I notice you conveniently left Xerox out of the Dynabook story. The project originally called "the interim Dynabook" was renamed the Alto. Xerox had done the R&D to develop Kay's idea into a working machine. Around this time, Xerox owned part of Apple, so they invited Steve Jobs and other Apple people to Xerox Parc, where they had a look at the Alto (Dynabook) development version. The Apple folks really liked the GUI idea, so they worked and worked to transform it into something that could work in the real world, made of materials that actually existed. And that's how we got the desktop GUI.
Kay had a wish "I wish for a kid's toy that's tablet sized, with a battery that lasts forever". Xerox and Apple started with the wish and developed something doable - and completely different from Kay's original vision. Kay jad wished for a children's device, Apple and Xerox created the desktop computer GUI for adults, something nobody had asked for.
> Erh... no. The supply side never created jobs. Never has, never will. A job is created if, and only if, there is someone willing and able to pay for the goods and/or services that job creates.
Yeah I remember back in 1980 we were all going into the stores trying to buy ipads and 3D printers. After we consumers did the R&Dand speced out exactly what kind of iPad we wanted to buy, Apple ordered some from China and started selling them.
Wait, maybe I'm remembering wrong. Maybe a bunch of companies hired a bunch of engineers, programmers, and product designers to come up with a variety of different computing devices, hoping that they'd come up with something people wanted to buy. Maybe people did not buy the first few tablet models, so for the first 15 years those companies were losing money trying. Maybe Maybe eventually one company, Apple, developed a version people would buy.
I don't remember for sure, which of those two scenarios actually happened?
> The centripetal force that is needed for any circular (or curved) movement is provided by the gravitational pull of the moon/earth, e.g. the gravitational force.
Think about what that would imply, it would mean that it's impossible to turn in space, away from the earth's gravity. In fact, it woild mean that here on earth you could only turn downward, toward the earth. Nascar drivers couldn't turn left, because all curved movement must curve downward.
G-force and gravity behave in indistinguishable ways, so it appears that they are the same thing (per Einstein). That does not mean that all G force is EARTH'S gravity. Orbital centripital force is gravity(-like), so it can therefore balance the gravity coming from another source (earth), resulting in net zero g aboard the spacecraft.
I looked and found more about it. You could of course fly around the moon at an altitude of 500 meters. Orbit has a specific definition it seems - centripital force being equal and opposite to gravity, so they balance out. Anyone inside the craft therefore feels zero gravity. If gravity pushes your into your seat as the craft flies around, that's not orbit, that's flying around.
Centripital force is small when you're moving almost in a straight line. Traveling just above the earths's surface, for example, the turn radius is several thousand miles. Therefore, for gravity to be balanced by centripital force, you need to be far enough away that gravity is reduced sufficiently that the small centripital force can balance it.
> One could orbit the (airless) moon at an altitude of 2000 feet
That's what I thought, but former NASA engineer Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) says you can't. Something about orbital physics involving gravity that I don't understand. I wonder who is right. I'm guessing the guy who did orbital physics for a living, although I don't understand it.
OS X is certified UNIX. You know, the network operating system that was serving clients before Xerox invented the desktop. I have a 1U OS X. server here that says you're clueless.
> There can no be any 'suspect' in the 'openness' because they have agreed to the license
In some cases, such as document formats, they have patents that apply. The _copyright_ license means you're not violating their _copyright_ by using/modifying/distributing the code, or code that has a similar function, but you're still subject to theor patents, so they can still sue you for millions and billions of dollars. The only protection you have for this code (and any code that reads or writes their format) is an informal promise that as long as they don't mind what you're doing, this year they won't sue you. That's certainly suspect. They might not completely screw everyone who touches their code, but they've reserved the right to do so.
They also have a license which they call "open", but it sure doesn't read like any open source license before. "Hi, my name's Chelsea", their license purrs, with her adam's apple rising. Suspect.
Some systems should be patched asap, of course, and we've patched our most critical systems. However, the bash team is still working out the best way to do a comprehensive fix, one that takes care of related issues as well as the initial exploit. As of Friday evening Red Hat and upstream bash were headed in two different directions. We'll be waiting until probably Monday evening to patch most of our systems, even the bash team decides what they're going to do and that gets implemented in rpms. It's not unreasonable for most OSX users to take care of it Monday or so, especially since most Macs don't have a public facing internet presence.
If you're using OSX for an important public facing web server, you can update it today via configure;./make; make install
Your main point is a good one - there are good reasons for the complexity.
I'm curious about the other thing you suggested. People have been making and breaking ciphers for thousands of years. For thousands of years, every algorithm* has been broken. Why would you say today's won't be? MD5 was believed to be secure for a long time, now it's thoroughly broken. What evidence is there that SHA-3 doesn't have an undiscovered weakness, given that every other algorithm has had some?
Further, quantum computers have now actually factored semiprimes, proving the theorems. So we already know how to break existing keys, given large quantum computers. At this stage, with so little knowledge about what medium-scale quantum computing, is it not hubris to think our kids won't come up with ways to use the new powers of quantum computing to solve problems that we don't yet know how to solve efficiently?
* "every algorithm " meaning all algorithms useful for this purpose. OTPs specifically, aren't applicable to the problem, though they are unbreakable if properly implemented.
OpenSSL's heartbleeed bug was a bug in openssl, a buffer overrun that didn't really have anything to do with ssl. A similar bug in any other server software would be approximately as bad. Where https protocol specified a ping, openssl instead leaked the contents of arbitrary memory locations .
Apple's goto bug was Apple's bug. Again, little to do with the protocol. Ssl/tls/https didn't fail here, the company failed to implement https.
The one "fault" of the protocol in the cited cases could be that it isn't brain-dead simple. Since the standard isn't idiot-proof, idiots can screw it up.
Slippery slope is the argument "if we let them ban filming movies, the next thing you know they'll ban all photography". The fallacious version stops there, just silently assuming that ALL slopes are slippery, rather than asserting that a particular slope is in fact slippery. The non-fallacious version points out that the number of pages of federal regulation has grown by 10,000% in the last few decades - showing that indeed the federal government DOES tend to enact more and more regulation. That slope really is slippery, and it's not fallacious to point that out.
Also GP said the current regulation IS too broad. Lannoc didn't say "if we allow this regulation, next thing you know they'll have a regulation that is too broad". So although Lannoc actually used the words "slope" and "slippery", the argument wasn't slippery slope - he asserts that the current regulation is too broad, not that it will become too broad. He (she?) also asserts that "the slope is getting slippery", rather than implying the assumption that all slopes are slippery, which would be the fallacy.
Your last two posts seem to be getting at the idea that being monolithic isn't bad. I never said it was. I said that monolithic packages are the way Microsoft and other Windows developers traditionally do things, and that small, single purpose tools are the Unix tradition.
> I don't particularly see any problem with Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.
I didn't say there was a problem with those. I said Microsoft builds software like that. Do you disagree?
> so whatever made the first probe fail might also make the second fail if they share design features or code.
Yes, if you make two copies of the same probe, two copies of the same failure is likely. However, that would only cost maybe 10%-20% more than making one copy.
I'm talking about do what India did - design and build a system, more or less from the ground up - twice. Have two companies do it independently, each at 1/6th the cost of the "reliable" version. The two different probes are unlikely to fail in the same way. Even if they did both fail, you could fix the problem and build two more, while spending less than the 6X reliable approach.
The point is, even if they made NO money, you'd save an entire ten cents on that new iPad. Cut their pay in half, you'll save a nickel on your iPad.
Therefore, the idea that the cost of US goods is drastically affected by CEO salary, or that "Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings" is ridiculous beyond measure. You're talking about 1% of 1% of the sales price and revenue. It's like saying products are inexpensive because of the cost of printing UPC codes.
> more in a year than the rest of us earn in a lifetime?
Median CEO salary in the US is $740K. If you work from age 18 to age 62, that's 44 years. At just $50K/year, that's $2.2 million- three times what the average CEO makes. If in fact you plan to make less in your life than a typical CEO makes in a year, you might consider completing school. Or showing up sober.
If the US spent six times as much in order to reduce the risk of failure, that would be STUPID. It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
> Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings.
Yeah, let's look at that! In just the last three months, Apple CEO Tim Cook was paid $10 million dollars. Over those three months, Apple customers bought just over $40 billion of Apple products. So one of every 4,000 dollars you spend on Apple products goes to the CEO. If the CEO wasn't paid at all, an iPad would be ten cents cheaper! Enslave CEOs, so we can save a dime!
> I have too many important passwords that could ruin my life.... If I kept the passwords for my bank/retirement fund/etc.'s web site in my wallet they could put my in the poor house. I haven't figured out what to do about this yet.
First, don't use the same password for Slashdot and Facebook that you use for your retirement account. Using the same password, or a similar password for two important accounts is fine. So let's say your PIN you use for important stuff is "5918", and the base password for important stuff is "LipCamLAG". Thats all you need to remember, a pin and a password stub. You then right down:
A bad guy who gets the written information hasn't gained anything useful, and you only have to remember one password and one pin. Actually, two password: one for crap that doesn't matter, like Slashdot, and one more critical stuff like your bank account.
> I've never understood what mechanism it is that drives some people to, apparently, exhibit actual deep-felt hatred for the idea of using technology to exploit a free resource like solar energy.
Quoting myself, in my national energy policy paper:
Solar electric is another option that has received significant attention, and it has some very attractive qualities.
Lewis and Nocera (2006) calculated that the total amount of solar energy striking the earth and it’s atmosphere
in one hour is more than humans use in a year. Sunshine will not be exhausted over the long term, though daily
and hourly fluctuations will occur.
Your concept of making critical national policy decisions based on your current emotions ("hatred") is interesting. My post you replied to is based on the fact that I know how energy is measured. Donkey cubed is not a measure of power. The proponents of this project clearly have no idea what they're talking about, none at all. As I said above, they're not even wrong - they're unintelligible. Advocating nonsense instead of actual, workable renewable energy is how we've remained stuck with coal-fired power plants. Rather than moving forward with cleaner options that actually work, we've wasted decades, and billions of dollars, on pump-and-dump schemes promising "free energy". Quoting Morris (2014) again:... This media interest can also create significant public relations issues for the solar industry and solar advocates.
In 2006 story, the chief news editor for Nature called Nanosolar “the poster child for Silicon Valley’s interest in solar power”.
Six years later, this “poster child” announced they would soon start shipping panels, thereby gaining more media attention
and investment (Wang 2012). Just one year later, Nanosolar closed down and was auctioning their office furniture,
having spent $450 million of investors’ money (Wang 2012).
Nanosolar is not the only solar company to vanish after getting hundreds of millions of dollars from hopeful investors.
In 2011, ABC news showed FBI raids of Solyndra offices and the homes of the Solyndra founders, with the FBI seeking
to find out what happened to over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds which had been directed to Solyndra (Greene & Mosk, 2011).
Do you think hyping this kind of fraud _helps_ the public perception of renewable energy?
Based on your tolerance for absolutely sloppy work, I'm guessing you're education is limited to government school, probably in California, DC, or New York, so it's not exactly your fault that you're accustomed to accepting extremely poor quality work. Your history textbook probably said that the Constitution was signed in 1976, and that's the quality of work you've come to expect. Many of us won't bet the nation's future on investing in people who don't seem to know the very basics about the field in which they claim to be making miraculous advancements. We expect people to actually know what they're talking about.
Seriously? Even a third grader with zero knowledge of anything related to power production would immediately recognize thus as pure BS. It produces cubic gallons if water and kilowatts per day? The claims are obviously _not_even_wrong_. Their marketing department needs to do about eight times better to even reach the point of writing intelligible bullshit. This is what you're claiming as what you've been promoting?
Well I guess it's good that you're clearly admitting that the stuff you advocate is stuff that would get a grade of D- as a fourth grade assignment.
Thanks. That analogy makes sense, as far as it goes. Now I just need to figure out how to get some of our liberals from here to move there, and some of the backcountry real mean from Canada to come here. Then everyone can be happy. I thought that was going to work with California- let all the hippies and needy people, while the self-sufficient people could do their thing in Texas. Unfortunately, when California predictably went bust all the Bay area hippies headed to Austin.
My post was in reply "no reason any country..." That's true I don't know much about Canada's regulation, and as I said in the SUBJECT line of my post, I wasn't talking about them, but about general principles.
I was hoping a Canadian could give some insight into the different perspective there. Sure the US was founded by a "fuck the king" revolution, and many came here in part because of religious or other persecution by the government of their homeland, so you'd expect the US to _traditionally_ be suspicious of too much government. I don't know Canadian history or culture well enough to understand what seems to be the prevailing attitude that bureaucrats have a divine rifht to rule. Does Canada have a long history of beloved monarchs before the modern era?
In the US, and probably many other places, the original argument for strict government regulation of broadcast goes like this:
The radio spectrum suitable for broadcast is limited (there can only ever be ~20 TV channels). It won't work to have multiple broadcasters competing on the same channel. The spectrum is a public resource. The public, through their bureaucrats, must choose certain broadcasters and grant them exclusive rights to a channel. Because the public is granting the broadcaster exclusive rights to a limited resource, they have the right to make demands in exchange. As representatives of the people, government has the right to make arbitrary demands of broadcasters.
Based on that reasoning, the regulation of cable TV is much less, and of the internet far less. The internet is not a limited medium, there can be millions of channels, and nobody is being granted exclusive rights to anything.
Of course the majority view in Canada is coming from an entirely different perspective. Canadian reasoning is: 1) ??? 2) ??? 3) Bureaucrats in Ottawa should tell me what to do, in all aspects of my life, whenever they feel the need. A _reason_, such as a physical limit to the number of channels, is unnecessary.
Sorry I don't know the first part of that reasoning. Maybe a Canadian can explain it to me.
> > 3. Do you disagree with the statement that ZFS is a volume manager, a filesystem, a raid-like redundancy system, and a few other other things as well? In other words, that it's a big, monolithic package tat does many things. Do you disagree with that?
> I'm suggesting that concepts such as "volume manager", "filesystem" and "raid-like redundancy system" don't need to be separate entities.
Absolutely they don't NEED to be. I'm suggesting that concepts such as "mail client, calendar, fax, RSS reader and weather reports" don't need to be separate entities. In fact, if you smash them all together into one big entity, you can sell it for $109.99 and LOTS of people will buy it.
So we agree that because those things don't HAVE to be separate, systemd combines all of them together, into one package that does everything. We also agree that: > 1. It appears that the Microsoft tradition is big monolithic packages that do everything.
Ergo, system fits the Microsoft tradition, the Microsoft way of doing things. That way certainly isn't impossible - Microsoft has made billions of dollars doing it that way. Unix traditionally does things a different way.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice you conveniently left Xerox out of the Dynabook story. The project originally called "the interim Dynabook" was renamed the Alto. Xerox had done the R&D to develop Kay's idea into a working machine. Around this time, Xerox owned part of Apple, so they invited Steve Jobs and other Apple people to Xerox Parc, where they had a look at the Alto (Dynabook) development version. The Apple folks really liked the GUI idea, so they worked and worked to transform it into something that could work in the real world, made of materials that actually existed. And that's how we got the desktop GUI.
Kay had a wish "I wish for a kid's toy that's tablet sized, with a battery that lasts forever". Xerox and Apple started with the wish and developed something doable - and completely different from Kay's original vision. Kay jad wished for a children's device, Apple and Xerox created the desktop computer GUI for adults, something nobody had asked for.
> Erh... no. The supply side never created jobs. Never has, never will. A job is created if, and only if, there is someone willing and able to pay for the goods and/or services that job creates.
Yeah I remember back in 1980 we were all going into the stores trying to buy ipads and 3D printers. After we consumers did the R&Dand speced out exactly what kind of iPad we wanted to buy, Apple ordered some from China and started selling them.
Wait, maybe I'm remembering wrong. Maybe a bunch of companies hired a bunch of engineers, programmers, and product designers to come up with a variety of different computing devices, hoping that they'd come up with something people wanted to buy. Maybe people did not buy the first few tablet models, so for the first 15 years those companies were losing money trying. Maybe Maybe eventually one company, Apple, developed a version people would buy.
I don't remember for sure, which of those two scenarios actually happened?
> The centripetal force that is needed for any circular (or curved) movement is provided by the gravitational pull of the moon/earth, e.g. the gravitational force.
Think about what that would imply, it would mean that it's impossible to turn in space, away from the earth's gravity. In fact, it woild mean that here on earth you could only turn downward, toward the earth. Nascar drivers couldn't turn left, because all curved movement must curve downward.
G-force and gravity behave in indistinguishable ways, so it appears that they are the same thing (per Einstein). That does not mean that all G force is EARTH'S gravity. Orbital centripital force is gravity(-like), so it can therefore balance the gravity coming from another source (earth), resulting in net zero g aboard the spacecraft.
I looked and found more about it. You could of course fly around the moon at an altitude of 500 meters. Orbit has a specific definition it seems - centripital force being equal and opposite to gravity, so they balance out. Anyone inside the craft therefore feels zero gravity. If gravity pushes your into your seat as the craft flies around, that's not orbit, that's flying around.
Centripital force is small when you're moving almost in a straight line. Traveling just above the earths's surface, for example, the turn radius is several thousand miles. Therefore, for gravity to be balanced by centripital force, you need to be far enough away that gravity is reduced sufficiently that the small centripital force can balance it.
> One could orbit the (airless) moon at an altitude of 2000 feet
That's what I thought, but former NASA engineer Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) says you can't. Something about orbital physics involving gravity that I don't understand. I wonder who is right. I'm guessing the guy who did orbital physics for a living, although I don't understand it.
OS X is certified UNIX. You know, the network operating system that was serving clients before Xerox invented the desktop.
I have a 1U OS X. server here that says you're clueless.
> There can no be any 'suspect' in the 'openness' because they have agreed to the license
In some cases, such as document formats, they have patents that apply. The _copyright_ license means you're not violating their _copyright_ by using/modifying/distributing the code, or code that has a similar function, but you're still subject to theor patents, so they can still sue you for millions and billions of dollars. The only protection you have for this code (and any code that reads or writes their format) is an informal promise that as long as they don't mind what you're doing, this year they won't sue you. That's certainly suspect. They might not completely screw everyone who touches their code, but they've reserved the right to do so.
They also have a license which they call "open", but it sure doesn't read like any open source license before. "Hi, my name's Chelsea", their license purrs, with her adam's apple rising. Suspect.
Some systems should be patched asap, of course, and we've patched our most critical systems. However, the bash team is still working out the best way to do a comprehensive fix, one that takes care of related issues as well as the initial exploit. As of Friday evening Red Hat and upstream bash were headed in two different directions. We'll be waiting until probably Monday evening to patch most of our systems, even the bash team decides what they're going to do and that gets implemented in rpms. It's not unreasonable for most OSX users to take care of it Monday or so, especially since most Macs don't have a public facing internet presence.
If you're using OSX for an important public facing web server, you can update it today via configure; ./make; make install
Maybe someone who works in new led technology can answer two questions:
Does / might this apply to to LED light bulbs as opposed to screens?
TFA refers to screens.
If so, care to take a guess as to how long it will take for this to be on store shelves?
Your main point is a good one - there are good reasons for the complexity.
I'm curious about the other thing you suggested. People have been making and breaking ciphers for thousands of years. For thousands of years, every algorithm* has been broken. Why would you say today's won't be? MD5 was believed to be secure for a long time, now it's thoroughly broken. What evidence is there that SHA-3 doesn't have an undiscovered weakness, given that every other algorithm has had some?
Further, quantum computers have now actually factored semiprimes, proving the theorems. So we already know how to break existing keys, given large quantum computers. At this stage, with so little knowledge about what medium-scale quantum computing, is it not hubris to think our kids won't come up with ways to use the new powers of quantum computing to solve problems that we don't yet know how to solve efficiently?
* "every algorithm " meaning all algorithms useful for this purpose. OTPs specifically, aren't applicable to the problem, though they are unbreakable if properly implemented.
OpenSSL's heartbleeed bug was a bug in openssl, a buffer overrun that didn't really have anything to do with ssl. A similar bug in any other server software would be approximately as bad. Where https protocol specified a ping, openssl instead leaked the contents of arbitrary memory locations .
Apple's goto bug was Apple's bug. Again, little to do with the protocol. Ssl/tls/https didn't fail here, the company failed to implement https.
The one "fault" of the protocol in the cited cases could be that it isn't brain-dead simple. Since the standard isn't idiot-proof, idiots can screw it up.
Slippery slope is the argument "if we let them ban filming movies, the next thing you know they'll ban all photography". The fallacious version stops there, just silently assuming that ALL slopes are slippery, rather than asserting that a particular slope is in fact slippery. The non-fallacious version points out that the number of pages of federal regulation has grown by 10,000% in the last few decades - showing that indeed the federal government DOES tend to enact more and more regulation. That slope really is slippery, and it's not fallacious to point that out.
Also GP said the current regulation IS too broad. Lannoc didn't say "if we allow this regulation, next thing you know they'll have a regulation that is too broad". So although Lannoc actually used the words "slope" and "slippery", the argument wasn't slippery slope - he asserts that the current regulation is too broad, not that it will become too broad. He (she?) also asserts that "the slope is getting slippery", rather than implying the assumption that all slopes are slippery, which would be the fallacy.
Your last two posts seem to be getting at the idea that being monolithic isn't bad. I never said it was.
I said that monolithic packages are the way Microsoft and other Windows developers traditionally do things,
and that small, single purpose tools are the Unix tradition.
> I don't particularly see any problem with Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.
I didn't say there was a problem with those. I said Microsoft builds software like that. Do you disagree?
> so whatever made the first probe fail might also make the second fail if they share design features or code.
Yes, if you make two copies of the same probe, two copies of the same failure is likely. However, that would only cost maybe 10%-20% more than making one copy.
I'm talking about do what India did - design and build a system, more or less from the ground up - twice.
Have two companies do it independently, each at 1/6th the cost of the "reliable" version. The two different probes are unlikely to fail in the same way.
Even if they did both fail, you could fix the problem and build two more, while spending less than the 6X reliable approach.
The point is, even if they made NO money, you'd save an entire ten cents on that new iPad. Cut their pay in half, you'll save a nickel on your iPad.
Therefore, the idea that the cost of US goods is drastically affected by CEO salary, or that "Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings" is ridiculous beyond measure. You're talking about 1% of 1% of the sales price and revenue. It's like saying products are inexpensive because of the cost of printing UPC codes.
> more in a year than the rest of us earn in a lifetime?
Median CEO salary in the US is $740K. If you work from age 18 to age 62, that's 44 years. At just $50K/year, that's $2.2 million- three times what the average CEO makes. If in fact you plan to make less in your life than a typical CEO makes in a year, you might consider completing school. Or showing up sober.
If the US spent six times as much in order to reduce the risk of failure, that would be STUPID.
It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
> Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings.
Yeah, let's look at that! In just the last three months, Apple CEO Tim Cook was paid $10 million dollars. Over those three months, Apple customers bought just over $40 billion of Apple products. So one of every 4,000 dollars you spend on Apple products goes to the CEO. If the CEO wasn't paid at all, an iPad would be ten cents cheaper! Enslave CEOs, so we can save a dime!
/bin/sh is frequently a symlink to /bin/bash
# ls -alh /bin/sh /bin/sh -> bash
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4 Sep 24 12:47
> I have too many important passwords that could ruin my life. ... If I kept the passwords for my bank/retirement fund/etc.'s web site in my wallet they could put my in the poor house. I haven't figured out what to do about this yet.
First, don't use the same password for Slashdot and Facebook that you use for your retirement account. Using the same password, or a similar password for two important accounts is fine. So let's say your PIN you use for important stuff is "5918", and the base password for important stuff is "LipCamLAG". Thats all you need to remember, a pin and a password stub. You then right down:
scottrade: pass + pin
schwab: pass + !?
wells fargo: pin + pass
A bad guy who gets the written information hasn't gained anything useful, and you only have to remember one password and one pin. Actually, two password: one for crap that doesn't matter, like Slashdot, and one more critical stuff like your bank account.
> I've never understood what mechanism it is that drives some people to, apparently, exhibit actual deep-felt hatred for the idea of using technology to exploit a free resource like solar energy.
Quoting myself, in my national energy policy paper:
Solar electric is another option that has received significant attention, and it has some very attractive qualities.
Lewis and Nocera (2006) calculated that the total amount of solar energy striking the earth and it’s atmosphere
in one hour is more than humans use in a year. Sunshine will not be exhausted over the long term, though daily
and hourly fluctuations will occur.
Your concept of making critical national policy decisions based on your current emotions ("hatred") is interesting. ... This media interest can also create significant public relations issues for the solar industry and solar advocates.
My post you replied to is based on the fact that I know how energy is measured. Donkey cubed is not a measure of power.
The proponents of this project clearly have no idea what they're talking about, none at all. As I said above, they're not even
wrong - they're unintelligible. Advocating nonsense instead of actual, workable renewable energy is how we've remained
stuck with coal-fired power plants. Rather than moving forward with cleaner options that actually work, we've wasted
decades, and billions of dollars, on pump-and-dump schemes promising "free energy". Quoting Morris (2014) again:
In 2006 story, the chief news editor for Nature called Nanosolar “the poster child for Silicon Valley’s interest in solar power”.
Six years later, this “poster child” announced they would soon start shipping panels, thereby gaining more media attention
and investment (Wang 2012). Just one year later, Nanosolar closed down and was auctioning their office furniture,
having spent $450 million of investors’ money (Wang 2012).
Nanosolar is not the only solar company to vanish after getting hundreds of millions of dollars from hopeful investors.
In 2011, ABC news showed FBI raids of Solyndra offices and the homes of the Solyndra founders, with the FBI seeking
to find out what happened to over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds which had been directed to Solyndra (Greene & Mosk, 2011).
Do you think hyping this kind of fraud _helps_ the public perception of renewable energy?
Based on your tolerance for absolutely sloppy work, I'm guessing you're education is limited to government school,
probably in California, DC, or New York, so it's not exactly your fault that you're accustomed to accepting extremely
poor quality work. Your history textbook probably said that the Constitution was signed in 1976, and that's the quality
of work you've come to expect. Many of us won't bet the nation's future on investing in people who don't seem to know
the very basics about the field in which they claim to be making miraculous advancements. We expect people to actually
know what they're talking about.
Seriously? Even a third grader with zero knowledge of anything related to power production would immediately recognize thus as pure BS. It produces cubic gallons if water and kilowatts per day? The claims are obviously _not_even_wrong_. Their marketing department needs to do about eight times better to even reach the point of writing intelligible bullshit. This is what you're claiming as what you've been promoting?
Well I guess it's good that you're clearly admitting that the stuff you advocate is stuff that would get a grade of D- as a fourth grade assignment.
Thanks. That analogy makes sense, as far as it goes.
Now I just need to figure out how to get some of our liberals from here to move there, and some of the backcountry real mean from Canada to come here. Then everyone can be happy. I thought that was going to work with California- let all the hippies and needy people, while the self-sufficient people could do their thing in Texas. Unfortunately, when California predictably went bust all the Bay area hippies headed to Austin.
My post was in reply "no reason any country ..."
That's true I don't know much about Canada's regulation, and as I said in the SUBJECT line of my post, I wasn't talking about them, but about general principles.
I was hoping a Canadian could give some insight into the different perspective there.
Sure the US was founded by a "fuck the king" revolution, and many came here in part because of religious or other persecution by the government of their homeland, so you'd expect the US to _traditionally_ be suspicious of too much government. I don't know Canadian history or culture well enough to understand what seems to be the prevailing attitude that bureaucrats have a divine rifht to rule. Does Canada have a long history of beloved monarchs before the modern era?
In the US, and probably many other places, the original argument for strict government regulation of broadcast goes like this:
The radio spectrum suitable for broadcast is limited (there can only ever be ~20 TV channels).
It won't work to have multiple broadcasters competing on the same channel.
The spectrum is a public resource.
The public, through their bureaucrats, must choose certain broadcasters and grant them exclusive rights to a channel.
Because the public is granting the broadcaster exclusive rights to a limited resource, they have the right to make demands in exchange.
As representatives of the people, government has the right to make arbitrary demands of broadcasters.
Based on that reasoning, the regulation of cable TV is much less, and of the internet far less.
The internet is not a limited medium, there can be millions of channels, and nobody is being granted exclusive rights to anything.
Of course the majority view in Canada is coming from an entirely different perspective. Canadian reasoning is:
1) ???
2) ???
3) Bureaucrats in Ottawa should tell me what to do, in all aspects of my life, whenever they feel the need. A _reason_, such as a physical limit to the number of channels, is unnecessary.
Sorry I don't know the first part of that reasoning. Maybe a Canadian can explain it to me.
> > 3. Do you disagree with the statement that ZFS is a volume manager, a filesystem, a raid-like redundancy system, and a few other other things as well? In other words, that it's a big, monolithic package tat does many things. Do you disagree with that?
> I'm suggesting that concepts such as "volume manager", "filesystem" and "raid-like redundancy system" don't need to be separate entities.
Absolutely they don't NEED to be.
I'm suggesting that concepts such as "mail client, calendar, fax, RSS reader and weather reports" don't need to be separate entities.
In fact, if you smash them all together into one big entity, you can sell it for $109.99 and LOTS of people will buy it.
So we agree that because those things don't HAVE to be separate, systemd combines all of them together, into one package that does everything. We also agree that:
> 1. It appears that the Microsoft tradition is big monolithic packages that do everything.
Ergo, system fits the Microsoft tradition, the Microsoft way of doing things. That way certainly isn't impossible - Microsoft has made billions of dollars doing it that way. Unix traditionally does things a different way.