How do you charge such a 300 mile battery in any where near a comparable amount of time that it now takes to fill a gas tank?
By swapping out the batteries at the charging station and slotting in freshly charged ones.
Next question?
Oh, and there's only a factor of 500 between lead-acid batteries and petrol with regard to energy density, and less than a factor of 50 between lithium batteries and petrol. Still a big gap, but perhaps not entirely insurmountable.
A better way is to tax the poorest performing vehicles in a class and _use_ that money to subsidize the top ones
This is one of many solutions to this problem that are, as someone once said, "simple, obvious and wrong."
Good public policy, like good engineering, measures outcomes, not inputs. I don't care what class of car someone owns. Nor do I care that they are buying a gallon of gas today, which is what a tax on gas measures. Neither of those things has anything necessary connection with how much a person pollutes.
For example, a friend who lives in California owns an older car. But she drives about two miles every couple of weeks. Regardless, the emissions limits the vehicle has to fufill are based on some presumptive and quite false belief about how far she drives each year. Thus, the outcome we want to limit--high emissions--is estimated via an input--the fact of car ownership and its tailpipe emission levels--and some trivially false assumptions about how much the vehicle will be driven.
This is the kind of thinking that brought us Three Mile Island, where the engineer who designed the reactor control system thought for some unaccountable reason that the power going to the motor controlling a valve could be used to measure the the state of the valve, thus misleading operators as to the state of the reactor when a valve jammed. This is trivially bad engineering, and likewise trivially bad public policy.
If it matters, measure it. That is, measure the actual thing, not "something that I think ought to be somehow kinda sorta related to it in my incredibly limited imagination."
I know damed well I'm not smart enough to figure out an adequate surrogate measure of pollution that takes into account the incredible diversity of human behaviour. Trying to do so is like what the architects of modern security theatre do when they ban an entire state of matter from carry on luggage: they focus exclusively on one particular scenario that "just seems to me" to be the most important one, and ignore all the inconvenient realities.
The ideal anti-pollution charge is one that is based on actual emissions, not imaginary surrogates. This is both a technological and a political problem. Fixed power plants are easy to monitor. Automobiles could be retrofitted with tailpipe loggers that measured actual emissions, and a charge levied as part of the license fee based on the past year's actual emissions. But even this solution would a) cost more than some people can afford and b) create a cottage industry in tampering with the data.
The difficulty is that we would like any anti-pollution charge to only kick in above a certain level. We'd like everyone to have a certain amount of polution for free, or at least cheap. That way poor people wouldn't get hit by socially-regressive charges. The only way to do this is to somehow monitor fuel usage, which requires burdens of measurement and monitoring that are unacceptably invasive to many people, especially in the U.S. (although with your government, I can understand that a certain level of paranoia is justified.)
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the title of this article was pornography, of the general and more dubious types.
The biggest effect of the 'Net hasn't been as an enabler of guilty pleasures, but as a means for the rest of us to know just how weird we all are.
There were a number of mid-20th-century artistic movements, like the Dadaists, that claimed to be exposing the absurdity, hypocrisy, and perversity of the bourgois, but none of them came close to the sort of thing you can find apparently ordinary people doing on the 'Net. The imagination of the writers and artists fell far, far short of the reality.
For example, type "* fetish" into Google, where * is any word, and you'll find the most remarkable array of strangeness. Presumably all of this has been going on since time immemorial, but now anyone can find out about it. I just tried it for "slashdot fetish" and got a hit on a site that defined it as "the desire to be publicly flogged for multiple posts of a news item." How guilty a pleasure is that?
Back in the day I worked in a lab where the network cabling ran through the electronics shop, and part of the network was RG-58U co-ax, which is was used heavily in those days for nuclear instruments. There was a coil of cable with a BNC straight-through hanging on the rack beside all the other spare cable. Some grad student (it might even have been me) scrounged the connector for his apparatus, not knowing that it was part of the network. It took over a day to figure out why a couple of machines were suddenly incommunicado.
On the other hand, the "neat" installation examples in the article are a little too cable-tied for my taste. The first time something goes bad or needs to be changed there's going to be a lot of cutting and re-tieing going on. A few ties as required is good. More is not better.
The key part of the term "Global Warming" is "Global". That is to say that the average temperature of the entire surface of the Earth is increasing.
More correctly, the average heat content of the troposphere is increasing. Because the atmosphere is not just air, this can happen in different ways, notably by the addition of more water vapour, which has a higher heat content than air. For homogenous substances of stable composition temperature is a reasonable surrogate for heat content. For the atmosphere it is not, although wet-bulb/dry-bulb temperature differences can be used to determine heat content in a straightforward way, and there may be other ways of getting at the heat content from historical measures of temperature and humidity.
Basically global warming has just become a boogeyman for socialists to use to push their agenda, which is of far more concern to them than the actual environment.
Unfortunately, sometime the socialists are right. I'm a green social democrat politically, but I'm a scientist before anything else, and my participation in politics is limited by my respect for the truth, which does not respect anyone's biases.
The environmental movement continues to have a real problem with "watermellons" (green on the outside, red on the inside" but the fact that socialists believe something because they think they can use it to push their agenda does not make what they believe false.
The facts on climate are as follows:
1) The CO2 load in the Earth's atmosphere has increased dramatically in the past 200 years, and C02 is a known greenhouse gas. The additional climate forcing from all that added CO2 is disputed by almost no one. More of the sun's heat is retained by the troposphere than was the case pre-industrially. There really is no argument about that, and I assume you and everyone else agrees with this. More CO2 means more retained heat, unless...
2)...there is a response from the global climate to change the heat balance in such a way that a new equilibrium is achieved. If, for example, the Earth's albedo increased sufficiently to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere, then the system might achieve a new equilibrium that way. Or temperatures could go up until radiative cooling balanced the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. Or the heat content of the atmosphere may increase due to changes in wettness to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. Or convective heat transfer by the ocean's currents to the poles might compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. BUT...
3)...the one thing that no one sane can claim is that a new climate equilibrium will be achieved with no changes whatsoever. Whatever happens, there will be a response of the climate to the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere.
The Earth's climate is a complex, nonlinear system that has shown remarkable stability over billions of years, somehow coping with changes in insolation due to the "early quiet sun" that are far larger than the changes in heat flux due to added C02. True, there have been major extinction events in there due to extreme climate changes, but almost no one is arguing that we are loooking at anything as big as the transition from glacial to interglacial climate that wiped out so many species a mere 10,000 years ago. But there is some uncertainty as to how the system will respond. Then again, no one sane can claim that there will be no response. The best that climate skeptics can claim is that the response will differ, either in magnitude or kind, from the concensus achieved by the best climate scientists in the world using the most sophistocated models, which have been subject to the process of peer review.
But that is not what climate skeptics argue--they seem to be arguing that it is possible that the climate will achieve a new equilibrium with no change whatsoever, or at least no change on a scale sufficient to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere.
There's a reason why we live better in the USA than people did in the Soviet Union, or in the typical middle-east dictatorship.
Indeed, and that reason is mostly to do with the rule of law and a well regulated market, which is not much like the "free market" libertarians defend. Nations with better-regulated markets than the U.S., like Canada, Denmark and Sweden to name but a few, have populaces that live better than people in the USA do. At least according the UN measure of quality of life.
Neither libertarianism nor communism require "perfect humans", whatever those might be. But they do require human beings to be other than they actually are, and therefore have not been notably successful in the creation of stable societies.
Other than the obvious geek factor, why would we want to increase our dependancy on a fossil fuel.
I'm just guessing here, but maybe because we are monkeys.
We are, after all, the species that dropped automotive research into aerodynamics for the better part of fifty years because the marketing droids realized that aerodynamic shapes would limit the scope of pointless re-stylings that can be used to sell monkeys new cars they don't need every few years.
Humans are not very far out of the trees, driven by monkey drives of hierarchy and status. These drives are remarkably robust, to the extent that all attempts to subvert them are rapidly subverted themselves, giving us folks like Stalin at the extremely pointed pinnicle of a "classless" society.
These failures have nothing to do with people not being "good enough" for non-hierarchical societies, any more than whales persistently dieing on the beach is evidence that they are not "good enough" to live on land. It is simply a matter of our nature, which is unfortunately largely ill-suited to creating stable, sane, passably decent societies that use technology for the betterment of all rather the convenience of some and the oppression of many.
Nothing new has happened on either side in 2000 or 2004 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life.
"Nothing new has happened with the Stamp Act that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happened with Townshend Acts that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happened with the Royal Proclomation of 1763 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happend with the Quebec Act of 1774 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
This kind of bovine complacency about political corruption and the abuse of power to feed the powerful is utterly, absolutely, un-American. It is by far the greatest threat to America today, and until the people of the United States get their heads out of their collective butts they will continue to get the government they deserve.
Unfortunately, however deeply the rest of us feel for the plight of the average American, whom these data show did not vote for the current administration, we are getting tired of the outcomes. Fortunately (for us, but not for the average American) in a few more years we will have complete control of your country due to the huge foreign debts the bozos you have allowed to seize power have run up.
There will be some rough waters as the Euro replaces the greenback as the defacto world currency, but in the end we will have a saner, safer world.
Sorry, bud, those most certainly ARE very socialist, left-wing, countries who have crippled their economies.
Yeah, Canada has longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, spends about half what the U.S. does per capita on health care and gets universal coverage for its money, has a currency that is rising against the U.S. dollar and has had budgets balanced at the federal level and in most provinces for the past ten years. We have low unemployment and interest rates, and you can incorporate federally in your pyjamas (I've done it--is that too much information?)
Sure sounds like a crippled economy to me.
Re:Business is good - just get healthcare clients
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The Engine of US Jobs
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I'd say that making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years, is quite 'productive'.
I'm in exactly the same position as the GP, an independent consultant with several healthcare clients, and focusing on changing focus for a variety of reasons. I've also worked in the Canadian healthcare system in a variety of capacities, mostly in imaging and medical physics, as well as for U.S. healthcare companies, and have lived in the U.S. for long enough to experience a bit of the U.S. healthcare system as a client.
The thing to realize is that equating "heathcare dollars" or even "healthcare services" with "making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years" is simply wrong. It is a truism in the healthcare industry that you could take all of the money spent on healthcare in the developed world and spend it on public health in the developing world, and the lifespan in the developed world would hardly change while the lifespan in the developing world would take a great leap forward.
Healthcare adds almost nothing to the average lifespan compared to access to clean water, sewage treatment, and universal education, especially for women. Nor does the actual health of a population correlate very well with health care expenditures: Canada spends a little more than half of what the U.S. does per capita on health care, and we have lower infant mortality and longer lifespans. Sweden spends less than half of what the U.S. does per capita, and has infant mortality rates that are less than half the U.S. rate.
It is also worth noting that the U.S. spends more public money per capita in healthcare than Canada does. That's right: the U.S. government-funded healthcare system spends more per capita than Canada's socialized healthcare system. It just does so in such an astonishingly inefficient way that fifteen percent of the U.S. population doesn't have any form of healthcare insurance whatsoever.
So there are very good reasons to be concerned about the growth of healthcare industries as an economic driver.
Politicians NEED the terrorist threats to push through legislation giving themselves more power.
Nothing illustrates this better than George W. Bush's citing Osama bin Laden's belief that "we are engaged in a third world war" to bolster his (Bush's) claims that the U.S. government needs to be able to ride roughshod over the fundamental liberties Americans have fought and died for over centuries.
When I heard Bush say that it suddenly made perfect sense: two sides, both of whom have an interest in a war that is by definition practically unwinnable. And the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth claiming the blitherings of a man hiding in a cave constitute a creditable attack on our world-spanning civilization. Neither is interested in victory. Both are interested in pervasive warfare and fear. That is what secures their own power-base.
It is time for the rest of us to say we are tired of this make-believe war that is only in the interests of the nutters who want to lead it. Ordinary police work has been and continues to be an effective tool for fighting the minor threat that terrorism presents. We know terrorism is a minor threat because major threats actually kill people, whereas death by terrorism was negligable in 2001, much less 2006.
Ordinary police work, within the strong framework of rights and liberties that is fundamental to Anglo-American law, and not "security theatre", is what has kept us safe for decades. And even depending on ordinary police work did mean we were a little less safe, I personally am willing to trade a little bit of security in favour of liberty for myself, my compatriots, and my children.
A Treatise on Determining if Women on Ships Cause Shipwrecks
Damn right!
Scientific exploration of folk belief is one of the fundamental contributions of the Enlightenment to civilization.
But if you really want to see something interesting, read the paper immediately following Newton's 1720 publication. You'll never look at the cowpox myth the same way again.
It wasn't what the U.S. signed on for in 1776 or 1789.
Yeah, but look at what you've got: a government that is basing its whole policy on "security" and asking "are we more secure?" "Do you feel more secure?" "Would the other party be able to make you feel as secure as we do?"
It's like they've forgotten what that statue in New York Harbour is named.
And like they've forgotten what some radical left-wing terrorist-sympathizer said: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be bought at the price of warrentless wiretaps, violations of the IVth, Vth and VIth Ammendments and foreign wars-of-choice? Forbid it almighty God! I care not what course others may choose, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me the minor elevated risk of death that comes from terrorism, which is far smaller than the risk of death from falling down or being struck by lightning."
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals?
I really wish people would stop asking what will happen when GM genes get loose. It is an absolute certainty that they will. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but then in our childrens, or their childrens. And frankly everything we know about hybridization in plants tells us that it will happen sooner rather than later. It always does.
So my question is: WHEN the engineered genes get loose, what are the makers and promoters of these products going to do about it?
In some jurisdictions it is illegal to introduce new species because of the ecological havoc they are capable of wreaking. The genetic changes we're talking about here are less than speciation, but they can still be pretty radical.
Are the nice people telling me how wonderful GM foods are willing to put up a few trillion in bond to pay for partial remediation when their playthings get loose? If not, why not?
I fail to see why anyone is happy having rice with unintentional, random genetic changes (i.e. natural rice) and concerned over intentional changes.
Apparently because you know nothing about how many GM foods are created: by the introduction of powerful mutagens, either chemical or radioactive.
Simply because a change is intentional does not mean it is non-random, and GM foods are created with a variety of techniques whose sole purpose is to induce particular, commerically valuable, changes that could not be created economically by hybridization or selective breeding, as has been done for thousands of years.
So if you really feel like eating something that has been produced by a novel, essentially experimental process, whose consequences we've not quite worked out yet because it hasn't been around for that long, go right ahead. Just do it on your own time, in your own fields, on your own table, thanks. I know from thousands of years of history that the minor random genetic changes that come between generations are very, very unlikely to do me any harm.
But do please get back to me in a few thousand years, when you've built up a reasonable amount of data on Deadly Poison Ready wheat and the like.
But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses.
Not "if". When.
It is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose. That's what they do, and plants hybridize to the extent that there are biologists who have challenged the validity of the "biological species concept" as a general means of categorization, citing cases where up to 40% of the individuals in a particular lump of foliage are unclassifiable hybrids.
The very point of the story here is that GM rice got into non-GM shipments. This kind of thing has already happened in Canada, where a farmer got done for storing seed from "Deadly Poison Ready" wheat that had grown from cross-pollination from a neighbour's field.
As to the GP's argument that this is all good for the developing world...yeah, right. Just like drug companies spend all that money on marketing because they want to help the sick...but somehow neglect to invest anything much in the diseases that have the largest effect on people, because the people they affect, also in the developing world, don't have any money to speak of.
The meaning of "GM" is: genetically altered by direct manipulation of DNA to produce commercially useful varieties that are not capable of being produced by hybridization. Releasing such varieties into the wild is a great big ecological experiment that we are all getting to participate in, like it or not.
I wonder how the folks who are responsible for this stuff will feel when they find out what's growing in their back yards in a few years?
Today, nineteen year old men are still considered "kids".
Just to second your comments, by the time my father was nineteen he had lived through the Great Depression, lost his father to what is now a treatable condition which couldn't even be diagnosed in those days, supported himself and my grandmother by buying, fixing and reselling cars, and marched off to serve his country in a war that killed virtually all of his childhood friends.
Kids today, including my generation and even moreso my children's generation, have never had it so good.
I would humbly suggest that economic impact (though sometimes difficult to measure) is often a very good way to estimate the importance of an innovation. After all, if it's not impacting the economy, directly or indirectly, how is it impacting people's lives?
The economic effect of an innovation can only in rare circumstances be used as a proxy for the "importance" of an innovation, especially if "importance" is given environmental and ethical as well as economic connotations.
The environmental and ethical impacts of an innovation are very poorly measured by purely economic factors, to the extent that they may be diametrically opposed.
The town where I live is on the Great Lakes "Poker Run" circuit, an environmentally damaging enterprise in which a bunch of rich men with adequacy issues follow a point-to-point course in over-powered speedboats, some of which burn a gallon of gas every 700 feet. They pick up a playing card at each point. At the end, the five cards each guy has picked up are compared, and the one with the best poker hand wins some token amount of money, and presumably finds himself with a certain status amongst the sadder sort of boat babe.
This laughable travesty is not only pretty good for the local economy, it is also pretty innovative. The whole thing is run by the companies that build the boats, and they have effectively created a huge self-funding marketing vehicle to not only advertise their wares, but sustain a community of rich men with adequacy issues that a new buyer can become part of.
By harnessing the near infinite power of men who aren't too sure of their masculinity they've had a big economic impact within their industry and within the local economies that these poor losers travel around to.
But is that impact a measure of the "importance" of this innovation in any way a decent human being would want to count it?
At the other end of the spectrum, the effects of a clean environment and a healthy community have at most an indirect impact on economics, and again sometimes a negative one, as people are apt to get off the ladder of pointless consumption and actually enjoy their lives.
So there are many cases were economics just won't do as a proxy for the importance of an innovation. Measuring environmental and happiness impacts is equally important.
Because the guy physically doing the gambling was in the US. The servers were only facilitating the gambling.
One question this raises is: was the income of the gambling company taxed in the U.S.? In your contention, the transaction, which is what I understand gambling to be, occured in the U.S., and transactions are generally what trigger tax consequences.
Let's try a different analogy.
1) U.S. guy FedEx's his credit card number to a company in the UK with instructions to put $X on black during the first spin of the roulette wheel at table four on the second Saturday after the next full moon.
2) UK company plays the bet, and bills his credit card if it comes up read or green, and credits 2X to his account if it comes up black.
Where has the gambling occured?
And how is the case described above different from the U.S. guy travelling to the UK and gambling there?
If I log on to someone's server, I have a virtual presence on the server. They do not have a virtual presence in my client software. My presence on their server has the fundamental characteristics of "being there": it is stateful, persistent and singular (there is only one of it). But the information they send back over to wire to me could as easily be broadcast to many people, and my persistent client state information is at most enough to identify me.
Your position may well be that of the government, but I believe it is based on a mistake with regard to the nature of virtual presence. I am arguing on an epistemological and ontological basis, not a legal one.
The Americans who are engaged in online gambling are breaking a law against logging in to an online gambling site and participating in games of chance there. There is no doubt they are doing those things, and they are doing so while on U.S. soil. But the gambling itself is--or ought to be considered to be--taking place in the UK.
The sheer magnitude of bullsh*t this promises is nearly limitless, based just the amazing lack of common sense found in the idea. Its like modeling a operating room after a CPA office.
Indeed. Teaching is almost entirely unlike management. I've done both, and while my management style tends strongly toward mentoring, the differences between the two are much, much greater than the similarities.
There are universal aspects to management that are independent of field, and Microsoft's management culture appears from the outside to be basically similar to any other high-tech company: brain damaged sociopaths telling an understaffed team to implement ill-defined features on impossible deadlines. I have had the good fortune to work at some very good, large companies, but that description of management has applied to all of them. Even when the managers were good people as individuals, as most of them have been, the organizational pressures had a very strong tendency to push them into the same ugly mould when it came to doing their job. Nor does this have anything to do with the corporate environment as such: I've seen the same thing in public hospitals and universities.
Teaching is about guiding and nurturing, where the thing that matters most is that the student actually learns something, and eventually learns the skill of learning (which cannot be done without learning, any more than one can learn to swim without actually swimming.)
Management is about gratifying the manager's ego, helping the manager get promoted, and delivering product, usually in that order. It is about hierarchy and power, not truth and knowledge.
So even the best-managed company in the world--and Microsoft's routine failure to ship major products on time demonstrates they are far from that--would be a very bad model for teaching.
Thanks for the info--I had the FORTRAN bug story both from the Myers book and a colleague who had close NASA contacts. The interesting thing is that the Mariner I bug as described was actually a problem with the equation, not with the program as such. So it was really a specification error or a design transfer error rather than a programming error. The program faithfully represented the specification, which was incorrect.
Well, just to play devil's advocate - what if the vulnerability fix was, literally, a couple of lines of code? Maybe it was just a tiny fix.
I once moved a single line of code up one line and broke the product in a subtle and interesting way that fouled up major testing, delayed a milestone, and severely and justifiably pissed off one of my colleagues.
There are no small fixes. A famous single-character error (typing "." for "," in a FORTRAN DO loop header, so it read DO I=1.10 instead of DO I=1,10) resulted in the destruction of a spacecraft.
So I guess fixes that involve changing less than one character are safe to release with minimal testing. All the rest need the full cycle.
The only reason why Microsoft might not do that in the present case is because keeping partners who depend on DRM happy is really, really important, and therefore they are willing to take the risk of crashing user's machines. Either that, or the person making the decision is just not very smart, a possibility never to be discounted.
Many people (particularly those who do not understand the evidence) dislike the idea of dark matter, thinking it sounds too much like epicycles
Some of us were skeptical because we did understand the evidence, and understood that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Galactic dark matter is something (almost) everyone believes in, because the evidence is compelling and it does not require additional, and thus far quite undetectable, particles.
Dark matter on larger scales, which is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter, depended on infering 3D dynamics from 2D projections of complex collections of galaxies. Even well-studied systems like the Local Group have had their dynamics revised in the past twenty years as new data have become available, and as such a healthy skepticism has been warranted with regard to extra-galactic dark matter, which, in case anyone missed what I said previously, is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter and the well-measured rotation curves of spiral galaxies.
I agree that the quite beautiful recent study of hot gas dynamics in colliding clusters gets at the dark matter distribution in a much more direct way than previous approaches, and puts to rest most of the doubts about extra-galactic dark matter, which is unrelated to galactic dark matter.
The fact that MOND also requires extra-galactic dark matter (which is unrelated to galactic dark matter) is a big count against it, and a 2 eV neutrino is very nearly as exotic as some of the more colourful imaginary particles that have been proposed to constitute the extra-galactic dark matter.
So MOND is now a theory with no plausible motivation at all, and can be expected to die a natural death over the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you charge such a 300 mile battery in any where near a comparable amount of time that it now takes to fill a gas tank?
By swapping out the batteries at the charging station and slotting in freshly charged ones.
Next question?
Oh, and there's only a factor of 500 between lead-acid batteries and petrol with regard to energy density, and less than a factor of 50 between lithium batteries and petrol. Still a big gap, but perhaps not entirely insurmountable.
A better way is to tax the poorest performing vehicles in a class and _use_ that money to subsidize the top ones
This is one of many solutions to this problem that are, as someone once said, "simple, obvious and wrong."
Good public policy, like good engineering, measures outcomes, not inputs. I don't care what class of car someone owns. Nor do I care that they are buying a gallon of gas today, which is what a tax on gas measures. Neither of those things has anything necessary connection with how much a person pollutes.
For example, a friend who lives in California owns an older car. But she drives about two miles every couple of weeks. Regardless, the emissions limits the vehicle has to fufill are based on some presumptive and quite false belief about how far she drives each year. Thus, the outcome we want to limit--high emissions--is estimated via an input--the fact of car ownership and its tailpipe emission levels--and some trivially false assumptions about how much the vehicle will be driven.
This is the kind of thinking that brought us Three Mile Island, where the engineer who designed the reactor control system thought for some unaccountable reason that the power going to the motor controlling a valve could be used to measure the the state of the valve, thus misleading operators as to the state of the reactor when a valve jammed. This is trivially bad engineering, and likewise trivially bad public policy.
If it matters, measure it. That is, measure the actual thing, not "something that I think ought to be somehow kinda sorta related to it in my incredibly limited imagination."
I know damed well I'm not smart enough to figure out an adequate surrogate measure of pollution that takes into account the incredible diversity of human behaviour. Trying to do so is like what the architects of modern security theatre do when they ban an entire state of matter from carry on luggage: they focus exclusively on one particular scenario that "just seems to me" to be the most important one, and ignore all the inconvenient realities.
The ideal anti-pollution charge is one that is based on actual emissions, not imaginary surrogates. This is both a technological and a political problem. Fixed power plants are easy to monitor. Automobiles could be retrofitted with tailpipe loggers that measured actual emissions, and a charge levied as part of the license fee based on the past year's actual emissions. But even this solution would a) cost more than some people can afford and b) create a cottage industry in tampering with the data.
The difficulty is that we would like any anti-pollution charge to only kick in above a certain level. We'd like everyone to have a certain amount of polution for free, or at least cheap. That way poor people wouldn't get hit by socially-regressive charges. The only way to do this is to somehow monitor fuel usage, which requires burdens of measurement and monitoring that are unacceptably invasive to many people, especially in the U.S. (although with your government, I can understand that a certain level of paranoia is justified.)
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the title of this article was pornography, of the general and more dubious types.
The biggest effect of the 'Net hasn't been as an enabler of guilty pleasures, but as a means for the rest of us to know just how weird we all are.
There were a number of mid-20th-century artistic movements, like the Dadaists, that claimed to be exposing the absurdity, hypocrisy, and perversity of the bourgois, but none of them came close to the sort of thing you can find apparently ordinary people doing on the 'Net. The imagination of the writers and artists fell far, far short of the reality.
For example, type "* fetish" into Google, where * is any word, and you'll find the most remarkable array of strangeness. Presumably all of this has been going on since time immemorial, but now anyone can find out about it. I just tried it for "slashdot fetish" and got a hit on a site that defined it as "the desire to be publicly flogged for multiple posts of a news item." How guilty a pleasure is that?
Back in the day I worked in a lab where the network cabling ran through the electronics shop, and part of the network was RG-58U co-ax, which is was used heavily in those days for nuclear instruments. There was a coil of cable with a BNC straight-through hanging on the rack beside all the other spare cable. Some grad student (it might even have been me) scrounged the connector for his apparatus, not knowing that it was part of the network. It took over a day to figure out why a couple of machines were suddenly incommunicado.
On the other hand, the "neat" installation examples in the article are a little too cable-tied for my taste. The first time something goes bad or needs to be changed there's going to be a lot of cutting and re-tieing going on. A few ties as required is good. More is not better.
The key part of the term "Global Warming" is "Global". That is to say that the average temperature of the entire surface of the Earth is increasing.
More correctly, the average heat content of the troposphere is increasing. Because the atmosphere is not just air, this can happen in different ways, notably by the addition of more water vapour, which has a higher heat content than air. For homogenous substances of stable composition temperature is a reasonable surrogate for heat content. For the atmosphere it is not, although wet-bulb/dry-bulb temperature differences can be used to determine heat content in a straightforward way, and there may be other ways of getting at the heat content from historical measures of temperature and humidity.
Basically global warming has just become a boogeyman for socialists to use to push their agenda, which is of far more concern to them than the actual environment.
...there is a response from the global climate to change the heat balance in such a way that a new equilibrium is achieved. If, for example, the Earth's albedo increased sufficiently to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere, then the system might achieve a new equilibrium that way. Or temperatures could go up until radiative cooling balanced the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. Or the heat content of the atmosphere may increase due to changes in wettness to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. Or convective heat transfer by the ocean's currents to the poles might compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere. BUT...
...the one thing that no one sane can claim is that a new climate equilibrium will be achieved with no changes whatsoever. Whatever happens, there will be a response of the climate to the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere.
Unfortunately, sometime the socialists are right. I'm a green social democrat politically, but I'm a scientist before anything else, and my participation in politics is limited by my respect for the truth, which does not respect anyone's biases.
The environmental movement continues to have a real problem with "watermellons" (green on the outside, red on the inside" but the fact that socialists believe something because they think they can use it to push their agenda does not make what they believe false.
The facts on climate are as follows:
1) The CO2 load in the Earth's atmosphere has increased dramatically in the past 200 years, and C02 is a known greenhouse gas. The additional climate forcing from all that added CO2 is disputed by almost no one. More of the sun's heat is retained by the troposphere than was the case pre-industrially. There really is no argument about that, and I assume you and everyone else agrees with this. More CO2 means more retained heat, unless...
2)
3)
The Earth's climate is a complex, nonlinear system that has shown remarkable stability over billions of years, somehow coping with changes in insolation due to the "early quiet sun" that are far larger than the changes in heat flux due to added C02. True, there have been major extinction events in there due to extreme climate changes, but almost no one is arguing that we are loooking at anything as big as the transition from glacial to interglacial climate that wiped out so many species a mere 10,000 years ago. But there is some uncertainty as to how the system will respond. Then again, no one sane can claim that there will be no response. The best that climate skeptics can claim is that the response will differ, either in magnitude or kind, from the concensus achieved by the best climate scientists in the world using the most sophistocated models, which have been subject to the process of peer review.
But that is not what climate skeptics argue--they seem to be arguing that it is possible that the climate will achieve a new equilibrium with no change whatsoever, or at least no change on a scale sufficient to compensate for the added retained heat that absolutely everyone agrees is being added to the troposphere.
There's a reason why we live better in the USA than people did in the Soviet Union, or in the typical middle-east dictatorship.
Indeed, and that reason is mostly to do with the rule of law and a well regulated market, which is not much like the "free market" libertarians defend. Nations with better-regulated markets than the U.S., like Canada, Denmark and Sweden to name but a few, have populaces that live better than people in the USA do. At least according the UN measure of quality of life.
Neither libertarianism nor communism require "perfect humans", whatever those might be. But they do require human beings to be other than they actually are, and therefore have not been notably successful in the creation of stable societies.
Other than the obvious geek factor, why would we want to increase our dependancy on a fossil fuel.
I'm just guessing here, but maybe because we are monkeys.
We are, after all, the species that dropped automotive research into aerodynamics for the better part of fifty years because the marketing droids realized that aerodynamic shapes would limit the scope of pointless re-stylings that can be used to sell monkeys new cars they don't need every few years.
Humans are not very far out of the trees, driven by monkey drives of hierarchy and status. These drives are remarkably robust, to the extent that all attempts to subvert them are rapidly subverted themselves, giving us folks like Stalin at the extremely pointed pinnicle of a "classless" society.
These failures have nothing to do with people not being "good enough" for non-hierarchical societies, any more than whales persistently dieing on the beach is evidence that they are not "good enough" to live on land. It is simply a matter of our nature, which is unfortunately largely ill-suited to creating stable, sane, passably decent societies that use technology for the betterment of all rather the convenience of some and the oppression of many.
Nothing new has happened on either side in 2000 or 2004 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life.
"Nothing new has happened with the Stamp Act that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happened with Townshend Acts that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happened with the Royal Proclomation of 1763 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
"Nothing new has happend with the Quebec Act of 1774 that hasn't ever happened before. That's just a fact of life."
This kind of bovine complacency about political corruption and the abuse of power to feed the powerful is utterly, absolutely, un-American. It is by far the greatest threat to America today, and until the people of the United States get their heads out of their collective butts they will continue to get the government they deserve.
Unfortunately, however deeply the rest of us feel for the plight of the average American, whom these data show did not vote for the current administration, we are getting tired of the outcomes. Fortunately (for us, but not for the average American) in a few more years we will have complete control of your country due to the huge foreign debts the bozos you have allowed to seize power have run up.
There will be some rough waters as the Euro replaces the greenback as the defacto world currency, but in the end we will have a saner, safer world.
Sorry, bud, those most certainly ARE very socialist, left-wing, countries who have crippled their economies.
Yeah, Canada has longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, spends about half what the U.S. does per capita on health care and gets universal coverage for its money, has a currency that is rising against the U.S. dollar and has had budgets balanced at the federal level and in most provinces for the past ten years. We have low unemployment and interest rates, and you can incorporate federally in your pyjamas (I've done it--is that too much information?)
Sure sounds like a crippled economy to me.
I'd say that making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years, is quite 'productive'.
I'm in exactly the same position as the GP, an independent consultant with several healthcare clients, and focusing on changing focus for a variety of reasons. I've also worked in the Canadian healthcare system in a variety of capacities, mostly in imaging and medical physics, as well as for U.S. healthcare companies, and have lived in the U.S. for long enough to experience a bit of the U.S. healthcare system as a client.
The thing to realize is that equating "heathcare dollars" or even "healthcare services" with "making many more people capable of working, and working for many more years" is simply wrong. It is a truism in the healthcare industry that you could take all of the money spent on healthcare in the developed world and spend it on public health in the developing world, and the lifespan in the developed world would hardly change while the lifespan in the developing world would take a great leap forward.
Healthcare adds almost nothing to the average lifespan compared to access to clean water, sewage treatment, and universal education, especially for women. Nor does the actual health of a population correlate very well with health care expenditures: Canada spends a little more than half of what the U.S. does per capita on health care, and we have lower infant mortality and longer lifespans. Sweden spends less than half of what the U.S. does per capita, and has infant mortality rates that are less than half the U.S. rate.
It is also worth noting that the U.S. spends more public money per capita in healthcare than Canada does. That's right: the U.S. government-funded healthcare system spends more per capita than Canada's socialized healthcare system. It just does so in such an astonishingly inefficient way that fifteen percent of the U.S. population doesn't have any form of healthcare insurance whatsoever.
So there are very good reasons to be concerned about the growth of healthcare industries as an economic driver.
Politicians NEED the terrorist threats to push through legislation giving themselves more power.
Nothing illustrates this better than George W. Bush's citing Osama bin Laden's belief that "we are engaged in a third world war" to bolster his (Bush's) claims that the U.S. government needs to be able to ride roughshod over the fundamental liberties Americans have fought and died for over centuries.
When I heard Bush say that it suddenly made perfect sense: two sides, both of whom have an interest in a war that is by definition practically unwinnable. And the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth claiming the blitherings of a man hiding in a cave constitute a creditable attack on our world-spanning civilization. Neither is interested in victory. Both are interested in pervasive warfare and fear. That is what secures their own power-base.
It is time for the rest of us to say we are tired of this make-believe war that is only in the interests of the nutters who want to lead it. Ordinary police work has been and continues to be an effective tool for fighting the minor threat that terrorism presents. We know terrorism is a minor threat because major threats actually kill people, whereas death by terrorism was negligable in 2001, much less 2006.
Ordinary police work, within the strong framework of rights and liberties that is fundamental to Anglo-American law, and not "security theatre", is what has kept us safe for decades. And even depending on ordinary police work did mean we were a little less safe, I personally am willing to trade a little bit of security in favour of liberty for myself, my compatriots, and my children.
A Treatise on Determining if Women on Ships Cause Shipwrecks
Damn right!
Scientific exploration of folk belief is one of the fundamental contributions of the Enlightenment to civilization.
But if you really want to see something interesting, read the paper immediately following Newton's 1720 publication. You'll never look at the cowpox myth the same way again.
It wasn't what the U.S. signed on for in 1776 or 1789.
Yeah, but look at what you've got: a government that is basing its whole policy on "security" and asking "are we more secure?" "Do you feel more secure?" "Would the other party be able to make you feel as secure as we do?"
It's like they've forgotten what that statue in New York Harbour is named.
And like they've forgotten what some radical left-wing terrorist-sympathizer said: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be bought at the price of warrentless wiretaps, violations of the IVth, Vth and VIth Ammendments and foreign wars-of-choice? Forbid it almighty God! I care not what course others may choose, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me the minor elevated risk of death that comes from terrorism, which is far smaller than the risk of death from falling down or being struck by lightning."
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals?
I really wish people would stop asking what will happen when GM genes get loose. It is an absolute certainty that they will. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but then in our childrens, or their childrens. And frankly everything we know about hybridization in plants tells us that it will happen sooner rather than later. It always does.
So my question is: WHEN the engineered genes get loose, what are the makers and promoters of these products going to do about it?
In some jurisdictions it is illegal to introduce new species because of the ecological havoc they are capable of wreaking. The genetic changes we're talking about here are less than speciation, but they can still be pretty radical.
Are the nice people telling me how wonderful GM foods are willing to put up a few trillion in bond to pay for partial remediation when their playthings get loose? If not, why not?
I fail to see why anyone is happy having rice with unintentional, random genetic changes (i.e. natural rice) and concerned over intentional changes.
Apparently because you know nothing about how many GM foods are created: by the introduction of powerful mutagens, either chemical or radioactive.
Simply because a change is intentional does not mean it is non-random, and GM foods are created with a variety of techniques whose sole purpose is to induce particular, commerically valuable, changes that could not be created economically by hybridization or selective breeding, as has been done for thousands of years.
So if you really feel like eating something that has been produced by a novel, essentially experimental process, whose consequences we've not quite worked out yet because it hasn't been around for that long, go right ahead. Just do it on your own time, in your own fields, on your own table, thanks. I know from thousands of years of history that the minor random genetic changes that come between generations are very, very unlikely to do me any harm.
But do please get back to me in a few thousand years, when you've built up a reasonable amount of data on Deadly Poison Ready wheat and the like.
But just think what would happen if pesticide resistant rice cross pollinates with weed grasses.
Not "if". When.
It is an absolute certainty that the genes will get loose. That's what they do, and plants hybridize to the extent that there are biologists who have challenged the validity of the "biological species concept" as a general means of categorization, citing cases where up to 40% of the individuals in a particular lump of foliage are unclassifiable hybrids.
The very point of the story here is that GM rice got into non-GM shipments. This kind of thing has already happened in Canada, where a farmer got done for storing seed from "Deadly Poison Ready" wheat that had grown from cross-pollination from a neighbour's field.
As to the GP's argument that this is all good for the developing world...yeah, right. Just like drug companies spend all that money on marketing because they want to help the sick...but somehow neglect to invest anything much in the diseases that have the largest effect on people, because the people they affect, also in the developing world, don't have any money to speak of.
The meaning of "GM" is: genetically altered by direct manipulation of DNA to produce commercially useful varieties that are not capable of being produced by hybridization. Releasing such varieties into the wild is a great big ecological experiment that we are all getting to participate in, like it or not.
I wonder how the folks who are responsible for this stuff will feel when they find out what's growing in their back yards in a few years?
Today, nineteen year old men are still considered "kids".
Just to second your comments, by the time my father was nineteen he had lived through the Great Depression, lost his father to what is now a treatable condition which couldn't even be diagnosed in those days, supported himself and my grandmother by buying, fixing and reselling cars, and marched off to serve his country in a war that killed virtually all of his childhood friends.
Kids today, including my generation and even moreso my children's generation, have never had it so good.
I would humbly suggest that economic impact (though sometimes difficult to measure) is often a very good way to estimate the importance of an innovation. After all, if it's not impacting the economy, directly or indirectly, how is it impacting people's lives?
The economic effect of an innovation can only in rare circumstances be used as a proxy for the "importance" of an innovation, especially if "importance" is given environmental and ethical as well as economic connotations.
The environmental and ethical impacts of an innovation are very poorly measured by purely economic factors, to the extent that they may be diametrically opposed.
The town where I live is on the Great Lakes "Poker Run" circuit, an environmentally damaging enterprise in which a bunch of rich men with adequacy issues follow a point-to-point course in over-powered speedboats, some of which burn a gallon of gas every 700 feet. They pick up a playing card at each point. At the end, the five cards each guy has picked up are compared, and the one with the best poker hand wins some token amount of money, and presumably finds himself with a certain status amongst the sadder sort of boat babe.
This laughable travesty is not only pretty good for the local economy, it is also pretty innovative. The whole thing is run by the companies that build the boats, and they have effectively created a huge self-funding marketing vehicle to not only advertise their wares, but sustain a community of rich men with adequacy issues that a new buyer can become part of.
By harnessing the near infinite power of men who aren't too sure of their masculinity they've had a big economic impact within their industry and within the local economies that these poor losers travel around to.
But is that impact a measure of the "importance" of this innovation in any way a decent human being would want to count it?
At the other end of the spectrum, the effects of a clean environment and a healthy community have at most an indirect impact on economics, and again sometimes a negative one, as people are apt to get off the ladder of pointless consumption and actually enjoy their lives.
So there are many cases were economics just won't do as a proxy for the importance of an innovation. Measuring environmental and happiness impacts is equally important.
Because the guy physically doing the gambling was in the US. The servers were only facilitating the gambling.
One question this raises is: was the income of the gambling company taxed in the U.S.? In your contention, the transaction, which is what I understand gambling to be, occured in the U.S., and transactions are generally what trigger tax consequences.
Let's try a different analogy.
1) U.S. guy FedEx's his credit card number to a company in the UK with instructions to put $X on black during the first spin of the roulette wheel at table four on the second Saturday after the next full moon.
2) UK company plays the bet, and bills his credit card if it comes up read or green, and credits 2X to his account if it comes up black.
Where has the gambling occured?
And how is the case described above different from the U.S. guy travelling to the UK and gambling there?
If I log on to someone's server, I have a virtual presence on the server. They do not have a virtual presence in my client software. My presence on their server has the fundamental characteristics of "being there": it is stateful, persistent and singular (there is only one of it). But the information they send back over to wire to me could as easily be broadcast to many people, and my persistent client state information is at most enough to identify me.
Your position may well be that of the government, but I believe it is based on a mistake with regard to the nature of virtual presence. I am arguing on an epistemological and ontological basis, not a legal one.
The Americans who are engaged in online gambling are breaking a law against logging in to an online gambling site and participating in games of chance there. There is no doubt they are doing those things, and they are doing so while on U.S. soil. But the gambling itself is--or ought to be considered to be--taking place in the UK.
The sheer magnitude of bullsh*t this promises is nearly limitless, based just the amazing lack of common sense found in the idea. Its like modeling a operating room after a CPA office.
Indeed. Teaching is almost entirely unlike management. I've done both, and while my management style tends strongly toward mentoring, the differences between the two are much, much greater than the similarities.
There are universal aspects to management that are independent of field, and Microsoft's management culture appears from the outside to be basically similar to any other high-tech company: brain damaged sociopaths telling an understaffed team to implement ill-defined features on impossible deadlines. I have had the good fortune to work at some very good, large companies, but that description of management has applied to all of them. Even when the managers were good people as individuals, as most of them have been, the organizational pressures had a very strong tendency to push them into the same ugly mould when it came to doing their job. Nor does this have anything to do with the corporate environment as such: I've seen the same thing in public hospitals and universities.
Teaching is about guiding and nurturing, where the thing that matters most is that the student actually learns something, and eventually learns the skill of learning (which cannot be done without learning, any more than one can learn to swim without actually swimming.)
Management is about gratifying the manager's ego, helping the manager get promoted, and delivering product, usually in that order. It is about hierarchy and power, not truth and knowledge.
So even the best-managed company in the world--and Microsoft's routine failure to ship major products on time demonstrates they are far from that--would be a very bad model for teaching.
The guy in the article was arrested because the gambling took place within an area where it's illegal -- namely, somewhere on US soil.
How do you figure that?
The servers were in the U.K.
The dice rolled (or rather, the RNG was called) in the U.K.
Why do you place the gambling in the U.S.?
Thanks for the info--I had the FORTRAN bug story both from the Myers book and a colleague who had close NASA contacts. The interesting thing is that the Mariner I bug as described was actually a problem with the equation, not with the program as such. So it was really a specification error or a design transfer error rather than a programming error. The program faithfully represented the specification, which was incorrect.
Well, just to play devil's advocate - what if the vulnerability fix was, literally, a couple of lines of code? Maybe it was just a tiny fix.
I once moved a single line of code up one line and broke the product in a subtle and interesting way that fouled up major testing, delayed a milestone, and severely and justifiably pissed off one of my colleagues.
There are no small fixes. A famous single-character error (typing "." for "," in a FORTRAN DO loop header, so it read DO I=1.10 instead of DO I=1,10) resulted in the destruction of a spacecraft.
So I guess fixes that involve changing less than one character are safe to release with minimal testing. All the rest need the full cycle.
The only reason why Microsoft might not do that in the present case is because keeping partners who depend on DRM happy is really, really important, and therefore they are willing to take the risk of crashing user's machines. Either that, or the person making the decision is just not very smart, a possibility never to be discounted.
Many people (particularly those who do not understand the evidence) dislike the idea of dark matter, thinking it sounds too much like epicycles
Some of us were skeptical because we did understand the evidence, and understood that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Galactic dark matter is something (almost) everyone believes in, because the evidence is compelling and it does not require additional, and thus far quite undetectable, particles.
Dark matter on larger scales, which is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter, depended on infering 3D dynamics from 2D projections of complex collections of galaxies. Even well-studied systems like the Local Group have had their dynamics revised in the past twenty years as new data have become available, and as such a healthy skepticism has been warranted with regard to extra-galactic dark matter, which, in case anyone missed what I said previously, is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter and the well-measured rotation curves of spiral galaxies.
I agree that the quite beautiful recent study of hot gas dynamics in colliding clusters gets at the dark matter distribution in a much more direct way than previous approaches, and puts to rest most of the doubts about extra-galactic dark matter, which is unrelated to galactic dark matter.
The fact that MOND also requires extra-galactic dark matter (which is unrelated to galactic dark matter) is a big count against it, and a 2 eV neutrino is very nearly as exotic as some of the more colourful imaginary particles that have been proposed to constitute the extra-galactic dark matter.
So MOND is now a theory with no plausible motivation at all, and can be expected to die a natural death over the next few years.