Wrong site, dude. The original site was scrapped because of the tortoise. The second site was approved after they cut 100 acres of tortoise habitat out of the construction. And Greens still opposed it, due to incidental damage that might occur to the tortoises. Read the comments on your own link.
>>You think environmental impacts studies and lawsuits are what's keeping nuclear from being profitable enough to build? They're a fucking rounding error.
You're right, a 12 year delay due to lawsuits is a rounding error, but probably the other way than what you originally intended.
I'm not even counting the cost of seismic retrofitting - if you think that protests, blockades, and lawsuits didn't cause Diablo Canyon's numbers to be blown the fuck out of the water between the time it was finished (1973) and licensed (1985), you're out of your fucking mind.
This leads to things like Phillip Morris killing people for profit for millions of years, because they did the cost/benefit analysis and realized that in reality they can get away with human life and suffering costing them many orders of magnitude LESS than they should, all because they have the power.
Whereas now they're taxed heavily and still kill millions of people. Success story?
In any event, I'm talking about *modern society* (see my OP) forgetting cost/benefit analysis, not corporations. Corporations certainly do. Our society doesn't like being told that we kill a certain number of people every year on our roads, because it's too expensive to fix them up / install guard rails, etc. Which is almost a tautology - any one-car crash could theoretically have been engineered to prevent it.
We *really* don't like being told we don't have infinite resources to build infinite safety features, and that at a certain level, people are going to die because of our lack of money.
People of a certain political persuasion like you want to believe there's a giant fairy wand in the sky that can grant wishes and do anything we just want it hard enough.
>>As to where the benefit was from the Fannie Mae disaster, that would be recipients of property taxes, which are driven up each time ANY property is sold
Only true if Prop 13 applies.
The tax basis of the house I bought this year went down substantially from its assessed high in 2008.
>>cost analysis usually halts at any point where short-term gov't revenue might be impacted.
What cost analysis? =)
Besides, Fannie Mae doesn't care about local government revenue, except incidentally. They are/were a quasi-private corporation.
I disagree. We all remember it. We all also remember the scene in Fight Club about how cost/benefit analysis is used to decide whether a safety defect is worth fixing or just paying the damages. And we all remember the Pinto. And everyone goes "Those psychopaths who only use cost/benefit analysis and cold, calculating math are forgetting the humanity of the problem!" And then everyone ignores them.
It's not that people have forgotten cost/benefit analysis, it's that it makes them uncomfortable, so they avoid it.
Well, I guess that's the less hyperbolic way of saying the same thing I did. =)
But really, in practice, we've codified into law certain things like the Endangered Species Act that basically removes rational decision making from the equation. It doesn't matter that executing one river snail might save 100 million tons of CO2 per year - the law overrides you. While there is a mechanism to appeal, as wikipedia cites, only one was granted in all of 2009.
>>Furthermore, life insurance, like any insurance, is a transfer of risk. Someone who is independently wealthy does not need life insurance as their savings will suffice.
If a guy with a million bucks doesn't take out life insurance because he has a million bucks already, that means he's self-insured for a million bucks. =)
In any event it's a heuristic, but it makes a more important point. "How much is not being here worth to my family?" And as I said, you can scale that out another 10x or more and *still* have much more rational cost/benefit analysis than what we have now, which essentially sets the value of human life at "infinite". While this is wonderfully nice from a Philosophy perspective, it doesn't work when dealing with non-infinite dollars.
>>I don't believe I've ever been in a car with the so-called "standard" ultrasonic parking sensors. I have been in a car with a backup camera and I was somewhat scared when the owner *only* used the camera to back up.
That's a really good point. Like a lot of safety features, rear-view cameras seem destined to cause more deaths than they prevent. Bicycle helmets, red-light cameras, etc., all create paradoxical effects that result in more accidents and injuries, while costing more money as well. And in the case of red-light cameras, stealing money from the populace as well. (Err, sorry, taxing the populace in a morally negative fashion.)
Higher end manufacturers I believe might include the backup sensors as standard, but on most cars you're right, they're package upgrades. Which is really annoying, since most package upgrades nowadays (except the most basic) come with a moonroof, which takes up all of the fucking headroom in a car.
It's just a question of degrees though. When the government came in and mandated a small thing like seatbelts, they were (presumably) saving more than 200 lives a year, and not at a cost of $200/car. But there's no reason for anyone involved in this decision-making process to stop there.
There's a core concept in decision making, called cost/benefit analysis, that our modern day society has completely forgotten. I mean this very seriously: Once you move from cost/benefit analysis decision making to Precautionary Principle decision making, you are officially insane, because you believe things that are contradictory. This applies (especially) to societies - if you refuse to make a decision because it has any con at all, you will be left with the status quo. This means that the Sierra Club and other Green groups, who oppose pretty much everything everywhere nowadays, are responsible for us being stuck with gas cars, coal burning power plants, and the ongoing destruction of our nation's food supply.
Some examples: 1) 10 kinda-sorta-endangered (threatened) desert tortoises are found near a new, environmentally happy C02-less solar plant in the Mojave. You might call it HELIOS-1 because you've played Fallout New Vegas, but this is a true story (it's actually in Ivanpah, which is a bit south of the HELIOS-1 plant in the game.) The company offered to relocate the tortoises at a cost of $100M. $10M per bloody tortoise. The Sierra Club and Senator Feinstein shut it down. Any downside whatsoever, even if the Pro column in the Green playbook is much bigger than the Con column, causes them to file lawsuits to shut it down.
2) See any number of examples of Green groups shutting down nuclear power plants or stopping them from being built. The really amusing/frustrating irony is that they then say that nuclear isn't a viable option because they continually encounter delays and cost overruns due to, well, their own lawsuits. Even though the Pro side is very good on nuclear from a Green perspective, they still block it because they are too stupid to know the difference between Chernobyl-style positve feedback plants and modern negative feedback plants. Bonus points for stupidity: a Green group that chained themselves to a fence of a local nuclear plant to protest the CO2 emissions it was emitting.
3) They're extending an interstate in North Carolina. 10 river snails on the Endangered Species List migrate up a branch of the river from their homeland downstream. The Endangered Species Act is our modern insanity codified into law - it doesn't matter how the Pro and Con balance works out, the new snail habitat must be protected. Even though rerouting the interstate will cost billions, add 10 minutes to every person's commute, and will cause untold extra car emissions to go into the atmosphere, it doesn't matter. We don't do cost/benefit analyses any more. They're going to reroute the interstate.
4) A buddy of mine (PhD economics from the University of California) got a job working for Fanny Mae over the summer. He started doing a cost benefit analysis of the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act and similar policies on our housing market, and on the economy in general. The first thing that he found was that nobody had done this analysis before. In Fannie Mae, Fortune 100 company whose entire business is based on these sorts of things. Conclusion number 2, it was possible to codify the costs for each of the lowerings of housing standards congress (i.e. Barney Frank) mandated to Fannie Mae. They kept pushing standards lower until the whole system collapsed. Conclusion number 3: nobody was ever able to quantify the upside of home ownership. Why is it important for people to own homes instead of renting, if all else is held the same. What kind of dollar value can be assigned to owning instead of renting? The whole system was based on a nebulous upside, subsidized by the American taxpayer, and nobody could say why, precisely.
>>Realistically you'd get a couple hours of video out of this, maybe a movie and a half worth.
Burning through your $80 allocation to watch one movie a month... ew, and I thought theatres were expensive.
Honestly, one of the reasons I use Verizon is because the unlimited 3G data plan means I don't have to worry about my wife watching Youtube videos on my DroidX during a road trip and costing me several hundred dollars. Even though I don't even come close to 5G a month on my cell phone with normal usage, she has the capability to blow any limit out of the water.
>>The problem i see is that the "blood" nationalists are going to throw the baby out with the bath water. They can't see past the superficial differences and so end up wanting to throw out those that want to learn the language and ways of their new home, alongside those that are not.
I grew up in San Diego, where immigration is a really hot issue, and I've yet to see anyone ever make the argument against immigration over "superficial differences". The closest it may come to this is cultural differences. So you'll see a Tea Party guy disliking Mexican immigrants due to their culture in one breath, and supporting amnesty for kids that came here when they were 3 in their next. Because "they're pretty much American anyway", you see. And that's an actual quote from a neighbor in San Diego.
But really, the issue is economic first and foremost. Beyond the whole "they took our yobs" thing, you have problems with them stressing social services programs, especially Southern California hospital emergency rooms (half of which have shut down), in a state that is bankrupt, and recently discovered it was even more bankrupt than it previously thought.
>>I think the post you are responding to meant that the prosecution will keep trying _different_ people for the same "crime" until they get a judge more friendly to their argument, then hope that sets precedent.
Yes. Thank you.
They'll necessarily want to move to a friendlier jurisdiction.
>>I only wonder how long before this sort of technology makes its way to the consumer market, if only for show.
Photonic interconnects have been studied for a long time. One of my faculty advisers at UC San Diego, Dr. Clark Guest (brilliant man) has been doing work on optical computing since... the 80s? (I don't know, but a long time.)
They really do represent the next step in computer evolution, but are really tricky to get working right at a consumer-grade level. For example, holographic storage has been around for ages, and allows amazing storage densities since you can "change the angle" and write down a new hologram, but when it works at a speed of about a bit per second to write (develop) the hologram, it's just not practical. It sounds like the problems with optical interconnects have been worked out, which is very exciting.
>>"you should love one another because you are all related", it says "think about the possibility that you may be related and you may find it easier to find compassion for one another".
Right, which is predicated on the doctrine of reincarnation and an infinite past. You're right that it doesn't say it's 100% (hence your escape-from-the-cycle argument holds) but it is definitely based on Buddhist cosmology.
>>But regardless of what the purpose and spiritual meaning of the dialog is, what makes you think it requires an infinite timeline?
Beyond that the universe-is-eternal is a core concept in Buddhism?
>>If there's a finite number of beings, even with random mixing, it only takes a finite number of generations until they have gone through all combinations
You're assuming a pigeonhole principle that doesn't exist, or that the universe has some sort of fitting function to guarantee all combinations will happen. Contrawise, with an infinite timeline and a non-zero probability of getting the same mother every time you reincarnate, the odds are pretty close to unity (excepting people that escape the cycle) for every person to be your mother.
Buddhist cosmology isn't really "religious"; whether it is true or not has little bearing on whether you're a Buddhist. The cyclic model in Buddhist cosmology simply makes sense and avoids issues of first causes and the end of time.
You've never read Buddhist theology then. It's absolutely predicated on the eternal nature of the universe. If the universe has a definite origin, then Buddhism is logically in trouble.
See for example the theology that we should all love one another because, since the world is infinitely old, we have all been each other's mother at some point or another. This argument fails if the universe is not infinitely old.
>>I saw Penrose speak on this topic at the Perimeter Institute about two years ago. He has been working on this for quite a while.
Penrose works on a lot of whacky far-out ideas, none of which so far have panned out. Like that we have quantum tuburoles in our brain that provide our consciousness.
He's kind of like Denethor, from Fringe.
I wouldn't put much faith in this hypothesis of his, either, since I can generate whacky ideas without evidence just as fast as him.
>>Wouldn't it be nice to tell the public BEFORE you let the coyotes run wild?
Why? According to Mr. Idiot Block, coyotes are perfectly safe./rolleyes
I grew up in San Diego, near canyons. My cat in middle school was disemboweled by a coyote on the sidewalk outside my house, with its blood staining the concrete for years.
A girl I was interested in had coyotes sneak through their fence and slaughter their bunch of puppies. Not a pleasant thing to find when you're expecting to take your new pets out for a walk, eh?
But hey, Mr. Idiot Block probably thought of that already and bought pet-safe coyotes, right?
>>Now I have no doubt that this is still quite bad, but this doesn't mean that it has 50million times as much carbon emissions as cars
Only a few percentage points of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are due to ships. Most is due to power plants (~40%), cars and trucks (~30%) and cement plants (~10%) - at least in America. In other countries, you also have deforestation issues, which contribute about a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
I wouldn't call CO2 a pollutant, though, since it doesn't cause health problems for humans (cf the Pollutant Standards Index and similar measurements). CO2 is harmless except at levels hundreds of times higher than our current atmospheric concentration.
>>All of Creative's products are utter garbage, the X-Fi is no exception.
The X-Fi is far better than the built-in audio that comes on a mobo. Out of curiosity, what do you use?
>>Those audio filters you mention just mess up the sound quality with cheap effects, the "crystalizer" being the absolute worst of them
The crystalizer ruins most music, but does help improve sound quality a bit at the lower settings (~20%). At values > 30% it makes things like cymbals way too harsh and shrill.
I primarily bought it for the framerate advantage, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong site, dude. The original site was scrapped because of the tortoise. The second site was approved after they cut 100 acres of tortoise habitat out of the construction. And Greens still opposed it, due to incidental damage that might occur to the tortoises. Read the comments on your own link.
Here's what you should read instead:
http://greenenergyreporter.com/renewables/solar/green-on-green-brightsource-scraps-plans-for-mojave-desert-solar-farm/
>>You think environmental impacts studies and lawsuits are what's keeping nuclear from being profitable enough to build? They're a fucking rounding error.
You're right, a 12 year delay due to lawsuits is a rounding error, but probably the other way than what you originally intended.
I'm not even counting the cost of seismic retrofitting - if you think that protests, blockades, and lawsuits didn't cause Diablo Canyon's numbers to be blown the fuck out of the water between the time it was finished (1973) and licensed (1985), you're out of your fucking mind.
Whereas now they're taxed heavily and still kill millions of people. Success story?
In any event, I'm talking about *modern society* (see my OP) forgetting cost/benefit analysis, not corporations. Corporations certainly do. Our society doesn't like being told that we kill a certain number of people every year on our roads, because it's too expensive to fix them up / install guard rails, etc. Which is almost a tautology - any one-car crash could theoretically have been engineered to prevent it.
We *really* don't like being told we don't have infinite resources to build infinite safety features, and that at a certain level, people are going to die because of our lack of money.
People of a certain political persuasion like you want to believe there's a giant fairy wand in the sky that can grant wishes and do anything we just want it hard enough.
>>As to where the benefit was from the Fannie Mae disaster, that would be recipients of property taxes, which are driven up each time ANY property is sold
Only true if Prop 13 applies.
The tax basis of the house I bought this year went down substantially from its assessed high in 2008.
>>cost analysis usually halts at any point where short-term gov't revenue might be impacted.
What cost analysis? =)
Besides, Fannie Mae doesn't care about local government revenue, except incidentally. They are/were a quasi-private corporation.
Well, I guess that's the less hyperbolic way of saying the same thing I did. =)
But really, in practice, we've codified into law certain things like the Endangered Species Act that basically removes rational decision making from the equation. It doesn't matter that executing one river snail might save 100 million tons of CO2 per year - the law overrides you. While there is a mechanism to appeal, as wikipedia cites, only one was granted in all of 2009.
>>Furthermore, life insurance, like any insurance, is a transfer of risk. Someone who is independently wealthy does not need life insurance as their savings will suffice.
If a guy with a million bucks doesn't take out life insurance because he has a million bucks already, that means he's self-insured for a million bucks. =)
In any event it's a heuristic, but it makes a more important point. "How much is not being here worth to my family?" And as I said, you can scale that out another 10x or more and *still* have much more rational cost/benefit analysis than what we have now, which essentially sets the value of human life at "infinite". While this is wonderfully nice from a Philosophy perspective, it doesn't work when dealing with non-infinite dollars.
>>I don't believe I've ever been in a car with the so-called "standard" ultrasonic parking sensors. I have been in a car with a backup camera and I was somewhat scared when the owner *only* used the camera to back up.
That's a really good point. Like a lot of safety features, rear-view cameras seem destined to cause more deaths than they prevent. Bicycle helmets, red-light cameras, etc., all create paradoxical effects that result in more accidents and injuries, while costing more money as well. And in the case of red-light cameras, stealing money from the populace as well. (Err, sorry, taxing the populace in a morally negative fashion.)
Higher end manufacturers I believe might include the backup sensors as standard, but on most cars you're right, they're package upgrades. Which is really annoying, since most package upgrades nowadays (except the most basic) come with a moonroof, which takes up all of the fucking headroom in a car.
There's a core concept in decision making, called cost/benefit analysis, that our modern day society has completely forgotten. I mean this very seriously: Once you move from cost/benefit analysis decision making to Precautionary Principle decision making, you are officially insane, because you believe things that are contradictory. This applies (especially) to societies - if you refuse to make a decision because it has any con at all, you will be left with the status quo. This means that the Sierra Club and other Green groups, who oppose pretty much everything everywhere nowadays, are responsible for us being stuck with gas cars, coal burning power plants, and the ongoing destruction of our nation's food supply.
Some examples:
1) 10 kinda-sorta-endangered (threatened) desert tortoises are found near a new, environmentally happy C02-less solar plant in the Mojave. You might call it HELIOS-1 because you've played Fallout New Vegas, but this is a true story (it's actually in Ivanpah, which is a bit south of the HELIOS-1 plant in the game.) The company offered to relocate the tortoises at a cost of $100M. $10M per bloody tortoise. The Sierra Club and Senator Feinstein shut it down. Any downside whatsoever, even if the Pro column in the Green playbook is much bigger than the Con column, causes them to file lawsuits to shut it down.
2) See any number of examples of Green groups shutting down nuclear power plants or stopping them from being built. The really amusing/frustrating irony is that they then say that nuclear isn't a viable option because they continually encounter delays and cost overruns due to, well, their own lawsuits. Even though the Pro side is very good on nuclear from a Green perspective, they still block it because they are too stupid to know the difference between Chernobyl-style positve feedback plants and modern negative feedback plants. Bonus points for stupidity: a Green group that chained themselves to a fence of a local nuclear plant to protest the CO2 emissions it was emitting.
3) They're extending an interstate in North Carolina. 10 river snails on the Endangered Species List migrate up a branch of the river from their homeland downstream. The Endangered Species Act is our modern insanity codified into law - it doesn't matter how the Pro and Con balance works out, the new snail habitat must be protected. Even though rerouting the interstate will cost billions, add 10 minutes to every person's commute, and will cause untold extra car emissions to go into the atmosphere, it doesn't matter. We don't do cost/benefit analyses any more. They're going to reroute the interstate.
4) A buddy of mine (PhD economics from the University of California) got a job working for Fanny Mae over the summer. He started doing a cost benefit analysis of the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act and similar policies on our housing market, and on the economy in general. The first thing that he found was that nobody had done this analysis before. In Fannie Mae, Fortune 100 company whose entire business is based on these sorts of things. Conclusion number 2, it was possible to codify the costs for each of the lowerings of housing standards congress (i.e. Barney Frank) mandated to Fannie Mae. They kept pushing standards lower until the whole system collapsed. Conclusion number 3: nobody was ever able to quantify the upside of home ownership. Why is it important for people to own homes instead of renting, if all else is held the same. What kind of dollar value can be assigned to owning instead of renting? The whole system was based on a nebulous upside, subsidized by the American taxpayer, and nobody could say why, precisely.
Anyhow, going back to
>>Realistically you'd get a couple hours of video out of this, maybe a movie and a half worth.
Burning through your $80 allocation to watch one movie a month... ew, and I thought theatres were expensive.
Honestly, one of the reasons I use Verizon is because the unlimited 3G data plan means I don't have to worry about my wife watching Youtube videos on my DroidX during a road trip and costing me several hundred dollars. Even though I don't even come close to 5G a month on my cell phone with normal usage, she has the capability to blow any limit out of the water.
>>The problem i see is that the "blood" nationalists are going to throw the baby out with the bath water. They can't see past the superficial differences and so end up wanting to throw out those that want to learn the language and ways of their new home, alongside those that are not.
I grew up in San Diego, where immigration is a really hot issue, and I've yet to see anyone ever make the argument against immigration over "superficial differences". The closest it may come to this is cultural differences. So you'll see a Tea Party guy disliking Mexican immigrants due to their culture in one breath, and supporting amnesty for kids that came here when they were 3 in their next. Because "they're pretty much American anyway", you see. And that's an actual quote from a neighbor in San Diego.
But really, the issue is economic first and foremost. Beyond the whole "they took our yobs" thing, you have problems with them stressing social services programs, especially Southern California hospital emergency rooms (half of which have shut down), in a state that is bankrupt, and recently discovered it was even more bankrupt than it previously thought.
>>I think the post you are responding to meant that the prosecution will keep trying _different_ people for the same "crime" until they get a judge more friendly to their argument, then hope that sets precedent.
Yes. Thank you.
They'll necessarily want to move to a friendlier jurisdiction.
And tomorrow the feds drop the case since they don't want to set a precedent, and try again next month with a friendlier judge.
>>I only wonder how long before this sort of technology makes its way to the consumer market, if only for show.
Photonic interconnects have been studied for a long time. One of my faculty advisers at UC San Diego, Dr. Clark Guest (brilliant man) has been doing work on optical computing since... the 80s? (I don't know, but a long time.)
They really do represent the next step in computer evolution, but are really tricky to get working right at a consumer-grade level. For example, holographic storage has been around for ages, and allows amazing storage densities since you can "change the angle" and write down a new hologram, but when it works at a speed of about a bit per second to write (develop) the hologram, it's just not practical. It sounds like the problems with optical interconnects have been worked out, which is very exciting.
>>"you should love one another because you are all related", it says "think about the possibility that you may be related and you may find it easier to find compassion for one another".
Right, which is predicated on the doctrine of reincarnation and an infinite past. You're right that it doesn't say it's 100% (hence your escape-from-the-cycle argument holds) but it is definitely based on Buddhist cosmology.
>>But regardless of what the purpose and spiritual meaning of the dialog is, what makes you think it requires an infinite timeline?
Beyond that the universe-is-eternal is a core concept in Buddhism?
>>If there's a finite number of beings, even with random mixing, it only takes a finite number of generations until they have gone through all combinations
You're assuming a pigeonhole principle that doesn't exist, or that the universe has some sort of fitting function to guarantee all combinations will happen. Contrawise, with an infinite timeline and a non-zero probability of getting the same mother every time you reincarnate, the odds are pretty close to unity (excepting people that escape the cycle) for every person to be your mother.
>>we can't really turn off the internet, which is the largest robot yet
It's not a robot unless it has laser guns.
>>Show me a canonical text that actually says what you claim.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn15/sn15.014.than.html
And you can find further discourse and analysis online.
Apologies can be accepted in the form of Oreos in the mail.
>>No, sorry, those ideas have little to do with Buddhism.
Only if by "having little to do with Buddhism" you mean "are taught daily to Buddhists around the globe".
You've never read Buddhist theology then. It's absolutely predicated on the eternal nature of the universe. If the universe has a definite origin, then Buddhism is logically in trouble.
See for example the theology that we should all love one another because, since the world is infinitely old, we have all been each other's mother at some point or another. This argument fails if the universe is not infinitely old.
>>Maybe, but I doubt you have the mathematical skill of Penrose to back it up.
No, I don't.
But I can still mock his theories of the mind.
>>It's time to accept that the nearest you'll come to the thrill of a head shot, is a riveting game of cribbage with the ladies.
Yeah, especially if the only game he likes is Lord of Ultima. You click once per three hours or so.
(OP - at least you should be playing Stronghold Kingdoms, instead of the crap that is LoU.)
>>I saw Penrose speak on this topic at the Perimeter Institute about two years ago. He has been working on this for quite a while.
Penrose works on a lot of whacky far-out ideas, none of which so far have panned out. Like that we have quantum tuburoles in our brain that provide our consciousness.
He's kind of like Denethor, from Fringe.
I wouldn't put much faith in this hypothesis of his, either, since I can generate whacky ideas without evidence just as fast as him.
>>You are full of shit you liar. Coyotes are harmless.
Sarcasm or lying? I can't tell.
>>Wouldn't it be nice to tell the public BEFORE you let the coyotes run wild?
Why? According to Mr. Idiot Block, coyotes are perfectly safe. /rolleyes
I grew up in San Diego, near canyons. My cat in middle school was disemboweled by a coyote on the sidewalk outside my house, with its blood staining the concrete for years.
A girl I was interested in had coyotes sneak through their fence and slaughter their bunch of puppies. Not a pleasant thing to find when you're expecting to take your new pets out for a walk, eh?
But hey, Mr. Idiot Block probably thought of that already and bought pet-safe coyotes, right?
Fuck coyotes.
>>Here, it's mostly teenage boys donning them. They're ignorant of history and what the Nazi swastika represents
Pfft. Nazis and their swastikas are pretty much the most recognizable figures out of history to the modern teenager.
If for no other reason than that all the early Call of Duty games featured Nazis.
While I understand banning the swastikas, it seems rather fucking hypocritical from a series that has made billions of dollars off WWII.
>>Now I have no doubt that this is still quite bad, but this doesn't mean that it has 50million times as much carbon emissions as cars
Only a few percentage points of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are due to ships. Most is due to power plants (~40%), cars and trucks (~30%) and cement plants (~10%) - at least in America. In other countries, you also have deforestation issues, which contribute about a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
I wouldn't call CO2 a pollutant, though, since it doesn't cause health problems for humans (cf the Pollutant Standards Index and similar measurements). CO2 is harmless except at levels hundreds of times higher than our current atmospheric concentration.
>>All of Creative's products are utter garbage, the X-Fi is no exception.
The X-Fi is far better than the built-in audio that comes on a mobo. Out of curiosity, what do you use?
>>Those audio filters you mention just mess up the sound quality with cheap effects, the "crystalizer" being the absolute worst of them
The crystalizer ruins most music, but does help improve sound quality a bit at the lower settings (~20%). At values > 30% it makes things like cymbals way too harsh and shrill.
I primarily bought it for the framerate advantage, though.