complete combustion goes like this: CxHyOz + n O2 = x CO2 + y/2 H2O
i'm sorry, but "biofuels" obey freshman chemistry and produce CO2 when burned
Ok, Mr. Freshman - simple question: where did that carbon come from to begin with?
Answer: It came from absorbing CO2 in the atmosphere.
Biofuel does produce nitrate pollution, IIRC, and forces up food prices when farmers covert their land to growing biofuel products, but it doesn't add any CO2 to the atmosphere.
Links to credible information on that. In particular, I will bet 20 right now that hydropower is CHEAPER than coal or nukes. Hell, if you use a LITTLE bit of intelligence, you would realize that hydropower will be cheaper than either coal or nukes. Why? Because it is STILL cheaper to put in a dam than either coal, gas, or nuke plant (assuming suitable location). In addition, you have free energy after that. And geo-thermal has already been shown to be cheaper than nukes (but there are few locations for shallow geo-thermal).
You'd lose your bet. Unless you're talking about the amortized price. The CEC was primarily interested into the 10-year amortized wholesale cost of building a new plant, which hydro is not especially cost-efficient at. Of course, it gives you flood control and other benefits as well.
>>All of this game theory crap, along with CAPM, APT, GARCH, DDM, etc is just a bunch of ivory tower bullshit.
Well put. Especially since a lot of smart people make money off of figuring out how the market is going to move before you do, making the process inherently chaotic.
>>You are thinking only in economic terms. At some point there is an absolute economic limit when you are using as much energy to extract and process the oil as the energy you actually get out of it.
Fortunately oil shale and oil sands are relatively easy to get, energetically speaking. It's more expensive than pumping crude, but when gas prices go up, it becomes economically feasible. The actual issue is the amount of water consumed by the extraction process, not the amount of oil consumed.
There's plenty of oil out their, as the GP says. If we do reach an oil crisis in our lifetime, it's only because our idiot government caused it.
We have energy problems? I guess we did have rolling brownouts a while back here in California, but California has had its collective head up its butt for a long time when it comes to power infrastructure.
And no, I'm serious. There's no real looming crisis when it comes to power. Even if we move to a completely carbon neutral energy grid, it'll raise prices by about 50% across the board if we stick with coal, but would remain around the same if we start switching more to nuclear.
Since making a statement like that tends to draw out the Greens on Slashdot, I'll post the prices of different sources of energy. I looked at four different sources: ClimateProgress.org, a tidal power company survey of power costs, the California Energy Commission study on what wholesale prices would be for new plants built today, and the Federal DoE energy costs estimates. There's quite a bit of discrepancy between the four sources, so I'll give the range of prices between the four.
There's also subsidies and carbon/social cost adjustments, which I'll also list.
Summarizing from cheapest to most expensive: 1) Coal (currently 49% of our power production): 3.15c to 9.4c/KWH. Carbon Capture or Reduction systems raise the price to around 10c to 12c/KWH.
2) Natural Gas (20% of current production): 4.95c to 9.15c/KWH. Produces half the CO2 of coal. Carbon Capture or Reduction raises the price to 8c - 11.5c/KWH.
3) Nuclear (19% of current production): 2.16c - 11.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Price includes decommissioning and lawsuit costs. Federal subsidies knock about 1c/KWH off. Actual wholesale costs from existing plants runs around 4c/KWH these days.
4) Hydro (7% of current production): 8.7c to 19.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Federal subsidies knock off about 2c/KWH. Dams have recently become non-politically correct, with some being dynamited to free up fish runs.
5) Oil (1.7% of current production): Roughly twice as much as natural gas, but prices have fluctuated massively in the last few years. Mainly used as a power backstop. Also puts some pressure on consumer fuel costs.
6) Biofuel (0.93% of current production): 7.5c - 20c/KWH. No CO2 production, but produces other pollutants. Federal subsidies are large, knocking the price to 5c-15c/KWH for biofuel. Can put pressure on consumer food costs if they do something stupid like burning edible food products for power. (Braindead plans like Ethanol.)
7) Wind (0.78% of current production): 6.5c - 14.1c/KWH. Offshore adds another 5c-10c/KWH. No CO2 production. Wind farms run into NIMBY resistance from people like the late Sen. Kennedy (who didn't want offshore wind near his estate because it'd ruin the view - what a great environmentalist, no?) Subsidies would knock the price from 13.9c/KWH to 9.9c/KWH, so it's likely the low end estimates (which came from the hippie sources) already include the subsidies.
8) Metropolitan Solid Waste (0.4% of current production): 6.5c - 8.6c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources of fuel. Subsidies reduce price to 5.4c/KWH.
9) Geothermal (0.36% of current production): 5.5c - 13c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources. Federal subsidies knock the 13c/KWH price to 9c/KWH. (It's likely the 5.5c price from the Hippie groups include the subsidies already.)
10) Solar (0.03% of current production): 12c - 98c/KWH; discarding high and low: around 18c - 39c/KWH (counting subsidies, 36c-60c/KWH or so without). No CO2 production. Sierra Club has been blocking development of solar power in deserts for environmental reasons.
11) Wave Power (~0% of current production): 6.5c - 137c/KWH. Note the 6.5c estimate came from a wave power company. The 137c estimate came from the State of California's estimated costs of actually building one. No CO2 production. Some people dislike tidal power plants.
Knowledge is power. Hopefully, with these numbers out there (which, again, were drawn half from hippie sources, and half fr
>>That software did not come out of thin air. Yes, the copies you made were essentially free but resources were initially consumed to produce it. The value of copies of that product when access and distribution are nearly free is essentially zero.
The "value" of something (sorry to break it to you) is whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
If I think MATLAB is worth $1,000, but I can find a used copy for $100, am I now effectively $900 richer or $100 poorer? By your definition, I would be poorer (since it has an "inherent" value of $0, according to you). Also, by your funky definition, wealth would only decrease. But in an actual objective sense, since I need MATLAB in order to run my business and make more money elsewhere.
Your weird definition would also say I came out $900 ahead if I got MATLAB on a physical DVD, but lost money on the transaction if it was fully digital, which is rather silly if you think about it - I get the same software either way.
I'd recommend you reflect on your definitions of wealth and value.
>>But if you do that, you'll most likely run afoul of the 5GB limit, unless you're a very casual tetherer. What you're really paying for with that additional $30/month is a second 5GB of data.
I am a casual tetherer. More or less, I just tether (or did on my old phone, in which tethering was free on Verizon.:p) once or twice a month, when I'm on the road, just to check my email or read slashdot or whatever. I can do all that on the phone, but it's much easier to use a laptop.
>>Somehow, all of the cell phone companies are basically together on the idea that 5GB == Unlimited if you're on a smart phone of any kind and you're not tethering
Yeah, it's kind of weird. When I bought the Droid, I asked the lady if the "unlimited data" was capped at 5GB, or if it was actually unlimited. She said it was actually unlimited. So in the off chance I do exceed the limit, I'll at least probably be able to get a month of overages out of them, with a threat of lawsuit.
>>I don't think that such a thing can possibly be "proven" to be wrong.
Well, insofar as everyone who believed in the land = wealth theory ended up either going bankrupt or were vastly overshadowed by the money made (seemingly out of thin air) by the people who didn't believe in it, yeah.
>>In fact, the economist Henry George in his book "Progress and Poverty" makes a very compelling argument which suggests that monopolization of land and resources is the fundamental mechanism by which vast disparities in wealth are created and perpetuated.
How much land does Bill Gates own? He's a monopolist, but he doesn't have a monopoly over land or natural resources. Plus, I'm inherently suspicious of any book that has the word progress in the title.
>>It makes sense to me because the amount of land is fixed, so unlike taxing income, you don't create a dis-incentive for engaging in productive activity.
It is, sort of. But when land is limited, society has found ways around the limitations. Houses become apartments become skyscrapers, for example. In a worst-case scenario, we could turn our farms into hyrdoponics towers many stories high.
They've tried taxing land, before. (As Hillary says, we tax everything that moves or doesn't move.) And people find ways around that as well. In Dublin, for example, all the older houses are incredibly narrow and have fake windows. Why? Because they were taxed based on street frontage and the number of windows they had (it was a sign of wealth, I suppose). The Irish Parliament building, IIRC, has something like a hundred fake windows in it since they didn't want to pay taxes to the British.
Overall though, there's an important philosophical difference between a productivity tax (like an income or sales or VAT tax) and an asset confiscation tax (like property or death taxes), with pros and cons going both ways. Our government, of course, does both.
How many starving Palestinians could Arafat have fed with the Billions he embezzeled from foreign aid donations? We can easily feed the entire world, and could feed 60 billion if we had to.
The thing the Greens don't understand is that if they want to save the world, they should work to bring everyone up to 1st world living standards. Look at the population growth rates for every developed country. Exponential growth is no longer a worry... when people become wealthy and productive they stop having babies.
You've been reading too much Green propaganda. Or economic textbooks from the 1500s. Wealth used to be based on land and natural resources, true, but this was proven to be wrong by the late 1600s.
Take the following example - I trade you a piece of software for another over some P2P network. We're both wealthier now in a real sense, but no resources of any note were consumed or expended.
If you make a couterargument in any way involving the power consumed or the entropic heat death of the universe, I'll mock you. Fair warning.
>>So does that mean that you can only get a Droid telephone with a verizon account?
Yeah. It even has the Verizon logo engraved on the back, right near Google's.
>>Say what you might about the EU, they really whipped the mobile telco's into submission and as such, we don't have a system where your phone is branded by the telco.
There's a few areas where the EU leads America, and this is one of them.
That said, I actually like the Droid, but the niggardly things like charging for tethering on what is theoretically an open source system and so people should be able to hack it to do it for free... yeah, that's Verizon for you.
The only really shocking thing about the phone is the free GPS - Verizon is used to charging $8/day for GPS directions on its phone, and not only is it free on the Droid, but it's actually a pretty respectable replacement for my Nuvi.
The issue is that many people won't buy health insurance until they need it. That fundamentally breaks the model because insurance depends on having a pool of healthy people paying but not costing anything. The legislation kind of makes up for that by forcing everybody to buy health insurance (with threats of jail or heavy fines if they don't), but ultimately that will screw poor people who don't have money to buy it.
Depends. It's proven that when people have health insurance, their usage of health services goes up (when you don't have health insurance, you don't go to the doctor for trivial things like hangnails). Demand will go up, and so prices will go up.
What we really needed was a national catastrophic insurance plan (with very high deductibles), so that people without insurance won't be wiped out by a single event (major trauma, cancer, etc.), and then allowing the free market to handle run of the mill health care costs. Walmart (don't laugh) has been doing a great job making doctor "office" visits and pharmaceuticals cheap. I think it's like $20 bucks for an office visit, and you can pop in while your kids are finishing the shopping. Want an eye exam? That's $20 as well. Generic drugs? Try $10-$20 for a month's supply. Even though I have health insurance with Kaiser, these prices are competitive. You mean I don't have to sit in a waiting room for 2 hours with a bunch of sick people coughing before my doctor finally gets around to seeing me? Oh, and Kaiser charges $20 for a doctor visit anyway? And I need to book it a week in advance? Yeah, I'll take the drop-in service, thanks.
The entire health care industry is incredibly badly designed, but this bill will only make things worse.
>>These jellyfish spawn off the cost of China, near Hong Kong. The increasing water temperature (since the end of the last ice age) coupled with the pollution that China dumps into the sea, has caused an explosion of the aforementioned animals. The jellyfish then float eastward, right into the Japanese fishing waters.
No, no, no! You forgot to blame it on global warming!
Remember, anytime anything weird happens, you must blame it on global warming!
>>The bible fully endorses the practice of slavery and makes little to no attempt to dismantle the institution.
I think you might need to reconsider that in light of your 12 years of "religious education". It is quite a common misconception that to think that because there is a law about something, that the Bible endorses it. Jesus made it quite clear that the laws for Divorce were there not because God endorses divorce, but because mankind sucks. (And it was needed to protect the wives, actually.)
If you read, say, the Epistle to Philemon (which takes all of 30 seconds) you can get a good feel for what Paul thought of slavery.
>>Google, you KNOW I speak English, stop overriding my account setting for my language with demographic data based on my IP address. When I'm traveling it doesn't make me fluent in the local language...
Yeah, that drives me nuts, too.
I try to override the damn feature by going to http://www.google.co.uk/, but even that gets overriden half the time.
>>On the other hand, if they really do believe that these devices work, then the bombers may share those beliefs. That, also, could deter bombings.
This Israeli guy I know, big biomechanics guy, has worked on gait-analysis systems for Israel. You see, a guy who has a bunch of explosives strapped to his waist walks differently from someone normally. The system flags people down as they go through a checkpoint, and get searched and wanded more extensively than the normal line. When I asked him why they don't just blow up the security checkpoint people then, he said that just knowing the detection systems are there is enough to deter suicide bombings.
>>Seriously, if my car were to accelerate without warning, the first thing I would do would be to push down the clutch. The second would be to apply the brake. And if that didn't work, I would pull the emergency brake. Meanwhile, aim for something soft without people in it.
I used to drive an old Caprice Classic, which had a famous "flying dutchman" syndrome in which it would accelerate out of control. Happened to me once when driving along a 15MPH campus loop drive at my university. I slammed down on the brakes but it still accelerated. I went through a couple stop signs and nearly hit a few people before I thought to shift it into neutral and then killed the gas.
Scary as hell. I believe it was caused by the cruise control computer turning on spuriously (and set at a very high speed). They never did do a recall on that model, IIRC.
So I do have a tendency to believe these new car owners...
>>Anyone who uses any computer (including Mac AND Linux) without anti-virus is asking for what they get.
Depends. I've had bad experiences with anti-virus software (AVG caused winamp to crash when loading 100KB files, rather bizarrely), and their constant nagging, updating, etc., even when they're not causing your machine to become more unstable, doesn't seem worth the hassle when I don't actually ever run programs except those I buy. I suppose there's a chance I could get a virus from installing Crysis or whatever, but when balanced against the annoyance of avir software, it's generally not worth it to have antivirus software installed.
The real threat nowadays is hostile stuff on the web, which things like Norton suck balls at handling - Spybot S&D is really the only protection you need now.
>>You misunderstand. The EULA is a one-sided contract. There is no negotiation, there is no signature from both parties. There is only "You follow this or else"
Aren't one-sided contracts unconscionable? There needs to be a consideration on each side in order for a contract to be valid, right?
They got the BNETD guys on a EULA violation, but IMO, the BNETD guys should have attempted to return their copies of Diablo II, saying they didn't want to agree to the EULA, and see if Blizzard actually would follow through with their contract. From what I've heard, most companies don't actually have much support in place for people turning down the EULAs.
It also violates the doctrine of first sale, IMO. Some court really needs to bitch-slap the entire EULA idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, Mr. Freshman - simple question: where did that carbon come from to begin with?
Answer: It came from absorbing CO2 in the atmosphere.
Biofuel does produce nitrate pollution, IIRC, and forces up food prices when farmers covert their land to growing biofuel products, but it doesn't add any CO2 to the atmosphere.
>>It's not a secret that there is scarcity, genius.
I don't think you know what "scarcity" actually means, in an economic sense...
You'd lose your bet. Unless you're talking about the amortized price. The CEC was primarily interested into the 10-year amortized wholesale cost of building a new plant, which hydro is not especially cost-efficient at. Of course, it gives you flood control and other benefits as well.
Here's some links to get you started. Enjoy:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eiaenergy2016.png
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-011/CEC-200-2007-011-SD.PDF
http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/ocean_policy/documents/te_workshop_cost_compare.pdf
>>Post-2020 there might not be enough energy left to run a television or computer to watch them.
Can I quote you on this in 2020? Reading environmentalists predictions of doom is a neverending source of amusement for me.
Assuming Slashdot is still around and we haven't de-evolutionized ourselves into subhuman primates.
Not that the two aren't necessarily contradictory.
>>All of this game theory crap, along with CAPM, APT, GARCH, DDM, etc is just a bunch of ivory tower bullshit.
Well put. Especially since a lot of smart people make money off of figuring out how the market is going to move before you do, making the process inherently chaotic.
>>You are thinking only in economic terms. At some point there is an absolute economic limit when you are using as much energy to extract and process the oil as the energy you actually get out of it.
Fortunately oil shale and oil sands are relatively easy to get, energetically speaking. It's more expensive than pumping crude, but when gas prices go up, it becomes economically feasible. The actual issue is the amount of water consumed by the extraction process, not the amount of oil consumed.
There's plenty of oil out their, as the GP says. If we do reach an oil crisis in our lifetime, it's only because our idiot government caused it.
>>An Australian economist who is one of the few credited as having a model that predicted this crisis before it happened.
Hell, even Glen Beck predicted the crisis. You can google videos of his from before the housing crash.
If you looked at housing prices relative to income and the housing affordability index, it was way beyond any levels it'd ever been at before.
Heck, I refused to buy a house in 2005 and 2006 since I thought prices were overinflated. I've been renting, and doing quite well with it.
>>So the solution to the energy problems we face
We have energy problems? I guess we did have rolling brownouts a while back here in California, but California has had its collective head up its butt for a long time when it comes to power infrastructure.
And no, I'm serious. There's no real looming crisis when it comes to power. Even if we move to a completely carbon neutral energy grid, it'll raise prices by about 50% across the board if we stick with coal, but would remain around the same if we start switching more to nuclear.
Since making a statement like that tends to draw out the Greens on Slashdot, I'll post the prices of different sources of energy. I looked at four different sources: ClimateProgress.org, a tidal power company survey of power costs, the California Energy Commission study on what wholesale prices would be for new plants built today, and the Federal DoE energy costs estimates. There's quite a bit of discrepancy between the four sources, so I'll give the range of prices between the four.
There's also subsidies and carbon/social cost adjustments, which I'll also list.
Summarizing from cheapest to most expensive:
1) Coal (currently 49% of our power production): 3.15c to 9.4c/KWH. Carbon Capture or Reduction systems raise the price to around 10c to 12c/KWH.
2) Natural Gas (20% of current production): 4.95c to 9.15c/KWH. Produces half the CO2 of coal. Carbon Capture or Reduction raises the price to 8c - 11.5c/KWH.
3) Nuclear (19% of current production): 2.16c - 11.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Price includes decommissioning and lawsuit costs. Federal subsidies knock about 1c/KWH off. Actual wholesale costs from existing plants runs around 4c/KWH these days.
4) Hydro (7% of current production): 8.7c to 19.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Federal subsidies knock off about 2c/KWH. Dams have recently become non-politically correct, with some being dynamited to free up fish runs.
5) Oil (1.7% of current production): Roughly twice as much as natural gas, but prices have fluctuated massively in the last few years. Mainly used as a power backstop. Also puts some pressure on consumer fuel costs.
6) Biofuel (0.93% of current production): 7.5c - 20c/KWH. No CO2 production, but produces other pollutants. Federal subsidies are large, knocking the price to 5c-15c/KWH for biofuel. Can put pressure on consumer food costs if they do something stupid like burning edible food products for power. (Braindead plans like Ethanol.)
7) Wind (0.78% of current production): 6.5c - 14.1c/KWH. Offshore adds another 5c-10c/KWH. No CO2 production. Wind farms run into NIMBY resistance from people like the late Sen. Kennedy (who didn't want offshore wind near his estate because it'd ruin the view - what a great environmentalist, no?) Subsidies would knock the price from 13.9c/KWH to 9.9c/KWH, so it's likely the low end estimates (which came from the hippie sources) already include the subsidies.
8) Metropolitan Solid Waste (0.4% of current production): 6.5c - 8.6c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources of fuel. Subsidies reduce price to 5.4c/KWH.
9) Geothermal (0.36% of current production): 5.5c - 13c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources. Federal subsidies knock the 13c/KWH price to 9c/KWH. (It's likely the 5.5c price from the Hippie groups include the subsidies already.)
10) Solar (0.03% of current production): 12c - 98c/KWH; discarding high and low: around 18c - 39c/KWH (counting subsidies, 36c-60c/KWH or so without). No CO2 production. Sierra Club has been blocking development of solar power in deserts for environmental reasons.
11) Wave Power (~0% of current production): 6.5c - 137c/KWH. Note the 6.5c estimate came from a wave power company. The 137c estimate came from the State of California's estimated costs of actually building one. No CO2 production. Some people dislike tidal power plants.
Knowledge is power. Hopefully, with these numbers out there (which, again, were drawn half from hippie sources, and half fr
>>Smaller scale movements might as well be quantum foam. Something like the uncertainty principle will likely be in play somewhere as well.
That's what Black-Sholes tries to approximate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes).
It's also why LTCM exploded and nearly took our economy out with it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management)
>>That software did not come out of thin air. Yes, the copies you made were essentially free but resources were initially consumed to produce it. The value of copies of that product when access and distribution are nearly free is essentially zero.
The "value" of something (sorry to break it to you) is whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
If I think MATLAB is worth $1,000, but I can find a used copy for $100, am I now effectively $900 richer or $100 poorer? By your definition, I would be poorer (since it has an "inherent" value of $0, according to you). Also, by your funky definition, wealth would only decrease. But in an actual objective sense, since I need MATLAB in order to run my business and make more money elsewhere.
Your weird definition would also say I came out $900 ahead if I got MATLAB on a physical DVD, but lost money on the transaction if it was fully digital, which is rather silly if you think about it - I get the same software either way.
I'd recommend you reflect on your definitions of wealth and value.
>>But if you do that, you'll most likely run afoul of the 5GB limit, unless you're a very casual tetherer. What you're really paying for with that additional $30/month is a second 5GB of data.
I am a casual tetherer. More or less, I just tether (or did on my old phone, in which tethering was free on Verizon. :p) once or twice a month, when I'm on the road, just to check my email or read slashdot or whatever. I can do all that on the phone, but it's much easier to use a laptop.
>>Somehow, all of the cell phone companies are basically together on the idea that 5GB == Unlimited if you're on a smart phone of any kind and you're not tethering
Yeah, it's kind of weird. When I bought the Droid, I asked the lady if the "unlimited data" was capped at 5GB, or if it was actually unlimited. She said it was actually unlimited. So in the off chance I do exceed the limit, I'll at least probably be able to get a month of overages out of them, with a threat of lawsuit.
>>I don't think that such a thing can possibly be "proven" to be wrong.
Well, insofar as everyone who believed in the land = wealth theory ended up either going bankrupt or were vastly overshadowed by the money made (seemingly out of thin air) by the people who didn't believe in it, yeah.
>>In fact, the economist Henry George in his book "Progress and Poverty" makes a very compelling argument which suggests that monopolization of land and resources is the fundamental mechanism by which vast disparities in wealth are created and perpetuated.
How much land does Bill Gates own? He's a monopolist, but he doesn't have a monopoly over land or natural resources. Plus, I'm inherently suspicious of any book that has the word progress in the title.
>>It makes sense to me because the amount of land is fixed, so unlike taxing income, you don't create a dis-incentive for engaging in productive activity.
It is, sort of. But when land is limited, society has found ways around the limitations. Houses become apartments become skyscrapers, for example. In a worst-case scenario, we could turn our farms into hyrdoponics towers many stories high.
They've tried taxing land, before. (As Hillary says, we tax everything that moves or doesn't move.) And people find ways around that as well. In Dublin, for example, all the older houses are incredibly narrow and have fake windows. Why? Because they were taxed based on street frontage and the number of windows they had (it was a sign of wealth, I suppose). The Irish Parliament building, IIRC, has something like a hundred fake windows in it since they didn't want to pay taxes to the British.
Overall though, there's an important philosophical difference between a productivity tax (like an income or sales or VAT tax) and an asset confiscation tax (like property or death taxes), with pros and cons going both ways. Our government, of course, does both.
How many starving Palestinians could Arafat have fed with the Billions he embezzeled from foreign aid donations? We can easily feed the entire world, and could feed 60 billion if we had to.
The thing the Greens don't understand is that if they want to save the world, they should work to bring everyone up to 1st world living standards. Look at the population growth rates for every developed country. Exponential growth is no longer a worry... when people become wealthy and productive they stop having babies.
You've been reading too much Green propaganda. Or economic textbooks from the 1500s. Wealth used to be based on land and natural resources, true, but this was proven to be wrong by the late 1600s.
Take the following example - I trade you a piece of software for another over some P2P network. We're both wealthier now in a real sense, but no resources of any note were consumed or expended.
If you make a couterargument in any way involving the power consumed or the entropic heat death of the universe, I'll mock you. Fair warning.
Yeah... he's not alone though... fair use is under attack from most content producers
>>So does that mean that you can only get a Droid telephone with a verizon account?
Yeah. It even has the Verizon logo engraved on the back, right near Google's.
>>Say what you might about the EU, they really whipped the mobile telco's into submission and as such, we don't have a system where your phone is branded by the telco.
There's a few areas where the EU leads America, and this is one of them.
That said, I actually like the Droid, but the niggardly things like charging for tethering on what is theoretically an open source system and so people should be able to hack it to do it for free... yeah, that's Verizon for you.
The only really shocking thing about the phone is the free GPS - Verizon is used to charging $8/day for GPS directions on its phone, and not only is it free on the Droid, but it's actually a pretty respectable replacement for my Nuvi.
Depends. It's proven that when people have health insurance, their usage of health services goes up (when you don't have health insurance, you don't go to the doctor for trivial things like hangnails). Demand will go up, and so prices will go up.
What we really needed was a national catastrophic insurance plan (with very high deductibles), so that people without insurance won't be wiped out by a single event (major trauma, cancer, etc.), and then allowing the free market to handle run of the mill health care costs. Walmart (don't laugh) has been doing a great job making doctor "office" visits and pharmaceuticals cheap. I think it's like $20 bucks for an office visit, and you can pop in while your kids are finishing the shopping. Want an eye exam? That's $20 as well. Generic drugs? Try $10-$20 for a month's supply. Even though I have health insurance with Kaiser, these prices are competitive. You mean I don't have to sit in a waiting room for 2 hours with a bunch of sick people coughing before my doctor finally gets around to seeing me? Oh, and Kaiser charges $20 for a doctor visit anyway? And I need to book it a week in advance? Yeah, I'll take the drop-in service, thanks.
The entire health care industry is incredibly badly designed, but this bill will only make things worse.
>>These jellyfish spawn off the cost of China, near Hong Kong. The increasing water temperature (since the end of the last ice age) coupled with the pollution that China dumps into the sea, has caused an explosion of the aforementioned animals. The jellyfish then float eastward, right into the Japanese fishing waters.
No, no, no! You forgot to blame it on global warming!
Remember, anytime anything weird happens, you must blame it on global warming!
Do this again and we'll revoke your card.
-Greenpeace
>>The bible fully endorses the practice of slavery and makes little to no attempt to dismantle the institution.
I think you might need to reconsider that in light of your 12 years of "religious education". It is quite a common misconception that to think that because there is a law about something, that the Bible endorses it. Jesus made it quite clear that the laws for Divorce were there not because God endorses divorce, but because mankind sucks. (And it was needed to protect the wives, actually.)
If you read, say, the Epistle to Philemon (which takes all of 30 seconds) you can get a good feel for what Paul thought of slavery.
>>Google, you KNOW I speak English, stop overriding my account setting for my language with demographic data based on my IP address. When I'm traveling it doesn't make me fluent in the local language...
Yeah, that drives me nuts, too.
I try to override the damn feature by going to http://www.google.co.uk/, but even that gets overriden half the time.
>>On the other hand, if they really do believe that these devices work, then the bombers may share those beliefs. That, also, could deter bombings.
This Israeli guy I know, big biomechanics guy, has worked on gait-analysis systems for Israel. You see, a guy who has a bunch of explosives strapped to his waist walks differently from someone normally. The system flags people down as they go through a checkpoint, and get searched and wanded more extensively than the normal line. When I asked him why they don't just blow up the security checkpoint people then, he said that just knowing the detection systems are there is enough to deter suicide bombings.
>>Seriously, if my car were to accelerate without warning, the first thing I would do would be to push down the clutch. The second would be to apply the brake. And if that didn't work, I would pull the emergency brake. Meanwhile, aim for something soft without people in it.
I used to drive an old Caprice Classic, which had a famous "flying dutchman" syndrome in which it would accelerate out of control. Happened to me once when driving along a 15MPH campus loop drive at my university. I slammed down on the brakes but it still accelerated. I went through a couple stop signs and nearly hit a few people before I thought to shift it into neutral and then killed the gas.
Scary as hell. I believe it was caused by the cruise control computer turning on spuriously (and set at a very high speed). They never did do a recall on that model, IIRC.
So I do have a tendency to believe these new car owners...
>>Anyone who uses any computer (including Mac AND Linux) without anti-virus is asking for what they get.
Depends. I've had bad experiences with anti-virus software (AVG caused winamp to crash when loading 100KB files, rather bizarrely), and their constant nagging, updating, etc., even when they're not causing your machine to become more unstable, doesn't seem worth the hassle when I don't actually ever run programs except those I buy. I suppose there's a chance I could get a virus from installing Crysis or whatever, but when balanced against the annoyance of avir software, it's generally not worth it to have antivirus software installed.
The real threat nowadays is hostile stuff on the web, which things like Norton suck balls at handling - Spybot S&D is really the only protection you need now.
>>No, the flood story of Noah is based on the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim.
Yeah, those damn native Americans totally ripped off the Sumerians with their story of the flood, too. Giant canoe? How derivative!
>>You misunderstand. The EULA is a one-sided contract. There is no negotiation, there is no signature from both parties. There is only "You follow this or else"
Aren't one-sided contracts unconscionable? There needs to be a consideration on each side in order for a contract to be valid, right?
They got the BNETD guys on a EULA violation, but IMO, the BNETD guys should have attempted to return their copies of Diablo II, saying they didn't want to agree to the EULA, and see if Blizzard actually would follow through with their contract. From what I've heard, most companies don't actually have much support in place for people turning down the EULAs.
It also violates the doctrine of first sale, IMO. Some court really needs to bitch-slap the entire EULA idea.