I don't see the difference between the (obviously jesting) "how do I make the datacenter server sitting nearby unreliable/crash" and "how do I force it to shut down". Once either of the two are done, the result is the same. And indeed cut fan wires are going to take longer to diagnose than most OS crashes.
American polls are always wrong, and they've got a lot of practice figuring out how to ask questions and decipher the answers of their countrymen. I don't think polls of "common people off the street" in Arab countries, where the questioner could be the secret police and there's little culture answering polls "for the common good" (whatever that is - all we have is polls, and they're always wrong), are going to be much more than a rorschach of what their propaganda (state and/or religious) trains them to say to strangers.
Non-Shiite Muslims have seen ample reason to fear Iran. Shiites, too, whose local theocracy is mostly laissez-faire, would see Iran as a threat. Iraqis who can still remember the 1980s war fear Iran. Saudis especially fear Iran, because Iran is indeed the biggest actual threat to Saudis now that Iraq is a threat almost entirely only to itself. Generally Arabs don't think even other Arabs should have a nuke, Persians even less - and who could blame them?
The simple way to see your results is on a logarithmic scale. Arabs will say that Israel and the US are such extreme threats that other countries like Iran barely register, but normalize the hyperbole and Iran is also considered a threat along with those other nuke powers whose actions are consistent with the propaganda Arabs hear all the time.
Clearly? How do you know it wasn't Saudi warfare? They've got the money, plenty of smart people (especially in reverse engineering, which is useful in spec'ing from a snatched or bought sample centrifuge), and are Iran's primary foe in the world. They've been trying to get the US to bomb Iran for years, and are the primary target of an Iranian nuke programme.
How do you know it wasn't Russian marketing? The more Iran wastes uranium, the more Iran needs Russia. The longer it takes to get a fuel stockpile, the longer Iran needs Russia. Plus Russia isn't entirely evil, and is itself an old and longstanding enemy of Iran in more ways than it is an ally, and could just be defending itself from Iran's nuke programme. Likewise China.
Those are three very plausible sources of Stuxnet. And they're all increasingly Eastern, including the ultimate Eastern of all - not Western.
Iran is a very dangerous and isolated state. It's got lots of enemies with the means and motive to unleash Stuxnet. The question is which had the opportunity, which I expect we will never know, as Iran's windows of vulnerability in this respect are some of the most closely guarded secrets ever.
The best understanding we have says that if we keep pushing it, we'll push the climate into a new stable cycle that's much different from what we're used to. But the majority of the science says it's not too late to let it slip back to where it was, or at least to no worse than the 1 degree NASA said in that citation.
Species are dying faster than in human history. Ocean coral environments might also be past the point of no return, or the climate past that point but coral just catching up by starting to die. Droughts and floods, giant hurricanes are the leading edge of the changing "sealevel". The ship is turning "slowly" compared to a human lifetime, but it's a huge ship. Hundreds of millions of refugees are going to amplify relatively small changes that affect them.
Maybe you just don't care that the major catastrophes will come in the lifetime following the end of yours, because in your lifetime we didn't do what we could to stop, slow or reverse it. Or maybe you don't care about civilization collapsing because the species will survive (possibly, unless it WMDs itself extinct on the way down). Or maybe you think that you can build some kind of ark for humans and "a few allied species", because you don't understand how many species are interlocked to keep our lives anything like what we find comfortable, or even tenable at all.
Those are all so wrong that I'm not interested in discussing it with you. It's bad enough that I have to drag you along with me in protecting our mutual survival. I don't need to waste my time seeing just how little you deserve it.
Yeah, I think it's "scientific method" culture. Once a statement is articulated, like "I want this", I then don't accept the statement until I've tried to prove it wrong. And because of the asocial cycle that creates and sustains someone in that culture, I don't articulate statements like "I want this" just because someone else is saying they want it.
Of course there is: natural selection. If the climate changes as rapidly as we're making it, our species will perish. Or enough of the species we depend on will perish that our civilization will collapse.
I suppose that there's an argument that the threat of collapse doesn't require us to avert collapse. But if you don't think self preservation is a natural or moral law, then I'm not really interested in pursuing it further with you.
Well, of course when I read the negative reviews I don't take them without skepticism.
Everything on the Web goes through my BS detector first. My point is that the positive reviews don't give me enough useful info to be worth my time, even if the negative reviews aren't gospel.
I was exaggerating, because there are some times (unusual) when I'm turning to reviews before understanding the thing, in which case I sometimes read positive reviews for a description by someone else who's dealt with it personally. I also read positive reviews sometimes if I'm choosing between multiple strong candidates whose negatives haven't already decided it.
But I do count the number of positives, or rather the ratio of positives to negatives, which depending on the thing might weight my overall take on the reviews. I'll scan positives to discount a high count if a lot are redundant, or if I can quickly disagree with them. And of course the same with negatives, though just their presence usually counts for something. And I do whatever I can to ensure the reviews are relevant to the actual thing I'm evaluating, not something else like a previous model.
Overall, the negatives are much more important, while the positives are usually irrelevant.
And I read only the negative reviews for anything, anyway. Once I'm looking at something reviewed, I probably already want it, so I'm looking for reasons not to get it. And negative reviews are harder to write convincingly without actually knowing something about the thing and its context, anyway. Anyone mad enough at something to go to all that trouble is itself an honestly negative review.
The answer to your question, "what is the cost:benefit*risk in climate change of various human actions" is not "do nothing", if the answer to my question is "Yes".
A "Yes" to my question requires us to change by reducing our GHG emissions.
Not only do we know (with more certainty than we do other global undertakings already) that the answer to my question is "Yes", we know that the best cost:benefit*risk analysis lies in reducing GHG emissions, mainly by increasing energy efficiency (mainly by insulating buildings) and replacing petrofuels (especially coal) with geothermal.
That is why my question is the only worthwhile question. Because we know the answer, and we know what it means we must do.
We have enough science to take the risk that reducing GHG emissions is wrong. As I said, we take risks worse than that all the time. We're taking a bigger risk with all our nuke plants. We're taking a bigger risk with all our oil drilling.
If reducing GHG emissions is a waste of time, we'll still have the increased energy efficiency payoff to make it all worthwhile. We'll have less disease from coal mining and emissions. We'll have less enslavement to petrofuel tyrants, foreign and domestic. And we'll have leveraged the US skill in reinventing our industrial base to leapfrog our newly lethal foreign competitors.
If GHG emissions reduction is worse than a waste, allowing an impending ice age to continue to manifest, we'll have a lot more time to deal with that than we do with global warming: centuries instead of years. And the experience of modulating GHG emissions will give us understanding and tools to deal with it.
We have validated enough. Indeed, the way we do science (and the way interest conflicted actors also do "science"), we can't be much more certain, and never truly certain. But the way we do action doesn't require more certainty than we've got. We can keep doing the science, and indeed more science is an essential part of doing the mitigating action, to know how we're doing, how we can do better. But we cannot wait to act anymore. Indeed, we've already started to act, so we can't afford to blow it by doing it halfway.
More geothermal alone would probably bring net GHG emissions down to manageable levels. Especially since geothermal plants using liquefied CO2 as the working fluid are something like twice as efficient as those using water, and offer a manageable way to capture and contain large amounts of CO2. And are a quick, entirely domestic-sufficient way to directly replace nukes (half the plants are the same: steam generators of electricity), without any of their risks.
If we could get Red States and agricorps to give up ethanol subsidies to fund geothermal plants (largely in other states), we'd probably be OK within 10 years.
In web browsing market share, Linux has 5.0%, while OSX has 7.7%. In servers (and other, embedded network devices), Linux has many times as many users as OSX. Counting mobile phones (including Android) there are about as many iOS users as Linux users, but iOS is not OSX, and so there's already more Linux users. Among developers, where the difference between iOS and OSX creates two separate groups with little overlap but where Linux and Android groups largely overlap, there are so obviously more Linux developers than either OSX or iOS (or dual) developers that it's not worth looking for a citation. Linux has more users and more developers, even though it doesn't have a genius marketing company like Apple with a mass market to sell into to swell its ranks.
Sun, IBM, Apple, Google all compete in markets using OS'es as a competitive tool, even if not directly competing in an "OS market". Because only Microsoft competes directly in the OS market, though "competes" is a fuzzy term for a monopoly, which is the definition that excludes Sun, IBM, Apple and Google from competing. Yet Red Hat does compete, and it's nearly a $BILLION now. Sun used Solaris wrong to compete, but it could have used it (or Linux) to compete well, just as IBM does with Linux (and AIX).
Look, you keep making assertions that you don't even back up, let alone cite with some independent facts. I keep citing the inarguable realities of success and failure, and citing facts from independent sources when they're actually arguable. You're not changing, and you've given me no reason to change. This is boring.
IBM's "mistake" has it growing while its biggest competitors (Sun) perish. The clue Sun needed was how to compete in OS'es, and each of IBM and Red Hat showed how to do so using an open source OS, with a proprietary OS getting strong sidestream benefits, even while deprecated.
Linux kernel / Solaris userland makes sense for capturing Linux app developers who can port all Linux apps and techniques that don't depend on the GNU userland (most real apps), and making it easy for Sun to port its entire Solaris toolchain and ecosystem (which do depend on the Solaris userland) to that platform. That platform, especially in combination with the other variations, gives Sun the natural product line for all developers, which is the lifeblood of any OS, or HW, or tool developer. Sun already had them for the taking with Java, before Linux got them, and could have kept them (and kept Linux, but manageably within its product line as "option 4: GNU/Linux").
Apple ditched Linux, and that's why its platform had few developers, though relatively easy porting from Linux kept it (barely) alive until it had iOS, which is cannibalizing the remaining Apple developers. Who are fleeing to Android, which is following exactly the (HW- and legacy-OS-independent subset of the) strategy Sun should have followed.
The tech superiority of a product means nothing when consumers, and even developers, ignore it (Beta/VHS). We have real world examples in Sun's competitors in IBM, Red Hat, Google and Apple. Only Apple did anything like what Sun did (fully integrated stack atop propritary HW), though Apple ditched the expensive part of its proprietary HW (CPU) and its proprietary OS for something both largely open and substantially compatible with Linux - and Apple would have gone under even sooner than Sun has without the iPod and then the iPhone. Even there Sun got into the mobile device game and blew that, too, by failing to tie it to something at least partly open: Apple, like Google, has triumphed by being a medium for 3rd party content.
These are business opportunities, not tech opportunities. Sun blew them all, while its competitors sacrificed (even if just for a while, but still mostly) investments in superior tech for superior products: the ones that sell and stay selling. Which is all that matters, and really all that a CEO's job ever is.
Not sure where you learned English, but "but IBM is pushing its proprietary systems again" is where you admit that "IBM deprecated its proprietary OSes", as I said.
If Sun had deprecated Solaris while embracing Windows (with Java, so no C#) and Linux for the long years IBM deprecated AIX, Sun might have survived (and thrived) like IBM has, long enough to market Solaris as a niche OS as IBM does. Or, as I suggested elsewhere, opening Solaris early could have preempted Linux. Indeed, a really clever McNealy could have rolled out a Linux kernel / Solaris userland, as Apple did (using NetBSD userland instead). And rolled out a Solaris kernel / GNU userland (and maybe also Solaris kernel / NetBSD userland, to capture Apple developers). And if things turned out well overall, as it has for IBM, then pushed an all-Solaris OS for Sparcs to keep mining that niche into which it sank so much investment.
It's pretty clear that any obstacle to oil drilling anywhere just means it costs more money. The bribes paid to officials to allow it are small compared to the $BILLIONS it costs to do the rest, and of course much smaller than the many $BILLIONS the well produces.
Even when the damage done by the drilling can't be repaired with money. And even when the money spent on getting the drilling done is not spent on the people (or other living things) damaged by it.
I am sick of waiting for the goddamn oil to run out. We should use what's left to produce decentralized, renewable energy systems. Otherwise the 21st Century is going to be as mercenary and dreadfully wasteful as the 20th, but much faster, less opposable by mere humans, and so much, much worse.
If we stop spewing so much CO2 (and equivalent) into the sky, will the climate stop changing as rapidly as it has been the past few decades?
We have absolutely no science that says "No", and plenty that says "Yes". Reducing our GHG emissions will protect the relative stability of the climate upon which our civilization depends. With far better certainty that we ask to do anything else we do on the scale of the globe or billions of people.
Of course Sun had a problem marketing - by definition. Evidently you don't really know what marketing is. "Knows who they are and what products they have" is not marketing. It's not "= advertising". It's connecting the market to the company for maximum access. Sun's products were mostly locked up within a server vendor. Outside of the geeks buried in IT, nobody even knew what StarOffice was, or even really what Java is - the two products Sun needed to build its marketing on to compete instead of dying.
The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.
If it were Sun, with its greater investment and expertise in Java, revving Solaris would have a lot more Java and a lot less C and C++. While it is not necessary to compile Java to native code, it is still necessary to compile it to a virtual native code, bytecode, for a JVM. Or entirely to native code instead of to bytecode. Java is a language, with a VM that runs its own code. Sun could have delivered a Sparc CPU with a "JM" implementing bytecode in HW, or just optimized the compiler for Sparc, or optimized it for x86 or whatever CPU it wanted Sun machines to run the full stack best on.
An OS needs to be compiled to machine code to perform well (much of the OS could be bytecode interpreted by a JVM in machine code embedded in a machine code OS), but Java can be compiled to machine code - or run in a CPU that executes bytecode - as I already pointed out. I've been writing SW professionally for over 30 years, and professionally in Java (originally on Sparcs) for over a decade myself, since the first beta JDK. It doesn't cost $billions for an effort like that, rather dozens or a few hundred million. But Sun had the money, and could have stolen Linux's growth, accelerated by Sun's other assets. Indeed Google would likely be putting a "picoSolaris" onto all these mobile and embedded devices which will be the large majority of OS installs in the world within 5 years. Instead Sun spent its money McNealy's way, and the rest is history.
If you want Solaris running on an embedded device, you have to compile it to run on that device's CPU. Sun barely ported Solaris to x86 while it was worth doing (before Linux fully owned that segment). To port not just to the dozens of CPUs already necessary this decade, but to the new ones popping up every year or month, Sun would need the OS written in a language suited to such varied deployment, which is neither C nor C++ - more like Java. Going halfway with a JVM until a CPU matured as a (profitable) platform, then optimizing the OS better than JIT and other autogeneration does. Or you could just run Solaris on a tiny few platforms, betting the farm on them, as Linux and now Android run circles around you.
Open sourcing was too little, too late, but just opening more earlier is of course not the answer. The answer was to open more, earlier, and more strategically. Which doesn't mean everything opened has to have a revenue stream as if it were proprietary, which is both practically impossible and proven unnecessary by Red Hat, IBM and others. And even someone like me, who's not applying for the Sun CEO job, knows it takes some big leaps, some of which I've pointed out here - and some of which opportunities and risks a Sun CEO would know much better than I do. And indeed some of my suggestions might not have worked in their business - though technically and at first business glance it's better than what Sun did try. It was well beyond McNealy to see that, though.
The UI benefits for the next 2 years are $56B. The extended reduced tax rates on over $250K income costs $150B. The extended reduced tax rates on the first $250K costs $300B.
Which programs are "entitlement spending"? None of them. Entitlement programs include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, most Veterans' Administration programs, federal employee and military retirement plans, unemployment compensation, food stamps, and agricultural price support programs.
Social Security pays for itself (workers pay to buy government bonds that pay off and are rolled over, but at an interest rate that's smaller than the growth of the economy that's taxed to pay the interest), and will continue to do so for at least another 25 years. Are you talking about (and wanting to cut) Medicare and Medicaid? Food stamps? Veterans services, including their pensions and healthcare? Pensions for Federal employees, who deferred their incomes while working to get it back as a pension later? Agricultural subsidies?
Or some other actual entitlement program?
Or maybe you just didn't really know what an entitlement program really is.
Well, I'm curious what they're talking about. They did refer to tax cuts as spending, so they could mean anything, no matter what the term actually means. So far, who knows?
You're arguing semantics. The new tax cut is repeating a tax cut that Bush got through Congress by using the Congressional technique of "reconciliation", where ordinary majority rules are suspended but the passed bill must expire in 10 years. It's a new tax cut, following an old tax cut.
That old tax cut didn't put enough money into the economy, which instead was faked with an orgy of debt spending by almost everyone: Federal/state/local governments, corporations (especially banks, which went bust), somewhere around 175M credit card debtors, and about 10 million homebuyers who couldn't pay mortgages on homes they shouldn't have bought. 40% of GDP growth 2000-2008 was purely in the financial industry, which is not actual wealth (it's inflation, as is all that credit).
But the main point is that the money has not gone into the pockets of people who spend it in the US economy. Unemployment benefits nearly all go right back into the economy: an estimated $1.64 per dollar of UI moves through the economy. Because unemployed people spend all the money they get on goods right in their neighborhoods. While people who make over $250K a year spend quite a lot on foreign investments and imported goods - something like $0.50 per dollar cumulative effect in the US economy. In the middle are people who also spend a lot of their money on what they need to work, which is the most productive money. Hence the priority of the middle class keeping lower tax rates and the unemployed keeping even a meager income, while rich people are the least useful to give more money to.
Of course, the unemployed are much more expensive to the rest of us when they can't get UI, because they turn to crime (expensive in damages as well as judicial/jail work) and increased health costs. And of course the rich can actually afford to live quite well while paying a higher total percentage of their income in taxes, as their actual needs are met on a tiny fraction of their income (and accumulated wealth), though poorer people bottom out with a higher tax bill. Of course the rich also benefited vastly more from both the credit bubble and its bust, while also being the ones who caused it (by sponsoring deregulation and actually being bankers).
Yet $150B of that $850B is reduced taxes for income over $250K, but only $56B is for UI extensions. The $300B in reduced taxes for income under $250K is shared by everyone, including everyone making over $250K for their first $250K. And there's a lot fewer rich people over $250K, so their share of the $850B is a lot more money per person than for everyone else, money that performs a lot worse in the economy.
Some people's protected incomes have a lot more effect than others'. But then there's government spending (which includes UI), which also has different effects depending on what (and whom) it's spent on. $850B on the military/intel is mostly spent on keeping fairly productive people out of the workforce at mediocre incomes, but also largely spent on weapons never used (like digging and refilling ditches, economically). And then there's the hundreds of $BILLIONS spent on actually destroying things, which of course doesn't produce anything, while increasing costs by turning many people against us, including people among our allies who lose interest in "buying American" because "America isn't cool anymore". There's lots of government spending that just harms the US economy (before even accounting for the interest cost - and uncertainty costs - of the debt it accounts for). But most government spending is worthwhile, to protect and grow Americans' ability to produce what we sell and keep.
We can argue in the semantic circles hammered out by corporate thinktanks for politicians to peddle to corporate media outlets. Or we can look at what we're actually spending on, from whom we're collecting, who benefits and how much. The semantic madhouse has got us into this mess. As have the previous tax rates, that are being extended on the basis that "they're the best way to get u
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Why not Siemens? Planned obsolescence, plus German national security.
I don't see the difference between the (obviously jesting) "how do I make the datacenter server sitting nearby unreliable/crash" and "how do I force it to shut down". Once either of the two are done, the result is the same. And indeed cut fan wires are going to take longer to diagnose than most OS crashes.
Which would be equivalent to a crash.
American polls are always wrong, and they've got a lot of practice figuring out how to ask questions and decipher the answers of their countrymen. I don't think polls of "common people off the street" in Arab countries, where the questioner could be the secret police and there's little culture answering polls "for the common good" (whatever that is - all we have is polls, and they're always wrong), are going to be much more than a rorschach of what their propaganda (state and/or religious) trains them to say to strangers.
Non-Shiite Muslims have seen ample reason to fear Iran. Shiites, too, whose local theocracy is mostly laissez-faire, would see Iran as a threat. Iraqis who can still remember the 1980s war fear Iran. Saudis especially fear Iran, because Iran is indeed the biggest actual threat to Saudis now that Iraq is a threat almost entirely only to itself. Generally Arabs don't think even other Arabs should have a nuke, Persians even less - and who could blame them?
The simple way to see your results is on a logarithmic scale. Arabs will say that Israel and the US are such extreme threats that other countries like Iran barely register, but normalize the hyperbole and Iran is also considered a threat along with those other nuke powers whose actions are consistent with the propaganda Arabs hear all the time.
So one wrong call and you ignore all their other research? Your loss.
OTOH, you're quoting Dennis Miller in your .sig. His batting average disqualifies both of you ;).
Clearly? How do you know it wasn't Saudi warfare? They've got the money, plenty of smart people (especially in reverse engineering, which is useful in spec'ing from a snatched or bought sample centrifuge), and are Iran's primary foe in the world. They've been trying to get the US to bomb Iran for years, and are the primary target of an Iranian nuke programme.
How do you know it wasn't Russian marketing? The more Iran wastes uranium, the more Iran needs Russia. The longer it takes to get a fuel stockpile, the longer Iran needs Russia. Plus Russia isn't entirely evil, and is itself an old and longstanding enemy of Iran in more ways than it is an ally, and could just be defending itself from Iran's nuke programme. Likewise China.
Those are three very plausible sources of Stuxnet. And they're all increasingly Eastern, including the ultimate Eastern of all - not Western.
Iran is a very dangerous and isolated state. It's got lots of enemies with the means and motive to unleash Stuxnet. The question is which had the opportunity, which I expect we will never know, as Iran's windows of vulnerability in this respect are some of the most closely guarded secrets ever.
"as rapidly as it has been the past few decades".
The best understanding we have says that if we keep pushing it, we'll push the climate into a new stable cycle that's much different from what we're used to. But the majority of the science says it's not too late to let it slip back to where it was, or at least to no worse than the 1 degree NASA said in that citation.
Species are dying faster than in human history. Ocean coral environments might also be past the point of no return, or the climate past that point but coral just catching up by starting to die. Droughts and floods, giant hurricanes are the leading edge of the changing "sealevel". The ship is turning "slowly" compared to a human lifetime, but it's a huge ship. Hundreds of millions of refugees are going to amplify relatively small changes that affect them.
Maybe you just don't care that the major catastrophes will come in the lifetime following the end of yours, because in your lifetime we didn't do what we could to stop, slow or reverse it. Or maybe you don't care about civilization collapsing because the species will survive (possibly, unless it WMDs itself extinct on the way down). Or maybe you think that you can build some kind of ark for humans and "a few allied species", because you don't understand how many species are interlocked to keep our lives anything like what we find comfortable, or even tenable at all.
Those are all so wrong that I'm not interested in discussing it with you. It's bad enough that I have to drag you along with me in protecting our mutual survival. I don't need to waste my time seeing just how little you deserve it.
Goodbye.
Yeah, I think it's "scientific method" culture. Once a statement is articulated, like "I want this", I then don't accept the statement until I've tried to prove it wrong. And because of the asocial cycle that creates and sustains someone in that culture, I don't articulate statements like "I want this" just because someone else is saying they want it.
Of course there is: natural selection. If the climate changes as rapidly as we're making it, our species will perish. Or enough of the species we depend on will perish that our civilization will collapse.
I suppose that there's an argument that the threat of collapse doesn't require us to avert collapse. But if you don't think self preservation is a natural or moral law, then I'm not really interested in pursuing it further with you.
Well, of course when I read the negative reviews I don't take them without skepticism.
Everything on the Web goes through my BS detector first. My point is that the positive reviews don't give me enough useful info to be worth my time, even if the negative reviews aren't gospel.
I was exaggerating, because there are some times (unusual) when I'm turning to reviews before understanding the thing, in which case I sometimes read positive reviews for a description by someone else who's dealt with it personally. I also read positive reviews sometimes if I'm choosing between multiple strong candidates whose negatives haven't already decided it.
But I do count the number of positives, or rather the ratio of positives to negatives, which depending on the thing might weight my overall take on the reviews. I'll scan positives to discount a high count if a lot are redundant, or if I can quickly disagree with them. And of course the same with negatives, though just their presence usually counts for something. And I do whatever I can to ensure the reviews are relevant to the actual thing I'm evaluating, not something else like a previous model.
Overall, the negatives are much more important, while the positives are usually irrelevant.
The only reviews I take at all seriously are at epinions.com and ConsumerReports.org .
And I read only the negative reviews for anything, anyway. Once I'm looking at something reviewed, I probably already want it, so I'm looking for reasons not to get it. And negative reviews are harder to write convincingly without actually knowing something about the thing and its context, anyway. Anyone mad enough at something to go to all that trouble is itself an honestly negative review.
The answer to your question, "what is the cost:benefit*risk in climate change of various human actions" is not "do nothing", if the answer to my question is "Yes".
A "Yes" to my question requires us to change by reducing our GHG emissions.
Not only do we know (with more certainty than we do other global undertakings already) that the answer to my question is "Yes", we know that the best cost:benefit*risk analysis lies in reducing GHG emissions, mainly by increasing energy efficiency (mainly by insulating buildings) and replacing petrofuels (especially coal) with geothermal.
That is why my question is the only worthwhile question. Because we know the answer, and we know what it means we must do.
We have enough science to take the risk that reducing GHG emissions is wrong. As I said, we take risks worse than that all the time. We're taking a bigger risk with all our nuke plants. We're taking a bigger risk with all our oil drilling.
If reducing GHG emissions is a waste of time, we'll still have the increased energy efficiency payoff to make it all worthwhile. We'll have less disease from coal mining and emissions. We'll have less enslavement to petrofuel tyrants, foreign and domestic. And we'll have leveraged the US skill in reinventing our industrial base to leapfrog our newly lethal foreign competitors.
If GHG emissions reduction is worse than a waste, allowing an impending ice age to continue to manifest, we'll have a lot more time to deal with that than we do with global warming: centuries instead of years. And the experience of modulating GHG emissions will give us understanding and tools to deal with it.
We have validated enough. Indeed, the way we do science (and the way interest conflicted actors also do "science"), we can't be much more certain, and never truly certain. But the way we do action doesn't require more certainty than we've got. We can keep doing the science, and indeed more science is an essential part of doing the mitigating action, to know how we're doing, how we can do better. But we cannot wait to act anymore. Indeed, we've already started to act, so we can't afford to blow it by doing it halfway.
More geothermal alone would probably bring net GHG emissions down to manageable levels. Especially since geothermal plants using liquefied CO2 as the working fluid are something like twice as efficient as those using water, and offer a manageable way to capture and contain large amounts of CO2. And are a quick, entirely domestic-sufficient way to directly replace nukes (half the plants are the same: steam generators of electricity), without any of their risks.
If we could get Red States and agricorps to give up ethanol subsidies to fund geothermal plants (largely in other states), we'd probably be OK within 10 years.
In web browsing market share, Linux has 5.0%, while OSX has 7.7%. In servers (and other, embedded network devices), Linux has many times as many users as OSX. Counting mobile phones (including Android) there are about as many iOS users as Linux users, but iOS is not OSX, and so there's already more Linux users. Among developers, where the difference between iOS and OSX creates two separate groups with little overlap but where Linux and Android groups largely overlap, there are so obviously more Linux developers than either OSX or iOS (or dual) developers that it's not worth looking for a citation. Linux has more users and more developers, even though it doesn't have a genius marketing company like Apple with a mass market to sell into to swell its ranks.
Sun, IBM, Apple, Google all compete in markets using OS'es as a competitive tool, even if not directly competing in an "OS market". Because only Microsoft competes directly in the OS market, though "competes" is a fuzzy term for a monopoly, which is the definition that excludes Sun, IBM, Apple and Google from competing. Yet Red Hat does compete, and it's nearly a $BILLION now. Sun used Solaris wrong to compete, but it could have used it (or Linux) to compete well, just as IBM does with Linux (and AIX).
Look, you keep making assertions that you don't even back up, let alone cite with some independent facts. I keep citing the inarguable realities of success and failure, and citing facts from independent sources when they're actually arguable. You're not changing, and you've given me no reason to change. This is boring.
Goodbye.
IBM's "mistake" has it growing while its biggest competitors (Sun) perish. The clue Sun needed was how to compete in OS'es, and each of IBM and Red Hat showed how to do so using an open source OS, with a proprietary OS getting strong sidestream benefits, even while deprecated.
Linux kernel / Solaris userland makes sense for capturing Linux app developers who can port all Linux apps and techniques that don't depend on the GNU userland (most real apps), and making it easy for Sun to port its entire Solaris toolchain and ecosystem (which do depend on the Solaris userland) to that platform. That platform, especially in combination with the other variations, gives Sun the natural product line for all developers, which is the lifeblood of any OS, or HW, or tool developer. Sun already had them for the taking with Java, before Linux got them, and could have kept them (and kept Linux, but manageably within its product line as "option 4: GNU/Linux").
Apple ditched Linux, and that's why its platform had few developers, though relatively easy porting from Linux kept it (barely) alive until it had iOS, which is cannibalizing the remaining Apple developers. Who are fleeing to Android, which is following exactly the (HW- and legacy-OS-independent subset of the) strategy Sun should have followed.
The tech superiority of a product means nothing when consumers, and even developers, ignore it (Beta/VHS). We have real world examples in Sun's competitors in IBM, Red Hat, Google and Apple. Only Apple did anything like what Sun did (fully integrated stack atop propritary HW), though Apple ditched the expensive part of its proprietary HW (CPU) and its proprietary OS for something both largely open and substantially compatible with Linux - and Apple would have gone under even sooner than Sun has without the iPod and then the iPhone. Even there Sun got into the mobile device game and blew that, too, by failing to tie it to something at least partly open: Apple, like Google, has triumphed by being a medium for 3rd party content.
These are business opportunities, not tech opportunities. Sun blew them all, while its competitors sacrificed (even if just for a while, but still mostly) investments in superior tech for superior products: the ones that sell and stay selling. Which is all that matters, and really all that a CEO's job ever is.
Not sure where you learned English, but
"but IBM is pushing its proprietary systems again " is where you admit that "IBM deprecated its proprietary OSes", as I said.
If Sun had deprecated Solaris while embracing Windows (with Java, so no C#) and Linux for the long years IBM deprecated AIX, Sun might have survived (and thrived) like IBM has, long enough to market Solaris as a niche OS as IBM does. Or, as I suggested elsewhere, opening Solaris early could have preempted Linux. Indeed, a really clever McNealy could have rolled out a Linux kernel / Solaris userland, as Apple did (using NetBSD userland instead). And rolled out a Solaris kernel / GNU userland (and maybe also Solaris kernel / NetBSD userland, to capture Apple developers). And if things turned out well overall, as it has for IBM, then pushed an all-Solaris OS for Sparcs to keep mining that niche into which it sank so much investment.
It's pretty clear that any obstacle to oil drilling anywhere just means it costs more money. The bribes paid to officials to allow it are small compared to the $BILLIONS it costs to do the rest, and of course much smaller than the many $BILLIONS the well produces.
Even when the damage done by the drilling can't be repaired with money. And even when the money spent on getting the drilling done is not spent on the people (or other living things) damaged by it.
I am sick of waiting for the goddamn oil to run out. We should use what's left to produce decentralized, renewable energy systems. Otherwise the 21st Century is going to be as mercenary and dreadfully wasteful as the 20th, but much faster, less opposable by mere humans, and so much, much worse.
No, the only worthwhile question is:
If we stop spewing so much CO2 (and equivalent) into the sky, will the climate stop changing as rapidly as it has been the past few decades?
We have absolutely no science that says "No", and plenty that says "Yes". Reducing our GHG emissions will protect the relative stability of the climate upon which our civilization depends. With far better certainty that we ask to do anything else we do on the scale of the globe or billions of people.
Of course Sun had a problem marketing - by definition. Evidently you don't really know what marketing is. "Knows who they are and what products they have" is not marketing. It's not "= advertising". It's connecting the market to the company for maximum access. Sun's products were mostly locked up within a server vendor. Outside of the geeks buried in IT, nobody even knew what StarOffice was, or even really what Java is - the two products Sun needed to build its marketing on to compete instead of dying.
If it were Sun, with its greater investment and expertise in Java, revving Solaris would have a lot more Java and a lot less C and C++. While it is not necessary to compile Java to native code, it is still necessary to compile it to a virtual native code, bytecode, for a JVM. Or entirely to native code instead of to bytecode. Java is a language, with a VM that runs its own code. Sun could have delivered a Sparc CPU with a "JM" implementing bytecode in HW, or just optimized the compiler for Sparc, or optimized it for x86 or whatever CPU it wanted Sun machines to run the full stack best on.
An OS needs to be compiled to machine code to perform well (much of the OS could be bytecode interpreted by a JVM in machine code embedded in a machine code OS), but Java can be compiled to machine code - or run in a CPU that executes bytecode - as I already pointed out. I've been writing SW professionally for over 30 years, and professionally in Java (originally on Sparcs) for over a decade myself, since the first beta JDK. It doesn't cost $billions for an effort like that, rather dozens or a few hundred million. But Sun had the money, and could have stolen Linux's growth, accelerated by Sun's other assets. Indeed Google would likely be putting a "picoSolaris" onto all these mobile and embedded devices which will be the large majority of OS installs in the world within 5 years. Instead Sun spent its money McNealy's way, and the rest is history.
If you want Solaris running on an embedded device, you have to compile it to run on that device's CPU. Sun barely ported Solaris to x86 while it was worth doing (before Linux fully owned that segment). To port not just to the dozens of CPUs already necessary this decade, but to the new ones popping up every year or month, Sun would need the OS written in a language suited to such varied deployment, which is neither C nor C++ - more like Java. Going halfway with a JVM until a CPU matured as a (profitable) platform, then optimizing the OS better than JIT and other autogeneration does. Or you could just run Solaris on a tiny few platforms, betting the farm on them, as Linux and now Android run circles around you.
Open sourcing was too little, too late, but just opening more earlier is of course not the answer. The answer was to open more, earlier, and more strategically. Which doesn't mean everything opened has to have a revenue stream as if it were proprietary, which is both practically impossible and proven unnecessary by Red Hat, IBM and others. And even someone like me, who's not applying for the Sun CEO job, knows it takes some big leaps, some of which I've pointed out here - and some of which opportunities and risks a Sun CEO would know much better than I do. And indeed some of my suggestions might not have worked in their business - though technically and at first business glance it's better than what Sun did try. It was well beyond McNealy to see that, though.
The UI benefits for the next 2 years are $56B. The extended reduced tax rates on over $250K income costs $150B. The extended reduced tax rates on the first $250K costs $300B.
Which programs are "entitlement spending"? None of them. Entitlement programs include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, most Veterans' Administration programs, federal employee and military retirement plans, unemployment compensation, food stamps, and agricultural price support programs.
Social Security pays for itself (workers pay to buy government bonds that pay off and are rolled over, but at an interest rate that's smaller than the growth of the economy that's taxed to pay the interest), and will continue to do so for at least another 25 years. Are you talking about (and wanting to cut) Medicare and Medicaid? Food stamps? Veterans services, including their pensions and healthcare? Pensions for Federal employees, who deferred their incomes while working to get it back as a pension later? Agricultural subsidies?
Or some other actual entitlement program?
Or maybe you just didn't really know what an entitlement program really is.
Well, I'm curious what they're talking about. They did refer to tax cuts as spending, so they could mean anything, no matter what the term actually means. So far, who knows?
You're arguing semantics. The new tax cut is repeating a tax cut that Bush got through Congress by using the Congressional technique of "reconciliation", where ordinary majority rules are suspended but the passed bill must expire in 10 years. It's a new tax cut, following an old tax cut.
That old tax cut didn't put enough money into the economy, which instead was faked with an orgy of debt spending by almost everyone: Federal/state/local governments, corporations (especially banks, which went bust), somewhere around 175M credit card debtors, and about 10 million homebuyers who couldn't pay mortgages on homes they shouldn't have bought. 40% of GDP growth 2000-2008 was purely in the financial industry, which is not actual wealth (it's inflation, as is all that credit).
But the main point is that the money has not gone into the pockets of people who spend it in the US economy. Unemployment benefits nearly all go right back into the economy: an estimated $1.64 per dollar of UI moves through the economy. Because unemployed people spend all the money they get on goods right in their neighborhoods. While people who make over $250K a year spend quite a lot on foreign investments and imported goods - something like $0.50 per dollar cumulative effect in the US economy. In the middle are people who also spend a lot of their money on what they need to work, which is the most productive money. Hence the priority of the middle class keeping lower tax rates and the unemployed keeping even a meager income, while rich people are the least useful to give more money to.
Of course, the unemployed are much more expensive to the rest of us when they can't get UI, because they turn to crime (expensive in damages as well as judicial/jail work) and increased health costs. And of course the rich can actually afford to live quite well while paying a higher total percentage of their income in taxes, as their actual needs are met on a tiny fraction of their income (and accumulated wealth), though poorer people bottom out with a higher tax bill. Of course the rich also benefited vastly more from both the credit bubble and its bust, while also being the ones who caused it (by sponsoring deregulation and actually being bankers).
Yet $150B of that $850B is reduced taxes for income over $250K, but only $56B is for UI extensions. The $300B in reduced taxes for income under $250K is shared by everyone, including everyone making over $250K for their first $250K. And there's a lot fewer rich people over $250K, so their share of the $850B is a lot more money per person than for everyone else, money that performs a lot worse in the economy.
Some people's protected incomes have a lot more effect than others'. But then there's government spending (which includes UI), which also has different effects depending on what (and whom) it's spent on. $850B on the military/intel is mostly spent on keeping fairly productive people out of the workforce at mediocre incomes, but also largely spent on weapons never used (like digging and refilling ditches, economically). And then there's the hundreds of $BILLIONS spent on actually destroying things, which of course doesn't produce anything, while increasing costs by turning many people against us, including people among our allies who lose interest in "buying American" because "America isn't cool anymore". There's lots of government spending that just harms the US economy (before even accounting for the interest cost - and uncertainty costs - of the debt it accounts for). But most government spending is worthwhile, to protect and grow Americans' ability to produce what we sell and keep.
We can argue in the semantic circles hammered out by corporate thinktanks for politicians to peddle to corporate media outlets. Or we can look at what we're actually spending on, from whom we're collecting, who benefits and how much. The semantic madhouse has got us into this mess. As have the previous tax rates, that are being extended on the basis that "they're the best way to get u