Oil companies look for alternative fuels because they want to make money, and because there's a lot of money to be had in alternative fuels. Yes, there's a patent dispute here, and yes, patents are lame; but to imply that the only reason for the dispute is because the oil company wants to shut down alternative fuel production is absurd.
BP and DuPont have a lot invested in this field, probably more than the entire opposing company is worth. I can totally understand their view that an upstart is attempting to profit from from their hard work.
We at Alter Aeon ran into exactly this issue, and like Threshold fought bitterly to keep pages in Wikipedia. The proposed deletions were massive, alarming, inconsistent, and very difficult to fight even for established games with over a decade of history.
I’ll be the first to say that there is much to be desired regarding “conventional citations” for these games. A number of the most famous MUDs are mentioned in out-of-print books of the previous century; many, many more had web articles written about them, before anyone considered the web to be a true publishing medium. But because so many games existed before permanent web archives became commonplace, many of the sources that would have been called upon have simply been destroyed.
The worst part of the whole Wikipedia affair was that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the proposed deletions. All of the mud pages were clearly linked and indexed, very easy to find. Ironically, the games with the most well constructed pages and most solid references seemed to be the ones most strongly targetted. Countless MUD stub pages were ignored, while battles raged on for deletion of such landmarks as Threshold and Alter Aeon. The targetting was baffling.
Sufficient reference was eventually found for many games. Some games waged made their own contacts with the press get third party references; some doubtless simply purchased articles so that the required ‘notability’ check mark could be ticked off. Unmaintained games that had been the bedrock of the past simply vanished.
I have disk copies and files from my IBM PC in the 1985 time frame. That's the oldest data I personally owned/created that I have records for; prior to that it was TRS-80 BASIC on cassette tapes and extremely hard to retrieve/use. I've got it in my permanent data archive, which is sometimes fun to browse around and see what I was doing 20+ years ago.
One possible thing to consider here is that while some cancers are inoperable due to location/size, a good percentage are inoperable because they've fragmented/metastasized and there's no way to get them all. Take for example testicular cancer where the removal procedure is complicated and weird, not because they're trying to save the reproductive organs, but because the goal is to minimize leaving behind or knocking loose any cancer cells.
If you can stop cancer spread, and assuming the growth rate is slow enough, some of these inoperables become operable. You administer the drugs to stop spread, then you go in and hit the biggest localized tumors that are causing the most pain/dysfunction. Wait for the smaller ones to get well-defined edges and grow big enough to find them, then remove them. Yeah, you're going to be pulling out tumors for years as they surface, but as long as they can't spread and stay contained in blobs, you stand a chance of being able to eventually get them all.
Another interesting idea here is the combination of anti-metastasis and anti-angiogenesis therapies. With one preventing spread and one preventing large growth, you could conceivably live indefinitely with extensive inoperable cancer. Not an ideal solution, but better than nothing.
I don't have a problem with people home-schooling to improve the quality of education. I myself was home-schooled for several years.
I do, however, have a major issue with people pulling their children out of public school so they can be home-schooled according to religious criteria. I recognize this is a slippery slope, but based on what I've read so far I support the German government.
Religious freedom allows you to worship, but it does not in my mind give one free license to program children with it. Children are not property. Religious conflict with a secular school is not a valid reason for home-schooling.
Further, home schooled children should be subject to, at the very least, the same aptitude tests and subject material criteria as public school children. (Yes, I know most public school criteria and tests are a joke, but it's at least a starting point.)
I first read through this article when it was first posted on the oil drum weeks ago, and at the time it just seemed... wrong, somehow. I've since spent a lot of time doing my own research and reading on the topics, and I feel Dr. Dittmar has been intellectually dishonest in at least a few areas. Further, the organization of the article is terrible, mixing sections and topics in a confusing fashion. I suspect this is intentional.
Prime examples of issues in the article:
- He uses nonstandard terminology with respect to breeding gain, and in several places uses phrases such as 'has only a maximum theoretical breeding gain of 0.7' in a context that implies that anything below 1.0 is not self-sustaining. Once armed with a better understanding of the terminology I was able to put his comments into proper context, but this just made the negative spin obvious instead of allowing it to slip under the radar.
- He makes the claim that no thorium breeder has ever reached breakeven, when in fact the very first one assembled had a net gain after operation.
- He makes the claim that no currently online breeder reactors are at breakeven, combined with claims that breeder reactors are a huge proliferation concern, neglecting the fact that most currently operational breeders were designed explicitly to have slightly less than breakeven gain precisely to address proliferation concerns.
In short, while he may be competent and he may be very experienced, there is a clear agenda behind this. The paper contains a substantial amount of spin and FUD, and further is organized in such a fashion as to make it difficult to analyze. I would firmly lump it into the 'armchair FUD' category instead of 'unbiased scientific position paper'. YMMV.
It's not an arbitrary metric. You want an arbitrary metric? Try "what have you done to enrich the lives of others, and have a positive long term influence on society".
Money is quantifiable and measurable, and it pays for research. It also pays for hospitals, EKGs, vaccines and plastic surgery. People with a lot of money put a lot more money into the system. It only makes sense that they should be able to buy better service.
No matter what you may think of her, I guarantee you with complete certainty that Paris Hilton has done more for American health care than your typical 'dirt farmer in Appalachia', simply due to the fact that she has pushed a huge amount of money into the system. I'm perfectly willing to give her the privilege of paying more to buy better care than what I could purchase with my limited resources.
I can explain very succinctly why I, as an American, oppose public health care, wheras you may not. First, let me explain my position:
1) The cost of health care is infinite.
In other words, there are ailments and diseases which no amount of money can cure. We could consume every single dollar produced by the planet simply giving one small country the best health care possible, and people in that country would still die from uncurable diseases.
The result of 1) is that health care must be rationed. This is the case regardless of which system is installed; therefore, when we talk about health care systems, the real question we are asking is, 'how should the limited health care budget be spent'.
2) Individuals are not the same, and some are worth substantially more than others.
How do you measure the value of an individual? Quite frankly, I would measure value using money, since health care is paid for with money, and people with more money generally contribute more to the total health care funding than those without.
3) When it comes to allocating a limited resource, an omniscient oracle will give the optimum result. The next most efficient way is using a properly regulated market.
In short, markets are the best way to distribute the money pool. Having a centralized government do it is less efficient than a proper market.
So there we go. Healthcare resources are limited, not everyone deserves the same level of health care, and if the government is involved there will be unnecessary inefficiency. That's why I'm opposed to it.
That said, I recognize the need for government support for some fraction of the population (let's try to keep it below 10% please), and I absolutely see the need for reform in tax laws, drug approval processes, and pricing models in health care.
Quite frankly, one of the things I'd most like to see is a requirement for 'posted pricing' for health care providers: the price for a service is posted publicly at least one month in advance, and that is the price for all payers, whether homeless bum or insurance company.
The reason I think this is important has to do with recent billing information I've been getting from my 'insurance' company. The billed price for a service is typically ten to 15 times (!) the amount paid by the insurance company, due to hardball agreements negotiated by the respective companies. Just to be clear on this, if I were to pay the billed amount, I would pay for example 100 USD. My insurance company would pay, for example, 8 USD. This is rate seem consistent across the board for nearly all services.
With an imbalance that great, it seems to me like a good idea to slap down an isolation barrier between the two. Something funky is definitely going on.
I personally wouldn't trust either of these environments. The vast bulk of my data is static, with usually only small or minor changes daily. Rsync CRC mirroring is how I handle it.
My setup:
1 TB main drive. All OS, config, and user data. 1 TB backup drive in same box. All OS, config, and user data mirrored from main drive nightly, using rsync with CRC checking.
2 - 1 TB backup drive in second box mirrored once a month. This machine is typically unplugged until in use. Each of the two backups are staggered two weeks apart, so that the oldest recent copy is no more than a month old.
Very important 'real time' data, on the order of 10 GB, are mirrored nightly off-site.
Note - CRC checking, in my anecdotal experience, is important. Modern drives actively look for 'questionable' sectors when reading; calculating CRC nightly ensures that the drive has to actually read every sector that's in use.
CRC checking mails you what has changed, which is easily filtered to make sure that you haven't lost something important.
Nightly cron job should dump any questionable SMART statistics from your drives. If any pre-fail counters increment, immediately consider that drive suspect and have a hot replacement ready.
How important is your information?
This is the level of data integrity risk that I am currently comfortable with. In a particularly nasty scenario involving my building being destroyed in an earthquake while I'm not in it, I have to fall back to my off-site data.
I accidentally found a solution to this when I was in school: change the keyboard so people have to touch type to use it. One day I decided I really needed to improve my touch typing, so I popped all the key caps off the keyboard and put them back on in a random order. People would come in to use my machine for mail and the like, and start typing by LOOKING AT THE KEYS. When learning that they had to touch type to get it to make any sense, they immediately gave up and left.
Another option might be to switch to dvorak keyboard layout, if you can type that way.
This of course doesn't address situations where it's just a "can you put this file up on the viewer", but it might be a start.
The presentation of power factor is very misleading, if not outright wrong. Power factor is a measure of the phase of the voltage versus the phase of the current in the system; this phase difference causes higher current flow than would be expected for a given power output, but it does NOT increase the power consumed.
Where it does cause problems is that the increased current causes increased losses in the supply lines, and it puts a heavier load on those lines. A supply line that can carry a thousand amperes can only carry a thousand amperes; if part of that is due to bad power factor, less power can be transferred when the line is operating at capacity.
For most environments, the supply lines run well below capacity, so it's not like this is a big deal unless all of the loading begins to come from low power factor CFLs (which isn't bloody likely.)
Additionally, supply line losses are typically less than 1% of the power delivered over them. The following contrived worst case example demonstrates the implications of this.
Assume a 50% loaded line that loses 1% of the power delivered over it at a power factor of 1.0.
That same line will be 100% loaded at a power factor of 0.5, and will suffer a 4% power loss. (P = I*I*R)
In short, the actual losses due to bad power factor are only a few percent, even in a worst case scenario. Much more important is the network loading.
It should also be noted that utility companies employ extensive power factor correction at substations and other locations. All electric motors and inductors have power factor issues by their very nature; as these things make up the backbone of nearly all electromechanical subsystems, utilities are very well aware of how to deal with power factor problems.
I just reread now and understand the discrepancy: I missed the part about 1.67 exajoules being for the St. Helens eruption; I thought that number was for an estimated 'supervolcano' detonation in Yellowstone. For St. Helens, that number doesn't sound terribly far off, though I would have thought a little high.
That said, I'm definitely uninformed. I basically just took some of the supervolcano numbers off other pages (specifically 40 mile diameter caldera and one mile depth) and did a back-of-the envelope calculation. It was meant to be a quick sanity check only; thanks for catching it.
Wikipedia should be modified. Did not the words "Institute for Creation Research" not give it away? These are the same guys that did the 'science' for the creation museum in Ohio - the museum with adam and eve walking in the garden of eden side by side with vegetarian velociraptors.
The ICR is a known fraudulent non-scientific organization. All information in that article should be considered bogus until confirmed by reputable sources.
That said, I still think 1.67 exajoules is too low. We're talking about moving around on the order of a thousand cubic miles of rock here, where each cubic mile is around 1.5e13 kilograms. Just by this rough calculation, I get 1.67e18 / 1.5e16 which is about one hundred joules per kilo, or enough energy to raise/lower the landmass by about ten meters. Most of the stuff I've read indicates a caldera shift much larger than that, never mind the lava flows and other expunged material.
Just to be clear, one kilogram of energy is 9e16 joules, which IIRC is considered approximately the equivalent amount of energy released by a 25 megaton nuclear bomb.
1.67 exajoules is only about 20 times this, or in short the equivalent of 20 bikini atoll blasts, or 10 kilos of antimatter. Yes, it will be irritating in terms of the amount of ash lifted, but in terms of raw explosive force it's not that big a deal.
That said, 1.67 exajoules seems a bit low. Are you sure that's the right number?
Yes, that (and other factors similar to it) are almost entirely the reason. Shooting people is not compatible with my plans for the future, and restricts my freedom in ways that are not acceptable to me.
Is it not sufficient that I have logical reasons for not wanting to shoot people? Must I also have irrational, primal, emotional, or instinctive reasons as well?
Lastly, why should the fact that I make this decision using logic imply that I am not human? And do you really mean to imply that anything non-human should be 'shot immediately'?
Well, to an extent it depends on your definition of a 'god'. My definition of a god is pretty simple - an entity multiple orders of magnitude smarter and more powerful than I am. Our technology even gives considerable insight into how to construct entities like this - for example, upload yourself into a jupiter-brain with its associated I/O and control facilities.
This definition, while simple and even in the realm of plausibility, is vastly at odds with the definitions of most true believers, usually because 1) a god you can conceive of obviously isn't powerful enough, and 2) such a god is limited by the rules of the universe in the same way we are, regardless of how powerful it is.
By Occams Razor, clearly your second option is preferrable over the third. I see no reason to postulate that there be a creator or creating entity unless there is evidence that requires an act of creation to explain. The fact that the universe exists is not in and of itself sufficient evidence, any more so than the existence of lightning is evidence for an entity that hurls lightning bolts from the heavens.
I also do not find it absurd that the universe came from nothing. In fact, it seems quite reasonable.
Further, given that time did not exist prior to the big bang, option three is defective by default: cause and effect (eg. 'something else caused the universe to be created') has no meaning if you take the concept of time out of the picture.
(This will be considered flamebait, but someone has to say it.)
The way I see it, we shouldn't be cluttering a clear, simple and sane interface like the unix console with complexity like unicode. Unix is inherently byte based, and unix terminals are byte based. If it's not a byte, don't put it in a unix terminal.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't have other mechanisms for supporting foreign languages - but this particular path has been travelled before and it's not pretty. Look at the AS/400 - tables stored in the DB/FS are marked as being in a particular character set, and the OS tries real hard to fix up and convert from set to set as needed. This causes countless problems in the infrequent cases where there is no possible mapping between sets.
Another way to look at it - why don't we have unicode support for grep? Why aren't all files tagged with an appropriate character set, so we know what they're really supposed to look like? When you 'tail -n 20' a file, how does tail know that those line feeds and carriage returns aren't part of some unicode char?
In short, unix is byte based. All the unix tools are byte based. If you want to use unicode, build a unicode layer on top of the bytes, but dont screw with the existing stuff that already works perfectly well.
You grossly overestimate the power of nuclear weaponry. While a single nuke can indeed level most of a city, and the impact on a local environment can be great, the earth has seen much, much greater disasters in the past. The probability of human extinction due to human nuclear war is effectively zero - a full scale nuclear war where every nation with nukes used them to the best of its ability would likely not even kill half of the world population.
Think twice before you wish for this thing. One of the beauties of the net as it stands is that I can get to anywhere I want to go, just by typing in a small amount of stuff in the location bar. The small allowed character set means that the urls stay accessible for all languages, and that everyone can type them.
Think for a minute - how am I going to go to a chinese site if I am on an american keyboard? Suppose I know how to read german, but don't know how to type an umlaut? By giving out bastardized urls that only a small subset of the population can even type, you break the internet into cliques based on language, even more so than they already are. In my mind, this defeats the purpose of a net that everyone, everywhere, can use.
URLs and URIs should contain only characters from a small, standardized set. The english alphabet plus a few other symbols is already the defacto standard, and while not perfect I see no point or advantage to anyone in changing it now.
I understand your argument about having a legitimate need to send tens of thousands of pieces of email, and I see easy solutions for it.
Consider these possibilities when a remote host tries to send us mail:
It is recognized as a 'good' host, so we accept its connection and mail unchallenged.
It is recognized as a 'bad' host, so we challenge it and tell it we don't accept mail from spammers.
The third option is more complicated: The connecting host is unknown. We ask who the mail is destined for, and attempt to do a lookup. If the user doesn't exist, we challenge the host, then after getting a response reply that the user 'either does not exist or is not accepting mail from you.' If the user does exist, we open ~user/.somemailrcfile and take actions based on that: The sender might be known good, in which case we accept the mail without challenge. It might be known bad, in which case we deny with the same 'does not exist' reply as above. Otherwise, we just challenge and accept the mail.
This gives system administrators the ability to form the mail networks they need, but it also puts the power of white and black lists in the hands of the users, where it is needed. If I, as a user, don't want to ever receive mail from *.tw, I should be able to tell the system mailer that. Filtering after the fact (with tools like procmail) means the mail still got delivered and consumed bandwidth.
In some ways, this also solves the opt-in/opt-out mailing list problem. If you have a mailing list and you send to a lot of people, you'll have to deny sending to any users/hosts that challenge you. If the user really wanted to be on your list, the user would have to add your list to his personal 'do not challenge' list.
This would also make it easy to unsubscribe - simply remove the list from your 'do not challenge' list, and you would be automatically dropped from the list.
I also don't see any insurmountable problems with forwarding. What do the rest of you think?
I have had no problems with any of the things you mention, and your kernel compilation bugs don't even make sense. Barring bad hardware, the most reasonable explanation seems to me to be PEBKAC.
My 60 year old dad uses linux. He doesn't know the difference between it and windows, and he doesn't have to care. It just works for him.
The killer app thing is a total crock. 90+% of users don't just surf the web. It would be nice to have more games, but that's about it.
X works fine, and my dad has a 266 MHz k6-II. He is constantly getting compliments about how it runs faster than other people's machines, and all his friends are amazed that it hasn't been rebooted in three months.
Open office. Let's be honest... who actually uses an office suite for anything? I don't know anyone who does. It might be important in the business world, but 90+% of the users out there could care less.
Netscape and fonts - I don't see the problem. Apparently they work quite well for my pop, as well as myself.
KDE and Gnome being crap? You might actually be right on that one. We don't know or care though - both my dad and I use FVWM (not FVWM2) for everything. It does exactly what we tell it to, exactly what we want, and nothing more. That is a good thing, not a bad thing - especially from the perspective of new users.
No good printing? Don't be a dumbass.
There's not two competing graphical platforms. There's about a hundred. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
We don't need a desktop champion. Broken assumption.
Removing X is retarded. The only reason for using direct access to the graphics hardware is brute force speed, and that's only needed for things like video playback. Moving the graphics support into the kernel is equally retarded, if not more.
While we're standardizing on one api layer, why don't we also standardize on one programming language as well? I pick forth, since it's clearly the best choice for all tasks.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You seem to be paving full tilt. You might be more productive spending your time writing code than paving.
So you're saying that if you want good performance from Linux, you just code it normally - but if you want good performance from windows, you have to use all the platform dependent nonportable operating system extensions.
It might not be a valid benchmark, but perhaps there is a point to be learned from it after all...
Actually, I probably own on the order of a thousand music cds - but I certainly didn't pay full price for them. Most of them were bought in lots of 50 or so from pawn shops. You'd be suprised what prices you can get if you walk up to the counter and say 'I'm here to buy cds, about 50 of them. I'll buy wierd stuff you'll never sell to anyone else. Make me a good deal'.
The only drawback to this is that you're unlikely to get cutting edge music, and most of the risks you take won't pay off. But if you're like me, the winners you find make it completely worthwhile.
The only time you should buy full retail cds is when you've already listened to every track and know it'll be worth your time. I've bought 10 cds for that reason in the past 6 months, purely as a result of napster. My normal rate is under two per year at full retail price.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil companies look for alternative fuels because they want to make money, and because there's a lot of money to be had in alternative fuels. Yes, there's a patent dispute here, and yes, patents are lame; but to imply that the only reason for the dispute is because the oil company wants to shut down alternative fuel production is absurd.
BP and DuPont have a lot invested in this field, probably more than the entire opposing company is worth. I can totally understand their view that an upstart is attempting to profit from from their hard work.
We at Alter Aeon ran into exactly this issue, and like Threshold fought bitterly to keep pages in Wikipedia. The proposed deletions were massive, alarming, inconsistent, and very difficult to fight even for established games with over a decade of history.
I’ll be the first to say that there is much to be desired regarding “conventional citations” for these games. A number of the most famous MUDs are mentioned in out-of-print books of the previous century; many, many more had web articles written about them, before anyone considered the web to be a true publishing medium. But because so many games existed before permanent web archives became commonplace, many of the sources that would have been called upon have simply been destroyed.
The worst part of the whole Wikipedia affair was that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the proposed deletions. All of the mud pages were clearly linked and indexed, very easy to find. Ironically, the games with the most well constructed pages and most solid references seemed to be the ones most strongly targetted. Countless MUD stub pages were ignored, while battles raged on for deletion of such landmarks as Threshold and Alter Aeon. The targetting was baffling.
Sufficient reference was eventually found for many games. Some games waged made their own contacts with the press get third party references; some doubtless simply purchased articles so that the required ‘notability’ check mark could be ticked off. Unmaintained games that had been the bedrock of the past simply vanished.
It still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
I have disk copies and files from my IBM PC in the 1985 time frame. That's the oldest data I personally owned/created that I have records for; prior to that it was TRS-80 BASIC on cassette tapes and extremely hard to retrieve/use. I've got it in my permanent data archive, which is sometimes fun to browse around and see what I was doing 20+ years ago.
One possible thing to consider here is that while some cancers are inoperable due to location/size, a good percentage are inoperable because they've fragmented/metastasized and there's no way to get them all. Take for example testicular cancer where the removal procedure is complicated and weird, not because they're trying to save the reproductive organs, but because the goal is to minimize leaving behind or knocking loose any cancer cells.
If you can stop cancer spread, and assuming the growth rate is slow enough, some of these inoperables become operable. You administer the drugs to stop spread, then you go in and hit the biggest localized tumors that are causing the most pain/dysfunction. Wait for the smaller ones to get well-defined edges and grow big enough to find them, then remove them. Yeah, you're going to be pulling out tumors for years as they surface, but as long as they can't spread and stay contained in blobs, you stand a chance of being able to eventually get them all.
Another interesting idea here is the combination of anti-metastasis and anti-angiogenesis therapies. With one preventing spread and one preventing large growth, you could conceivably live indefinitely with extensive inoperable cancer. Not an ideal solution, but better than nothing.
I don't have a problem with people home-schooling to improve the quality of education. I myself was home-schooled for several years.
I do, however, have a major issue with people pulling their children out of public school so they can be home-schooled according to religious criteria. I recognize this is a slippery slope, but based on what I've read so far I support the German government.
Religious freedom allows you to worship, but it does not in my mind give one free license to program children with it. Children are not property. Religious conflict with a secular school is not a valid reason for home-schooling.
Further, home schooled children should be subject to, at the very least, the same aptitude tests and subject material criteria as public school children. (Yes, I know most public school criteria and tests are a joke, but it's at least a starting point.)
I first read through this article when it was first posted on the oil drum weeks ago, and at the time it just seemed ... wrong, somehow. I've since spent a lot of time doing my own research and reading on the topics, and I feel Dr. Dittmar has been intellectually dishonest in at least a few areas. Further, the organization of the article is terrible, mixing sections and topics in a confusing fashion. I suspect this is intentional.
Prime examples of issues in the article:
- He uses nonstandard terminology with respect to breeding gain, and in several places uses phrases such as 'has only a maximum theoretical breeding gain of 0.7' in a context that implies that anything below 1.0 is not self-sustaining. Once armed with a better understanding of the terminology I was able to put his comments into proper context, but this just made the negative spin obvious instead of allowing it to slip under the radar.
- He makes the claim that no thorium breeder has ever reached breakeven, when in fact the very first one assembled had a net gain after operation.
- He makes the claim that no currently online breeder reactors are at breakeven, combined with claims that breeder reactors are a huge proliferation concern, neglecting the fact that most currently operational breeders were designed explicitly to have slightly less than breakeven gain precisely to address proliferation concerns.
In short, while he may be competent and he may be very experienced, there is a clear agenda behind this. The paper contains a substantial amount of spin and FUD, and further is organized in such a fashion as to make it difficult to analyze. I would firmly lump it into the 'armchair FUD' category instead of 'unbiased scientific position paper'. YMMV.
It's not an arbitrary metric. You want an arbitrary metric? Try "what have you done to enrich the lives of others, and have a positive long term influence on society".
Money is quantifiable and measurable, and it pays for research. It also pays for hospitals, EKGs, vaccines and plastic surgery. People with a lot of money put a lot more money into the system. It only makes sense that they should be able to buy better service.
No matter what you may think of her, I guarantee you with complete certainty that Paris Hilton has done more for American health care than your typical 'dirt farmer in Appalachia', simply due to the fact that she has pushed a huge amount of money into the system. I'm perfectly willing to give her the privilege of paying more to buy better care than what I could purchase with my limited resources.
I can explain very succinctly why I, as an American, oppose public health care, wheras you may not. First, let me explain my position:
1) The cost of health care is infinite.
In other words, there are ailments and diseases which no amount of money can cure. We could consume every single dollar produced by the planet simply giving one small country the best health care possible, and people in that country would still die from uncurable diseases.
The result of 1) is that health care must be rationed. This is the case regardless of which system is installed; therefore, when we talk about health care systems, the real question we are asking is, 'how should the limited health care budget be spent'.
2) Individuals are not the same, and some are worth substantially more than others.
How do you measure the value of an individual? Quite frankly, I would measure value using money, since health care is paid for with money, and people with more money generally contribute more to the total health care funding than those without.
3) When it comes to allocating a limited resource, an omniscient oracle will give the optimum result. The next most efficient way is using a properly regulated market.
In short, markets are the best way to distribute the money pool. Having a centralized government do it is less efficient than a proper market.
So there we go. Healthcare resources are limited, not everyone deserves the same level of health care, and if the government is involved there will be unnecessary inefficiency. That's why I'm opposed to it.
That said, I recognize the need for government support for some fraction of the population (let's try to keep it below 10% please), and I absolutely see the need for reform in tax laws, drug approval processes, and pricing models in health care.
Quite frankly, one of the things I'd most like to see is a requirement for 'posted pricing' for health care providers: the price for a service is posted publicly at least one month in advance, and that is the price for all payers, whether homeless bum or insurance company.
The reason I think this is important has to do with recent billing information I've been getting from my 'insurance' company. The billed price for a service is typically ten to 15 times (!) the amount paid by the insurance company, due to hardball agreements negotiated by the respective companies. Just to be clear on this, if I were to pay the billed amount, I would pay for example 100 USD. My insurance company would pay, for example, 8 USD. This is rate seem consistent across the board for nearly all services.
With an imbalance that great, it seems to me like a good idea to slap down an isolation barrier between the two. Something funky is definitely going on.
I personally wouldn't trust either of these environments. The vast bulk of my data is static, with usually only small or minor changes daily. Rsync CRC mirroring is how I handle it.
My setup:
1 TB main drive. All OS, config, and user data.
1 TB backup drive in same box. All OS, config, and user data mirrored from main drive nightly, using rsync with CRC checking.
2 - 1 TB backup drive in second box mirrored once a month. This machine is typically unplugged until in use. Each of the two backups are staggered two weeks apart, so that the oldest recent copy is no more than a month old.
Very important 'real time' data, on the order of 10 GB, are mirrored nightly off-site.
Note - CRC checking, in my anecdotal experience, is important. Modern drives actively look for 'questionable' sectors when reading; calculating CRC nightly ensures that the drive has to actually read every sector that's in use.
CRC checking mails you what has changed, which is easily filtered to make sure that you haven't lost something important.
Nightly cron job should dump any questionable SMART statistics from your drives. If any pre-fail counters increment, immediately consider that drive suspect and have a hot replacement ready.
How important is your information?
This is the level of data integrity risk that I am currently comfortable with. In a particularly nasty scenario involving my building being destroyed in an earthquake while I'm not in it, I have to fall back to my off-site data.
I accidentally found a solution to this when I was in school: change the keyboard so people have to touch type to use it. One day I decided I really needed to improve my touch typing, so I popped all the key caps off the keyboard and put them back on in a random order. People would come in to use my machine for mail and the like, and start typing by LOOKING AT THE KEYS. When learning that they had to touch type to get it to make any sense, they immediately gave up and left.
Another option might be to switch to dvorak keyboard layout, if you can type that way.
This of course doesn't address situations where it's just a "can you put this file up on the viewer", but it might be a start.
The presentation of power factor is very misleading, if not outright wrong. Power factor is a measure of the phase of the voltage versus the phase of the current in the system; this phase difference causes higher current flow than would be expected for a given power output, but it does NOT increase the power consumed.
Where it does cause problems is that the increased current causes increased losses in the supply lines, and it puts a heavier load on those lines. A supply line that can carry a thousand amperes can only carry a thousand amperes; if part of that is due to bad power factor, less power can be transferred when the line is operating at capacity.
For most environments, the supply lines run well below capacity, so it's not like this is a big deal unless all of the loading begins to come from low power factor CFLs (which isn't bloody likely.)
Additionally, supply line losses are typically less than 1% of the power delivered over them. The following contrived worst case example demonstrates the implications of this.
Assume a 50% loaded line that loses 1% of the power delivered over it at a power factor of 1.0.
That same line will be 100% loaded at a power factor of 0.5, and will suffer a 4% power loss. (P = I*I*R)
In short, the actual losses due to bad power factor are only a few percent, even in a worst case scenario. Much more important is the network loading.
It should also be noted that utility companies employ extensive power factor correction at substations and other locations. All electric motors and inductors have power factor issues by their very nature; as these things make up the backbone of nearly all electromechanical subsystems, utilities are very well aware of how to deal with power factor problems.
I just reread now and understand the discrepancy: I missed the part about 1.67 exajoules being for the St. Helens eruption; I thought that number was for an estimated 'supervolcano' detonation in Yellowstone. For St. Helens, that number doesn't sound terribly far off, though I would have thought a little high.
That said, I'm definitely uninformed. I basically just took some of the supervolcano numbers off other pages (specifically 40 mile diameter caldera and one mile depth) and did a back-of-the envelope calculation. It was meant to be a quick sanity check only; thanks for catching it.
Wikipedia should be modified. Did not the words "Institute for Creation Research" not give it away? These are the same guys that did the 'science' for the creation museum in Ohio - the museum with adam and eve walking in the garden of eden side by side with vegetarian velociraptors.
The ICR is a known fraudulent non-scientific organization. All information in that article should be considered bogus until confirmed by reputable sources.
That said, I still think 1.67 exajoules is too low. We're talking about moving around on the order of a thousand cubic miles of rock here, where each cubic mile is around 1.5e13 kilograms. Just by this rough calculation, I get 1.67e18 / 1.5e16 which is about one hundred joules per kilo, or enough energy to raise/lower the landmass by about ten meters. Most of the stuff I've read indicates a caldera shift much larger than that, never mind the lava flows and other expunged material.
Just to be clear, one kilogram of energy is 9e16 joules, which IIRC is considered approximately the equivalent amount of energy released by a 25 megaton nuclear bomb.
1.67 exajoules is only about 20 times this, or in short the equivalent of 20 bikini atoll blasts, or 10 kilos of antimatter. Yes, it will be irritating in terms of the amount of ash lifted, but in terms of raw explosive force it's not that big a deal.
That said, 1.67 exajoules seems a bit low. Are you sure that's the right number?
Yes, that (and other factors similar to it) are almost entirely the reason. Shooting people is not compatible with my plans for the future, and restricts my freedom in ways that are not acceptable to me.
Is it not sufficient that I have logical reasons for not wanting to shoot people? Must I also have irrational, primal, emotional, or instinctive reasons as well?
Lastly, why should the fact that I make this decision using logic imply that I am not human? And do you really mean to imply that anything non-human should be 'shot immediately'?
Well, to an extent it depends on your definition of a 'god'. My definition of a god is pretty simple - an entity multiple orders of magnitude smarter and more powerful than I am. Our technology even gives considerable insight into how to construct entities like this - for example, upload yourself into a jupiter-brain with its associated I/O and control facilities.
This definition, while simple and even in the realm of plausibility, is vastly at odds with the definitions of most true believers, usually because 1) a god you can conceive of obviously isn't powerful enough, and 2) such a god is limited by the rules of the universe in the same way we are, regardless of how powerful it is.
By Occams Razor, clearly your second option is preferrable over the third. I see no reason to postulate that there be a creator or creating entity unless there is evidence that requires an act of creation to explain. The fact that the universe exists is not in and of itself sufficient evidence, any more so than the existence of lightning is evidence for an entity that hurls lightning bolts from the heavens.
I also do not find it absurd that the universe came from nothing. In fact, it seems quite reasonable.
Further, given that time did not exist prior to the big bang, option three is defective by default: cause and effect (eg. 'something else caused the universe to be created') has no meaning if you take the concept of time out of the picture.
(This will be considered flamebait, but someone has to say it.)
The way I see it, we shouldn't be cluttering a clear, simple and sane interface like the unix console with complexity like unicode. Unix is inherently byte based, and unix terminals are byte based. If it's not a byte, don't put it in a unix terminal.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't have other mechanisms for supporting foreign languages - but this particular path has been travelled before and it's not pretty. Look at the AS/400 - tables stored in the DB/FS are marked as being in a particular character set, and the OS tries real hard to fix up and convert from set to set as needed. This causes countless problems in the infrequent cases where there is no possible mapping between sets.
Another way to look at it - why don't we have unicode support for grep? Why aren't all files tagged with an appropriate character set, so we know what they're really supposed to look like? When you 'tail -n 20' a file, how does tail know that those line feeds and carriage returns aren't part of some unicode char?
In short, unix is byte based. All the unix tools are byte based. If you want to use unicode, build a unicode layer on top of the bytes, but dont screw with the existing stuff that already works perfectly well.
You grossly overestimate the power of nuclear weaponry. While a single nuke can indeed level most of a city, and the impact on a local environment can be great, the earth has seen much, much greater disasters in the past. The probability of human extinction due to human nuclear war is effectively zero - a full scale nuclear war where every nation with nukes used them to the best of its ability would likely not even kill half of the world population.
-dentin
Think twice before you wish for this thing. One of the beauties of the net as it stands is that I can get to anywhere I want to go, just by typing in a small amount of stuff in the location bar. The small allowed character set means that the urls stay accessible for all languages, and that everyone can type them.
Think for a minute - how am I going to go to a chinese site if I am on an american keyboard? Suppose I know how to read german, but don't know how to type an umlaut? By giving out bastardized urls that only a small subset of the population can even type, you break the internet into cliques based on language, even more so than they already are. In my mind, this defeats the purpose of a net that everyone, everywhere, can use.
URLs and URIs should contain only characters from a small, standardized set. The english alphabet plus a few other symbols is already the defacto standard, and while not perfect I see no point or advantage to anyone in changing it now.
-dentin
I understand your argument about having a legitimate need to send tens of thousands of pieces of email, and I see easy solutions for it.
Consider these possibilities when a remote host tries to send us mail:
It is recognized as a 'good' host, so we accept its connection and mail unchallenged.
It is recognized as a 'bad' host, so we challenge it and tell it we don't accept mail from spammers.
The third option is more complicated: The connecting host is unknown. We ask who the mail is destined for, and attempt to do a lookup. If the user doesn't exist, we challenge the host, then after getting a response reply that the user 'either does not exist or is not accepting mail from you.' If the user does exist, we open ~user/.somemailrcfile and take actions based on that: The sender might be known good, in which case we accept the mail without challenge. It might be known bad, in which case we deny with the same 'does not exist' reply as above. Otherwise, we just challenge and accept the mail.
This gives system administrators the ability to form the mail networks they need, but it also puts the power of white and black lists in the hands of the users, where it is needed. If I, as a user, don't want to ever receive mail from *.tw, I should be able to tell the system mailer that. Filtering after the fact (with tools like procmail) means the mail still got delivered and consumed bandwidth.
In some ways, this also solves the opt-in/opt-out mailing list problem. If you have a mailing list and you send to a lot of people, you'll have to deny sending to any users/hosts that challenge you. If the user really wanted to be on your list, the user would have to add your list to his personal 'do not challenge' list.
This would also make it easy to unsubscribe - simply remove the list from your 'do not challenge' list, and you would be automatically dropped from the list.
I also don't see any insurmountable problems with forwarding. What do the rest of you think?
-dentin
I have had no problems with any of the things you mention, and your kernel compilation bugs don't even make sense. Barring bad hardware, the most reasonable explanation seems to me to be PEBKAC.
-dentin
Man, WTF are you smoking?
My 60 year old dad uses linux. He doesn't know the difference between it and windows, and he doesn't have to care. It just works for him.
The killer app thing is a total crock. 90+% of users don't just surf the web. It would be nice to have more games, but that's about it.
X works fine, and my dad has a 266 MHz k6-II. He is constantly getting compliments about how it runs faster than other people's machines, and all his friends are amazed that it hasn't been rebooted in three months.
Open office. Let's be honest... who actually uses an office suite for anything? I don't know anyone who does. It might be important in the business world, but 90+% of the users out there could care less.
Netscape and fonts - I don't see the problem. Apparently they work quite well for my pop, as well as myself.
KDE and Gnome being crap? You might actually be right on that one. We don't know or care though - both my dad and I use FVWM (not FVWM2) for everything. It does exactly what we tell it to, exactly what we want, and nothing more. That is a good thing, not a bad thing - especially from the perspective of new users.
No good printing? Don't be a dumbass.
There's not two competing graphical platforms. There's about a hundred. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
We don't need a desktop champion. Broken assumption.
Removing X is retarded. The only reason for using direct access to the graphics hardware is brute force speed, and that's only needed for things like video playback. Moving the graphics support into the kernel is equally retarded, if not more.
While we're standardizing on one api layer, why don't we also standardize on one programming language as well? I pick forth, since it's clearly the best choice for all tasks.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You seem to be paving full tilt. You might be more productive spending your time writing code than paving.
-dentin
So you're saying that if you want good performance from Linux, you just code it normally - but if you want good performance from windows, you have to use all the platform dependent nonportable operating system extensions.
It might not be a valid benchmark, but perhaps there is a point to be learned from it after all...
-dentin
Actually, I probably own on the order of a thousand music cds - but I certainly didn't pay full price for them. Most of them were bought in lots of 50 or so from pawn shops. You'd be suprised what prices you can get if you walk up to the counter and say 'I'm here to buy cds, about 50 of them. I'll buy wierd stuff you'll never sell to anyone else. Make me a good deal'.
The only drawback to this is that you're unlikely to get cutting edge music, and most of the risks you take won't pay off. But if you're like me, the winners you find make it completely worthwhile.
The only time you should buy full retail cds is when you've already listened to every track and know it'll be worth your time. I've bought 10 cds for that reason in the past 6 months, purely as a result of napster. My normal rate is under two per year at full retail price.
-dentin