It's a bit too simplistic to call all the people responsible for the Republicans' fiasco neo-cons.
The Republicans looked very powerful around the time of GW Bush's first election, but what they had is something we old time Democrats knew a lot about: a big tent coalition. We had the cultural elite and labor, and Reagan figured out that that was a fracture line he could split Democratic support along.
The difference is that the Republican coalition had even less coherence than the Democrats, and underwent spontaneous implosion as they tried to put together an agenda that pleased everyone in the tent: Westerners of a libertarian bent, the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party, the evangelicals, the flat out racists. That's why they could never control spending, they were too busy keeping everybody in the tent happy. They fooled themselves into thinking they were cleverly doing this temporarily so they could "starve the beast" until such a time the system began to fall apart. That was stupid. You can't starve the beast. If you try, then when things start to fall apart it just reaches out and eats you alive.
Still, if you want to find a scapegoat, look the the Southern social conservatives. It was their backing of the messianic mission of the neo-cons that allowed them to hijack foreign policy.
Nixon invited the old enemies of the Republicans economic elites into th party, the old Dixiecrats. They became powerful, like the far out religious parties in Israel, because they were the key to power. They're the ones that run the Republican party; not the people who elected Eisenhower. It's too bad, because the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party weren't such a bad bunch, if you kept an eye on them. The country needs people like that, even if you didn't want them to have unchallenged control over policy.
But those old time Republicans don't have any place to go now. The Republican party has been redefined out from under them. It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
For one thing, while he won't be an automatic vote for cloture, he won't be an automatic vote against it either. If Franken is seated (as appears likely), Specter will be the swing vote. He'll have the Republicans by the short and curlies.
With the Republican percentage so close to the point where they can be stomped on in the Senate by the Democrats, this is a major setback for them.
If you paid 100,000 for a vacation, that's one kind of spending. If you paid $100,000 for a computer controlled milling machine, that's a different kind of spending.
The financial difference is that the second expenditure is a capital expense. You convert money assets into valuable non-money assets, moreover ones that will create more money in the future.
Furthermore, you can't just lump all kinds of spending together, you can't lump the same expenditures at different times together. "Stimulative" spending during times of robust economic growth and full employment is wasteful, because the economy is a stimulated as it's going to be. You end up choking the goose that lays the golden eggs with food.
Likewise belt-tightening during a time when demand is slackening because everyone thinks the bottom is dropping out of the economy would be suicidal.
OK, maybe this is a 3% tax on America. But if it's been spent in America, it's not like we're taking that money out of the economy. Nobody blinks an eye when the Fed lowers interest rates, even though this in effect devalues the future value of our assets more than this would. Well, the Fed has darn near reached the end of what it can do. For a while people were willing to basically pay the Fed to hold onto their money.
So, this would be a good time to think about that milling machine, or more specifically things like technology to help us out of our foreign oil dependency. The private sector isn't going to get the job done, because energy prices won't start rising again until there's strong economic growth. Once there is strong economic growth, and the money is flowing into the treasury, then that's a good time to tighten our belts.
Well, any kind of warfare would then be terrorism, wouldn't it, at least according to Clausewitz, who famously called war "the continuation of policy by other means."
The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is often in the eye of the beholder. My wife was on a boy scout leader forum the other day in which one participant claimed that trade unions and the National Organization of Women were terrorist organizations.
The salient features of terrorism are that
(1) it is violently intimidating, either causing or threatening civilian casualties as its primary effect. (2) it falls outside the internationally recognized norms for conducting warfare. (3) is not justifiable in terms of attacking a nation's war fighting or military operational capabilities. i.e. it does not target military units or civilian infrastructure critical to those units' operations.
Even so, it's not always possible to draw a bright line. For example, there is still debate as to whether the WW2 firebombing of Dresden was justifiable. "They deserve it because they're at war with us" isn't a justification. You could use the same justification for the 9/11 attacks; certainly of the Pentagon, and probably of the WTC too. They're both part of a system which helps keep regimes that Al Qaeda doesn't like in power, for example the Saudi monarchy.
Likewise the American Revolution included non-uniformed militia who could attack British units then fade back into the population, e.g. in the NJ Forage War. These militia operated outside the norms of warfare during their day. In fact some of the arguments advanced to show that Taliban fighters are terrorists would serve for US Revolutionary minutemen as well.
While it is possible to argue that those Taliban fighters are "illegal combatants", they aren't necessarily terrorists.
Except that they can't recoup costs by giving away efficient appliances and bulbs, because they aren't a utility, nor are they a government with enough electricity users and a regulated utility to play those kinds of financial games.
So, unless there's untapped oil reserves sitting under Rome, this is just about the only way for them to get into the energy game, once they've replace all their own light bulbs.
Also, catching the tech wave is all about timing and positioning too. There's always going to be some folks who try too early, and others that think the ones catching the wave are too early. Somebody's got to try early, because the technology won't really be practical until there have been a few failures.
There is no citation to follow, not even enough information to find a citation. There's only a recounting of selected remarks by Dr. Allison that the reporter thought most likely to sway our opinion.
When you've got a published study you can cite, you've got something to make an argument from. One study isn't conclusive, but at least it's negatable, which Murdoch "journalism" is by design not. Remember the polar bears? Millions of people are still confused by Murdoch's "science journalism".
Anybody who "cites" an article like TFA as proof of anything only demonstrates his own ignorance.
Where the defenses are strongest, the suffering is greatest.
Let's consider that proverb in a slightly different light. Let's say we've identified some OS as the most hacker-proof operating system in the world. You are free to imagine this is whatever you like: Windows, MaxOS, FreeBSD, or some Linux variant.
Now consider that "hacker proof" is a relative term. We cannot cling to an OS brand and expect it to protect us from all harm. In fact, strengthening our defenses by using that OS makes us more vulnerable than we ever were before. Yes, it's harder to break than any other OS, but not impossible, and now the reward for an attacker is very much greater. It is conceivable that an attacker could use this lack of diversity to digitally silence all Tibetans at some critical point in the future.
I would, instead, mandate diversity. Embrace open standards, insist on compliant implementations, and forgo non-standard extensions unless there is a clear duty to do otherwise. This is much easier than it was a few years ago. Don't standardize on OpenOffice, standardize on OpenDocument format. Don't use ActiceDirectory, use Kerberos or some LDAP based scheme. Then encourage the adoption of more than one implementation. Promote the projects that are useful, using the great moral authority of HHTDL to bring the same software freedoms to others that the Tibetans will enjoy.
The main point is not to become attached to a platform, much less a brand or vendor. Make the rewards of an attacker as small as possible by spreading your eggs across multiple baskets. Also, be as open with information as possible; the fewer secrets, the smaller the rewards of cracking the safe.
Ultimately, you should be attached only to standards. This is different than being attached to a "de facto standard" implementation, because a good, non-proprietary standard is easier to let go of.
Since the consumer is paying the tax, it seems reasonable to me that the money go to his state. Otherwise, it increases, albeit slightly, the distorting effects of the tax on economic decisions. If I had two vendors, one in state and one out of state, and I was paying the same tax either way, I'd opt for in state. Likewise, it provides an incentive for states to move taxation from sales to income taxes (which might be a good thing) or property taxes in order to attract business to bricks and mortar stores and away from online retailers.
I buy and use what I like and what I feel lets me work best.
Reports like this aren't aimed for people like you.
They're aimed at people who buy stuff for other people, using money that is not their own, which is a crappy and thankless job. And those people aren't expected to believe this stuff. It's more of a courtesy to the ones who spend their lives plodding along on the purchasing treadmill; a valentine if you will.
It's like diplomacy. Nobody believes it when talks are described as "frank but cordial". That's just a code that says, "Even if all is not right with the world, things aren't getting much worse than they used to be." When talks are just "frank" it's time to restock your nuclear shelter.
Competitive products haven't gained a foothold because iPods are priced effectively at zero.
Of course they aren't actually priced at zero from the point of view of making a profit, but they are priced low enough that people don't bother to comparison shop, and from a competitive standpoint that's within spitting distance of zero. Apple doesn't have to watch their low-price flank, because they're occupying every price niche from $79 up to the maximum any sane person would want to spend on such a device. And in every price range, they're offering no-brainer values. Oh, you can probably get better devices for the price, but it's not worth the trouble to figure that out when you can buy an iPod. People have better things to do with their time than pouring over the specifications and features of portable media players. They just figure out how much they're willing to spend, walk over to the iPod display, and buy the next model up. Then they get on with their lives.
Now if somebody came out with a device that inspired consumer lust, and priced it comparably to a similar iPod, then we'd see some market position turmoil and Apple would have to either tweak its products or its prices. But Zune wasn't the device to make them do it.
Well, it all boils down to this: businesses maximize profits.
Sure, they'd like theft to go away, but they aren't going to spend $2 to reduce $1 of theft. That's why ATM technology has never been particularly secure. People just assume that ATMs have the kind of safeguards that are used to control the nation's nuclear launch capability, but they don't, because while that would probably reduce theft to nearly zero, it would cost more than it would save.
That's why Diebold doesn't have the expertise or technology needed to produce a decent voting machine. Good enough for an ATM is so far below good enough for a voting machine, you're far better off hiring somebody who is starting with a blank sheet of paper than somebody with ATM experience.
Now if this vulnerability proves to be a big money hole, they'll plug it. And that's all they'll do. They won't reevaluate and overhaul their entire installed based of machines and the networks that connect them, they'll do the bare minimum to plug the hole. That means there'll be another hole in a year or two. And that's OK, because it'll be a different person's problem, or if it's the same person's problem, well he fixed the last one so he can probably fix this one too. That's how they'll think about it. And they'll be "doing things right", from an economic standpoint, which is the only one that matters in this case.
If we were talking something like identity theft, there'd be a deeper moral obligation to do something about that. But they probably wouldn't unless there was a law that made them do it. Businesses don't spend $2 to save themselves $1 of expense, nor do they spend $1 to save somebody else $100,000 of expense.
Well, sure. But the thing I keep coming back to is this: democracy isn't about ensuring that we get good and wise leaders. No system can do that. It's about making sure we can kick the really bad ones out.
Here's something interesting. I'm only two degrees separated from Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar. We have a mutual friend. So whenever he's in the news, I always listen to what he is saying. Mostly, what he does is act for an apologist for the Saudi regime. One point he likes to make is that monarchies aren't really that different from democracies. When a monarchy screws up, it gets thrown out, only instead of it being done by an election, you have armed people in the streets.
The point he's missing, of course, is that things have to get really awful for that to happen. They've either got to be so bad that people risk being arrested and tortured by the secret police, or that everybody in the country rises up at the same time. You can't throw out the monarchy because you don't like, let's say, their trade policies. Nobody is going to throw out the monarchy because they think the next monarchy might have marginally better taxation policies.
The thing that makes a republic the best form of government ever devised is the low cost of participating in revolution. All you've got to do is check somebody else's box on the ballot. That means the people in power have to pay attention to the future well-being of the people if they don't want to lose power. You don't even get that under direct democracy.
They don't need to build a regular power station. They can just tap into the grid like everyone else.
Also, while your amortization is a bit high, you have to realize that $2200/year is not such a huge amount of money for Florida, under last year's energy prices. As a New Englander, I only turn on the air conditioning in one or two rooms part time for maybe six weeks out of the year, but Floridians don't have that option. For them air conditioning is like heating is for us. I'll bet a lot of folks in Miami use electric heaters in one or two rooms in the middle of winter, but have whole house air conditioning. Up here, we do the opposite. We've got a couple of teeny window air conditioners, but run our central heating system nine months out of the year.
Also, you have to figure in probable energy prices after the economic recovery kicks in. It's like a futures market. This would be a great time to lock in most of your energy prices for the next decade or two.
Well, look at Lotus Note/Domino. The original, pre-Internet application was essentially a document management and distribution engine. The E-mail bit was just a pre-built template you got with it. There was nothing special about that. An experienced administrator could cobble together other kinds of document distribution applications of equal sophistication for tasks like document approval or content management (although we didn't call it that).
Despite it's stylistic faults, I think this approach was conceptually sound. The problem was that so many of the really useful concepts, such as public key cryptographic message authentication and key management, were way beyond the average admin of the day. I attended a class once, and people just couldn't get their brains around the process of signing keys, which really isn't that conceptually challenging. I think once they got over that hump, they never wanted to learn anything else about the product.
The problem was rather than accept this made Notes a niche product, IBM tried to compete with Exchange. They didn't address the faults of Notes so much as try to copy Exchange, and then only superficially. The best part of Exchange is the ease of integrating calendar and e-mail. Since many people use e-mail anyway as a to-do list, integrating PIM and email is a must-do. The underlying document model of Notes should work very well with something like CalDAV, where calendars are basically collections of documents describing events. That shows the architecture is basically sound and they could have carved out a solid, high end niche. IBM just never put together a compelling "value proposition". They tried to chase Microsoft's taillights and lost.
Sure, but you don't create new radioactivity by oxidizing the carbon atoms in coal. It was there already.
The problem isn't fly ash per se. Every non-renewable energy source is going to have its equivalent of that. Even certain renewable energy sources have their environmental issues associated with them. Whatever the issue an energy source has, that issue should not come as a surprise when usage of that source is scaled up.
The problem is looking for a quick fix. Don't have enough petroleum? Coal is a quick fix. Worried about carbon emissions? "Clean coal" is a quick fix. But even "clean coal" has its issues, and they shouldn't come as a surprise if we attempt to create that technology and scale it up. If you view it as part of a range of strategies we might combine, you don't have to stick your head under the blanket about clean coal's problems, because you've got more than one arrow in your quiver. You can decide whether to scale coal up more and use the savings to pay to deal with its issues, or you can adjust the mix of sources you use. The same applies to nuclear.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominate.
Also known in the last election as "real America".
On the other hand, looks can be deceiving. In my big city suburb we have book clubs, craft and sports clubs, coffee houses and restaurants that have regulars that see each other all the time and so are practically private social clubs, voluntary service organizations, a volunteer symphony orchestra, amateur theater, churches, synagogues... the list goes on. And guess what? The people in these groups are friends.
You can disappear into anonymous loneliness in the big city, and nobody notices. That's probably the difference. In a small town, a loner sticks out. But you don't have to be a loner just because you have to be.
It may have been five months since Obama was elected, but his AG is brand spankin' new on the job. Not to mention he's had other things to do in his first three months on the job other than putting Ted Stevens head on a pike, like learn the names of his staff, and review the past administration's policies. You can hardly expect him to sort out this mess in that time as well. If there is one thing this case shows, its that we don't want sloppy prosecution. It's crazy that we even have to be reminded of this. Ramming people through highly public, procedurally broken trials is a favorite tactic of dictators.
The reason we're going back to the Bush administration is that it is very likely that Bush administration officials committed crimes in this case. The judge starting contempt proceedings now against the prosecutors that will probably result in them being disbarred at the very least. It's a crime of negligence, but that doesn't matter. A democracy can't afford to let its legal system run people over with crappy prosecutions -- even guilty people. Every legal right a person has, voting, freedom of speech and assembly, property, even the right to life; every one of these rights can be taken away from an individual by a court of law.
Therefore the standards of conduct for such courts must be amazingly high. Ted Stevens is nothing compared to this. They probably could convict him on the second time around, but he is nothing compared to the importance of keeping prosecutions honest. When a court orders some right of a citizen to be stripped from him, we cannot allow cases like his to overshadow that act. There has to be a higher standard of legal success than the count of heads stuck on a pike.
The AG is sending a message that getting the DoJ's house in order is his highest priority. That's a good call, in my opinion.
Everyone knows penguins are cuter than polar bears.
Also, spend a few hours on Google Scholar on the polar bear issue. Record polar bear populations seen in a single habitat is a reasonable outcome of overall habitat reduction.
Well, I've been following this since issue well before it was a political one - since around 1983 or so. Let me tell you, there were years and years of serious debate and back and forth on this issue before it got any mention in the popular press.
You need to back up your statement "My concern is that scientists are getting caught up in the Global Warming dogma and it is narrowing their search patterns." It seems to me that you think the discussion is one sided because you've come late to the party. You can't expect everyone to backup and have that same old conversation over again. That's why your library keeps old journals around.
I'm not a scientist myself, but my wife is an Earth scientist. We've been following the climate change story now for twenty five years or more in Eos and other journals.
As an interested outsider, I think one of the reasons that scientists took so long to get off the dime when it came to sounding the alarm was that most of them were waiting for the other shoe to drop. There has not been another scientific story like climate change in generations. Not since evolution.
One of the things my wife often said over the years was, "the evidence is too good." And I'm sure she's not the only one. It goes against scientific training to get behind a theory until it's been given a serious beating, and nobody has been able to lay a glove on this one.
What people who don't have a real live Earth scientist available for observation need to understand is that even proponents of the theory would love to see the skeptical position put up a decent fight. Data this unambiguous doesn't seem scientific. It's spooky. They'd rather see the theory knocked down onto the mat, then get up to fight another round and win by decision.
People waited around for the skeptics to give this theory a solid hit, and in over twenty five years the skeptics have failed, over and over and over. First they argued that climate wasn't changing, and although they did manage to discredit some data sets, that position failed. Next they tried to explain the data in terms of non-anthropogenic causes; at best they've forced some changes in models and in the predicted ranges of change. So far as I know, no attempt to explain the changes in climate data over the last fifty years in terms of natural cycles or statistical artifacts has held up to scrutiny.
I understand that science is not a democracy; but it's not driven by individual data sets either. You have to look at how robust an hypothesis is, how it stands up under stress. Thus far, nobody has been able to seriously set the theory back. Who wouldn't want to do this, if they could? Discrediting anthropogenic climate change would be Nobel caliber work. It would be an immense service to humanity, comparable in importance if not greater than the discovery of the vaccine for polio, or penicillin was in medicine.
Think about the places that have lots of oil. Nigeria. Saudi Arabia. Venezuela.
Now, think about how enlightened those places are in comparisons to place that built their economy mostly on the industry and ingenuity of their people. Would you rather live in Switzerland or Nigeria? Denmark or Venezuela?
The thing is, if you want to make a lot of money by digging it out of the ground, once you have enough engineers and accountants and such to fill your needs, an intelligent, educated populace doesn't contribute much to the corporate bottom line. They're a pain in the ass, to be frank. They'll complain about environmental costs you foist on them. They'll ask inconvenient questions about the financial aspects of the government's relationship to the extracting companies, like the details of leases for public lands, waivers, permits and the like.
If you're one of the major benefactors of an extraction based economy, you want your average neighbor to be as idiotic as possible. Since making this happen costs money like anything else in this world, you also want them to stay that way. What's the cheapest way of doing this?
You make them proud. You fill their heads with glorious myths and very few hard facts, until they'll fight like hell to stay ignorant.
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Well, maybe the fact that 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania have called it quits says something about the Republican party.
There is a saying in The Talmud: If one man calls you an ass, ignore him. If two call you an ass, buy a saddle.
It's a bit too simplistic to call all the people responsible for the Republicans' fiasco neo-cons.
The Republicans looked very powerful around the time of GW Bush's first election, but what they had is something we old time Democrats knew a lot about: a big tent coalition. We had the cultural elite and labor, and Reagan figured out that that was a fracture line he could split Democratic support along.
The difference is that the Republican coalition had even less coherence than the Democrats, and underwent spontaneous implosion as they tried to put together an agenda that pleased everyone in the tent: Westerners of a libertarian bent, the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party, the evangelicals, the flat out racists. That's why they could never control spending, they were too busy keeping everybody in the tent happy. They fooled themselves into thinking they were cleverly doing this temporarily so they could "starve the beast" until such a time the system began to fall apart. That was stupid. You can't starve the beast. If you try, then when things start to fall apart it just reaches out and eats you alive.
Still, if you want to find a scapegoat, look the the Southern social conservatives. It was their backing of the messianic mission of the neo-cons that allowed them to hijack foreign policy.
Nixon invited the old enemies of the Republicans economic elites into th party, the old Dixiecrats. They became powerful, like the far out religious parties in Israel, because they were the key to power. They're the ones that run the Republican party; not the people who elected Eisenhower. It's too bad, because the old economic and intellectual elite of the Republican party weren't such a bad bunch, if you kept an eye on them. The country needs people like that, even if you didn't want them to have unchallenged control over policy.
But those old time Republicans don't have any place to go now. The Republican party has been redefined out from under them. It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
Maybe it's time for a Grand New Party.
Nerds are citizens, therefore we have an interest in this. We aren't idiots, therefore we don't have an interest in celebrity news.
Oh, I think this is bad news for the Republicans.
For one thing, while he won't be an automatic vote for cloture, he won't be an automatic vote against it either. If Franken is seated (as appears likely), Specter will be the swing vote. He'll have the Republicans by the short and curlies.
With the Republican percentage so close to the point where they can be stomped on in the Senate by the Democrats, this is a major setback for them.
Well, there's spending and spending.
If you paid 100,000 for a vacation, that's one kind of spending. If you paid $100,000 for a computer controlled milling machine, that's a different kind of spending.
The financial difference is that the second expenditure is a capital expense. You convert money assets into valuable non-money assets, moreover ones that will create more money in the future.
Furthermore, you can't just lump all kinds of spending together, you can't lump the same expenditures at different times together. "Stimulative" spending during times of robust economic growth and full employment is wasteful, because the economy is a stimulated as it's going to be. You end up choking the goose that lays the golden eggs with food.
Likewise belt-tightening during a time when demand is slackening because everyone thinks the bottom is dropping out of the economy would be suicidal.
OK, maybe this is a 3% tax on America. But if it's been spent in America, it's not like we're taking that money out of the economy. Nobody blinks an eye when the Fed lowers interest rates, even though this in effect devalues the future value of our assets more than this would. Well, the Fed has darn near reached the end of what it can do. For a while people were willing to basically pay the Fed to hold onto their money.
So, this would be a good time to think about that milling machine, or more specifically things like technology to help us out of our foreign oil dependency. The private sector isn't going to get the job done, because energy prices won't start rising again until there's strong economic growth. Once there is strong economic growth, and the money is flowing into the treasury, then that's a good time to tighten our belts.
That's right. It's not a state, like Georgia.
Oh, wait a minute...
Oh, wait a minute wait a minute ......
Well, any kind of warfare would then be terrorism, wouldn't it, at least according to Clausewitz, who famously called war "the continuation of policy by other means."
The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is often in the eye of the beholder. My wife was on a boy scout leader forum the other day in which one participant claimed that trade unions and the National Organization of Women were terrorist organizations.
The salient features of terrorism are that
(1) it is violently intimidating, either causing or threatening civilian casualties as its primary effect.
(2) it falls outside the internationally recognized norms for conducting warfare.
(3) is not justifiable in terms of attacking a nation's war fighting or military operational capabilities. i.e. it does not target military units or civilian infrastructure critical to those units' operations.
Even so, it's not always possible to draw a bright line. For example, there is still debate as to whether the WW2 firebombing of Dresden was justifiable. "They deserve it because they're at war with us" isn't a justification. You could use the same justification for the 9/11 attacks; certainly of the Pentagon, and probably of the WTC too. They're both part of a system which helps keep regimes that Al Qaeda doesn't like in power, for example the Saudi monarchy.
Likewise the American Revolution included non-uniformed militia who could attack British units then fade back into the population, e.g. in the NJ Forage War. These militia operated outside the norms of warfare during their day. In fact some of the arguments advanced to show that Taliban fighters are terrorists would serve for US Revolutionary minutemen as well.
While it is possible to argue that those Taliban fighters are "illegal combatants", they aren't necessarily terrorists.
nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair...
Reminds me of that joke that starts: "Why do dogs lick their balls?"
Except that they can't recoup costs by giving away efficient appliances and bulbs, because they aren't a utility, nor are they a government with enough electricity users and a regulated utility to play those kinds of financial games.
So, unless there's untapped oil reserves sitting under Rome, this is just about the only way for them to get into the energy game, once they've replace all their own light bulbs.
Also, catching the tech wave is all about timing and positioning too. There's always going to be some folks who try too early, and others that think the ones catching the wave are too early. Somebody's got to try early, because the technology won't really be practical until there have been a few failures.
analysis from Rupert Murdoch?
There is no citation to follow, not even enough information to find a citation. There's only a recounting of selected remarks by Dr. Allison that the reporter thought most likely to sway our opinion.
When you've got a published study you can cite, you've got something to make an argument from. One study isn't conclusive, but at least it's negatable, which Murdoch "journalism" is by design not. Remember the polar bears? Millions of people are still confused by Murdoch's "science journalism".
Anybody who "cites" an article like TFA as proof of anything only demonstrates his own ignorance.
Where the defenses are strongest, the suffering is greatest.
Let's consider that proverb in a slightly different light. Let's say we've identified some OS as the most hacker-proof operating system in the world. You are free to imagine this is whatever you like: Windows, MaxOS, FreeBSD, or some Linux variant.
Now consider that "hacker proof" is a relative term. We cannot cling to an OS brand and expect it to protect us from all harm. In fact, strengthening our defenses by using that OS makes us more vulnerable than we ever were before. Yes, it's harder to break than any other OS, but not impossible, and now the reward for an attacker is very much greater. It is conceivable that an attacker could use this lack of diversity to digitally silence all Tibetans at some critical point in the future.
I would, instead, mandate diversity. Embrace open standards, insist on compliant implementations, and forgo non-standard extensions unless there is a clear duty to do otherwise. This is much easier than it was a few years ago. Don't standardize on OpenOffice, standardize on OpenDocument format. Don't use ActiceDirectory, use Kerberos or some LDAP based scheme. Then encourage the adoption of more than one implementation. Promote the projects that are useful, using the great moral authority of HHTDL to bring the same software freedoms to others that the Tibetans will enjoy.
The main point is not to become attached to a platform, much less a brand or vendor. Make the rewards of an attacker as small as possible by spreading your eggs across multiple baskets. Also, be as open with information as possible; the fewer secrets, the smaller the rewards of cracking the safe.
Ultimately, you should be attached only to standards. This is different than being attached to a "de facto standard" implementation, because a good, non-proprietary standard is easier to let go of.
Since the consumer is paying the tax, it seems reasonable to me that the money go to his state. Otherwise, it increases, albeit slightly, the distorting effects of the tax on economic decisions. If I had two vendors, one in state and one out of state, and I was paying the same tax either way, I'd opt for in state. Likewise, it provides an incentive for states to move taxation from sales to income taxes (which might be a good thing) or property taxes in order to attract business to bricks and mortar stores and away from online retailers.
I buy and use what I like and what I feel lets me work best.
Reports like this aren't aimed for people like you.
They're aimed at people who buy stuff for other people, using money that is not their own, which is a crappy and thankless job. And those people aren't expected to believe this stuff. It's more of a courtesy to the ones who spend their lives plodding along on the purchasing treadmill; a valentine if you will.
It's like diplomacy. Nobody believes it when talks are described as "frank but cordial". That's just a code that says, "Even if all is not right with the world, things aren't getting much worse than they used to be." When talks are just "frank" it's time to restock your nuclear shelter.
Competitive products haven't gained a foothold because iPods are priced effectively at zero.
Of course they aren't actually priced at zero from the point of view of making a profit, but they are priced low enough that people don't bother to comparison shop, and from a competitive standpoint that's within spitting distance of zero. Apple doesn't have to watch their low-price flank, because they're occupying every price niche from $79 up to the maximum any sane person would want to spend on such a device. And in every price range, they're offering no-brainer values. Oh, you can probably get better devices for the price, but it's not worth the trouble to figure that out when you can buy an iPod. People have better things to do with their time than pouring over the specifications and features of portable media players. They just figure out how much they're willing to spend, walk over to the iPod display, and buy the next model up. Then they get on with their lives.
Now if somebody came out with a device that inspired consumer lust, and priced it comparably to a similar iPod, then we'd see some market position turmoil and Apple would have to either tweak its products or its prices. But Zune wasn't the device to make them do it.
Well, it all boils down to this: businesses maximize profits.
Sure, they'd like theft to go away, but they aren't going to spend $2 to reduce $1 of theft. That's why ATM technology has never been particularly secure. People just assume that ATMs have the kind of safeguards that are used to control the nation's nuclear launch capability, but they don't, because while that would probably reduce theft to nearly zero, it would cost more than it would save.
That's why Diebold doesn't have the expertise or technology needed to produce a decent voting machine. Good enough for an ATM is so far below good enough for a voting machine, you're far better off hiring somebody who is starting with a blank sheet of paper than somebody with ATM experience.
Now if this vulnerability proves to be a big money hole, they'll plug it. And that's all they'll do. They won't reevaluate and overhaul their entire installed based of machines and the networks that connect them, they'll do the bare minimum to plug the hole. That means there'll be another hole in a year or two. And that's OK, because it'll be a different person's problem, or if it's the same person's problem, well he fixed the last one so he can probably fix this one too. That's how they'll think about it. And they'll be "doing things right", from an economic standpoint, which is the only one that matters in this case.
If we were talking something like identity theft, there'd be a deeper moral obligation to do something about that. But they probably wouldn't unless there was a law that made them do it. Businesses don't spend $2 to save themselves $1 of expense, nor do they spend $1 to save somebody else $100,000 of expense.
Well, sure. But the thing I keep coming back to is this: democracy isn't about ensuring that we get good and wise leaders. No system can do that. It's about making sure we can kick the really bad ones out.
Here's something interesting. I'm only two degrees separated from Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar. We have a mutual friend. So whenever he's in the news, I always listen to what he is saying. Mostly, what he does is act for an apologist for the Saudi regime. One point he likes to make is that monarchies aren't really that different from democracies. When a monarchy screws up, it gets thrown out, only instead of it being done by an election, you have armed people in the streets.
The point he's missing, of course, is that things have to get really awful for that to happen. They've either got to be so bad that people risk being arrested and tortured by the secret police, or that everybody in the country rises up at the same time. You can't throw out the monarchy because you don't like, let's say, their trade policies. Nobody is going to throw out the monarchy because they think the next monarchy might have marginally better taxation policies.
The thing that makes a republic the best form of government ever devised is the low cost of participating in revolution. All you've got to do is check somebody else's box on the ballot. That means the people in power have to pay attention to the future well-being of the people if they don't want to lose power. You don't even get that under direct democracy.
They don't need to build a regular power station. They can just tap into the grid like everyone else.
Also, while your amortization is a bit high, you have to realize that $2200/year is not such a huge amount of money for Florida, under last year's energy prices. As a New Englander, I only turn on the air conditioning in one or two rooms part time for maybe six weeks out of the year, but Floridians don't have that option. For them air conditioning is like heating is for us. I'll bet a lot of folks in Miami use electric heaters in one or two rooms in the middle of winter, but have whole house air conditioning. Up here, we do the opposite. We've got a couple of teeny window air conditioners, but run our central heating system nine months out of the year.
Also, you have to figure in probable energy prices after the economic recovery kicks in. It's like a futures market. This would be a great time to lock in most of your energy prices for the next decade or two.
Well, look at Lotus Note/Domino. The original, pre-Internet application was essentially a document management and distribution engine. The E-mail bit was just a pre-built template you got with it. There was nothing special about that. An experienced administrator could cobble together other kinds of document distribution applications of equal sophistication for tasks like document approval or content management (although we didn't call it that).
Despite it's stylistic faults, I think this approach was conceptually sound. The problem was that so many of the really useful concepts, such as public key cryptographic message authentication and key management, were way beyond the average admin of the day. I attended a class once, and people just couldn't get their brains around the process of signing keys, which really isn't that conceptually challenging. I think once they got over that hump, they never wanted to learn anything else about the product.
The problem was rather than accept this made Notes a niche product, IBM tried to compete with Exchange. They didn't address the faults of Notes so much as try to copy Exchange, and then only superficially. The best part of Exchange is the ease of integrating calendar and e-mail. Since many people use e-mail anyway as a to-do list, integrating PIM and email is a must-do. The underlying document model of Notes should work very well with something like CalDAV, where calendars are basically collections of documents describing events. That shows the architecture is basically sound and they could have carved out a solid, high end niche. IBM just never put together a compelling "value proposition". They tried to chase Microsoft's taillights and lost.
Sure, but you don't create new radioactivity by oxidizing the carbon atoms in coal. It was there already.
The problem isn't fly ash per se. Every non-renewable energy source is going to have its equivalent of that. Even certain renewable energy sources have their environmental issues associated with them. Whatever the issue an energy source has, that issue should not come as a surprise when usage of that source is scaled up.
The problem is looking for a quick fix. Don't have enough petroleum? Coal is a quick fix. Worried about carbon emissions? "Clean coal" is a quick fix. But even "clean coal" has its issues, and they shouldn't come as a surprise if we attempt to create that technology and scale it up. If you view it as part of a range of strategies we might combine, you don't have to stick your head under the blanket about clean coal's problems, because you've got more than one arrow in your quiver. You can decide whether to scale coal up more and use the savings to pay to deal with its issues, or you can adjust the mix of sources you use. The same applies to nuclear.
Also known in the last election as "real America".
On the other hand, looks can be deceiving. In my big city suburb we have book clubs, craft and sports clubs, coffee houses and restaurants that have regulars that see each other all the time and so are practically private social clubs, voluntary service organizations, a volunteer symphony orchestra, amateur theater, churches, synagogues ... the list goes on. And guess what? The people in these groups are friends.
You can disappear into anonymous loneliness in the big city, and nobody notices. That's probably the difference. In a small town, a loner sticks out. But you don't have to be a loner just because you have to be.
It may have been five months since Obama was elected, but his AG is brand spankin' new on the job. Not to mention he's had other things to do in his first three months on the job other than putting Ted Stevens head on a pike, like learn the names of his staff, and review the past administration's policies. You can hardly expect him to sort out this mess in that time as well. If there is one thing this case shows, its that we don't want sloppy prosecution. It's crazy that we even have to be reminded of this. Ramming people through highly public, procedurally broken trials is a favorite tactic of dictators.
The reason we're going back to the Bush administration is that it is very likely that Bush administration officials committed crimes in this case. The judge starting contempt proceedings now against the prosecutors that will probably result in them being disbarred at the very least. It's a crime of negligence, but that doesn't matter. A democracy can't afford to let its legal system run people over with crappy prosecutions -- even guilty people. Every legal right a person has, voting, freedom of speech and assembly, property, even the right to life; every one of these rights can be taken away from an individual by a court of law.
Therefore the standards of conduct for such courts must be amazingly high. Ted Stevens is nothing compared to this. They probably could convict him on the second time around, but he is nothing compared to the importance of keeping prosecutions honest. When a court orders some right of a citizen to be stripped from him, we cannot allow cases like his to overshadow that act. There has to be a higher standard of legal success than the count of heads stuck on a pike.
The AG is sending a message that getting the DoJ's house in order is his highest priority. That's a good call, in my opinion.
Serves you right.
Everyone knows penguins are cuter than polar bears.
Also, spend a few hours on Google Scholar on the polar bear issue. Record polar bear populations seen in a single habitat is a reasonable outcome of overall habitat reduction.
Well, I've been following this since issue well before it was a political one - since around 1983 or so. Let me tell you, there were years and years of serious debate and back and forth on this issue before it got any mention in the popular press.
You need to back up your statement "My concern is that scientists are getting caught up in the Global Warming dogma and it is narrowing their search patterns." It seems to me that you think the discussion is one sided because you've come late to the party. You can't expect everyone to backup and have that same old conversation over again. That's why your library keeps old journals around.
I'm not a scientist myself, but my wife is an Earth scientist. We've been following the climate change story now for twenty five years or more in Eos and other journals.
As an interested outsider, I think one of the reasons that scientists took so long to get off the dime when it came to sounding the alarm was that most of them were waiting for the other shoe to drop. There has not been another scientific story like climate change in generations. Not since evolution.
One of the things my wife often said over the years was, "the evidence is too good." And I'm sure she's not the only one. It goes against scientific training to get behind a theory until it's been given a serious beating, and nobody has been able to lay a glove on this one.
What people who don't have a real live Earth scientist available for observation need to understand is that even proponents of the theory would love to see the skeptical position put up a decent fight. Data this unambiguous doesn't seem scientific. It's spooky. They'd rather see the theory knocked down onto the mat, then get up to fight another round and win by decision.
People waited around for the skeptics to give this theory a solid hit, and in over twenty five years the skeptics have failed, over and over and over. First they argued that climate wasn't changing, and although they did manage to discredit some data sets, that position failed. Next they tried to explain the data in terms of non-anthropogenic causes; at best they've forced some changes in models and in the predicted ranges of change. So far as I know, no attempt to explain the changes in climate data over the last fifty years in terms of natural cycles or statistical artifacts has held up to scrutiny.
I understand that science is not a democracy; but it's not driven by individual data sets either. You have to look at how robust an hypothesis is, how it stands up under stress. Thus far, nobody has been able to seriously set the theory back. Who wouldn't want to do this, if they could? Discrediting anthropogenic climate change would be Nobel caliber work. It would be an immense service to humanity, comparable in importance if not greater than the discovery of the vaccine for polio, or penicillin was in medicine.
Well, sure, and it also gave us Molly Ivins.
Still, I wonder.
Think about the places that have lots of oil. Nigeria. Saudi Arabia. Venezuela.
Now, think about how enlightened those places are in comparisons to place that built their economy mostly on the industry and ingenuity of their people. Would you rather live in Switzerland or Nigeria? Denmark or Venezuela?
The thing is, if you want to make a lot of money by digging it out of the ground, once you have enough engineers and accountants and such to fill your needs, an intelligent, educated populace doesn't contribute much to the corporate bottom line. They're a pain in the ass, to be frank. They'll complain about environmental costs you foist on them. They'll ask inconvenient questions about the financial aspects of the government's relationship to the extracting companies, like the details of leases for public lands, waivers, permits and the like.
If you're one of the major benefactors of an extraction based economy, you want your average neighbor to be as idiotic as possible. Since making this happen costs money like anything else in this world, you also want them to stay that way. What's the cheapest way of doing this?
You make them proud. You fill their heads with glorious myths and very few hard facts, until they'll fight like hell to stay ignorant.