OK, I thoroughly despise Bush Jr. (was his final press conference pathetic or what?) but on this one issue you're being a little unfair. The CYA attitude is as old as bureaucracy and as the legal profession. Which, come to think of it, are not really different entities.
A couple years ago I was called into a meeting at work. What was it about? Can't tell you, would violate my NDA. And if I did tell you, it would have to be from memory, because everybody in the meeting was to forbidden to take notes or to write email about what happened in the meeting.
I'll bend the rules a bit, and tell you that it was a really, really trivial legal issue. No bodies were being buried, no careers were at stake. Many companies would have just told their lawyers, "Your problem, do whatever is necessary." But that costs money, and we didn't have money to burn. So we picked the most cost effective strategy, and that involved created an absolutely minimal paper trail.
We were following advice that lawyers give their clients every day: minimize your exposure. That's the advice Bush's lawyers gave him 8 years ago, and that's the advice Obama's lawyers are giving him now. I like to think that Obama will ignore them in the name of open government. But he's a pragmatic guy, so he knows that making that kind of idealistic choice comes at a cost.
Obama's something of an idealist; if he weren't, I wouldn't have voted for him. (I probably wouldn't have voted at all.) But he also knows that if he makes every decision on purely idealistic grounds he's going to have lots of Right Decisions and very little to show for it. Woodrow Wilson can tell you all about that.
No doubt Bush thinks he's the same way: making the idealistic decision when he can, making the pragmatic decision when he has to. The difference is that what Bush considers to be his ideals are morally bankrupt, and his critical judgment fatally impaired.
I'm sorry, how is "President Elect" imaginary? It's a widely-used term, and everybody knows what it means. And BTW, it's been around for about three centuries, according to the OED.
But even if it had been invented last year, it wouldn't be "imaginary", not if people are actually using it.
This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too.
Actually, it was an issue for Bush, though it had nothing to do with phone calls or PDA functionality.
Obama is a notorious IM addict. He pretty much ran his campaign through his Blackberry. Now of course, you can use a Blackberry to make phone calls and track your appointments, but that's not why he's under pressure to give it up. The security wonks don't like the potential for text messages getting intercepted, and the lawyers don't like the legal exposure he'd get if the messages were subpoenaed or FOIAed.
I'm not sure if Bush ever had a Blackberry or a PDA, but he used to be a heavy email user. He went cold turkey when he assumed office. According to his "last email" that went out to all his correspondents, it was mainly about the legal exposure.
An NSA-approved smart phone is probably the solution to the security issue. (See one of the submissions in my sig.) I suspect Obama will just blow off the legal issue. He's supposed to be Mr. Open Government, after all.
Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.
And you'd deserve it! People who don't like fangirl stories (what happened to fanboys?) have no place on Slashdot!
But this is not a fanchild issue. Obama keeps talking about the dangers of living in the "Presidential Bubble". One way he wants to avoid this is to have a lot of contacts that aren't mediated by his underlings. A Blackberry or other pocket IM device is an obvious tool for this purpose.
I suspect he's being a little naive. He's going to be in charge of the biggest bureaucracy on the planet — does he really think that he can be on a first-person basis with the whole kaboodle? But hey, he's surprised us before!
I just did a pretty good submission about the very same issue. Now, alas, redundant. But I did pick up one useful new fact: General Dynamics makes something called a Sectera Edge which would probably be a good, secure, replacement for the Obamaberry.
Nudity is bad because people complain about it. Violence is OK because people don't complain about it. And violence is more than OK, because it's a sort of representational sex. Consider the fight scene at the end of the second TOS. Are William Shatner and Gary Lockwood fighting or making love? It's not all that obvious.
As it said in TFA, the list comes from readers. So yeah, it is a FOSS wishlist.
Except maybe for Sun, which is actually big in the FOSS world. (Guess its problems are so bad even its fans can't ignore them.) Which is my excuse to reply to this comment:
Some of the companies on this list, like Sun and AMD, are shocking because of their size.
I don't know about AMD, but Sun is not that big any more, for a multitude of reasons that don't need repeating. It's so small these days, it's market capitalization is actually less than its assets!
In ordinary times, Sun would be close to the end, since it's worth more broken up than as a working concern. But to buy up all those assets would take more capital than is available right now.
Here's what I think will happen. The CEO will resist any changes as long as he can, but he's already reorganized the company so that the parts with market value (especially development software) are in separate divisions. Some of these business are small enough to buy without outside leveraging. Google probably has the cash, and they already employ a lot of Sun's Java alumni, so they're an obvious customer for the development tools.
That leaves a core hardware business that really has no value as part of a bigger company. Nobody wants to branch out into SPARC computers, and any potential purchasers already sell x64 computers. But these businesses actually make money — not a lot, and not across the board, but they do.
So you take the money from the sale of the software businesses, add it to Sun's huge cash reserves, and maybe you have enough money to take the company private. Do that, and you're no longer at the mercy of stockholders pressuring you to do dumb stuff to "enhance value". On that basis, Sun could soldier on indefinitely, though as a minor player.
You're really oversimplifying the issue. Depending on how you manage them, wetlands can be either a net sink or a net emitter of greenhouse gases. Also note that wetlands are handy for the way they sequester various pollutants. Finally, destroying wetlands eliminates habitat you might need to maintain biodiversity.
Dude, you're reading a lot more into my posts than I'm actually saying. I am not saying Dams Are Evil. I'm saying they have their ecological cost, and that cost is not insignificant. Would I oppose any proposal to build new dams? No I wouldn't. Would I support any proposal to demolish existing damns? No again.
On the other hand, I would want to know the environmental impact of a proposed new dam. And I would dissent from any claim that dams are harmless and benign. Which is how this thread started — not as an attack on dams.
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
Did I say otherwise? I'm simply saying the lunch, though relatively cheap, is not free. (And more of the carbon bill is ongoing then you think. Flooding wetlands, as dams inevitably do, removes important carbon sinks.) The fact that some of the bill was paid 73 years ago doesn't change that. Though I actually raise the point in connection with the question of building new dams, which comes up pretty often.
Look, I admit I should have read the existing thread before posting. But if you repeat mindless cliches like "nuclear power plants have zero carbon footprint" people are going to call you on it. That's not nitpicking, that's simple honest fact-checking.
If you don't think through what you're saying, you don't have any right to get bent out of shape by what happens next.
That's funny because mine generates 0g per hour. It's called nuclear power.
As usual, the nuclear debate brings up BS. (And yes, I do mean on both sides.) Running a nuclear power plant is not carbon neutral. You have to build the plant, dig up the ore, process the fissionables, operate plant, dispose of the waste. All these things have a carbon footprint. Not nearly as much as burning coal, but not zero either.
The latest statistics [med.govt.nz] I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.
Not perfect, but pretty good compared to the rest of the world. That's almost two-thirds from renewable resources — I doubt that many countries can match that. Even what fossil fuel NZ does use is 5/7 gas to 2/7 coal. Gas not only produces less CO2 per watt than coal, it lacks a lot of nasty pollutants (cough cough).
And if you're saying "well yeah, I wouldn't expect that"... that's what your whole post says.
I'm not even sure what you're saying I'm saying, so I can't confirm or deny that I'm actually saying it.
Trust me, you aren't the only one who cares, it just makes you feel better to think you do.
Where did I say I was the only one that cares? Obviously people care. They wouldn't be taking all these measure,s as half-assed as they are, if they didn't care. My point is simply that the measures that people do take seem to mostly about convincing themselves that they are indeed doing something.
This is sort of like people who know they need to make lifestyle changes in order to stay alive, and just can't do it. I used to know a guy with multiple health issues that should have motivated him to make a lot of basic changes, including giving up smoking. But he didn't do that. He claimed that he was doing a bunch of stuff (herbal remedies among other things) that made that unnecessary.
He died of course. Did he not care about dying? Of course not. He just found it easier to con himself than to make the necessary changes. And I'm afraid we're all a bit like him.
OK, you had me until the last paragraph. (And the moderator who gave you a "flamebait" is an idiot.) You can pick nits with the climate change models until the cows come home, but the fact remains that nobody who's seriously studied them has found real issues with them. The best you can offer is criticism from non-climate scientists who don't even attack the statistical theory, but just quibble with this fact and that.
The only "proof" we're ever going to see is when shit actually happens. I submit that we can't afford to wait for that. The fact that low-carbon energy sources have environmental problems of their own doesn't change that.
My city doesn't have bus service. So yes, waiting for a bus would be incredibly inconvenient.
Even if you did live in a city with bus service, very few U.S. cities have systems that don't take forever to get you to where you want to go. The only people that use them are folks who don't have access to a car for some reason or another.
So, most of us have really good excuses for not relying on public transit. But excuses are not solutions. I don't see anybody pounding on their local government demanding bigger mass transit systems. At least, not as many as complain about the condition of the road system.
Does this include you?
Absolutely. I never said I was better than everybody else. Like everybody else, I'm waiting on everybody else.
Everyone making a small change has a much, much bigger impact than just a few people (those unselfish enough to care) making a big change.
I'm sorry, but that's feel-good nonsense. If everybody switched to cars that go, say 20% better mileage, we're talking about a fractional decrease in total CO2 emissions. It's not even enough to offset all the folks in the developing world who are getting more prosperous and buying cars of their own.
And cars are only one aspect. Meat production accounts for something like 1/3 of greenhouse gases. All that crap you buy from Amazon (and yes, I buy it too) makes a big dent, between the air freight and all those UPS trucks. Even our fondness for excessive packing makes a huge dent.
I'm not saying the problem's intractable. I'm saying it can't be done without major livestyle changes by everybody. And yes, I'm hypocritical about this, because I'm old and tired and don't have the energy to kick the shit that needs to be kicked. But my hypocrisy doesn't change the facts.
I'm not pointing fingers here. I'm just as bad as everybody else. I'm simply saying that people who think they're making a difference by buying a high-mileage car and recycling their bottles are fooling themselves.
Hydro power may be cheaper than fossil fuel, but it's not free. Same goes for its carbon footprint.
If you're going to quote the Retief stories in your sig, how about something that conveys their droll sense of humor. My favorite: "Elevate your manipulative member above your sense organ cluster!" And of course, anything by those weird aliens who never use verbs.
Slashdot Mirror
People who are paid by the hour do. Or if they don't, they get overtime.
But you mean, "people like us". But what "us" do you mean? I'm sure there are a lot of hourly workers on Slashdot.
OK, I thoroughly despise Bush Jr. (was his final press conference pathetic or what?) but on this one issue you're being a little unfair. The CYA attitude is as old as bureaucracy and as the legal profession. Which, come to think of it, are not really different entities.
A couple years ago I was called into a meeting at work. What was it about? Can't tell you, would violate my NDA. And if I did tell you, it would have to be from memory, because everybody in the meeting was to forbidden to take notes or to write email about what happened in the meeting.
I'll bend the rules a bit, and tell you that it was a really, really trivial legal issue. No bodies were being buried, no careers were at stake. Many companies would have just told their lawyers, "Your problem, do whatever is necessary." But that costs money, and we didn't have money to burn. So we picked the most cost effective strategy, and that involved created an absolutely minimal paper trail.
We were following advice that lawyers give their clients every day: minimize your exposure. That's the advice Bush's lawyers gave him 8 years ago, and that's the advice Obama's lawyers are giving him now. I like to think that Obama will ignore them in the name of open government. But he's a pragmatic guy, so he knows that making that kind of idealistic choice comes at a cost.
Obama's something of an idealist; if he weren't, I wouldn't have voted for him. (I probably wouldn't have voted at all.) But he also knows that if he makes every decision on purely idealistic grounds he's going to have lots of Right Decisions and very little to show for it. Woodrow Wilson can tell you all about that.
No doubt Bush thinks he's the same way: making the idealistic decision when he can, making the pragmatic decision when he has to. The difference is that what Bush considers to be his ideals are morally bankrupt, and his critical judgment fatally impaired.
I'm sorry, how is "President Elect" imaginary? It's a widely-used term, and everybody knows what it means. And BTW, it's been around for about three centuries, according to the OED.
But even if it had been invented last year, it wouldn't be "imaginary", not if people are actually using it.
This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too.
Actually, it was an issue for Bush, though it had nothing to do with phone calls or PDA functionality.
Obama is a notorious IM addict. He pretty much ran his campaign through his Blackberry. Now of course, you can use a Blackberry to make phone calls and track your appointments, but that's not why he's under pressure to give it up. The security wonks don't like the potential for text messages getting intercepted, and the lawyers don't like the legal exposure he'd get if the messages were subpoenaed or FOIAed.
I'm not sure if Bush ever had a Blackberry or a PDA, but he used to be a heavy email user. He went cold turkey when he assumed office. According to his "last email" that went out to all his correspondents, it was mainly about the legal exposure.
An NSA-approved smart phone is probably the solution to the security issue. (See one of the submissions in my sig.) I suspect Obama will just blow off the legal issue. He's supposed to be Mr. Open Government, after all.
Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.
And you'd deserve it! People who don't like fangirl stories (what happened to fanboys?) have no place on Slashdot!
But this is not a fanchild issue. Obama keeps talking about the dangers of living in the "Presidential Bubble". One way he wants to avoid this is to have a lot of contacts that aren't mediated by his underlings. A Blackberry or other pocket IM device is an obvious tool for this purpose.
I suspect he's being a little naive. He's going to be in charge of the biggest bureaucracy on the planet — does he really think that he can be on a first-person basis with the whole kaboodle? But hey, he's surprised us before!
I just did a pretty good submission about the very same issue. Now, alas, redundant. But I did pick up one useful new fact: General Dynamics makes something called a Sectera Edge which would probably be a good, secure, replacement for the Obamaberry.
Nudity is bad because people complain about it. Violence is OK because people don't complain about it. And violence is more than OK, because it's a sort of representational sex. Consider the fight scene at the end of the second TOS. Are William Shatner and Gary Lockwood fighting or making love? It's not all that obvious.
You're talking about real life. We're talking about television.
I don't see how exchanging a few emails every day makes the experience less immersive. He's a student, not a Monk.
We're not pedants, we're nitpickers (he said pedantically).
Right, because people who don't ride bicycles don't eat.
As it said in TFA, the list comes from readers. So yeah, it is a FOSS wishlist.
Except maybe for Sun, which is actually big in the FOSS world. (Guess its problems are so bad even its fans can't ignore them.) Which is my excuse to reply to this comment:
Some of the companies on this list, like Sun and AMD, are shocking because of their size.
I don't know about AMD, but Sun is not that big any more, for a multitude of reasons that don't need repeating. It's so small these days, it's market capitalization is actually less than its assets!
In ordinary times, Sun would be close to the end, since it's worth more broken up than as a working concern. But to buy up all those assets would take more capital than is available right now.
Here's what I think will happen. The CEO will resist any changes as long as he can, but he's already reorganized the company so that the parts with market value (especially development software) are in separate divisions. Some of these business are small enough to buy without outside leveraging. Google probably has the cash, and they already employ a lot of Sun's Java alumni, so they're an obvious customer for the development tools.
That leaves a core hardware business that really has no value as part of a bigger company. Nobody wants to branch out into SPARC computers, and any potential purchasers already sell x64 computers. But these businesses actually make money — not a lot, and not across the board, but they do.
So you take the money from the sale of the software businesses, add it to Sun's huge cash reserves, and maybe you have enough money to take the company private. Do that, and you're no longer at the mercy of stockholders pressuring you to do dumb stuff to "enhance value". On that basis, Sun could soldier on indefinitely, though as a minor player.
Fine, stay at home, and be there when the meteor strikes.
You're really oversimplifying the issue. Depending on how you manage them, wetlands can be either a net sink or a net emitter of greenhouse gases. Also note that wetlands are handy for the way they sequester various pollutants. Finally, destroying wetlands eliminates habitat you might need to maintain biodiversity.
As with dams, it's not all black and white.
Dude, you're reading a lot more into my posts than I'm actually saying. I am not saying Dams Are Evil. I'm saying they have their ecological cost, and that cost is not insignificant. Would I oppose any proposal to build new dams? No I wouldn't. Would I support any proposal to demolish existing damns? No again.
On the other hand, I would want to know the environmental impact of a proposed new dam. And I would dissent from any claim that dams are harmless and benign. Which is how this thread started — not as an attack on dams.
Of course it's not completely carbon neutral. But it would be hard to find any energy source with a lower carbon cost.
Did I say otherwise? I'm simply saying the lunch, though relatively cheap, is not free. (And more of the carbon bill is ongoing then you think. Flooding wetlands, as dams inevitably do, removes important carbon sinks.) The fact that some of the bill was paid 73 years ago doesn't change that. Though I actually raise the point in connection with the question of building new dams, which comes up pretty often.
Gee, all of a sudden there's nothing more important in your life then telling everybody how stupid I am. What does that say about your life?
Look, I admit I should have read the existing thread before posting. But if you repeat mindless cliches like "nuclear power plants have zero carbon footprint" people are going to call you on it. That's not nitpicking, that's simple honest fact-checking.
If you don't think through what you're saying, you don't have any right to get bent out of shape by what happens next.
Goddamnit, Slashdotters need to learn to stop being fucking pedantic gits and stop caring about irrelevant bullshit.
You're right. I, for one, will resist any temptation to rebut your mindless scream.
That's funny because mine generates 0g per hour. It's called nuclear power.
As usual, the nuclear debate brings up BS. (And yes, I do mean on both sides.) Running a nuclear power plant is not carbon neutral. You have to build the plant, dig up the ore, process the fissionables, operate plant, dispose of the waste. All these things have a carbon footprint. Not nearly as much as burning coal, but not zero either.
The latest statistics [med.govt.nz] I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.
Not perfect, but pretty good compared to the rest of the world. That's almost two-thirds from renewable resources — I doubt that many countries can match that. Even what fossil fuel NZ does use is 5/7 gas to 2/7 coal. Gas not only produces less CO2 per watt than coal, it lacks a lot of nasty pollutants (cough cough).
And if you're saying "well yeah, I wouldn't expect that"... that's what your whole post says.
I'm not even sure what you're saying I'm saying, so I can't confirm or deny that I'm actually saying it.
Trust me, you aren't the only one who cares, it just makes you feel better to think you do.
Where did I say I was the only one that cares? Obviously people care. They wouldn't be taking all these measure,s as half-assed as they are, if they didn't care. My point is simply that the measures that people do take seem to mostly about convincing themselves that they are indeed doing something.
This is sort of like people who know they need to make lifestyle changes in order to stay alive, and just can't do it. I used to know a guy with multiple health issues that should have motivated him to make a lot of basic changes, including giving up smoking. But he didn't do that. He claimed that he was doing a bunch of stuff (herbal remedies among other things) that made that unnecessary.
He died of course. Did he not care about dying? Of course not. He just found it easier to con himself than to make the necessary changes. And I'm afraid we're all a bit like him.
Yes, but it boils you too. Not terribly practical.
OK, you had me until the last paragraph. (And the moderator who gave you a "flamebait" is an idiot.) You can pick nits with the climate change models until the cows come home, but the fact remains that nobody who's seriously studied them has found real issues with them. The best you can offer is criticism from non-climate scientists who don't even attack the statistical theory, but just quibble with this fact and that.
The only "proof" we're ever going to see is when shit actually happens. I submit that we can't afford to wait for that. The fact that low-carbon energy sources have environmental problems of their own doesn't change that.
My city doesn't have bus service. So yes, waiting for a bus would be incredibly inconvenient.
Even if you did live in a city with bus service, very few U.S. cities have systems that don't take forever to get you to where you want to go. The only people that use them are folks who don't have access to a car for some reason or another.
So, most of us have really good excuses for not relying on public transit. But excuses are not solutions. I don't see anybody pounding on their local government demanding bigger mass transit systems. At least, not as many as complain about the condition of the road system.
Does this include you?
Absolutely. I never said I was better than everybody else. Like everybody else, I'm waiting on everybody else.
Everyone making a small change has a much, much bigger impact than just a few people (those unselfish enough to care) making a big change.
I'm sorry, but that's feel-good nonsense. If everybody switched to cars that go, say 20% better mileage, we're talking about a fractional decrease in total CO2 emissions. It's not even enough to offset all the folks in the developing world who are getting more prosperous and buying cars of their own.
And cars are only one aspect. Meat production accounts for something like 1/3 of greenhouse gases. All that crap you buy from Amazon (and yes, I buy it too) makes a big dent, between the air freight and all those UPS trucks. Even our fondness for excessive packing makes a huge dent.
I'm not saying the problem's intractable. I'm saying it can't be done without major livestyle changes by everybody. And yes, I'm hypocritical about this, because I'm old and tired and don't have the energy to kick the shit that needs to be kicked. But my hypocrisy doesn't change the facts.
I'm not pointing fingers here. I'm just as bad as everybody else. I'm simply saying that people who think they're making a difference by buying a high-mileage car and recycling their bottles are fooling themselves.
Hydro power may be cheaper than fossil fuel, but it's not free. Same goes for its carbon footprint.
If you're going to quote the Retief stories in your sig, how about something that conveys their droll sense of humor. My favorite: "Elevate your manipulative member above your sense organ cluster!" And of course, anything by those weird aliens who never use verbs.