Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
Well, we do have a "constitutional right" to privacy. However, there are allways areas where two rights are in conflict (in this example the right of the employer to check if their employers are actually working vs. the right of the employee to privacy). In that case, you have to clarify which right is more important. This law does basically clarify that. Most of the stuff described in the article would have deemed illigal by most judges even before that law (i.e. having cameras on the loo). But we don't have case law, so to have legal certainity, codification of law is needed.
Now, back to the topic in question. So I own a company. I pay for the computer. I pay for the internet connection, electricity, desk, and even for the time you are there, supposed to be working. And I can't check on you ? Does that strike anyone else as utterly ridiculous ? Ok, I will accept (not agree) having to inform the employees the company will be monitoring. But not being able to check if the person is doing the work they get payed to do, is just stupid.
I sense a big cultural difference here. You seem to assume that your employees generally are trying to slack and not doing their work. In Germany we usually assume that employees do their job and have some sort of loyalty to the company. I believe that employees tend to work better if they are shown some trust. Of course there will allways be some people who are misusing this trust, but the majority will be more productive.
Additionally I feel there should be borders to what an employer can do with his employees (there obviously are). In Germany, you have a right to privacy. The employer should not be allowed to breach that right without a very good reason (and indeed, there are exceptions in that law, e.g. if you stronly suspect an employee of beeing corrupt, you are allowed to monitor him)
In Germany, everybody has by law a rigth to privacy. In this case, the right of the employer to install surveillance software on their computers has to be weighted against the right of the employee. It was decided that the right of the employee was more important. (Actually the decision was a little more complex than this because there are still cases where the right of the employer is considered more important than the imployee's right to privacy. E.g. it is still allowed to monitor employees it there is a reasonable suspection of a crime or corruption. And if it is neccessary to monitor the location of employees for security reasons, you are still allowed to do that. But you are not allowed to do it secretly)
They are not the first trying to revive the airship. Several years ago, CargoLifter was developing a "second generation airship". Despide heavy subsidaries they've gone insolvent, because the engeneering required to create an actually useful airship is not exactly trivial, and the list of potential customers is astonishingly small. Well, at least they left a damn big hangar that now contains a nice amusement park.
If the track should have a reasonable length, there will have to be intersections. And those will either allow the cars to drive over the tracks (creating the problem above), or will have to include some ramp or tunnel design, which would make things pretty complicated. Not impossible, but negating lots of the gains/cost advantages over a classical subway.
You surely can't be German. Everything I've heard about them is that they're excellent drivers, and take it far more seriously than we do: no yakking on cellphones, texting while driving, etc.
Well, having no speed limit on freeways surely helps taking driving seriosly. And the driver educations is a lot better (and a lot more expensive, too). Also I believe it is a good thing that people here are allowed to drink beer with 16, and only start driving with 17/18. So they already know the effects of alcohol and tend to be more responsible with drinking and (not) driving.
we recently got a light-rail system here. There's accidents with that thing every week or so with some dumb driver hitting it, getting hit by it (by turning in front of it), getting squashed between the train and a pole, etc. IMO, having any kind of mass-transit system that shares space with cars is a disaster.
I've been to lots of towns with light rails systems, and I'm currently living in one, but I've never seen many accidents. In fact, I remember exactly two of them. I guess a reason for that is that in Germany, drivers are much more used to random stuff on the road (pedestrians, light trains, bicycles) than in the US.
You know, that intent is great and all, but as quite many important conferences are helt in the US, that intent will seriously hamper any academic career. Try explaining your professor/boss/whoever is paing you that you can not attain an important conference because "the US are evil and all".
I've never tried, but isn't threatening officers with lethal force a bad idea? Especially if THEY have all sorts of weapons, while YOU are armed only with your bare fists (this was inside an airport, remember?). Well, when I think about it, it is probably even more stupid if you are actually armed, because that will probably make them take your threat seriously and try to avoid getting shot by shooting you first.
That's not funny, that's insightful. Because you would have to fight exactly that attitude when trying to build a new nuclear reactor of any kind. And I can't see a lot of countries in europe where you could possibly win that fight (and I don't know enough about the popular opinion about nuclear energy in the US, but I'd guess it would be at least a pretty tough fight).
This. To be able to use my existing books after a device upgrade, I have to rely on the coorperation of the DRM holder. Which may be likely, but which I can never be sure of. (Especially if I'd like to switch to a different e-book vendor)
This only works for big servics: If you have only a couple of users, you will miss many of the easy-to-guess passwords. Instead of preventing users to pick the same password as other users, you should check the passwords against a pre-made dictionary. This is basically the same approach, only without relying on the users for building your dictionary.
Which is especially interesting in combination with the DRM point. With DRM, you can never be sure your old books will actually be useable with the new device.
I don't care why "they" would care (but I'm sure there has to be some marketing money in that data). All it takes is *one* rogue employee with access to the database. (Oh, I see you are married, but you regulary spend time at a brothel/gay bar/the house of this other woman? Don't want your spouse to know about this? Oh, and you visit that psychologis pretty often? Do you have problems your employer might be interested in?)
They know where you live, but now they also know (and STORE) where you work, where you hang out after work, and to which medical institutions you may go to regulary.
Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks
This is basically true, except for the "impractical" part. Those gimmics do actually work. They are not perfect, and we'll need better and hopefully cheaper ones in the future, but they are perfectly feasible.
I didn't say that balancing the input/output and buffering is a bad idea.
I only said that if the energy is needed in the grid, you should deliver it directly instead of storing it in water towers.
Maybe I took wrong your first post when you say taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place?: it looked to me as you suggested to always store it as hydro - if that's indeed what you were saying, my argument was against "always" which should be replaced with "when in excess".
The question is: What is more efficient in total, converting wind into electricity and storing the excess energy (which is probably a lot, as wind energy is spikey and you'll need some kind of reserve if you want a stable supply even in case of a few weeks without much wind), or converting wind energy to potential energy (water, compressed air,...) and generate whatever is needed at the moment. The former would mean only one conversion for the "direct" electricity, but three conversions for the "excess" energy (wind->electical energy->potential energy->electrical energy). The latter would mean two conversions (wind->potential energy->electrical energy) consistantly.
Mitigating that problem by reducing efficiency is a trade-off that can really help renewable energy become more mainstream and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel
a. in your example, to store the excess in Norway lakes, you need a cable that's currently the wonder of submersible cables. And TFA was saying "the grid is the bottleneck, otherwise the CA people would be happy to suck the energy in". If you need to lay a line to the appropriate lake and build a hydro on it, wouldn't it be cheaper to just enhance the current grid which acts as a bottleneck?
You'll need the line to the lake anyways. Enhancing the grid is always a good idea, but if you want renewable enegery to become baseline, you need to buffer the spikes eventually.
The problem is not the occasionally waste of energy. The problem is that if you want to allow for more renewable energy, and to actually reduce non-renewable energy, you will need a grid that can handle this. You will need some energy storage (like pumped storage hydroelectrics, or compressed air, or whatever), else your base energy has to be provided by predictable energy sources like coal or nuclear.
That mostly true, but that's a problem all by itself: We will have to transition to renewable energy at some point. Its merely a question WHEN we have to do it. So the grid has to be extended to allow more spikey energy. You can do that now, when there is still time, or wait until it is too late. Europe is in the process to gradually expand there grid to allow for more renewable energy. It's not perfect yet, and it still has a long way to go. But this is the only way to go. Starting now is expensive, but delaying the inevitable is even more expensive.
Basically, this.
There also is research into storing the energy as compressed air. The compressed air can also be generated directly by the windmills (sorry for the marketing video, was to lazy to search for a more scientific source)
We've spend ages to tell people to make backups even when using a RAID. And you are telling people to go off-shore sailing without taking any backup system? You know, if your RAID crashes and you have no backup, you only lose your data. If your electonics fail in the middle of the ocean (electonics and salt water tend to dislike each other), you have a pretty good chance to lose your life. But yeah, you could save some hundered bucks by not having a sextant!
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Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
Well, we do have a "constitutional right" to privacy. However, there are allways areas where two rights are in conflict (in this example the right of the employer to check if their employers are actually working vs. the right of the employee to privacy). In that case, you have to clarify which right is more important. This law does basically clarify that. Most of the stuff described in the article would have deemed illigal by most judges even before that law (i.e. having cameras on the loo). But we don't have case law, so to have legal certainity, codification of law is needed.
Now, back to the topic in question. So I own a company. I pay for the computer. I pay for the internet connection, electricity, desk, and even for the time you are there, supposed to be working. And I can't check on you ? Does that strike anyone else as utterly ridiculous ? Ok, I will accept (not agree) having to inform the employees the company will be monitoring. But not being able to check if the person is doing the work they get payed to do, is just stupid.
I sense a big cultural difference here. You seem to assume that your employees generally are trying to slack and not doing their work. In Germany we usually assume that employees do their job and have some sort of loyalty to the company. I believe that employees tend to work better if they are shown some trust. Of course there will allways be some people who are misusing this trust, but the majority will be more productive.
Additionally I feel there should be borders to what an employer can do with his employees (there obviously are). In Germany, you have a right to privacy. The employer should not be allowed to breach that right without a very good reason (and indeed, there are exceptions in that law, e.g. if you stronly suspect an employee of beeing corrupt, you are allowed to monitor him)
In Germany, everybody has by law a rigth to privacy. In this case, the right of the employer to install surveillance software on their computers has to be weighted against the right of the employee. It was decided that the right of the employee was more important. (Actually the decision was a little more complex than this because there are still cases where the right of the employer is considered more important than the imployee's right to privacy. E.g. it is still allowed to monitor employees it there is a reasonable suspection of a crime or corruption. And if it is neccessary to monitor the location of employees for security reasons, you are still allowed to do that. But you are not allowed to do it secretly)
They are not the first trying to revive the airship. Several years ago, CargoLifter was developing a "second generation airship". Despide heavy subsidaries they've gone insolvent, because the engeneering required to create an actually useful airship is not exactly trivial, and the list of potential customers is astonishingly small. Well, at least they left a damn big hangar that now contains a nice amusement park.
If the track should have a reasonable length, there will have to be intersections. And those will either allow the cars to drive over the tracks (creating the problem above), or will have to include some ramp or tunnel design, which would make things pretty complicated. Not impossible, but negating lots of the gains/cost advantages over a classical subway.
Also it should be fun in intersections if the driver under the bus likes to go straight on and the bus takes a turn (or vice versa)
You surely can't be German. Everything I've heard about them is that they're excellent drivers, and take it far more seriously than we do: no yakking on cellphones, texting while driving, etc.
Well, having no speed limit on freeways surely helps taking driving seriosly. And the driver educations is a lot better (and a lot more expensive, too). Also I believe it is a good thing that people here are allowed to drink beer with 16, and only start driving with 17/18. So they already know the effects of alcohol and tend to be more responsible with drinking and (not) driving.
we recently got a light-rail system here. There's accidents with that thing every week or so with some dumb driver hitting it, getting hit by it (by turning in front of it), getting squashed between the train and a pole, etc. IMO, having any kind of mass-transit system that shares space with cars is a disaster.
I've been to lots of towns with light rails systems, and I'm currently living in one, but I've never seen many accidents. In fact, I remember exactly two of them. I guess a reason for that is that in Germany, drivers are much more used to random stuff on the road (pedestrians, light trains, bicycles) than in the US.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Europe is a bigger market than the US.
You know, that intent is great and all, but as quite many important conferences are helt in the US, that intent will seriously hamper any academic career. Try explaining your professor/boss/whoever is paing you that you can not attain an important conference because "the US are evil and all".
I've never tried, but isn't threatening officers with lethal force a bad idea? Especially if THEY have all sorts of weapons, while YOU are armed only with your bare fists (this was inside an airport, remember?). Well, when I think about it, it is probably even more stupid if you are actually armed, because that will probably make them take your threat seriously and try to avoid getting shot by shooting you first.
Such a device should be virtually impossible. So there is a finite probability... wait, let me get a fresh cup of really hot tea.
That's not funny, that's insightful. Because you would have to fight exactly that attitude when trying to build a new nuclear reactor of any kind. And I can't see a lot of countries in europe where you could possibly win that fight (and I don't know enough about the popular opinion about nuclear energy in the US, but I'd guess it would be at least a pretty tough fight).
This. To be able to use my existing books after a device upgrade, I have to rely on the coorperation of the DRM holder. Which may be likely, but which I can never be sure of. (Especially if I'd like to switch to a different e-book vendor)
This only works for big servics: If you have only a couple of users, you will miss many of the easy-to-guess passwords. Instead of preventing users to pick the same password as other users, you should check the passwords against a pre-made dictionary. This is basically the same approach, only without relying on the users for building your dictionary.
Oh, stop with your new-fangled parchment. How is the writing going to survive the aeons if it's not carved into stone?
Which is especially interesting in combination with the DRM point. With DRM, you can never be sure your old books will actually be useable with the new device.
DRM which is *illegal* to remove. (In some countries, you mileage may vary)
I don't care why "they" would care (but I'm sure there has to be some marketing money in that data). All it takes is *one* rogue employee with access to the database.
(Oh, I see you are married, but you regulary spend time at a brothel/gay bar/the house of this other woman? Don't want your spouse to know about this?
Oh, and you visit that psychologis pretty often? Do you have problems your employer might be interested in?)
They know where you live, but now they also know (and STORE) where you work, where you hang out after work, and to which medical institutions you may go to regulary.
Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks
This is basically true, except for the "impractical" part. Those gimmics do actually work. They are not perfect, and we'll need better and hopefully cheaper ones in the future, but they are perfectly feasible.
I didn't say that balancing the input/output and buffering is a bad idea. I only said that if the energy is needed in the grid, you should deliver it directly instead of storing it in water towers.
Maybe I took wrong your first post when you say taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place?: it looked to me as you suggested to always store it as hydro - if that's indeed what you were saying, my argument was against "always" which should be replaced with "when in excess".
The question is: What is more efficient in total, converting wind into electricity and storing the excess energy (which is probably a lot, as wind energy is spikey and you'll need some kind of reserve if you want a stable supply even in case of a few weeks without much wind), or converting wind energy to potential energy (water, compressed air, ...) and generate whatever is needed at the moment. The former would mean only one conversion for the "direct" electricity, but three conversions for the "excess" energy (wind->electical energy->potential energy->electrical energy). The latter would mean two conversions (wind->potential energy->electrical energy) consistantly.
Mitigating that problem by reducing efficiency is a trade-off that can really help renewable energy become more mainstream and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel
a. in your example, to store the excess in Norway lakes, you need a cable that's currently the wonder of submersible cables. And TFA was saying "the grid is the bottleneck, otherwise the CA people would be happy to suck the energy in". If you need to lay a line to the appropriate lake and build a hydro on it, wouldn't it be cheaper to just enhance the current grid which acts as a bottleneck?
You'll need the line to the lake anyways. Enhancing the grid is always a good idea, but if you want renewable enegery to become baseline, you need to buffer the spikes eventually.
The problem is not the occasionally waste of energy. The problem is that if you want to allow for more renewable energy, and to actually reduce non-renewable energy, you will need a grid that can handle this. You will need some energy storage (like pumped storage hydroelectrics, or compressed air, or whatever), else your base energy has to be provided by predictable energy sources like coal or nuclear.
That mostly true, but that's a problem all by itself: We will have to transition to renewable energy at some point. Its merely a question WHEN we have to do it. So the grid has to be extended to allow more spikey energy. You can do that now, when there is still time, or wait until it is too late. Europe is in the process to gradually expand there grid to allow for more renewable energy. It's not perfect yet, and it still has a long way to go. But this is the only way to go. Starting now is expensive, but delaying the inevitable is even more expensive.
Basically, this. There also is research into storing the energy as compressed air. The compressed air can also be generated directly by the windmills (sorry for the marketing video, was to lazy to search for a more scientific source)
We've spend ages to tell people to make backups even when using a RAID. And you are telling people to go off-shore sailing without taking any backup system? You know, if your RAID crashes and you have no backup, you only lose your data. If your electonics fail in the middle of the ocean (electonics and salt water tend to dislike each other), you have a pretty good chance to lose your life. But yeah, you could save some hundered bucks by not having a sextant!