only taxing and subsidizing to account for positive and negative externalities
Excellent idea in theory. But good luck getting any Red State, or our current Congress, to arrive at a sane figure for coal/oil/gas external costs.....And in general... just how would one arrive at an accurate external cost of carbon/pollution? A Blue State might have the political will to create an external cost for non-desireable energy sources, but it would basically have the exact same effect as subsidies for green energy, right? You either make one more expensive, or the other less expensive. Same difference in the end right?
Requiring that an energy company pay you for all the energy you produce, whether they need it or not, is problematic without utility-scale storage. (I'd rather see all utilities be non-profit, government run, 'cost of society' services. That would remove a lot of these problems).
I don't see why there couldn't be a requirement that home solar also has to have a battery storage system. It wouldn't be very expensive compared to the overall cost of the solar installation.
And as utility-scale storage becomes more commonplace, the requirement of home storage could be eased.
Depends where you live in the country also. As an Oregonian, I consider slashdot more conservative than liberal.
But there seems to be sizable amount of libertarians, which can confuse the casual reader sometime. They might strongly disbelieve AGW in one discussion, then strongly support the legalization of all drugs in another discussion.
Libertarians can oftentimes be anti-religion, or at least tend atheistic in my opinion.
However, I consider Libertarians "to the far right" of liberal. There may be some philosophical similarities between liberal/libertarian when it comes to 'freedom issues' like drugs, marriage, religion, etc.. but libertarians and liberals don't agree on what I consider to be fundamental societal power issues. Namely strong government vs weak government. Community vs individual.
That article describes different approaches to how courts have approached the problem.
One approach, at one point in time (The Emerson court 2001):
In our situation, we must ask “what did ‘arms’ mean when the Second Amendment was written and ratified, in that society, and in that context?” How would a citizen or judge back then have understood “arms”? Only after we are confident in our answer can we apply it to our own world to predict an outcome. The Emerson court used this method of interpretation, and we will use it too, to discover what “arms” meant to the generations alive near 1787, when the Second Amendment was drafted.
religion is playing a role in motivating DAESHes actions.
But that is where we run into trouble. Is religion just an excuse for them, or the motivating factor? If they had the exact same background (poor, uneducated, violent past and present, unstable country, no job prospects, kids bombed by foreign power, etc..) but the religion was something other than Islam, I suspect we would see the exact same violent actions.
I think a lot of people conclude that Islam is the problem, and work backwards to fill in definitions and explanations to retain that assertion. Without running an experiment where you swap out the religion for another one, keeping everything else the same, I don't think there is any good evidence to conclude that Islam motivates people to violence.
It is much more meaningful to look at the totality of the historical cultural shared experience of a region. Religion is just one facet of culture. Simplifying the explanation of that enormously complex environment to the phrase "Islam motivates violence", just leads to bigotry and racism.
It is always amusing hearing stories about how the 'game became too easy' from WoW players:)
I was a hardcore EQ player. When WoW came out we all laughed at it. It was like a mmorpg with training wheels. We kinda stopped laughing after WoW eventually sucked a lot of our userbase away.... but I digress.
I guess 'easy' and 'hard' are very relative concepts. EQ you could literally sit (camp) at a spot, clearing the mobs around that single spot, for 3 actual real days. Trying to get 1 rare drop, out of 16 rare drops you need from other camping spots. In order to eventually do another quest and combine those rare drops into a key that lets you enter a dungeon, that requires 60+ real people working together days to beat. And there never was any concept of questing for experience in EQ. You wanted to level up? Prepare to just kill monsters over and over and over in an open world, where every good monster killing spot was competed for by thousands of players.
Quarantine and Hospital are not mutually exclusive.
I can't speak for the level of professionalism in hospitals in any African countries, but if Ebola broke out in a big way in the US, quarantines inside hospitals would be the best and safest way to help and contain the infected.
Hospitals have well documented, practiced, quarantine procedures. I worked in IT for a hospital years back. Even the IT folks got to participate in practice drills on things like natural disasters and outbreaks. For instance, my job during one practice, was helping to keep the media out of quarantine areas. I stood in the parking lot, radioing-in to security if I saw any people climbing fences or otherwise trying to bypass checkpoints.
And note that even in the US, about 75,000 people a year die from infections they acquire in hospitals
How many people die driving each year? No one is afraid of driving.
If you ask medically trained people (doctors, nurses, etc..) where they would want to be cared for in the case of an outbreak, they are all going to say "in a hospital".
You are right that some of the new highly resistant stuff caught (and continues to catch) some hospitals off guard. But Hospitals are modifying their procedures as needed to deal with those new threats.
In the case of known, highly deadly, contagious diseases, hospitals already have procedures in place. I would feel much safer in a modern US hospital vs being out on the street during an outbreak.
Plus, every new infection means more chances for Ebola to mutate, possibly into an airborne form.
Technically...kinda true. But that is Hollywood scaremongering. Think of all the contagious diseases currently known right now. How many can you name that became airborne in the last 100 years? If you count the man-made influenza virus, specifically crafted to be airborne, then I think the answer is 1, right?
If I call myself Christian, but no one in the world believes me, am I Christian? It seems to me that you need to be more specific.
Catholics have the ultimate authority: the pope. If the pope says I'm Catholic, then I'm a Catholic. Muslims have a bunch of "popes", called Clerics. If none of top Clerics of the Sunni/Shia/etc... sects of Islam agree with me when I call myself Muslim, am I Muslim? (I assume not).
As far as I know, there are zero (big/mainstream) Clerics supporting ISIL. I wish the news wouldn't even call them Muslim or Islamic at all. Just call them crazy terrorists.
I'm not saying we should consider them legitimate or anything of the kind. But claiming that they are "not Islamic" sounds like claiming that the child molesting Irish priests weren't Catholic.
Those Irish priests were recognized by the leaders of the Church as members of the Church. I don't know any prominent Muslim Clerics saying that ISIL actions are in line with Islamic teaching. (I can find the opposite though)
I am making the assumption that despite calling yourself X, the authorities of X have to agree with you for it to be true.
I didn't know much about the story. Is the above article accurate? Why isn't the UK public screaming bloody murder? In the US an allegation of child abuse/sex abuse in a kids orphanage/shelter, especially if it supposedly involved higher ups... that would be on every news channel 24/7.
There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.
Why in the world would people thoughtlessly run any command under CGI?
They were not.
A very harmless cgi script that a web site uses to output a message, like "hello world" could be executed by a browser, and by tweaking the user agent string to include, for example () {:;};/bin/bash rm -rf . , you could delete anything that the web server had rights to delete. Get a plugin for firefox like 'tamper data' and you can see how trivial it is to exploit.
Philosophically it can be really tricky to accept what science tells us and at the same time accept what certain interpretations of the bible tell us.
You can remove all conflict by assuming that god cannot alter the physical world (except maybe for the Big Bang) but then what is the purpose of having a god? Just for the afterlife?
If you do believe that god can alter the physical world, then as science progressively explains more and more about the physical world, your god loses areas of previous influence in your belief system. A god of the gaps (god explains only what science cannot).
This is not new. The problem has always been one of getting the nitrogen fixing bacteria to stay on the seed when handled in a commercial/industrial manner.
The real holy grail is getting the bacteria to just follow the plants life cycle, like in beans.
Or by directly applying previously freeze dried bacteria through drip lines, sprinklers, sprayers, etc.. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ and letting it colonize around the root mass each season.
We have thousands of acres using it in Washington State, and several trials ongoing in Oregon State. Elsewhere, like Australia where the product is made, it has been used for... I forget.. about 5-6 years maybe?
I'm not sure why this being touted as a 'new breakthrough'. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are well known.
I'm actually selling freeze dried bacteria right now, it is called Twin N - http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It produces nitrogen way cheaper than buying N, doubly so if you are buying organic sources of N, like fish fert. N fixing bacteria are already being applied to thousands and thousands of acres of crops just in the pacific northwest alone.
What the article didn't say, was if their method was commercially viable. Can they reproduce the bacteria at high volumes? Can they freeze dry them for transport?
I wish them luck though. I'd like to see a lot more use of natural nitrogen fixing in commercial farming. Commercial nitrogen applications now tend to run off and into streams and rivers, making algae blooms and other detrimental side effects.
I understand what you're saying (I think) but I've always wondered (and this is from a hardware-guy's perspective) wouldn't you rather have one big monitor, than two small monitors? I know there may be a significant price difference, but the whole concept of bigger=better seems to be a nomenclature that itself keeps expanding when it comes to screen size. If you can learn to enjoy the multiple desktop feature that corychristison is talking about, couldn't that be as good?
I prefer many small monitors over 1 or 2 big ones because it is easier to snap/lock/full screen apps in each screen. There is probably a software solution to carving up a large monitor into grids, but I've never bothered to look for it.
I do use virtualwin to create 4 virtual desktops in windows 7. But each virtual desktop is for performing a different type of work.
Like virtual desktop 1 is for development. Monitor 1 - view of my application, Monitor 2 - source code, Monitor 3 - documentation/googling. I never have to alt tab while building an application or web page.
Virtual desktop 2 is for server stuff. Monitor 1 - performance/status on servers, Monitor 2 - SSH sessions, Monitor 3 - documentation/googling, misc.
I like how the dailycaller article admits that the vast majority of poor have a greatly increased standard of living than they did 50 years ago while still declaring the war on poverty a failure....
The daily beast article points something out that I think is very important: the war on poverty was only fully waged for about a decade.
Total defense spending, 22%. Pensions, 25%. Healthcare 27%.
And this does NOT include Social Security or Medicare (separate funds, they keep telling us).
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com is not something that the US government publishes. The about page lists the owner/author as the same person who blogs here: http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/ Which appears to be a very conservative/libertarian type blog.
(I don't feel like typing out a long detailed explanation of the budget, or finding one to copy paste...again... but just to point out 1 thing that may not be obvious to people: 22% defense spending is not taking into account the actual cost of the military. One example: it does not include the VA Healthcare System... which is kinda large....add up all the stuff that keeps our military ticking, and the number is much larger than 22%)
Slashdot Mirror
Also http://www.ambri.com/technology/
only taxing and subsidizing to account for positive and negative externalities
Excellent idea in theory. But good luck getting any Red State, or our current Congress, to arrive at a sane figure for coal/oil/gas external costs.....And in general... just how would one arrive at an accurate external cost of carbon/pollution? A Blue State might have the political will to create an external cost for non-desireable energy sources, but it would basically have the exact same effect as subsidies for green energy, right? You either make one more expensive, or the other less expensive. Same difference in the end right?
Requiring that an energy company pay you for all the energy you produce, whether they need it or not, is problematic without utility-scale storage. (I'd rather see all utilities be non-profit, government run, 'cost of society' services. That would remove a lot of these problems).
I don't see why there couldn't be a requirement that home solar also has to have a battery storage system. It wouldn't be very expensive compared to the overall cost of the solar installation.
And as utility-scale storage becomes more commonplace, the requirement of home storage could be eased.
Depends where you live in the country also. As an Oregonian, I consider slashdot more conservative than liberal.
But there seems to be sizable amount of libertarians, which can confuse the casual reader sometime. They might strongly disbelieve AGW in one discussion, then strongly support the legalization of all drugs in another discussion.
Libertarians can oftentimes be anti-religion, or at least tend atheistic in my opinion.
However, I consider Libertarians "to the far right" of liberal. There may be some philosophical similarities between liberal/libertarian when it comes to 'freedom issues' like drugs, marriage, religion, etc.. but libertarians and liberals don't agree on what I consider to be fundamental societal power issues. Namely strong government vs weak government. Community vs individual.
We don't need an amendment to decide what 'arms' means. Courts decide what words (in context) mean all the time.
http://brainshavings.com/the-right-to-keep-and-bear-what/
That article describes different approaches to how courts have approached the problem.
One approach, at one point in time (The Emerson court 2001):
In our situation, we must ask “what did ‘arms’ mean when the Second Amendment was written and ratified, in that society, and in that context?” How would a citizen or judge back then have understood “arms”? Only after we are confident in our answer can we apply it to our own world to predict an outcome. The Emerson court used this method of interpretation, and we will use it too, to discover what “arms” meant to the generations alive near 1787, when the Second Amendment was drafted.
I thought that wasn't possible because Mars has no protective magnetosphere.
religion is playing a role in motivating DAESHes actions.
But that is where we run into trouble. Is religion just an excuse for them, or the motivating factor? If they had the exact same background (poor, uneducated, violent past and present, unstable country, no job prospects, kids bombed by foreign power, etc..) but the religion was something other than Islam, I suspect we would see the exact same violent actions.
I think a lot of people conclude that Islam is the problem, and work backwards to fill in definitions and explanations to retain that assertion. Without running an experiment where you swap out the religion for another one, keeping everything else the same, I don't think there is any good evidence to conclude that Islam motivates people to violence.
It is much more meaningful to look at the totality of the historical cultural shared experience of a region. Religion is just one facet of culture. Simplifying the explanation of that enormously complex environment to the phrase "Islam motivates violence", just leads to bigotry and racism.
It leads to stuff like store owners banning muslims
It is always amusing hearing stories about how the 'game became too easy' from WoW players:)
I was a hardcore EQ player. When WoW came out we all laughed at it. It was like a mmorpg with training wheels. We kinda stopped laughing after WoW eventually sucked a lot of our userbase away.... but I digress.
I guess 'easy' and 'hard' are very relative concepts. EQ you could literally sit (camp) at a spot, clearing the mobs around that single spot, for 3 actual real days. Trying to get 1 rare drop, out of 16 rare drops you need from other camping spots. In order to eventually do another quest and combine those rare drops into a key that lets you enter a dungeon, that requires 60+ real people working together days to beat. And there never was any concept of questing for experience in EQ. You wanted to level up? Prepare to just kill monsters over and over and over in an open world, where every good monster killing spot was competed for by thousands of players.
Quarantine and Hospital are not mutually exclusive.
I can't speak for the level of professionalism in hospitals in any African countries, but if Ebola broke out in a big way in the US, quarantines inside hospitals would be the best and safest way to help and contain the infected.
Hospitals have well documented, practiced, quarantine procedures. I worked in IT for a hospital years back. Even the IT folks got to participate in practice drills on things like natural disasters and outbreaks. For instance, my job during one practice, was helping to keep the media out of quarantine areas. I stood in the parking lot, radioing-in to security if I saw any people climbing fences or otherwise trying to bypass checkpoints.
And note that even in the US, about 75,000 people a year die from infections they acquire in hospitals
How many people die driving each year? No one is afraid of driving.
If you ask medically trained people (doctors, nurses, etc..) where they would want to be cared for in the case of an outbreak, they are all going to say "in a hospital".
You are right that some of the new highly resistant stuff caught (and continues to catch) some hospitals off guard. But Hospitals are modifying their procedures as needed to deal with those new threats.
In the case of known, highly deadly, contagious diseases, hospitals already have procedures in place. I would feel much safer in a modern US hospital vs being out on the street during an outbreak.
Plus, every new infection means more chances for Ebola to mutate, possibly into an airborne form.
Technically...kinda true. But that is Hollywood scaremongering. Think of all the contagious diseases currently known right now. How many can you name that became airborne in the last 100 years? If you count the man-made influenza virus, specifically crafted to be airborne, then I think the answer is 1, right?
Well then, I guess the decision to be uneducated and ignorant
You think the average African made a choice to not go to school?
The KKK are Christian
If I call myself Christian, but no one in the world believes me, am I Christian? It seems to me that you need to be more specific.
Catholics have the ultimate authority: the pope. If the pope says I'm Catholic, then I'm a Catholic.
Muslims have a bunch of "popes", called Clerics. If none of top Clerics of the Sunni/Shia/etc... sects of Islam agree with me when I call myself Muslim, am I Muslim? (I assume not).
As far as I know, there are zero (big/mainstream) Clerics supporting ISIL. I wish the news wouldn't even call them Muslim or Islamic at all. Just call them crazy terrorists.
I'm not saying we should consider them legitimate or anything of the kind. But claiming that they are "not Islamic" sounds like claiming that the child molesting Irish priests weren't Catholic.
Those Irish priests were recognized by the leaders of the Church as members of the Church.
I don't know any prominent Muslim Clerics saying that ISIL actions are in line with Islamic teaching. (I can find the opposite though)
I am making the assumption that despite calling yourself X, the authorities of X have to agree with you for it to be true.
http://www.ukcolumn.org/article/melanie-shaw-beechwood-child-abuse-witness-held-peterborough-prison
I didn't know much about the story. Is the above article accurate? Why isn't the UK public screaming bloody murder? In the US an allegation of child abuse/sex abuse in a kids orphanage/shelter, especially if it supposedly involved higher ups... that would be on every news channel 24/7.
There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.
https://dpa.aapg.org/gac/statements/climatechange.cfm
Is that the statement you were referring to? It is pretty weak. Did they make a stronger supporting statement somewhere else?
Why in the world would people thoughtlessly run any command under CGI?
They were not.
A very harmless cgi script that a web site uses to output a message, like "hello world" could be executed by a browser, and by tweaking the user agent string to include, for example () { :;}; /bin/bash rm -rf . , you could delete anything that the web server had rights to delete. Get a plugin for firefox like 'tamper data' and you can see how trivial it is to exploit.
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/68122/what-is-a-specific-example-of-how-the-shellshock-bash-bug-could-be-exploited
To be fair, anyone using bash as the cgi handler for anything remotely serious was already doing it wrong
It isn't just cgi. Even ssh could be used as an attack vector. ssh into a system as user, and if that user's env is bash....
There were multiple attack vectors (even dhcp). cgi being just one of them.
Philosophically it can be really tricky to accept what science tells us and at the same time accept what certain interpretations of the bible tell us.
You can remove all conflict by assuming that god cannot alter the physical world (except maybe for the Big Bang) but then what is the purpose of having a god? Just for the afterlife?
If you do believe that god can alter the physical world, then as science progressively explains more and more about the physical world, your god loses areas of previous influence in your belief system. A god of the gaps (god explains only what science cannot).
This is not new. The problem has always been one of getting the nitrogen fixing bacteria to stay on the seed when handled in a commercial/industrial manner.
The real holy grail is getting the bacteria to just follow the plants life cycle, like in beans.
Or by directly applying previously freeze dried bacteria through drip lines, sprinklers, sprayers, etc.. http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ and letting it colonize around the root mass each season.
We have thousands of acres using it in Washington State, and several trials ongoing in Oregon State. Elsewhere, like Australia where the product is made, it has been used for... I forget.. about 5-6 years maybe?
Or, you know, just apply more bacteria in place of liquid N each year:) http://www.mabiotec.com/main.php?page=twinn1
I'm not sure why this being touted as a 'new breakthrough'. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are well known.
I'm actually selling freeze dried bacteria right now, it is called Twin N - http://www.bridgetownorganics.com/ . It produces nitrogen way cheaper than buying N, doubly so if you are buying organic sources of N, like fish fert. N fixing bacteria are already being applied to thousands and thousands of acres of crops just in the pacific northwest alone.
What the article didn't say, was if their method was commercially viable. Can they reproduce the bacteria at high volumes? Can they freeze dry them for transport?
I wish them luck though. I'd like to see a lot more use of natural nitrogen fixing in commercial farming. Commercial nitrogen applications now tend to run off and into streams and rivers, making algae blooms and other detrimental side effects.
Also http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/
I understand what you're saying (I think) but I've always wondered (and this is from a hardware-guy's perspective) wouldn't you rather have one big monitor, than two small monitors? I know there may be a significant price difference, but the whole concept of bigger=better seems to be a nomenclature that itself keeps expanding when it comes to screen size. If you can learn to enjoy the multiple desktop feature that corychristison is talking about, couldn't that be as good?
I prefer many small monitors over 1 or 2 big ones because it is easier to snap/lock/full screen apps in each screen. There is probably a software solution to carving up a large monitor into grids, but I've never bothered to look for it.
I do use virtualwin to create 4 virtual desktops in windows 7. But each virtual desktop is for performing a different type of work.
Like virtual desktop 1 is for development. Monitor 1 - view of my application, Monitor 2 - source code, Monitor 3 - documentation/googling. I never have to alt tab while building an application or web page.
Virtual desktop 2 is for server stuff. Monitor 1 - performance/status on servers, Monitor 2 - SSH sessions, Monitor 3 - documentation/googling, misc.
I like how the dailycaller article admits that the vast majority of poor have a greatly increased standard of living than they did 50 years ago while still declaring the war on poverty a failure....
The daily beast article points something out that I think is very important: the war on poverty was only fully waged for about a decade.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/06/marco-rubio-is-wrong-the-war-on-poverty-worked.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/how-the-war-on-poverty-succeeded-in-four-charts
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/report/2014/01/07/81702/50-years-after-lbjs-war-on-poverty/
The military is the biggest part of the US budget? Gee.... our government disagrees with that, according to the budget they publish.
http://www.usgovernmentspendin...
Total defense spending, 22%. Pensions, 25%. Healthcare 27%.
And this does NOT include Social Security or Medicare (separate funds, they keep telling us).
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com is not something that the US government publishes.
The about page lists the owner/author as the same person who blogs here: http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/ Which appears to be a very conservative/libertarian type blog.
(I don't feel like typing out a long detailed explanation of the budget, or finding one to copy paste...again... but just to point out 1 thing that may not be obvious to people: 22% defense spending is not taking into account the actual cost of the military. One example: it does not include the VA Healthcare System... which is kinda large....add up all the stuff that keeps our military ticking, and the number is much larger than 22%)