You're right, you personally reducing your output by 1/3 doesn't do much of anything. But if your neighbors and friends see you doing it and do it too, then so do their neighbors and friends and so on and so forth. Maybe enough momentum builds that your city's researchers and planners notice, and start a new recycling program, or spring for a renewable energy source of some kind. Now something big and useful and worthwhile is happening that couldn't have happened without the aggregate momentum of all those little things that didn't feel like they did anything.
What really riled me up about the post I replied to was that tired-ass old assertion that it's all politics, that basically "both sides are just as bad." No. Not on climate change they're fucking not.
They did a study recently and found that conservatives, even when told it will cost them more money in the long run, will refuse to buy energy efficient bulbs that make any kind of ecological statements on their packaging? That's a real thing that was demonstrated recently. So I refuse to let people like that sit and say people who care about energy efficiency are fucking blinded by politics. Not when their ilk will knowingly cost themselves money and their children a stable ecosystem in the name of political allegiances. No.
We have to cut everywhere and everybody has to do it.
I don't follow. It's not like there's a direct causal relationship between one person cutting their emissions and another person raising theirs. If anything there's a decent causal relationship in the other direction. As more people and nations begin to take energy efficiency seriously it gets easier and easier to shame those who don't into not being selfish assholes any more.
You're right with your point that cars and incandescents aren't "SOLELY" to blame...but with that one little adjective you're reduced to tilting at straw men.
FACTS: Worldwide 15% of CO2 emissions are from personal vehicles, and that number is rising. The United States accounts for half of that. Our houses use so much energy that they produce twice the CO2 that our cars even do. That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions. Given our wealth and the relative ease with which we can invest in energy-saving technology, that makes them pretty good places to start trying to improve efficiency.
If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, improving the efficiency of American cars and homes is important by any reasonable standard. That's a fact. No politics involved.
Manufacturers would also be a good place to look, but since publicly traded companies can only look as far ahead as their next earnings report I imagine you've drunk their Kool-Aid and would start shrieking "OMG TEH JOB CREATORZ" at the slightest whiff of regulation.
It's not like that shit is secret or sensitive in any way. Those bunk-ass PDFs aren't exactly military-grade training manuals.
Anybody who has ever watched the Bourne movies or interacted with other human beings is pretty well trained to avoid the warning signs this nonsense advises watching for.
About a year ago I stuck a GTX 550 Ti in a machine that was at the time pushing five years old.
I generally upgrade video cards at least twice after the initial build of my computers, every 2 years or so. My needs for upgrading other components are generally low, because...really...who needs a top of the line processor? I generally stick to the top of the mid tier and it does anything I might need done for the next 5-6 years. As far as RAM goes, whenever I get a new motherboard I just put as much RAM as it supports in it, and have been known to spend more on RAM than CPU when building a computer.
I just recently rebuilt my computer (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and a second GPU) for about $550, and that got it to a point where it can play Crysis 2 with max settings. I expect it will be able to play any game the makers throw at it for another two years before performance starts to become a real issue. Maybe longer, because it seems to me that game-makers are getting better at building games that still run (albeit less prettily) on older hardware.
If it hadn't been for some recent hardware failures I'd probably STILL be rocking the last machine, which would be over 6 years old now. I just didn't feel like throwing money down the drain buying a replacement motherboard that used and old-ass socket.
I think the only reason to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware these days is to stroke your e-peen.
The difference is that when you sit in the street or chain yourself to a tree to stop a construction project or disrupt traffic the general public understands what you're doing. A prosecutor might be able to *try* to press terrorism charges, or some other trumped up nonsense, but at the end of the day enough of the public will understand the story to say "wait. He was just sitting in the street." So the crazy-ass charges won't fly for long.
When you engage in a little hacktivism, though, not enough of the public understands what you've done to protect you from overzealous prosecution. The prosecutor can throw around a few terms like "cyber criminal," "hacking," and "digital crowbar." All of a sudden in the eyes of the majority of the public you're some sort of criminal mastermind, wielding dark arts to bring society to its knees -- even if all your *really* did was essentially run wget on a website.
That's why we need to be more careful in how we craft "cyber crime" laws, and prosecutors and judges need to be more careful in how they interpret them.
Wrong. A crime is not a crime, regardless. Copyright and contractual violations (such as breaking JSTOR or MIT's EULA) require the wronged party to actually take the offender to court.
That's why the feds were charging him with ridiculous crap like wire fraud and damaging protected computer systems, because they couldn't press charges unilaterally on the crimes that he *actually* appears to have committed.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
Remember that the feds were acting unilaterally. They had not been asked by the supposedly wronged parties to bring these charges. In fact, they had been asked by one of them -- JSTOR -- to *not* bring these charges against Swartz.
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far. There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life. When I was 16 one of my friends committed suicide and more recently a roommate's girlfriend came over while my roommate was gone and committed suicide. As someone who has witnessed the aftermath both to someone who meant so much to me and someone I barely knew, I will tell you right now that it is a terrible act that impacts everyone -- and most often in a profoundly negative way. To call it 'rational' or 'sane' in any case reveals that you do not know anything about suicide.
...I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up with a fine plus time served.
Furthermore, he almost certainly could get a plea bargain-- believe it or not, prosecutors don't want to go to court if they can possibly get a conviction without doing so. Unfortunately, a plea bargain would have required Swartz admitting that he did broke the law, and it looks like he was not the type of person who would do that.
Swartz tried to plea bargain two days before he killed himself. The prosecutor adamantly refused to accept less than a guilty plea to every single charge (even the patently absurd ones), and was also adamant that prison time would be required.
Well, you're not MIT or JSTOR. *They* didn't press charges, or even pursue civil suits, but the feds did it anyway?
What does it say about the merits of this case that it was "United States v Aaron Swartz?" I'm skeptical as hell -- as you should be -- of any federal criminal case in which the supposedly wronged parties aren't even the plaintiffs.
If I bypassed your home's security and installed a laptop in your home that connected to your network and took all your files, would you want there to be laws against that?
Yes, but I'd also like the ability to call off the fucking dogs if you and I work out a civil solution to your wrongdoing. Remember that JSTOR and MIT were both aware of Swartz' actions, and neither had asked the feds to charge him. In fact, JSTOR had asked the feds *not* to charge him.
The red flag of prosecutorial over-zealousness is obvious from the name of the case: "United States v. Aaron Swartz." Not MIT, not JSTOR, not the alleged "victims." United States. The prosecutor was *way* out of line.
This row wasn't "legal" at all. Thanks to the fucking DMCA copyright infringement is now generally sorted out with the content "owners" functioning as judge and jury (because they're not at all biased or greedy). If the legal system isn't involved it's hardly a "legal" row, it's more like a shakedown.
They're "solid democrats" who just happen to also run a site at beastobama.com where they write -- and I quote -- "Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and is leading doomed america to her final destruction and the destruction of the world!"
"They are not an extreme version of what the people controlling this country believe... I put them more in line with Anne Coulter and whatshisface on Fox"
So they're not an extreme version of what the people controlling this country believe, they're just in line with some of the more extreme media darlings of the cable news network that does an astonishing amount of tone-setting for the national dialogue? Oh wait.
Westboro Baptists can get away with it because they're white, and are simply the extreme version of what the dangerous people who control this country believe. I promise you if brown people who believe in a slightly different god did what they did they'd be hauled in for questioning and quite possibly extraordinary rendition-ed off to be tortured by the CIA.
Do you want to do whatever the fuck you want, with no regard whatsoever for the wishes of your constituency? Do you want to then get reelected over and over again because only 200 old-ass white people show up at the election to vote straight down the party line?
Sound like paradise? Can't possibly be real?
But wait! It is real! It's local government! Getting in is easy, too! Just wait for an incumbent to die or retire, then take their place in whatever party they came from. Unless you get redistricted, you're now set for life. Congratulations!
I'm as entrenched as anyone could possibly be in the Google ecosystem, and it's not because they're force-feeding me their products. I frequently try alternatives when comes to stuff like online calendars, documents, email, whatever.
The reason my attempts to use other services never stick is simple: they're just not as good as Google's offerings.
I can kind of see where they're coming from if Google is in fact promoting their own services in their search, but I suspect that their own algorithms are picking out their own services because the most people use and talk about them...again because they're just the best offering.
Personally it's tough to sell me on the idea of a provider of free web services getting into antitrust territory, because a different search engine is always one different URL away. The same goes for all their other services. It's tough to even call them out on vendor lock-in, because thanks to the data liberation front they're one of the best companies I've ever seen on the internet when it comes to avoiding lock-in.
Slashdot Mirror
HUMAN CO2 emissions above and beyond the normal, stable carbon cycle. Obviously.
You're right, you personally reducing your output by 1/3 doesn't do much of anything. But if your neighbors and friends see you doing it and do it too, then so do their neighbors and friends and so on and so forth. Maybe enough momentum builds that your city's researchers and planners notice, and start a new recycling program, or spring for a renewable energy source of some kind. Now something big and useful and worthwhile is happening that couldn't have happened without the aggregate momentum of all those little things that didn't feel like they did anything.
What really riled me up about the post I replied to was that tired-ass old assertion that it's all politics, that basically "both sides are just as bad." No. Not on climate change they're fucking not.
They did a study recently and found that conservatives, even when told it will cost them more money in the long run, will refuse to buy energy efficient bulbs that make any kind of ecological statements on their packaging? That's a real thing that was demonstrated recently. So I refuse to let people like that sit and say people who care about energy efficiency are fucking blinded by politics. Not when their ilk will knowingly cost themselves money and their children a stable ecosystem in the name of political allegiances. No.
America: The land of measuring brightness in units of energy consumption instead of...you know...brightness.
We have to cut everywhere and everybody has to do it.
I don't follow. It's not like there's a direct causal relationship between one person cutting their emissions and another person raising theirs. If anything there's a decent causal relationship in the other direction. As more people and nations begin to take energy efficiency seriously it gets easier and easier to shame those who don't into not being selfish assholes any more.
You're right with your point that cars and incandescents aren't "SOLELY" to blame...but with that one little adjective you're reduced to tilting at straw men.
FACTS: Worldwide 15% of CO2 emissions are from personal vehicles, and that number is rising. The United States accounts for half of that. Our houses use so much energy that they produce twice the CO2 that our cars even do. That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions. Given our wealth and the relative ease with which we can invest in energy-saving technology, that makes them pretty good places to start trying to improve efficiency.
If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, improving the efficiency of American cars and homes is important by any reasonable standard. That's a fact. No politics involved.
Manufacturers would also be a good place to look, but since publicly traded companies can only look as far ahead as their next earnings report I imagine you've drunk their Kool-Aid and would start shrieking "OMG TEH JOB CREATORZ" at the slightest whiff of regulation.
It's not like that shit is secret or sensitive in any way. Those bunk-ass PDFs aren't exactly military-grade training manuals.
Anybody who has ever watched the Bourne movies or interacted with other human beings is pretty well trained to avoid the warning signs this nonsense advises watching for.
My favorite thing so far about their site is that one of the "Places to watch" is "Peroxide-Based Explosives."
Sounds like a fun place to spend a weekend.
Soylent Green is SPIDERS!!!!!
RTFA
Damn the almost-perfect timing of my retirement account contribution this month!
About a year ago I stuck a GTX 550 Ti in a machine that was at the time pushing five years old.
I generally upgrade video cards at least twice after the initial build of my computers, every 2 years or so. My needs for upgrading other components are generally low, because...really...who needs a top of the line processor? I generally stick to the top of the mid tier and it does anything I might need done for the next 5-6 years. As far as RAM goes, whenever I get a new motherboard I just put as much RAM as it supports in it, and have been known to spend more on RAM than CPU when building a computer.
I just recently rebuilt my computer (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and a second GPU) for about $550, and that got it to a point where it can play Crysis 2 with max settings. I expect it will be able to play any game the makers throw at it for another two years before performance starts to become a real issue. Maybe longer, because it seems to me that game-makers are getting better at building games that still run (albeit less prettily) on older hardware.
If it hadn't been for some recent hardware failures I'd probably STILL be rocking the last machine, which would be over 6 years old now. I just didn't feel like throwing money down the drain buying a replacement motherboard that used and old-ass socket.
I think the only reason to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware these days is to stroke your e-peen.
The difference is that when you sit in the street or chain yourself to a tree to stop a construction project or disrupt traffic the general public understands what you're doing. A prosecutor might be able to *try* to press terrorism charges, or some other trumped up nonsense, but at the end of the day enough of the public will understand the story to say "wait. He was just sitting in the street." So the crazy-ass charges won't fly for long.
When you engage in a little hacktivism, though, not enough of the public understands what you've done to protect you from overzealous prosecution. The prosecutor can throw around a few terms like "cyber criminal," "hacking," and "digital crowbar." All of a sudden in the eyes of the majority of the public you're some sort of criminal mastermind, wielding dark arts to bring society to its knees -- even if all your *really* did was essentially run wget on a website.
That's why we need to be more careful in how we craft "cyber crime" laws, and prosecutors and judges need to be more careful in how they interpret them.
Wrong. A crime is not a crime, regardless. Copyright and contractual violations (such as breaking JSTOR or MIT's EULA) require the wronged party to actually take the offender to court.
That's why the feds were charging him with ridiculous crap like wire fraud and damaging protected computer systems, because they couldn't press charges unilaterally on the crimes that he *actually* appears to have committed.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
Remember that the feds were acting unilaterally. They had not been asked by the supposedly wronged parties to bring these charges. In fact, they had been asked by one of them -- JSTOR -- to *not* bring these charges against Swartz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_discretion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far. There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life. When I was 16 one of my friends committed suicide and more recently a roommate's girlfriend came over while my roommate was gone and committed suicide. As someone who has witnessed the aftermath both to someone who meant so much to me and someone I barely knew, I will tell you right now that it is a terrible act that impacts everyone -- and most often in a profoundly negative way. To call it 'rational' or 'sane' in any case reveals that you do not know anything about suicide.
Thank you for that, though.
...I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up with a fine plus time served.
Furthermore, he almost certainly could get a plea bargain-- believe it or not, prosecutors don't want to go to court if they can possibly get a conviction without doing so. Unfortunately, a plea bargain would have required Swartz admitting that he did broke the law, and it looks like he was not the type of person who would do that.
Swartz tried to plea bargain two days before he killed himself. The prosecutor adamantly refused to accept less than a guilty plea to every single charge (even the patently absurd ones), and was also adamant that prison time would be required.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262137/Aaron-Swartz-Reddit-founder-request-plea-deal-turned-Massachusetts-prosecutor.html
If you're just going to make stuff up, you should probably be quiet.
Well, you're not MIT or JSTOR. *They* didn't press charges, or even pursue civil suits, but the feds did it anyway?
What does it say about the merits of this case that it was "United States v Aaron Swartz?" I'm skeptical as hell -- as you should be -- of any federal criminal case in which the supposedly wronged parties aren't even the plaintiffs.
If I bypassed your home's security and installed a laptop in your home that connected to your network and took all your files, would you want there to be laws against that?
Yes, but I'd also like the ability to call off the fucking dogs if you and I work out a civil solution to your wrongdoing. Remember that JSTOR and MIT were both aware of Swartz' actions, and neither had asked the feds to charge him. In fact, JSTOR had asked the feds *not* to charge him.
The red flag of prosecutorial over-zealousness is obvious from the name of the case: "United States v. Aaron Swartz." Not MIT, not JSTOR, not the alleged "victims." United States. The prosecutor was *way* out of line.
You could also say "Metro App" vs "Real Software."
This row wasn't "legal" at all. Thanks to the fucking DMCA copyright infringement is now generally sorted out with the content "owners" functioning as judge and jury (because they're not at all biased or greedy). If the legal system isn't involved it's hardly a "legal" row, it's more like a shakedown.
Oh really?
They're "solid democrats" who just happen to also run a site at beastobama.com where they write -- and I quote -- "Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and is leading doomed america to her final destruction and the destruction of the world!"
"They are not an extreme version of what the people controlling this country believe ... I put them more in line with Anne Coulter and whatshisface on Fox"
So they're not an extreme version of what the people controlling this country believe, they're just in line with some of the more extreme media darlings of the cable news network that does an astonishing amount of tone-setting for the national dialogue? Oh wait.
Westboro Baptists can get away with it because they're white, and are simply the extreme version of what the dangerous people who control this country believe. I promise you if brown people who believe in a slightly different god did what they did they'd be hauled in for questioning and quite possibly extraordinary rendition-ed off to be tortured by the CIA.
On the Microsoft front they should specifically be going after Microsoft AND Intel together.
Do you want to do whatever the fuck you want, with no regard whatsoever for the wishes of your constituency? Do you want to then get reelected over and over again because only 200 old-ass white people show up at the election to vote straight down the party line?
Sound like paradise? Can't possibly be real?
But wait! It is real! It's local government! Getting in is easy, too! Just wait for an incumbent to die or retire, then take their place in whatever party they came from. Unless you get redistricted, you're now set for life. Congratulations!
I'm inclined to agree with you.
I'm as entrenched as anyone could possibly be in the Google ecosystem, and it's not because they're force-feeding me their products. I frequently try alternatives when comes to stuff like online calendars, documents, email, whatever.
The reason my attempts to use other services never stick is simple: they're just not as good as Google's offerings.
I can kind of see where they're coming from if Google is in fact promoting their own services in their search, but I suspect that their own algorithms are picking out their own services because the most people use and talk about them...again because they're just the best offering.
Personally it's tough to sell me on the idea of a provider of free web services getting into antitrust territory, because a different search engine is always one different URL away. The same goes for all their other services. It's tough to even call them out on vendor lock-in, because thanks to the data liberation front they're one of the best companies I've ever seen on the internet when it comes to avoiding lock-in.
I'm dubious.