It appears that the only incentive being offered to opt in to this system is your own ability to use Virgin's public nodes. I would offer specific billing credit for bandwidth lent out for public access; that way, subscribers would be incentivized to actually improve public access to their routers.
"is texas oil country? they have refineries in california too"
You might think of solar development as being more ideologically 'California' than it is 'Texas,' but the crucial difference is you can still get things built in Texas.
I would be really happy to see manned space programs go private, if for no other reason that any meaningful next steps in manned spaceflight will have to involve very high personal risk to crews. No government, especially ours given current politics, is ready to assume such risk, even if it were to lavish funds on such projects.
So let Thiel, et. al. go up there with their own money and with their own motivations, and reap whatever rewards there may be. Just let us not hear any future whining from you people along the lines of "Now they're strip-mining Pallas!"
I'm not claiming that the mangled predictions of weather invalidate carbon warming as a hypothesis; rather, they point to the need for an improved model. They should also be telling the apocalyptic political activists who run the movement to back off and leave the modeling and the weather predictions to the real scientists.
After all, if you don't want denialists to take over the debate, why are you giving them ammunition with those contradictory weather warnings?
Is the predictive power of climate models the reason that Warmists predict that every contradictory kind of bad weather that happens in the world, including record cold and snow, is proof of warming?
So long as they stick to technology that can't run away, I don't see a problem. Aerosols to increase the Earth's albedo, ocean algal growth that is tied to a nutrient we have to supply, many approaches have been suggested. What they are trying to do is characterize early attempts at sequestration before the carbon problem becomes acute. Because the climate models we have now do a poor job of predicting weather, we don't know yet how big the carbon problem is. Prudence dictates that we prepare for a "major impact" outcome in case of need.
Unfortunately, one thing I know for sure is the very carbon hawks who believe we're all about to die really quick are the ones who will resist any potential solution and try to kill off any experimentation before it gets started. A viable sequestration or cooling program wouldn't fit in with their agenda of human extinction.
Science fiction authors always had political differences, which fans were in many cases aware of. In the days of the Big Three, we had, let's see...a New Deal Democrat, a military/libertarian Republican, a gay Eurosocialist. The worlds they built reflected their sociopolitical values, and guess what - nobody worried about it! It just caused them to offer different styles of future, which fans debated as alternative scenarios, which is the whole idea. The field as a whole had no net political coloration.
What Beale and his minions (there might be henchmen in next year's budget, but they'll never be able to afford cronies) are mainly concerned about seems to be identity politics, especially when combined with the current softening of the science being presented in an effort to broaden readership. I think they have a point on the retreat from science into what Beale calls "angsty fantasy," but do fans really care deeply about the gender ratios in their stories? Beale is attacking from a fundie Christian perspective that has zero following in the genre.
If SF needs a political mission, I would like to see it address a real present danger, which is the general culture's mounting disrespect for science itself. Tis showed up first as a generalized fear of every application of science, but it has mushroomed into deep-seated evil like this: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015...
If these people gain political traction, everything we value here is in deep trouble. If the genre wants to charge into a political battle, this is the one it needs to join.
"Unbelievably harsh" is relative the technology of the time. A few specialized people do live in Antarctica now. New islands have been created, and swamps drained. As we better at robotics and nanotech and genetic engineering, we will populate the solar system.
One nice feature that industrial unions offered was training, taking workers through a series of steps from apprentice to journeyman to master. On each level there was a certain set of skills required, and the organization served as a focus for getting each worker to his (yes, that was the only pronoun in those days) maximum level of competency. Certainly, after WW II and through the Fifties and Sixties the tipping of power toward big-city unions led to those dreaded excesses that today's young people would hate to see happen in tech. We've all heard the stories about conferences in Eastern cities where the jobsite work rules won't allow an exhibitor to move her own chair ten feet across the hall. But in organizing for the modern age, tech workers have an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past and do it better. We can concentrate on the advantages while avoiding those Rust Belt excesses.
Note that your source is the same Michael Church as my source, writing a couple of years earlier on the topic. In his latest column there was no attempt to set aside "professionals" as being somehow more magic than regular organized workers. The difference is what, exactly? Professionals have codes of ethics, can't be "fired" in the ordinary sense, and generally operate in small groups from their own partnerships, which have a life independent from the clients they serve. Perhaps he has realized since then that most developers don't have the same interests as neurosurgeons, that not everyone wants to run his own complicated little business that has to deal with the client as an independent bargaining unit. Furthermore, such an arrangement might not even increase employment in the field, because many companies want to operate their own staffs of tech personnel under their own rules. So now Church seems to have relaxed his stance and come to the conclusion that unions are a better, more inclusive type of organization for tech workers than trying to form a new profession.
"That would mean less wars, less bombing campaigns, less drone attacks and less demonetisation of muslims and arabs."
Grammatical terrorism aside, "demonetisation" would be the most humane approach if you don't like bombing and droning, and leads to the big nerd tie-in on this issue.
Who funds terrorists, ultimately? We do, whenever we stop at a gas station. We need to stop buying anything whatever from the jihadist region. Build the reactor fleet it will take to move us away from fossil fuel, while transitionally maxing out our own remaining oil and gas production. If there proves to be anything to that carbon warming hypothesis, we would thereby have that covered too.
I'm glad to see Flash go, but it did offer us an element of control over autoplaying videos, by setting your Flash add-on to "Play if clicked." Now we have been stripped of even that meager choice.
A "random brown guy." Yeah, right. Pull the other one. No matter how many massacres involving organization and the kind of heavy weapons which are hard to get in Europe because, you know, it has strict gun control, the media there hopefully keeps calling each one a lone-wolf attack.
What Europe needs to do is ship all of those "refugees" back to the hellhole shores they came from. Those who honestly want a better life have two options: they can go to a embassy and apply for legal immigration into some other country like all those generations of people before them, or they can stand and take back their homelands from the jihadists. We will gladly offer drone and bomb strikes where those might help.
We have a refugee problem of our own in the US, solutions for which are the biggest subject of debate in the new presidential campaign. As in Europe, a certain small percentage of our refugee stream consists of bad guys. But at least our bad guys are the kind of common criminals we can take care of with our own guns, not bloodthirsty international terrorists organizing to take over a continent where hitting your mugger with an umbrella is considered a felony.
"This sort of thing feeds into the TSA mentality - search everyone everywhere every time. And then it will feed into the NRA mantra of everyone being armed everywhere every time."
And best of all, it's the umpteenth time that an illegal alien terrorist (sorry, "refugee") has taken advantage of European white guilt to slaughter people he know were unarmed and wouldn't resist. But whoops, US Marines happened to be standing near that toilet.
How many Charlie Hebdos will it take before they know That too many people have died?
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that the only incentive being offered to opt in to this system is your own ability to use Virgin's public nodes. I would offer specific billing credit for bandwidth lent out for public access; that way, subscribers would be incentivized to actually improve public access to their routers.
"The eagle and condor carcasses falling down from the chopping blades foul up the solar collectors."
Solar grills right below the wind towers!
"is texas oil country? they have refineries in california too"
You might think of solar development as being more ideologically 'California' than it is 'Texas,' but the crucial difference is you can still get things built in Texas.
I would be really happy to see manned space programs go private, if for no other reason that any meaningful next steps in manned spaceflight will have to involve very high personal risk to crews. No government, especially ours given current politics, is ready to assume such risk, even if it were to lavish funds on such projects.
So let Thiel, et. al. go up there with their own money and with their own motivations, and reap whatever rewards there may be. Just let us not hear any future whining from you people along the lines of "Now they're strip-mining Pallas!"
I'm not claiming that the mangled predictions of weather invalidate carbon warming as a hypothesis; rather, they point to the need for an improved model. They should also be telling the apocalyptic political activists who run the movement to back off and leave the modeling and the weather predictions to the real scientists.
After all, if you don't want denialists to take over the debate, why are you giving them ammunition with those contradictory weather warnings?
Is the predictive power of climate models the reason that Warmists predict that every contradictory kind of bad weather that happens in the world, including record cold and snow, is proof of warming?
So long as they stick to technology that can't run away, I don't see a problem. Aerosols to increase the Earth's albedo, ocean algal growth that is tied to a nutrient we have to supply, many approaches have been suggested. What they are trying to do is characterize early attempts at sequestration before the carbon problem becomes acute. Because the climate models we have now do a poor job of predicting weather, we don't know yet how big the carbon problem is. Prudence dictates that we prepare for a "major impact" outcome in case of need.
Unfortunately, one thing I know for sure is the very carbon hawks who believe we're all about to die really quick are the ones who will resist any potential solution and try to kill off any experimentation before it gets started. A viable sequestration or cooling program wouldn't fit in with their agenda of human extinction.
And remember when we could apply science, American or otherwise, to the problems we face without the default reaction being total gibbering fear?
If you read a food joke as a racist comment, then you're a SJW dumbass. Can you cite a genetic connection between ethnicity and cuisine?
To advertise your old beater as air-gapped and secure.
If you look in on Beale's blog, it has an angry screed denouncing "Stranger In A Strange Land."
"Is it Strawman season again?"
Yes it is. They burn one every Labor Day weekend.
Movie adaptation forthcoming: http://www.slashfilm.com/the-m...
...Delivered over CenturyLink!
Yes, the Slashdot readership will greatly miss the five posts you have made over the last four years.
Science fiction authors always had political differences, which fans were in many cases aware of. In the days of the Big Three, we had, let's see...a New Deal Democrat, a military/libertarian Republican, a gay Eurosocialist. The worlds they built reflected their sociopolitical values, and guess what - nobody worried about it! It just caused them to offer different styles of future, which fans debated as alternative scenarios, which is the whole idea. The field as a whole had no net political coloration.
What Beale and his minions (there might be henchmen in next year's budget, but they'll never be able to afford cronies) are mainly concerned about seems to be identity politics, especially when combined with the current softening of the science being presented in an effort to broaden readership. I think they have a point on the retreat from science into what Beale calls "angsty fantasy," but do fans really care deeply about the gender ratios in their stories? Beale is attacking from a fundie Christian perspective that has zero following in the genre.
If SF needs a political mission, I would like to see it address a real present danger, which is the general culture's mounting disrespect for science itself. Tis showed up first as a generalized fear of every application of science, but it has mushroomed into deep-seated evil like this:
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015...
If these people gain political traction, everything we value here is in deep trouble. If the genre wants to charge into a political battle, this is the one it needs to join.
"There's nothing more frustrating than getting everything set up and then having your loco break."
But don't you want your railroad to be a realistic Amtrak model?
But seriously, if you want to see a really large railfan layout, visit San Diego:
http://www.balboapark.org/in-t...
"Unbelievably harsh" is relative the technology of the time. A few specialized people do live in Antarctica now. New islands have been created, and swamps drained. As we better at robotics and nanotech and genetic engineering, we will populate the solar system.
One nice feature that industrial unions offered was training, taking workers through a series of steps from apprentice to journeyman to master. On each level there was a certain set of skills required, and the organization served as a focus for getting each worker to his (yes, that was the only pronoun in those days) maximum level of competency. Certainly, after WW II and through the Fifties and Sixties the tipping of power toward big-city unions led to those dreaded excesses that today's young people would hate to see happen in tech. We've all heard the stories about conferences in Eastern cities where the jobsite work rules won't allow an exhibitor to move her own chair ten feet across the hall. But in organizing for the modern age, tech workers have an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past and do it better. We can concentrate on the advantages while avoiding those Rust Belt excesses.
Note that your source is the same Michael Church as my source, writing a couple of years earlier on the topic. In his latest column there was no attempt to set aside "professionals" as being somehow more magic than regular organized workers. The difference is what, exactly? Professionals have codes of ethics, can't be "fired" in the ordinary sense, and generally operate in small groups from their own partnerships, which have a life independent from the clients they serve. Perhaps he has realized since then that most developers don't have the same interests as neurosurgeons, that not everyone wants to run his own complicated little business that has to deal with the client as an independent bargaining unit. Furthermore, such an arrangement might not even increase employment in the field, because many companies want to operate their own staffs of tech personnel under their own rules. So now Church seems to have relaxed his stance and come to the conclusion that unions are a better, more inclusive type of organization for tech workers than trying to form a new profession.
If we stopped buying from the Middle East, our oil costs would rise somewhat, probably enough to encourage the exploitation we need.
"That would mean less wars, less bombing campaigns, less drone attacks and less demonetisation of muslims and arabs."
Grammatical terrorism aside, "demonetisation" would be the most humane approach if you don't like bombing and droning, and leads to the big nerd tie-in on this issue.
Who funds terrorists, ultimately? We do, whenever we stop at a gas station. We need to stop buying anything whatever from the jihadist region. Build the reactor fleet it will take to move us away from fossil fuel, while transitionally maxing out our own remaining oil and gas production. If there proves to be anything to that carbon warming hypothesis, we would thereby have that covered too.
GOOD one! Why don't we get mod points anymore?
I'm glad to see Flash go, but it did offer us an element of control over autoplaying videos, by setting your Flash add-on to "Play if clicked." Now we have been stripped of even that meager choice.
A "random brown guy." Yeah, right. Pull the other one. No matter how many massacres involving organization and the kind of heavy weapons which are hard to get in Europe because, you know, it has strict gun control, the media there hopefully keeps calling each one a lone-wolf attack.
What Europe needs to do is ship all of those "refugees" back to the hellhole shores they came from. Those who honestly want a better life have two options: they can go to a embassy and apply for legal immigration into some other country like all those generations of people before them, or they can stand and take back their homelands from the jihadists. We will gladly offer drone and bomb strikes where those might help.
We have a refugee problem of our own in the US, solutions for which are the biggest subject of debate in the new presidential campaign. As in Europe, a certain small percentage of our refugee stream consists of bad guys. But at least our bad guys are the kind of common criminals we can take care of with our own guns, not bloodthirsty international terrorists organizing to take over a continent where hitting your mugger with an umbrella is considered a felony.
"This sort of thing feeds into the TSA mentality - search everyone everywhere every time. And then it will feed into the NRA mantra of everyone being armed everywhere every time."
And best of all, it's the umpteenth time that an illegal alien terrorist (sorry, "refugee") has taken advantage of European white guilt to slaughter people he know were unarmed and wouldn't resist. But whoops, US Marines happened to be standing near that toilet.
How many Charlie Hebdos will it take before they know
That too many people have died?