Your quote from the Rasool & Schneider article improperly inserts an exclamation point at the end to make it seem alarmist. It also omits the next line:
However, by that time, nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.
In short, Schneider believed that particulates would produce cooling and that carbon dioxide would produce warming, and that both were potential threats. Particulates have been controlled, as Schneider recommended, although by particulate controls rather than by a shift to nuclear. Carbon dioxide emissions have not been controlled.
The quote doesn't indicate that either of the scientists mentioned predicted an ice age, or that either of those scientists later predicted global warming.
(Schneider was co-author of a 1971 paper attempting to predict the cooling effect of aerosols -- e.g., soot -- from global temperatures. He and his co-author concluded that the cooling effect could be substantial *but* also suggested that a shift to nuclear power would lower aerosol pollution and defeat the cooling effect. In fact, aerosol pollution has been substantially lowered, although more by use of pollution-control technologies mandated by environmental laws than by a shift to nuclear power. In the same article, he and his co-author incidentally predicted that carbon dioxide emissions would have a countervailing warming effect. Carbon dioxide emissions have not been controlled, however.)
Five years ago, the same authors argued that the sun was getting brighter, and that that was the cause of global warning. Whoops.
(Note that the Telegraph article refers to "a team from Harvard University." As everyone should know, Harvard as an institution does not designate a couple faculty members to check out this whole global warming thing and give the definitive answer; these researchers -- astrophysicists by training -- decided to investigate this subject of their own accord. It is not atypical for people associated with prestigious institutions to use the name of the institution to advance their views on a subject outside their area of expertise. This is why it is sometimes said that a Berkeley study proved that the theory of evolution is fatally flawed -- a professor of criminal law at Berkeley has written a number of books and articles so contending. All that having been said, it makes sense to wait and see what they have to say.)
If the people actually could choose where their tax money goes, and how much of it goes where, I guarantee we'd see a drastic reduction in the scope and power of government.
Well, yes. Under your hypothetical, if I thought there should be a road from here to Kalamazoo, I wouldn't spend my tax money on it because I can't personally pay for the whole road, and if the road is only partly finished -- i.e., if other people don't spend their tax money on it -- it's no good to me. That doesn't prove that the public "actually" doesn't want a road to Kalamazoo; it just shows that if you introduce a lot of free-rider and coordination costs by removing an intermediary institution whose purpose is to remove those costs, we won't be able to have it.
I own(ed) a Linksys wireless router and a wireless access point. They both take AC adapters, which pump out different DC voltages. There is no apparent way of telling from the adapter which goes with which. Suffice it to say that the router is now fried.
The weird thing with Linksys is that they seem to get the big things right, but f**k up the details.
Re:If you're a Google H4X0R...
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: 1
"dreamchaser" correctly observes that suggesting we replace oil with hydrogen is not that different from suggesting that we replace oil with Duracells. Either way, you're begging the question of where we get energy from.
The authors of the linked article suggest we'll get the power from nuclear plants: "Nuclear power will serve as a stopgap, enabling the US to achieve energy independence while allowing wind, solar, and hydropower a chance to mature. Given the choice between powering the carbon-free hydrogen economy with fossil fuels or nuclear energy, even Greenpeace might embrace nuke plants as the lesser evil." (See point 4.)
It might have been more accurate for the authors to call their piece "The Nuclear Economy" -- hydrogen is just the storage and delivery mechanism.
So fly fewer planes. Duh. Fewer planes = less fuel used. And since you have less passengers anyway....
Doesn't work that way. When demand for air travel drops, it tends to drop relatively uniformly; i.e., the planes get less full. It's not just that no one wants to go to Tuscaloosa anymore. (In some cases, the airplanes have contractually or otherwise committed themselves to fly certain routes.)
Having multiple prices doesn't make accounting difficult. There is no simple answer why airlines go bankrupt, but part of the reason surely is that (i) they have huge fixed costs and long-term labor and facilities contracts, and at the same time (ii) they are in an extremely cyclical business, in the sense that during a recession where fuel prices rise, their customer demand falls.
Re:Redifference between uppercase and lowercase
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
To elaborate a bit:
Suppose I set up Supergoogle, a web search site. Google wants to go to court and get an injunction to stop me from using that name. To do that, they will need to submit an affidavit from an officer of the company that explains, among other things, how Google has tried to protect its trademark. A typical paragraph of that affidavit could be a short explanation of how Google once sent a letter to a person whose web site implied that Google wasn't a trademark. A copy of the letter would be attached to the affidavit as one of many such exhibits.
The primary purpose of sending the letter on this occasion was to prepare for that possibility.
Just out of curiosity I checked to see if the internet grocery delivery service in Boston takes food stamps. It doesn't, and it probably will never, but it wouldn't strike me as the worst thing in the world if it did. If I were a single mother with a couple of young children, I can easily imagine that I might do a better job buying cheaper, healthier food online than in peron at a grocery store.
I carried my ass to a library for internet access.
Well, what's cheaper: maintaining a staffed piece of real estate containing a PC (i.e., a library), or just dropping an antenna on top of a housing project?
Now that I think about it, providing welfare recipients with broadband access may well be the most cost-effective way of getting them the information they need most: where they can get a job, where they can get housing outside the public housing system, what's going on at their kids' schools, medical information, local news, etc., etc. (Some Harvard students set up a program to do online tutoring for Boston high school students; by all accounts, it seems to work pretty well.)
If a welfare recipient had to have one "luxury" appliance, a broadband-equipped PC seems like a reasonable choice. It would be far more justified than any other similarly priced item I can think of.
Go PAY to see them live. They get paid for the work they do that way...
How about a business model that doesn't include money for recordings anymore?
Begs the question. I don't really want to see any but a few bands live. I don't want them to reshingle my roof. I don't want them to wash my car. What I want are recordings of their music. There's a lot of money in sales of recordings; surely more of it could find its way to artists.
My recollection is that Disney does this from time to time with their traditional animation. IIRC, film of Robin Williams was used as the basis for some of the genie in Aladdin (of course, Williams did the voice). That's not the only example; surely someone more knowledgeable than I could provide more detail.
It still wouldn't be a good idea. Even if I were very careful not to make any unauthorized copies of material myself, it would be too dangerous to have it around. Suppose I leave my iPod out while I go to the restroom: some joker copies a file while I'm gone, and two weeks later I get a call from the RIAA informing me that the reason no one is buying Britney's new single is that everyone is p2p-ing my copy, and would I mind paying them $2 million. Too dangerous for my tastes, thanks.
In any event, people frequently reap enormous tax savings on death because of something called the "angel of death" step-up. Suppose your grandpappy bought $100 in IBM stock which is now worth $1,000,000. If he wanted to blow the gain on liquor and loose women, he'd have to sell the stock and pay capital gains taxes on the gain -- $999,900 times 20-some percent. But if he died and left you the IBM stock as his sole asset, he wouldn't owe any estate tax, because the estate's not large enough for estate tax to kick in. And if you sold the stock, the "basis" for purposes of calculating gain would be the value of the stock when he died, $1,000,000 (not the amount grandpappy originally paid, $100). If you sold the stock for $1,000,000, no one would ever pay any capital gains tax on that increase in the stock value.
You could argue that grandpappy paid something for the stock in the first place, and presumably paid taxes when he made that money, or that IBM has had to pay corporate income tax all the way along. These are essentially subspecies of the argument that investment income shouldn't be taxed at all, which is interesting but I don't buy it.
To be technical, the tax you pay to your state on things you buy out of state is more often called a "use" tax (because theoretically you are being taxed on the use of the product, not the sale which may have occurred elsewhere). But it amounts to the same thing.
Why for God's sake are they applying the tax to where you SHIPPED it instead of the billing address???
This is a pretty universal feature of consumption taxation. The theory is that when you purchase out of state items you can still be taxed on your use of the item in the state. It is somewhat arbitrary, agreed, but it is better than the alternative: if you were taxed based on billing address, someone in the Caymans could set up a web site and offer to buy things for you for a small percentage of the price (less than the sales tax). Of course, you might not bother to do this for a paperback, but someone buying $10,000 in office supplies for a business might.
Lose the Political Correctness. Seriously. We don't appreciate being preached to.
Not to be flip, but have you seen TOS? Pretty much every episode is high intensity 1960s style liberalism. (Don't be prejudiced, worry about the environment, here's a nice black woman who's part of the crew, yada yada yada...) By those standards, 1990s-2000s ST has been downright apolitical.
I think it is time for "Star Trek" to make a mighty leap forward another 1,000 years into the future, to a time when starships do not look like rides in a 1970s amusement arcade, when aliens do not look like humans with funny foreheads, and when wonder, astonishment and literacy are permitted back into the series.
The reason Star Trek can't make such a leap is because, fundamentally, it is still "Wagon Train" in outer space. I follow Star Trek (to the extent I do anymore) mostly as a soap opera -- I no longer believe Star Trek as a vision of the future. I believed Minority Report as a vision of the future (saw it again on DVD this weekend; I was just shocked by how good it is). I believed Contact as a vision of the future. I believed Russell's The Sparrow and Children Of God as a vision of the future. I even believe 2001 and Outland as a vision of the future. But 30 years after the Apollo landing, I know the future isn't going to look like ST.
Fed. R. Crim. P. 15(e) allows the use of deposition testimony of a witness who is available if "the witness gives testimony at the trial or hearing inconsistent with that witness' deposition."
I am not sure how this would apply here, because Elcomsoft called Dmitry after the government introduced the deposition testimony. If the live testimony hadn't been given yet, how would you know if the deposition testimony was inconsistent?
Two possibilities:
(1) Perhaps Elcomsoft indicated in the opening statement that it would present testimony from Dmitry, and its description of that testimony made clear that it would be inconsistent with Dmitry's deposition. That might be a sufficient basis to get the deposition testimony in even before the live testimony occurs. However, I don't know what courts have held on that subject.
(2) The government and Elcomsoft might have come to some sort of agreement on the issue. (E.g., "Hey, we're going to interrupt your case to show the jury rebuttal deposition testimony on video if you call Sklyarov, so if you're going do do that, why not let us present the video as part of our case?") Attorneys make these little agreements all the time as part of trying cases. (The fact that they enter into such agreements voluntarily doesn't necessarily keep them from sniping at the other side after the case is over.)
There could be something else going on here too; e.g., perhaps the fact that Sklyarov happened to be in the country wasn't sufficient to make him "available" for purposes of the rule, because he could have jumped on a plane at any time.
In any event, that's some informed speculation. The attorneys on the case would know what the whole deal is.
Slashdot Mirror
However, by that time, nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.
In short, Schneider believed that particulates would produce cooling and that carbon dioxide would produce warming, and that both were potential threats. Particulates have been controlled, as Schneider recommended, although by particulate controls rather than by a shift to nuclear. Carbon dioxide emissions have not been controlled.
The quote doesn't indicate that either of the scientists mentioned predicted an ice age, or that either of those scientists later predicted global warming.
(Schneider was co-author of a 1971 paper attempting to predict the cooling effect of aerosols -- e.g., soot -- from global temperatures. He and his co-author concluded that the cooling effect could be substantial *but* also suggested that a shift to nuclear power would lower aerosol pollution and defeat the cooling effect. In fact, aerosol pollution has been substantially lowered, although more by use of pollution-control technologies mandated by environmental laws than by a shift to nuclear power. In the same article, he and his co-author incidentally predicted that carbon dioxide emissions would have a countervailing warming effect. Carbon dioxide emissions have not been controlled, however.)
You should think about where you are posting before you assume those questions will be taken as rhetorical.
Really? Name one.
(Note that the Telegraph article refers to "a team from Harvard University." As everyone should know, Harvard as an institution does not designate a couple faculty members to check out this whole global warming thing and give the definitive answer; these researchers -- astrophysicists by training -- decided to investigate this subject of their own accord. It is not atypical for people associated with prestigious institutions to use the name of the institution to advance their views on a subject outside their area of expertise. This is why it is sometimes said that a Berkeley study proved that the theory of evolution is fatally flawed -- a professor of criminal law at Berkeley has written a number of books and articles so contending. All that having been said, it makes sense to wait and see what they have to say.)
Well, yes. Under your hypothetical, if I thought there should be a road from here to Kalamazoo, I wouldn't spend my tax money on it because I can't personally pay for the whole road, and if the road is only partly finished -- i.e., if other people don't spend their tax money on it -- it's no good to me. That doesn't prove that the public "actually" doesn't want a road to Kalamazoo; it just shows that if you introduce a lot of free-rider and coordination costs by removing an intermediary institution whose purpose is to remove those costs, we won't be able to have it.
I own(ed) a Linksys wireless router and a wireless access point. They both take AC adapters, which pump out different DC voltages. There is no apparent way of telling from the adapter which goes with which. Suffice it to say that the router is now fried. The weird thing with Linksys is that they seem to get the big things right, but f**k up the details.
Not much else, tho.
The authors of the linked article suggest we'll get the power from nuclear plants: "Nuclear power will serve as a stopgap, enabling the US to achieve energy independence while allowing wind, solar, and hydropower a chance to mature. Given the choice between powering the carbon-free hydrogen economy with fossil fuels or nuclear energy, even Greenpeace might embrace nuke plants as the lesser evil." (See point 4.)
It might have been more accurate for the authors to call their piece "The Nuclear Economy" -- hydrogen is just the storage and delivery mechanism.
Doesn't work that way. When demand for air travel drops, it tends to drop relatively uniformly; i.e., the planes get less full. It's not just that no one wants to go to Tuscaloosa anymore. (In some cases, the airplanes have contractually or otherwise committed themselves to fly certain routes.)
Having multiple prices doesn't make accounting difficult. There is no simple answer why airlines go bankrupt, but part of the reason surely is that (i) they have huge fixed costs and long-term labor and facilities contracts, and at the same time (ii) they are in an extremely cyclical business, in the sense that during a recession where fuel prices rise, their customer demand falls.
Suppose I set up Supergoogle, a web search site. Google wants to go to court and get an injunction to stop me from using that name. To do that, they will need to submit an affidavit from an officer of the company that explains, among other things, how Google has tried to protect its trademark. A typical paragraph of that affidavit could be a short explanation of how Google once sent a letter to a person whose web site implied that Google wasn't a trademark. A copy of the letter would be attached to the affidavit as one of many such exhibits.
The primary purpose of sending the letter on this occasion was to prepare for that possibility.
Just out of curiosity I checked to see if the internet grocery delivery service in Boston takes food stamps. It doesn't, and it probably will never, but it wouldn't strike me as the worst thing in the world if it did. If I were a single mother with a couple of young children, I can easily imagine that I might do a better job buying cheaper, healthier food online than in peron at a grocery store.
Well, what's cheaper: maintaining a staffed piece of real estate containing a PC (i.e., a library), or just dropping an antenna on top of a housing project?
Now that I think about it, providing welfare recipients with broadband access may well be the most cost-effective way of getting them the information they need most: where they can get a job, where they can get housing outside the public housing system, what's going on at their kids' schools, medical information, local news, etc., etc. (Some Harvard students set up a program to do online tutoring for Boston high school students; by all accounts, it seems to work pretty well.)
If a welfare recipient had to have one "luxury" appliance, a broadband-equipped PC seems like a reasonable choice. It would be far more justified than any other similarly priced item I can think of.
By contrast, the amount of money spent on Boston's public access cable programming is massive, and is entirely wasted.
How about a business model that doesn't include money for recordings anymore?
Begs the question. I don't really want to see any but a few bands live. I don't want them to reshingle my roof. I don't want them to wash my car. What I want are recordings of their music. There's a lot of money in sales of recordings; surely more of it could find its way to artists.
My recollection is that Disney does this from time to time with their traditional animation. IIRC, film of Robin Williams was used as the basis for some of the genie in Aladdin (of course, Williams did the voice). That's not the only example; surely someone more knowledgeable than I could provide more detail.
It still wouldn't be a good idea. Even if I were very careful not to make any unauthorized copies of material myself, it would be too dangerous to have it around. Suppose I leave my iPod out while I go to the restroom: some joker copies a file while I'm gone, and two weeks later I get a call from the RIAA informing me that the reason no one is buying Britney's new single is that everyone is p2p-ing my copy, and would I mind paying them $2 million. Too dangerous for my tastes, thanks.
In any event, people frequently reap enormous tax savings on death because of something called the "angel of death" step-up. Suppose your grandpappy bought $100 in IBM stock which is now worth $1,000,000. If he wanted to blow the gain on liquor and loose women, he'd have to sell the stock and pay capital gains taxes on the gain -- $999,900 times 20-some percent. But if he died and left you the IBM stock as his sole asset, he wouldn't owe any estate tax, because the estate's not large enough for estate tax to kick in. And if you sold the stock, the "basis" for purposes of calculating gain would be the value of the stock when he died, $1,000,000 (not the amount grandpappy originally paid, $100). If you sold the stock for $1,000,000, no one would ever pay any capital gains tax on that increase in the stock value.
You could argue that grandpappy paid something for the stock in the first place, and presumably paid taxes when he made that money, or that IBM has had to pay corporate income tax all the way along. These are essentially subspecies of the argument that investment income shouldn't be taxed at all, which is interesting but I don't buy it.
To be technical, the tax you pay to your state on things you buy out of state is more often called a "use" tax (because theoretically you are being taxed on the use of the product, not the sale which may have occurred elsewhere). But it amounts to the same thing.
This is a pretty universal feature of consumption taxation. The theory is that when you purchase out of state items you can still be taxed on your use of the item in the state. It is somewhat arbitrary, agreed, but it is better than the alternative: if you were taxed based on billing address, someone in the Caymans could set up a web site and offer to buy things for you for a small percentage of the price (less than the sales tax). Of course, you might not bother to do this for a paperback, but someone buying $10,000 in office supplies for a business might.
This post lacks the narcissistic blindness and irrationality typical of Slashdot posts. Mod it down.
Not to be flip, but have you seen TOS? Pretty much every episode is high intensity 1960s style liberalism. (Don't be prejudiced, worry about the environment, here's a nice black woman who's part of the crew, yada yada yada ...) By those standards, 1990s-2000s ST has been downright apolitical.
The reason Star Trek can't make such a leap is because, fundamentally, it is still "Wagon Train" in outer space. I follow Star Trek (to the extent I do anymore) mostly as a soap opera -- I no longer believe Star Trek as a vision of the future. I believed Minority Report as a vision of the future (saw it again on DVD this weekend; I was just shocked by how good it is). I believed Contact as a vision of the future. I believed Russell's The Sparrow and Children Of God as a vision of the future. I even believe 2001 and Outland as a vision of the future. But 30 years after the Apollo landing, I know the future isn't going to look like ST.
Fed. R. Crim. P. 15(e) allows the use of deposition testimony of a witness who is available if "the witness gives testimony at the trial or hearing inconsistent with that witness' deposition."
I am not sure how this would apply here, because Elcomsoft called Dmitry after the government introduced the deposition testimony. If the live testimony hadn't been given yet, how would you know if the deposition testimony was inconsistent?
Two possibilities:
(1) Perhaps Elcomsoft indicated in the opening statement that it would present testimony from Dmitry, and its description of that testimony made clear that it would be inconsistent with Dmitry's deposition. That might be a sufficient basis to get the deposition testimony in even before the live testimony occurs. However, I don't know what courts have held on that subject.
(2) The government and Elcomsoft might have come to some sort of agreement on the issue. (E.g., "Hey, we're going to interrupt your case to show the jury rebuttal deposition testimony on video if you call Sklyarov, so if you're going do do that, why not let us present the video as part of our case?") Attorneys make these little agreements all the time as part of trying cases. (The fact that they enter into such agreements voluntarily doesn't necessarily keep them from sniping at the other side after the case is over.)
There could be something else going on here too; e.g., perhaps the fact that Sklyarov happened to be in the country wasn't sufficient to make him "available" for purposes of the rule, because he could have jumped on a plane at any time.
In any event, that's some informed speculation. The attorneys on the case would know what the whole deal is.