No, if he was some low-level employee, no one would have given a shit about his political views and donations unless he made an annoyance of himself at the office. People only care in this case because he was the fucking CEO. The CEO speaks for the company, and his views can be assumed to mirror those of the company. If your CEO doesn't give your company the public face you want it to have, you have every right to replace him with someone who does.
It seems to be correct for large countries, but I'm not an expert in the field. But the point this leads me to here is: maybe we shouldn't have large countries, if they always tend this way, and small countries don't.
There's going to be a steady stream of customers whether you like it or not. Go drive down one of the main cross-country interstates like I-40, and stop in some random little cow-town where there's nothing but a bunch of fast-food restaurants and gas stations. There's a constant stream of cars going to those gas stations, and all those customers are long-distance drivers who are using the place as a rest stop.
Yes, if everyone had EVs all of a sudden, your local gas stations would likely go out of business since commuters would just charge their cars at home (and maybe at work too). But there's a lot of long-distance car traffic, and lots of places, mainly along large highways, where there really is a steady stream of customers refilling during their long-distance trips.
Upgrade cost is probably not a big factor for most people running XP, at least not in the US (maybe in China/etc it is). The real issues are old hardware, not wanting to wipe/reinstall/reconfigure everything, and not wanting to deal with a lot of change. Any of those issues are potentially a problem with Linux as well.
Not so much. Linux generally works well with old hardware (though if you're low on RAM, you'll want to stick with a leaner DE like XCFE, not KDE4, but RAM is fairly cheap so it's a good idea to upgrade to at least 2GB). Not wanting to wipe everything isn't an excuse with Windows, because when using Windows you're going to have to do that periodically like it or not (the phrase "reboot, reinstall, reformat" came about for a good reason). Not wanting to deal with change is no excuse either; since XP is going away, they're going to have to deal with change, like it or not (or limp along with a botnet-infested OS); once you're using something in Linux, it's not that hard to just keep using it indefinitely, or something very close. Just look at how long Gnome2 has been around (though now you'd need to switch to MATE, but that's the same thing).
The boring part keeps FOSS developers from backporting fixes to 10-year-old distro releases,
With Linux, there's no reason to support 10-year-old releases unless some stodgy corporation is paying you big bucks to do so. When your release is getting old, just upgrade; it's free. Yes, it takes time, but it's better to be up-to-date on software so you can avoid security problems, plus it's nice having the latest stuff (remember also, many things in Linux get faster with new releases; the kernel is constantly getting better, and KDE4 has gotten consistently faster and bug-free with each release). If I could have a brand-new car every year for free, and this magically didn't increase my carbon footprint or waste resources, and it only took a hour of my time to magically convert my car to the next model year, why wouldn't I take advantage of that?
It isn't the same for all makes and models. I recently got a used Volvo (2005 model year), and shop manuals don't appear to be available for it except by piracy, by buying the "VIDA" DVD-ROMs on Ebay (definitely not factory-authorized; these all come from China). To do many things on the car, you also need the "DICE" unit, which plugs into the car's OBD-II port and into a laptop computer running the VIDA software. This unit costs several thousand dollars; luckily again, the Chinese sellers (and American resellers) are selling knock-offs on Ebay for ~$120. This appears to allow you to do many things that only the dealership is supposed to be able to do, but not everything; there's many operations (probably upgrades, rather than repairs) where you would need to download software directly from Volvo, which can't be done with the knock-off DICE units. Luckily there are a bunch of active forums for this vehicle so there's a good amount of advice available for common repairs, common problems, etc.
I never said MS didn't support their products for fairly long terms; obviously they do. But they don't support them for infinitely-long periods of time.
With Linux, you don't need support for such long periods; you just upgrade to a newer version periodically, because it's free. You just have to pencil some time into your calendar to do it (and many distros can upgrade on-the-fly, though some people have reported problems doing this, so it's a good idea to back up your data first, though this is a good idea for everyone running any OS to do on a regular basis of course). Yes, there have been some cases of things getting slower or needing more RAM; KDE4 is definitely more of a RAM hog than older versions. The newest versions (4.10+) are a lot better than the early 4.x versions however as far as speed. Generally speaking, things have plateaued with computers across the board; software isn't really getting much (or any) slower any more, unless of course you're running McAfee shitware like some stupid corporations' IT departments do, so at this point it doesn't really look like you need to upgrade your hardware at all as long as you're running something made in the last 5 years or so. People just don't complain much about computer speed any more when all they do is web browsing, office documents, etc. Get something that's not too old and has 4GB (or better yet 8) and you'll be fine for the foreseeable future. (Of course, if you intend to play high-end video games this advice does not apply.)
Second, they don't solve most of the problems with gasoline (cost, dependence on foreign oil).
Yes, actually, they do (assuming they can be made). Gas-powered ICEs are horrifically inefficient. Converting the gas to electricity, assuming this has a very high efficiency (say, 80%), and then powering electric motors (~95+% efficient) with that, will require far less gasoline than burning it in ICEs. Doing this for even a fraction of the cars on the road in the US would eliminate the need for foreign oil, since we only import a minority of the oil we use.
And what's wrong with having a different vehicle anyway? Lots of households have 2 or 3 cars. Use one or two EVs for commuting and local errands, and keep one gas-burner for the long trips.
Call me lazy if you want, but I find as I get older that I am unmotivated to put myself through driving enough in one day to empty a full tank.
That's funny. When I was young, I regularly made long trips by car (8+ hours) to visit relatives and such, because airfare was pretty expensive back then and gas was $0.99/gallon. Later, airfare came down and I had a good job and could afford to fly. Now that I'm older, I'd rather sit in my car for hours because that's better than getting molested by the TSA, sitting on the tarmac for hours, and having to be crammed together with a bunch of weird people I don't know in horribly uncomfortable seats. Of course, the car I have now is a lot nicer than the underpowered, buzzy little POS I had as a teenager.
Don't forget, EVs don't really need to solve this problem to become viable. It's entirely viable to have an EV for commuting and local driving, and a gas car for longer but infrequent trips. I don't take trips of more than 100 miles very often, so if I had one car I recharged every night for my commute or my local errands, that's sufficient for me. If you're commuting more than 100 miles a day, you need to look at relocating.
I thought there was also research into gasoline-powered fuel cells (they convert gasoline directly into electricity, without combustion). Hydrogen has a lot of problems with storage because it's a gas with tiny molecules.
Electrical transmission lines operate at hundreds of kV so we must have insulators up to the task.
Those transmission lines don't have insulation. The wires are completely bare. When they attach to towers, they use huge ceramic insulators which look like this.
There's no way you can route 100kV into a car and not have it explode.
Braided cables don't conduct any better than solid copper, unless you're using alternating current (and here it's dependent on the frequency; 60Hz doesn't have that much skin effect). The main advantage to braiding is that it makes the cable more flexible, the best being "Litz wire" (a fancier form of braiding that's very flexible).
I doubt this. They had prototype robotic gas pumps 15 years ago, and they still aren't here. It's just like how nuclear fusion reactors are always 40 years away.
I get 12MW to charge a 100kWh battery in 30s. Your nuclear generator would only be able to charge 100 cars simultaneously.
But if you relax the requirements, it isn't quite as bad. It's unlikely anyone is going to fully run down their battery, and I also believe EVs like Teslas don't ever fully charge their batteries either, in fact it appears they recommend not to fully charge it unless you really need the full range, as fully charging it reduces its lifespan faster (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, let's suppose you just need to recharge 50kWh within 3 minutes, which is a pretty reasonable time to wait (do you ever refuel your gas car in less time?). This brings the power requirement down to only 1MW. Or with 5 minutes, it's down to 600kW. At 440V, that's only 1364A of current. Of course, that is really high, but not astronomically so. Make it 10 minutes (giving people time for a bathroom break and time to buy some snacks at the quik-mart) and you're down to 300kW.
Of course, this all really is a lot of power, and shows just how much energy we're consuming (and pollution we're producing) just so we can move our 100-200 pound bodies around in 2500-6000 pound cages. We'd be much better off if we built SkyTran PRT systems, which can move two people around in fully-automated pods at 100mph using the equivalent of two hairdryers (about 3600W).
The problem is this depends on your definition of "long term". If choice 1 works out better 3 years down the road, but choice 2 works out much, much better 15 years down the road, we should probably pick choice 2. However, it takes a long time to see these results. So taking a wait-and-see approach really doesn't work that well for very long-term choices. You need to make intelligent decisions, rather than leaving things to evolution.
Think about this problem: you have two choices for how to handle energy usage and pollution at the national and international levels. Choice 1 seems to work out better after 1 year. However, 20 years later, it results in too much greenhouse gases, causing massive global climate change that goes "off a cliff" so to speak, resulting in global cataclysm which can't be reversed, and the end of civilization ensues. Choice 2 averts this catastrophe, however the effects of choice 2 are not obvious only 1 year later, so no one wants to make the larger investment it requires. Scientists studying the problem correctly predicted that Choice 2 would probably be successful and that Choice 1 would result in disaster (because of being "too little too late"), but due to this choosing algorithm their concerns were dismissed.
There isn't much hardware that doesn't work with a modern Linux distro. The main exceptions are winprinters, and you don't need those; you can just buy a new printer (the printer isn't a vital part of the computer). It's unlikely you have a 13-year-old winprinter still working anyway; those things don't usually last very long, and the consumables cost is outrageous anyway.
Ford isn't still on the hook for safety updates to cars made in the 1970s. House builders aren't on the hook for aluminum wiring installed in the 1970s. Why should MS be on the hook for an OS made almost 15 years ago? If people don't want to be victims of hackers, they can get a new computer with a newer OS, or they can upgrade to Linux for free. They aren't owed anything. They can either let the salespeople at Best Buy make a decision for them, or they can choose to educate themselves and avail themselves of Free offerings.
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Gay CEOs are likely smart enough to stay away from highly conservative industries in highly conservative states. Eich apparently isn't that smart.
If you're an executive or high-level manager at Koch Industries and become a gay activist, I would fully expect you to be shown the door.
But he's all in favor of limiting same-sex benefits given by the government to his workers.
Smells just like "separate but equal" to me.
No, if he was some low-level employee, no one would have given a shit about his political views and donations unless he made an annoyance of himself at the office. People only care in this case because he was the fucking CEO. The CEO speaks for the company, and his views can be assumed to mirror those of the company. If your CEO doesn't give your company the public face you want it to have, you have every right to replace him with someone who does.
After engaging in a lawsuit like that, good luck ever getting another executive-level position anywhere.
It seems to be correct for large countries, but I'm not an expert in the field. But the point this leads me to here is: maybe we shouldn't have large countries, if they always tend this way, and small countries don't.
There's going to be a steady stream of customers whether you like it or not. Go drive down one of the main cross-country interstates like I-40, and stop in some random little cow-town where there's nothing but a bunch of fast-food restaurants and gas stations. There's a constant stream of cars going to those gas stations, and all those customers are long-distance drivers who are using the place as a rest stop.
Yes, if everyone had EVs all of a sudden, your local gas stations would likely go out of business since commuters would just charge their cars at home (and maybe at work too). But there's a lot of long-distance car traffic, and lots of places, mainly along large highways, where there really is a steady stream of customers refilling during their long-distance trips.
Upgrade cost is probably not a big factor for most people running XP, at least not in the US (maybe in China/etc it is). The real issues are old hardware, not wanting to wipe/reinstall/reconfigure everything, and not wanting to deal with a lot of change. Any of those issues are potentially a problem with Linux as well.
Not so much. Linux generally works well with old hardware (though if you're low on RAM, you'll want to stick with a leaner DE like XCFE, not KDE4, but RAM is fairly cheap so it's a good idea to upgrade to at least 2GB). Not wanting to wipe everything isn't an excuse with Windows, because when using Windows you're going to have to do that periodically like it or not (the phrase "reboot, reinstall, reformat" came about for a good reason). Not wanting to deal with change is no excuse either; since XP is going away, they're going to have to deal with change, like it or not (or limp along with a botnet-infested OS); once you're using something in Linux, it's not that hard to just keep using it indefinitely, or something very close. Just look at how long Gnome2 has been around (though now you'd need to switch to MATE, but that's the same thing).
The boring part keeps FOSS developers from backporting fixes to 10-year-old distro releases,
With Linux, there's no reason to support 10-year-old releases unless some stodgy corporation is paying you big bucks to do so. When your release is getting old, just upgrade; it's free. Yes, it takes time, but it's better to be up-to-date on software so you can avoid security problems, plus it's nice having the latest stuff (remember also, many things in Linux get faster with new releases; the kernel is constantly getting better, and KDE4 has gotten consistently faster and bug-free with each release). If I could have a brand-new car every year for free, and this magically didn't increase my carbon footprint or waste resources, and it only took a hour of my time to magically convert my car to the next model year, why wouldn't I take advantage of that?
It isn't the same for all makes and models. I recently got a used Volvo (2005 model year), and shop manuals don't appear to be available for it except by piracy, by buying the "VIDA" DVD-ROMs on Ebay (definitely not factory-authorized; these all come from China). To do many things on the car, you also need the "DICE" unit, which plugs into the car's OBD-II port and into a laptop computer running the VIDA software. This unit costs several thousand dollars; luckily again, the Chinese sellers (and American resellers) are selling knock-offs on Ebay for ~$120. This appears to allow you to do many things that only the dealership is supposed to be able to do, but not everything; there's many operations (probably upgrades, rather than repairs) where you would need to download software directly from Volvo, which can't be done with the knock-off DICE units. Luckily there are a bunch of active forums for this vehicle so there's a good amount of advice available for common repairs, common problems, etc.
There's no way in hell any diesel engines hit 50% efficiency.
If you have two working adults in the household, you're probably going to need two cars anyway.
I never said MS didn't support their products for fairly long terms; obviously they do. But they don't support them for infinitely-long periods of time.
With Linux, you don't need support for such long periods; you just upgrade to a newer version periodically, because it's free. You just have to pencil some time into your calendar to do it (and many distros can upgrade on-the-fly, though some people have reported problems doing this, so it's a good idea to back up your data first, though this is a good idea for everyone running any OS to do on a regular basis of course). Yes, there have been some cases of things getting slower or needing more RAM; KDE4 is definitely more of a RAM hog than older versions. The newest versions (4.10+) are a lot better than the early 4.x versions however as far as speed. Generally speaking, things have plateaued with computers across the board; software isn't really getting much (or any) slower any more, unless of course you're running McAfee shitware like some stupid corporations' IT departments do, so at this point it doesn't really look like you need to upgrade your hardware at all as long as you're running something made in the last 5 years or so. People just don't complain much about computer speed any more when all they do is web browsing, office documents, etc. Get something that's not too old and has 4GB (or better yet 8) and you'll be fine for the foreseeable future. (Of course, if you intend to play high-end video games this advice does not apply.)
Second, they don't solve most of the problems with gasoline (cost, dependence on foreign oil).
Yes, actually, they do (assuming they can be made). Gas-powered ICEs are horrifically inefficient. Converting the gas to electricity, assuming this has a very high efficiency (say, 80%), and then powering electric motors (~95+% efficient) with that, will require far less gasoline than burning it in ICEs. Doing this for even a fraction of the cars on the road in the US would eliminate the need for foreign oil, since we only import a minority of the oil we use.
And what's wrong with having a different vehicle anyway? Lots of households have 2 or 3 cars. Use one or two EVs for commuting and local errands, and keep one gas-burner for the long trips.
Call me lazy if you want, but I find as I get older that I am unmotivated to put myself through driving enough in one day to empty a full tank.
That's funny. When I was young, I regularly made long trips by car (8+ hours) to visit relatives and such, because airfare was pretty expensive back then and gas was $0.99/gallon. Later, airfare came down and I had a good job and could afford to fly. Now that I'm older, I'd rather sit in my car for hours because that's better than getting molested by the TSA, sitting on the tarmac for hours, and having to be crammed together with a bunch of weird people I don't know in horribly uncomfortable seats. Of course, the car I have now is a lot nicer than the underpowered, buzzy little POS I had as a teenager.
Don't forget, EVs don't really need to solve this problem to become viable. It's entirely viable to have an EV for commuting and local driving, and a gas car for longer but infrequent trips. I don't take trips of more than 100 miles very often, so if I had one car I recharged every night for my commute or my local errands, that's sufficient for me. If you're commuting more than 100 miles a day, you need to look at relocating.
I thought there was also research into gasoline-powered fuel cells (they convert gasoline directly into electricity, without combustion). Hydrogen has a lot of problems with storage because it's a gas with tiny molecules.
Electrical transmission lines operate at hundreds of kV so we must have insulators up to the task.
Those transmission lines don't have insulation. The wires are completely bare. When they attach to towers, they use huge ceramic insulators which look like this.
There's no way you can route 100kV into a car and not have it explode.
When you have a fairly steady stream of customers, this isn't going to help much; you'll still need a nuclear generating station next door.
Braided cables don't conduct any better than solid copper, unless you're using alternating current (and here it's dependent on the frequency; 60Hz doesn't have that much skin effect). The main advantage to braiding is that it makes the cable more flexible, the best being "Litz wire" (a fancier form of braiding that's very flexible).
Here in New Jersey, we still do. It's illegal to pump gas yourself (though I've done it, because the attendant kept ignoring me).
I doubt this. They had prototype robotic gas pumps 15 years ago, and they still aren't here. It's just like how nuclear fusion reactors are always 40 years away.
I get 12MW to charge a 100kWh battery in 30s. Your nuclear generator would only be able to charge 100 cars simultaneously.
But if you relax the requirements, it isn't quite as bad. It's unlikely anyone is going to fully run down their battery, and I also believe EVs like Teslas don't ever fully charge their batteries either, in fact it appears they recommend not to fully charge it unless you really need the full range, as fully charging it reduces its lifespan faster (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, let's suppose you just need to recharge 50kWh within 3 minutes, which is a pretty reasonable time to wait (do you ever refuel your gas car in less time?). This brings the power requirement down to only 1MW. Or with 5 minutes, it's down to 600kW. At 440V, that's only 1364A of current. Of course, that is really high, but not astronomically so. Make it 10 minutes (giving people time for a bathroom break and time to buy some snacks at the quik-mart) and you're down to 300kW.
Of course, this all really is a lot of power, and shows just how much energy we're consuming (and pollution we're producing) just so we can move our 100-200 pound bodies around in 2500-6000 pound cages. We'd be much better off if we built SkyTran PRT systems, which can move two people around in fully-automated pods at 100mph using the equivalent of two hairdryers (about 3600W).
The problem is this depends on your definition of "long term". If choice 1 works out better 3 years down the road, but choice 2 works out much, much better 15 years down the road, we should probably pick choice 2. However, it takes a long time to see these results. So taking a wait-and-see approach really doesn't work that well for very long-term choices. You need to make intelligent decisions, rather than leaving things to evolution.
Think about this problem: you have two choices for how to handle energy usage and pollution at the national and international levels. Choice 1 seems to work out better after 1 year. However, 20 years later, it results in too much greenhouse gases, causing massive global climate change that goes "off a cliff" so to speak, resulting in global cataclysm which can't be reversed, and the end of civilization ensues. Choice 2 averts this catastrophe, however the effects of choice 2 are not obvious only 1 year later, so no one wants to make the larger investment it requires. Scientists studying the problem correctly predicted that Choice 2 would probably be successful and that Choice 1 would result in disaster (because of being "too little too late"), but due to this choosing algorithm their concerns were dismissed.
There isn't much hardware that doesn't work with a modern Linux distro. The main exceptions are winprinters, and you don't need those; you can just buy a new printer (the printer isn't a vital part of the computer). It's unlikely you have a 13-year-old winprinter still working anyway; those things don't usually last very long, and the consumables cost is outrageous anyway.
Ford isn't still on the hook for safety updates to cars made in the 1970s. House builders aren't on the hook for aluminum wiring installed in the 1970s. Why should MS be on the hook for an OS made almost 15 years ago? If people don't want to be victims of hackers, they can get a new computer with a newer OS, or they can upgrade to Linux for free. They aren't owed anything. They can either let the salespeople at Best Buy make a decision for them, or they can choose to educate themselves and avail themselves of Free offerings.