I assume this is the same problem suffered by "solitaire" on Windows where the victory animation zips by at an absurd rate on any non-ancient computer.
The simple solution, for you Game Genie owners: Use Game Genie, push game and genie together into the NES firmly. Works every time. And you purists don't even need to enter any codes if you don't want to. But messing with the physics engine on Bases Loaded was always tons of fun, I wish I had written some of the better ones down... anyone have anything like this?
As for this new data retention crap, are the cops going to pay for the huge servers and disks required to hold all this information? And the people to keep everything going?
No, your tax dollars will!
I agree with the rest of your post... At the very least, I should know what the gov't/police have and haven't read of my personal communications. (which I would if they needed a proper warrant to legally comel me to decrypt.)
This a very prevelant attitude, or perhaps prevelant within a vocal minority. It is however, a terrible attitude. True, we should be very grateful to those who pour their time and heart into the volunteer work that is most free software. If all developers hear is "oh that sucks", they will get discouraged. However, authors should welcome and encourage constructive criticism from users. A large part of designing an [interactive] tool is to observe people using it in an attempt to identify and understand the reasons behind common problems and design flaws so that the flaws may be eliminated. True, this is neither the domain nor the desire of every free software developer nor should it be. But to deride any criticism with the argument "well, it's free and open; fix it yourself" is pointless at best and extremely harmful at worst. When users are too discouraged or fearful to complain, bad software that is difficult to use is the result.
To developers: If you are not interested in user complaints that is fine. Please state this in your program documentation. We still thank you for your generous gifts as you give them. If you are interested in user complaints, please make this clear so as to not discourage potential insight from the users.
To designers: Please observe users and listen to and understand complaints; design usable software. We will thank you for your contributions.
To users: Be grateful, but do not let us go on in ignorance. We want to understand your problems.
Well said. This is also my chief complaint with the current software copyright debacle. The publishers are cheating at the game (the contract between society and the publishers or authors).
The intent of copyright is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences by extending to creators of a work the right to control its distribution. This is no different today than it was in times past.
Ah, but what does "promote progress" mean? And why should we promote progress? Simply to allow a business model of creating and selling copyable works? No, I submit that the ultimate goal is to nuture a rich public domain. Wide knowledge of science obviously benefits society as duplication of effort is reduced and people can use knowledge of science to, say, go to the moon. A public domain of artistic works also benefits society, though it's less obvious how. A society's culture is shared amongst its members; it belongs to society, not any one member. The progress and growth of this culture is seen as a good thing, and so a copyright incentive is installed under the belief that it will promote this society owned culture.
Furthermore, all science and art builds upon what came before. A lifetime of experience drawn from society leads to new science and new art. I agree that it is selfish to, for example, never buy a CD but always download or copy from friends; however it is equally selfish for the author of such a work to claim "it's mine and mine alone", ignoring the shoulders of the giants on which she stands.
In conclusion, copying hurts everyone, just a little; it also benefits everyone, just a little. The key is to strike a balance.
A true random number generator could produce the string 1111111111; it's
merely highly unlikely. I can easily compress that as 1*10. I think the word
you want is "entropy". Random number generators can produce strings of low
entropy, it just isn't very likely. See the second law of thermodynamics. All
the gas molecules in my room could rush to the opposite wall suffocating me;
it's just astronomically unlikely.
Hi, I've been using Ruby for some time and never seen Ruby/DL. It looks very
promising. Is this the preferred way to write extensions when a shared lib is
available? I've been having good luck with the fairly simple "traditional"
method of writing and compiling extensions in C, and I've never (well, now I'm
not sure...) run across an extension that used Ruby/DL. Do you know of any good
comparisons online? Perhaps I should just try to write my next extension with
Ruby/DL. I suppose not needing a C compiler is quite an advantage.
For me, email is not instant. It is also (more?) susceptible to spam. I use AIM (grudgingly) and have never had a problem with spam.
My email setup mostly consists of me running "fetchmail" on some pop3 accounts. I also have a mail server which I must get messages from (offlineimap). Both of these methods are "pull" rather than "push". I.e. if someone sends me an email, it isn't possible for a window to pop up and say "here's the email"; I have to fetch it first (even if this step is completely automated, it isn't instant).
Now that I'm off topic, I'd like to pose the question: what kind of software exists to make email "instant"? I have control of my own mail server, but my desktop computer is not my mail server, and is behind firewall, NAT, etc. Thus messages to my email address are not delivered directly to my computer.
Basically, I want something on the mail server end that: 1) queues up received mail. 2) when my desktop connects as a client, it receives the queued mail and does with it as it wishes (runs it through the local mail system). 3) the desktop remains connected indefinitely, and new mail received by the mail server is pushed down to the desktop "instantly". 4) If the desktop client ever disconnects, the mail server resumes its queueing.
IMAP is nice, but my server is dog slow latency wise. I like having a local copy of my mail. While I'm designing my ideal system, it'd also be capable of supporting multiple clients (main desktop and web client at least). The server would retain some number of emails so any client that connected would see the old email. The primary client would download all the emails to have a local copy and for archival purposes, and nothing would prevent multiple clients from doing the same.
Back the topic, it remains much easier to fire off a quick instant message and expect an immediate response than with email. (Though the MS Exchange setup at work comes close. Here the network is fast enough for it to work without local delivery, just the Outlook client connecting to the server.)
More like, "how many different text editing interfaces must I
learn??". One for line entry, bigger box entry (web browser), text editing
(notepad, vim, etc.), word processing (MS Word, Abiword), every other largish
application with text (spreadsheet, email program, IM program, etc. etc.).
Yeah, some use the same GUI widget, but most have some amount of
customization... It's ridiculous really. Fantastically frustrating to use in
addition to be wasted programming effort. I am the computer and I know how to
spell check, just not here because here is..., well..., I don't know I just
won't spell check here... Haave a nise daiye! GRR.
We have stories of people who *almost* did it, but we'll never hear stories of people who actually have done it. They may be living among you now, someone you know and trust...
A single chip of gallium and some other chemicals is used to create the light.
Um, that's one method, as I stated. GaN LEDs are blue to ultraviolet in color. They may be coated with chemicals that emit yellow light, together creating the illusion of white. This isn't ideal for all purposes; light using more of the spectrum is more pleasing (more like sunlight) and so is desireable for indoor lighting, hence tri-color LEDs.
Traffic lights, for example, are owned by a city. The city keeps accurate budget information about how its money is spent. Incandescent traffice lights are typically changed on a yearly basis and require a substantial workforce with trucks and ladders to reach the bulbs. One can usually make a convincing case to a city that using LED traffice lights will save $x per year, and so the city opts to use LED lights.
I personally do not keep track of my light bulb spending, and I imagine most households also do not. Thus the "it saves money in the long run" is a much more difficult argument to make.
Furthermore, making white LEDs is typically done either with a blue LED surrounded by something that will emit yellow (and transmit some of the blue) when the blue LED is lit, or by using a red, green, and blue LED together.
The first style has makes a white light that isn't "nice", because it's creating "white" by only combining two colors in the spectrum (blue and yellow). I can't explain it more than that, perhaps someone more knowledgeable can? This style is great for outdoor lighting (street lamps) where "niceness" doesn't matter so much; people aren't trying to read a newspaper but are merely identifying oncoming traffic.
The second style is great (well, as good as RGB monitors), except for one problem: the different colored LEDs wear out at different rates. Thus the color of the light will drift slowly over time and obtain a green hue (how much time? I don't know... 2 years? 5 years?). So, the LEDs may last forever, but the "whiteness" may not last much longer than a conventional bulb.
An aside: what is really cool about the tri-color LEDs is that you could potentially have dials to adjust the relative intensity of the colors and thus produce any color of the rainbow (or RGB spectrum at least), leading to many decorative and even utilitarian applications (e.g. a light inside a water faucet that lights the water according to its temperature).
I just lost my wallet, and am fairly certain it's somewhere in the mess of my house. I was just wishing it had an RFID tag so I could take, say, some sort of wand and sweep my house to locate which pile of clothes it's in. This would also be useful for keys, remote controls, eyeglasses, and other things people are constatly misplacing. Just stick a small RFID tag on the item and somehow tell your wand what item it is so it will know how to find it later. Just don't lose the wand:) Obviously, if my wallet is in the middle of some parking lot this wouldn't be too useful, but again, chances are it's in my house and I simply can't find it.
The paper trail is a red herring, if you ask me. What is really needed is publicly-available source code that anyone can view.
The paper trail is human verifiable (not some cryptic barcode or silliness like that). If I voted for John Jones, and the paper says "John Jones", then I know I'm putting something in a box with the candidate I voted for written on it. The paper trail should, for convenience, also be machine readable. Perhaps by having a list of candidates with a darkened oval next to the selected candidates. Oh, this is starting to sound like proper purely paper ballot systems.
The point of a paper trail is to generate some human verifiable chunk of stuff that will be cumbersome to alter or hide or burn or whatever. It could be anything really, it just needs to convince a human that yes, it is likely that this chunk of stuff represents what the people voted for. And for me, pure electronics don't even come close to doing that.
Publically available source code is a red-herring. Sure it should be insisted upon, but how do you verify that the box you're voting on has the correct code? You'd have to verify it manually on election day, and this would be cumbersome, require extensive knowledge of programming and computers and the specific hardware involved (the *real* code isn't hiding somewhere else is it?), and would look a lot like tampering with the machine.
Electronic voting just brings in too much complexity. Filling in an oval with a felt marker seems to me to be as close to ideal as you're gonna get. I can see who I voted for, and I can see my vote going into a box of other votes. Beyond that I have to trust the system, but at least I know someone has to physically hide or destroy my paper ballot to make it not count.
This is how many "everything should be a market" would like pollution to work. It may sound evil when you word it that way, but at least there's a monetary incentive to pollute less. In some schemes, corporations can buy and sell tickets that allow them to pollute a certain amount. A company may gain money by polluting less and selling its tickets (to other companies who will then pollute more). Alternatively, organizations could purchase tickets and then destroy them, or the government could purchase tickets to set an overall limit on the particular polution.
It's an interesting idea that I don't know too much about, just wanted to share.
Exactly. And if they really wanted to tax "time on the road" rather than "fuel burned", couldn't they ask you to report your vehicle's mileage on a yearly basis? Areas with emissions testing (California?) already report mileage; it shows up in online VIN reports. Sounds somewhat less intrusive.
I once heard (on slashdot actually) about a display that was entirely passive. Instead of electrically modifying the pixels emit colored light (as with lcd monitors), the pixels were modified to reflect different colors (and emit no light at all). It was described as being much like ink on paper, except that the pixels could be modified like an lcd display. This sounds so cool to me, but I've heard nothing about it since.
Your browser probably has a back button, yes? A duplication of the functionality of this button will waste your time as you decide whether to use the browser's back button or in-page navigation. Of course, you're now so familiar with in-page navigation (probably because browser navigation is lacking), and waste even more time wondering why in-page navagation isn't there. AHHHHHHHHHH!
Why do these comments always come up? I *want* my software with lots of dependencies. I don't want my software duplicating effort, especially if the duplicate will be of lower quality. I want it to inherit the work of Gtk+/Gnome so that my computer will have a consistent look and feel. I understand this program uses wxWidgets which supposedly abstracts the gui. This is only true to a point... I hate the wxWidgets gtk file selector (though perhpas they now use the nicer gtk2 file selector? I don't know...).
Portability between desktop environments and platforms is nice... but can't I have a consistency as well? This isn't a question of everyone deciding on the One True GUI Widgets. It's a question of a poorly designed system. Can a system be designed that has a consistent interface *by design* ? (e.g. not due to developer discipline, which as we can see from experience will never produce a consistent system). I submit that one can, though it would be difficult at best and certainly a long uphill battle to gain the popularity required for it to become useful.
Thank you. I certainly recognized the satirical humor when I wrote the post, but I am genuinely interested in the answer to my question. Am I missing something in my analysis (I know very little about nuclear reactors)?
Of course humanity is and will further impact the environment. The big questions are, what impact is acceptable, and where can we make imporovements? These are very subjective questions, and some possible answers are:
"I don't care, as an individual I cannot significantly impact the environment"
"I don't care, I'll be dead before it matters."
"I care, I'd like to see the Earth last just the way it is for as long as possible."
"I care, I'd like to see the Earth last, but recognize that it will probably change."
Then there's the question of "how much do you care?". Are you willing to sacrifice the automobile? trains? planes? indoor lighting? The answer to these is typically "no", so let's move on. Now we need to decide if any change (like using wind power) is worth it. The question is then, "is the impact from massive windfarms better or worse than the impact from burning fossil fuels? running nuclear reactors? using tidal forces? sacrificing automobiles? etc? doing nothing until we have magic fusion reactors?".
So, there will *surely* be an impact, no matter what course of action is taken. It is rather annoying however, for every possibility to be shot down with "it's bad for the environment" without an acknowledgement that this is an implicit vote for the current situation over the possible alternative.
Planet Earth is constantly gaining energy on a daily basis thanks to the generosity of The Sun.
Slight nitpick: I was under the impression that Earth (on a global scale) was in an equilibrium with the Sun (radiating at night the energy gained in the day). Otherwise, the planet would be getting hotter, yes? (Well, some say it is getting hotter, but dismiss global warming for a moment).
Slashdot Mirror
I assume this is the same problem suffered by "solitaire" on Windows where the victory animation zips by at an absurd rate on any non-ancient computer.
The simple solution, for you Game Genie owners: Use Game Genie, push game and genie together into the NES firmly. Works every time. And you purists don't even need to enter any codes if you don't want to. But messing with the physics engine on Bases Loaded was always tons of fun, I wish I had written some of the better ones down... anyone have anything like this?
As for this new data retention crap, are the cops going to pay for the huge servers and disks required to hold all this information? And the people to keep everything going?
No, your tax dollars will!
I agree with the rest of your post... At the very least, I should know what the gov't/police have and haven't read of my personal communications. (which I would if they needed a proper warrant to legally comel me to decrypt.)
This a very prevelant attitude, or perhaps prevelant within a vocal minority. It is however, a terrible attitude. True, we should be very grateful to those who pour their time and heart into the volunteer work that is most free software. If all developers hear is "oh that sucks", they will get discouraged. However, authors should welcome and encourage constructive criticism from users. A large part of designing an [interactive] tool is to observe people using it in an attempt to identify and understand the reasons behind common problems and design flaws so that the flaws may be eliminated. True, this is neither the domain nor the desire of every free software developer nor should it be. But to deride any criticism with the argument "well, it's free and open; fix it yourself" is pointless at best and extremely harmful at worst. When users are too discouraged or fearful to complain, bad software that is difficult to use is the result.
To developers: If you are not interested in user complaints that is fine. Please state this in your program documentation. We still thank you for your generous gifts as you give them. If you are interested in user complaints, please make this clear so as to not discourage potential insight from the users.
To designers: Please observe users and listen to and understand complaints; design usable software. We will thank you for your contributions.
To users: Be grateful, but do not let us go on in ignorance. We want to understand your problems.
Well said. This is also my chief complaint with the current software copyright debacle. The publishers are cheating at the game (the contract between society and the publishers or authors).
Copying hurts everyone, only just a little.
The intent of copyright is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences by extending to creators of a work the right to control its distribution. This is no different today than it was in times past.
Ah, but what does "promote progress" mean? And why should we promote progress? Simply to allow a business model of creating and selling copyable works? No, I submit that the ultimate goal is to nuture a rich public domain. Wide knowledge of science obviously benefits society as duplication of effort is reduced and people can use knowledge of science to, say, go to the moon. A public domain of artistic works also benefits society, though it's less obvious how. A society's culture is shared amongst its members; it belongs to society, not any one member. The progress and growth of this culture is seen as a good thing, and so a copyright incentive is installed under the belief that it will promote this society owned culture.
Furthermore, all science and art builds upon what came before. A lifetime of experience drawn from society leads to new science and new art. I agree that it is selfish to, for example, never buy a CD but always download or copy from friends; however it is equally selfish for the author of such a work to claim "it's mine and mine alone", ignoring the shoulders of the giants on which she stands.
In conclusion, copying hurts everyone, just a little; it also benefits everyone, just a little. The key is to strike a balance.
If you're going to be picky...
A true random number generator could produce the string 1111111111; it's merely highly unlikely. I can easily compress that as 1*10. I think the word you want is "entropy". Random number generators can produce strings of low entropy, it just isn't very likely. See the second law of thermodynamics. All the gas molecules in my room could rush to the opposite wall suffocating me; it's just astronomically unlikely.
Hi, I've been using Ruby for some time and never seen Ruby/DL. It looks very promising. Is this the preferred way to write extensions when a shared lib is available? I've been having good luck with the fairly simple "traditional" method of writing and compiling extensions in C, and I've never (well, now I'm not sure...) run across an extension that used Ruby/DL. Do you know of any good comparisons online? Perhaps I should just try to write my next extension with Ruby/DL. I suppose not needing a C compiler is quite an advantage.
For me, email is not instant. It is also (more?) susceptible to spam. I use AIM (grudgingly) and have never had a problem with spam.
My email setup mostly consists of me running "fetchmail" on some pop3 accounts. I also have a mail server which I must get messages from (offlineimap). Both of these methods are "pull" rather than "push". I.e. if someone sends me an email, it isn't possible for a window to pop up and say "here's the email"; I have to fetch it first (even if this step is completely automated, it isn't instant).
Now that I'm off topic, I'd like to pose the question: what kind of software exists to make email "instant"? I have control of my own mail server, but my desktop computer is not my mail server, and is behind firewall, NAT, etc. Thus messages to my email address are not delivered directly to my computer.
Basically, I want something on the mail server end that: 1) queues up received mail. 2) when my desktop connects as a client, it receives the queued mail and does with it as it wishes (runs it through the local mail system). 3) the desktop remains connected indefinitely, and new mail received by the mail server is pushed down to the desktop "instantly". 4) If the desktop client ever disconnects, the mail server resumes its queueing.
IMAP is nice, but my server is dog slow latency wise. I like having a local copy of my mail. While I'm designing my ideal system, it'd also be capable of supporting multiple clients (main desktop and web client at least). The server would retain some number of emails so any client that connected would see the old email. The primary client would download all the emails to have a local copy and for archival purposes, and nothing would prevent multiple clients from doing the same.
Back the topic, it remains much easier to fire off a quick instant message and expect an immediate response than with email. (Though the MS Exchange setup at work comes close. Here the network is fast enough for it to work without local delivery, just the Outlook client connecting to the server.)
More like, "how many different text editing interfaces must I learn??". One for line entry, bigger box entry (web browser), text editing (notepad, vim, etc.), word processing (MS Word, Abiword), every other largish application with text (spreadsheet, email program, IM program, etc. etc.). Yeah, some use the same GUI widget, but most have some amount of customization... It's ridiculous really. Fantastically frustrating to use in addition to be wasted programming effort. I am the computer and I know how to spell check, just not here because here is..., well..., I don't know I just won't spell check here... Haave a nise daiye! GRR.
We have stories of people who *almost* did it, but we'll never hear stories of people who actually have done it. They may be living among you now, someone you know and trust...
What a letdown.
Not my idea. I saw it in a magazine article about faucet design, but I like the idea very much.
Here's something from google: student project
A single chip of gallium and some other chemicals is used to create the light.
Um, that's one method, as I stated. GaN LEDs are blue to ultraviolet in color. They may be coated with chemicals that emit yellow light, together creating the illusion of white. This isn't ideal for all purposes; light using more of the spectrum is more pleasing (more like sunlight) and so is desireable for indoor lighting, hence tri-color LEDs.
Traffic lights, for example, are owned by a city. The city keeps accurate budget information about how its money is spent. Incandescent traffice lights are typically changed on a yearly basis and require a substantial workforce with trucks and ladders to reach the bulbs. One can usually make a convincing case to a city that using LED traffice lights will save $x per year, and so the city opts to use LED lights.
I personally do not keep track of my light bulb spending, and I imagine most households also do not. Thus the "it saves money in the long run" is a much more difficult argument to make.
Furthermore, making white LEDs is typically done either with a blue LED surrounded by something that will emit yellow (and transmit some of the blue) when the blue LED is lit, or by using a red, green, and blue LED together.
The first style has makes a white light that isn't "nice", because it's creating "white" by only combining two colors in the spectrum (blue and yellow). I can't explain it more than that, perhaps someone more knowledgeable can? This style is great for outdoor lighting (street lamps) where "niceness" doesn't matter so much; people aren't trying to read a newspaper but are merely identifying oncoming traffic.
The second style is great (well, as good as RGB monitors), except for one problem: the different colored LEDs wear out at different rates. Thus the color of the light will drift slowly over time and obtain a green hue (how much time? I don't know... 2 years? 5 years?). So, the LEDs may last forever, but the "whiteness" may not last much longer than a conventional bulb.
An aside: what is really cool about the tri-color LEDs is that you could potentially have dials to adjust the relative intensity of the colors and thus produce any color of the rainbow (or RGB spectrum at least), leading to many decorative and even utilitarian applications (e.g. a light inside a water faucet that lights the water according to its temperature).
I just lost my wallet, and am fairly certain it's somewhere in the mess of my house. I was just wishing it had an RFID tag so I could take, say, some sort of wand and sweep my house to locate which pile of clothes it's in. This would also be useful for keys, remote controls, eyeglasses, and other things people are constatly misplacing. Just stick a small RFID tag on the item and somehow tell your wand what item it is so it will know how to find it later. Just don't lose the wand :) Obviously, if my wallet is in the middle of some parking lot this wouldn't be too useful, but again, chances are it's in my house and I simply can't find it.
Um, he's joking about the chick. Remember Hanson? I mean, come on...
The paper trail is a red herring, if you ask me. What is really needed is publicly-available source code that anyone can view.
The paper trail is human verifiable (not some cryptic barcode or silliness like that). If I voted for John Jones, and the paper says "John Jones", then I know I'm putting something in a box with the candidate I voted for written on it. The paper trail should, for convenience, also be machine readable. Perhaps by having a list of candidates with a darkened oval next to the selected candidates. Oh, this is starting to sound like proper purely paper ballot systems.
The point of a paper trail is to generate some human verifiable chunk of stuff that will be cumbersome to alter or hide or burn or whatever. It could be anything really, it just needs to convince a human that yes, it is likely that this chunk of stuff represents what the people voted for. And for me, pure electronics don't even come close to doing that.
Publically available source code is a red-herring. Sure it should be insisted upon, but how do you verify that the box you're voting on has the correct code? You'd have to verify it manually on election day, and this would be cumbersome, require extensive knowledge of programming and computers and the specific hardware involved (the *real* code isn't hiding somewhere else is it?), and would look a lot like tampering with the machine.
Electronic voting just brings in too much complexity. Filling in an oval with a felt marker seems to me to be as close to ideal as you're gonna get. I can see who I voted for, and I can see my vote going into a box of other votes. Beyond that I have to trust the system, but at least I know someone has to physically hide or destroy my paper ballot to make it not count.
buying the right to poison us
This is how many "everything should be a market" would like pollution to work. It may sound evil when you word it that way, but at least there's a monetary incentive to pollute less. In some schemes, corporations can buy and sell tickets that allow them to pollute a certain amount. A company may gain money by polluting less and selling its tickets (to other companies who will then pollute more). Alternatively, organizations could purchase tickets and then destroy them, or the government could purchase tickets to set an overall limit on the particular polution.
It's an interesting idea that I don't know too much about, just wanted to share.
Exactly. And if they really wanted to tax "time on the road" rather than "fuel burned", couldn't they ask you to report your vehicle's mileage on a yearly basis? Areas with emissions testing (California?) already report mileage; it shows up in online VIN reports. Sounds somewhat less intrusive.
I once heard (on slashdot actually) about a display that was entirely passive. Instead of electrically modifying the pixels emit colored light (as with lcd monitors), the pixels were modified to reflect different colors (and emit no light at all). It was described as being much like ink on paper, except that the pixels could be modified like an lcd display. This sounds so cool to me, but I've heard nothing about it since.
Your browser probably has a back button, yes? A duplication of the functionality of this button will waste your time as you decide whether to use the browser's back button or in-page navigation. Of course, you're now so familiar with in-page navigation (probably because browser navigation is lacking), and waste even more time wondering why in-page navagation isn't there. AHHHHHHHHHH!
Why do these comments always come up? I *want* my software with lots of dependencies. I don't want my software duplicating effort, especially if the duplicate will be of lower quality. I want it to inherit the work of Gtk+/Gnome so that my computer will have a consistent look and feel. I understand this program uses wxWidgets which supposedly abstracts the gui. This is only true to a point... I hate the wxWidgets gtk file selector (though perhpas they now use the nicer gtk2 file selector? I don't know...).
Portability between desktop environments and platforms is nice... but can't I have a consistency as well? This isn't a question of everyone deciding on the One True GUI Widgets. It's a question of a poorly designed system. Can a system be designed that has a consistent interface *by design* ? (e.g. not due to developer discipline, which as we can see from experience will never produce a consistent system). I submit that one can, though it would be difficult at best and certainly a long uphill battle to gain the popularity required for it to become useful.
Thank you. I certainly recognized the satirical humor when I wrote the post, but I am genuinely interested in the answer to my question. Am I missing something in my analysis (I know very little about nuclear reactors)?
Of course humanity is and will further impact the environment. The big questions are, what impact is acceptable, and where can we make imporovements? These are very subjective questions, and some possible answers are:
Then there's the question of "how much do you care?". Are you willing to sacrifice the automobile? trains? planes? indoor lighting? The answer to these is typically "no", so let's move on. Now we need to decide if any change (like using wind power) is worth it. The question is then, "is the impact from massive windfarms better or worse than the impact from burning fossil fuels? running nuclear reactors? using tidal forces? sacrificing automobiles? etc? doing nothing until we have magic fusion reactors?".
So, there will *surely* be an impact, no matter what course of action is taken. It is rather annoying however, for every possibility to be shot down with "it's bad for the environment" without an acknowledgement that this is an implicit vote for the current situation over the possible alternative.
Planet Earth is constantly gaining energy on a daily basis thanks to the generosity of The Sun.
Slight nitpick: I was under the impression that Earth (on a global scale) was in an equilibrium with the Sun (radiating at night the energy gained in the day). Otherwise, the planet would be getting hotter, yes? (Well, some say it is getting hotter, but dismiss global warming for a moment).