One of the reasons I have no time for the anti-WTO protestors is that they appear to have no idea what they are protesting about. They completely fail to set out a coherent set of political goals or a strategy to achieve them.
Unfortunately, this misconception is quite common.
You are confusing persons with people. The impact of the course that globalization is being directed along affects many different people in many different ways. When it hurts people, they protest. When it hurts people in different ways for different reasons, they usually protest about the problem that is relevant to them. Naturally, this means people protesting for different reasons, and some of them might be at odds with the reasons other people oppose globalization's current direction. Big Fat Hairy Deal! Why would you expect anything else - let alone try to use this as some kind of reason to dismiss their problems or concerns?!?
I don't understand why the vast range of issues regarding globalization's current course makes them somehow less legitimate than the kind of highly organised and coherrent campaign that only insincere PR organisations are capible of.
Many people have extremely coherrent set of political goals, strategy, etc. That different people are different, such that all that diversity results in a diverse rather than single-minded "movement" seems an absurd reason to dismiss all those people.
And it's exactly the same argument that MS is making against Linux, and MS's argument is just as silly. Ok ok, it's not silly, there is real merit to the arg, but there is more merit to the counter arg - as demonsrated by Linux and OSS now being "THE threat" to MS.
People are different. Therefore, if a mass of people are genuinely sincere, it would be quite surprising (and quite suspicious) if they were all of one mind, all with the exactly the same narrowly defined goal. But Linux works. And Windows wouldn't work if MS didn't pay it's people to make it.
Equally it is a bit odd being lectured on the evils of global capitalism by some teenager wearing a $150 pair of Nike trainers.
In my experience (which might not apply here but I suspect it does), statements such as this are almost always vacant excuses to rationalize the dismissal of a point of view (without listening), in such a way that you don't have to question your own rationality.
For example:
1) How do you know he was wearing $150 nike trainers? I have a pair of nike trainers that were purchased directly from sweatshop workers for fair price. (I never wear them cause nike wouldn't know style if it bit them on the nose, they were a gift). Or did you assume that since you didn't agree with him, he must be an ignorant hypocrite to be dismissed?
2) Did you pay enough attention to the lecture on the evils of global capitalism to find out if the particular evils that this particular teenager objected to, did, in fact, require that he not wear nike for some reason? Or did you just assume that since you didn't want to agree with him, he must be an ignorant hypocrite?
3) How do you know that he didn't aquire the shoes before he aquired his opinion on global capitalism? If they're as evil as you seem to think he should think they are, then he should at least get some wear out of them now that he's got them.
4) Do you know that he purchased the shoes? Is it possible that his grandmother, trying really hard to grok past the generation barrier, gave them to him as a gift and he feels that telling you about his views on capitalism is a better thing to do about it than to reject his grandmother's gift?
Bottom line, (which may or may not apply to you, but certainly applies to a lot of people out there), finding flimsy reasons to dismiss an opinion you do not like, is not sufficient for anyone who likes to think of themselves as a rational being. But that's a great thing about having higher cognitive functions - you can rationalise away anything you do, and you fall for your fanciful "reasoning" every time:-)
I happen to be a member of the Yale Solar Car team - Team Lux. So needless to say I've studied solar cars quite a bit. So...
WHat kind of batteries tend to get used?
I'm assuming that you want the most storage for the least weight (polymer batteries?) vs limited budget (cheap-ass lead-acid...)
Chemically propelled cars can potentially be much simpler and more efficient, since they aren't losing power through the extra electrical storage/transformation
I do a lot of solar projects (mostly on a miniature scale, won a few small solar competitions, etc), and sometimes keep an eye on some commerical electric car developements, and my understanding is that the opposite is true - anything with a combustion engine suffers from hundreds of moving, wearing parts, relies on kludgey, expensive additional systems (clutch, etc), dumps all it's energy every time you hit the brakes - then wastes fuel getting back up to speed again. (Which in a city commute might mean you're spending ten times the energy actually needed. Hence hybrids getting up to four times the mileage).
Electric engines are cheaper to make, last longer, more reliable, often involve no moving parts bar the shaft itself, gruntier even when running on significantly less energy, etc etc.
But until an electricity storage system gets to the point where it hold even a signficant fraction of the energy that petrol does, you're right.
BTW - I'd be interested to know how many orders of magnitude less energy these solar cars run on compared to a combustion car - can you give us an idea of what a typical solar-racer solar panel output is?
Saying a fact is established is not the same thing as establishing a fact. If it is proven, why don't you mention the known proof in your post?
Because we're not talking simple sound-bite psuedo-science here. It's big, it's complex, and it's not something you can just post to slashdot as a few pages of text and a link. If people aren't going to do their own homework, I can't do it for them. All I can do is say "you're making assumptions that are simply not the case. Read up on these things rather than spreading misconceptions about them."
I'm not going to waste my life trying to educate someone who quite possibly needs and wants to believe that pollutants never had any real effects, and will defend said worldview from any and all evidence or reason. But every now and then I waste a much smaller amount of time bitching about politically-motivated ignorance. And sometimes when it's clear that someone is talking crap they know nothing about, maybe I'll respond with an equally idiotic post, such as the one you just replied to:-)
Unfortunately in this case, "Reading up" doesn't mean Popular Science, Time, or CNN, or whatever. It takes actual research. And likely no-one is going to bother. And next time Slashdot covers a story about o-zone, likely the same people will trot out the same misconceptions about how it's probably natural, and is another evil greenie conspiracy hurting good clean industry to the detriment of us all.
i>nice try, but it takes CFCs 50 years to get to the upper atmosphear where it can cause the damage to O3
This is kind of sad. Read up on the details of the science involved in the ozone issue - it is _known_ beyond all reasonable doubt that the problem is manmade.
Ozone hole science is NOT based on correlation.
It sounds like you've misheard something along the lines of "CFC's can take as long as 50 years to reach the upper atmosphere" and turned it into some cosy argument for there being no need to change anything.
You say "perhaps" this, "perhaps" that. But the fact is that most of these "unknowns" are not unknown at all. The doubts you raise have been laid to rest a long time ago by sound methodology. Nobel-winning methodology in one case. Just because joe-public-friendly articles don't have the space or readership go into hard, tedious, boring, ugly science doesn't mean the science isn't rock solid.
Just because the science indicates that particular industrial emmissions are the cause doesn't mean that it must be some sort of wacko lefty greenie psuedo-science.
Where is the evidence of the increase of human skin cancers due to "ozone hole" ?
Speaking from personal experience, and speaking of the experiences of other people I know, you sunburn sooo fast in New Zealand, compared to hotter, sunnier, more northery countries, it's scary. If you accept that there is a link between sunburn and skin-cancer, the dreadfull ease of getting burned when under the ozone hole should constitute evidence.
If you don't accept any link between sunburn and cancer, you're probably the sort of person that the PR department of BiocideCorp Chemicals Inc would love to hire...:-)
(I currently live at about the same latitude north as I did latitude south when in New Zealand. The sun is just different. It doesn't have the same sting in it - you can feel the difference).
As a mix of protest and consumer rights enforcement, could get some lawyers to draft a small contract saying "I am buying this CD on the understanding that it will play on all CD players, as confirmed by the salesperson. If this is not a CD-player compatible product, it can be returned for a full refund".
If the sales person refuses to sign, ask them to get the manager to sign it. If neither will, you walk out of the store leaving them with the CD and the unsigned contract.
Either way you win - they can't help but remember such an example of consumer concern, and if they sign, you can get a refund no-matter what their store policy if the CD is degraded.
Is format-shifting is a consumer right in the USA? (I'm new here)
Not buying achieves nothing. No-one will notice. Your sacrifice only serves to lower your own quality of life.
What I'm thinking you should do is buy CDs. Take them home and rip them. If they don't rip, take them back and get a refund. This FORCES the store to take notice, and data on the number of returns goes all the way up the distribution chain to the asshole execs who try to work out exactly how unethical a policy they can get away with.
I'm new to this country and don't know much about consumer rights laws here. Given that CD stores are reluctant to take back used CDs (and sometimes have a policy against it), it would be useful for us to know our rights. That the CD violates your right to format-shift might be sufficient grounds that they cannot legally refuse the refund, as might the misrepresentation of the product looking like a CD but not playing in all CD players. I don't know.
If someone like the EFF could get a lawyer to write a page explaining our consumer rights with regards to these degraded-CDs, that would be very useful. It may be that the matter is legally grey and we wait for the results of lawsuits. In which case, it's up to us to not take "no" for an answer when demanding our money back.
The result: Yick. But good enough for most people.
Though thinking about it... they both get to their results in similar ways (hence Fraunhofer's suit against Xiph). So I'm curious as to what the audio artifacts left over from such a conversion would be. My guess is... good enough for most people who will be listening to them via 2" computer speakers anyway
I've tried a similar thing - transcribing MP3 to minidisc (a 256kbps format), via analogue audio lineout. My thinking was that while such recordings would sound crap on my sound system, I usually use the minidisc for portable music, so would only hear them via earphones anyway. Most songs are fine - equivalent to a very mediocre cassette-tape/walkman quality, which is quite acceptable considering earphones, traffic and ambient noise etc. However with some kinds of sound, you get some really noticable artefacts, clearly heard on even earphones.
Having done it, I'll continue to do it because the convenience of being able to take the songs with me is easily worth the sound hit, but it's only a in-the-meantime solution - as soon as I get the gear to record directly from the CDs, I'll start reworking my minidiscs. Or better - ditch them alltogether for a HDD-mp3 (or ogg) player, if one that meets my requirements reaches the market soon enough.
Summary - don't do it unless it's just a quick-fix to tide you over while you do the first-gen format-shifting from CD, or you're using it in situations where sound quality is unimportant.
Most importantly, don't let other people hear it, as they will assume the crap quality indicates a crap format.
"So, a reasonable extrapolation says that Michaelangelo was not the only artist around at the time. "
Thats right, but he was one of very few.
I can't believe I have to point this out - you are talking about a time when by necessity 99% of people were illiterate, and the number of man-hours that a society could support being spent on non-essential labour (eg arts) was a tiny tiny fraction of what it is today. Today, an hour of work buys enough food for a week. Parents of common blood can now afford to support their give kids through 12 (or more) years of education instead of work. Think about these things.
If anything, the increase in our arts community over the years is a fraction of what it perhaps should be when compared to the much larger growth of similar non-essential pursuits resulting from the mechanisation of essential labour.
Talk of artists then and artists now without consideration for the changed cost of living is insane.
Dream on. You're confusing their attempts to avoid FDA prosecution with genuine evidence. If it has been debunked, why do the FDA studies still show differently?
Biotech companies are doing great work
Methinks you read too much corporate propaganda. If you actually read the fine print, you discover that the biotech companies are doing the ethically dubious but highly profitable stuff, while the ethically laudible but profitably dubious stuff (golden rice, etc) that the corporate PR is always singing about, is almost always being done by various govt-funded agencies, universities, public institutions, and the like.
The most ethically laudible thing that all too many biotech companies are doing is occaisionally waivering their fees on on the use of the processes that make GM possible, when used for such laudible purposes. Or if you're really cynical; they don't halt the developement of useful PR material via unaffordable patent fees:-)
By the way, you make it sound like there is not a single biotech claim that you seriously question. I doubt that the hook-line&sinker image is what you want to project. If you agree with what they are doing, being able to come up with justifications that address the raised issues, rather than sound scarily like PR avoiding the issues, would work to your advantage. Don't take that the wrong way, it's meant to be vaguely constructive criticism:)
Re:Tell me what THIS is good for?
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Then why aren't you commuting in a hybrid one seater? Is it your dedication to mindless consumerism and your yuppie stupiditiy?
It's funny. People assume that their flaws are normal. Has it ever occured to you that just because you wouldn't dream of leaving your car behind, everyone else is the same?
Like the way so many lying cheating backstabbing exec's never assume that ruthless pursuit of wealth and power is the norm, and so in their mind, there is nothing wrong with their dirty office intrigues. (In case you're wondering, I don't have anyone in particular in mind:)
A word of advice: Ditch the car, commute by bike until you're good at it. You might be surprised at how much quicker you arrive at work (no traffic jams for cyclists.), how much better you feel, how much time you save (no need to spend time at the gym, quicker commute), and how much money you save (no petrol, gym, maintenance, etc).
If you live on a mountain, you've got an excuse, but not a very big one:-)
IMHO, trying to dismiss someone's views by assuming (with less than no evidence) that they must be a hypocrite, is pretty low.
Re:"Are these sorts of actions justifiable?"
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No.
No.
No.
Problem solved.
Excuse me?!? I didn't see a single solution in that entire post. All you did was disagree with a bunch of thoughts regarding possible solutions.
"Drugs are Bad, mkay."
There, I've just solved the world's drug problems.
:-)
Re:At least people notice terrorism.
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But there is considerable dispute over what caused it--among scientists
You don't seem to have a good grasp of the problem if you think this is relevant. Global warming is a prediction based on the observed effects of gases, not a retrospective attempt to explain current temperatures. Even if currently observed temperature rises were entirely natural, that's quite possibly BAD news, because a) it doesn't even remotely suggest that global warming won't result from our greenhouse gases, and b) it means any greenhouse warming will be IN ADDITION TO natural warming, which means even deeper shit than artificial warming alone.
Like everyone else I guess, I kinda hope that it will never really eventuate, but day by day, the evidence gets even less contraversial. There may be disagreement among "scientists", but disagreement among reputable scientists of high standing is becoming awfully difficult to find.
Re:The "Roundup Ready" Seeds
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The problems with GM seeds are many, and rarely heard over the more emotive noise the issue generates. Hence many incorrectly assume there are no problems.
But anyway, here is an example: farmer has his crops contaminated by GM crops from neighbouring farm. To add injury to injury, he was successfully sued by Monsanto for violating their IP.
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/04/03/1.htm l
Eg GM+IP=unprecidented corporate power that can and is being abused. So the current deal is that the corporation makes the product, but none of the economic or ecological or fallout from it is their responsibility. Wow, no wonder bio-corps are such a great investment - how can they lose! The starlink corn thing may yet prove an exception here, but only because it hit enough wealthy and powerful people. (I mean wealthy and powerful in the sense that subsitence farmers in 3rd world countries are not).
Re:People tend to shoot back
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Start by debunking everything you read at junkscience.com
Are you insane!?!
Junkscience contains almost nothing except more junk science masquerading as debunking. It's almost solid propaganda, and even if saying they're liars funded by corporate interests "doesn't count", that their funding reads like a "who's who" list of the worst corporate polluters, rights abusers, etc, should at the very least suggest that you might use genuine facts to debunk things, not yet more junk science masquerading as the genuine thing.
If you're going to debunk something, have the intellectual honesty to do it by genuine means, not just select a website that tells you what you want to hear.
I disagree. They're subsidized far more than electrics, but by different mechanisms to what you're thinking of. For example, think how many billions of dollars of infrastructure have been shaped to accomodate gas, but not electric. Sure, that's the Way Things Are, but it's also acting as a huge subsidy.
Not to mention the huge subsidies in terms of the costs of the vehicles that owners do not pay, but are forced on others, such as pollution, oil-supply induced wars etc. If the exhaust pipe of vehicles were required to be piped straight back into the cab such that only the producer of the emmissions had to breath them, opinions on gas would change real fast:-)
Show me the electric car that can do all that, and cost less than $20k (without government subsidies hiding half the cost)
Show me the gas-powered truck that can do all that and cost less than $20 (without the huge subsidies hiding most of the cost). Right now, the $$$ cost of petroleum vehicles is a mere fraction of the real cost we pay. Not to mention the huge subsidy that gas effectively enjoys compared to electric when it comes to infrastructure, because gas is currently established tech while electric is currently not.
Like I said, while electric motors are more powerful, cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, more reliable, faster, smaller, quieter, longer-lasting, more efficient, lower maintenance, etc than gas motors, they have one big disadvantage - the form of energy they use is incredibly difficult to store, and until that probem is solved, electric vehicles will benefit from only a few of the advantages of electric motors. In other words, the combustion engine is still going strong, but doesn't stand a chance - technology is continually inproving the storage of electricity, and storage of electricity is the only thing preventing electrics from sending combustion engines the way of the steam engine.
I don't dispute that your gas truck is the best cheap-n-nasty way to go at this time. What I'm saying is that the demise of the combustion engine is inevitable, simply because they are such utter crap, and an infinitely superior technology is slowly heading towards becoming viable in small vehicles.
Of course, like the steam engine, enthusiests of combustion will remain a long time after.
Sure, if you don't mind me dumping 1310 pounds of lead acid cells in your backyard every couple of years
Oh come on. Lead acid is a joke. Any electric car that runs on lead acid is either an obsolete model, or a half-hearted token attempt to grab some PR. Look into polymer batteries, flywheels, fuel cells, etc. Pointing to a lead-acid electric car in order to defend sticking to what you know is like pointing to Win3.1 to defend the command line user interface on home computers.
This is the problem with both induction motors and battery motors: they don't eliminate the fossil fuel consumption, they just hide it at the power company.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the technology. Take two identical combustion engines producing identical emissions. Put one under the hood of a car, and use the other to charge a cell, which you then use to drive an electric car. The electric car will do the same commuting as the combustion car yet total emmissions can be ten to a hundred times less. How is this possible? Because the inefficiency of combustion engine cars is simply mind blowing.
Not only do they require wasteful, expensive kludges like the clutch, no only do they frequently operate at 0% efficiency (they emit pollutants even when you are not using them - just waiting at the lights), not only do they simply dump the vast majority of their energy (every time you hit the brakes, you throw away all your energy, then burn yet more fuel to get back up to speed when the light turns green, as opposed to electrics which convert your kinetic energy back into storage when you brake), but they are simply insanely inefficient even when running at maximum efficiency under ideal conditions, which don't exist in the real world to begin with.
And on top of all that, even the dirtiest power stations are far cleaner energy generators than cars to begin with, and in many areas, the powerstations produce no emissions.
Bottom line: It's simply a joke to claim that electrics just hide the emissions. They don't. Electrics are genuinely cleaner by orders of magnitude. When you discover how much cleaner they really are, you realise why combustion engines are causing so great a pollution problem in so many areas. When you learn how electric motors beat the pants of combustions in all other areas too, you lose all respect for those crude, smelly, noisy, victorian contraptions. The big problem is that the full power of the electric motor cannot be brought to bear in a car until the problem of storing electric power is solved. Until then, electric cars will be running underpowered with tiny electric motors (and even then are still giving combustion motors a hard time).
Heh, looks like you hit reply a little too fast too, which I guess makes us even:-)
(I hit "Submit" before I realised I had my mental diagram of the spectrum mixed up, and since I then posted a "duh, me stoopid" correction, you must have hit "Submit" before noticing that there was already a retraction)
Being able to edit one's posts here would save some Virtual Embarressment. (As you can guess, I'm thinking of me in particular here:-))
Speaking of wavelengths, I'm trying to modify my computer case to add some extra EM sheilding. (The computer currently affects the TV, radio, cordless phones, etc). Using metal mesh, I don't suppose you (or anyone else) would know a) how small the holes have to be to block all the useful frequencies, b) how great the metal-to-hole ratio has to be, to be effective, and c) if a mesh of wires will do it, even if the wires are insulated and thus the horizontal ones don't connect with the vertical where they cross/touch, (though are elsewhere both connected to each and ground)?
(The only DIY faraday caging stuff I seem to find on the net seems to be the ravin^D^D^D^D^Dwisdom of some survivalist showing people how to protect their televisions from the EMP blasts that will accompany nuclear war. And I'm not sure why this is necessary when the TV stations themselves are not shielded...)
As a sidenote, those interested in such issues of Junk Science
An additional note - those interested in junk science would probably also do well to avoid the website of the same name, which is actually a corporate front, funded by the worst of the worst polluters, rights-abusers, environmentally destructuve companies, etc.
(It's largely just fairly crude anti-environmental propaganda, but if you're the sort who both tends to be highly suspicious of enviromentalist's claims, and don't thoroughly verify your sources, it could easily sucker you in).
I read in a magazine that the guy who runs it is something of a nutbar too. Some of the claims he's made and things he's done would make even the slimiest MultinationalBigPolluter Co. PR man wince:-)
But anyway, like I say, if you want junk science, then www.junkscience.com might not be a good one, because much of the so-called junk science there is of the straw man variety, and much of the debunking of said imaginary or exaggerated junk science, is itself junk science. IOW, you could look at it as a bonanza of junk science and of junk science junking other science, or as an annoying perversion of what the term "junk science" should refer to. Whatever, but the chat forums there seem filled with people who swallow the propaganda hook line and sinker, and dance to the tune of the website's backers, so I just found it kinda depressing:-)
Stop encouraging the MPAA to do this by buying their product.
1) "Fighting" this shit by discarding our culture, with virtually no hope of said large sacrifice even being noticed, is a tactically poor approach to the problem.
2) I am inclined to think that buying DVDs might even be a better approach than not (if only slightly), because DVD protection has been broken, and now that encryption export laws have been relaxed, in conjunction with the DMCA coming into force, a new format is likely to be much nastier, thus by enlarging DVD infrastructure, you enlarge the problems facing attempts to seriously crank up the cripples.
3) Even though copyright law has recently been rewritten (via corrupt means) to remove our legal right to our own heritage, I don't think it is morally acceptable that we should make that sacrifice while the bad guys rake it in. Make them work for their racketeering. Break their anti-competitive systems, and don't sacrifice your quality of life or entertainment to them while you do it.
Sure, the MPAA gets money if I buy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but I get an example of their latest trade-barrier, I get to find out how to bypass it, and spread that information. That information may lead to others purchasing more DVDs, but it will also lead to a shift in finance away from manufacturers of crippled DVD players, and into the pockets of those who defy the MPAA.
I get an example of my society's culture, and the MPAA gets a few dollars and the start of another headache. Fair trade:-)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons I have no time for the anti-WTO protestors is that they appear to have no idea what they are protesting about. They completely fail to set out a coherent set of political goals or a strategy to achieve them.
:-)
:-)
Unfortunately, this misconception is quite common.
You are confusing persons with people. The impact of the course that globalization is being directed along affects many different people in many different ways. When it hurts people, they protest. When it hurts people in different ways for different reasons, they usually protest about the problem that is relevant to them. Naturally, this means people protesting for different reasons, and some of them might be at odds with the reasons other people oppose globalization's current direction. Big Fat Hairy Deal! Why would you expect anything else - let alone try to use this as some kind of reason to dismiss their problems or concerns?!?
I don't understand why the vast range of issues regarding globalization's current course makes them somehow less legitimate than the kind of highly organised and coherrent campaign that only insincere PR organisations are capible of.
Many people have extremely coherrent set of political goals, strategy, etc. That different people are different, such that all that diversity results in a diverse rather than single-minded "movement" seems an absurd reason to dismiss all those people.
And it's exactly the same argument that MS is making against Linux, and MS's argument is just as silly. Ok ok, it's not silly, there is real merit to the arg, but there is more merit to the counter arg - as demonsrated by Linux and OSS now being "THE threat" to MS.
People are different. Therefore, if a mass of people are genuinely sincere, it would be quite surprising (and quite suspicious) if they were all of one mind, all with the exactly the same narrowly defined goal. But Linux works. And Windows wouldn't work if MS didn't pay it's people to make it.
Equally it is a bit odd being lectured on the evils of global capitalism by some teenager wearing a $150 pair of Nike trainers.
In my experience (which might not apply here but I suspect it does), statements such as this are almost always vacant excuses to rationalize the dismissal of a point of view (without listening), in such a way that you don't have to question your own rationality.
For example:
1) How do you know he was wearing $150 nike trainers? I have a pair of nike trainers that were purchased directly from sweatshop workers for fair price. (I never wear them cause nike wouldn't know style if it bit them on the nose, they were a gift). Or did you assume that since you didn't agree with him, he must be an ignorant hypocrite to be dismissed?
2) Did you pay enough attention to the lecture on the evils of global capitalism to find out if the particular evils that this particular teenager objected to, did, in fact, require that he not wear nike for some reason? Or did you just assume that since you didn't want to agree with him, he must be an ignorant hypocrite?
3) How do you know that he didn't aquire the shoes before he aquired his opinion on global capitalism? If they're as evil as you seem to think he should think they are, then he should at least get some wear out of them now that he's got them.
4) Do you know that he purchased the shoes? Is it possible that his grandmother, trying really hard to grok past the generation barrier, gave them to him as a gift and he feels that telling you about his views on capitalism is a better thing to do about it than to reject his grandmother's gift?
Bottom line, (which may or may not apply to you, but certainly applies to a lot of people out there), finding flimsy reasons to dismiss an opinion you do not like, is not sufficient for anyone who likes to think of themselves as a rational being. But that's a great thing about having higher cognitive functions - you can rationalise away anything you do, and you fall for your fanciful "reasoning" every time
As for me, I'm quite happy being irrational
I happen to be a member of the Yale Solar Car team - Team Lux. So needless to say I've studied solar cars quite a bit. So...
WHat kind of batteries tend to get used?
I'm assuming that you want the most storage for the least weight (polymer batteries?) vs limited budget (cheap-ass lead-acid...)
Chemically propelled cars can potentially be much simpler and more efficient, since they aren't losing power through the extra electrical storage/transformation
I do a lot of solar projects (mostly on a miniature scale, won a few small solar competitions, etc), and sometimes keep an eye on some commerical electric car developements, and my understanding is that the opposite is true - anything with a combustion engine suffers from hundreds of moving, wearing parts, relies on kludgey, expensive additional systems (clutch, etc), dumps all it's energy every time you hit the brakes - then wastes fuel getting back up to speed again. (Which in a city commute might mean you're spending ten times the energy actually needed. Hence hybrids getting up to four times the mileage).
Electric engines are cheaper to make, last longer, more reliable, often involve no moving parts bar the shaft itself, gruntier even when running on significantly less energy, etc etc.
But until an electricity storage system gets to the point where it hold even a signficant fraction of the energy that petrol does, you're right.
BTW - I'd be interested to know how many orders of magnitude less energy these solar cars run on compared to a combustion car - can you give us an idea of what a typical solar-racer solar panel output is?
Saying a fact is established is not the same thing as establishing a fact. If it is proven, why don't you mention the known proof in your post?
:-)
Because we're not talking simple sound-bite psuedo-science here. It's big, it's complex, and it's not something you can just post to slashdot as a few pages of text and a link. If people aren't going to do their own homework, I can't do it for them. All I can do is say "you're making assumptions that are simply not the case. Read up on these things rather than spreading misconceptions about them."
I'm not going to waste my life trying to educate someone who quite possibly needs and wants to believe that pollutants never had any real effects, and will defend said worldview from any and all evidence or reason. But every now and then I waste a much smaller amount of time bitching about politically-motivated ignorance. And sometimes when it's clear that someone is talking crap they know nothing about, maybe I'll respond with an equally idiotic post, such as the one you just replied to
Unfortunately in this case, "Reading up" doesn't mean Popular Science, Time, or CNN, or whatever. It takes actual research. And likely no-one is going to bother. And next time Slashdot covers a story about o-zone, likely the same people will trot out the same misconceptions about how it's probably natural, and is another evil greenie conspiracy hurting good clean industry to the detriment of us all.
i>nice try, but it takes CFCs 50 years to get to the upper atmosphear where it can cause the damage to O3
This is kind of sad. Read up on the details of the science involved in the ozone issue - it is _known_ beyond all reasonable doubt that the problem is manmade.
Ozone hole science is NOT based on correlation.
It sounds like you've misheard something along the lines of "CFC's can take as long as 50 years to reach the upper atmosphere" and turned it into some cosy argument for there being no need to change anything.
You say "perhaps" this, "perhaps" that. But the fact is that most of these "unknowns" are not unknown at all. The doubts you raise have been laid to rest a long time ago by sound methodology. Nobel-winning methodology in one case. Just because joe-public-friendly articles don't have the space or readership go into hard, tedious, boring, ugly science doesn't mean the science isn't rock solid.
Just because the science indicates that particular industrial emmissions are the cause doesn't mean that it must be some sort of wacko lefty greenie psuedo-science.
Where is the evidence of the increase of human skin cancers due to "ozone hole" ?
:-)
Speaking from personal experience, and speaking of the experiences of other people I know, you sunburn sooo fast in New Zealand, compared to hotter, sunnier, more northery countries, it's scary. If you accept that there is a link between sunburn and skin-cancer, the dreadfull ease of getting burned when under the ozone hole should constitute evidence.
If you don't accept any link between sunburn and cancer, you're probably the sort of person that the PR department of BiocideCorp Chemicals Inc would love to hire...
(I currently live at about the same latitude north as I did latitude south when in New Zealand. The sun is just different. It doesn't have the same sting in it - you can feel the difference).
As a mix of protest and consumer rights enforcement, could get some lawyers to draft a small contract saying "I am buying this CD on the understanding that it will play on all CD players, as confirmed by the salesperson. If this is not a CD-player compatible product, it can be returned for a full refund".
If the sales person refuses to sign, ask them to get the manager to sign it. If neither will, you walk out of the store leaving them with the CD and the unsigned contract.
Either way you win - they can't help but remember such an example of consumer concern, and if they sign, you can get a refund no-matter what their store policy if the CD is degraded.
Is format-shifting is a consumer right in the USA? (I'm new here)
Thoughts?
Not buying achieves nothing. No-one will notice. Your sacrifice only serves to lower your own quality of life.
What I'm thinking you should do is buy CDs. Take them home and rip them. If they don't rip, take them back and get a refund. This FORCES the store to take notice, and data on the number of returns goes all the way up the distribution chain to the asshole execs who try to work out exactly how unethical a policy they can get away with.
I'm new to this country and don't know much about consumer rights laws here. Given that CD stores are reluctant to take back used CDs (and sometimes have a policy against it), it would be useful for us to know our rights. That the CD violates your right to format-shift might be sufficient grounds that they cannot legally refuse the refund, as might the misrepresentation of the product looking like a CD but not playing in all CD players. I don't know.
If someone like the EFF could get a lawyer to write a page explaining our consumer rights with regards to these degraded-CDs, that would be very useful. It may be that the matter is legally grey and we wait for the results of lawsuits. In which case, it's up to us to not take "no" for an answer when demanding our money back.
I'm not at all surprised that judges think that open source enthusiasts are pirates; Think about the rallying cry, "Information wants to be free!"
To the non-technical audience, that means "I don't want to pay for my information!"
You're right. Perhaps we should consider changing the phrase slightly.
"Information seeks freedom"?
"Information wants to be freed"?
"Information wants liberty"?
These are much harder to misunderstand, albiet not as aesthetic as the original to those of us who understand it.
Comments?
The result: Yick. But good enough for most people.
Though thinking about it... they both get to their results in similar ways (hence Fraunhofer's suit against Xiph). So I'm curious as to what the audio artifacts left over from such a conversion would be. My guess is... good enough for most people who will be listening to them via 2" computer speakers anyway
I've tried a similar thing - transcribing MP3 to minidisc (a 256kbps format), via analogue audio lineout. My thinking was that while such recordings would sound crap on my sound system, I usually use the minidisc for portable music, so would only hear them via earphones anyway. Most songs are fine - equivalent to a very mediocre cassette-tape/walkman quality, which is quite acceptable considering earphones, traffic and ambient noise etc. However with some kinds of sound, you get some really noticable artefacts, clearly heard on even earphones.
Having done it, I'll continue to do it because the convenience of being able to take the songs with me is easily worth the sound hit, but it's only a in-the-meantime solution - as soon as I get the gear to record directly from the CDs, I'll start reworking my minidiscs. Or better - ditch them alltogether for a HDD-mp3 (or ogg) player, if one that meets my requirements reaches the market soon enough.
Summary - don't do it unless it's just a quick-fix to tide you over while you do the first-gen format-shifting from CD, or you're using it in situations where sound quality is unimportant.
Most importantly, don't let other people hear it, as they will assume the crap quality indicates a crap format.
"So, a reasonable extrapolation says that Michaelangelo was not the only artist around at the time. "
Thats right, but he was one of very few.
I can't believe I have to point this out - you are talking about a time when by necessity 99% of people were illiterate, and the number of man-hours that a society could support being spent on non-essential labour (eg arts) was a tiny tiny fraction of what it is today. Today, an hour of work buys enough food for a week. Parents of common blood can now afford to support their give kids through 12 (or more) years of education instead of work. Think about these things.
If anything, the increase in our arts community over the years is a fraction of what it perhaps should be when compared to the much larger growth of similar non-essential pursuits resulting from the mechanisation of essential labour.
Talk of artists then and artists now without consideration for the changed cost of living is insane.
the "StarLink allergy" has been debunked.
:-)
:)
Dream on. You're confusing their attempts to avoid FDA prosecution with genuine evidence. If it has been debunked, why do the FDA studies still show differently?
Biotech companies are doing great work
Methinks you read too much corporate propaganda. If you actually read the fine print, you discover that the biotech companies are doing the ethically dubious but highly profitable stuff, while the ethically laudible but profitably dubious stuff (golden rice, etc) that the corporate PR is always singing about, is almost always being done by various govt-funded agencies, universities, public institutions, and the like.
The most ethically laudible thing that all too many biotech companies are doing is occaisionally waivering their fees on on the use of the processes that make GM possible, when used for such laudible purposes. Or if you're really cynical; they don't halt the developement of useful PR material via unaffordable patent fees
By the way, you make it sound like there is not a single biotech claim that you seriously question. I doubt that the hook-line&sinker image is what you want to project. If you agree with what they are doing, being able to come up with justifications that address the raised issues, rather than sound scarily like PR avoiding the issues, would work to your advantage. Don't take that the wrong way, it's meant to be vaguely constructive criticism
Then why aren't you commuting in a hybrid one seater? Is it your dedication to mindless consumerism and your yuppie stupiditiy?
:)
:-)
It's funny. People assume that their flaws are normal. Has it ever occured to you that just because you wouldn't dream of leaving your car behind, everyone else is the same?
Like the way so many lying cheating backstabbing exec's never assume that ruthless pursuit of wealth and power is the norm, and so in their mind, there is nothing wrong with their dirty office intrigues. (In case you're wondering, I don't have anyone in particular in mind
A word of advice: Ditch the car, commute by bike until you're good at it. You might be surprised at how much quicker you arrive at work (no traffic jams for cyclists.), how much better you feel, how much time you save (no need to spend time at the gym, quicker commute), and how much money you save (no petrol, gym, maintenance, etc).
If you live on a mountain, you've got an excuse, but not a very big one
IMHO, trying to dismiss someone's views by assuming (with less than no evidence) that they must be a hypocrite, is pretty low.
No.
No.
No.
Problem solved.
Excuse me?!? I didn't see a single solution in that entire post. All you did was disagree with a bunch of thoughts regarding possible solutions.
"Drugs are Bad, mkay."
There, I've just solved the world's drug problems.
:-)
But there is considerable dispute over what caused it--among scientists
You don't seem to have a good grasp of the problem if you think this is relevant. Global warming is a prediction based on the observed effects of gases, not a retrospective attempt to explain current temperatures. Even if currently observed temperature rises were entirely natural, that's quite possibly BAD news, because a) it doesn't even remotely suggest that global warming won't result from our greenhouse gases, and b) it means any greenhouse warming will be IN ADDITION TO natural warming, which means even deeper shit than artificial warming alone.
Like everyone else I guess, I kinda hope that it will never really eventuate, but day by day, the evidence gets even less contraversial. There may be disagreement among "scientists", but disagreement among reputable scientists of high standing is becoming awfully difficult to find.
The problems with GM seeds are many, and rarely heard over the more emotive noise the issue generates. Hence many incorrectly assume there are no problems.
m l
But anyway, here is an example: farmer has his crops contaminated by GM crops from neighbouring farm. To add injury to injury, he was successfully sued by Monsanto for violating their IP.
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/04/03/1.ht
Eg GM+IP=unprecidented corporate power that can and is being abused. So the current deal is that the corporation makes the product, but none of the economic or ecological or fallout from it is their responsibility. Wow, no wonder bio-corps are such a great investment - how can they lose! The starlink corn thing may yet prove an exception here, but only because it hit enough wealthy and powerful people. (I mean wealthy and powerful in the sense that subsitence farmers in 3rd world countries are not).
Start by debunking everything you read at junkscience.com
Are you insane!?!
Junkscience contains almost nothing except more junk science masquerading as debunking. It's almost solid propaganda, and even if saying they're liars funded by corporate interests "doesn't count", that their funding reads like a "who's who" list of the worst corporate polluters, rights abusers, etc, should at the very least suggest that you might use genuine facts to debunk things, not yet more junk science masquerading as the genuine thing.
If you're going to debunk something, have the intellectual honesty to do it by genuine means, not just select a website that tells you what you want to hear.
In any case, gasoline vehicles are not subsidized
:-)
I disagree. They're subsidized far more than electrics, but by different mechanisms to what you're thinking of. For example, think how many billions of dollars of infrastructure have been shaped to accomodate gas, but not electric. Sure, that's the Way Things Are, but it's also acting as a huge subsidy.
Not to mention the huge subsidies in terms of the costs of the vehicles that owners do not pay, but are forced on others, such as pollution, oil-supply induced wars etc. If the exhaust pipe of vehicles were required to be piped straight back into the cab such that only the producer of the emmissions had to breath them, opinions on gas would change real fast
Show me the electric car that can do all that, and cost less than $20k (without government subsidies hiding half the cost)
Show me the gas-powered truck that can do all that and cost less than $20 (without the huge subsidies hiding most of the cost). Right now, the $$$ cost of petroleum vehicles is a mere fraction of the real cost we pay. Not to mention the huge subsidy that gas effectively enjoys compared to electric when it comes to infrastructure, because gas is currently established tech while electric is currently not.
Like I said, while electric motors are more powerful, cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, more reliable, faster, smaller, quieter, longer-lasting, more efficient, lower maintenance, etc than gas motors, they have one big disadvantage - the form of energy they use is incredibly difficult to store, and until that probem is solved, electric vehicles will benefit from only a few of the advantages of electric motors. In other words, the combustion engine is still going strong, but doesn't stand a chance - technology is continually inproving the storage of electricity, and storage of electricity is the only thing preventing electrics from sending combustion engines the way of the steam engine.
I don't dispute that your gas truck is the best cheap-n-nasty way to go at this time. What I'm saying is that the demise of the combustion engine is inevitable, simply because they are such utter crap, and an infinitely superior technology is slowly heading towards becoming viable in small vehicles.
Of course, like the steam engine, enthusiests of combustion will remain a long time after.
Sure, if you don't mind me dumping 1310 pounds of lead acid cells in your backyard every couple of years
Oh come on. Lead acid is a joke. Any electric car that runs on lead acid is either an obsolete model, or a half-hearted token attempt to grab some PR. Look into polymer batteries, flywheels, fuel cells, etc. Pointing to a lead-acid electric car in order to defend sticking to what you know is like pointing to Win3.1 to defend the command line user interface on home computers.
This is the problem with both induction motors and battery motors: they don't eliminate the fossil fuel consumption, they just hide it at the power company.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the technology. Take two identical combustion engines producing identical emissions. Put one under the hood of a car, and use the other to charge a cell, which you then use to drive an electric car. The electric car will do the same commuting as the combustion car yet total emmissions can be ten to a hundred times less. How is this possible? Because the inefficiency of combustion engine cars is simply mind blowing.
Not only do they require wasteful, expensive kludges like the clutch, no only do they frequently operate at 0% efficiency (they emit pollutants even when you are not using them - just waiting at the lights), not only do they simply dump the vast majority of their energy (every time you hit the brakes, you throw away all your energy, then burn yet more fuel to get back up to speed when the light turns green, as opposed to electrics which convert your kinetic energy back into storage when you brake), but they are simply insanely inefficient even when running at maximum efficiency under ideal conditions, which don't exist in the real world to begin with.
And on top of all that, even the dirtiest power stations are far cleaner energy generators than cars to begin with, and in many areas, the powerstations produce no emissions.
Bottom line: It's simply a joke to claim that electrics just hide the emissions. They don't. Electrics are genuinely cleaner by orders of magnitude. When you discover how much cleaner they really are, you realise why combustion engines are causing so great a pollution problem in so many areas. When you learn how electric motors beat the pants of combustions in all other areas too, you lose all respect for those crude, smelly, noisy, victorian contraptions. The big problem is that the full power of the electric motor cannot be brought to bear in a car until the problem of storing electric power is solved. Until then, electric cars will be running underpowered with tiny electric motors (and even then are still giving combustion motors a hard time).
Nope, they're not
:-)
:-))
Heh, looks like you hit reply a little too fast too, which I guess makes us even
(I hit "Submit" before I realised I had my mental diagram of the spectrum mixed up, and since I then posted a "duh, me stoopid" correction, you must have hit "Submit" before noticing that there was already a retraction)
Being able to edit one's posts here would save some Virtual Embarressment. (As you can guess, I'm thinking of me in particular here
Speaking of wavelengths, I'm trying to modify my computer case to add some extra EM sheilding. (The computer currently affects the TV, radio, cordless phones, etc). Using metal mesh, I don't suppose you (or anyone else) would know a) how small the holes have to be to block all the useful frequencies, b) how great the metal-to-hole ratio has to be, to be effective, and c) if a mesh of wires will do it, even if the wires are insulated and thus the horizontal ones don't connect with the vertical where they cross/touch, (though are elsewhere both connected to each and ground)?
(The only DIY faraday caging stuff I seem to find on the net seems to be the ravin^D^D^D^D^Dwisdom of some survivalist showing people how to protect their televisions from the EMP blasts that will accompany nuclear war. And I'm not sure why this is necessary when the TV stations themselves are not shielded...)
As a sidenote, those interested in such issues of Junk Science
:-)
:-)
An additional note - those interested in junk science would probably also do well to avoid the website of the same name, which is actually a corporate front, funded by the worst of the worst polluters, rights-abusers, environmentally destructuve companies, etc.
(It's largely just fairly crude anti-environmental propaganda, but if you're the sort who both tends to be highly suspicious of enviromentalist's claims, and don't thoroughly verify your sources, it could easily sucker you in).
I read in a magazine that the guy who runs it is something of a nutbar too. Some of the claims he's made and things he's done would make even the slimiest MultinationalBigPolluter Co. PR man wince
But anyway, like I say, if you want junk science, then www.junkscience.com might not be a good one, because much of the so-called junk science there is of the straw man variety, and much of the debunking of said imaginary or exaggerated junk science, is itself junk science. IOW, you could look at it as a bonanza of junk science and of junk science junking other science, or as an annoying perversion of what the term "junk science" should refer to. Whatever, but the chat forums there seem filled with people who swallow the propaganda hook line and sinker, and dance to the tune of the website's backers, so I just found it kinda depressing
I got my mental EM spectrum diagram around the wrong way. Duh. Ignore everything I just said.
"below a certain threshold (I believe in the UV region), electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing,...
...Since cell phones emit microwaves, which are non-ionizing, we don't have to worry about it too much"
???
If the cutoff is in the UV band, then cellphone radiation (microwaves) must be ionising radiation, as microwaves are higher energy than UV AFAIK.
Stop encouraging the MPAA to do this by buying their product.
:-)
1) "Fighting" this shit by discarding our culture, with virtually no hope of said large sacrifice even being noticed, is a tactically poor approach to the problem.
2) I am inclined to think that buying DVDs might even be a better approach than not (if only slightly), because DVD protection has been broken, and now that encryption export laws have been relaxed, in conjunction with the DMCA coming into force, a new format is likely to be much nastier, thus by enlarging DVD infrastructure, you enlarge the problems facing attempts to seriously crank up the cripples.
3) Even though copyright law has recently been rewritten (via corrupt means) to remove our legal right to our own heritage, I don't think it is morally acceptable that we should make that sacrifice while the bad guys rake it in. Make them work for their racketeering. Break their anti-competitive systems, and don't sacrifice your quality of life or entertainment to them while you do it.
Sure, the MPAA gets money if I buy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but I get an example of their latest trade-barrier, I get to find out how to bypass it, and spread that information. That information may lead to others purchasing more DVDs, but it will also lead to a shift in finance away from manufacturers of crippled DVD players, and into the pockets of those who defy the MPAA.
I get an example of my society's culture, and the MPAA gets a few dollars and the start of another headache. Fair trade