Remembering a 60s-ish science fiction story about pollution, and they called pollution from China "the Dragon's Breath," and, when that reached the West Coast, it meant that the world was basically done.
Hadn't heard the Dragon's Breath was here, though.
The thing that's bothering me with this is that the whole point of Phoenix was to give a good basic solid browser, and then allow for extensions to add whatever additional capability users want. But I keep finding features shoved on me that I have to go into about:config to turn off, which just strikes me as rude. I have a configuration that I like, so how about asking me if I want to try out your new toy and giving me the option to try it out if I want. Thus far, your guessing record hasn't been all that good.
People who haven't heard of a VPN or remote desktop/terminal services/Citrix? There's a phrase for that set of people: Almost everyone in the world.
I agree that there are off-the-shelf solutions that work better than this, but OP wasn't talking about/. readers, he was talking about normal people whose eyes glaze when you start using technical terms like "browser" and "client" and don't understand what all this fuss is about when they don't feel like they have anything to hide.
Almost everybody in the US has some access to the internet, but almost none have any appreciable understanding of how it works and what dangers they can face by trusting anything that comes by or all the people who can come into contact with their information. I don't know how you change that, but I'm pretty sure it's not from an appeal to geek-speak.
Oh, I get that. But laws of any science are never more than useful abstractions -- things don't follow the laws, the laws attempt to predict their behavior.
But fossil fuels remain consumable scarce goods. Very important scarce goods in the current energy economy, but not special enough that they are outside the bounds of supply and demand.
You have a scarce good that responds to economic forces, just like gold, food, computers, internet access, etc. And one of the first things you learn when you start studying economics (101 level) is that what people want isn't important, it's what they demand. I encourage people to study basic economics so they can understand basic market forces like demand and supply.
Fossil fuels are going to have to get a whole lot more expensive and a whole lot harder to get to before any other energy source is going to become a close second to them globally.
Just making it clear is all. I agree with the security problems inherent in Windows that make these things necessary -- I always found ClamAV for linux a little weird, frankly.
I'm not running Windows because I like it (although Vista hasn't really annoyed me as much as it seems to have annoyed everybody else -- I also found ME no more annoying than others, so I'm a definite outlier). I'm running it to run software that doesn't run right under wine, and because I haven't yet got Kubuntu running on the laptop.
To be fair, none of the security products I use is an MS product. The security features added to Vista (yeah, I know, they weren't all about security) I just found annoying as well, so I looked for other solutions.
When I bought the Windows laptop I'm using to post this a year ago, I decided it was time to be "responsible," and just add a basic set of security programs to protect me from baddies out there that were going to get my computer, the way everybody said I should. They said that it was irresponsible to run a computer without it.
So I did. After about 11 months, my firewall was fighting with FF badly enough that I had to replace it, and my new firewall fought with the cheap little Risk game I was trying to install, but, other than that, it's been at the annoyance level. After twenty years of using computers and telecommunicating to BBSs and the internet (where I've been for more than fifteen years), I still have yet to have a piece of actual malware run on any of my computers. I have had anti-malware programs produce false-positives, or freak out about email-viruses in my email archives that my email settings would never allow to run, but that's it. So, now that I'm running my security setup, it just sits there, scanning stuff, sucking up cycles, and being annoying, but that's all it does. My regular habits are exceptionally safe.
I'm reminded of a Smothers Brothers special back in the 90s where Dick accused Tom of being irresponsible, and Tom said "I'm not irresponsible, I'm wearing a condom right now!" My computer is standing around, wearing its condom, and then not engaging in at-risk behavior (beyond the obvious of running Windows).
So to those who want to tell me I was irresponsible for not running anti-virus software, my response is to point out that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that I ran sufficiently safe on my own without this software.
Too late. He was killed in 1945 by sympathizers of the Chinese Communist Party. He was a missionary who helped Jimmy Doolittle get to safety after bombing Tokyo.
I think you were talking about the society that was named for him thirteen years later. Google is your friend.
I think it's time to free your head from the idea that censorship is necessarily and always bad. If somebody wants to publish information about me that I'd rather not have shared, I'm tickled pink if someone can censor that expression. My problem with censorship is when it's done by the government in the form of prior restraint based on arbitrary standards which are, for the most part, unconstitutional. With a few other similar exceptions, a bit of well thought out censorship is a very good idea when used appropriately.
In the case of OpenDNS, the kinds of sites I've asked them not to serve to me are sites I don't want to see. I similarly have a reasonably substantial hosts file that points many domains I don't want loaded on my machine to 127.0.0.1. I also don't allow just any old script that comes across my http stream to load and run without my giving permission for that to happen. This is because my machine is mine, and my browsing experience is my responsibility.
If OpenDNS breaks something to the point that I can no longer do what I want them to do, I can stop using them in about 30 seconds, and that takes care of that problem.
Also, OpenDNS provides some convenient filtering of various kinds of websites, but it is far from comprehensive. Even if you decide you never want to see goatse sites, you're not going to be blocked from goatse videos on YouTube, or goatse profiles on FaceBook, or what have you. It only blocks entire domains, not individual sites, so it's ability to block content has not a few holes in it.
If you think it's tricky to get people to give up driving SUVs or eating beef, that's a cake walk prepared to trying to get people to stop breeding. The cultures still breeding above replacement level value will be the ones still around in 100 years to try to deal with these problems, so, if you want to have the idea of reducing the population still on the agenda in 100 years, you'd better breed and hope you're able to impart your ideas to your children (it's a Hell of a lot harder than it looks).
China is just recently breeding at something in the neighborhood of replacement level, but show of hands for people who want to be subjected to the population control regime they used to get there? Anybody? The other candidates for major changes in population levels ride on four horses, and there's not much chance humanity is going to stop trying to avoid them to tidy up our population problems.
Also, humans-as-locusts breaks down quickly because there is no locust equivalent to a George Washington Carver, who was able to develop hundreds of uses for previously unwanted plants and transform the agricultural economy of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Population control programs can't successfully predict which individuals are going to make the breakthroughs necessary to continue offsetting the problems increasing populations have made. Nor do they take into account the massive amount of work and production it takes to transform something large and complex like the global energy and material economy.
There are no simple answers here. We will make guesses, and we will find out where we are right, and where we are wrong. Anybody claiming to have an accurate crystal ball should be viewed with suspicion.
When people learn how much control they give up of their information, and when there are sites that show respect for their information. I've been trying for months to get CareerBuilder.com to stop spamming me, and, when that took too long, to delete my account. Their representative tells me that there is no way in the system to delete my account. The most they can(will) do is delete my subscriptions from the various (and they have many) mail lists. I have repeated that this is unacceptable, and that I want my account deleted, and they refuse to do so. Most likely, this is described in their privacy policy which I agreed to when I created my account. I will be more careful about such things in the future.
I would recommend anybody who wants control over their personal information to stay away from CareerBuilder.com until such time as they change this policy. The ease of access to job listings and employers doesn't counter the lack of control of your information, and the reality that you will be spammed repeatedly, even when you follow the directions available on the site to eliminate yourself from their mail lists, even when you've found a job and don't want to have any relationship with the site as all.
The ironic part is that I found very few employers who used the date I submitted to CareerBuilder.com. Many of the employers I was trying to reach had their own job application process on their own websites.
Actually, those all add up as additional costs of non-digital copies -- the requirement to successfully guess sales of the non-digital copies and where they should be sent. None of those is required for a digital copy, no matter what, whether you sell one or one million.
For tracks that are predicted to have relatively smaller sales, choosing digital-only isn't a bad idea either. That's where Amie Street is quite good, as is CD Baby.
But my point was that everybody was talking about this in terms of revenue only, and revenue is only part of the question -- cost is also an important factor. Digital distribution of music, after a relatively small threshold has much lower cost than non-digital music does, and that's something the music companies need to be thinking about.
Not exactly. Pirating from private torrent trackers may not come with a direct dollar cost, but that's not exactly free. Quality isn't assured, and neither is the content assured, nor is download speed.
Buying from Amazon gives me a guarantee that the content I buy is what I get at a 256k bitrate, and the downloads are reasonably fast -- faster than many of the torrent downloads I'm aware of.
Itunes, unfortunately, requires more of my soul than I want to give up, so I can't vouch for that.
Digital cost increase is also more than matched by a non-digital cost decrease. Specifically, the marginal increase in cost for a digital copy of a track is much, much lower than the marginal increase in cost for a non-digital copy. There is no physical media, no printing of the CD label, no case, no shrink-wrap, no theft prevention device, no shipping cost, no shelf-space. Eventually, enough digital copies can require some additional bandwidth and server space, but that's more than made up for by the increased revenue for all of those digital copies.
So total revenues may not be up 25%, but those marginal digital revenues had a much higher marginal profit than the same revenues would have had in non-digital formats.
And the point was more that legal music downloads are producing more and more income as time goes on, which was predicted by many folks around these parts a long time ago. I'm gleefully loving the Amazon download service -- high bitrates, no DRM, and bargains if you're willing to wait for them (Dark Side of the Moon today for $5). But CD-Baby and Amie Street have some good stuff as well -- Amie Street with a very interesting pricing model worth checking out by those with non-mainstream tastes and musicians interested in opportunities outside the traditional studios.
It's not that simple. Combining CO2 and H2O through photosynthesis gives you carbohydrates (made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) directly, not hydrocarbons (made up of just carbon and hydrogen). Plants and animals can take energy from carbohydrates and produce fatty acids (hydrocarbons), but it's not the automatic result of combining carbon dioxide and water.
Seems to me that this is an opportunity in a different fashion. Squish the algae for the oil you can get from it, then take the left-over material (mostly cellulose) and use the catalytic process for converting that to ethanol, and you can get a second shot at harnessing the solar energy the algae absorbed as vehicle fuel.
This would also be a good recovery pattern for non-oil algae strains infiltrating an oil-based crop.
Slashdot Mirror
<i>This looks like a good spot for some Trace Adkins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9VzEulip9Q</i>
Fixed that for you.
Element 5 was also know as the quintessence. FWIW.
Remembering a 60s-ish science fiction story about pollution, and they called pollution from China "the Dragon's Breath," and, when that reached the West Coast, it meant that the world was basically done.
Hadn't heard the Dragon's Breath was here, though.
The thing that's bothering me with this is that the whole point of Phoenix was to give a good basic solid browser, and then allow for extensions to add whatever additional capability users want. But I keep finding features shoved on me that I have to go into about:config to turn off, which just strikes me as rude. I have a configuration that I like, so how about asking me if I want to try out your new toy and giving me the option to try it out if I want. Thus far, your guessing record hasn't been all that good.
I loved The Last Boy on Earth. That could make a great film too -- intelligent animals, humans gone, environmental disaster. Hmm.
My bad -- I noticed the "W" in the last stanza a portion of a second after "submit." Sorry.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
by e e cummings
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
Mine had the Qwerty keyboard, but, yeah. Who could afford the extravagance of 16k of ram, though?
People who haven't heard of a VPN or remote desktop/terminal services/Citrix? There's a phrase for that set of people: Almost everyone in the world.
I agree that there are off-the-shelf solutions that work better than this, but OP wasn't talking about /. readers, he was talking about normal people whose eyes glaze when you start using technical terms like "browser" and "client" and don't understand what all this fuss is about when they don't feel like they have anything to hide.
Almost everybody in the US has some access to the internet, but almost none have any appreciable understanding of how it works and what dangers they can face by trusting anything that comes by or all the people who can come into contact with their information. I don't know how you change that, but I'm pretty sure it's not from an appeal to geek-speak.
Oh, I get that. But laws of any science are never more than useful abstractions -- things don't follow the laws, the laws attempt to predict their behavior.
But fossil fuels remain consumable scarce goods. Very important scarce goods in the current energy economy, but not special enough that they are outside the bounds of supply and demand.
Birds? You mean air-kittens?
You have a scarce good that responds to economic forces, just like gold, food, computers, internet access, etc. And one of the first things you learn when you start studying economics (101 level) is that what people want isn't important, it's what they demand. I encourage people to study basic economics so they can understand basic market forces like demand and supply.
Fossil fuels are going to have to get a whole lot more expensive and a whole lot harder to get to before any other energy source is going to become a close second to them globally.
All resources are finite.
Just making it clear is all. I agree with the security problems inherent in Windows that make these things necessary -- I always found ClamAV for linux a little weird, frankly.
I'm not running Windows because I like it (although Vista hasn't really annoyed me as much as it seems to have annoyed everybody else -- I also found ME no more annoying than others, so I'm a definite outlier). I'm running it to run software that doesn't run right under wine, and because I haven't yet got Kubuntu running on the laptop.
To be fair, none of the security products I use is an MS product. The security features added to Vista (yeah, I know, they weren't all about security) I just found annoying as well, so I looked for other solutions.
When I bought the Windows laptop I'm using to post this a year ago, I decided it was time to be "responsible," and just add a basic set of security programs to protect me from baddies out there that were going to get my computer, the way everybody said I should. They said that it was irresponsible to run a computer without it.
So I did. After about 11 months, my firewall was fighting with FF badly enough that I had to replace it, and my new firewall fought with the cheap little Risk game I was trying to install, but, other than that, it's been at the annoyance level. After twenty years of using computers and telecommunicating to BBSs and the internet (where I've been for more than fifteen years), I still have yet to have a piece of actual malware run on any of my computers. I have had anti-malware programs produce false-positives, or freak out about email-viruses in my email archives that my email settings would never allow to run, but that's it. So, now that I'm running my security setup, it just sits there, scanning stuff, sucking up cycles, and being annoying, but that's all it does. My regular habits are exceptionally safe.
I'm reminded of a Smothers Brothers special back in the 90s where Dick accused Tom of being irresponsible, and Tom said "I'm not irresponsible, I'm wearing a condom right now!" My computer is standing around, wearing its condom, and then not engaging in at-risk behavior (beyond the obvious of running Windows).
So to those who want to tell me I was irresponsible for not running anti-virus software, my response is to point out that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that I ran sufficiently safe on my own without this software.
Too late. He was killed in 1945 by sympathizers of the Chinese Communist Party. He was a missionary who helped Jimmy Doolittle get to safety after bombing Tokyo.
I think you were talking about the society that was named for him thirteen years later. Google is your friend.
I think it's time to free your head from the idea that censorship is necessarily and always bad. If somebody wants to publish information about me that I'd rather not have shared, I'm tickled pink if someone can censor that expression. My problem with censorship is when it's done by the government in the form of prior restraint based on arbitrary standards which are, for the most part, unconstitutional. With a few other similar exceptions, a bit of well thought out censorship is a very good idea when used appropriately.
In the case of OpenDNS, the kinds of sites I've asked them not to serve to me are sites I don't want to see. I similarly have a reasonably substantial hosts file that points many domains I don't want loaded on my machine to 127.0.0.1. I also don't allow just any old script that comes across my http stream to load and run without my giving permission for that to happen. This is because my machine is mine, and my browsing experience is my responsibility.
If OpenDNS breaks something to the point that I can no longer do what I want them to do, I can stop using them in about 30 seconds, and that takes care of that problem.
Also, OpenDNS provides some convenient filtering of various kinds of websites, but it is far from comprehensive. Even if you decide you never want to see goatse sites, you're not going to be blocked from goatse videos on YouTube, or goatse profiles on FaceBook, or what have you. It only blocks entire domains, not individual sites, so it's ability to block content has not a few holes in it.
If you think it's tricky to get people to give up driving SUVs or eating beef, that's a cake walk prepared to trying to get people to stop breeding. The cultures still breeding above replacement level value will be the ones still around in 100 years to try to deal with these problems, so, if you want to have the idea of reducing the population still on the agenda in 100 years, you'd better breed and hope you're able to impart your ideas to your children (it's a Hell of a lot harder than it looks).
China is just recently breeding at something in the neighborhood of replacement level, but show of hands for people who want to be subjected to the population control regime they used to get there? Anybody? The other candidates for major changes in population levels ride on four horses, and there's not much chance humanity is going to stop trying to avoid them to tidy up our population problems.
Also, humans-as-locusts breaks down quickly because there is no locust equivalent to a George Washington Carver, who was able to develop hundreds of uses for previously unwanted plants and transform the agricultural economy of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Population control programs can't successfully predict which individuals are going to make the breakthroughs necessary to continue offsetting the problems increasing populations have made. Nor do they take into account the massive amount of work and production it takes to transform something large and complex like the global energy and material economy.
There are no simple answers here. We will make guesses, and we will find out where we are right, and where we are wrong. Anybody claiming to have an accurate crystal ball should be viewed with suspicion.
When people learn how much control they give up of their information, and when there are sites that show respect for their information. I've been trying for months to get CareerBuilder.com to stop spamming me, and, when that took too long, to delete my account. Their representative tells me that there is no way in the system to delete my account. The most they can(will) do is delete my subscriptions from the various (and they have many) mail lists. I have repeated that this is unacceptable, and that I want my account deleted, and they refuse to do so. Most likely, this is described in their privacy policy which I agreed to when I created my account. I will be more careful about such things in the future.
I would recommend anybody who wants control over their personal information to stay away from CareerBuilder.com until such time as they change this policy. The ease of access to job listings and employers doesn't counter the lack of control of your information, and the reality that you will be spammed repeatedly, even when you follow the directions available on the site to eliminate yourself from their mail lists, even when you've found a job and don't want to have any relationship with the site as all.
The ironic part is that I found very few employers who used the date I submitted to CareerBuilder.com. Many of the employers I was trying to reach had their own job application process on their own websites.
Actually, those all add up as additional costs of non-digital copies -- the requirement to successfully guess sales of the non-digital copies and where they should be sent. None of those is required for a digital copy, no matter what, whether you sell one or one million.
For tracks that are predicted to have relatively smaller sales, choosing digital-only isn't a bad idea either. That's where Amie Street is quite good, as is CD Baby.
But my point was that everybody was talking about this in terms of revenue only, and revenue is only part of the question -- cost is also an important factor. Digital distribution of music, after a relatively small threshold has much lower cost than non-digital music does, and that's something the music companies need to be thinking about.
Not exactly. Pirating from private torrent trackers may not come with a direct dollar cost, but that's not exactly free. Quality isn't assured, and neither is the content assured, nor is download speed.
Buying from Amazon gives me a guarantee that the content I buy is what I get at a 256k bitrate, and the downloads are reasonably fast -- faster than many of the torrent downloads I'm aware of.
Itunes, unfortunately, requires more of my soul than I want to give up, so I can't vouch for that.
Digital cost increase is also more than matched by a non-digital cost decrease. Specifically, the marginal increase in cost for a digital copy of a track is much, much lower than the marginal increase in cost for a non-digital copy. There is no physical media, no printing of the CD label, no case, no shrink-wrap, no theft prevention device, no shipping cost, no shelf-space. Eventually, enough digital copies can require some additional bandwidth and server space, but that's more than made up for by the increased revenue for all of those digital copies.
So total revenues may not be up 25%, but those marginal digital revenues had a much higher marginal profit than the same revenues would have had in non-digital formats.
And the point was more that legal music downloads are producing more and more income as time goes on, which was predicted by many folks around these parts a long time ago. I'm gleefully loving the Amazon download service -- high bitrates, no DRM, and bargains if you're willing to wait for them (Dark Side of the Moon today for $5). But CD-Baby and Amie Street have some good stuff as well -- Amie Street with a very interesting pricing model worth checking out by those with non-mainstream tastes and musicians interested in opportunities outside the traditional studios.
It's not that simple. Combining CO2 and H2O through photosynthesis gives you carbohydrates (made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) directly, not hydrocarbons (made up of just carbon and hydrogen). Plants and animals can take energy from carbohydrates and produce fatty acids (hydrocarbons), but it's not the automatic result of combining carbon dioxide and water.
Seems to me that this is an opportunity in a different fashion. Squish the algae for the oil you can get from it, then take the left-over material (mostly cellulose) and use the catalytic process for converting that to ethanol, and you can get a second shot at harnessing the solar energy the algae absorbed as vehicle fuel.
This would also be a good recovery pattern for non-oil algae strains infiltrating an oil-based crop.