Okay, sit back and think about this. If it takes you five minutes per CD ripped, you can rip twelve in an hour. Guessing that each CD case takes up 9 cubic inches, you're saving yourself a whopping 108 cubic inches for every hour you put into this project. You can't pack three t-shirts into 108 cubic inches. If your primary goal is to save space, this is a very inefficient way to do it.
You can get most of the same benefit much more quickly by getting rid of the ones you're not attached to, throwing the rest on an old CDR spindle, and ripping on an as-needed basis. Not nearly as sexy as having your entire CD collection filed away, but my rule of thumb is that 80% of the average digital music library is stuff the owner wouldn't want to listen to anyways. 95% for me, but I'm the shameless packrat who kept all those SXSW tracks around "just to be safe".
In summary, your media collection (books/movies/CDs) is just one of many things you should be looking at in your quest to unclutter your lives. I have to wonder what makes this table worth all the trouble. Unless it flies around the room granting wishes, remind yourself, "There's just the two of us, we don't need a huge table", then whittle it down with a bow saw.
It's more like saying, "If traffic lights are installed, some motorists will behave dangerously while attempting to get through them." If an IT department is making even a minimal honest effort, then it's likely that their efforts are making the computer infrastructure more secure and reliable than they would otherwise be, even if the users are more lax as a result.
Now, you could be in a situation where management "tasks" (stupid verb) the IT department with "making everything secure", and then shoots down every suggestion as inconvenient. At that point, people behave insecurely because the existence of the IT department provides a false sense of security.
At that point, management really should be asking itself whether or not their ineffectual IT department is making things less secure.
I don't think the article is trying to show that a company with an IT department has worse security than a company without one (though the/. article seems to interpret it that way). I think that, in the same sense, you're right about hospitals, police, etc. Think how much more careful you would be about locking up your house if there was nobody to report robberies to, or how much less likely you'd be to take up bungee jumping knowing there isn't a hospital to fix you up.
I think the tradition was always a little suspect, but it made more sense back when only a small handful of people had the necessary skills to pull off significant computer crimes. Now that the tools needed to do major damage are available to any juvenile delinquent (rather than just the exceptionally clever juvenile delinquents), getting arrested for computer crime isn't enough to attract the attention of the average security firm.
I'm pretty sure that many law enforcement agencies do hire people from the other side, when they think said people might have expertise that will help them with their efforts.
Well, say you started asking about the differences between cars, and the dealer said, "Well, the F150-Xtreme is basically the same as the F150-Standard, except that we take this little rubber band off the fuel intake so that you get maximum horsepower. The F150-Standard is a better deal than the F150-Minimus because the Minimus has a nine hundred pound lead weight in the bed to keep you from accelerating quickly. Now, you'll probably want to splurge and get the air conditioning. It's installed on every car on the lot, but if you don't give us $500, we poke a hole in the casing to let the freon out."
Once again, physical items and data have completely different economics.
I thought the "nude pictures of barely clothed females" was just him being funny. I'm very forgiving when it comes to naked women.
In the end, I don't think it's right to say that security education can be done away with. But I do believe that it's crazy to believe that good education can make up for bad initial design, and I think it's good to replace education with design wherever possible. After all, given the choice between drumming, "Don't run executables you get in your e-mail" into thick skulls, and simply yanking executables before they hit the inbox, the latter is both more reliable and easier on the end user.
If you read it as "write perfect code," then yes, the guy is crazy. But I think the article passed through a dumbification filter before it got to your brain. what I think he's really saying is, "Think about the security implications of new features before you add new features."
"What we need is a way to detect that the screensaver is a trojan and warn me that this is a bad thing."
This one makes the Halting Problem look like a walk in the park.
Whitelisting should work fine, in situations where the user isn't able to add to the whitelist at the click of a button. But even if the user can decide for himself whether to run a program, it would be nice if it were simple for the user to decide what privileges the program should have.
I don't see anything wrong with the idea, because there is no reason not to add an antivirus scanner into the mix. But the AV scanner alone is only as good as its latest definitions. Even if they're good enough to catch 99% of the bad stuff, you're still left with the glaring fact that the scanner can only protect against threats it knows about. A whitelist will protect against threats both known and unknown.
Half the time when I hear people griping about the eroding of "personal responsibilities", it's cleverly disguised code for "I'm sick of being forced to take responsibility for the effects of my actions on others, so maybe if I tarnish the mechanisms that call me to account, people will shut up and let me get back to making more money for myself."
The "personal responsibility" mantra often seems to come from the same folks who say, "the government can't solve problems; the government is the problem". The fact is, we need a government. Not a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, or a government big enough to assert stifling control over every aspect of our lives. Rather, we need to create a government that is as good, as efficient, as fair, and as responsive as we can possibly make it. Then we need to charge it with righting the inequities that people would inflict upon each other, whether out of incompetence, greed, or malice.
I generally agree that there isn't enough personal responsibility going around these days, and you cite lots of good examples. But the examples are still rife with oversimplification. For example, yes there are lots of frivolous lawsuits going around. I could name a dozen over the last few years. But for the "anti-government" crowd, the solution is to make those who bring the suits "take personal responsibility" by making it harder or riskier to bring suit.
If the goal is simply to cut down on frivolous lawsuits, why not go a step further and shut down the courts altogether? It's just one step further along the same road. So often in this debate, reformers seem to forget the reason we have lawsuits in the first place: so that those who suffer injury can have their legitimate grievances redressed. The people who are pushing hardest for these "reforms" are corporations who don't want to be held liable in any way for defective products, dangerous working conditions, and illegal activities. In short, the cries of "personal responsibility" are being offered up by those who want to avoid as much responsibility as they can.
The same ideologues may decry corporate scandals, but will offer toothless "reforms" that corporations are expected to institute voluntarily, because the "free market" will demand them. They'll never bring up solutions that will improve the SEC's ability to fulfill its mandate, because they don't want that mandate fulfilled.
When problems are systemic, personal action can only get you so far. If the government in this country is evenly divided between two entrenched parties, you'll never see them pass legislation that would make third party candidates more viable. So personal action (in this case, voting) is not going to bring about the changes that many people desire to see.
The same goes for offshoring: No matter how hard American IT workers work to improve his knowledge and productivity, it's almost guaranteed that only a handful will be able to make themselves efficient enough to compete against the five qualified Indian programmers that could be had for the same salary. As India practices the craft over the next few years, the difference will continue to shrink. I don't see Indian programmers as "the enemy", and I won't try to delude myself with the fantasy that we Americans have some special "innovation gene" that will keep us ahead of them. If we still want to have a vibrant IT field by 2015, corporations have to be made to see the value of having Americans who are well-versed in computer science and IT. So far, all the free market seems to be able to teach them is that offshoring translates into big fat profit margins.
When a "personal" solution meets a systemic problem, the problem endures. The genius of an effective government is its ability to correct the system, rather than relying on ineffective boycotts of misbehavers. Yes, we have to be responsible for ourselves. But there are some responsibilities for which the government is ideally suited. In those cases, personal responsibility requires that we take responsibility for our government.
Nyuh-uh. Lynx still does "rendering", which means it's actually interpreting the information being sent to it. That means there is still a risk of it being sent a piece of data that exploits a vulnerability.
I was going to argue that the only safe thing to do would be to use wget and interpret the web pages in your head. But the last guy who took that advice got 'sploited anyways. He's in the hospital with his brain stuck in an infinite loop.
Your allegations of cronyism and nepotism are absolutely, utterly appalling! George W. Bush is a fair man, and would gladly have given disaster relief to any state where he'd won the last election by 500 votes!
To those of you who are running around with your heads cut off, babbling about moving to the BSD license, locking yourself into GPL2, or even giving up on Open Source altogether, please: Sit down, breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes, maybe pop a Valium. All we know for sure is one MSNBC reporter's interpretation of a few ideas that may or may not be running around in Richard Stallman's head. When we see this provision in an actual draft proposal, then go ahead and climb back out onto the ledge.
I think it's very unlikely that this will actually happen. First, it would bring the GPL's enforcability into question, since this would be the first restriction on users of the software. Up until now, the only restrictions were on people who modified and redistributed GPL'ed software.
Second, you just know a good chunk of the community would revolt.
Finally, there are much less extreme forms that would achieve similar aims. One person suggested only removing the right to use the software if the company actually tried to enforce a patent against an open source project.
Where in the DoJ antitrust trial did the government ask for money? Their goal was the breakup of Microsoft into various companies, because that would have forced some actual competition in the marketplace.
Microsoft doesn't have to compete on quality. All they need to do is sit on their butts and be happy that most organizations are locked into using their software because so much third-party software runs only on Windows. The antitrust trial was necessary, and American consumers were hurt when the DoJ settled for a slap on the wrist.
People like you, who worship at the altar of "the free market" and who think a critical attempt at curbing anticompetitive behavior was nothing more than "a country trying to rape you for cash", are doing untold harm to this country. If Bill Gates does close down Redmond and move his entire fiefdom overseas, it will be nothing but the logical extension of the loyalty he has already shown this country.
If you think Microsoft gives back even 1% of what it takes from local school budgets every year, then you and the moderators are clearly taking hits from the same crack pipe.
Repeat after me: Microsoft is a net drain on education funds.
Well, you know the old saying: You lie down with the dogs, you wake up with a mailbox full of litigation.
I like MySQL, both as a product and as a company. They've generally done the right things, thus far. I just hope they're being careful, and I hope they understand just how silly this looks to us all.:)
Yes, I do live in the city. Salt Lake, to be precise. While I prefer it to the rural/suburban life, it's noisier and more polluted than I'd like, and I'm a bit skittish about most of my neighbors. You're acting as though I can't see any downside to living all bunched up like this. I can.
But for my purposes, I still live in "the country", to the extent that it is impractical not to use a car for day-to-day activities. I have a pretty straightforward and flexible schedule, but I can't rely on mass transit because the only bus that goes near my house shuts down around 6PM.
It's the "presumption of car"-ness of American society that I'm really railing against. I can point out huge neighborhoods in my city where hundreds of cars pass every minute, but you'll only see a pedestrian three or four times an hour. We've built our society in such a way that everyone has their little plot of grass, but our entire country is held hostage to oil prices.
Yes, the people in the country should be moving in towards the city. I'm sorry for the loss of "small-town atmosphere", but as long as we're this spread out, unable to walk, pedal, or bus our way to the things we need, as long as we're willing to pillage every square mile of wilderness and invade other countries to keep the oil flowing, then those plots of grass come at too high a price.
Seriously, I'd love to have my own plot of grass (so long as I don't have to mow it). But I'd also love to have my very own mansion in the middle of the wilderness, and commute to the city via helicopter. We can't afford everything we want, and we're destroying ourselves and our economy by trying.
Oh, you prefer the country? Too bad. Americans can't afford the suburban/rural lifestyle anymore. Get over your claustrophobia or misanthropy or whatever before our entire country goes bankrupt.
I'm curious. Why have you chosen to live 30-40 miles away from so many "basic things?" Even if oil were free, it seems like the time and inconvenience alone would discourage you from living that far from an economic center.
I'm much in favor of depopulating the rural areas and moving everyone closer to the cities. I can think of only a few valid reasons for living in rural areas, the most important being that you actually work in a land-intensive industry like farming or mining, or work to support the trucking industry (which needs facilities at regular intervals along transportation routes). I think that people who live way out in the boondocks because they "like the view", "enjoy the atmosphere", or "think the cities are too dangerous" are screwing everyone else over. It's the exact sort of thinking that led to suburban flight in the 50s and 60s, and left us with crumbling urban infrastructure and black ghettos: run from the problems rather than pitching in to help fix them.
I know, I know. I don't know you, or what you do, or why you made the decisions you've made in life. I'm sure you could explain this decision in a way that would have me nodding my head in sympathy. Sorry if the last paragraph came across as a personal attack.
I don't think America's superior GDP is a sign of a superior lifestyle. There are many other factors that enter into the happiness equation than simple material possessions. Imagine that you have two countries, both with the same GDP. One of the countries has a very far-flung population, tied together with expensive vehicles and an elaborate network of roads, with big houses scattered over the landscape. The other country has the same amount of land as the first, but its population is much more concentrated around urban centers. There is more and better mass transit, fewer cars, parking lots, roads, gas stations, and auto repair shops. With so little of their GDP tied up in such things, they choose to spend the extra money on health care and education. They protect their wilderness in a way that the first country cannot, and that provides opportunities for inexpensive recreation that the first country doesn't have.
That, in a nutshell, is the difference I see between Europe and the U.S. We're working ourselves to early deaths trying to support an unsustainable and unfulfilling lifestyle, while those Eurotrash bastards are piddling around their walkable communities, working 35/40 hours a week, taking a month of vacation every year, and babbling in languages I can't understand. I'm downright jealous of their lower GDP.
While I'm against the idea overall, this isn't actually a problem. The author mentioned using piping, so long as they seal their pipes well, they can take the refrigerant with them when they're done.
It sounds like this is a terribly inefficient process. One poster offered the 80/1 statistic for traditional oil pumping (1 barrel of oil in -> 80 barrels out). By comparison, this process requires that you burn about a third of your production. I could be thinking about this wrong, but it seems that (from a global warming perspective) it's as though we would take every car in America and reduce its fuel efficiency by a third.
From the article, it's not clear whether the "wall of ice" is taken into account when doing the energy calculations. If it's not, then it may be even less efficient, closer to a 2:1 yield perhaps.
From an environmental standpoint, it doesn't sounds downright scary. Drilling a shaft every ten feet around the perimeter of the site, freezing it, then heating the bedrock to 700 degrees? That's going to take a lot of equipment and manpower, and produce a lot of waste. Nor am I as confident in this "wall of ice" as the author. So they may have to scrub the groundwater once they're done, if there is any chance of contaminating drinking water. Finally, I do believe that most bedrock contains extremophiles, and while I don't want to be an alarmist or a eukaryote-rights activist, we can't be sure of the environmental impact of burning them away.
Can't we just agree to not do this? Our country has an energy addiction, and this article just goes to show how far we are willing to go to avoid facing the problem (Exhibit B being the way our lustful eyes keep falling on the ANWR). If we start the transition away from fossil fuels now, we could quickly become the leaders in alternative fuels and energy efficient technology. If, on the other hand, we use this process as a crutch to keep us strung out on oil for a few more decades, then it ends with us having the same energy-inefficient infrastructure we have now, a much more serious global warming problem, and no expertise in alternatives. We'll have to buy all our fuel efficient vehicles from the French.
C'mon, Republicans. You hate the French. Hop on board with this.
Rather than eliminating this option entirely, I think it would make more sense to put a tax on it, so that the break-even point is around to $7/gallon, not $3.50. The revenue generated would go to subsidize alternative fuels research and to mitigate the environmental damage from this process.
Also, if we're going to do this come hell or high water, it seems sensible to pursue the idea of using geothermal to provide the heat for this process, rather than heaters powered from the surface. Hydrocarbons are good heat carriers; that's one reason we use oil to cool and lubricate our engines. The oil is down there, the energy is down there. It seems like all you would need to do is heat it long enough to distill out a small amount of oil, then use that oil to circulate heat up from the hot bedrock below. Of course, that means deeper holes. Like I said, maybe this idea should just be scratched altogether.
You're right. It's their own choice to keep gas that expensive. But it's a choice that is serving them well right now, as it has pushed their economies towards more consolidated land use, more mass transit, and smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. It's as though they've been preparing for this for decades.
Damn. I need to make a tin foil hat now, but all they sell is aluminum these days. Something veeeeeerrrrrrrry suspicious about that....
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, use Synaptic.
Even better, try not being a plagarizing troll. Go outside and get some fresh air, perhaps also try dating. You'll be happier.
Okay, sit back and think about this. If it takes you five minutes per CD ripped, you can rip twelve in an hour. Guessing that each CD case takes up 9 cubic inches, you're saving yourself a whopping 108 cubic inches for every hour you put into this project. You can't pack three t-shirts into 108 cubic inches. If your primary goal is to save space, this is a very inefficient way to do it.
You can get most of the same benefit much more quickly by getting rid of the ones you're not attached to, throwing the rest on an old CDR spindle, and ripping on an as-needed basis. Not nearly as sexy as having your entire CD collection filed away, but my rule of thumb is that 80% of the average digital music library is stuff the owner wouldn't want to listen to anyways. 95% for me, but I'm the shameless packrat who kept all those SXSW tracks around "just to be safe".
In summary, your media collection (books/movies/CDs) is just one of many things you should be looking at in your quest to unclutter your lives. I have to wonder what makes this table worth all the trouble. Unless it flies around the room granting wishes, remind yourself, "There's just the two of us, we don't need a huge table", then whittle it down with a bow saw.
No it isn't.
It's more like saying, "If traffic lights are installed, some motorists will behave dangerously while attempting to get through them." If an IT department is making even a minimal honest effort, then it's likely that their efforts are making the computer infrastructure more secure and reliable than they would otherwise be, even if the users are more lax as a result.
Now, you could be in a situation where management "tasks" (stupid verb) the IT department with "making everything secure", and then shoots down every suggestion as inconvenient. At that point, people behave insecurely because the existence of the IT department provides a false sense of security.
At that point, management really should be asking itself whether or not their ineffectual IT department is making things less secure.
I don't think the article is trying to show that a company with an IT department has worse security than a company without one (though the /. article seems to interpret it that way). I think that, in the same sense, you're right about hospitals, police, etc. Think how much more careful you would be about locking up your house if there was nobody to report robberies to, or how much less likely you'd be to take up bungee jumping knowing there isn't a hospital to fix you up.
I think the tradition was always a little suspect, but it made more sense back when only a small handful of people had the necessary skills to pull off significant computer crimes. Now that the tools needed to do major damage are available to any juvenile delinquent (rather than just the exceptionally clever juvenile delinquents), getting arrested for computer crime isn't enough to attract the attention of the average security firm.
I'm pretty sure that many law enforcement agencies do hire people from the other side, when they think said people might have expertise that will help them with their efforts.
Well, say you started asking about the differences between cars, and the dealer said, "Well, the F150-Xtreme is basically the same as the F150-Standard, except that we take this little rubber band off the fuel intake so that you get maximum horsepower. The F150-Standard is a better deal than the F150-Minimus because the Minimus has a nine hundred pound lead weight in the bed to keep you from accelerating quickly. Now, you'll probably want to splurge and get the air conditioning. It's installed on every car on the lot, but if you don't give us $500, we poke a hole in the casing to let the freon out."
Once again, physical items and data have completely different economics.
Google is your candy bar-offering friend.
I thought the "nude pictures of barely clothed females" was just him being funny. I'm very forgiving when it comes to naked women.
In the end, I don't think it's right to say that security education can be done away with. But I do believe that it's crazy to believe that good education can make up for bad initial design, and I think it's good to replace education with design wherever possible. After all, given the choice between drumming, "Don't run executables you get in your e-mail" into thick skulls, and simply yanking executables before they hit the inbox, the latter is both more reliable and easier on the end user.
You saved me a good thirty minutes there. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Whitelisting should work fine, in situations where the user isn't able to add to the whitelist at the click of a button. But even if the user can decide for himself whether to run a program, it would be nice if it were simple for the user to decide what privileges the program should have.
I don't see anything wrong with the idea, because there is no reason not to add an antivirus scanner into the mix. But the AV scanner alone is only as good as its latest definitions. Even if they're good enough to catch 99% of the bad stuff, you're still left with the glaring fact that the scanner can only protect against threats it knows about. A whitelist will protect against threats both known and unknown.
Half the time when I hear people griping about the eroding of "personal responsibilities", it's cleverly disguised code for "I'm sick of being forced to take responsibility for the effects of my actions on others, so maybe if I tarnish the mechanisms that call me to account, people will shut up and let me get back to making more money for myself."
The "personal responsibility" mantra often seems to come from the same folks who say, "the government can't solve problems; the government is the problem". The fact is, we need a government. Not a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, or a government big enough to assert stifling control over every aspect of our lives. Rather, we need to create a government that is as good, as efficient, as fair, and as responsive as we can possibly make it. Then we need to charge it with righting the inequities that people would inflict upon each other, whether out of incompetence, greed, or malice.
I generally agree that there isn't enough personal responsibility going around these days, and you cite lots of good examples. But the examples are still rife with oversimplification. For example, yes there are lots of frivolous lawsuits going around. I could name a dozen over the last few years. But for the "anti-government" crowd, the solution is to make those who bring the suits "take personal responsibility" by making it harder or riskier to bring suit.
If the goal is simply to cut down on frivolous lawsuits, why not go a step further and shut down the courts altogether? It's just one step further along the same road. So often in this debate, reformers seem to forget the reason we have lawsuits in the first place: so that those who suffer injury can have their legitimate grievances redressed. The people who are pushing hardest for these "reforms" are corporations who don't want to be held liable in any way for defective products, dangerous working conditions, and illegal activities. In short, the cries of "personal responsibility" are being offered up by those who want to avoid as much responsibility as they can.
The same ideologues may decry corporate scandals, but will offer toothless "reforms" that corporations are expected to institute voluntarily, because the "free market" will demand them. They'll never bring up solutions that will improve the SEC's ability to fulfill its mandate, because they don't want that mandate fulfilled.
When problems are systemic, personal action can only get you so far. If the government in this country is evenly divided between two entrenched parties, you'll never see them pass legislation that would make third party candidates more viable. So personal action (in this case, voting) is not going to bring about the changes that many people desire to see.
The same goes for offshoring: No matter how hard American IT workers work to improve his knowledge and productivity, it's almost guaranteed that only a handful will be able to make themselves efficient enough to compete against the five qualified Indian programmers that could be had for the same salary. As India practices the craft over the next few years, the difference will continue to shrink. I don't see Indian programmers as "the enemy", and I won't try to delude myself with the fantasy that we Americans have some special "innovation gene" that will keep us ahead of them. If we still want to have a vibrant IT field by 2015, corporations have to be made to see the value of having Americans who are well-versed in computer science and IT. So far, all the free market seems to be able to teach them is that offshoring translates into big fat profit margins.
When a "personal" solution meets a systemic problem, the problem endures. The genius of an effective government is its ability to correct the system, rather than relying on ineffective boycotts of misbehavers. Yes, we have to be responsible for ourselves. But there are some responsibilities for which the government is ideally suited. In those cases, personal responsibility requires that we take responsibility for our government.
Nyuh-uh. Lynx still does "rendering", which means it's actually interpreting the information being sent to it. That means there is still a risk of it being sent a piece of data that exploits a vulnerability.
I was going to argue that the only safe thing to do would be to use wget and interpret the web pages in your head. But the last guy who took that advice got 'sploited anyways. He's in the hospital with his brain stuck in an infinite loop.
Until I see it in The Register, it hasn't happened.
Your allegations of cronyism and nepotism are absolutely, utterly appalling! George W. Bush is a fair man, and would gladly have given disaster relief to any state where he'd won the last election by 500 votes!
To those of you who are running around with your heads cut off, babbling about moving to the BSD license, locking yourself into GPL2, or even giving up on Open Source altogether, please: Sit down, breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes, maybe pop a Valium. All we know for sure is one MSNBC reporter's interpretation of a few ideas that may or may not be running around in Richard Stallman's head. When we see this provision in an actual draft proposal, then go ahead and climb back out onto the ledge.
I think it's very unlikely that this will actually happen. First, it would bring the GPL's enforcability into question, since this would be the first restriction on users of the software. Up until now, the only restrictions were on people who modified and redistributed GPL'ed software.
Second, you just know a good chunk of the community would revolt.
Finally, there are much less extreme forms that would achieve similar aims. One person suggested only removing the right to use the software if the company actually tried to enforce a patent against an open source project.
In summary: Don't Panic.
Where in the DoJ antitrust trial did the government ask for money? Their goal was the breakup of Microsoft into various companies, because that would have forced some actual competition in the marketplace.
Microsoft doesn't have to compete on quality. All they need to do is sit on their butts and be happy that most organizations are locked into using their software because so much third-party software runs only on Windows. The antitrust trial was necessary, and American consumers were hurt when the DoJ settled for a slap on the wrist.
People like you, who worship at the altar of "the free market" and who think a critical attempt at curbing anticompetitive behavior was nothing more than "a country trying to rape you for cash", are doing untold harm to this country. If Bill Gates does close down Redmond and move his entire fiefdom overseas, it will be nothing but the logical extension of the loyalty he has already shown this country.
If you think Microsoft gives back even 1% of what it takes from local school budgets every year, then you and the moderators are clearly taking hits from the same crack pipe.
Repeat after me: Microsoft is a net drain on education funds.
Microsoft offshoring 1.75% of its workforce every year is a big deal.
Do you have any idea how quickly this adds up? Think where they'll be in ten years, or twenty.
grumble grumble... won't even read the bloody article... grumble grumble
Well, you know the old saying: You lie down with the dogs, you wake up with a mailbox full of litigation.
:)
I like MySQL, both as a product and as a company. They've generally done the right things, thus far. I just hope they're being careful, and I hope they understand just how silly this looks to us all.
Yes, I do live in the city. Salt Lake, to be precise. While I prefer it to the rural/suburban life, it's noisier and more polluted than I'd like, and I'm a bit skittish about most of my neighbors. You're acting as though I can't see any downside to living all bunched up like this. I can.
But for my purposes, I still live in "the country", to the extent that it is impractical not to use a car for day-to-day activities. I have a pretty straightforward and flexible schedule, but I can't rely on mass transit because the only bus that goes near my house shuts down around 6PM.
It's the "presumption of car"-ness of American society that I'm really railing against. I can point out huge neighborhoods in my city where hundreds of cars pass every minute, but you'll only see a pedestrian three or four times an hour. We've built our society in such a way that everyone has their little plot of grass, but our entire country is held hostage to oil prices.
Yes, the people in the country should be moving in towards the city. I'm sorry for the loss of "small-town atmosphere", but as long as we're this spread out, unable to walk, pedal, or bus our way to the things we need, as long as we're willing to pillage every square mile of wilderness and invade other countries to keep the oil flowing, then those plots of grass come at too high a price.
Seriously, I'd love to have my own plot of grass (so long as I don't have to mow it). But I'd also love to have my very own mansion in the middle of the wilderness, and commute to the city via helicopter. We can't afford everything we want, and we're destroying ourselves and our economy by trying.
Oh, you prefer the country? Too bad. Americans can't afford the suburban/rural lifestyle anymore. Get over your claustrophobia or misanthropy or whatever before our entire country goes bankrupt.
I'm curious. Why have you chosen to live 30-40 miles away from so many "basic things?" Even if oil were free, it seems like the time and inconvenience alone would discourage you from living that far from an economic center.
I'm much in favor of depopulating the rural areas and moving everyone closer to the cities. I can think of only a few valid reasons for living in rural areas, the most important being that you actually work in a land-intensive industry like farming or mining, or work to support the trucking industry (which needs facilities at regular intervals along transportation routes). I think that people who live way out in the boondocks because they "like the view", "enjoy the atmosphere", or "think the cities are too dangerous" are screwing everyone else over. It's the exact sort of thinking that led to suburban flight in the 50s and 60s, and left us with crumbling urban infrastructure and black ghettos: run from the problems rather than pitching in to help fix them.
I know, I know. I don't know you, or what you do, or why you made the decisions you've made in life. I'm sure you could explain this decision in a way that would have me nodding my head in sympathy. Sorry if the last paragraph came across as a personal attack.
I don't think America's superior GDP is a sign of a superior lifestyle. There are many other factors that enter into the happiness equation than simple material possessions. Imagine that you have two countries, both with the same GDP. One of the countries has a very far-flung population, tied together with expensive vehicles and an elaborate network of roads, with big houses scattered over the landscape. The other country has the same amount of land as the first, but its population is much more concentrated around urban centers. There is more and better mass transit, fewer cars, parking lots, roads, gas stations, and auto repair shops. With so little of their GDP tied up in such things, they choose to spend the extra money on health care and education. They protect their wilderness in a way that the first country cannot, and that provides opportunities for inexpensive recreation that the first country doesn't have.
That, in a nutshell, is the difference I see between Europe and the U.S. We're working ourselves to early deaths trying to support an unsustainable and unfulfilling lifestyle, while those Eurotrash bastards are piddling around their walkable communities, working 35/40 hours a week, taking a month of vacation every year, and babbling in languages I can't understand. I'm downright jealous of their lower GDP.
While I'm against the idea overall, this isn't actually a problem. The author mentioned using piping, so long as they seal their pipes well, they can take the refrigerant with them when they're done.
Hey, we were the ones who decided to flee the cities for the vast landscape of suburban tract houses. We have nobody to blame but ourselves for that.
When it comes to transportation costs, local population density is much more important than absolute population density.
It sounds like this is a terribly inefficient process. One poster offered the 80/1 statistic for traditional oil pumping (1 barrel of oil in -> 80 barrels out). By comparison, this process requires that you burn about a third of your production. I could be thinking about this wrong, but it seems that (from a global warming perspective) it's as though we would take every car in America and reduce its fuel efficiency by a third.
From the article, it's not clear whether the "wall of ice" is taken into account when doing the energy calculations. If it's not, then it may be even less efficient, closer to a 2:1 yield perhaps.
From an environmental standpoint, it doesn't sounds downright scary. Drilling a shaft every ten feet around the perimeter of the site, freezing it, then heating the bedrock to 700 degrees? That's going to take a lot of equipment and manpower, and produce a lot of waste. Nor am I as confident in this "wall of ice" as the author. So they may have to scrub the groundwater once they're done, if there is any chance of contaminating drinking water. Finally, I do believe that most bedrock contains extremophiles, and while I don't want to be an alarmist or a eukaryote-rights activist, we can't be sure of the environmental impact of burning them away.
Can't we just agree to not do this? Our country has an energy addiction, and this article just goes to show how far we are willing to go to avoid facing the problem (Exhibit B being the way our lustful eyes keep falling on the ANWR). If we start the transition away from fossil fuels now, we could quickly become the leaders in alternative fuels and energy efficient technology. If, on the other hand, we use this process as a crutch to keep us strung out on oil for a few more decades, then it ends with us having the same energy-inefficient infrastructure we have now, a much more serious global warming problem, and no expertise in alternatives. We'll have to buy all our fuel efficient vehicles from the French.
C'mon, Republicans. You hate the French. Hop on board with this.
Rather than eliminating this option entirely, I think it would make more sense to put a tax on it, so that the break-even point is around to $7/gallon, not $3.50. The revenue generated would go to subsidize alternative fuels research and to mitigate the environmental damage from this process.
Also, if we're going to do this come hell or high water, it seems sensible to pursue the idea of using geothermal to provide the heat for this process, rather than heaters powered from the surface. Hydrocarbons are good heat carriers; that's one reason we use oil to cool and lubricate our engines. The oil is down there, the energy is down there. It seems like all you would need to do is heat it long enough to distill out a small amount of oil, then use that oil to circulate heat up from the hot bedrock below. Of course, that means deeper holes. Like I said, maybe this idea should just be scratched altogether.
You're right. It's their own choice to keep gas that expensive. But it's a choice that is serving them well right now, as it has pushed their economies towards more consolidated land use, more mass transit, and smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. It's as though they've been preparing for this for decades.
Damn. I need to make a tin foil hat now, but all they sell is aluminum these days. Something veeeeeerrrrrrrry suspicious about that....