An interesting side note, the continents being so poor in metal makes them lighter and unable to subduct and also to float higher, which leads to the appearance of land. Continental rock is the result of volcanic arc subduction fractional melting which results in a lower metal felsic rock that becomes the continental crust. It is due to plate tectonics and arc subduction magmatism that we see the continent/oceanic crust duality that has led to land on otherwise what would have been an ocean planet. SInce the oceanic crust can be subducted it is entirely less than 180 million years old and the only rocks from the early history oif the earth exist on the continents.
Since the oceanic crust is composed of mafic material with higher levels of metals, wouldn't this be a good place to look for metals. The continental crust is much more metal poor and not as good a place to mine it seems. In many ways it seems the continents are not good places to mine. AS well, eventually the oceanic crust will be recycled so any mining of the ocean floor would cause only temporary damage to the terrain. So the effects of mining the ocean floor are relatively short lived. The oceanic crust is made from material directly from the interior of the earth and continents however are only composed a fraction of material, from the interior containing mostly non metallic substances. So the oceanic crust is likely going to be more metal rich. The effects of mining there would seem to have far less environmental impacts.
The money has all been used up on the much more important (sarcasm) war on Iraq. While Obama has continued these wars when he should have killed them immediately, I doubt we would have gotten as much from McCain/Palin alternative and the Republicans, who ignore the data and as well believe in religious nonsense more than science.
Because of Republican ideologies, important environmental and human health needs are ignored while we spend billions on a war in Iraq. I call it the result of a mental disorder.
With the health care bill for instance, it is disgusting that we would have Republicans basically murder thousands of more people each year by blocking the health care reform, which will safe millions of lives, while their is always enough money for their stupid wars.
The US needs to be investing in renewable energy like wind and solar and nuclear fusion development, and on energy efficient improvements to cities to base them on public transit, bike and pedestrian use, and we need to put in tariffs to keep the jobs in the US to fix our economy which has been damaged by offshoring which Republicans love as it increases corporate profit at the expense of working americans.
If he really had something here that could be so wonderous. Why not try to interest a car manufacturer in licencing to the technology. Instead he says he is "raising money for a prototype", sounds like an investment scam. Ive heard it said there is not anything particularly new about this design, that he basically has taken a design that already exists and labelled it as his own.
This post shows an amazing ignorance to the nature of telecom. It is a natural monopoly, as it is impractical to build so many independant distribution systems into an area. The capital costs are so high. Thats why net neutrality is critical. If government did not regulate these companies with franchises it would be a monopoly anyway with maybe 2 or 3 players at the most. The best way to do things is to set up a non profit company which will operate the physical infrastructure and allow other companies to use that to provide ISP services for instance, and to regard ISPs as a common carrier that must not discriminate based on source and destination.
patents are particularly harmful becuase they also block using just an element of the format in another format. Many of these methods may simply be the best way of doing something and there may be no better way, so we have given an elite group the monopoly on an basically digital video. It can also impede progress on independant enhancements to these technologies.
I think patents need serious reform. Software patents banned. And there should be a requirement, at least, to licence to the patent to anyone at a reasonable cost.
They so often say you need to be 1 km from the CO. But a loop extender or node can be used to extend it to areas far beyond 1 km distance, in fact, to extend service many, many miles away, even dozens, basically which rejuvenates the signal, and possibly connects to a fiber trunk, although electronics can probably be developed to regenerate the signal even over a very long copper run, which is made even easier with the digital signal. The investment in that is far less than laying all new cable. It requires perhaps some electronic equipment every mile or so. This would, it is often forgotten, cut down on the cost needed to extend broadband to remote areas. It is probably the cheapest way to do it as much of the infrastructure can be reused. Its much better than the insane and crazy idea of BPL which is unfeasible and has so many more technical problems (RFI).
many trunk lines already probably have an extra set, since they are designed for many lines per house. they could just throw extra lines into the digital stream. As well, it would cut costs to implement, since a loop extender can be added at 1 km, so it reduces the amount of new cable that must be laid. Its a far better way to get broadband to rural areas than the crazy and dumb idea of BPL.
You make a lot of good points. I think one of the big mistakes as to why Linux ois still the desktop niche it is, is lack of a binary stable driver interface to make it easier for hardware manufacturers to support it. So hardware support remains crappy, and people really dont want an OS that they are never sure if it will work with hardware. An OS will just never catch on like that.
Linux is used on servers because its free, and IT people can put up with all of the useability nightmares that would drive off grandma. Linux however is a time consuming system to use. I admit even at the server end, Windows is faster to set up because of the GUI. Its easier to learn a GUI than configuration files. Ive wasted a lot of time trying to coax some arcane config file when something can be done in 1/20th the time on Windows. Id bet if Windows didnt cost so much there would be more uptake of it than Linux.
The economic reasons are also interesting. Unfortunately we do not live in a socialist utopia. Ideally people would make software to contribute to and make the world a better place. But we live in a world that has a capitalist mentality and where money is involved in everything, that encouraged closedness and all the ill behaviours that we see, the things that open source software has been so opposed to.
In the past in the 90s we had an economy different from today. There was perhaps less job security anxiety and people felt relaxed enough to spend spare time on the open source projects. The present economy has created a desperate mentality that has diminished altruism. The economic situation today is bad and I believe it is worsening for several reasons (peak oil, overpopulation, and increased greed and wealth consolidation by the elite).
Things look a lot bleaker than they did in the 90s.
You mention a good point. Part of the problems with Linux is the poor documentation of the kernel. A mailing list is not a good place to learn about the kernel systems, these are what documentation is for of the kernel systems. Obviously its more efficient to document the kernel once rather than respond 10,000 times to response for help on understanding it.
Another problem with Linux is that it is simply not a pleasant system to use and this is due to the elitist and ideological philosophy of some developers who are unwilling to adopt some ideas such as encouraging more hardware makers to make drivers which would lead to better hardware support. By taking more of a pragmatic approach in adding the technical possibility of a stable ABI, we can make a more useable system and increase deployment of OSS systems. Hardware makers can test the drivers better than any OSS driver is tested, and realese drivers much quicker, we need their help. Indeed we see a group of kernel devs which technically hobbles the Linux kernel, actually lets politics drive Kernel development, including excluding the possibility of a stable kernel ABI. The hardware vendor drivers would even speed up OSS driver development by providing more back engineering possibilities. OSS drivers are great, need to be done, but we should not make people wait the year it takes for someone to do them. Some hardware never has an OSS driver. This is simply not acceptable and will keep Linux from being useable to most, including its developers. Whats the point in developing a system that does not work well for you, and will not because of some politics of some other developers? Hardware makers are not going to release open source drivers in massive numbers, lets be realistic, and without their help even if their drivers are binary, we are not going to see a useable system.
Obviously as well it takes people who are intellectual and who havea drive to achieve rather than just game consumers, to work on a kernel, so there is a work ethic that needs to be taught. Games are great, but the purpose of the kernel is to make the games work and run well, which is one way to suggest the relevance of kernel work.
What i said was there is not an amount of oil there that would make a significant difference in US energy supply enough to have real value in energy independance or prices. The fact is, the amount there is so small it is marginal and insignificant compared to our energy consumption. So the fact is there is no benefit of drilling and the environmental problems alone are enough reason to not do it. This includes threats to wildlife, etc. Spills are inevitable, dont let anyone tell you otherwise.
Of course the oil companies can make some profit from drilling there, that does not mean that the mount extracted will make any real difference in US energy supply, because we use so much of it, . They have only been interesting recently in some of the harder to get because rising oil prices, its just so expensive to drill there and there is so little there, its really not as profitable as a land well.
Ocean drilling tends to be an orders magnitude more dangerous from spilling which means is the worst place to do it, thats why it should not be allowed.
That is a lie, there were millions of gallons which leaked into the gulf. This includes from pipes and transit systems and these have to be considered a result of the oil rigs as they are an essential part of the operation. In fact the massive spills after the hurricanes is a good example of why it should not be done. THe gulf drilling also contributes a marginal, pretty much insignificant amount to US energy consumption.
The real reason we are not drilling offshore, is that it will not reduce gas prices more than 2 cents and will not make the US energy independant. There have been extensive studies on this and the oil is not just there. The EIA estimated that offshore drilling would reduce US gas prices by 2 cents. The areas offshore entire states contain enough oil to supply the US for only a few months. We could save more energy if people installed some more insulation in their homes and inflated their tires than we would ever get from offshore oil drilling. The idea that we can solve our problems with domestic drilling is a lie told by the public relations of the Oil Industry and Republican puppets.
The second point is it cannot be done safely. That is a fact. Last year there was a massive oil spill off of Australia using the same "Clean safe" technology that the oil companies wanted to use offshore in the US. The fact is, it would take just one spill to destroy miles of beaches and pollute and contaminate the very seafood we eat. A study of the environment around oil rigs found fish around there with vastly higher levels of heavy metals and the seafloor covered with heavy metals and toxic carcinogens including arsenic. Unfortunately there are some who seem to think it is acceptable to pollute our environment with toxic waste that will kill us in order for oil companies to make some more profit.
Here again we see the oil company propoganda at work. In the real world unexpected things happen, pipes break. An oil rig can have a drill shaft miles deep, a leak anywhere in that can pollute and contaminate ground water, cause long running leaks into the ocean which can last for months and destroy hundreds of miles of ocean environment and beaches.
All of this means offshore drilling simply isnt worth the risk. Just one spill and we have ruined the environment, and for nothing at all, it simply will not solve energy problems.
One thing that does not seem to be talked about much is that all rare earth metals will be completely depleted, in any practically extractable reserves, within the next 50-100 years. The response to the shortage of rare earth metals seen here is similar to a fishing fleet who is pushing the fish population to total extinction through overfishing, doubling the number of fishing boats in order to make up production decline... it only speeds up the extinction process, and that repeatedly we see fishing industries opposing any efforts to allow fish populations to rebound, thus dooming destruction of the very fish population being fished, forever. This is short sighted thinking, it is far easier to carry on business as usual for fisherman even though the species is going extinct, in the short term, in the long term that behaviour leads to a much worse outcome.
A difference with these metals is they cannot regenerate. Once they are gone, thats it. Still today metals are being used like its an endless supply, and people throw away everything from electronics to batteries which contian precious metals. In the process, we are throwing away our future. Knowing this one realises that with all environmental and resource issues, recycling is not a joke, and the people who have been pushing for it desperately are not "environmental nutjobs", they understand what is really going on and the true ramifications. I find this is true with nearly all environmental issues which are often ignored by the vested interests from pollution which threatens to severely damage our health adn well being to resource depletion.
The concerns over metal are also existing for oil as well, which is now predicted to peak as soon as 2014, that is a question of when, not if.
There may be a civilisation out there that is creating an intentional high powered signal, but maybe not, for the same reasons we do not. That is, we are too afraid that we might open the pandoras box. There might be civilisations out there that, for instance, have global warming and other environmental problems, and knowing of another planet somewhere could inspire them to hostally take that planet.
Question, what kind of antenna would we need to build in order to detect a TV or FM radio transmitter on another planet with similar strength and radiation pattern as common commercial radio TV and Radio transmitters on this planet, if they were located on the other planet. What about other common transmissions of ours as well?
I think at some point that SETI assumed that a ET civilisation would eb generating a signal stronger than we normally produce in day to day activities and pointing it at this solar system. It could be that there may be lots of civilisations out there but simply none are doing that. S
So how big of an antenna would it take for, lets say, a civilisation on a remote solar system planet to detect the day to day RF activity on this planet?
MySQL has never been a good example of a relational database, the underlying implementation is limited. Its MySQL that is the problem here, not relational databases.
I suspect here that it is not the relational model at fault here, but the lack of creativity and competence in implementing a relational database technology. MySQL perhaps has never been a particularly scalable platform, it has a number of severe limitation and does not seem to be designed with a lot of thought for a distributed environment. Its developers seem to have developed it for small scale webpages, and have been notorius on leaving out many advanced features, and thus have limited its effectiveness to small, low powered pages.
Its all in implementation, its not the relational database model that needs fixing, it is the underlying implementations.
Given all of the link ins between the w3C and the corporations, maybe it is times to abolish it and start with a new standards body. One of the problem with involving companies like Microsoft in this is that they tend to try to subvert the process to keep standards from addressing needs, so they can implement their own proprietary solutions (like video in html5). Maybe it should be run by people who have no ties to corporations and who develop open source software only. Or why not allow the people who run it to be elected by the internet community at large rather than profit proprietary technology companies?
I have not read every page but i have read the synopsis. It is an incredibly arrogant book and it seems to be intentional disfinformation written by pro-corporate shills. Being an engineer myself, I can say she gets it all wrong. Corporations are not a good environment for engineers, the would like to reduce salaries as much as they could, and as well there is little room today for independant research, everything has to generate an immediate profit. The days of Bell Labs are gone, and that didnt even exist in a market environment, it was possible because Bell had a monopoly and a constant source of revenue, that they could throw into such useless projects which would never stand the tests of the market, such as the transistor and Unix. The irony is the government provides a haven for researchers who are interested in research that ultimately expands or database of scientific knowledge and leads to new inventions. Scientists do their work to benefit society, because they enjoy it, the passion they have, money is just a means, really a nuisance, the business aspect that has to be dealt with. Ayn Rand cannot seem to understand how anyone could work to contribute to society or with a sense of generosity or because one enjoys their work, she is a sociopath as for here, everything is based on greed, money is the end rather than means.
Ayn Rand advocates basically an attack on democracy and is meant to promote an ideology that benefits powerful elitist corporations that are a pernicious vampire that sucks then lifeblood out of the productive areas of the economy, the working class, which includes scientists, architects, farmers, factory workers and everyone else who does the real work that keep things going. Money is, for engineers and scientist, a means rather than an end. They need money to do their research, funding, and ironically in many cases it is government itself which funds their research and gives them more freedom to do as they wish. With corporations rather, the short sighted interests of the markets dominate, so unless something generates immediate return, the money tends to not flow there. Markets are not rational in any way, They can be one of the most irrational forces. The fact we are continue to be dependant on oil, this is sort of one of the set behavioural patterns of the markets that is self reinforcing, it takes planning to break off of it, and the investments needed in renewables needs to take place decades before oil actually starts to run out, long before the problem really becomes critical and apparent that it would begin to affect markets. Even in the death throes of oil depletion, I doubt that there would be able to be, with markets alone, or even with corporations, a smooth transition to a renewable paradigm.
Ayn Rands ideas ignore the critical balance between government and corporate power. That corporations and corporate amalgamation and control of resources allows for exploitation an control of those who depend on those resources, their control of the markets, capital, prices, wages, and so on them allows them to subordinate the workers beneath an elite and allow for these workers to be exploited, for the work generated from them to be exploited by the elite, with little going back to the productive source. Corporate capitalism is more of a slave plantation system as such.
Through bad luck, bad things happen to good people. PEople may have an unexpected health problem, or despite their being a talented scientist they may be rendered jobless byu an economic collapse. In these situations it makes since to have insurance systems. That we can benefit from insurance is an inevitable conclusions. It makes sense to have these systems run in a non profit manner and for them to equally available to all persons regardless of income, for them to be democratic and accountable to the people rather than a mechanism for the wealthy to exploit the people to expand their wealth.
We need to stop judging people by their income. The law income people i know work hardere than any of the
I am sure McBride has probably made quite a bit of money out of this little scam. This is an example of Ayn Rand greed ideology at its finest, and shows how someones wealth has little to do with how hard they work, otherwise people like Gates or McBride would be broke and Chinese factory workers would be millionaires. Your wealth depends on your ability to exploit others, and generally most millionaires have made their money that way, including legalised forms of this kind of exploitation of the working class. Ayn Rand ideologies are thinly veiled propogation fo ideas which are meant to allow corporate elites to exploit the working class to enrich the rich further and to drive the poor further into poverty. They then dupe ignorant rednecks into electing Randists into power, such as Republicans who proceed to do this. Thus we see in the US a shrinking middle clas, ruined economy while the elites make billions of dollars. THis is why it is time for major reforms of corporatoins to turn them into employee owned democracies foxued on the public good rather than enriching wealthy elites, and establishing maximum salaries for the employees of these corporations.
Thanks for this. I think the evidence quite clearly supports that a privitised system is more inefficient. Private insurance companies are structured, in the US, to generate the maximum profits, this means provide the worst services at the highest cost, as much as they can get away with. These systems are not designed to help people get healthcare, they are designed to make shareholders wealthy. Thus we have a health care system that provides extremely expensive health care that many cannot afford but it is very profitable for the elites that run it.
A non profit, democratic (run by people elected by whom it serves) health care system would of course allow greater efficiencies, would be required to keep profit margins low, to provide health care to everyone at the lowest administrative overhead possible.
The fact is, the US spends twice as much per capita on health care than ANY country with a socialised system. If we got rid of private health insurance companies and socialised health care in this country we would be able to cover everyone for what we pay already on health care. Government run health care would actually improve quality and access and reduce costs.
I also believe we should place primary priority on human life. A large number of people either cannot find jobs or work very hard for low pay. The amount people make has no relation to how hard they work, otherwise we would have people like Bill Gates penniless and the hard working factory workers would be millionaires. Capitalism, is based on greed, and this means exploitation of other people to enriches a wealthy elite that control capital.
People need to get out of their ayn rand fantasy land and her destructive ideology which worships greed, arrogance, cruelty and corruption, and leads to a society where everyone is out to exploit others, one that eventually tears itself to pieces. This can be seen with the real estate speculators who so overpriced housing that average families could not afford it, and ignoted the bomb that was the over leveraged financial system created by greedy bankers. Most real technologies and developments came from compassionate, passionate people who intensely enjoy what they do and like making the world a better place and achieving useful things, not people who look to get rich with as little real contributions as possible. Ayn Rand cannot imagine a world where people are not driven by greed. The fact is, the world is kept running by people who put compassion and responsibility to the common good before greed. Einstien was not interested in money, money was only the means, not the end, he was interested in making the world a better place to live and expanding knowledge.
Perhaps there is no better way to do space travel than Constellation. Everyone assumes there is a better way, but, the fact is, it may not and probably is not possible to make space travel affordable enough for a large number of people. The costs will always be extraordinarily expensive. We say we cancelled constellation to look for better alternatives. I believe that either we will see private space existing entirely on public subsidies, and either providing inferior technology to constellation, or essentially the same technology. I have not seen, any physics data, really any way to make space travel actually in any way a cheap thing.
I think cancelling constellation was politics, and probably will just delay space travel for technologies which will be inferior or the same as constellation provides, and with private corporate managed profit based industries, will be, just like privatised health care, excessive in cost to what publicly developed constellation would have been. We will probably end up subdising a corporate white elephant for some crappy technology when we could have at least had a successful launch system with constellation.
Constellation was indeed based on proven technologies, but this also meant it was tested and reliable. Quite frankly the alternatives, whatever that exist, will be unlikely to work and are pie in the sky.
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An interesting side note, the continents being so poor in metal makes them lighter and unable to subduct and also to float higher, which leads to the appearance of land. Continental rock is the result of volcanic arc subduction fractional melting which results in a lower metal felsic rock that becomes the continental crust. It is due to plate tectonics and arc subduction magmatism that we see the continent/oceanic crust duality that has led to land on otherwise what would have been an ocean planet. SInce the oceanic crust can be subducted it is entirely less than 180 million years old and the only rocks from the early history oif the earth exist on the continents.
Since the oceanic crust is composed of mafic material with higher levels of metals, wouldn't this be a good place to look for metals. The continental crust is much more metal poor and not as good a place to mine it seems. In many ways it seems the continents are not good places to mine. AS well, eventually the oceanic crust will be recycled so any mining of the ocean floor would cause only temporary damage to the terrain. So the effects of mining the ocean floor are relatively short lived. The oceanic crust is made from material directly from the interior of the earth and continents however are only composed a fraction of material, from the interior containing mostly non metallic substances. So the oceanic crust is likely going to be more metal rich. The effects of mining there would seem to have far less environmental impacts.
The money has all been used up on the much more important (sarcasm) war on Iraq. While Obama has continued these wars when he should have killed them immediately, I doubt we would have gotten as much from McCain/Palin alternative and the Republicans, who ignore the data and as well believe in religious nonsense more than science.
Because of Republican ideologies, important environmental and human health needs are ignored while we spend billions on a war in Iraq. I call it the result of a mental disorder.
With the health care bill for instance, it is disgusting that we would have Republicans basically murder thousands of more people each year by blocking the health care reform, which will safe millions of lives, while their is always enough money for their stupid wars.
The US needs to be investing in renewable energy like wind and solar and nuclear fusion development, and on energy efficient improvements to cities to base them on public transit, bike and pedestrian use, and we need to put in tariffs to keep the jobs in the US to fix our economy which has been damaged by offshoring which Republicans love as it increases corporate profit at the expense of working americans.
If he really had something here that could be so wonderous. Why not try to interest a car manufacturer in licencing to the technology. Instead he says he is "raising money for a prototype", sounds like an investment scam. Ive heard it said there is not anything particularly new about this design, that he basically has taken a design that already exists and labelled it as his own.
This post shows an amazing ignorance to the nature of telecom. It is a natural monopoly, as it is impractical to build so many independant distribution systems into an area. The capital costs are so high. Thats why net neutrality is critical. If government did not regulate these companies with franchises it would be a monopoly anyway with maybe 2 or 3 players at the most. The best way to do things is to set up a non profit company which will operate the physical infrastructure and allow other companies to use that to provide ISP services for instance, and to regard ISPs as a common carrier that must not discriminate based on source and destination.
patents are particularly harmful becuase they also block using just an element of the format in another format. Many of these methods may simply be the best way of doing something and there may be no better way, so we have given an elite group the monopoly on an basically digital video. It can also impede progress on independant enhancements to these technologies.
I think patents need serious reform. Software patents banned. And there should be a requirement, at least, to licence to the patent to anyone at a reasonable cost.
They so often say you need to be 1 km from the CO. But a loop extender or node can be used to extend it to areas far beyond 1 km distance, in fact, to extend service many, many miles away, even dozens, basically which rejuvenates the signal, and possibly connects to a fiber trunk, although electronics can probably be developed to regenerate the signal even over a very long copper run, which is made even easier with the digital signal. The investment in that is far less than laying all new cable. It requires perhaps some electronic equipment every mile or so. This would, it is often forgotten, cut down on the cost needed to extend broadband to remote areas. It is probably the cheapest way to do it as much of the infrastructure can be reused. Its much better than the insane and crazy idea of BPL which is unfeasible and has so many more technical problems (RFI).
The loop extender can extend service areas beyond 1 km from the CO, BTW.
many trunk lines already probably have an extra set, since they are designed for many lines per house. they could just throw extra lines into the digital stream. As well, it would cut costs to implement, since a loop extender can be added at 1 km, so it reduces the amount of new cable that must be laid. Its a far better way to get broadband to rural areas than the crazy and dumb idea of BPL.
You make a lot of good points. I think one of the big mistakes as to why Linux ois still the desktop niche it is, is lack of a binary stable driver interface to make it easier for hardware manufacturers to support it. So hardware support remains crappy, and people really dont want an OS that they are never sure if it will work with hardware. An OS will just never catch on like that.
Linux is used on servers because its free, and IT people can put up with all of the useability nightmares that would drive off grandma. Linux however is a time consuming system to use. I admit even at the server end, Windows is faster to set up because of the GUI. Its easier to learn a GUI than configuration files. Ive wasted a lot of time trying to coax some arcane config file when something can be done in 1/20th the time on Windows. Id bet if Windows didnt cost so much there would be more uptake of it than Linux.
The economic reasons are also interesting. Unfortunately we do not live in a socialist utopia. Ideally people would make software to contribute to and make the world a better place. But we live in a world that has a capitalist mentality and where money is involved in everything, that encouraged closedness and all the ill behaviours that we see, the things that open source software has been so opposed to.
In the past in the 90s we had an economy different from today. There was perhaps less job security anxiety and people felt relaxed enough to spend spare time on the open source projects. The present economy has created a desperate mentality that has diminished altruism. The economic situation today is bad and I believe it is worsening for several reasons (peak oil, overpopulation, and increased greed and wealth consolidation by the elite).
Things look a lot bleaker than they did in the 90s.
You mention a good point. Part of the problems with Linux is the poor documentation of the kernel. A mailing list is not a good place to learn about the kernel systems, these are what documentation is for of the kernel systems. Obviously its more efficient to document the kernel once rather than respond 10,000 times to response for help on understanding it.
Another problem with Linux is that it is simply not a pleasant system to use and this is due to the elitist and ideological philosophy of some developers who are unwilling to adopt some ideas such as encouraging more hardware makers to make drivers which would lead to better hardware support. By taking more of a pragmatic approach in adding the technical possibility of a stable ABI, we can make a more useable system and increase deployment of OSS systems. Hardware makers can test the drivers better than any OSS driver is tested, and realese drivers much quicker, we need their help. Indeed we see a group of kernel devs which technically hobbles the Linux kernel, actually lets politics drive Kernel development, including excluding the possibility of a stable kernel ABI. The hardware vendor drivers would even speed up OSS driver development by providing more back engineering possibilities. OSS drivers are great, need to be done, but we should not make people wait the year it takes for someone to do them. Some hardware never has an OSS driver. This is simply not acceptable and will keep Linux from being useable to most, including its developers. Whats the point in developing a system that does not work well for you, and will not because of some politics of some other developers? Hardware makers are not going to release open source drivers in massive numbers, lets be realistic, and without their help even if their drivers are binary, we are not going to see a useable system.
Obviously as well it takes people who are intellectual and who havea drive to achieve rather than just game consumers, to work on a kernel, so there is a work ethic that needs to be taught. Games are great, but the purpose of the kernel is to make the games work and run well, which is one way to suggest the relevance of kernel work.
What i said was there is not an amount of oil there that would make a significant difference in US energy supply enough to have real value in energy independance or prices. The fact is, the amount there is so small it is marginal and insignificant compared to our energy consumption. So the fact is there is no benefit of drilling and the environmental problems alone are enough reason to not do it. This includes threats to wildlife, etc. Spills are inevitable, dont let anyone tell you otherwise.
Of course the oil companies can make some profit from drilling there, that does not mean that the mount extracted will make any real difference in US energy supply, because we use so much of it, . They have only been interesting recently in some of the harder to get because rising oil prices, its just so expensive to drill there and there is so little there, its really not as profitable as a land well.
Ocean drilling tends to be an orders magnitude more dangerous from spilling which means is the worst place to do it, thats why it should not be allowed.
That is a lie, there were millions of gallons which leaked into the gulf. This includes from pipes and transit systems and these have to be considered a result of the oil rigs as they are an essential part of the operation. In fact the massive spills after the hurricanes is a good example of why it should not be done. THe gulf drilling also contributes a marginal, pretty much insignificant amount to US energy consumption.
The real reason we are not drilling offshore, is that it will not reduce gas prices more than 2 cents and will not make the US energy independant. There have been extensive studies on this and the oil is not just there. The EIA estimated that offshore drilling would reduce US gas prices by 2 cents. The areas offshore entire states contain enough oil to supply the US for only a few months. We could save more energy if people installed some more insulation in their homes and inflated their tires than we would ever get from offshore oil drilling. The idea that we can solve our problems with domestic drilling is a lie told by the public relations of the Oil Industry and Republican puppets.
The second point is it cannot be done safely. That is a fact. Last year there was a massive oil spill off of Australia using the same "Clean safe" technology that the oil companies wanted to use offshore in the US. The fact is, it would take just one spill to destroy miles of beaches and pollute and contaminate the very seafood we eat. A study of the environment around oil rigs found fish around there with vastly higher levels of heavy metals and the seafloor covered with heavy metals and toxic carcinogens including arsenic. Unfortunately there are some who seem to think it is acceptable to pollute our environment with toxic waste that will kill us in order for oil companies to make some more profit.
Here again we see the oil company propoganda at work. In the real world unexpected things happen, pipes break. An oil rig can have a drill shaft miles deep, a leak anywhere in that can pollute and contaminate ground water, cause long running leaks into the ocean which can last for months and destroy hundreds of miles of ocean environment and beaches.
All of this means offshore drilling simply isnt worth the risk. Just one spill and we have ruined the environment, and for nothing at all, it simply will not solve energy problems.
One thing that does not seem to be talked about much is that all rare earth metals will be completely depleted, in any practically extractable reserves, within the next 50-100 years. The response to the shortage of rare earth metals seen here is similar to a fishing fleet who is pushing the fish population to total extinction through overfishing, doubling the number of fishing boats in order to make up production decline... it only speeds up the extinction process, and that repeatedly we see fishing industries opposing any efforts to allow fish populations to rebound, thus dooming destruction of the very fish population being fished, forever. This is short sighted thinking, it is far easier to carry on business as usual for fisherman even though the species is going extinct, in the short term, in the long term that behaviour leads to a much worse outcome.
A difference with these metals is they cannot regenerate. Once they are gone, thats it. Still today metals are being used like its an endless supply, and people throw away everything from electronics to batteries which contian precious metals. In the process, we are throwing away our future. Knowing this one realises that with all environmental and resource issues, recycling is not a joke, and the people who have been pushing for it desperately are not "environmental nutjobs", they understand what is really going on and the true ramifications. I find this is true with nearly all environmental issues which are often ignored by the vested interests from pollution which threatens to severely damage our health adn well being to resource depletion.
The concerns over metal are also existing for oil as well, which is now predicted to peak as soon as 2014, that is a question of when, not if.
There may be a civilisation out there that is creating an intentional high powered signal, but maybe not, for the same reasons we do not. That is, we are too afraid that we might open the pandoras box. There might be civilisations out there that, for instance, have global warming and other environmental problems, and knowing of another planet somewhere could inspire them to hostally take that planet.
We should have an open mind about FTL but, i dont know if we have a clue about how to practically do that.
Question, what kind of antenna would we need to build in order to detect a TV or FM radio transmitter on another planet with similar strength and radiation pattern as common commercial radio TV and Radio transmitters on this planet, if they were located on the other planet. What about other common transmissions of ours as well?
I think at some point that SETI assumed that a ET civilisation would eb generating a signal stronger than we normally produce in day to day activities and pointing it at this solar system. It could be that there may be lots of civilisations out there but simply none are doing that. S
So how big of an antenna would it take for, lets say, a civilisation on a remote solar system planet to detect the day to day RF activity on this planet?
MySQL has never been a good example of a relational database, the underlying implementation is limited. Its MySQL that is the problem here, not relational databases.
I suspect here that it is not the relational model at fault here, but the lack of creativity and competence in implementing a relational database technology. MySQL perhaps has never been a particularly scalable platform, it has a number of severe limitation and does not seem to be designed with a lot of thought for a distributed environment. Its developers seem to have developed it for small scale webpages, and have been notorius on leaving out many advanced features, and thus have limited its effectiveness to small, low powered pages.
Its all in implementation, its not the relational database model that needs fixing, it is the underlying implementations.
Given all of the link ins between the w3C and the corporations, maybe it is times to abolish it and start with a new standards body. One of the problem with involving companies like Microsoft in this is that they tend to try to subvert the process to keep standards from addressing needs, so they can implement their own proprietary solutions (like video in html5). Maybe it should be run by people who have no ties to corporations and who develop open source software only. Or why not allow the people who run it to be elected by the internet community at large rather than profit proprietary technology companies?
I have not read every page but i have read the synopsis. It is an incredibly arrogant book and it seems to be intentional disfinformation written by pro-corporate shills. Being an engineer myself, I can say she gets it all wrong. Corporations are not a good environment for engineers, the would like to reduce salaries as much as they could, and as well there is little room today for independant research, everything has to generate an immediate profit. The days of Bell Labs are gone, and that didnt even exist in a market environment, it was possible because Bell had a monopoly and a constant source of revenue, that they could throw into such useless projects which would never stand the tests of the market, such as the transistor and Unix. The irony is the government provides a haven for researchers who are interested in research that ultimately expands or database of scientific knowledge and leads to new inventions. Scientists do their work to benefit society, because they enjoy it, the passion they have, money is just a means, really a nuisance, the business aspect that has to be dealt with. Ayn Rand cannot seem to understand how anyone could work to contribute to society or with a sense of generosity or because one enjoys their work, she is a sociopath as for here, everything is based on greed, money is the end rather than means.
Ayn Rand advocates basically an attack on democracy and is meant to promote an ideology that benefits powerful elitist corporations that are a pernicious vampire that sucks then lifeblood out of the productive areas of the economy, the working class, which includes scientists, architects, farmers, factory workers and everyone else who does the real work that keep things going. Money is, for engineers and scientist, a means rather than an end. They need money to do their research, funding, and ironically in many cases it is government itself which funds their research and gives them more freedom to do as they wish. With corporations rather, the short sighted interests of the markets dominate, so unless something generates immediate return, the money tends to not flow there. Markets are not rational in any way, They can be one of the most irrational forces. The fact we are continue to be dependant on oil, this is sort of one of the set behavioural patterns of the markets that is self reinforcing, it takes planning to break off of it, and the investments needed in renewables needs to take place decades before oil actually starts to run out, long before the problem really becomes critical and apparent that it would begin to affect markets. Even in the death throes of oil depletion, I doubt that there would be able to be, with markets alone, or even with corporations, a smooth transition to a renewable paradigm.
Ayn Rands ideas ignore the critical balance between government and corporate power. That corporations and corporate amalgamation and control of resources allows for exploitation an control of those who depend on those resources, their control of the markets, capital, prices, wages, and so on them allows them to subordinate the workers beneath an elite and allow for these workers to be exploited, for the work generated from them to be exploited by the elite, with little going back to the productive source. Corporate capitalism is more of a slave plantation system as such.
Through bad luck, bad things happen to good people. PEople may have an unexpected health problem, or despite their being a talented scientist they may be rendered jobless byu an economic collapse. In these situations it makes since to have insurance systems. That we can benefit from insurance is an inevitable conclusions. It makes sense to have these systems run in a non profit manner and for them to equally available to all persons regardless of income, for them to be democratic and accountable to the people rather than a mechanism for the wealthy to exploit the people to expand their wealth.
We need to stop judging people by their income. The law income people i know work hardere than any of the
I am sure McBride has probably made quite a bit of money out of this little scam. This is an example of Ayn Rand greed ideology at its finest, and shows how someones wealth has little to do with how hard they work, otherwise people like Gates or McBride would be broke and Chinese factory workers would be millionaires. Your wealth depends on your ability to exploit others, and generally most millionaires have made their money that way, including legalised forms of this kind of exploitation of the working class. Ayn Rand ideologies are thinly veiled propogation fo ideas which are meant to allow corporate elites to exploit the working class to enrich the rich further and to drive the poor further into poverty. They then dupe ignorant rednecks into electing Randists into power, such as Republicans who proceed to do this. Thus we see in the US a shrinking middle clas, ruined economy while the elites make billions of dollars. THis is why it is time for major reforms of corporatoins to turn them into employee owned democracies foxued on the public good rather than enriching wealthy elites, and establishing maximum salaries for the employees of these corporations.
Thanks for this. I think the evidence quite clearly supports that a privitised system is more inefficient. Private insurance companies are structured, in the US, to generate the maximum profits, this means provide the worst services at the highest cost, as much as they can get away with. These systems are not designed to help people get healthcare, they are designed to make shareholders wealthy. Thus we have a health care system that provides extremely expensive health care that many cannot afford but it is very profitable for the elites that run it.
A non profit, democratic (run by people elected by whom it serves) health care system would of course allow greater efficiencies, would be required to keep profit margins low, to provide health care to everyone at the lowest administrative overhead possible.
The fact is, the US spends twice as much per capita on health care than ANY country with a socialised system. If we got rid of private health insurance companies and socialised health care in this country we would be able to cover everyone for what we pay already on health care. Government run health care would actually improve quality and access and reduce costs.
I also believe we should place primary priority on human life. A large number of people either cannot find jobs or work very hard for low pay. The amount people make has no relation to how hard they work, otherwise we would have people like Bill Gates penniless and the hard working factory workers would be millionaires. Capitalism, is based on greed, and this means exploitation of other people to enriches a wealthy elite that control capital.
People need to get out of their ayn rand fantasy land and her destructive ideology which worships greed, arrogance, cruelty and corruption, and leads to a society where everyone is out to exploit others, one that eventually tears itself to pieces. This can be seen with the real estate speculators who so overpriced housing that average families could not afford it, and ignoted the bomb that was the over leveraged financial system created by greedy bankers. Most real technologies and developments came from compassionate, passionate people who intensely enjoy what they do and like making the world a better place and achieving useful things, not people who look to get rich with as little real contributions as possible. Ayn Rand cannot imagine a world where people are not driven by greed. The fact is, the world is kept running by people who put compassion and responsibility to the common good before greed. Einstien was not interested in money, money was only the means, not the end, he was interested in making the world a better place to live and expanding knowledge.
Perhaps there is no better way to do space travel than Constellation. Everyone assumes there is a better way, but, the fact is, it may not and probably is not possible to make space travel affordable enough for a large number of people. The costs will always be extraordinarily expensive. We say we cancelled constellation to look for better alternatives. I believe that either we will see private space existing entirely on public subsidies, and either providing inferior technology to constellation, or essentially the same technology. I have not seen, any physics data, really any way to make space travel actually in any way a cheap thing.
I think cancelling constellation was politics, and probably will just delay space travel for technologies which will be inferior or the same as constellation provides, and with private corporate managed profit based industries, will be, just like privatised health care, excessive in cost to what publicly developed constellation would have been. We will probably end up subdising a corporate white elephant for some crappy technology when we could have at least had a successful launch system with constellation.
Constellation was indeed based on proven technologies, but this also meant it was tested and reliable. Quite frankly the alternatives, whatever that exist, will be unlikely to work and are pie in the sky.