacky. My local fundies say I'm a typical "arrogant atheist liberal tree-hugging fascist communist socialist pinko homosexual" so it would be a fun change to get called an arrogant religious fundie!
I absolutely agree we hardly know anything, and it's pretty amusing that so many people act like they know everything.
Since we're on that subject, my own WAGs:
Magnetic fields are fairly common in 2nd and 3rd generation solar systems
Predominance of binary systems will make habitability harder for complex life, although we could see some pretty awesome adaptations
Large numbers of moons around large planets could make life, especially underground and aquatic, much more common than we expect
Historians in a thousand years will look back on us and say "most of their predictions were fairly logical given their limited data set... but they still seem so silly!"
I'm not ready to call Earth an average planet. We have an awesome magnetic field and a tidally locked moon. Additionally, it's likely that the majority of planets exist outside of the liquid water zone, although we obviously don't know enough about formation of solar systems to answer that with any certainty. Insufficient evidence still, but it's not crazy to guess that ours is probably a rare planet.
Of course, this is the universe we're talking about. Rare things happen all the time.
Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.
If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform. That will give us plenty of time to have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Martian Lifeforms present a convincing case for why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes. If they fail in convincing the rest of humanity, then we'll carry on with our terraforming effort, and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.
Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?
I didn't hear him say "This is how we should be", just "This is how it'll happen"... As you're watching the AGW Deniers and anti-environmentalists getting dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, do you really think he's WRONG?
yes. because truth is always more important than feelings.
I'm still waiting for you to give me your email password. We've already got the audio recordings of every phone conversation you've ever had, secretly taped post-coital conversations (if any), and secretly taped coital acts archived and ready to publish.
And if it gets down to that price, the same manufacturer (not google) is going to offer similar netbooks with other operating systems for a few bucks more, and without the advertising. they already have the economies of scale at that point, so why not milk it for a few extra bucks? Sell it with a real linux distro that doesn't have adware for $10 more. Sell it with Windows for $20 more. Sell it with OSX for... ummm... maybe not OSX...
That's still a net win for Google! They don't have to dominate the netbook market, they just have to drive costs down and get as many people as possible using netbooks to access Google's services.
My take on this is that it's just about simple Business 101: Commoditize whatever customers need to use your service.
Google wants everyone to be able to use Google as much as possible. To do this, they need to put out a good mobile OS and browser for free. Drive the price of these devices down as much as possible, and more people will be using Google services.
It seems that's what it's really all about. Who gives a damn whether or not Google actually offers their own netbooks? They just have to drive the costs down as much as possible so that everyone with a dollar to spend has SOME device that has them using Google's services.
I would expect that this would place a strong selective pressure on immune function. As such, I would think that you would expect the trend to continue in the children of families from such areas and transplanted them into a cleaner culture.
Which sounds like a great argument in favor of mail-order brides - if you want healthy kids, get yourself a dirty woman. Or something like that...
Sounds more like a good argument against marrying virgins:)
Well, one method would be to measure CO2 levels around cities and industrial areas and compare them to CO2 levels elsewhere... 500 ppm CO2 around cities and 200 ppm CO2 around oceans and forests would be a pretty damned strong indicator.
But even if I couldn't think of that as a possible solution, it doesn't mean there's a hole in the argument for anthropogenic CO2 rise. Simple math will tell us how many million tonnes of coal, oil, and natural gas are burned every year, and we can then easily calculate how much CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere assuming average combustion efficiencies.
I would argue that we cannot know if a given amount of CO2 is released or just not absorbed.
You'd be quite wrong. We can figure out exactly how much CO2 is being released, and we can figure out the absorption of that CO2 by monitoring changes in both global and local CO2 levels. What we can't do (yet) is figure out exactly what future carbon sink activity will be. We're not sure when the oceans will be CO2 saturated, for example, or precisely how some large CO2 sinks will respond. We can say, with certainty, that we're releasing more CO2 than the environment is currently absorbing. And we can say with very high confidence that this will affect the climate unless something changes.
Of course not but that's because your story is an irrelevant anecdote, NASA (the organisation, not just one of it's scientists) are now predicting an ice free artic sea to occur in summer of 2012-13, so we don't have to wait long to find out. If as I suspect NASA's observations and models are correct then an ice free Artic goes hand in hand with dustbowl conditions in the midwest.
Sadly, they still won't admit we were right. They'll simply blame it all on "those damned liberals and their government programs" and "those damned liberals allowing gay marriage", and once again their failures will be reinterpreted to reinforce their beliefs.
Yes, but only because they have prearranged short codes for orders that are likely to be given. A message only a handful of characters long can be useful under those circumstances.
We're talking about 200 years of latency here... I think we can tolerate the message taking a few weeks to transmit...
Just to add to the geek levels in this thread, 1 bit/s = 86.4kb/day, which means we would transmit the 3,153,600,000th bit as the first bit reached its destination, or 394 MB. That's about one well-compressed episode of your favorite science fiction show... Should we start with SG-1 or BSG?
For what it's worth, I agree entirely. I try to avoid commenting on articles where I can't add anything informative, and I'd certainly prefer it if more people would do the same.
Remember, this is an American site with American readers
So we need this measurement in megafuckload football fields?
No! This is the imperial system we're talking about... what are you, stupid?
When you're talking about football fields the prefix changes to "hella". Football field size varies, so we're going with the NFL standard of 360 feet per football field.
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers = 0.621371192 megafuckload miles = 9.1134441389 hella football fields
(Disclaimer: "mega" means "1,000,000" in this text)
You've never lived as an outsider in a community, have you? If you're a hardcore Christian, well, you're probably safe just about anywhere in the states... but if you're an atheist, good luck in a small town in Tennessee. Same for homosexuals or anyone else who faces other social consequences just for voicing their views on a matter in a society that doesn't accept it.
It really has nothing to do with government or free speech. We need anonymous speech the same way we need anonymous voting.
Anonymity is not a right, and is only legitimate for as long as YOU can maintain it - there is no expectation that anybody else will maintain it for you unless that person is in a sensitive position (like a doctor or lawyer) or you have a contract maintaining it (like a non-disclosure agreement).
You could've stopped right there. Through various contracts and privacy laws, the defendant DOES have multiple contracts to maintain their privacy. The first is with their ISP revealing their identity. Hint: if ISPs didn't need court orders to reveal identities based on IP addresses, the RIAA would be very, very happy. Beyond that is the website itself where this was posted, which very likely has privacy closes in its contracts as well. As stated in the article, the court ORDERED both of those parties to provide private, personally identifiable information about John Doe.
My web host's TOS specifically states that they will not reveal my identity without a court order. So have many of my internet service providers.
Or were you seriously arguing that anyone who has your username on a website can demand your IP address and then your name and address from your ISP, for public disclosure, with no valid court order or reason? Or that that court order should be obtained without both actionable evidence of wrongdoing and an intent to file suit?
You've made the most truthful and informative posts on this story, and nobody is listening to you for the same reason people still think Hitler was an atheist.
Reason lost this argument long ago, and the overly emotional public will continue to believe this crazy stuff long after we're both dead.
I couldn't agree more. Many of Stephenson's writings are superfluous at best, particularly his multi-page descriptions of architecture, clothing, and jewelry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Baroque Cycle or Anathem.
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, on the other hand, were among my favorites.
And yes, I know that this says a lot about me as a reader. I have no problem reading multiple pages about weaknesses in ciphers, but two pages of architecture has me yawning. I would say, though, that there is a fundamental difference. When Stephenson has me yawning, it's because he's trying to explain every detail of a visual image. In those cases, a picture really is a suitable replacement for a thousand words. When he has non-nerds yawning, it's because he's explaining concepts or how things work.
Same thing the U.S. gained when it rebuilt Europe - a place to sell goods. In this case it's Chinese turbines so they get jobs, and we get poorer.
Repeat after me:
There is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
China getting richer doesn't automatically mean that the US gets poorer.
Not necessarily, but us borrowing money from China to buy their wares means they're getting richer AND we're getting poorer unless we're using those borrowed funds to actually boost some sort of economically rewarding activity... which we're not. If the power from this wind farm is being used to build widgets that we're exporting to China or elsewhere, then sure, we're all getting richer.
If this wind farm is simply going to power houses owned by the banks and built with tools manufactured in China, power electric cars built in China, and allow people to drive those electric cars to stores to buy goods made in China, then this whole system primarily benefits China. The real question is whether they've blindly embraced consumerism as we have or if they're just using it temporarily.
Salient points that I generally agree with, but I do have to correct one small issue. Political scientists have pretty good working definitions of all of those terms. It's mainstream media and, by extension, the public who have no goddamned clue what anything means. I rather like the Progressive/Conservative contrast, to be honest--it's a beautifully obvious example.
Conservatives appeal to the status quo, either present or past, sometimes imaginary, but always to the status quo. They have since formed an alliance with religious fanatics who also want to roll back the clock to their own special imagined historical status quo--The Theocratic Republic of America.
Progressives don't appeal to the status quo and they state that maintaining it is undesirable, they come right out with "wouldn't it be better if..." They're not ideological about WHAT specific changes need to be made, they simply feel there's always a better way to do things and have a basic idea of what direction to go in.
Oh be quiet... He's still right. EU governments are doing things the proper way AND the improper way. The American government is primarily not doing anything properly, intentionally refraining from doing necessary things, doing things the improper way, and making a lot of contractors wealthy... all while still renewing the Patriot Act. I know which I would rather have.
Slashdot Mirror
That won't actually work unless you are willing to have the government just take huge amounts of land away from folks in the desert regions to build these massive solar generators.
Are you seriously suggesting that we don't have enough undeveloped land in the desert to build a significant number of solar plants? Really?
So right now it looks like we're sticking with coal or going nuclear...which would you prefer?
Talk about false dichotomies! We don't need to choose between "nuclear or coal". Why are we extending nuclear plant lifetimes in California and not planning to replace them with solar thermal? Why aren't we making use of our vast wind resources across the country? Why aren't we building more than a couple solar thermal plants?
I agree that in some areas nuclear probably still makes some sense and we should be pursuing it as a medium-term solution, just recognize that it's much more expensive. Most large population and industry centers have other massive sources of untapped energy nearby and we would be wise to tap into them.
We (the western world) pushed for massive nuclear power plants to get energy independence. If we made a similar push for renewables, we'd have more energy than we'd know what to do with.
Completely unrealistic. It's not safe to assume that any rivers will continue to reach the ocean--many already don't.
I'm glad you read it all :). I almost put a disclaimer up top, but I always felt that was rather tacky. My local fundies say I'm a typical "arrogant atheist liberal tree-hugging fascist communist socialist pinko homosexual" so it would be a fun change to get called an arrogant religious fundie!
I absolutely agree we hardly know anything, and it's pretty amusing that so many people act like they know everything.
Since we're on that subject, my own WAGs:
I'm not ready to call Earth an average planet. We have an awesome magnetic field and a tidally locked moon. Additionally, it's likely that the majority of planets exist outside of the liquid water zone, although we obviously don't know enough about formation of solar systems to answer that with any certainty. Insufficient evidence still, but it's not crazy to guess that ours is probably a rare planet.
Of course, this is the universe we're talking about. Rare things happen all the time.
Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?
I didn't hear him say "This is how we should be", just "This is how it'll happen"... As you're watching the AGW Deniers and anti-environmentalists getting dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, do you really think he's WRONG?
yes. because truth is always more important than feelings.
I'm still waiting for you to give me your email password. We've already got the audio recordings of every phone conversation you've ever had, secretly taped post-coital conversations (if any), and secretly taped coital acts archived and ready to publish.
And if it gets down to that price, the same manufacturer (not google) is going to offer similar netbooks with other operating systems for a few bucks more, and without the advertising. they already have the economies of scale at that point, so why not milk it for a few extra bucks? Sell it with a real linux distro that doesn't have adware for $10 more. Sell it with Windows for $20 more. Sell it with OSX for ... ummm ... maybe not OSX ...
That's still a net win for Google! They don't have to dominate the netbook market, they just have to drive costs down and get as many people as possible using netbooks to access Google's services.
My take on this is that it's just about simple Business 101: Commoditize whatever customers need to use your service.
Google wants everyone to be able to use Google as much as possible. To do this, they need to put out a good mobile OS and browser for free. Drive the price of these devices down as much as possible, and more people will be using Google services.
It seems that's what it's really all about. Who gives a damn whether or not Google actually offers their own netbooks? They just have to drive the costs down as much as possible so that everyone with a dollar to spend has SOME device that has them using Google's services.
I compromise: VFFs absolutely rule. Nearly as good as going barefoot, but with the protection from broken glass, rocks, etc.
I would expect that this would place a strong selective pressure on immune function. As such, I would think that you would expect the trend to continue in the children of families from such areas and transplanted them into a cleaner culture.
Which sounds like a great argument in favor of mail-order brides - if you want healthy kids, get yourself a dirty woman. Or something like that...
Sounds more like a good argument against marrying virgins :)
Well, one method would be to measure CO2 levels around cities and industrial areas and compare them to CO2 levels elsewhere... 500 ppm CO2 around cities and 200 ppm CO2 around oceans and forests would be a pretty damned strong indicator.
But even if I couldn't think of that as a possible solution, it doesn't mean there's a hole in the argument for anthropogenic CO2 rise. Simple math will tell us how many million tonnes of coal, oil, and natural gas are burned every year, and we can then easily calculate how much CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere assuming average combustion efficiencies.
I would argue that we cannot know if a given amount of CO2 is released or just not absorbed.
You'd be quite wrong. We can figure out exactly how much CO2 is being released, and we can figure out the absorption of that CO2 by monitoring changes in both global and local CO2 levels. What we can't do (yet) is figure out exactly what future carbon sink activity will be. We're not sure when the oceans will be CO2 saturated, for example, or precisely how some large CO2 sinks will respond. We can say, with certainty, that we're releasing more CO2 than the environment is currently absorbing. And we can say with very high confidence that this will affect the climate unless something changes.
Of course not but that's because your story is an irrelevant anecdote, NASA (the organisation, not just one of it's scientists) are now predicting an ice free artic sea to occur in summer of 2012-13, so we don't have to wait long to find out. If as I suspect NASA's observations and models are correct then an ice free Artic goes hand in hand with dustbowl conditions in the midwest.
Sadly, they still won't admit we were right. They'll simply blame it all on "those damned liberals and their government programs" and "those damned liberals allowing gay marriage", and once again their failures will be reinterpreted to reinforce their beliefs.
My favorite Simpsons episode :)
One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
Yes, but only because they have prearranged short codes for orders that are likely to be given. A message only a handful of characters long can be useful under those circumstances.
We're talking about 200 years of latency here... I think we can tolerate the message taking a few weeks to transmit...
Just to add to the geek levels in this thread, 1 bit/s = 86.4kb/day, which means we would transmit the 3,153,600,000th bit as the first bit reached its destination, or 394 MB. That's about one well-compressed episode of your favorite science fiction show... Should we start with SG-1 or BSG?
Don't even joke about that. What are the odds that they're going to be able to see an object as small as Pluto?
"I'm counting four rocky inner planets, four gas giants, and... well, shit, there's no ninth planet. Moving on..."
What are the odds they CAN'T detect Pluto?
"Haha, those primitive monkeys haven't even figured out their own solar system! LOL!!!1"
For what it's worth, I agree entirely. I try to avoid commenting on articles where I can't add anything informative, and I'd certainly prefer it if more people would do the same.
Remember, this is an American site with American readers
So we need this measurement in megafuckload football fields?
No! This is the imperial system we're talking about... what are you, stupid?
When you're talking about football fields the prefix changes to "hella". Football field size varies, so we're going with the NFL standard of 360 feet per football field.
1 cm = 1 megafuckload kilometers = 0.621371192 megafuckload miles = 9.1134441389 hella football fields
(Disclaimer: "mega" means "1,000,000" in this text)
You've never lived as an outsider in a community, have you? If you're a hardcore Christian, well, you're probably safe just about anywhere in the states... but if you're an atheist, good luck in a small town in Tennessee. Same for homosexuals or anyone else who faces other social consequences just for voicing their views on a matter in a society that doesn't accept it.
It really has nothing to do with government or free speech. We need anonymous speech the same way we need anonymous voting.
Anonymity is not a right, and is only legitimate for as long as YOU can maintain it - there is no expectation that anybody else will maintain it for you unless that person is in a sensitive position (like a doctor or lawyer) or you have a contract maintaining it (like a non-disclosure agreement).
You could've stopped right there. Through various contracts and privacy laws, the defendant DOES have multiple contracts to maintain their privacy. The first is with their ISP revealing their identity. Hint: if ISPs didn't need court orders to reveal identities based on IP addresses, the RIAA would be very, very happy. Beyond that is the website itself where this was posted, which very likely has privacy closes in its contracts as well. As stated in the article, the court ORDERED both of those parties to provide private, personally identifiable information about John Doe.
My web host's TOS specifically states that they will not reveal my identity without a court order. So have many of my internet service providers.
Or were you seriously arguing that anyone who has your username on a website can demand your IP address and then your name and address from your ISP, for public disclosure, with no valid court order or reason? Or that that court order should be obtained without both actionable evidence of wrongdoing and an intent to file suit?
Fair enough, I accept your statement as-is :)
You've made the most truthful and informative posts on this story, and nobody is listening to you for the same reason people still think Hitler was an atheist.
Reason lost this argument long ago, and the overly emotional public will continue to believe this crazy stuff long after we're both dead.
I couldn't agree more. Many of Stephenson's writings are superfluous at best, particularly his multi-page descriptions of architecture, clothing, and jewelry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Baroque Cycle or Anathem.
Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, on the other hand, were among my favorites.
And yes, I know that this says a lot about me as a reader. I have no problem reading multiple pages about weaknesses in ciphers, but two pages of architecture has me yawning. I would say, though, that there is a fundamental difference. When Stephenson has me yawning, it's because he's trying to explain every detail of a visual image. In those cases, a picture really is a suitable replacement for a thousand words. When he has non-nerds yawning, it's because he's explaining concepts or how things work.
Repeat after me:
There is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
China getting richer doesn't automatically mean that the US gets poorer.
Not necessarily, but us borrowing money from China to buy their wares means they're getting richer AND we're getting poorer unless we're using those borrowed funds to actually boost some sort of economically rewarding activity... which we're not. If the power from this wind farm is being used to build widgets that we're exporting to China or elsewhere, then sure, we're all getting richer.
If this wind farm is simply going to power houses owned by the banks and built with tools manufactured in China, power electric cars built in China, and allow people to drive those electric cars to stores to buy goods made in China, then this whole system primarily benefits China. The real question is whether they've blindly embraced consumerism as we have or if they're just using it temporarily.
Salient points that I generally agree with, but I do have to correct one small issue. Political scientists have pretty good working definitions of all of those terms. It's mainstream media and, by extension, the public who have no goddamned clue what anything means. I rather like the Progressive/Conservative contrast, to be honest--it's a beautifully obvious example.
Conservatives appeal to the status quo, either present or past, sometimes imaginary, but always to the status quo. They have since formed an alliance with religious fanatics who also want to roll back the clock to their own special imagined historical status quo--The Theocratic Republic of America.
Progressives don't appeal to the status quo and they state that maintaining it is undesirable, they come right out with "wouldn't it be better if..." They're not ideological about WHAT specific changes need to be made, they simply feel there's always a better way to do things and have a basic idea of what direction to go in.
Also, only the intelligent can take the stars ;)
Oh be quiet... He's still right. EU governments are doing things the proper way AND the improper way. The American government is primarily not doing anything properly, intentionally refraining from doing necessary things, doing things the improper way, and making a lot of contractors wealthy... all while still renewing the Patriot Act. I know which I would rather have.