All sarcasm aside, the biggest problems with windmills, as reported by the folks in Palm Springs who voted to deny construction of more wind farms their way is that they are an eyesore, they're noisy, and they impact birds that may otherwise be native to the hundreds or thousands of acres where wind electrical generators live.
Thats a pretty messed up logical statement you have going there. You're saying that and ice age is caused by an ice age?
Positive feedback loop. White ice reflects more radiant energy back into space than dark soil: it's basic physics, and it's what makes a small change create glaceration over thousands of years.
Actually, another ice age has been theorized. Europe could enter another ice age because of global warming.
Whaaaa?
Ice age events are triggered because the sheet of ice reflects radiant energy from the Sun back into space, causing things tiing glaciation to increase. Global warming will not cause an ice age; it may cause things to get colder in Europe as the atlantic ocean currents change, but if it were to cause significant increased snowfall, the white snow will reflect more sunlight back into space, cooling things off globally.
I'm not sure if I really buy all this, but the lack of certainty does inspire some concern.
Two points.
First, global warming is theorized to contribute to global climate changes (which may cause localized cooling) because ultimately, more energy from the sun is trapped on Earth. And more energy causes things to become more chaotic as well as globally warmer: meaning bigger hurricanes, bigger tornadoes, more energetic thunderstorms. Global warming doesn't just make the average weather a half-degree warmer.
Second, my skin crawls when people start suggesting that signficant political changes should be forced due to "lack of certainty." For example, there is some evidence (not very good evidence, granted, but enough for a "lack of certainty" in some quarters) that pornography contributes to increased incidences of rape. We have no real solid evidence nor a smoking gun--just as we don't have a smoking gun for global warming--but to suggest we should thus outlaw all pornography is sure to get some quarters into a serious tizzy fit.
I find it ironic when the same politican suggests on the one hand we should dismantle large parts of our economy to curb global warming when we don't have a 'smoking gun', who then says we should preserve freedom of expression rather than go after pornography because we don't have a 'smoking gun.'
The UK is talking about ramping up to 10% of their power derived from wind energy. It is expected to be competitive with other power types.
There are significant problems with wind energy, by the way, that most wind energy advocates apparently refuse to address.
First, wind energy is variable. If you are going to use wind energy, you need to both back it up with a traditional energy source, and you need to use very big batteries to store the spikes in energy generation to smooth it out before the energy goes out onto the grid. Large batteries tend to contain lots of toxic chemicals, and they need to be periodically replaced.
Second, you need a *lot* of wind energy turbines, which create an eyesore over the several hundreds or thousands of acres you need to spread them over.
And third, they are only useful where it's consistently windy, and where the winds routinely fit within a reasonable speed range. And in general, those tend to be canyon areas near large population centers, where land tends to be at a premium for land developers.
At the moment, we heat our houses by burning more fossile fuels. We could heat them by using waste heat from electrical power plants. Purdue University runs it's own electrical power plant, and heats the campus as a side effect. It's not a new idea.
No, but it requires a way to distribute the waste heat. In general, that tends to happen in the form of steam. And that only works in limited cases where your steam-generating electrical power plant is located nearby the places you want to heat. Meaning it will work for a small area (such as a college campus), but it won't work well for a large city such as Los Angeles, which would require a significant retrofit of piping, and where electrical generation plants tend to be located dozens of miles away from the steam source.
Further, let me note you've concentrated all your arguments on CO2 production. There are other greenhouse gasses, by the way, including methane, which is being produced in huge quantities by human agricultural activities, and is only secondmost to CO2 emissions in potentially affecting the environment.
Why do you think you've only talked about curbing CO2 emissions, and not curbing agricutural concerns? Because of a hidden assumption that technology is the underlying problem, and only curbing technology can fix the problem? Or because the whole "greenhouse" question has been so mixed up with other ecological questions that you cannot conceive that someone would want to swap in flouresant bulbs simply because they want to curb local pollution and cut their electric bill?
The question is not "will global warming cause significant property damage and loss of life." The questions are "is an unnatural global warming cycle occuring", "is mankind contributing to the problem, if there is one", and "can mankind reasonably curtail the problem, again if there is one."
Unfortunately enough, most debates have become so mixed up in global ecological politics that answering these three separate questions in any way other than "yes, yes, and yes" damn near politically impossible. (That is, answering any of these questions "i don't know" or "no" turns immediately into images of burly conservative men killing cute little white bunny rabbits while native americans cry in the background.) Worse yet, the ecological movement which is in part driving this whole discussion has become tied up in a strong philosophy of "european primitivism", wereby technology is denounced as the source of all problems, and the ultimate solution is to go back to living a "primitive", technology-free lifestyle. (Of course most modern practitioners of "european primitivism" only count technology they don't like, and insist on technologies they like, such as massive hemp production, as "good".)
As an example of these political and philosophical positions effecting the debate, the EPA notes that methane gas also contributes to global warming. But note we always talk about CO2 emissions, not methane emissions. Why?
Because CO2 emissions comes from the burning of fuels, which can be tied in most debates to a high-techological society and energy production and cars and all of those "bad" things. Methane, on the other hand, is largly a byproduct of agricultural activities--specifically livestock farts and decomposing plant matter in compost heaps contribute significantly to methane emissions. But will Greenpeace go after poor Chinese farmers and blow up their compost heaps, destroying yet another manmade source of greeenhouse gases?
Note to programmers: If it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to the operation of the program, go ahead and force installation, but tell the user what it is and why you need it.
I would say you should never force *anything* in that manner. Instead, I would put up an alert saying that the software cannot be installed without this module, and give the user to either continue or abort installation.
I have to disagree with your assertion that fewer companies would be in consulting. Far from it; all it would mean is that consultants such as myself would both (a) include a disclamer of liabilities for developed software, and (b) force the customer to notice and initial the statement (along with the other important elements of the contract) before development started. (I already include a limitation of liability statement in my standard consulting contract.)
The only thing this law would affect would be purchases of mass-produced software. Me; I'd get out of the shareware business quick in order to avoid the liability issues. That's because you generally cannot negotiate individaul contracts with mass-produced software. And I sure as hell would not rely on the "click-through" contracts as a valid contract negotiation in the face of a law like this.
The flip side is that people would suddenly realize how much quality software (as opposed to "shovel-ware", where marketing demands everything is shoveled into the product) costs to develop if they suddenly found themselves in a world where software for a word processor were developed the same way as software for the Space Shuttle...
You realize there will be a real market in smuggling MP3 players. And will Canada apply this tax to hard disks which could be added later to an MP3 player?
Hell's bells; we probably have contingency plans in case we are invaded by Mars. I do know we have a policy for how to deal with space craft from another planet inquiring if there is intelligent life here (ignore them and hope they go away).
Well, and how many recycling plants first brought on-line in the 70's and 80's are now on the EPA's superfund list?
In theory recycling is a good thing, but until more companies start buying unbleached post-consumer recycled cardboard boxes and shipping product in them, we're going to continue bleaching the recycled paper with toxic bleeching products. And all that toxic waste has to go *somewhere*...
Do recycle aluminum, however; the same process used to refine aluminum ore is used to recycle aluminum cans--it just take a lot less energy, which reduces the cost of producing aluminum, and less power means less emissions from electric power plants.
(I once told the story about bleaching recycled paper to a green, who actually had the gall to reply that the toxic waste wasn't important; what was important was that we were doing *something*...)
Lomborg quite correctly points out in his chapter on pollution that the worst pollution effects are the results of the early and middle stages of industrial development. Here he states that things are getting better in the developed world and as technology advances, the environmental impact of human activity will be reduced.
To clarify, I'm not a "doomsday" environmentalist, meaning I do not believe that all those cans of hairspray used to maintain beehive hairdoos in the 60's will cause the Earth to spiral into the sun.
However, while it is true evidence suggests that the developed world is better at manufacturing things than the developing world when it comes to pollution output verses productivity, that's not an inevitable result of technological advance. That's because of politics.
Politically the constant push of the environmentalists have forced manufacturers and power generation plants and car makers to reduce emissions in the United States. We have decided, in a sense, that the environment is worth the increased monitary and R&D expense that it cost to create smoke stack scrubbers and reduced emissions fuels and higher-efficiency cars. The current push for electric vehicles is not because the technology inevitably leads to putting a bunch of batteries into a high-performance golf cart and calling it a car; it's because environmentalists in California have dictated by law that a certan percentage of cars must be electric in the near future.
Take a look at Texas, where certain environmental controls have been negated or loosened. Some of the worse pollution in the United States occurs along the Tex/Mex border, in large part because no-one cares, the laws aren't in place, and if given a choice between polluting or spending a huge amount of money on pollution controls, factory owners in Texas have demonstrated they'd rather keep the money. The only thing that prevents them from polluting even more than they do is the potential cost of litigation.
Look; I believe a lot of environmental research is bogus. I was there at JPL when they first noticed the hole in the ozone--I saw the first pictures--and I remember a researcher telling me that the good part about this is that, if phrased as an environmental disaster, it would assure his research group continued funding for years. And I also used to work for a company who made "short runs" of printed circuit boards (about a hundred or so a month), who used to clean the toxic flux off the boards in a dishwasher hooked up to the main sewar line. (That shit's toxic waste, yet they didn't care they were flushing this stuff down the city sewar line. After all, it was just a hundred printed circuit boards worth--not that much, right?)
So I know that while a lot of this big-picture stuff may be bogus, if people aren't checked, by and large their apathy will cause more damage to our immediate environment. (After all, how can Mankind's CO2 be doing such damage to the global weather patterns when a volcanic eruption can put out more CO2 in an afternoon than all of Man's pollution in a year? Yet take those hundred printed circuit boards and multiply by all the printed circuits produced in the LA basin, and think of all that flux working it's way into the drinking water supply.)
I like to think of it as "think locally, act globally." I don't think we can accidently destroy the entire earth's ecosystem. But we sure as hell can mess up the air and water and greenery around a city--making our lives quite miserable in the process.
And I'm happy for the greens--not because in some unforseeable future we've reduced the chances of the sea level rising up and washing half of Los Angeles away. I'm happy because environmental laws have decreased the number of "unhealthful" air quality alerts that have been issued here since the 80's. I can now run along the Highway 5 corridor without feeling that my lungs are about to melt from the toxic waste in the air.
In cases like this, where one party in a lawsuit asks to review proprietary or secret code from another, generally a couple of guys are put under NDA and then are given access to the code for review.
This happened to me once; I was the litigation support expert for a lawsuit between two C compiler developers. Neither side wanted to allow the other side to see their code (for fear of future cross contamination), so I was placed under NDA, had to sign a proviso saying I would never work for a C compiler developer for 5 years (times up!), and then I was given access to both company's compiler code.
This is a pretty common tactic by the lawyers, hiring litigation support experts to help them review the code. My report on the similarities (the problem was one guy used to work for one company and went to work for the other--taking some code with him) was then sent to a professional "expert witness" who then actually testified.
Re:Total transparency for us; total privacy for po
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Did you even read Brin's article? If you had, you would have realized that the problem he has with the current debate is exactly the thing you point out--that our loss of privacy is currently happening without a corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government.
Without that corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government, it strips us of our own privacy without the necessary controls to allow us to know who has information on us and what they are doing with it. It also allows a small, elite class of people to arise who can control information on themselves (and, thus, do great harm or illegal stuff a'la Enron), while the rest of us are relegated to "sheep."
Until this transparency happens in Government, there is a problem.
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
And that's why Brin, in his article, called for transparency within Government. Otherwise, we cannot watch the watchers.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
But you have already lost your freedom. Enron happened; the powerful elite who can control the public's ability to see what they are doing already have closed the shutters and have already committed crimes which took money out of your pocket (if you are an investor or live in California and buy electricity here).
Only transparency (which means also the transparency to see what Bush--and Clinton--had to do with Enron) will allow you to prevent a bunch of elite thieves from picking your pocket in the future.
Sure--we have the right to free television. But to expect content to be produced for free is to expect others to work for nothing--that is, it's to expect for us to turn actors, producers and writers and SFX creators and the rest into slaves.
Of course there is already a lot of existing content--but who wants to go through eternity watching reruns of "I Love Lucy?"
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.
It's a stupid argument, anyways. I've got a ReplayTV 4000 which stores 80 hours at "standard"--which is good enough for time shifting, but the image is pretty grainy and not at all the quality of a DVD recording. If I wanted to store every episode of the X-Files on my ReplayTV, I could only store 20 episodes at high (near DVD) quality.
Which means for just $1,000 I have a piece of hardware which stores what I could buy for $99 at Amazon.com--rendering my ReplayTV unusable (as I'm using all my disk space to store 20 X-File episodes) in the process. How stupid is that?
Furthermore, the argument is incredibly dumb, given the fact that the studios refuse to sell me the damned DVDs of my favorite programs anyways! I love Stargate SG1--but can't they be bothered to release anything but the first season on disk (which I bought, dispite owning a ReplayTV)? Noooo....
Come on! I've got $400 burning a hole in my pocket, and the studios can't be bothered to put down the episodes to DVD for Region 1 (though the episodes for Seasons 2 through 4 are available for Region 2)...
The whole management process at these various entertainment companies stinks to high heaven. Using a lawsuit to protect a market they don't even want to sell into in the first place by making life more inconvenient for me is rediculous.
I would say that most observers believe that H saw himself as a patriotic and loyal German, but not a supporter of the Nazis per se. There were many Germans, at the time, who believed that the Nazis were, rightly or wrongly, the official government of Germany and that to go against them would be an act of treason against Germany
I will note that it's my understanding that the United States attitude that the country is separate from the government is relatively unique: we're one of the few countries in the world where the attitude that one can love one's country but demand the overthrow of it's government is seen as patriotic, albeit misguided.
So it may hurt our brains in the US to think of loyal Germans not questioning the NAZIs (who were seen as Germany's rightful government), throughout the rest of the world, that's the way it works: love your country pretty much means supporting it's government by definition--even if you disagree with your government's behavior.
Or rather, don't make open source a focal point in your campaign because you'll just get 40,000 glazed eyes, and 40,000 people who will think you're a nut who has focused on some small aspect of the campaign rather than the "big issue" ideas such as city management, police, fire, and schools.
Of course if you do put together a position paper on your overall campaign, you may want to toss out open source as a line item, or a minor talking point. But by and large, think of a campaign as a very large job interview in front of 40,000 potential employers who don't give a damn and who can't be bothered to read your resume.
If I were you, in this current election cycle, I would concern myself with police first, schools second, and local concerns third. If open source even comes up, talk about it as a potential tax savings that can potentially be used to help fund police efforts or whatever.
By the way, a realistic estimate of the cost to transition a town to open source should factor in the cost to retrain users and the cost for your town's MIS department to make the transition in terms of lowered productivity and consulting time. And while overall you probably will save a fair amount of money, realistically speaking the fiscal savings over the course of a year may not buy one police squad car. (Not that the savings is insignificant, but in the scope of running a town, it's relatively small chump change.)
Oh, and by the way, slightly off topic: beware political math done by any of your opponents! When I helped my brother win in the city council in Fresno several years back, it was done largely because he went up against an opponent who tried to claim that a $1 million savings in one place could be used to hire a hundred police officers and pay their salaries for one year. (Do the math: factoring in training costs and the cost of supplies, what's left wouldn't pay minimum wage.)
Oh, and beware the last minute advertising blitz! That is, beware of your opponents taking out a whole bunch of last minute advertising which sways the voters away from you. The last election cycle, my brother was defeated because his opponent violated campaign financing rules (a criminal offense in this state) to buy advertising that painted my brother as a crook. (The irony there should be obvious.)
As someone who has been writing software for the Macintosh since it was released in 1984, and for Windows since the 2.11 (386) days, just a few notes.
First, Windows was available in the stores since version 1.0, and until Windows 3.0 was released was being marketed as a program manager tool (that is, an enhancement to DOS which allowed you to run multiple DOS programs) during that time. And until Windows 3.1 came out, Microsoft emphasized DOS programs and DOS programming over Windows programming in large part because the consumer base was so locked into the whole "WIMP interfaces are for wimps" mentality which prevented early adoption of the Macintosh by a large segment of the population.
But to your comment that Windows was not viable until Windows 3.1--I'll note that the difference between Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were fairly minimal; a few bug fixes and some rather minor features were added. The only reason why 3.1 finally caught on was because Microsoft successfully had a large enough product list which targeted Windows to start pushing PC manufacturers to pre-install Windows as the default OS instead of DOS.
But the features in 3.0 (the ability to write large, albeit segmented addressing applications which made use of memory above 640K) were also present in Windows 2.11 (386). Why Windows 2.11 (386) never caught on was because it targeted 80386 systems, which at the time were very expensive boxes. (Oh, and note the designation Windows 2.11 (386)--there was a separate Windows 2.11 product which targeted 80286 boxes which used the 80286's brain-dead addressing modes. Windows 3.0 was essentially the unification of the earlier Windows 2.11 and Windows 2.11 (386) products by including code to determine which processor it was running on and which executable it was trying to start, and load the appropriate kernel. Yes: Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 had two, count them! two kernels, and some "thunk" code to translate 80286-addressing calls to 80386-addressing calls when running a program targeted for the x286 on an x386 and later box.)
As to your comments about X Windows, I'll note that in fact, X Windows does not predate Microsoft Windows by a decade.
In 1984, MIT created project Athena in order to create the X Windows project, which was the unification of several earlier windowing interfaces into a portable windowing system for Unix which isolates the hardware-dependant display issues into separate driver modules. While bits and pieces of X Windows borrows code from earlier projects, X Windows itself has not been around since the 70's, as your posting suggests. (The name 'X' itself is suggestive of the fact that X Windows runs on any box, as opposed to earlier efforts, which were named "Sun Windows" or "SGI Windows" or whatever; 'X' is a variable, and the target platforms were the constants over which X could vary.)
The X Window System was never ment to be a user interface. The design of the X Window System was deliberately "user interface agnostic" and "display hardware agnostic" as it's goal was not to provide a simple user interface, but to provide a portable interface environment and API. (That's why MIT created this whole concept of the "Windows Manager" as a separate object from the core X Window System, which only provides a mechanism for creating naked overlapping regions on the screen and drawing into them.)
Granted, today the X Window System and Microsoft Windows fills the same niche. But they were originally created to full two completely different markets. X Windows was created as an effort to unite several previous device-dependant and platform-dependant windowing systems, while Microsoft Windows was originally a graphical program manager. So comparing the two, or comparing the release dates of their earlier versions (as you have unsuccessfully have done) is comparing apples and oranges.
Re:If you aren't lazy, A BICYCLE IS FASTER.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
One disadvantage of a bike (at least here in Los Angeles) is that on a bike, you are subject to the rules of the road. That is, as far as the California Vehicle Code is concerned, you are a vehicle, not unlike a motorcycle or a car.
At times when I ride my bike, I don't particularly feel safe sharing the road with bikes.
Right now, the Segway HT cannot be driven on sidewalks alongside pedestrian traffic. However, if the laws can be changed, perhaps the Segway will have the advantage of a bike that it can be taken over sidewalks and pedestrian bridges. If the Segway has to be driven in the street alongside bikes and cars, however, then there is no advantage--and you may as well ride a bike instead.
I would argue, however, that a bike's top reasonable speed (assuming you don't want to show up covered in sweat) is about the same as the Segway HT.
How about...donating the money to support the victims of the 911 attacks? Or, donate money to charities that are helping the children in Afghanistan?
Why can't people do both?
Geez; before, it was "clean your plate because there are people starving in China" which lead a whole generation to be fat and guilty about it. Now it's "why are you enjoying christmas when people are out there who have nothing" to spoil the whole holidays. Didn't you know that before 9/11, there were still people who didn't have anything for Christmas? And now, because of 9/11, so many people are focused on the disaster in New York that more poor children who would otherwise receive a donated present for Christmas this year will get nothing?
I don't mean to be a killjoy, and yes, I donated money to the Red Cross for the 9/11 disaster, but that doesn't mean we have to alter our entire existance. I still intend to get my wife Christmas presents, and I still intend to donate a present to a poor child this year.
It would be a pathetic world if people altered their behavior this Christmas and started feeling guilty or vengeful or whatever because of the terrorists. In fact, I would say if people did alter their behavior substantially this Christmas, we would have allowed the terrorists to win.
If I spraypainted, "I love Crystal" on your house wouldn't that be enough for you to want my ass in a sling?
Oh, sure; I'd want your ass in a sling. And as someone who recently had to spend two days rebuilding a web server knocked down by the Nimda virus, I understand first hand the annoyance that accompanies such a defacement.
However, the question really is not "should this be a crime"--clearly the answer is yes. The question is "is this crime terrorism, and deserving of a life sentence"? Murderers who kill in a fit of passion don't do life; taggers who may tag my house with "I love Crystal" with spray paint don't get life. So why should some script kiddy get life? I would understand it if he got 18 months or three years. But life?
I don't mind increase survelance powers in order to fight terrorism. However, scrawling "I love you Crystal" or some such on some web page is not terrorism.
This thing needs to at least be tempered by a clause which adds or defines criminal intent. That is, if hacking is done with the intent to destroy or disable the United States government and/or make actual acts of terrorism (such as blowing people up) easier, then throw the bastards in jail. But defacing some web site doesn't harm the United States government; it's just annoying as hell. And annoying doesn't deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole--especially since actually killing someone is what I would consider slightly more annoying, yet many types of murder don't get anywhere near life.
Slashdot Mirror
All sarcasm aside, the biggest problems with windmills, as reported by the folks in Palm Springs who voted to deny construction of more wind farms their way is that they are an eyesore, they're noisy, and they impact birds that may otherwise be native to the hundreds or thousands of acres where wind electrical generators live.
Whaaaaa?
Thats a pretty messed up logical statement you have going there. You're saying that and ice age is caused by an ice age?
Positive feedback loop. White ice reflects more radiant energy back into space than dark soil: it's basic physics, and it's what makes a small change create glaceration over thousands of years.
Actually, another ice age has been theorized. Europe could enter another ice age because of global warming.
Whaaaa?
Ice age events are triggered because the sheet of ice reflects radiant energy from the Sun back into space, causing things tiing glaciation to increase. Global warming will not cause an ice age; it may cause things to get colder in Europe as the atlantic ocean currents change, but if it were to cause significant increased snowfall, the white snow will reflect more sunlight back into space, cooling things off globally.
I'm not sure if I really buy all this, but the lack of certainty does inspire some concern.
Two points.
First, global warming is theorized to contribute to global climate changes (which may cause localized cooling) because ultimately, more energy from the sun is trapped on Earth. And more energy causes things to become more chaotic as well as globally warmer: meaning bigger hurricanes, bigger tornadoes, more energetic thunderstorms. Global warming doesn't just make the average weather a half-degree warmer.
Second, my skin crawls when people start suggesting that signficant political changes should be forced due to "lack of certainty." For example, there is some evidence (not very good evidence, granted, but enough for a "lack of certainty" in some quarters) that pornography contributes to increased incidences of rape. We have no real solid evidence nor a smoking gun--just as we don't have a smoking gun for global warming--but to suggest we should thus outlaw all pornography is sure to get some quarters into a serious tizzy fit.
I find it ironic when the same politican suggests on the one hand we should dismantle large parts of our economy to curb global warming when we don't have a 'smoking gun', who then says we should preserve freedom of expression rather than go after pornography because we don't have a 'smoking gun.'
The UK is talking about ramping up to 10% of their power derived from wind energy. It is expected to be competitive with other power types.
There are significant problems with wind energy, by the way, that most wind energy advocates apparently refuse to address.
First, wind energy is variable. If you are going to use wind energy, you need to both back it up with a traditional energy source, and you need to use very big batteries to store the spikes in energy generation to smooth it out before the energy goes out onto the grid. Large batteries tend to contain lots of toxic chemicals, and they need to be periodically replaced.
Second, you need a *lot* of wind energy turbines, which create an eyesore over the several hundreds or thousands of acres you need to spread them over.
And third, they are only useful where it's consistently windy, and where the winds routinely fit within a reasonable speed range. And in general, those tend to be canyon areas near large population centers, where land tends to be at a premium for land developers.
At the moment, we heat our houses by burning more fossile fuels. We could heat them by using waste heat from electrical power plants. Purdue University runs it's own electrical power plant, and heats the campus as a side effect. It's not a new idea.
No, but it requires a way to distribute the waste heat. In general, that tends to happen in the form of steam. And that only works in limited cases where your steam-generating electrical power plant is located nearby the places you want to heat. Meaning it will work for a small area (such as a college campus), but it won't work well for a large city such as Los Angeles, which would require a significant retrofit of piping, and where electrical generation plants tend to be located dozens of miles away from the steam source.
Further, let me note you've concentrated all your arguments on CO2 production. There are other greenhouse gasses, by the way, including methane, which is being produced in huge quantities by human agricultural activities, and is only secondmost to CO2 emissions in potentially affecting the environment.
Why do you think you've only talked about curbing CO2 emissions, and not curbing agricutural concerns? Because of a hidden assumption that technology is the underlying problem, and only curbing technology can fix the problem? Or because the whole "greenhouse" question has been so mixed up with other ecological questions that you cannot conceive that someone would want to swap in flouresant bulbs simply because they want to curb local pollution and cut their electric bill?
The question is not "will global warming cause significant property damage and loss of life." The questions are "is an unnatural global warming cycle occuring", "is mankind contributing to the problem, if there is one", and "can mankind reasonably curtail the problem, again if there is one."
Unfortunately enough, most debates have become so mixed up in global ecological politics that answering these three separate questions in any way other than "yes, yes, and yes" damn near politically impossible. (That is, answering any of these questions "i don't know" or "no" turns immediately into images of burly conservative men killing cute little white bunny rabbits while native americans cry in the background.) Worse yet, the ecological movement which is in part driving this whole discussion has become tied up in a strong philosophy of "european primitivism", wereby technology is denounced as the source of all problems, and the ultimate solution is to go back to living a "primitive", technology-free lifestyle. (Of course most modern practitioners of "european primitivism" only count technology they don't like, and insist on technologies they like, such as massive hemp production, as "good".)
As an example of these political and philosophical positions effecting the debate, the EPA notes that methane gas also contributes to global warming. But note we always talk about CO2 emissions, not methane emissions. Why?
Because CO2 emissions comes from the burning of fuels, which can be tied in most debates to a high-techological society and energy production and cars and all of those "bad" things. Methane, on the other hand, is largly a byproduct of agricultural activities--specifically livestock farts and decomposing plant matter in compost heaps contribute significantly to methane emissions. But will Greenpeace go after poor Chinese farmers and blow up their compost heaps, destroying yet another manmade source of greeenhouse gases?
Note to programmers: If it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to the operation of the program, go ahead and force installation, but tell the user what it is and why you need it.
I would say you should never force *anything* in that manner. Instead, I would put up an alert saying that the software cannot be installed without this module, and give the user to either continue or abort installation.
I have to disagree with your assertion that fewer companies would be in consulting. Far from it; all it would mean is that consultants such as myself would both (a) include a disclamer of liabilities for developed software, and (b) force the customer to notice and initial the statement (along with the other important elements of the contract) before development started. (I already include a limitation of liability statement in my standard consulting contract.)
The only thing this law would affect would be purchases of mass-produced software. Me; I'd get out of the shareware business quick in order to avoid the liability issues. That's because you generally cannot negotiate individaul contracts with mass-produced software. And I sure as hell would not rely on the "click-through" contracts as a valid contract negotiation in the face of a law like this.
The flip side is that people would suddenly realize how much quality software (as opposed to "shovel-ware", where marketing demands everything is shoveled into the product) costs to develop if they suddenly found themselves in a world where software for a word processor were developed the same way as software for the Space Shuttle...
You realize there will be a real market in smuggling MP3 players. And will Canada apply this tax to hard disks which could be added later to an MP3 player?
This may be a little off-topic, but I also have an iBook; an older edition (the original bondai blue) box. I run OS X on it daily.
The only thing it needed to run OS X acceptably was a bump in RAM (to 256meg), and to upgrade the hard disk on it to 20gig.
Hell's bells; we probably have contingency plans in case we are invaded by Mars. I do know we have a policy for how to deal with space craft from another planet inquiring if there is intelligent life here (ignore them and hope they go away).
If the US dropped a nuke on anybody it would instantly lose every ally it has in Europe and NATO with the exception of the UK.
Yep they would--just like the last time we dropped nuclear weapons on a civilian population, in Japan, in 1945...
How 8.4% of US bandwidth be movies when 40% of it is illegal MPEGs and 75% of it is illegal underage porn?
Well, and how many recycling plants first brought on-line in the 70's and 80's are now on the EPA's superfund list?
In theory recycling is a good thing, but until more companies start buying unbleached post-consumer recycled cardboard boxes and shipping product in them, we're going to continue bleaching the recycled paper with toxic bleeching products. And all that toxic waste has to go *somewhere*...
Do recycle aluminum, however; the same process used to refine aluminum ore is used to recycle aluminum cans--it just take a lot less energy, which reduces the cost of producing aluminum, and less power means less emissions from electric power plants.
(I once told the story about bleaching recycled paper to a green, who actually had the gall to reply that the toxic waste wasn't important; what was important was that we were doing *something*...)
Lomborg quite correctly points out in his chapter on pollution that the worst pollution effects are the results of the early and middle stages of industrial development. Here he states that things are getting better in the developed world and as technology advances, the environmental impact of human activity will be reduced.
To clarify, I'm not a "doomsday" environmentalist, meaning I do not believe that all those cans of hairspray used to maintain beehive hairdoos in the 60's will cause the Earth to spiral into the sun.
However, while it is true evidence suggests that the developed world is better at manufacturing things than the developing world when it comes to pollution output verses productivity, that's not an inevitable result of technological advance. That's because of politics.
Politically the constant push of the environmentalists have forced manufacturers and power generation plants and car makers to reduce emissions in the United States. We have decided, in a sense, that the environment is worth the increased monitary and R&D expense that it cost to create smoke stack scrubbers and reduced emissions fuels and higher-efficiency cars. The current push for electric vehicles is not because the technology inevitably leads to putting a bunch of batteries into a high-performance golf cart and calling it a car; it's because environmentalists in California have dictated by law that a certan percentage of cars must be electric in the near future.
Take a look at Texas, where certain environmental controls have been negated or loosened. Some of the worse pollution in the United States occurs along the Tex/Mex border, in large part because no-one cares, the laws aren't in place, and if given a choice between polluting or spending a huge amount of money on pollution controls, factory owners in Texas have demonstrated they'd rather keep the money. The only thing that prevents them from polluting even more than they do is the potential cost of litigation.
Look; I believe a lot of environmental research is bogus. I was there at JPL when they first noticed the hole in the ozone--I saw the first pictures--and I remember a researcher telling me that the good part about this is that, if phrased as an environmental disaster, it would assure his research group continued funding for years. And I also used to work for a company who made "short runs" of printed circuit boards (about a hundred or so a month), who used to clean the toxic flux off the boards in a dishwasher hooked up to the main sewar line. (That shit's toxic waste, yet they didn't care they were flushing this stuff down the city sewar line. After all, it was just a hundred printed circuit boards worth--not that much, right?)
So I know that while a lot of this big-picture stuff may be bogus, if people aren't checked, by and large their apathy will cause more damage to our immediate environment. (After all, how can Mankind's CO2 be doing such damage to the global weather patterns when a volcanic eruption can put out more CO2 in an afternoon than all of Man's pollution in a year? Yet take those hundred printed circuit boards and multiply by all the printed circuits produced in the LA basin, and think of all that flux working it's way into the drinking water supply.)
I like to think of it as "think locally, act globally." I don't think we can accidently destroy the entire earth's ecosystem. But we sure as hell can mess up the air and water and greenery around a city--making our lives quite miserable in the process.
And I'm happy for the greens--not because in some unforseeable future we've reduced the chances of the sea level rising up and washing half of Los Angeles away. I'm happy because environmental laws have decreased the number of "unhealthful" air quality alerts that have been issued here since the 80's. I can now run along the Highway 5 corridor without feeling that my lungs are about to melt from the toxic waste in the air.
In cases like this, where one party in a lawsuit asks to review proprietary or secret code from another, generally a couple of guys are put under NDA and then are given access to the code for review.
This happened to me once; I was the litigation support expert for a lawsuit between two C compiler developers. Neither side wanted to allow the other side to see their code (for fear of future cross contamination), so I was placed under NDA, had to sign a proviso saying I would never work for a C compiler developer for 5 years (times up!), and then I was given access to both company's compiler code.
This is a pretty common tactic by the lawyers, hiring litigation support experts to help them review the code. My report on the similarities (the problem was one guy used to work for one company and went to work for the other--taking some code with him) was then sent to a professional "expert witness" who then actually testified.
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Did you even read Brin's article? If you had, you would have realized that the problem he has with the current debate is exactly the thing you point out--that our loss of privacy is currently happening without a corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government.
Without that corrisponding loss of privacy within the Government, it strips us of our own privacy without the necessary controls to allow us to know who has information on us and what they are doing with it. It also allows a small, elite class of people to arise who can control information on themselves (and, thus, do great harm or illegal stuff a'la Enron), while the rest of us are relegated to "sheep."
Until this transparency happens in Government, there is a problem.
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
And that's why Brin, in his article, called for transparency within Government. Otherwise, we cannot watch the watchers.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
But you have already lost your freedom. Enron happened; the powerful elite who can control the public's ability to see what they are doing already have closed the shutters and have already committed crimes which took money out of your pocket (if you are an investor or live in California and buy electricity here).
Only transparency (which means also the transparency to see what Bush--and Clinton--had to do with Enron) will allow you to prevent a bunch of elite thieves from picking your pocket in the future.
Sure--we have the right to free television. But to expect content to be produced for free is to expect others to work for nothing--that is, it's to expect for us to turn actors, producers and writers and SFX creators and the rest into slaves.
Of course there is already a lot of existing content--but who wants to go through eternity watching reruns of "I Love Lucy?"
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.
It's a stupid argument, anyways. I've got a ReplayTV 4000 which stores 80 hours at "standard"--which is good enough for time shifting, but the image is pretty grainy and not at all the quality of a DVD recording. If I wanted to store every episode of the X-Files on my ReplayTV, I could only store 20 episodes at high (near DVD) quality.
Which means for just $1,000 I have a piece of hardware which stores what I could buy for $99 at Amazon.com--rendering my ReplayTV unusable (as I'm using all my disk space to store 20 X-File episodes) in the process. How stupid is that?
Furthermore, the argument is incredibly dumb, given the fact that the studios refuse to sell me the damned DVDs of my favorite programs anyways! I love Stargate SG1--but can't they be bothered to release anything but the first season on disk (which I bought, dispite owning a ReplayTV)? Noooo....
Come on! I've got $400 burning a hole in my pocket, and the studios can't be bothered to put down the episodes to DVD for Region 1 (though the episodes for Seasons 2 through 4 are available for Region 2)...
The whole management process at these various entertainment companies stinks to high heaven. Using a lawsuit to protect a market they don't even want to sell into in the first place by making life more inconvenient for me is rediculous.
I would say that most observers believe that H saw himself as a patriotic and loyal German, but not a supporter of the Nazis per se. There were many Germans, at the time, who believed that the Nazis were, rightly or wrongly, the official government of Germany and that to go against them would be an act of treason against Germany
I will note that it's my understanding that the United States attitude that the country is separate from the government is relatively unique: we're one of the few countries in the world where the attitude that one can love one's country but demand the overthrow of it's government is seen as patriotic, albeit misguided.
So it may hurt our brains in the US to think of loyal Germans not questioning the NAZIs (who were seen as Germany's rightful government), throughout the rest of the world, that's the way it works: love your country pretty much means supporting it's government by definition--even if you disagree with your government's behavior.
Don't.
Or rather, don't make open source a focal point in your campaign because you'll just get 40,000 glazed eyes, and 40,000 people who will think you're a nut who has focused on some small aspect of the campaign rather than the "big issue" ideas such as city management, police, fire, and schools.
Of course if you do put together a position paper on your overall campaign, you may want to toss out open source as a line item, or a minor talking point. But by and large, think of a campaign as a very large job interview in front of 40,000 potential employers who don't give a damn and who can't be bothered to read your resume.
If I were you, in this current election cycle, I would concern myself with police first, schools second, and local concerns third. If open source even comes up, talk about it as a potential tax savings that can potentially be used to help fund police efforts or whatever.
By the way, a realistic estimate of the cost to transition a town to open source should factor in the cost to retrain users and the cost for your town's MIS department to make the transition in terms of lowered productivity and consulting time. And while overall you probably will save a fair amount of money, realistically speaking the fiscal savings over the course of a year may not buy one police squad car. (Not that the savings is insignificant, but in the scope of running a town, it's relatively small chump change.)
Oh, and by the way, slightly off topic: beware political math done by any of your opponents! When I helped my brother win in the city council in Fresno several years back, it was done largely because he went up against an opponent who tried to claim that a $1 million savings in one place could be used to hire a hundred police officers and pay their salaries for one year. (Do the math: factoring in training costs and the cost of supplies, what's left wouldn't pay minimum wage.)
Oh, and beware the last minute advertising blitz! That is, beware of your opponents taking out a whole bunch of last minute advertising which sways the voters away from you. The last election cycle, my brother was defeated because his opponent violated campaign financing rules (a criminal offense in this state) to buy advertising that painted my brother as a crook. (The irony there should be obvious.)
Anyways, good luck!
As someone who has been writing software for the Macintosh since it was released in 1984, and for Windows since the 2.11 (386) days, just a few notes.
First, Windows was available in the stores since version 1.0, and until Windows 3.0 was released was being marketed as a program manager tool (that is, an enhancement to DOS which allowed you to run multiple DOS programs) during that time. And until Windows 3.1 came out, Microsoft emphasized DOS programs and DOS programming over Windows programming in large part because the consumer base was so locked into the whole "WIMP interfaces are for wimps" mentality which prevented early adoption of the Macintosh by a large segment of the population.
But to your comment that Windows was not viable until Windows 3.1--I'll note that the difference between Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were fairly minimal; a few bug fixes and some rather minor features were added. The only reason why 3.1 finally caught on was because Microsoft successfully had a large enough product list which targeted Windows to start pushing PC manufacturers to pre-install Windows as the default OS instead of DOS.
But the features in 3.0 (the ability to write large, albeit segmented addressing applications which made use of memory above 640K) were also present in Windows 2.11 (386). Why Windows 2.11 (386) never caught on was because it targeted 80386 systems, which at the time were very expensive boxes. (Oh, and note the designation Windows 2.11 (386)--there was a separate Windows 2.11 product which targeted 80286 boxes which used the 80286's brain-dead addressing modes. Windows 3.0 was essentially the unification of the earlier Windows 2.11 and Windows 2.11 (386) products by including code to determine which processor it was running on and which executable it was trying to start, and load the appropriate kernel. Yes: Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 had two, count them! two kernels, and some "thunk" code to translate 80286-addressing calls to 80386-addressing calls when running a program targeted for the x286 on an x386 and later box.)
As to your comments about X Windows, I'll note that in fact, X Windows does not predate Microsoft Windows by a decade.
In 1984, MIT created project Athena in order to create the X Windows project, which was the unification of several earlier windowing interfaces into a portable windowing system for Unix which isolates the hardware-dependant display issues into separate driver modules. While bits and pieces of X Windows borrows code from earlier projects, X Windows itself has not been around since the 70's, as your posting suggests. (The name 'X' itself is suggestive of the fact that X Windows runs on any box, as opposed to earlier efforts, which were named "Sun Windows" or "SGI Windows" or whatever; 'X' is a variable, and the target platforms were the constants over which X could vary.)
The X Window System was never ment to be a user interface. The design of the X Window System was deliberately "user interface agnostic" and "display hardware agnostic" as it's goal was not to provide a simple user interface, but to provide a portable interface environment and API. (That's why MIT created this whole concept of the "Windows Manager" as a separate object from the core X Window System, which only provides a mechanism for creating naked overlapping regions on the screen and drawing into them.)
Granted, today the X Window System and Microsoft Windows fills the same niche. But they were originally created to full two completely different markets. X Windows was created as an effort to unite several previous device-dependant and platform-dependant windowing systems, while Microsoft Windows was originally a graphical program manager. So comparing the two, or comparing the release dates of their earlier versions (as you have unsuccessfully have done) is comparing apples and oranges.
One disadvantage of a bike (at least here in Los Angeles) is that on a bike, you are subject to the rules of the road. That is, as far as the California Vehicle Code is concerned, you are a vehicle, not unlike a motorcycle or a car.
At times when I ride my bike, I don't particularly feel safe sharing the road with bikes.
Right now, the Segway HT cannot be driven on sidewalks alongside pedestrian traffic. However, if the laws can be changed, perhaps the Segway will have the advantage of a bike that it can be taken over sidewalks and pedestrian bridges. If the Segway has to be driven in the street alongside bikes and cars, however, then there is no advantage--and you may as well ride a bike instead.
I would argue, however, that a bike's top reasonable speed (assuming you don't want to show up covered in sweat) is about the same as the Segway HT.
Why can't people do both?
Geez; before, it was "clean your plate because there are people starving in China" which lead a whole generation to be fat and guilty about it. Now it's "why are you enjoying christmas when people are out there who have nothing" to spoil the whole holidays. Didn't you know that before 9/11, there were still people who didn't have anything for Christmas? And now, because of 9/11, so many people are focused on the disaster in New York that more poor children who would otherwise receive a donated present for Christmas this year will get nothing?
I don't mean to be a killjoy, and yes, I donated money to the Red Cross for the 9/11 disaster, but that doesn't mean we have to alter our entire existance. I still intend to get my wife Christmas presents, and I still intend to donate a present to a poor child this year.
It would be a pathetic world if people altered their behavior this Christmas and started feeling guilty or vengeful or whatever because of the terrorists. In fact, I would say if people did alter their behavior substantially this Christmas, we would have allowed the terrorists to win.
If I spraypainted, "I love Crystal" on your house wouldn't that be enough for you to want my ass in a sling?
Oh, sure; I'd want your ass in a sling. And as someone who recently had to spend two days rebuilding a web server knocked down by the Nimda virus, I understand first hand the annoyance that accompanies such a defacement.
However, the question really is not "should this be a crime"--clearly the answer is yes. The question is "is this crime terrorism, and deserving of a life sentence"? Murderers who kill in a fit of passion don't do life; taggers who may tag my house with "I love Crystal" with spray paint don't get life. So why should some script kiddy get life? I would understand it if he got 18 months or three years. But life?
I don't mind increase survelance powers in order to fight terrorism. However, scrawling "I love you Crystal" or some such on some web page is not terrorism.
This thing needs to at least be tempered by a clause which adds or defines criminal intent. That is, if hacking is done with the intent to destroy or disable the United States government and/or make actual acts of terrorism (such as blowing people up) easier, then throw the bastards in jail. But defacing some web site doesn't harm the United States government; it's just annoying as hell. And annoying doesn't deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole--especially since actually killing someone is what I would consider slightly more annoying, yet many types of murder don't get anywhere near life.