I wish the article had a little more analysis and technical detail. Anyone know what drives the competitiveness of electric buses vs other vehicles? What technology changes are changing this cost equation and how do they impact other vehicle markets?
Why are buses more competitive but cars aren't?
Is this about the ability to recapture energy when braking on electric vehicles? For buses used in cities stopping regularly, I could see this being a big deal.
Do form factor differences allowing better engineering decisions?
Does the high usage of buses make the fuel cost difference more dominant in the equation, making up for the higher capital costs? Would that mean that electric vehicles will come to dominate the taxi market too (until the taxi market is overwhelmed by self-driving vehicles)?
Sometimes https is needed to keep content confidential, but sometimes it is used just to ensure integrity. Some or all site content may be innocuous and not require confidentiality, but a man-in-the-middle corrupting data could change meaning or include malicious code. Maybe there should be an httpv -- http verified -- which includes signed hashes of each resource to offer proxy-friendly integrity and possibly lower overhead.
If you take out the ability of insurance companies to selectively deny coverage (which the ACA does), this ability to model outcomes can enable new more effective ways of paying doctors for care and hopefully improving outcomes. Given an expected outcome, an insurance company can pay for improving that outcome rather than just paying for every test run or treatment rendered.
I support research scientists and get similar requests. They have been using systems for 10-15 years and want to follow the same pattern, but the long delay between upgrades makes for much more violent changes when the upgrades do happen. We have to make great efforts to migrate files and workflows, and fight with them over every change.
One group decided that their system worked and they weren't going to mess around with it. Now they are scrounging ebay for backup VAX parts and scouring old spaghetti code every time anything needs to change, hoping that they don't break it all. The migration process to a new system has been painful, complicated, and expensive.
If you want a stable system, plan for incremental changes that keep up with the times. Buy reasonably priced equipment with a good backup solution, and you can just replace things as they fail or become obsolete. Instead of a really big capital outlay once, plan for a more moderate investment with recurring maintenance and upgrade costs.
Now would also be a good time to look at new commercial off the shelf software for managing a veterinary practice. It may be another significant investment, but it will (hopefully) give him long-term commercial support, and access to new features he doesn't get with his existing system.
Your father may not like that answer, but it is the only responsible one. With the ever-changing nature of computer systems, planning not to change or adapt is planning to fail.
I think the most credible source on the safety of nuclear power may be the nuclear industry. While lobbying in the US for the 2005 Energy Act, in just about the same breath they would insist that nuclear power was perfectly safe, but at the same time, it was so risky that they couldn't possibly survive as an industry without a $5 billion liability cap.
If the nuclear industry wants me to believe that nuclear plants are safe, they ought to be willing to take the risk themselves.
Those Katrina victims are better off now -- we've flooded them out of their destitute lifestyles so they can be exposed to new destitute lifestyles in luxurious FEMA trailers.
I taught high school computer science last year in a 2-year-old Mac lab. We started with OS 9, but soon upgraded to OS X because OS 9 was so unstable.
OS X was stable, but never worked right for us, causing immense problems with its built-in menuing and security features for multiple users. (apparently implemented without using UNIX file permissions or groups or other seemingly obvious features, which would have seemed the obvious solution). Life would have been much better if we had an OS X server, but I ran stand-alone Win98 labs years ago, and found them much easier to manage (though admittedly less stable) than the Macs.
The lab was intermittently unusable for at least a quarter of the year as I waited for our support people to find ways to fix our problems, some of which they just couldn't figure out.
Our PC labs, on the other hand, had 80-90% uptime, with their greatest source of problems being physical network issues and physical issues of mice, keyboards, and cables being damaged by students.
Part of the issue was definitely the quality of our Mac support people, but after that experience, I don't want to deal with Macs, especially in an educational setting, ever again.
For $500-1000 less, you get a machine that is either just a little bit faster or just a little bit slower than the Mac. There will always be a faster processor within half a year, but Intel gives you more for your dollar right now.
The reason that Socialist countries have the worst pollution is that the government is too involved in the polluting industries, and thus faces a conflict of interest when citizens are harmed by the pollution they emit.
It is true that some of the most pristine forests are in private hands, but what about all the pristine forest that was in private hands, and was decimated? It is also true that our government manages our forests in a horribly irresponsible way, effectively paying companies to log them, but that would seem to be a good argument for better regulation and governmental reform.
You seem very happy to end the EPA, but what happens when the power companies down the road decide to end their pollution controls and we have another incident like what happened in Donora, Pennsylvanis in 1948, where, over the course of a week, over 20 people were killed, and over 7000 hospitalized by air pollution? This incident was one of the early influences on the first Clean Air Act, and without government regulation of polluting industries, it could easily happen again.
I strongly support private land trusts and other individual efforts to protect the environment, but everyone is hurt by environmental destruction, and we need broad public action to keep the public safe.
Misleading Math about the Earth
ESSAYS BY STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, JOHN P. HOLDREN, JOHN BONGAARTS AND THOMAS LOVEJOY
The book The Skeptical Environmentalist uses statistics to dismiss warnings about peril for the planet. But the science suggests that it's the author who is out of touch with the facts.
The magazine went to four real experts in the fields addressed by Lomborg's book, and had them each review its assertions in their fields. What they found was that Lomborg carefully selected sources, twisted their meanings, and horribly misrepresented the statistics (his supposed specialty).
A lot of people say a lot of things about the environment, and the rhetoric gets pretty extreme at times. The best way to sift through all of this is through good science with peer review. This book has neither of those.
Lomborg claims to be a "skeptical environmentalist," but a good skeptic asks tough questions to challenge commonly held views, rather than just twisting the facts to try to prove their own point. Lomborg is really just an opportunistic contrarian, trying to make a name (and a few dollars) for himself by opposing assertions that a lot of influential people don't like.
This sort of abridgment of freedom and individual liberties has become the hallmark of modern trade agreements. Corporations making big campaign contributions have taken control of the process, and have pushed the US Trade Representative to introduce all sorts of undemocratic and unethical provisions to trade agreements in secret negotiating sessions totally closed to public scrutiny or accountability. This is why there have been massive protests in Seattle, Quebec, and so many other places around the world.
The DMCA provisions are just one of the latest dirty little provisions added into these things. They also have provisions to gut environmental and safety standards, undermine workers rights, and prevent people from having a say over what goes into their food. US clean air laws and endangered species laws have already been overturned by international trade agreements, and now Mexico and the Bush administration are going after tractor trailer safety standards. If that doesn't seem crazy enough, consider this: the state of California is being sued under NAFTA for $900 million by a Canadian company for banning a cancer causing gasoline additive that was getting into their drinking water. Under NAFTA, as with most trade agreements, the case will be settled by a faceless dispute resolution body in a foreign country that has no accountability to the public, and conducts its operations in secret.
There is one big thing we can do right now. George W. Bush is trying to push legislation through Congress to give him the power to negotiate these agreements without any input or review from the Congress. Fast Track negotiating authority lets the president negotiate the FTAA and other trade agreements in secret, and then send it to Congress, which has 60 days to vote it up or down with no ammendmnets. 60 days is a very short period of time to sift through the details of thousands of pages of a trade agreement. The Congress has 100 legislative days (which translates into 4 or 5 months) to review executive orders that are generally much shorter and less complicated than trade agreements. Fast track is just plain wrong.
This is going to be a tight vote that will be won or lost in the House of Representatives, so any and all calls and letters to your Congressperson make a difference. You can look up who your congress person is at http://www.house.gov/writerep/
You can find more info on fast track at the followign sites:
I'm not sure the government could pass such a law. As I understand it, email has been ruled to be the property of the person owning the system. For the government to set an arbitrary time limit for people to use their property, in court or otherwise, seems like an unconstitutional taking of property. The government could not say that after a set time limit printed memos are meaningless or could not be used in court.
Suppose an employee stole some money or property from an employer, and sent an email about it over a company email system. The employer owns that email system, and should have every right to use it to reclaim their property, just as they could use company paper records.
You could try to draw a line between corporate email and personal email, but that line can get very blury. Suppose someone wrote from a personal email account to a corporate one.
I think the answer to this is to get the general public to pay more attention to privacy, and demand that their ISPs not keep any records of their correspondence. At work, if you are using your employer's email system, you will have to work out with them whether or not it will be kept private, but they are the ones paying for it, and it really isn't fair to legislate how they can use it.
In the end, it all comes down to people knowing what they are dealing with. If you are on a company email system, you just don't have a realistic expectation of privacy. On a private account, that privacy will only be there if you demand it and fight for it.
I think it is a good name. They named it carnivore because it just looks at the target information -- or meat -- instead of looking at everything.
I think it's just that we're all worried about what or who that meat is. Are they really just looking at criminals, or are they focusing it back at law abiding people. Will Carnivore end up being a cannibal?
Slashdot Mirror
I wish the article had a little more analysis and technical detail. Anyone know what drives the competitiveness of electric buses vs other vehicles? What technology changes are changing this cost equation and how do they impact other vehicle markets?
Why are buses more competitive but cars aren't?
Is this about the ability to recapture energy when braking on electric vehicles? For buses used in cities stopping regularly, I could see this being a big deal.
Do form factor differences allowing better engineering decisions?
Does the high usage of buses make the fuel cost difference more dominant in the equation, making up for the higher capital costs? Would that mean that electric vehicles will come to dominate the taxi market too (until the taxi market is overwhelmed by self-driving vehicles)?
Sometimes https is needed to keep content confidential, but sometimes it is used just to ensure integrity. Some or all site content may be innocuous and not require confidentiality, but a man-in-the-middle corrupting data could change meaning or include malicious code. Maybe there should be an httpv -- http verified -- which includes signed hashes of each resource to offer proxy-friendly integrity and possibly lower overhead.
If you take out the ability of insurance companies to selectively deny coverage (which the ACA does), this ability to model outcomes can enable new more effective ways of paying doctors for care and hopefully improving outcomes. Given an expected outcome, an insurance company can pay for improving that outcome rather than just paying for every test run or treatment rendered.
I support research scientists and get similar requests. They have been using systems for 10-15 years and want to follow the same pattern, but the long delay between upgrades makes for much more violent changes when the upgrades do happen. We have to make great efforts to migrate files and workflows, and fight with them over every change.
One group decided that their system worked and they weren't going to mess around with it. Now they are scrounging ebay for backup VAX parts and scouring old spaghetti code every time anything needs to change, hoping that they don't break it all. The migration process to a new system has been painful, complicated, and expensive.
If you want a stable system, plan for incremental changes that keep up with the times. Buy reasonably priced equipment with a good backup solution, and you can just replace things as they fail or become obsolete. Instead of a really big capital outlay once, plan for a more moderate investment with recurring maintenance and upgrade costs.
Now would also be a good time to look at new commercial off the shelf software for managing a veterinary practice. It may be another significant investment, but it will (hopefully) give him long-term commercial support, and access to new features he doesn't get with his existing system.
Your father may not like that answer, but it is the only responsible one. With the ever-changing nature of computer systems, planning not to change or adapt is planning to fail.
I think the most credible source on the safety of nuclear power may be the nuclear industry. While lobbying in the US for the 2005 Energy Act, in just about the same breath they would insist that nuclear power was perfectly safe, but at the same time, it was so risky that they couldn't possibly survive as an industry without a $5 billion liability cap.
If the nuclear industry wants me to believe that nuclear plants are safe, they ought to be willing to take the risk themselves.
Those Katrina victims are better off now -- we've flooded them out of their destitute lifestyles so they can be exposed to new destitute lifestyles in luxurious FEMA trailers.
Global Warming Rocks!
I taught high school computer science last year in a 2-year-old Mac lab. We started with OS 9, but soon upgraded to OS X because OS 9 was so unstable.
OS X was stable, but never worked right for us, causing immense problems with its built-in menuing and security features for multiple users. (apparently implemented without using UNIX file permissions or groups or other seemingly obvious features, which would have seemed the obvious solution). Life would have been much better if we had an OS X server, but I ran stand-alone Win98 labs years ago, and found them much easier to manage (though admittedly less stable) than the Macs.
The lab was intermittently unusable for at least a quarter of the year as I waited for our support people to find ways to fix our problems, some of which they just couldn't figure out.
Our PC labs, on the other hand, had 80-90% uptime, with their greatest source of problems being physical network issues and physical issues of mice, keyboards, and cables being damaged by students.
Part of the issue was definitely the quality of our Mac support people, but after that experience, I don't want to deal with Macs, especially in an educational setting, ever again.
Mac probably tilted the scores towards them, but who cares. The important numbers for me came about a third of the way down.
Dell Dimension 8300 $800 - $2500
Dell Precision 650 $1248 - $3680
Apple PowerMac G5 $2000 - $3000
For $500-1000 less, you get a machine that is either just a little bit faster or just a little bit slower than the Mac. There will always be a faster processor within half a year, but Intel gives you more for your dollar right now.
The reason that Socialist countries have the worst pollution is that the government is too involved in the polluting industries, and thus faces a conflict of interest when citizens are harmed by the pollution they emit.
It is true that some of the most pristine forests are in private hands, but what about all the pristine forest that was in private hands, and was decimated? It is also true that our government manages our forests in a horribly irresponsible way, effectively paying companies to log them, but that would seem to be a good argument for better regulation and governmental reform.
You seem very happy to end the EPA, but what happens when the power companies down the road decide to end their pollution controls and we have another incident like what happened in Donora, Pennsylvanis in 1948, where, over the course of a week, over 20 people were killed, and over 7000 hospitalized by air pollution? This incident was one of the early influences on the first Clean Air Act, and without government regulation of polluting industries, it could easily happen again.
I strongly support private land trusts and other individual efforts to protect the environment, but everyone is hurt by environmental destruction, and we need broad public action to keep the public safe.
Scientific American reviewed this book in its January, 2002 issue. The following is its article summary from its online table of contents.
The magazine went to four real experts in the fields addressed by Lomborg's book, and had them each review its assertions in their fields. What they found was that Lomborg carefully selected sources, twisted their meanings, and horribly misrepresented the statistics (his supposed specialty).
A lot of people say a lot of things about the environment, and the rhetoric gets pretty extreme at times. The best way to sift through all of this is through good science with peer review. This book has neither of those.
Lomborg claims to be a "skeptical environmentalist," but a good skeptic asks tough questions to challenge commonly held views, rather than just twisting the facts to try to prove their own point. Lomborg is really just an opportunistic contrarian, trying to make a name (and a few dollars) for himself by opposing assertions that a lot of influential people don't like.
Power over a year's worth of uptime (based DC area power rates -- ~$0.10/KWH including taxes):
200W PC: $175.20
10W device: $8.80
A $50-$100 router seems worth it to me.
This sort of abridgment of freedom and individual liberties has become the hallmark of modern trade agreements. Corporations making big campaign contributions have taken control of the process, and have pushed the US Trade Representative to introduce all sorts of undemocratic and unethical provisions to trade agreements in secret negotiating sessions totally closed to public scrutiny or accountability. This is why there have been massive protests in Seattle, Quebec, and so many other places around the world.
The DMCA provisions are just one of the latest dirty little provisions added into these things. They also have provisions to gut environmental and safety standards, undermine workers rights, and prevent people from having a say over what goes into their food. US clean air laws and endangered species laws have already been overturned by international trade agreements, and now Mexico and the Bush administration are going after tractor trailer safety standards. If that doesn't seem crazy enough, consider this: the state of California is being sued under NAFTA for $900 million by a Canadian company for banning a cancer causing gasoline additive that was getting into their drinking water. Under NAFTA, as with most trade agreements, the case will be settled by a faceless dispute resolution body in a foreign country that has no accountability to the public, and conducts its operations in secret.
There is one big thing we can do right now. George W. Bush is trying to push legislation through Congress to give him the power to negotiate these agreements without any input or review from the Congress. Fast Track negotiating authority lets the president negotiate the FTAA and other trade agreements in secret, and then send it to Congress, which has 60 days to vote it up or down with no ammendmnets. 60 days is a very short period of time to sift through the details of thousands of pages of a trade agreement. The Congress has 100 legislative days (which translates into 4 or 5 months) to review executive orders that are generally much shorter and less complicated than trade agreements. Fast track is just plain wrong.
This is going to be a tight vote that will be won or lost in the House of Representatives, so any and all calls and letters to your Congressperson make a difference. You can look up who your congress person is at http://www.house.gov/writerep/
You can find more info on fast track at the followign sites:
I'm not sure the government could pass such a law. As I understand it, email has been ruled to be the property of the person owning the system. For the government to set an arbitrary time limit for people to use their property, in court or otherwise, seems like an unconstitutional taking of property. The government could not say that after a set time limit printed memos are meaningless or could not be used in court.
Suppose an employee stole some money or property from an employer, and sent an email about it over a company email system. The employer owns that email system, and should have every right to use it to reclaim their property, just as they could use company paper records.
You could try to draw a line between corporate email and personal email, but that line can get very blury. Suppose someone wrote from a personal email account to a corporate one.
I think the answer to this is to get the general public to pay more attention to privacy, and demand that their ISPs not keep any records of their correspondence. At work, if you are using your employer's email system, you will have to work out with them whether or not it will be kept private, but they are the ones paying for it, and it really isn't fair to legislate how they can use it.
In the end, it all comes down to people knowing what they are dealing with. If you are on a company email system, you just don't have a realistic expectation of privacy. On a private account, that privacy will only be there if you demand it and fight for it.
I think it is a good name. They named it carnivore because it just looks at the target information -- or meat -- instead of looking at everything.
I think it's just that we're all worried about what or who that meat is. Are they really just looking at criminals, or are they focusing it back at law abiding people. Will Carnivore end up being a cannibal?