I think part of the problem is the simple fact that Amazon had to shoehorn this project to fit the Mechanical Turk model (no time to develop a custom solution).
What I really feel is missing: why aren't they putting up an older set of pictures alongside the new pictures? If there's a borderline case, knowing that "this white shiny thing wasn't there nine months ago" could be very important. It would also provide important context.
The TI Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks countries in terms of the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians. It is a composite index, drawing on corruption-related data in expert surveys carried out by a variety of reputable institutions. It reflects the views of businesspeople and analysts from around the world, including experts who are resident in the countries evaluated.
[...]
15. What are the sources of data for the CPI?
The CPI 2004 draws on 18 different polls and surveys from 12 independent institutions. TI strives to ensure that the sources used are of the highest quality and that the survey work is performed with complete integrity. To qualify, the data has to be well documented, and it has to be sufficient to permit a judgment on its reliability.
16. Whose opinion is polled by these surveys? Surveys are carried out among businesspeople and country analysts, including surveys of residents of countries. It is important to note that residents' viewpoints are found to correlate well with those of experts from abroad.
Your description makes it sound like they're doing a poll of random people in a strip mall in Duluth. The methodology sounds pretty good to me, and you're going to have to go into great detail about why you think TI is choosing bad data if you're going to convince me.
I think your tapwater to Internet service comparison is bogus:
1) It's far more obvious to the end user that they're getting poor Internet service. Tapwater pollutants can be entirely tasteless in dangerous quantities. 2) Currently, disastrous mistakes in Internet service are only an inconvenience. They are unlikely to cause grave health problems. As we put more and more critical services on the wires, that will change, so quality of service guarantees will be needed. 3) It is much easier to Internet service onto services that are already ubiquitous, so competition is more likely. It is also possible to deliver service in a wireless form, so an ambitious person could deploy a new service without having to negotiate with every single property owner between themselves and their customers.
Internet service doesn't constitute a "natural monopoly", the way potable water does. The only (efficient) way to deliver competing water service is to run your own pipes[1], but it's woefully inefficient to have two infrastructure intensive providers delivering the exact same service. Plus, anyone who wants to get into the business will have to negotiate with every single property owner, which is a huge disadvantage when competing against a company that:
A) already has all the customers.
B) either bought their own infrastructure from a deregulation-happy government at firesale prices, or laid down the pipes back before the property was split up into multiple parcels.
C) could easily lock their captive customers into contracts that denied them the ability to sell easements to competing services.
I don't believe that either boycotts or competition have any muscle in this particular economic domain, and if you do then you're probably not thinking about the problem clearly enough. Now, if you could propose a clear mechanism by which a service provider would be directly responsible for all the health problems caused by delivering poor quality water, then *maybe* libertarian water service would make more sense to me. But think for a while on just how difficult that would be.
You completely misunderstood my point about toll roads. I think toll roads can make perfect sense, so long as there is some level of uniformity of access conditions. But there are a few differences between libertopian toll roads and the toll roads we see today. First, your toll roads are just another property, and the owner can place whatever access and behavior restrictions he likes on the road. Imagine if an environmental group bought a critical road and restricted access to cars that got more than 50MPG, the KKK bought another road "for whites only", a risk-averse property owner bought a third road where only people with small cars and outstanding driving records, and a fourth one was bought up by Wal-Mart which specifically disallowed trucks carrying merchandise to Target stores (this road happens to wrap around one of the Target stores).
Then consider that, because each road is responsible for its own safety, and each property owner has different ideas about risk, and each property owner can set his own driving rules, you could end up with a dozen different sets of traffic laws. For the most part, I think you'd end up with two or three systems that were mostly compatible. But I can imagine a wealthy and paranoid parent buying up all the road within a mile of his house, and enforcing a draconian 5MPH speed limit to protect his kids.
With toll roads today, tolls are collected, traffic laws are enforced, and fines are assessed mostly with an eye to improving public safety. Okay, maybe not the fines. But because the government is involved in most every road on the map (even most of the purportedly private toll roads), there is at least some level of user-friendly uniformity to the entire infrastructure, which makes driving easier and less stressful.
Now, on to the "sheep" issue. Yes, people are sheep. Yes, they would be less sheepish given the proper incentives.
>> Nerds are often psychologically isolated and have grown up without any sense of community or personal involvement.
I think this describes my childhood somewhat, but I had precisely the opposite reaction. Instead of being independent and believing that everyone else should be as well, it made me hungry for that sense of community.
Witness the fact that Microsoft became large and powerful precisely *because* it abused its position, and its position still gives it huge amounts of leverage against encroachment by these open standards.
I think that--in a Libertarian world--far more companies would maintain their profitability by abusing the system than would lose their profitability through such abuse.
1) Hey! The government is just a big protection racket! 2) Under democracy, protection and privilege is just sold to the highest bidder! 3) Crime would go down if everyone had a gun! 4) It would be really nifty if we had one police force by the rich and for by the rich, and another by the poor and for the poor! I'm sure they'd both do a great job of protecting their clients' interests, and I can't imagine the two ever coming into conflict! 5) Rather than having one law for everybody, people should be allowed to live under whatever law they can pay for!
Sounds to me like this system would last all of six months before the various private armies decided to settle it once and for all.
I'm starting to love The Free State Project more and more. Y'all just move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Fascinating. So, what you're saying is, once India ended all regulation... no, wait, it didn't do that. But you're saying that the deregulation that did occur has made every person better off... I'm sure that's not true either. But at least all the improvement in the economy can be attributed to this deregulation, and not to things like the IT revolution and reduced communications costs, right? Again, wrong.
>> The point I'm trying to make is that even the lowly manual laborer with no skills can benefit from wealth created in a society.
Somewhat true.
>> The stratification or the gap between rich and poor does not matter.
Utterly false.
>> What matters is 'how much wealth does a society produce'?
Look at the situation in the United States. Since 1973, the per capita wealth has approximately tripled, but the vast majority of that increase went to the wealthiest 10%. The lower half of the wage earning population has seen almost no increase over the last thirty years. If the increase had been much smaller (say it only doubled instead of tripled) but the fruits had been shared more evenly, the vast majority of us would be objectively better off.
Subjectively, we'd be even better off than that. Humans are not the pathetic, selfish homo economicus you would like us to believe. We don't just judge our well being based on how much we have versus how much we need to survive. We're intensely social creatures; we compare "where we should be" to where others are. If a person moves from the biggest house in a neighborhood of small houses to a bigger house that happens to be the smallest in the area, they may actually feel less satisfied with the new house than the old one.
You also ignore the danger to democracy inherent in extreme inequality. Let's say that you, I, and a hypothetical third person have different political opinions. Let's also say that you're a multimillionaire, I'm living comfortably on a $50K coder's salary, and the third person has to hold down two minimum wage jobs just to hold things together. We are each equally committed to our respective ideologies. You, with your enormous resources, will be able to infuse vast sums of cash into political races (because caps on campaign contributions are amoral impositions on the free speech of the wealthy, right?), and hire a couple of lobbyists to promote your policies and interests on the hill day in and day out. Me, with my smaller resources, will be able to give a few thousand dollars to campaigns, and maybe a few thousand more to help a shoestring environmental group field a part-time political lobbyist. The person working two minimum wage jobs won't have the money to spend on campaigns. She won't have the time or energy needed to educate herself on issues, or write more than the occasional letter to a congressman.
The democratic ideal is that each person deserves to be heard. But clearly the wealthy are going to have the ear of the government, far out of proportion to their numbers. The more egalitarian the wealth distribution of a country, the more easily the average person can get a fair hearing.
In short, your GDP fetish is naive, and leads to bad policy.
>> Govt regulations do not produce more 'stuff' - they can only take from the most productive and give it to the least productive. The result is more equality and less wealth.
Thank you Ms. Rand, but I'm actually in favor of a slightly poorer but more equitable world. More to the point, government regulation has done a far better job of cleaning up our air, our food supply, our tapwater, and unsafe workplaces than your libertarian utopiae could ever do. Universal safety standards do a better job of protecting us than a policy of "letting individuals choose what they're willing to pay for safety" ever could.
Even the ardent libertarians agree that government is needed to keep things fair, by ensuring private property rights and enforcing legal contracts. That's certainly a
Your ideal world sounds horrendously complicated and bureaucratic. If a road is to be private property, then each distinct road owner is going to have a different toll structure, different rules of conduct, and different licensing requirements. As if planning a trip across town wasn't already complicated enough. Oh, and each driver has to keep track of the reputation of each road, because widespread boycotts are the only mechanism within libertarian "philosophy" for dealing with bad actors.
The same complexity enters into services we take for granted today. Buying a house is complicated enough without having to decide which water provider serves a given area, and does provides water that is sufficiently non-carcinogenic? You'd end up trying to sort through all sorts of misleading health claims printed in glossy brochures.
"But people who don't value clean water shouldn't have to pay extra for it!" > All you get from regulation is some bizarre system where a small handful of people (not society as a whole) take bribes (whether over the table or under) and decide who gets to pollute how much and where.
Ah, I see. So we're comparing our current system with its often dishonest participants to an idealized libertarian love-in where everyone is honest and forthright. No wonder you libbies can hold onto these childish utopian fantasies so easily. In reality, once you institute your reforms, everyone will pollute as much as they can until their customers, or the people downstream or downwind, start to notice that their kids are looking a little bit deformed. Then they'll pay someone to convince the public that their actions aren't to blame. Maybe they'll buy up the newspaper that keeps reporting on it, or just bribe the editor to fire all the Erin Brokovitch wanna-bes. Oh, the newspaper's reputation would suffer? It's pretty obvious to me that the average person only has a vague idea of how to judge the reliability of a news source, or remember the string of events that can morph an upstanding news source into a paid shill.
I certainly agree that there is a lot of naked self-interest that goes into decisions about which pollutants to regulate and how. The process needs more transparency. But it's practically utopian compared to your proposal.
>> Education seems a better solution. Your parents taught you that you eliminate your body's waste in the toilet and you place your household waste in its proper place(s). Chances are you were not taught that you should be as careful with waste out of doors as you are in your home. Perhaps that additional education along with parents teaching their children to have some personal responsibility is enough to keep people from polluting in the "average person" sense (e.g. littering, dumping consumer chemicals, improper disposal of bio-hazardous waste, etc.).
Education is the answer? You're off your rocker. If we allowed caveat emptor to decide what products ended up in which consumer products, do you really think the average person would be able to remember which materials were safe to flush and which ones need to be taken to the run-for-profit hazardous materials reclamation company? The materials they would be insisting people dispose of properly (with big public service billboards, glossy brochures, etc.) aren't the most dangerous; they're the products that the reclamation company can profitably recycle. Add to that the fact that nobody can require manufacturers to list their product ingredients, and you've got a recipe for a situation where everyone will be bringing dangerous materials into their homes, few people have the motivation to dispose of them properly (by definition, they're not downstream from their own toilet), and those who do care to make the effort will have no idea how to go about it.
>> If people cared enough about industrial pollution, they could simply not do business with those companies that pollute and demand restitution from companies that cause direct harm to the populace (e.g.
Here's an analogy for you: Say that I have a magic jellybean, and that magic jellybean can make as many red jellybeans as you like, but only five black ones each day. So I take my magic jellybean to the market, where I see Theo DeRaadt, and try to exchange my magic jellybean for a cow. It has a bit of a limp, but it makes chocolate milk on Thursdays. That's pretty nifty, so I offer him fifty black jellybeans. Then he says he'd also like a date with my sister, and I say, "I have two, and you'd better not mean the married one," and he fires back with, "Hey, you promised this analogy would be relevant to this discussion."
No, Theo, I promised no such thing. Just like nobody promises to share their changes with the BSD team when they take advantage of BSDL'ed code. The BSD'ers say people ought to be able to do what they like with their code. Well, what the GPL'ers would like to do is protect their modifications from being appropriated by people who won't share the code. If they automatically hand their changes back to the BSD folks to distribute as BSD code, then they lose the protections they wanted from the GPL in the first place.
Theo is basically saying, "The Linux people are hypocrites because they say they believe in software freedom but they don't believe in my definition of software freedom." Which is pretty lame.
The "agendas" I was referring to were not the agendas of the people in this thread, but the agendas of any coders the FSF might choose to represent, who haven't assigned copyright over to the FSF. I thought I'd made that clear.
Also, your assertion about "giving up your freedoms" when assigning copyright to the FSF is incorrect. I was surprised to discover that, when you assign copyright to the FSF, they immediately assign you back a license that allows you to license it to others under whatever terms you like. There may be situations where you lose out by assigning to the FSF, but they are probably few and far between.
I think you underestimate the value of the GPL to those who don't have the resources to police violations on their own. First, they can rely on the fact that most people will want to comply with the license, either because it's the right thing to do, or because they aren't sure of your inability to enforce it. Using the GPL can also let you use the name-and-shame approach in lieu of actual lawsuits.
>> The "vocal" part leaves people with the impression everyone is like you. I don't think they are.
What exactly does it mean to be "like me?" As a member of the "vocal minority", what am I espousing? My arguments thus far have amounted to, "the FSF are doing useful work," and "use whatever license suits you, though I think the GPL is the best at keeping code free."
So FSF won't act as pro bono GPL enforcement for code it doesn't own. Neither you nor the enlightened individual you're defending have given a valid reason why they should. Instead, you've accused them of being hypocrites. There are perfectly good reasons why they wouldn't (though according to them, they do initial investigation even on software they don't own).
If a piece of code has its copyright assigned to FSF, that code is guaranteed to stay free. If the code remains under the ownership of the author, the author could close it off at any time. Further, if FSF owns the code, they have absolute control over how a violation is dealt with. They act as their own legal counsel. If instead, they're simply providing legal services to the author, then they must prosecute the violation as the author dictates, which may not be in the interests of the FSF or the code itself. Imagine if they put months of effort into building a case against a violator, only to discover that the author is dropping the case because the company agreed to pay him 10K? Talk about throwing money down a gaping, bottomless pit.
The guy you're defending is an idiot. I say this because no intelligent person could write, "If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?" The answer, obviously, is that the author wants the software to be GPL'ed, but doesn't have the time, interest, or expertise to prosecute infringement himself.
I hesitate to call you an idiot as well, but you do buy into the same line of reasoning. Further, no intelligent person could write, "And then you realize that the only way to get that protection of freedom with them involved if it is ever challenged, is to give up your freedom and give them the copyright." No, you have the option of hiring your own lawyers (perhaps even the same lawyers who also provide services to the FSF) on your own dime.
I have a simple solution for you: if you like the GPL, use it. If you prefer GPL2 to GPL3, don't use GPL3. If you think making your software public domain makes it "more free" than any of the standard open source licenses, then use public domain. I defy you to find a single word in the grandparent's post that indicates that the GPL is the only license anyone should ever use, yet you have the temerity to write, "The bottom line is that there are all sorts of reasons people wouldn't want the restrictions and some of the issues the GPL places on their works. It doesn't mean they are retarded or any less then you." This leads me to question either your honesty, or your reading comprehension.
Neither of you have shown that there is any hypocrisy in the FSF's decision to only prosecute violations of FSF-owned code. Why should they waste their scarce resources on behalf of an author who has some other agenda than supporting open code?
>> We hit peak oil because it got too expensive in the mid 80s to continue drilling and pumping the US. It's cheaper to source from overseas. The big price crash of oil in 1985 is what closed a lot of our production.
That mischaracterizes the situation, because the peak didn't happen in 1985. It happened in 1970. The second, slightly lower peak can be primarily attributed to Alaska ramping up its production in the late 1970s and early 1980s (if I'm reading this graph right).
>> Additionally, it's not just ANWR, but the Florida and Californian coasts. A find last year in the Gulf of Mexico will increase US reserves by 50%. There's another BILLION barrels off the coast of California. And those oil shales - enough to power us for decades.
As of January 2000, the United States had about 21B barrels of proven reserves. That's equivalent to about three years worth of consumption. That BILLIONOMGLOL!!!1 barrels is enough for two months. Pointing to all these new finds simply overshadows the more relevant fact: worldwide, we're discovering about one new barrel of reserves for every five barrels we consume.
>> So, since you want to take new drilling, oil shale, and coal liquefaction off the table, then what the heck do we run on for the 20 years while alternative energy sources AND infrastructure are deployed? What powers airplanes, ships, trains, streetlights, IC fabs? What creates the plastics, drugs and fertilizers that modern society needs? What's your solution?
You seem to be attacking a position I never took, ignoring some available options, and making some wrongheaded assumptions. Currently, the Middle East delivers about 20% of our oil. We could replace most of that simply by raising CAFTA standards. Hell, that would probably be doing Detroit a favor, since they're clearly not manufacturing the cars people want to drive. Serious mass transit efforts along with higher gasoline taxes would also help.
If we decided, today, that every new vehicle sold in the U.S. had to be a hybrid, or an E85 vehicle, or an electric vehicle, the entire fleet could be replaced within 7-10 years (going by current buying patterns). We have enough nighttime capacity on our power grid to keep over a hundred million electric cars fueled for a daily commute. So I don't understand why you think it will take twenty years to roll out the necessary infrastructure, or why conservation alone couldn't cover the near-term shortages that the transition will entail. Instead, I see a situation where we've very nearly run out of the reserves we're currently exploiting, and you're suggesting transitioning to whatever--be it new oil fields, oil shale, or coal liquefaction--that will keep the oil industry profitable. We have enough oil worldwide to cover the transition if we act now; no intermediate step is necessary.
>> I say - if you're serious about wanting to be out of the Middle East because of our dependency on their oil, then we immediately develop our existing oil reserves so we have the energy to use while we transition to a different source. But we have to have the intermediate step.
Long term, the ONLY way to become independent of Middle Eastern oil is to get off oil altogether. We don't have the reserves to fuel ourselves for long, even if we were willing to sacrifice the environment for it (which is exactly what coal liquefaction and oil shale would require).
It would take ten years to get ANWR on line, and probably another ten before it was producing at full capacity. As an intermediate step, these new discoveries you're talking about are worthless, because by then we could have already replaced far more oil production with conservation and alternative fuel efforts. ANWR and all these other new fields are just a way of putting off the day when we actually get clean.
We *did* hit peak oil in the 1970s. Ever since then, the U.S. has trended towards producing fewer barrels of oil per year. Feel free to look it up. Also, the bulk of the remaining reserves are in Saudi Arabia, which is most likely lying about its reserves. We can only hope they are, because we're in deep trouble if they become the energy gatekeepers of the world.
By "mustering the political will" I assume you mean "drilling ANWR". Therefore, by "plenty of oil", you must mean about six months worth. How the hell is that going to fundamentally alter the picture?
Oil shale is an ecological disaster waiting to happen. It requires huge quantities of water and energy, and poses grave risks to groundwater. From a global warming standpoint, you only get half as much energy per unit of CO2 belched into the atmosphere. As far as I'm concerned, any high-carbon solution is off the table, so no coal liquefaction either.
I believe it would be the same temperature as the surrounding air. To actually be cold, it would have to be turning thermal energy into electricity as well.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a 3kW system (which is fairly large, as systems go) only requires 17 m^2 (150 ft^2) of roof space. For most people, roof space is not the limiting factor. In fact, if they could make solar panels with half the efficiency at a third the cost, most homeowners would be better off. For most people, the critical metric is output per dollar spent, and that's where concentrator systems are trying to make a name for themselves.
Unless you try and install the PV panels while drunk, and drop them off your roof, that just doesn't happen. Depending on the technology used, the initial energy payback for a PV panel is between six months and two years.
Yes, a private jet is the most hoggish, environmentally unfriendly way to travel. But if the functional advantage afforded by a private jet was really just "30 minutes waiting in the security line," I doubt near so many people would use them. Having a direct flight available from any airport to any other, able to depart at a moment's notice, is a big deal, especially for someone who is trying to hold meetings with lots of high level people with very tight schedules. If a private jet brings business advantages to an oil exec, should environmentalists be denied those advantages?
Here's a rather contrived example: The president of Flotsjetzistan is trying to decide what to do with a million acres of virgin timber. The CEO of Pollutocorp has a plan for cutting down the timber to build giant novelty toothpicks. Al Gore has a plan to keep most of the forest intact while bringing in the same amount of revenue. The secret? Cheese!
Anyhow, Prez sez, "These are both great plans. Drop by my office tomorrow, and explain them in further detail."
Pollutocorp says, "I'll be there."
Gore says, "For the sake of rigorous ethical consistency, I'm heeding fredmosby's advice and taking the public airline. I'll have to take a transcontinental flight to Beijing, with a five hour layover, then a flight to Jakarta. Then there's an eight hour flight to Saudi Arabia, because they're the one country you've managed to keep diplomatic relations with. In other words, I can be there on Thursday at the latest. Could we do a teleconference?"
"What is this... teleconference?"
"Well, we each have a camera..."
"No good. Cameras capture mens souls."
In the end, Pollutocorp wins. Had Al used a private jet, he might have spared a million acres of trees, enough to cover centuries of constantly running his jet.
The example is contrived, but the point is clear: If Al has even one huge success to show for his flagrant gulfstreaming, if he gets a few million more people trying to lower their energy bills, or gets an important piece of legislation passed, or gets a few coal plants in China replaced with renewable energy or energy conservation efforts, then by comparison his own personal CO2 emissions are but a fart in a hurricane. If using a private jet makes him more able to make his case to the movers and shakers who decide energy policy and research priorities, then shaming Gore into giving the jet up could be a net loss for the climate change movement as a whole.
The counterargument is that appearances matter, and the accusations of hypocrisy are causing problems for other environmentalists. But in my mind, if you took this issue away, the right wing would just find some other issue to blow out of proportion. Gore isn't going to win over the Hannitys of the world, and it's a waste of time for him to try.
Water vapor is not the most important greenhouse gas. Sure, it's trapping more heat than CO2 is. Thank god, or we'd freeze to death. But water vapor doesn't drive temperature change. It only reacts.
For instance, if you put several billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the stuff stays up there. You put the same amount of H2O up into the atmosphere, it falls back into the oceans within days, long before it has a chance to change the heat balance of the planet.
The amount of H2O is pretty much a function of atmospheric temperature. When CO2 rises, temperature rises, so the atmosphere can hold more water. IOW, water vapor is a feedback agent, not a forcing agent. [more]
The "increase in plant growth" you attribute to CO2 is only true if all else is held constant. If the Earth gets hotter, and some areas get drier, then the increased CO2 will lead to less plant growth. But maybe that could be counterbalanced by increased plant growth in currently permafrosted areas. But won't the thawing of those areas release vast quantities of methane, another very important greenhouse gas? Anyhow, plants aren't likely to act as a CO2 sink for long.
Even if (as you believe, and I doubt) there is substantial disagreement about whether anything bad will happen, then we have a choice.
1) We do nothing. If you're right, climate change falls flat and we end up with a somewhat improved economy. If I'm right, all sorts of nasty things happen. Floods, droughts, mass extinctions, increased hurricane activity, and so on.
2) We devote a sizeable fraction of our economy to fighting climate change. If you're right, we just wasted a whole bunch of money, and will have to stagger along with a weaker economy than we would have had. If I'm right, climate change means avoiding devastation to vast swaths of the economy. I would also argue that a shift away from fossil fuels is going to carry all sorts of unrelated benefits, like increased energy security, reduced pollution, technological advancement, etc.
As the argument goes, we have no control over whether climate change is real. All we can control is our response. Knowing that climate change is possible, it strikes me as insane to wait until it's absolutely certain before deciding whether to respond. In terms of risk management, there is no reasonable alternative.
Most E. coli is fine. It lives happily in our gut, and provides us with goods and services. But there is a particularly acid-resistant strain called Escherichia coli O157:H7 that is found in the guts of grain-fed cattle. Feeding the cows grain (grasses are their natural food, not grain) raises the acidity in their stomachs, making the deadly strain much more prevalent.
The ideal solution would be to feed cows grass, which would basically eliminate 73,000 cases of food poisoning every year, while being more humane to the cows themselves. But the meat industry says this is too expensive. Another alternative would be to feed them grass just for the last couple of days before slaughter. Again, the meat industry argues it's too expensive.
Now their filth is ending up downstream, in other agricultural products like peanut butter and spinach.
But that's just my tangential why-can't-everyone-just-be-vegetarian rant. The point was that the plant probably won't be using the deadly strain of E. coli.
If the corn you're turning into ethanol requires pesticides and fertilizers, the picture becomes much messier, because both are derived from petroleum products.
If your mom feels that you're being a bit patronizing for buying her a laptop that is supposed to be "for kids", there is a whole spate of similar low-spec'ed, low-powered, low-cost systems coming out these days. They have bizarre names, like the Zombu, the Koolu, and the Eee. I'm really tempted to get an Eee or an OLPC, since either would be lighter, less power hungry, and less fragile than my current laptop. Plus, you're sitting around the coffee shop with one of these babies, tappity-tapping away at the tiny keyboard, and the girls can't help but think, "Gee, he must not be compensating for anything." Which makes me sad for the guy with the huge, LED-bedecked Alienware rig. His loss, my gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think part of the problem is the simple fact that Amazon had to shoehorn this project to fit the Mechanical Turk model (no time to develop a custom solution).
What I really feel is missing: why aren't they putting up an older set of pictures alongside the new pictures? If there's a borderline case, knowing that "this white shiny thing wasn't there nine months ago" could be very important. It would also provide important context.
Ah well, back to searching.
Your description makes it sound like they're doing a poll of random people in a strip mall in Duluth. The methodology sounds pretty good to me, and you're going to have to go into great detail about why you think TI is choosing bad data if you're going to convince me.
I think your tapwater to Internet service comparison is bogus:
1) It's far more obvious to the end user that they're getting poor Internet service. Tapwater pollutants can be entirely tasteless in dangerous quantities.
2) Currently, disastrous mistakes in Internet service are only an inconvenience. They are unlikely to cause grave health problems. As we put more and more critical services on the wires, that will change, so quality of service guarantees will be needed.
3) It is much easier to Internet service onto services that are already ubiquitous, so competition is more likely. It is also possible to deliver service in a wireless form, so an ambitious person could deploy a new service without having to negotiate with every single property owner between themselves and their customers.
Internet service doesn't constitute a "natural monopoly", the way potable water does. The only (efficient) way to deliver competing water service is to run your own pipes[1], but it's woefully inefficient to have two infrastructure intensive providers delivering the exact same service. Plus, anyone who wants to get into the business will have to negotiate with every single property owner, which is a huge disadvantage when competing against a company that:
A) already has all the customers.
B) either bought their own infrastructure from a deregulation-happy government at firesale prices, or laid down the pipes back before the property was split up into multiple parcels.
C) could easily lock their captive customers into contracts that denied them the ability to sell easements to competing services.
I don't believe that either boycotts or competition have any muscle in this particular economic domain, and if you do then you're probably not thinking about the problem clearly enough. Now, if you could propose a clear mechanism by which a service provider would be directly responsible for all the health problems caused by delivering poor quality water, then *maybe* libertarian water service would make more sense to me. But think for a while on just how difficult that would be.
You completely misunderstood my point about toll roads. I think toll roads can make perfect sense, so long as there is some level of uniformity of access conditions. But there are a few differences between libertopian toll roads and the toll roads we see today. First, your toll roads are just another property, and the owner can place whatever access and behavior restrictions he likes on the road. Imagine if an environmental group bought a critical road and restricted access to cars that got more than 50MPG, the KKK bought another road "for whites only", a risk-averse property owner bought a third road where only people with small cars and outstanding driving records, and a fourth one was bought up by Wal-Mart which specifically disallowed trucks carrying merchandise to Target stores (this road happens to wrap around one of the Target stores).
Then consider that, because each road is responsible for its own safety, and each property owner has different ideas about risk, and each property owner can set his own driving rules, you could end up with a dozen different sets of traffic laws. For the most part, I think you'd end up with two or three systems that were mostly compatible. But I can imagine a wealthy and paranoid parent buying up all the road within a mile of his house, and enforcing a draconian 5MPH speed limit to protect his kids.
With toll roads today, tolls are collected, traffic laws are enforced, and fines are assessed mostly with an eye to improving public safety. Okay, maybe not the fines. But because the government is involved in most every road on the map (even most of the purportedly private toll roads), there is at least some level of user-friendly uniformity to the entire infrastructure, which makes driving easier and less stressful.
Now, on to the "sheep" issue. Yes, people are sheep. Yes, they would be less sheepish given the proper incentives.
I'm imagining a picture of a kitten in front of a bar graph, the caption saying, "I HAS A DAYTA POINTE! IS KONKLUSIV!"
>> Nerds are often psychologically isolated and have grown up without any sense of community or personal involvement.
I think this describes my childhood somewhat, but I had precisely the opposite reaction. Instead of being independent and believing that everyone else should be as well, it made me hungry for that sense of community.
Witness the fact that Microsoft became large and powerful precisely *because* it abused its position, and its position still gives it huge amounts of leverage against encroachment by these open standards.
I think that--in a Libertarian world--far more companies would maintain their profitability by abusing the system than would lose their profitability through such abuse.
That's an excellent analysis, which I fully agree with.
Of course, I usually forget that I believe this, and start calling libertarians greedy, naive morons. So you've got me beat.
All I got out of your first link is:
1) Hey! The government is just a big protection racket!
2) Under democracy, protection and privilege is just sold to the highest bidder!
3) Crime would go down if everyone had a gun!
4) It would be really nifty if we had one police force by the rich and for by the rich, and another by the poor and for the poor! I'm sure they'd both do a great job of protecting their clients' interests, and I can't imagine the two ever coming into conflict!
5) Rather than having one law for everybody, people should be allowed to live under whatever law they can pay for!
Sounds to me like this system would last all of six months before the various private armies decided to settle it once and for all.
I'm starting to love The Free State Project more and more. Y'all just move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Fascinating. So, what you're saying is, once India ended all regulation... no, wait, it didn't do that. But you're saying that the deregulation that did occur has made every person better off... I'm sure that's not true either. But at least all the improvement in the economy can be attributed to this deregulation, and not to things like the IT revolution and reduced communications costs, right? Again, wrong.
>> The point I'm trying to make is that even the lowly manual laborer with no skills can benefit from wealth created in a society.
Somewhat true.
>> The stratification or the gap between rich and poor does not matter.
Utterly false.
>> What matters is 'how much wealth does a society produce'?
Look at the situation in the United States. Since 1973, the per capita wealth has approximately tripled, but the vast majority of that increase went to the wealthiest 10%. The lower half of the wage earning population has seen almost no increase over the last thirty years. If the increase had been much smaller (say it only doubled instead of tripled) but the fruits had been shared more evenly, the vast majority of us would be objectively better off.
Subjectively, we'd be even better off than that. Humans are not the pathetic, selfish homo economicus you would like us to believe. We don't just judge our well being based on how much we have versus how much we need to survive. We're intensely social creatures; we compare "where we should be" to where others are. If a person moves from the biggest house in a neighborhood of small houses to a bigger house that happens to be the smallest in the area, they may actually feel less satisfied with the new house than the old one.
You also ignore the danger to democracy inherent in extreme inequality. Let's say that you, I, and a hypothetical third person have different political opinions. Let's also say that you're a multimillionaire, I'm living comfortably on a $50K coder's salary, and the third person has to hold down two minimum wage jobs just to hold things together. We are each equally committed to our respective ideologies. You, with your enormous resources, will be able to infuse vast sums of cash into political races (because caps on campaign contributions are amoral impositions on the free speech of the wealthy, right?), and hire a couple of lobbyists to promote your policies and interests on the hill day in and day out. Me, with my smaller resources, will be able to give a few thousand dollars to campaigns, and maybe a few thousand more to help a shoestring environmental group field a part-time political lobbyist. The person working two minimum wage jobs won't have the money to spend on campaigns. She won't have the time or energy needed to educate herself on issues, or write more than the occasional letter to a congressman.
The democratic ideal is that each person deserves to be heard. But clearly the wealthy are going to have the ear of the government, far out of proportion to their numbers. The more egalitarian the wealth distribution of a country, the more easily the average person can get a fair hearing.
In short, your GDP fetish is naive, and leads to bad policy.
>> Govt regulations do not produce more 'stuff' - they can only take from the most productive and give it to the least productive. The result is more equality and less wealth.
Thank you Ms. Rand, but I'm actually in favor of a slightly poorer but more equitable world. More to the point, government regulation has done a far better job of cleaning up our air, our food supply, our tapwater, and unsafe workplaces than your libertarian utopiae could ever do. Universal safety standards do a better job of protecting us than a policy of "letting individuals choose what they're willing to pay for safety" ever could.
Even the ardent libertarians agree that government is needed to keep things fair, by ensuring private property rights and enforcing legal contracts. That's certainly a
So your basic political philosophy is that your right to pollute the air supersedes my right to breathe clean air.
Good to know I won't have to write a long post that tries to reason with you. It would never work.
Your ideal world sounds horrendously complicated and bureaucratic. If a road is to be private property, then each distinct road owner is going to have a different toll structure, different rules of conduct, and different licensing requirements. As if planning a trip across town wasn't already complicated enough. Oh, and each driver has to keep track of the reputation of each road, because widespread boycotts are the only mechanism within libertarian "philosophy" for dealing with bad actors.
The same complexity enters into services we take for granted today. Buying a house is complicated enough without having to decide which water provider serves a given area, and does provides water that is sufficiently non-carcinogenic? You'd end up trying to sort through all sorts of misleading health claims printed in glossy brochures.
"But people who don't value clean water shouldn't have to pay extra for it!" > All you get from regulation is some bizarre system where a small handful of people (not society as a whole) take bribes (whether over the table or under) and decide who gets to pollute how much and where.
Ah, I see. So we're comparing our current system with its often dishonest participants to an idealized libertarian love-in where everyone is honest and forthright. No wonder you libbies can hold onto these childish utopian fantasies so easily. In reality, once you institute your reforms, everyone will pollute as much as they can until their customers, or the people downstream or downwind, start to notice that their kids are looking a little bit deformed. Then they'll pay someone to convince the public that their actions aren't to blame. Maybe they'll buy up the newspaper that keeps reporting on it, or just bribe the editor to fire all the Erin Brokovitch wanna-bes. Oh, the newspaper's reputation would suffer? It's pretty obvious to me that the average person only has a vague idea of how to judge the reliability of a news source, or remember the string of events that can morph an upstanding news source into a paid shill.
I certainly agree that there is a lot of naked self-interest that goes into decisions about which pollutants to regulate and how. The process needs more transparency. But it's practically utopian compared to your proposal.
>> Education seems a better solution. Your parents taught you that you eliminate your body's waste in the toilet and you place your household waste in its proper place(s). Chances are you were not taught that you should be as careful with waste out of doors as you are in your home. Perhaps that additional education along with parents teaching their children to have some personal responsibility is enough to keep people from polluting in the "average person" sense (e.g. littering, dumping consumer chemicals, improper disposal of bio-hazardous waste, etc.).
Education is the answer? You're off your rocker. If we allowed caveat emptor to decide what products ended up in which consumer products, do you really think the average person would be able to remember which materials were safe to flush and which ones need to be taken to the run-for-profit hazardous materials reclamation company? The materials they would be insisting people dispose of properly (with big public service billboards, glossy brochures, etc.) aren't the most dangerous; they're the products that the reclamation company can profitably recycle. Add to that the fact that nobody can require manufacturers to list their product ingredients, and you've got a recipe for a situation where everyone will be bringing dangerous materials into their homes, few people have the motivation to dispose of them properly (by definition, they're not downstream from their own toilet), and those who do care to make the effort will have no idea how to go about it.
>> If people cared enough about industrial pollution, they could simply not do business with those companies that pollute and demand restitution from companies that cause direct harm to the populace (e.g.
Here's an analogy for you: Say that I have a magic jellybean, and that magic jellybean can make as many red jellybeans as you like, but only five black ones each day. So I take my magic jellybean to the market, where I see Theo DeRaadt, and try to exchange my magic jellybean for a cow. It has a bit of a limp, but it makes chocolate milk on Thursdays. That's pretty nifty, so I offer him fifty black jellybeans. Then he says he'd also like a date with my sister, and I say, "I have two, and you'd better not mean the married one," and he fires back with, "Hey, you promised this analogy would be relevant to this discussion."
No, Theo, I promised no such thing. Just like nobody promises to share their changes with the BSD team when they take advantage of BSDL'ed code. The BSD'ers say people ought to be able to do what they like with their code. Well, what the GPL'ers would like to do is protect their modifications from being appropriated by people who won't share the code. If they automatically hand their changes back to the BSD folks to distribute as BSD code, then they lose the protections they wanted from the GPL in the first place.
Theo is basically saying, "The Linux people are hypocrites because they say they believe in software freedom but they don't believe in my definition of software freedom." Which is pretty lame.
Sounds like an ultimate showdown. My money is on Mister Rogers in a bloodstained sweater.
The "agendas" I was referring to were not the agendas of the people in this thread, but the agendas of any coders the FSF might choose to represent, who haven't assigned copyright over to the FSF. I thought I'd made that clear.
Also, your assertion about "giving up your freedoms" when assigning copyright to the FSF is incorrect. I was surprised to discover that, when you assign copyright to the FSF, they immediately assign you back a license that allows you to license it to others under whatever terms you like. There may be situations where you lose out by assigning to the FSF, but they are probably few and far between.
I think you underestimate the value of the GPL to those who don't have the resources to police violations on their own. First, they can rely on the fact that most people will want to comply with the license, either because it's the right thing to do, or because they aren't sure of your inability to enforce it. Using the GPL can also let you use the name-and-shame approach in lieu of actual lawsuits.
>> The "vocal" part leaves people with the impression everyone is like you. I don't think they are.
What exactly does it mean to be "like me?" As a member of the "vocal minority", what am I espousing? My arguments thus far have amounted to, "the FSF are doing useful work," and "use whatever license suits you, though I think the GPL is the best at keeping code free."
So FSF won't act as pro bono GPL enforcement for code it doesn't own. Neither you nor the enlightened individual you're defending have given a valid reason why they should. Instead, you've accused them of being hypocrites. There are perfectly good reasons why they wouldn't (though according to them, they do initial investigation even on software they don't own).
If a piece of code has its copyright assigned to FSF, that code is guaranteed to stay free. If the code remains under the ownership of the author, the author could close it off at any time. Further, if FSF owns the code, they have absolute control over how a violation is dealt with. They act as their own legal counsel. If instead, they're simply providing legal services to the author, then they must prosecute the violation as the author dictates, which may not be in the interests of the FSF or the code itself. Imagine if they put months of effort into building a case against a violator, only to discover that the author is dropping the case because the company agreed to pay him 10K? Talk about throwing money down a gaping, bottomless pit.
The guy you're defending is an idiot. I say this because no intelligent person could write, "If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?" The answer, obviously, is that the author wants the software to be GPL'ed, but doesn't have the time, interest, or expertise to prosecute infringement himself.
I hesitate to call you an idiot as well, but you do buy into the same line of reasoning. Further, no intelligent person could write, "And then you realize that the only way to get that protection of freedom with them involved if it is ever challenged, is to give up your freedom and give them the copyright." No, you have the option of hiring your own lawyers (perhaps even the same lawyers who also provide services to the FSF) on your own dime.
I have a simple solution for you: if you like the GPL, use it. If you prefer GPL2 to GPL3, don't use GPL3. If you think making your software public domain makes it "more free" than any of the standard open source licenses, then use public domain. I defy you to find a single word in the grandparent's post that indicates that the GPL is the only license anyone should ever use, yet you have the temerity to write, "The bottom line is that there are all sorts of reasons people wouldn't want the restrictions and some of the issues the GPL places on their works. It doesn't mean they are retarded or any less then you." This leads me to question either your honesty, or your reading comprehension.
Neither of you have shown that there is any hypocrisy in the FSF's decision to only prosecute violations of FSF-owned code. Why should they waste their scarce resources on behalf of an author who has some other agenda than supporting open code?
>> We hit peak oil because it got too expensive in the mid 80s to continue drilling and pumping the US. It's cheaper to source from overseas. The big price crash of oil in 1985 is what closed a lot of our production.
That mischaracterizes the situation, because the peak didn't happen in 1985. It happened in 1970. The second, slightly lower peak can be primarily attributed to Alaska ramping up its production in the late 1970s and early 1980s (if I'm reading this graph right).
>> Additionally, it's not just ANWR, but the Florida and Californian coasts. A find last year in the Gulf of Mexico will increase US reserves by 50%. There's another BILLION barrels off the coast of California. And those oil shales - enough to power us for decades.
As of January 2000, the United States had about 21B barrels of proven reserves. That's equivalent to about three years worth of consumption. That BILLIONOMGLOL!!!1 barrels is enough for two months. Pointing to all these new finds simply overshadows the more relevant fact: worldwide, we're discovering about one new barrel of reserves for every five barrels we consume.
>> So, since you want to take new drilling, oil shale, and coal liquefaction off the table, then what the heck do we run on for the 20 years while alternative energy sources AND infrastructure are deployed? What powers airplanes, ships, trains, streetlights, IC fabs? What creates the plastics, drugs and fertilizers that modern society needs? What's your solution?
You seem to be attacking a position I never took, ignoring some available options, and making some wrongheaded assumptions. Currently, the Middle East delivers about 20% of our oil. We could replace most of that simply by raising CAFTA standards. Hell, that would probably be doing Detroit a favor, since they're clearly not manufacturing the cars people want to drive. Serious mass transit efforts along with higher gasoline taxes would also help.
If we decided, today, that every new vehicle sold in the U.S. had to be a hybrid, or an E85 vehicle, or an electric vehicle, the entire fleet could be replaced within 7-10 years (going by current buying patterns). We have enough nighttime capacity on our power grid to keep over a hundred million electric cars fueled for a daily commute. So I don't understand why you think it will take twenty years to roll out the necessary infrastructure, or why conservation alone couldn't cover the near-term shortages that the transition will entail. Instead, I see a situation where we've very nearly run out of the reserves we're currently exploiting, and you're suggesting transitioning to whatever--be it new oil fields, oil shale, or coal liquefaction--that will keep the oil industry profitable. We have enough oil worldwide to cover the transition if we act now; no intermediate step is necessary.
>> I say - if you're serious about wanting to be out of the Middle East because of our dependency on their oil, then we immediately develop our existing oil reserves so we have the energy to use while we transition to a different source. But we have to have the intermediate step.
Long term, the ONLY way to become independent of Middle Eastern oil is to get off oil altogether. We don't have the reserves to fuel ourselves for long, even if we were willing to sacrifice the environment for it (which is exactly what coal liquefaction and oil shale would require).
It would take ten years to get ANWR on line, and probably another ten before it was producing at full capacity. As an intermediate step, these new discoveries you're talking about are worthless, because by then we could have already replaced far more oil production with conservation and alternative fuel efforts. ANWR and all these other new fields are just a way of putting off the day when we actually get clean.
We *did* hit peak oil in the 1970s. Ever since then, the U.S. has trended towards producing fewer barrels of oil per year. Feel free to look it up. Also, the bulk of the remaining reserves are in Saudi Arabia, which is most likely lying about its reserves. We can only hope they are, because we're in deep trouble if they become the energy gatekeepers of the world.
By "mustering the political will" I assume you mean "drilling ANWR". Therefore, by "plenty of oil", you must mean about six months worth. How the hell is that going to fundamentally alter the picture?
Oil shale is an ecological disaster waiting to happen. It requires huge quantities of water and energy, and poses grave risks to groundwater. From a global warming standpoint, you only get half as much energy per unit of CO2 belched into the atmosphere. As far as I'm concerned, any high-carbon solution is off the table, so no coal liquefaction either.
I believe it would be the same temperature as the surrounding air. To actually be cold, it would have to be turning thermal energy into electricity as well.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a 3kW system (which is fairly large, as systems go) only requires 17 m^2 (150 ft^2) of roof space. For most people, roof space is not the limiting factor. In fact, if they could make solar panels with half the efficiency at a third the cost, most homeowners would be better off. For most people, the critical metric is output per dollar spent, and that's where concentrator systems are trying to make a name for themselves.
Unless you try and install the PV panels while drunk, and drop them off your roof, that just doesn't happen. Depending on the technology used, the initial energy payback for a PV panel is between six months and two years.
Yes, a private jet is the most hoggish, environmentally unfriendly way to travel. But if the functional advantage afforded by a private jet was really just "30 minutes waiting in the security line," I doubt near so many people would use them. Having a direct flight available from any airport to any other, able to depart at a moment's notice, is a big deal, especially for someone who is trying to hold meetings with lots of high level people with very tight schedules. If a private jet brings business advantages to an oil exec, should environmentalists be denied those advantages?
Here's a rather contrived example: The president of Flotsjetzistan is trying to decide what to do with a million acres of virgin timber. The CEO of Pollutocorp has a plan for cutting down the timber to build giant novelty toothpicks. Al Gore has a plan to keep most of the forest intact while bringing in the same amount of revenue. The secret? Cheese!
Anyhow, Prez sez, "These are both great plans. Drop by my office tomorrow, and explain them in further detail."
Pollutocorp says, "I'll be there."
Gore says, "For the sake of rigorous ethical consistency, I'm heeding fredmosby's advice and taking the public airline. I'll have to take a transcontinental flight to Beijing, with a five hour layover, then a flight to Jakarta. Then there's an eight hour flight to Saudi Arabia, because they're the one country you've managed to keep diplomatic relations with. In other words, I can be there on Thursday at the latest. Could we do a teleconference?"
"What is this... teleconference?"
"Well, we each have a camera..."
"No good. Cameras capture mens souls."
In the end, Pollutocorp wins. Had Al used a private jet, he might have spared a million acres of trees, enough to cover centuries of constantly running his jet.
The example is contrived, but the point is clear: If Al has even one huge success to show for his flagrant gulfstreaming, if he gets a few million more people trying to lower their energy bills, or gets an important piece of legislation passed, or gets a few coal plants in China replaced with renewable energy or energy conservation efforts, then by comparison his own personal CO2 emissions are but a fart in a hurricane. If using a private jet makes him more able to make his case to the movers and shakers who decide energy policy and research priorities, then shaming Gore into giving the jet up could be a net loss for the climate change movement as a whole.
The counterargument is that appearances matter, and the accusations of hypocrisy are causing problems for other environmentalists. But in my mind, if you took this issue away, the right wing would just find some other issue to blow out of proportion. Gore isn't going to win over the Hannitys of the world, and it's a waste of time for him to try.
Water vapor is not the most important greenhouse gas. Sure, it's trapping more heat than CO2 is. Thank god, or we'd freeze to death. But water vapor doesn't drive temperature change. It only reacts.
For instance, if you put several billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the stuff stays up there. You put the same amount of H2O up into the atmosphere, it falls back into the oceans within days, long before it has a chance to change the heat balance of the planet.
The amount of H2O is pretty much a function of atmospheric temperature. When CO2 rises, temperature rises, so the atmosphere can hold more water. IOW, water vapor is a feedback agent, not a forcing agent. [more]
The "increase in plant growth" you attribute to CO2 is only true if all else is held constant. If the Earth gets hotter, and some areas get drier, then the increased CO2 will lead to less plant growth. But maybe that could be counterbalanced by increased plant growth in currently permafrosted areas. But won't the thawing of those areas release vast quantities of methane, another very important greenhouse gas? Anyhow, plants aren't likely to act as a CO2 sink for long.
Even if (as you believe, and I doubt) there is substantial disagreement about whether anything bad will happen, then we have a choice.
1) We do nothing. If you're right, climate change falls flat and we end up with a somewhat improved economy. If I'm right, all sorts of nasty things happen. Floods, droughts, mass extinctions, increased hurricane activity, and so on.
2) We devote a sizeable fraction of our economy to fighting climate change. If you're right, we just wasted a whole bunch of money, and will have to stagger along with a weaker economy than we would have had. If I'm right, climate change means avoiding devastation to vast swaths of the economy. I would also argue that a shift away from fossil fuels is going to carry all sorts of unrelated benefits, like increased energy security, reduced pollution, technological advancement, etc.
As the argument goes, we have no control over whether climate change is real. All we can control is our response. Knowing that climate change is possible, it strikes me as insane to wait until it's absolutely certain before deciding whether to respond. In terms of risk management, there is no reasonable alternative.
Most E. coli is fine. It lives happily in our gut, and provides us with goods and services. But there is a particularly acid-resistant strain called Escherichia coli O157:H7 that is found in the guts of grain-fed cattle. Feeding the cows grain (grasses are their natural food, not grain) raises the acidity in their stomachs, making the deadly strain much more prevalent.
The ideal solution would be to feed cows grass, which would basically eliminate 73,000 cases of food poisoning every year, while being more humane to the cows themselves. But the meat industry says this is too expensive. Another alternative would be to feed them grass just for the last couple of days before slaughter. Again, the meat industry argues it's too expensive.
Now their filth is ending up downstream, in other agricultural products like peanut butter and spinach.
But that's just my tangential why-can't-everyone-just-be-vegetarian rant. The point was that the plant probably won't be using the deadly strain of E. coli.
If the corn you're turning into ethanol requires pesticides and fertilizers, the picture becomes much messier, because both are derived from petroleum products.
If your mom feels that you're being a bit patronizing for buying her a laptop that is supposed to be "for kids", there is a whole spate of similar low-spec'ed, low-powered, low-cost systems coming out these days. They have bizarre names, like the Zombu, the Koolu, and the Eee. I'm really tempted to get an Eee or an OLPC, since either would be lighter, less power hungry, and less fragile than my current laptop. Plus, you're sitting around the coffee shop with one of these babies, tappity-tapping away at the tiny keyboard, and the girls can't help but think, "Gee, he must not be compensating for anything." Which makes me sad for the guy with the huge, LED-bedecked Alienware rig. His loss, my gain.