What's not well appreciated yet is that the human brain is mostly visual, and so is human thought. It's also the most powerful way to organize memory. The primacy of "The Word," of language-type coding, diverts us from this reality. Yet linguistic meaning is based on image schemas which are predominantly visuo-spatial. However, there is some evidence that in humans some aspects of linguistic thought have been brought into rough parity with the visuo-spatial in terms of dedicated support in the brain.
Okay, Prof. A says the world is a sphere. Prof. B says the world if flat. Prof. A has a extensive list of evidence coalescing on a coherent picture. Prof. B has a large collection of counterarguments against various specific pieces of Prof. A's list. Prof. A believes that, as a society, we'd be best off in working out how to best prosper in a spherical world. Prof. B believes it would be premature to go ahead with that before we've had a debate and opened our minds to the reinterpretation of all of Prof. A's evidence. Indeed, Prof. B cites as further evidence of the wrongness of Prof. A's analysis that so many other scientists agree with Prof. A. How, after all, could so many scientists agree, despite all the counterarguments collected by Prof. B, unless those scientists were conspiring to foist their "spherical earth" interpretation on society?
Ya know, sometimes you've just got to take what the majority of your best scientists suggest is the most successful set of theories and best collected sets of observations and go with that. This is despite that everything and anything is always open to doubt. We're doubt monkeys. That aspect of us is integral to our capacity to do science. But it's not the whole game. And treating it like it's the whole game is as incapacitating as if we lacked all doubt to begin with.
I believe that a warm world is a good world, and that CO2 helps warm the planet?
You see, this isn't a matter of belief. We're not talking about the premise of your religion here. All of the range of scientific projections on what the planet will be like if warmed a few degrees, or more, are of a far less comfortable place to live, with far less carrying capacity, leading to a whole lot of death and dislocation for human populations. You may believe that human life is evil, and so all this would please whatever beings you worship. Yes, we have sociopaths among humanity who have no compassion for other human beings. But it's not the majority of us, even if it's a large subset of the self-identified "libertarians" who like to go all Pollyanna about what a few degrees C in rise in average temperature will do to the quality of life - particularly human life.
New Scientist doesn't cover science as such. Instead it runs with a lot of stoned-Freshmen-at-midnight just so stories about "Free will is an illusion," and similar specious claims. For instance, on today's website we can learn "How the universe appeared from nothing" and ponder "Existence: Am I a hologram?" They go far out into the realm of scientism, of fantasy. Indeed their most popular article now is "Existence: Why is there a universe?" That's a delightful thing to get the children asking, and may even lead some of them towards science (or religion, or something), but it's not a scientific question. How are you going to design the experiment of not having a universe to compare that condition with having one?
There's some real science reported on there too. But it's all with the same style and depth of reporting that considers "Why is there a universe" a scientific question. These are very silly people, reducing all to fluff, with the greatest pretense, basically making of "science" a new religion to enforce their prejudices - and doubtless doing all this by no free will of their own whatsoever.
Instructions to "Build Your Own Dropbox Equivalent." CloudFS is an offshoot of GlusterFS, which is not quite ready for prime time, but getting damn close. So you'd be cautioned about trusting corporate data to this setup. For less vital stuff, it should work well.
If the purpose of reason is to win arguments, what faculty is in charge of deciding the winner? We can't reason who the winner is, because reason in this account is about arguing for one side, not weighing the arguments fairly and evenly.
Put it the other way around: This whole argument is presupposing that people can come to reasoned conclusions and by that change their course. But then it is saying the purpose of reason isn't to allow us to come to reasoned conclusions, but rather to undermine the capability of others to come to reasoned conclusions, by allowing us to construct unbalanced and perhaps unfair arguments to virtually force them to come to some conclusion that we, by whatever means, have come to favor.
This is an argument for being a sociopathic predator, a parasite on reasoning society, and the riches which reason has enabled us to amass. It's sanctioning this predator's attitude by saying "Evolution wants us to be this way." It's making the standard form of argument in "evolutionary psychology," in which "evolution" plays the role formerly played by "God" in constructing an argument along the lines of, "Your maker says: behave thus." They're both arguments against using our own reason. That is to say, they are both perversions of reason, turned against reason itself.
How can we define the elites whose minority opinions should be given priority over democratic majorities? By wealth? By academic degrees? By position in religious organizations? By a tendency to hang out in certain sectors of cyberspace where we can assure each other of our brilliance?
If the public is ignorant on issues, it's often largely because the "elites" (however self-defined) haven't shared their knowledge in an open way. Because the elites often define themselves as those who know better, if they were to freely share their supposed knowledge and wisdom, in a form where people in general could get it, then the elites would no longer know better. Couldn't have that.
On the other hand, nobody said the wise rule this world. The elites are often enough monumentally stupid on many issues. If that weren't the case, nations without democracy would routinely outperform those which have it. At the moment, the only example that comes close is China. But wait a year or two, and see if the Chinese bubble doesn't implode with a velocity making recent troubles in the Western democracies look like smooth sailing.
Why should we educate American kids, when Chinese kids study so much harder?
Our corporate/Chinese overlords are totally against spending another dime on American education, aside from private money spent in our elite universities to educate the American executive class... and Chinese!
This is why corporations should be absolutely forbidden from making any attempt to influence legislatures. Free speech is for individuals, for human beings. No corporation should be allowed to speak to a legislature through any mode whatsoever. They may speak to the public. They may speak to their employees. But they may not order their employees to say anything at all to elected representatives. What citizens say to representatives should be entirely a matter of personal conscience, not paychecks. We literally have a system now in which government is becoming the whore of the corporation.
Yes, under current Supreme Court corruption rules like this would require Constitutional amendment. Let's do it!
In case you haven't noticed, if for instance you are part of the 4/5ths of Americans who don't hold a passport and never travel out of North America, everyone in China and India and Africa and South America wants to live like Westerners. So the model we Westerners put forward for how to live well determines the future of resource consumption unless a time comes when everyone else stops looking with envy in our direction.
Closer to home, the rise in ostentatious lifestyles for the rich and famous has driven much of the American middle class deeply into debt. Go back a few decades, to when the rich largely viewed it as "without class" to be ostentatious about wealth, and you'll see an America in which the typical family set aside significant savings each year. Now envy has led millions into personal financial destruction.
And it can lead billions into collective environmental exhaustion and destruction. To believe otherwise is to totally fail to understand human psychology.
The bigger issue is in parts of the world where parents have to depend upon their children to care for them in old age.
That's why eliminating Medicare (by issuing inadequate vouchers and calling the "Medicare") and eliminating Social Security (by having people gamble in the stock market) are key to encouraging larger families in America. If we don't do this, poorer, less secure parts of the world will continue to outbreed us. Only by assuring that our seniors will have no security beyond that offered by their descendants will we return to the 12-child family that was the ideal in America in the 19th Century.
Classical physics describes a mechanical universe in which everything is fully pre-determined, such that conscious awareness of things can make no difference at all in outcomes and actions. As such, there would be no basis for consciousness to be selected for by evolution. As such, there would be no reason to expect consciousness to be part of biological creatures.
Therefore either classical physics suffices, and we have no free will, and possibly aren't even really conscious, in fact most likely aren't... or else classical physics is only a crude approximation of the universe quantum physics describes. At a minimum, quantum physics describes a universe which is not deterministic. There are some who argue that it nonetheless only introduces chance, still leaving no reason for biology to include consciousness, or method for consciousness to alter the course of ones life.
But there are others who argue that quantum physics at least opens the door to a true explanation of consciousness. And if you're satisfied that there's an explanation for consciousness in a universe in which it could not, literally, have evolved, because it provides no advantage to select for since every motion of matter is predetermined independently of it, well, good luck getting through life. Because to live like that would be to be clinically insane. And some of us perceive that would have dire consequence. If it does, if we're right, then classical physics is insufficient for explanation of consciousness, so we move to the next available candidate, quantum physics. Or the successor thereof at which Penrose points.
Depending on your favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's arguable that physics can't be explained without consciousness. Mind you, not that you have to be conscious to explain physics, but that physical laws presuppose that there is consciousness in the universe. In this sort of theory, in explaining the role of brains, obviously the do not create conscious (causally or otherwise). Brains focus it.
The realization that we can't distinguish on the evidence between theories in which brains act as creators of consciousness, and theories in which brains act as receivers of consciousness, goes back to William James. On the physics side, read some David Bohm. It's mainstream, if not universally held, in quantum physics that in a universe without consciousness you don't get physics - or a universe at all. Consciousness is, many of the best physicists have argued, fundamental.
Explanation of how it fits with the rest of physics on a fundamental level is what Penrose is getting at. That's not to say he's necessarily going at it in the way that will prove out. But anyone who understands quantum physics will recognize at least the validity of the questions he's raising. Or so they tell me. Henry Stapp's work connecting the quantum realm with consciousness is also of interest - and from a far different angle than Penrose's.
It's not said what the cluster is for. If it's going to be a private cloud, Ubuntu jeos (just enough OS) VMs are far quicker to configure than RHEL/CentOS 5.x VMs, if your taste runs to setting up VMs from scratch rather than just cloning them. Don't know what RH 6 offers there (and Scientific Linux, which unlike CentOS offers a RH 6 variant). You also haven't specified your file system's layers. Ubuntu support by most file system projects is equal to that of RHEL, in terms of easily installed packages being available. The exception is with some parts of RH's own preferred cluster stack, which I haven't used. DR:BD, for instance, is perhaps better supported on Ubuntu than RH. GlusterFS is better tested in RH, but runs as well, and is packaged as well, for Ubuntu (and is still a bit immature in either case, but worth considering down the line).
The main advantage of Ubuntu is you get the exact same product as support is sold for, without being required to buy the support. RH forces you to go to CentOS or Scientific Linux to come close to that, and there are differences in those - mostly in the package managers. And RH, if you do license it, pays out part of your money to patent trolls, whom RH essentially supports so that they may more productively attack its competition - other open source projects.
Sure, some are indispensable. If you are, or want to find out if you are, force their hand. Business is business and friendship is friendship. Tell them you've a strong desire for ownership interest in a business. They'll understand it. The desire is natural to them. Tell them you're leaving to collaborate in a new startup if they won't give you an interest here. Mean it.
They may come through. They may not. You'll learn something about your true worth - or at least their opinion of it.
And if you don't have the balls, you don't deserve to be an owner. Which is fine.
Mountains mean (1) abundant hydroelectric opportunity (much of it currently unexploited, from what I've seen traveling there), (2) plenty of ridge lines with abundant wind (almost totally undeveloped at present), and (3) a likelihood of major geothermal resources (reservoirs of underground heat).
As for "shut the country down on calm/cloudy days," the wind never stops blowing throughout Switzerland all at once. There are many different microclimes, and major mountain ranges generate their own winds throughout the course of a day. It's not like Oklahoma, where you really can have a day where there's no wind anywhere (although days in Oklahoma days with both no wind anywhere and clouds everywhere are rarer than hens' teeth). And note I didn't even mention solar for Switzerland.
It's one thing when firms are small and can't afford the struggle. Red Hat's profits are extraordinary. They can afford a zero tolerance attitude towards the trolls who steal freedom from all. In paying them off, they leave the trolls as a barrier to business for smaller players who - gasp - might compete with Red Hat in some small area. Thus Red Hat is buying protection not just from direct harm by trolls, but from competition by legitimate businesses who the Red Hat-enriched trolls can now afford to go after.
This is why, despite some of Red Hat's technology and people being quite fine, I'll never encourage my clients to buy their licenses. CentOS, yes. The stuff is well worth using. But if you pay Red Hat you're paying a tax to the trolls, who will fatten up on it and then come after other open software that really matters to us.
Clinton raised taxes, leading to full employment, an economic boom that for the first time in decades raised incomes from top to bottom rather than just at the top, and a budget surplus. Bush cut taxes, leading to a fall in employment, economic stagnation aside from the real estate bubble which was aided by Bush failures of regulation, incomes falling in all brackets except the top, and record budget deficits.
Sufficient taxes to support government programs lead to a healthy economy all around. The average economic performance is way better under Democratic presidents than under Republican. The notion that we can have a health country without sufficient taxation is like the notion that you can have a healthy body without sufficient food. History proves the Republican position that taxes must always be lowered, and lowered again, just doesn't lead to the Promised Land. It's a lie invented to serve the ultra-rich, who, having most of the money, have the most to lose from taxes. Average people, and the economy as a whole, prosper when taxes are higher.
More at Wikipedia. Summary: Can easily go over 9.0 from N. California to BC. If that happens, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver would be severely damaged.
There are orders from Israel's Supreme Court to move parts of the apartheid wall which were issued several years ago. The Israeli occupation government simply ignores them. Beyond the prosecution of several top Israeli officials for sex crimes, the Supreme Court there is not able to accomplish much, since it has no army of its own to enforce its rulings.
Thing is, with nuclear, you don't want a bet, you need a sure thing, at least in safety. GE has lately been pointing out about the Mark I reactor design, that they've run for 40 years without a major mishap. That's with 23 in the US, and how many others abroad? Let's pretend in total there are 40 of them. Then of 40 Mark I reactors over 40 years only 6 have partially melted down! If we project that out to a century, there will only be a 37.5% failure rate for this design. What, you say they won't run for a century? But the NRC has recertified the plant of this design in Vermont for another 20 years, and issued that after the Japan meltdowns. Surely if they can recertify it now, they can do it twice more.
This is a design over which 3 top GE engineers resigned in the 70s, saying it was unsafe. The AEC at the same time considered ordering all Mark I plants shut down, but declined to because of the political implications for atomic power. And that containment vessel that's been leaking in the Japanese Mark 1s? In the US they're routinely packed with 5 times the spent fuel they were engineered to hold safely, while in Japan they are only at 2-3 times engineered capacity.
As a user of Linux since Slackware was on 13 floppies, here's what I don't understand about the distros: Instead of sticking with an old kernel release and backporting patches, why not move forward to the latest kernel? Coming from the days were it was more common than not to compile your own kernel from vanilla source for whatever distro you were using, I've never gotten in trouble doing that. A few times I've left out an option and had to recompile. But I've never had a new vanilla kernel break other aspects of the distro. I used to do this on Slack, Red Hat (years back when their patched versions were often broken), Debian and Gentoo. I still do it when I need recent kernel features on Ubuntu, although when business requires something on CentOS I stick with the RH-patched version there. My experience with Ubuntu: 10.04 and 10.10 run fine with the most recent vanilla kernels, although YMMV, I guess.
Seriously, why do the distros backport to old kernels rather than roll the kernels forward? What they don't backport is often good stuff, which your machine will run happier with. I can see hanging back a few point releases to make sure the kernel version has no major bugs or regressions reported against it, but all the distros allow their kernels to get far too stale, with RH being the worst over time - and to know what your kernel really has in it, you then become dependent on RH rather than kernel.org. Has the policy long been to take the more obscure road to "earn" the support contracts?
Slashdot Mirror
What's not well appreciated yet is that the human brain is mostly visual, and so is human thought. It's also the most powerful way to organize memory. The primacy of "The Word," of language-type coding, diverts us from this reality. Yet linguistic meaning is based on image schemas which are predominantly visuo-spatial. However, there is some evidence that in humans some aspects of linguistic thought have been brought into rough parity with the visuo-spatial in terms of dedicated support in the brain.
Okay, Prof. A says the world is a sphere. Prof. B says the world if flat. Prof. A has a extensive list of evidence coalescing on a coherent picture. Prof. B has a large collection of counterarguments against various specific pieces of Prof. A's list. Prof. A believes that, as a society, we'd be best off in working out how to best prosper in a spherical world. Prof. B believes it would be premature to go ahead with that before we've had a debate and opened our minds to the reinterpretation of all of Prof. A's evidence. Indeed, Prof. B cites as further evidence of the wrongness of Prof. A's analysis that so many other scientists agree with Prof. A. How, after all, could so many scientists agree, despite all the counterarguments collected by Prof. B, unless those scientists were conspiring to foist their "spherical earth" interpretation on society?
Ya know, sometimes you've just got to take what the majority of your best scientists suggest is the most successful set of theories and best collected sets of observations and go with that. This is despite that everything and anything is always open to doubt. We're doubt monkeys. That aspect of us is integral to our capacity to do science. But it's not the whole game. And treating it like it's the whole game is as incapacitating as if we lacked all doubt to begin with.
You see, this isn't a matter of belief. We're not talking about the premise of your religion here. All of the range of scientific projections on what the planet will be like if warmed a few degrees, or more, are of a far less comfortable place to live, with far less carrying capacity, leading to a whole lot of death and dislocation for human populations. You may believe that human life is evil, and so all this would please whatever beings you worship. Yes, we have sociopaths among humanity who have no compassion for other human beings. But it's not the majority of us, even if it's a large subset of the self-identified "libertarians" who like to go all Pollyanna about what a few degrees C in rise in average temperature will do to the quality of life - particularly human life.
New Scientist doesn't cover science as such. Instead it runs with a lot of stoned-Freshmen-at-midnight just so stories about "Free will is an illusion," and similar specious claims. For instance, on today's website we can learn "How the universe appeared from nothing" and ponder "Existence: Am I a hologram?" They go far out into the realm of scientism, of fantasy. Indeed their most popular article now is "Existence: Why is there a universe?" That's a delightful thing to get the children asking, and may even lead some of them towards science (or religion, or something), but it's not a scientific question. How are you going to design the experiment of not having a universe to compare that condition with having one?
There's some real science reported on there too. But it's all with the same style and depth of reporting that considers "Why is there a universe" a scientific question. These are very silly people, reducing all to fluff, with the greatest pretense, basically making of "science" a new religion to enforce their prejudices - and doubtless doing all this by no free will of their own whatsoever.
Instructions to "Build Your Own Dropbox Equivalent." CloudFS is an offshoot of GlusterFS, which is not quite ready for prime time, but getting damn close. So you'd be cautioned about trusting corporate data to this setup. For less vital stuff, it should work well.
If the purpose of reason is to win arguments, what faculty is in charge of deciding the winner? We can't reason who the winner is, because reason in this account is about arguing for one side, not weighing the arguments fairly and evenly.
Put it the other way around: This whole argument is presupposing that people can come to reasoned conclusions and by that change their course. But then it is saying the purpose of reason isn't to allow us to come to reasoned conclusions, but rather to undermine the capability of others to come to reasoned conclusions, by allowing us to construct unbalanced and perhaps unfair arguments to virtually force them to come to some conclusion that we, by whatever means, have come to favor.
This is an argument for being a sociopathic predator, a parasite on reasoning society, and the riches which reason has enabled us to amass. It's sanctioning this predator's attitude by saying "Evolution wants us to be this way." It's making the standard form of argument in "evolutionary psychology," in which "evolution" plays the role formerly played by "God" in constructing an argument along the lines of, "Your maker says: behave thus." They're both arguments against using our own reason. That is to say, they are both perversions of reason, turned against reason itself.
How can we define the elites whose minority opinions should be given priority over democratic majorities? By wealth? By academic degrees? By position in religious organizations? By a tendency to hang out in certain sectors of cyberspace where we can assure each other of our brilliance?
If the public is ignorant on issues, it's often largely because the "elites" (however self-defined) haven't shared their knowledge in an open way. Because the elites often define themselves as those who know better, if they were to freely share their supposed knowledge and wisdom, in a form where people in general could get it, then the elites would no longer know better. Couldn't have that.
On the other hand, nobody said the wise rule this world. The elites are often enough monumentally stupid on many issues. If that weren't the case, nations without democracy would routinely outperform those which have it. At the moment, the only example that comes close is China. But wait a year or two, and see if the Chinese bubble doesn't implode with a velocity making recent troubles in the Western democracies look like smooth sailing.
Why should we educate American kids, when Chinese kids study so much harder?
Our corporate/Chinese overlords are totally against spending another dime on American education, aside from private money spent in our elite universities to educate the American executive class ... and Chinese!
This is why corporations should be absolutely forbidden from making any attempt to influence legislatures. Free speech is for individuals, for human beings. No corporation should be allowed to speak to a legislature through any mode whatsoever. They may speak to the public. They may speak to their employees. But they may not order their employees to say anything at all to elected representatives. What citizens say to representatives should be entirely a matter of personal conscience, not paychecks. We literally have a system now in which government is becoming the whore of the corporation.
Yes, under current Supreme Court corruption rules like this would require Constitutional amendment. Let's do it!
In case you haven't noticed, if for instance you are part of the 4/5ths of Americans who don't hold a passport and never travel out of North America, everyone in China and India and Africa and South America wants to live like Westerners. So the model we Westerners put forward for how to live well determines the future of resource consumption unless a time comes when everyone else stops looking with envy in our direction.
Closer to home, the rise in ostentatious lifestyles for the rich and famous has driven much of the American middle class deeply into debt. Go back a few decades, to when the rich largely viewed it as "without class" to be ostentatious about wealth, and you'll see an America in which the typical family set aside significant savings each year. Now envy has led millions into personal financial destruction.
And it can lead billions into collective environmental exhaustion and destruction. To believe otherwise is to totally fail to understand human psychology.
That's why eliminating Medicare (by issuing inadequate vouchers and calling the "Medicare") and eliminating Social Security (by having people gamble in the stock market) are key to encouraging larger families in America. If we don't do this, poorer, less secure parts of the world will continue to outbreed us. Only by assuring that our seniors will have no security beyond that offered by their descendants will we return to the 12-child family that was the ideal in America in the 19th Century.
A small church bell weighs only a bit over 300 pounds. Revere's factory made church bells, one of which today, in Bellows Falls, VT, used to function as a fire alarm . So it's easy and appropriate to ring a church bell while riding your horse and firing all of your guns at once, and exploding into space.
Classical physics describes a mechanical universe in which everything is fully pre-determined, such that conscious awareness of things can make no difference at all in outcomes and actions. As such, there would be no basis for consciousness to be selected for by evolution. As such, there would be no reason to expect consciousness to be part of biological creatures.
Therefore either classical physics suffices, and we have no free will, and possibly aren't even really conscious, in fact most likely aren't ... or else classical physics is only a crude approximation of the universe quantum physics describes. At a minimum, quantum physics describes a universe which is not deterministic. There are some who argue that it nonetheless only introduces chance, still leaving no reason for biology to include consciousness, or method for consciousness to alter the course of ones life.
But there are others who argue that quantum physics at least opens the door to a true explanation of consciousness. And if you're satisfied that there's an explanation for consciousness in a universe in which it could not, literally, have evolved, because it provides no advantage to select for since every motion of matter is predetermined independently of it, well, good luck getting through life. Because to live like that would be to be clinically insane. And some of us perceive that would have dire consequence. If it does, if we're right, then classical physics is insufficient for explanation of consciousness, so we move to the next available candidate, quantum physics. Or the successor thereof at which Penrose points.
Depending on your favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's arguable that physics can't be explained without consciousness. Mind you, not that you have to be conscious to explain physics, but that physical laws presuppose that there is consciousness in the universe. In this sort of theory, in explaining the role of brains, obviously the do not create conscious (causally or otherwise). Brains focus it.
The realization that we can't distinguish on the evidence between theories in which brains act as creators of consciousness, and theories in which brains act as receivers of consciousness, goes back to William James. On the physics side, read some David Bohm. It's mainstream, if not universally held, in quantum physics that in a universe without consciousness you don't get physics - or a universe at all. Consciousness is, many of the best physicists have argued, fundamental.
Explanation of how it fits with the rest of physics on a fundamental level is what Penrose is getting at. That's not to say he's necessarily going at it in the way that will prove out. But anyone who understands quantum physics will recognize at least the validity of the questions he's raising. Or so they tell me. Henry Stapp's work connecting the quantum realm with consciousness is also of interest - and from a far different angle than Penrose's.
It's not said what the cluster is for. If it's going to be a private cloud, Ubuntu jeos (just enough OS) VMs are far quicker to configure than RHEL/CentOS 5.x VMs, if your taste runs to setting up VMs from scratch rather than just cloning them. Don't know what RH 6 offers there (and Scientific Linux, which unlike CentOS offers a RH 6 variant). You also haven't specified your file system's layers. Ubuntu support by most file system projects is equal to that of RHEL, in terms of easily installed packages being available. The exception is with some parts of RH's own preferred cluster stack, which I haven't used. DR:BD, for instance, is perhaps better supported on Ubuntu than RH. GlusterFS is better tested in RH, but runs as well, and is packaged as well, for Ubuntu (and is still a bit immature in either case, but worth considering down the line).
The main advantage of Ubuntu is you get the exact same product as support is sold for, without being required to buy the support. RH forces you to go to CentOS or Scientific Linux to come close to that, and there are differences in those - mostly in the package managers. And RH, if you do license it, pays out part of your money to patent trolls, whom RH essentially supports so that they may more productively attack its competition - other open source projects.
Remember when your Osborne computer had the screen and the computer all in one box. Wow, that was the way of the future, man!
Or was it? Remember when your record player had the amplifier and speaker under the turntable? Wow, that was the way of the future, mam!
Or was it? Could it be possible that the future is, you know, modular?
Sure, some are indispensable. If you are, or want to find out if you are, force their hand. Business is business and friendship is friendship. Tell them you've a strong desire for ownership interest in a business. They'll understand it. The desire is natural to them. Tell them you're leaving to collaborate in a new startup if they won't give you an interest here. Mean it.
They may come through. They may not. You'll learn something about your true worth - or at least their opinion of it.
And if you don't have the balls, you don't deserve to be an owner. Which is fine.
Mountains mean (1) abundant hydroelectric opportunity (much of it currently unexploited, from what I've seen traveling there), (2) plenty of ridge lines with abundant wind (almost totally undeveloped at present), and (3) a likelihood of major geothermal resources (reservoirs of underground heat).
As for "shut the country down on calm/cloudy days," the wind never stops blowing throughout Switzerland all at once. There are many different microclimes, and major mountain ranges generate their own winds throughout the course of a day. It's not like Oklahoma, where you really can have a day where there's no wind anywhere (although days in Oklahoma days with both no wind anywhere and clouds everywhere are rarer than hens' teeth). And note I didn't even mention solar for Switzerland.
It's one thing when firms are small and can't afford the struggle. Red Hat's profits are extraordinary. They can afford a zero tolerance attitude towards the trolls who steal freedom from all. In paying them off, they leave the trolls as a barrier to business for smaller players who - gasp - might compete with Red Hat in some small area. Thus Red Hat is buying protection not just from direct harm by trolls, but from competition by legitimate businesses who the Red Hat-enriched trolls can now afford to go after.
This is why, despite some of Red Hat's technology and people being quite fine, I'll never encourage my clients to buy their licenses. CentOS, yes. The stuff is well worth using. But if you pay Red Hat you're paying a tax to the trolls, who will fatten up on it and then come after other open software that really matters to us.
Clinton raised taxes, leading to full employment, an economic boom that for the first time in decades raised incomes from top to bottom rather than just at the top, and a budget surplus. Bush cut taxes, leading to a fall in employment, economic stagnation aside from the real estate bubble which was aided by Bush failures of regulation, incomes falling in all brackets except the top, and record budget deficits.
Sufficient taxes to support government programs lead to a healthy economy all around. The average economic performance is way better under Democratic presidents than under Republican. The notion that we can have a health country without sufficient taxation is like the notion that you can have a healthy body without sufficient food. History proves the Republican position that taxes must always be lowered, and lowered again, just doesn't lead to the Promised Land. It's a lie invented to serve the ultra-rich, who, having most of the money, have the most to lose from taxes. Average people, and the economy as a whole, prosper when taxes are higher.
More at Wikipedia. Summary: Can easily go over 9.0 from N. California to BC. If that happens, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver would be severely damaged.
The fault near Oregon has caused quakes at least as bad as what Japan just had in the past.
There are orders from Israel's Supreme Court to move parts of the apartheid wall which were issued several years ago. The Israeli occupation government simply ignores them. Beyond the prosecution of several top Israeli officials for sex crimes, the Supreme Court there is not able to accomplish much, since it has no army of its own to enforce its rulings.
Thing is, with nuclear, you don't want a bet, you need a sure thing, at least in safety. GE has lately been pointing out about the Mark I reactor design, that they've run for 40 years without a major mishap. That's with 23 in the US, and how many others abroad? Let's pretend in total there are 40 of them. Then of 40 Mark I reactors over 40 years only 6 have partially melted down! If we project that out to a century, there will only be a 37.5% failure rate for this design. What, you say they won't run for a century? But the NRC has recertified the plant of this design in Vermont for another 20 years, and issued that after the Japan meltdowns. Surely if they can recertify it now, they can do it twice more.
This is a design over which 3 top GE engineers resigned in the 70s, saying it was unsafe. The AEC at the same time considered ordering all Mark I plants shut down, but declined to because of the political implications for atomic power. And that containment vessel that's been leaking in the Japanese Mark 1s? In the US they're routinely packed with 5 times the spent fuel they were engineered to hold safely, while in Japan they are only at 2-3 times engineered capacity.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
As a user of Linux since Slackware was on 13 floppies, here's what I don't understand about the distros: Instead of sticking with an old kernel release and backporting patches, why not move forward to the latest kernel? Coming from the days were it was more common than not to compile your own kernel from vanilla source for whatever distro you were using, I've never gotten in trouble doing that. A few times I've left out an option and had to recompile. But I've never had a new vanilla kernel break other aspects of the distro. I used to do this on Slack, Red Hat (years back when their patched versions were often broken), Debian and Gentoo. I still do it when I need recent kernel features on Ubuntu, although when business requires something on CentOS I stick with the RH-patched version there. My experience with Ubuntu: 10.04 and 10.10 run fine with the most recent vanilla kernels, although YMMV, I guess.
Seriously, why do the distros backport to old kernels rather than roll the kernels forward? What they don't backport is often good stuff, which your machine will run happier with. I can see hanging back a few point releases to make sure the kernel version has no major bugs or regressions reported against it, but all the distros allow their kernels to get far too stale, with RH being the worst over time - and to know what your kernel really has in it, you then become dependent on RH rather than kernel.org. Has the policy long been to take the more obscure road to "earn" the support contracts?