I thoroughly agree, current generation wind and solar aren't quite ready to replace other technologies. Nuclear is probably the best solution we have at the moment.
It would be nice to see a future with improved power storage technology for wind and solar. Nuclear could handle a large chunk of the grid's base load, while hydroelectric, wind, solar and their stored power could be used to handle shifts in demand.
It would also be nice to see more courage in developing nuclear systems, it's a mystery to me why Thorium isn't being developed, and why we can put so much security into waste, but not consider facilities which can generate power from the waste.
It amazes me the lack of logic. It seems consistent that when A -> B -> C, people get lost somewhere between A and B, policticians latch onto "Let's talk about 'A'", while anyone who starts to talk about B gets shouted down as some kind of egghead.
If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions won't do anything to help
That's a very big "if", based on a very black and white interpretation of reporters sensationalist reporting on science, and a stretch on "won't do anything". At best, I would say "If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions may have very little effect"
While economic incentives can help move things in certain directions, this won't really do that much and mostly will serve to enrich those that play the exchanges (see Wall Street).
This blows my mind. THE WORLD CONSUPTION OF FOSSIL FUELS IS BUILT ON ECONOMICS. people don't burn fossil fuels because it's fun, they burn them because they need to burn them to participate in their local economies. Shifting economic incentives could be all that's needed to make an enormous long term difference.
... climate change advocates...
There is no such thing. Nobody is advocating climate change, except maybe people planning the North West passage.
AGW, Anthroprogenic Global Warming. The theory that global temperatures are being altered by humans.
"cap and trade" your usage, you don't actually have to decrease the amount you use...
Cap and trade is economics. If you don't understand it, just stop talking about it. The free market sets the price on emissions. Increasing the price of emissions means that an incentive is created to reduce your emissions.
Cap and trade acts as a counterbalance to the problem that environmental controls cost money. The companies with the greatest energy efficiency are naturally penalized in the current economy. The controls cost more than the energy savings, so those without the controls outcompete in the market.
You can legislate local controls on emissions, but that affects your international competitiveness. China doesn't need to implement environmental controls, so they burn the fuel faster, negating any carbon emissions benefit that your local controls had in the first place.
Maybe crap in a bucket and dump it outside...
The problem with your crap in a bucket strawman is that climate science isn't like house repair. If you extend your analogy, we don't have other houses to compare ours with. Nobody's built a house before. Nobody's knocked down a house before. Only a handful of people have stepped on the lawn of the house, and nobody's sure if there are any other houses anywhere that we could live in. Also, all your food is grown inside your house, your water is contained inside your house, we're decades from figuring out how to put our crap in a bucket to throw our crap outside. Our windows don't open, we've got an air quality issue, and there are 6 billion people inside.
Do people mod this stuff up just because it suits their political opinions?
- 5% know somebody who can read code;
- 30% know somebody who knows somebody who can read code;
-...
- 100% know a newspaper who would publish the story if a single expert read the source code and discovered there is snooping hidden in it (by then a host of other experts can simply confirm this fact)
Knowing how to "code" isn't enough, you need to study the codebase. A tiny fraction of those who know how to code have studied the mailpile codebase enough to catch a backdoor. I would say, practially speaking... 0 outside the core developers.
Backdoors or snooping are best hidden with plausible deniability. Even if you discover one, it won't be obvious that it was intentional, it will be no more newsworthy than a typical vulnerability report.
I mean the "high volume of XP software" out there. Enterprises have downgrade rights to install their corporate standard XP images. The stickers on the machines might be Vista, but they're being wiped and loaded with XP before being given to employees.
WGA stopped the wholesale OEM piracy from the organized crime shops. They were even producing holograms, shiny boxes, "certificates of authenticity" etc. Palates of this counterfeit software would be shipped through quasi-legit channels into serious software retailers for realistic prices.
Casual piracy of Windows doesn't affect MS. Your PC probably shipped with the OS anyway. The high volume of XP licenses out there are businesses who were hoping for something better than Win7 before XP began to disappear. Few people are running machines old enough to have shipped with original XP licenses. Who wants a 256MB of RAM, 20GB HDD machine from 2002 anyway?
Other apps are missing these basic features: PKI, replication, integrated scripting, document-oriented databases, rapid application development, role based access control, local encryption. I'm sure there's more.
Sadly, using Notes feels like being trapped in the past, but when migrating to Outlook, you feel like you're going further back in time.
What do you recommend as an alternative?
Using your office suite to write documentation?
Bolt on Sharepoint to give yourself some semblence of versioning and access control?
Use a wiki with no encryption, limited access control, no offline usage, no scripting, and few if any rich-text options for input?
Hire developers to create apps?
Teach your users how to work with PGP?
Notes is crap, but there aren't good alternatives either.
Selfish because you care more about your tax dollars than about the future of the planet, and willfully ignorant because you're not only not interested in studying the issue further, but you oppose research and education because it will come out of tax dollars.
You're free to have that opinion of course. Just saying you shouldn't be proud of it.
"would this be the sort of national infrastructure concern that we would want to mandate that the cell companies install extra capacity? You know, in case of emergencies."
In Canada a telco exec told me that the government mandates Bell to provide priority service to emergency responders' home landlines. It'd be interesting if telcos could register emergency responder's cells in a similar way. May or may not be technicallly possible with current technology, given all the phones are trying to reach the towers at the same time, whether or not they'd be able to talk.
But then, for all I know, maybe they already do. Any emergency responders care to comment?
"Same thing with the housing bubble, which some were observing as a bubble in 2003, and it took all the way until 2008 before it finally popped. "
Still hasn't popped in Canada.
The market can remain irrational for a very, very long time, especially if the government puts gas on the fire. Some say that Canada dodged the bubble... we'll see what happens.
The point is that you can't predict these things when you're in them. Sometimes it's a bubble, sometimes it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Sometimes even if it's a bubble, the government intervenes and makes it bigger. Then when it blows, they take from the people who were prudent savers and investors to bail out those who rode it high.
After the.com bubble, the jobs got outsourced to India.
If you weren't in the job market to catch the y2k bug, you were cutting your teeth in a down market. Some programmers slogged it out making crap wages, (esp. Web Developers) many programmers never got a gig and jumped into IT, only to see massive outsourcing to Brazil, many got burnt out and jumped to a different field. Eventually some programmers got on the new wave of mobile app development.
When the daily innovation slows in the app sphere, I expect we'll see similar. For now, there's a big market in making "custom apps" for various companies, but they're little more than glorified websites optimized for mobile devices. As mobile devices grow in capabilities and apps grow in complexity, companies will merge, the size of development teams will grow, PHBs will take the fun out of programming, then they'll start "saving money" by sending jobs to whatever country is paying the least.
That said, nothing is forever, and there is always a good job for the best developers. Always.
"What Microsoft just never got because they are the bottom feeder..."
Some of us use MS products because we need to get work done.
... and Starbucks is fine, especially in Europe, where the typical cup of coffee is smaller than a Starbucks short cup.
That said, MS missed the mark. No question. Ballmer is a flaming idiot who won't give up until he succeeds at *something*, or destroys the company trying. He's doing a good job of the later.
"I do not know what the proper terminology for that is, but it is not all that different from sexism"
There's a lack of a proper label here and honestly, I don't care. "Geek" is a stereotype. "Woman" is a gender, "Black" is a race. The pattern of behaviour in stereotypes *I* would identify as "geeky" is real.
The pattern of behaviour in stereotypes *you* would identify as "geeky" doesn't include this behaviour. That's great.
Bring your girlfriend out to one of our meetings. I promise you'll understand. I promise nobody will *intentionally* offend her, but you may be shocked at what she tells you afterwards.
I applaud her for saying something about the stupid innuendos going on at these kinds of cons, but she shouldn't couch it in sexism.
Forking/Fucking is not degrading to women.
Dongles/Penises are not degrading to women.
If anyone thinks that sex is inherently degrading to women, or that penises are inherently degrading to women, they should seek counselling.
That said, the geek community is full of sexually inexperienced and frustrated people who say stupid and immature things. I seriously hope that the organizers simply would have told these guys in a sincere and compassionate way "you're in public, and your behaviour reflects on the community. This is a family-friendly event and a common problem but we need to change the geek culture. Your sexual innuendos are not in keeping with the environment we're trying to foster at this event and they contradict the code of conduct. Please stop yourselves, and stop your friends. Spread the word."
No need to degrade people who are already socially marginalized and awkward.
Slashdot Mirror
I thoroughly agree, current generation wind and solar aren't quite ready to replace other technologies. Nuclear is probably the best solution we have at the moment.
It would be nice to see a future with improved power storage technology for wind and solar. Nuclear could handle a large chunk of the grid's base load, while hydroelectric, wind, solar and their stored power could be used to handle shifts in demand.
It would also be nice to see more courage in developing nuclear systems, it's a mystery to me why Thorium isn't being developed, and why we can put so much security into waste, but not consider facilities which can generate power from the waste.
I think they were talking to the cafeteria workers.
It amazes me the lack of logic. It seems consistent that when A -> B -> C, people get lost somewhere between A and B, policticians latch onto "Let's talk about 'A'", while anyone who starts to talk about B gets shouted down as some kind of egghead.
That's a very big "if", based on a very black and white interpretation of reporters sensationalist reporting on science, and a stretch on "won't do anything". At best, I would say "If climate models are correct, a leveling off or small reduction in emissions may have very little effect"
This blows my mind. THE WORLD CONSUPTION OF FOSSIL FUELS IS BUILT ON ECONOMICS. people don't burn fossil fuels because it's fun, they burn them because they need to burn them to participate in their local economies. Shifting economic incentives could be all that's needed to make an enormous long term difference.
There is no such thing. Nobody is advocating climate change, except maybe people planning the North West passage.
AGW, Anthroprogenic Global Warming. The theory that global temperatures are being altered by humans.
Cap and trade is economics. If you don't understand it, just stop talking about it. The free market sets the price on emissions. Increasing the price of emissions means that an incentive is created to reduce your emissions.
Cap and trade acts as a counterbalance to the problem that environmental controls cost money. The companies with the greatest energy efficiency are naturally penalized in the current economy. The controls cost more than the energy savings, so those without the controls outcompete in the market.
You can legislate local controls on emissions, but that affects your international competitiveness. China doesn't need to implement environmental controls, so they burn the fuel faster, negating any carbon emissions benefit that your local controls had in the first place.
The problem with your crap in a bucket strawman is that climate science isn't like house repair. If you extend your analogy, we don't have other houses to compare ours with. Nobody's built a house before. Nobody's knocked down a house before. Only a handful of people have stepped on the lawn of the house, and nobody's sure if there are any other houses anywhere that we could live in. Also, all your food is grown inside your house, your water is contained inside your house, we're decades from figuring out how to put our crap in a bucket to throw our crap outside. Our windows don't open, we've got an air quality issue, and there are 6 billion people inside.
Do people mod this stuff up just because it suits their political opinions?
Knowing how to "code" isn't enough, you need to study the codebase. A tiny fraction of those who know how to code have studied the mailpile codebase enough to catch a backdoor. I would say, practially speaking... 0 outside the core developers.
Backdoors or snooping are best hidden with plausible deniability. Even if you discover one, it won't be obvious that it was intentional, it will be no more newsworthy than a typical vulnerability report.
No mistake, Vista was a joke, Windows 7 was barely an improvement over XP so there was little incentive to adopt it. Windows 8 would be ready in time.
After Windows 8 came out, time ran out on XP. Sadly, Windows 8 was slightly worse than Windows 7.
Corporations are choosing Win 7 because it sucks the least.
I mean the "high volume of XP software" out there. Enterprises have downgrade rights to install their corporate standard XP images. The stickers on the machines might be Vista, but they're being wiped and loaded with XP before being given to employees.
XP is still at 37% marketshare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
WGA stopped the wholesale OEM piracy from the organized crime shops. They were even producing holograms, shiny boxes, "certificates of authenticity" etc. Palates of this counterfeit software would be shipped through quasi-legit channels into serious software retailers for realistic prices.
Casual piracy of Windows doesn't affect MS. Your PC probably shipped with the OS anyway. The high volume of XP licenses out there are businesses who were hoping for something better than Win7 before XP began to disappear. Few people are running machines old enough to have shipped with original XP licenses. Who wants a 256MB of RAM, 20GB HDD machine from 2002 anyway?
MS is dying because Ballmer is an f-ing idiot.
Strongly disagree.
Other apps are missing these basic features: PKI, replication, integrated scripting, document-oriented databases, rapid application development, role based access control, local encryption. I'm sure there's more.
Sadly, using Notes feels like being trapped in the past, but when migrating to Outlook, you feel like you're going further back in time.
What do you recommend as an alternative?
Notes is crap, but there aren't good alternatives either.
That's a selfish and willfully ignorant position.
Selfish because you care more about your tax dollars than about the future of the planet, and willfully ignorant because you're not only not interested in studying the issue further, but you oppose research and education because it will come out of tax dollars.
You're free to have that opinion of course. Just saying you shouldn't be proud of it.
I mostly agree with you, but Skype outperforms everything else. It has a competitive advantage in being a trade secret.
Have you been to the South?
"Liar" means something too, and I'm not sure it means what you think it means.
... And worms have nothing to do with whether or not the code is interpreted or compiled.
"other than a modified 'httpd' file,"
It's completely invisible, as long as you're blind.
The point is to be able to reach them on and *off* duty.
"would this be the sort of national infrastructure concern that we would want to mandate that the cell companies install extra capacity? You know, in case of emergencies."
In Canada a telco exec told me that the government mandates Bell to provide priority service to emergency responders' home landlines. It'd be interesting if telcos could register emergency responder's cells in a similar way. May or may not be technicallly possible with current technology, given all the phones are trying to reach the towers at the same time, whether or not they'd be able to talk.
But then, for all I know, maybe they already do. Any emergency responders care to comment?
"Oh... I guess the people running UNIX servers will have to install a non-native layer to allow the Wayland folks access. That's just nuts. ?
That's a pretty flimsy straw-man. Of course you'd install an X Server on Windows.
What settings are you using for X over dialup?
My use case includes sound, printing, the clipboard and preserving state when disconnected.
VNC will preserve your state, but your performance is gone and you still haven't solved sound, printing or the clipboard.
X11 might give you the middle-button buffer, but not the clipboard.
"Same thing with the housing bubble, which some were observing as a bubble in 2003, and it took all the way until 2008 before it finally popped. "
Still hasn't popped in Canada.
The market can remain irrational for a very, very long time, especially if the government puts gas on the fire. Some say that Canada dodged the bubble... we'll see what happens.
The point is that you can't predict these things when you're in them. Sometimes it's a bubble, sometimes it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Sometimes even if it's a bubble, the government intervenes and makes it bigger. Then when it blows, they take from the people who were prudent savers and investors to bail out those who rode it high.
Not that I'm bitter.
After the .com bubble, the jobs got outsourced to India.
If you weren't in the job market to catch the y2k bug, you were cutting your teeth in a down market. Some programmers slogged it out making crap wages, (esp. Web Developers) many programmers never got a gig and jumped into IT, only to see massive outsourcing to Brazil, many got burnt out and jumped to a different field. Eventually some programmers got on the new wave of mobile app development.
When the daily innovation slows in the app sphere, I expect we'll see similar. For now, there's a big market in making "custom apps" for various companies, but they're little more than glorified websites optimized for mobile devices. As mobile devices grow in capabilities and apps grow in complexity, companies will merge, the size of development teams will grow, PHBs will take the fun out of programming, then they'll start "saving money" by sending jobs to whatever country is paying the least.
That said, nothing is forever, and there is always a good job for the best developers. Always.
How do you touch-type on a touchscreen?
"What Microsoft just never got because they are the bottom feeder ..."
Some of us use MS products because we need to get work done.
... and Starbucks is fine, especially in Europe, where the typical cup of coffee is smaller than a Starbucks short cup.
That said, MS missed the mark. No question. Ballmer is a flaming idiot who won't give up until he succeeds at *something*, or destroys the company trying. He's doing a good job of the later.
But it is like a hairdryer in that the waste product is heat.
Heat your home with your bitcoin rig and you won't be wasting the energy.
For that matter, a wifi-enabled GPU-heating element hair dryer would be pretty cool.
Don't worry, if the driverless car has a problem, you can drive your driverless car through your Google Glass.
"I do not know what the proper terminology for that is, but it is not all that different from sexism"
There's a lack of a proper label here and honestly, I don't care. "Geek" is a stereotype. "Woman" is a gender, "Black" is a race. The pattern of behaviour in stereotypes *I* would identify as "geeky" is real.
The pattern of behaviour in stereotypes *you* would identify as "geeky" doesn't include this behaviour. That's great.
Bring your girlfriend out to one of our meetings. I promise you'll understand. I promise nobody will *intentionally* offend her, but you may be shocked at what she tells you afterwards.
I applaud her for saying something about the stupid innuendos going on at these kinds of cons, but she shouldn't couch it in sexism.
Forking/Fucking is not degrading to women.
Dongles/Penises are not degrading to women.
If anyone thinks that sex is inherently degrading to women, or that penises are inherently degrading to women, they should seek counselling.
That said, the geek community is full of sexually inexperienced and frustrated people who say stupid and immature things. I seriously hope that the organizers simply would have told these guys in a sincere and compassionate way "you're in public, and your behaviour reflects on the community. This is a family-friendly event and a common problem but we need to change the geek culture. Your sexual innuendos are not in keeping with the environment we're trying to foster at this event and they contradict the code of conduct. Please stop yourselves, and stop your friends. Spread the word."
No need to degrade people who are already socially marginalized and awkward.