I would say we're basically in agreement on nuclear. I will say, however, the energy industry is notoriously bad about reaching out to the general public to establish trust in their motivations, and nuclear has been among the worst. Just as environmentalists are learning to look for business arguments to persuade businesses to go green, the nuclear industry needs to make a concerted, sustained effort to go meet some Sierra and Greenpeace folks and listen carefully to their concerns.
I was not intending to counter your argument that population declines could be economically problematic for many countries. I do have some firsthand experience with that, living as I do in a city that has lost a good fraction of its population. It was indeed ugly. The disparate nature of the population growth suggests that there will probably be vast overpopulation going on at the same time as substantial population loss, so all I'm saying is we can't overlook problems associated with population growth. And I certainly am all for countries trying to plan early to mitigate these kinds of risks. However, I don't think economic collapse is in store either. Europe, for example, has mostly levelled off, and while it is not the economic powerhouse of yore, it's still getting along pretty well.
I'd say 6% of GDP on insurance which keeps nearly everyone out of poverty in old age is actually a pretty darn efficient program. Social security is fixed-benefit insurance against poverty due to old age or disability. While it may have been considered a pension of sorts at one time (when standards of living were much, much lower), it's clearly not meant to be enough for a comfortable retirement now. It's meant to give you a place to live, keep the lights on, and some groceries, and by doing exactly that, it has spared 3 generations of families the stress of having to house, clothe, feed "someone living off the work of others". This is why people are committed to it as a defined-benefit program. The fact that many people pay more in payroll taxes than income tax is a sign of how much undermining of the progressive tax system has occurred, rather than a fundamental weakness in SS. And likewise, the fact that the retirement age has been gradually raised (entirely appropriate, in my view, because there are plenty more jobs you can do until you're 72 now than in the 30s) to me is evidence that the tune-ups the system has been given have worked pretty well. My point was really just that people who ideologically want to eliminate SS tend to overlook a lot of stabilizing factors about SS, and therefore characterize it as in much worse shape than it is.
Medicare is doubtless a bigger problem, but mainly because we have such a clusterfuck of a healthcare system: we spend nearly twice as much as any other developed country (including those with "socialized" medicine) and have generally worse health outcomes. The main thing we have not really addressed is the issue of cost control. You might argue that having private payers provides cost control, and it does in some small measure. As in most other businesses, however, payers largely just tack margins onto the basket of services they are selling and pass the bill on to the buyer. So we need to seriously reckon with how medicine is administered, and how much treatment is given. I ran into this just recently when my doctor asked my to get an MRI for a garden-variety ankle sprain. But his facility sunk money into a costly MRI facility, and now they need to be billing it. And since I can't unbundle that from the rest of my healthcare basket, I don't work that hard to avoid it. I work at a biomedical startup, and Medicare is presently the hardest entity from which to get payment - which is basically as it should be. The other question you have to ask as total wealth goes up is whether rising costs in healthcare and retirement are all that bad - I mean, the calculus of whether you want to spend your money on cars, health, or old age insurance changes a lot as people keep getting more
I think you and the parent might just be getting ahead of yourselves.
a) Nuclear is still a good idea, even as it needs careful stewardship. It was probably rushed to market rather quickly after the heady days of discovery at Los Alamos, and there was certainly no effective dialogue between engineers and environmentalists or others with legitimate concerns about the risks. It's still reasonable to be concerned about it, but to dismiss it because the breathless futurism about it was too optimistic is too doom nearly everything before it matures.
b) Population is still projected to double or more globally before it falls. Yes, you're right than contracting population poses some real challenges, but there's a lot of reason to be concerned about what happens between here and 10+ billion people, even growth levels. The US has done just fine making up for its native fertility shortfall with immigration, sans riots - until people like Tancredo pushed needlessly obnoxious and punitive legislation on the subject there weren't even demonstrations, and even then there was no violence. Yes, immigration is hard, but so is growth of all kinds.
And while you're correct that an aging populace implies definite changes in income and wealth cycles, no Social Security argument is complete without noting that productivity gains have made Social Security quite stable over its 60 year lifetime. When you get past press releases from Republicans ideologically driven to abolish Social Security (after all, nothing infuriates a conservative ideologue more than a smooth, well-functioning government program), there's a pretty good argument to be made that the SS Trust Fund will work exactly as intended, absorbing the wave of retirement at the front edge of the Baby Boom, and allowing gradual productivity growth to take up the slack. In other words, if Social Security is inherently at the mercy of demographic shifts towards older age, why hasn't it fallen victim to them already?
But we are far from having proved that human beings had any significant amount to do with it.
Sigh*. Once again, I'm struck by how people who frequent a nerd site can be so ignorant of what the science community says. Look, the climate science community has spoken on this subject in about as much unison as a bunch of cranky scientists ever get to: a substantial component of warming is due to anthropogenic carbon inputs (read any statements or reports from climate science organizations and this will be evident). If you've got substantial evidence to the contrary, please do publish it in a peer-reviewed journal immediately, as it is doubtless an important part of the scientific discussion. Otherwise please do us the favor of noting that your statements are discordant with 30+ years of scientific research.
I happen to think your UNIX analogy is a rather good one, but its present version relies on a critical faulty assumption, and that is that continue the current trajectory is "doing nothing". We are quite clearly not doing nothing, we are pushing a major lever of climate with increasing strength. The right way to analogize what we're doing is changing and deleting files from/etc and/bin at random or according to some criteria orthogonal to the system's design. As you correctly point out, the exact reaction of the system en route to being inoperable is highly unpredictable. But keep deleting files, and there's very little question you're going to end up with a totally hosed UNIX box. Climate scientists have not presupposed to appoint anyone to make any mandated global changes or methods of reducing carbon emissions. All they've said is that we have to stop deleting files soonest.
You point out that Earth has done a good job moderating climate for millions of years. That's true, and it's due to a robust biosphere. As humans have grown to be the most populous macrofauna, we have dramatically changed a lot of those balances. In particular, since the industrial revolution our capacity to change those balances has grown dramatically, but our understanding and willingness to preserve them has moved much more slowly. Earth has never naturally produced hypoxic zones hundreds of kilometers across, nor has it dried out an ocean and filled it with chemical residues. These are unbalancing events due to changes to the environment not well integrated with the biosphere's functioning. That's not to say that sort of thing should never be done or can't be remediated, it's just to say that our ability to cause change in the environment around is now so great that we need to integrate better with the "legacy" functioning of the biosphere in our designs, or we're wreck the whole infrastructure. Throwing a nuke down a volcano is not a good example of this. Improving the natural capacity of algae to fix CO2 into cellulose and oils is a good example. Genetic modification of food is probably more in the middle - it's sometimes an effective enhancement to natural systems, and other times radically damaging. That's why I tend to be very skeptical of these geo-engineering projects that have very little component of restoring or enhancing biosphere functioning.
That's a thoughtful point, so I'll try to elucidate what I mean along two lines. When push comes to shove, science is a little vague on the subject of truth. That's because any really strong claim of truth begins to involve metaphysics, and science has historically - and mostly wisely, I believe - steered clear of metaphysical claims. That's what leads me to my admitted slippery-slope assertion that what we are pretty sure we know now is what we call fact. For example, up until this year, I probably would have counted on lactic acid's tiring effects on muscles as a fact, even though that fact has reversed itself, and I'd defend having made decisions on the "old fact". Think of consensus as the current best effort. It's not perfect but you work with it. As that best effort ages, it's either turned over in favor of a new paradigm or it matures into a very solid law-type fact. If you believe that climate scientists have been doing good science for the last several decades, you've gotta think that their consensus that humans are responsible for the current warming are pretty well baked.
Certainly being skeptical is part of the process of science. And certainly the peer scrutiny that Michael Mann's "hockey stick" claims got was totally merited and has been an effective demonstration of the role of skepticism in the scientific process. Von Storch and the other Canadian guy wrote some scathing papers attacking the concept, and Mann and several other groups addressed most of the criticisms - case mostly closed. Totally healthy. Do I consider claims like the hockey stick in league with conservation of energy or the theory of relativity in "factiness"? No way. But the best efforts we have now are telling us we need to make changes, and as scientist I have a hard time accepting the notion that we should bet on something overturning decades of climate science work (which is what led to consensus 3 or 4 years ago) or bet on doing nothing over betting on climate science being basically right. The latter is a far better bet.
By no means does that mean people should stop asking questions or stop challenging science. And if they manage to put together a repeatable, credible alterative that upends the current consensus, so much the better. But there's also a lot of crap out there, particularly around a politicized issue like this one. Remember the Irish guys claiming to have gotten free energy? Does that upend the consensus about conservation of energy? My reaction is "not so fast" to those Irish guys, and likewise to people who claim that the AGU, American Meteorological Society, and National Academy of Sciences have it wrong after 30 years of work and debate. And the fact that Crichton is a non-climate scientist has quite clearly subbed in to the political game makes it hard to take his claim as real challenges. Richard Lindzen, maybe - certainly he's a real climate scientist with real accomplishments. William Gray, maybe as well - although it's worth noting that both of these characters are avowedly old guard. But Crichton? He's a raconteur.
I also have a very hard time stomaching the claims about the huge downside risk of reducing carbon emissions and the miniscule upside potential. Every time humanity has come up with big changes in its basic technology, vast improvements in human wealth and well-being have quickly followed. By nature any investment is uncertain, and it nearly always comes with unexpected costs and benefits. But if you don't make investments, you don't move forward.
My personal belief is that YES, global warming is a reality. But I also believe that it is more to do with the Sun, than with our burning fossil fuel. I also believe the consequences are/will be less severe than predicted.
This is what drives me nuts. It's one thing when there's a lack of consensus, but in this the communityhas spokenvery clearly. My personal belief is that we've probably reached Peak Oil. My personal belief is also that there will likely be a moderate serious housing bust this fall. In neither of these cases is there any sort of consensus among scholars of the subject, and I'm muddling through on my own. But if my personal belief is that smoking is not related to cancer, I just don't have a leg to stand on.
Also, I do not believe that science is yet at the stage where a prediction about efforts to stop global warming are anywhere near accurate.
Now that's still a defensible position - most climate scientists agree about the approximate magnitude (several 2.5-4 degrees C) and timescale (a century or two), but not about the intermediate path to that, and certain not about localized phenomena.
Now, you want us to accept that THIS time the scientists are right,
Yes, by definition. When a scientific community comes to consesus, whatever it presently concludes is accepted as correct until it's proven wrong. That's how science works. If you don't believe the climate science community, you don't believe science.
and that we should expend a significant proportion of the world's income on reducing emmissions
A signification proportion? Let's be realistic here - we're talking about taxing emissions at the level of a sales tax. That's what we've always been talking about. While we've been sitting on our thumbs, gas has increased in price far more than any proposed carbon taxation would have done. And shockingly, the sky hasn't fallen.
- when we have no idea if it will do what we hope it will?
Why should you wear a seat belt? After all, there's no evidence you're going to get in a crash today, and you're a safe driver. The reason is that the risk is non-negligible and the consequences are extremely severe. And nobody forbids you to drive on account of the risk, just to take some mitigating steps by buckling up. That's what the climate science community is saying - take mitigating steps: reduce emissions as quickly as is feasible, without draconian economic measures (e.g. bans on oil) or other measures that might shock the world's economy.
Far better to invest that money in protecting humanity from global warming, and to continue to develop strategies and techniques to live on a changeable and changeing world - just as we have always done.
As it happens, most human infrastructure on the planet has been developed in an extraordinarily short period of time, and hence we have felt approximately zero climate change on our timescale. So maybe, just perhaps a good place to start protecting ourselves from global warming is to stop causing it in the first place. Like, ya know, if you're slipping on the ice out front, maybe turn the hose off or something.
Two reasons: One is that it shows that water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. If the supply wasn't constantly being refreshed it would fall out in a matter of weeks. That's basically saying it's a transient phenomenon representing an adjustment to equilibrium. This is unlike carbon, where if the supply wasn't constantly refreshed it would fall out on timescale far longer than those of present interest to humans (and as far as we know this essentially requires biota to sequester it, hence the Gaia hypothesis). This timescale distinction is frequently used to distinguish between forcing and response in a system (waves generally being considered response, and other changes forcing).
The second is that on human-centric timescales there is a clearly a large-amplitude "sink" of water (i.e. lots of water leaves the atmosphere). The amplitude of the natural sink of carbon is much lower and therefore we can accumulate a meaningful amount more easily.
Also for those who LOVE hydrogen as a fuel, remember, water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
... with a 10 day or so residence time. I think your warning is legit, but for different reasons than the ones you cite. While I'm not holding out for a hydrogen economy any time soon (far too much infrastructure would need to be changed), I think the environmental problems you see would be mostly local - the relative humidity in places like Phoenix has already been driven up by the use of swamp coolers in people's house - waste steam replacing CO2 would take that to a whole new and likely detrimental level. But the variability of the hydrologic cycle and the short residence time make water a lot less powerful lever for pulling on the atmosphere than carbon, with it's much more stable cycle and long residence time. Confusion over this what allows people to make the bogus case that because water vapor is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon-driven global warming can't possibly be anthropogenic.
The problem isn't really that it's someone else's money, cause that's true at all companies. How much of your company's market cap did you or your boss or your boss's boss put in? In most cases, approximately 0 - it's Wall Street's money, which means it's millions of pension-payers' money rather than millions of tax-payers' money.
The driving problem is the rigidness and stagnation of the government's bureaucracy. The impulse to build this kind of lumbering bureaucracy was a good one - it's called civil service, and it's basically a way to insulate long-term government functions from short-term politicians, keep government employees from becoming the minions of whichever politician wants to build a personal empire. There's no question that the limitations of that approach are killing government. On the other hand, do you really want a civil service that can be downsized or force to work on producing bogus intelligence so we can invade 17 more countries? Or a government whose job is to buy as many copies of Microsoft Vapor Server as it can possibly cram into an appropriations bill? The idea that the government is fundamentally incapable is a useless one, sorta like existentialism, in that it fails to answer the question of what we DO as a result of that insight. Do you seriously propose that the FBI be run by a private interest? I'd rather not have someone like Verizon or ChoicePoint watching my back, thank you - at least the government has a mandate to protect people and not just make money off of them. And there's a name for the head of an large private armed force: warlord.
The article touches on the fact that government has progressively become a comparatively worse place to work than the private sector, because of the bureaucracy and because the salaries don't keep pace with the private sector. A friend of mine is working on Sentinel, and he's been really surprised to find an FBI-side partner who actually wants to oversee the work. If you do think that police work at the federal level should be the job of government, then how do we go about really fixing the FBI?
Government is what citizens make it. And here's the rub: under the past 25 years of leadership of the small-government zealots, we managed to prevent government from making important investments - e.g.: roads (any idea how many bridges in this country haven't been maintained in decades, and what the long-term maintenance will cost on the vast numbers of roads we've built?), emergency planning, a healthy population, an educated workforce, etc. These investments are the infrastructure on which the economy is built. And this stellar leadership has not only managed to give short shrift to the future, but it's utterly failed to address the real problems they correctly identified with government. Anti-government conservatism is a bankrupt ideology - it's nice to kick the government for it's failures real and perceived, but when push comes to shove, it offers no real alternative for building the public underpinnings of our economy and our lives, just faith that the free market fairy will come fix all our problems. We live in an extraordinarily pragmatic age: one where you can assemble data on a large scale to decide if something works or doesn't. It's time to stop carping and give our government a mandate to do this and find its way out of quandaries like the civil service vs. Tamany Hall problem.
Sorry for the rant. Somebody talk to me about fixing the FBI.
9. Excel spreadsheet Have to agree, this is a wonderful concept, but not pioneered in Excel
I have to disagree there. Excel is not only the single best piece of software Microsoft has ever made, a decade later it is still head and shoulders above any other spreadsheet product. Excel pioneered the spreadsheet as a real business analysis tool, rather than just a glorified calculator for accounting and budgets, by making it easy to get data from all sorts of sources, and including (just) enough mathematical horsepower to be able to do earnest analysis with it. And perhaps Microsoft didn't invent the Pivot Table concept (though I've never heard of anyone claiming to have done if before them), but they sure released a mature implementation of it. Pivot Tables are themselves a pioneering concept for anyone has ever had to write database reports. And Excel is very stable even with lots of macros and lots of data. In fact, it's so useful that it's becoming a real burden on businesses, who are having to unpackage complicated logic that was put into Excel spreadsheets without good software engineering practices.
I use Linux at home and on my servers, but unless someone can come up with a spreadsheet package remotely approaching the utility of Excel, I simply don't see getting rid of Office. Excel is great software.
"This sounds like a strength of the open source model. Many eyes can include security auditors too. The weaknesses get reported and fixed."
This seems to be the call of the open source zealout, but it is not reality. 99% of the people using Open Office are users. The other 1% contain people that might have the ability to look at it, but may not have the time or patience.
While I agree that the attitude that open source fixes all vulnerabilities is blasee, your statement is also a bit too broad. Secure projects are generally those that have been engineered to be secure from start to finish. Apache is quite secure, and OpenBSD sets the bar there. This is because these projects are carefully designed and managed for security. MS Office's general insecurity comes from its incredibly ugly code base - apparently it is just a mess in there - which is due to the product having been munged together by acquisition rather than engineered from scratch. Sadly, OpenOffice appears to have nearly the same problem - the original code base was very ugly, and while some cleanup has been done, there has been no general design process to ensure that problems are fixed at a broad level rather than an individual one. So there's very likely a lot of merit to MoD's claims.
Application security will always be a problem, both in terms of modifying or misusing the OS, and in terms of wrecking users data. The former can and will be mitigated by better sandboxing (e.g. some sort of Zones or virtual machine approach for each app), while continuous backups and shadow copies may help the latter. I suspect you'll see security evolve in two ways - one it will take on much more importance, but two it will also move towards the "plan for flaws and keep things working" approach you hear Amazon, Google and others adopt these days. If OOo can move towards that model, it continue to be a fine alternative, but that requires somebody rescueing it from its enduring stepchild status. Time will tell whether that turns out to happen.
I think you're on to something that's the key all this (I haven't read the book, so I'm probably making a weak version of the points the author makes):
What do people do when they can choose from everything? I mean seriously, what if you could go anywhere, see anything,listen to anything, etc.
This explosion of choice is partly a product of the internet, but also a product of dropping prices on consumer items. Most middle class Americans can now afford any work of music they want, plus with a little scrimping and prioritization, about 80% of the dishwashers, washers, dryers, bedding, etc, they could want. In the example of the CD store the choice the "price" is the effort it would have taken to find the rare album, and the "price cut" is really that the track is just as easy to find as anything else. But so is moving - you can now pretty much move to any major American city and make it - find work, make a few friends, rent or buy a place. Find a job, an apartment, a girlfriend, and a restaurant - all of which you can afford or borrow to afford if you're reasonably well educated - and you're off to the races.
Here's a speculation: I would bet that the long tail effect is dwarfed by the "all the water sloshing the same way" effect - because choices and changes are so much easier these days, a vast number of people can all make the same choice at once, and swamp something. Hence the pile-ups of people trying to find work in San Francisco, Boston, DC, Seattle and driving rents and home prices up. Had moving been harder, more of these folks would have ended up doing something different than all doing the same thing, and the markets wouldn't have been quite as overwhlemed. OK, fire away on that one...
IANAL, but as far as I know, destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice in general is a pretty serious crime. And no worthwhile lawyer will ignore a good, winnable charge like that unless the other charges are completely airtight. If SCO had this from the getgo, wouldn't they have made this charge after the first round of discovery or so? Can anyone who IAL attest to this?
I've been giving some thought to this lately, and there's literally no indentifier that you can use on a long-term basis that does not lend itself to being captured or mimicked in some way. Fingerprints, retina, DNA, secure key, password, etc. What it really comes down to is verifying not only identity but location (which uniquely identifies you in a way that incorporates the dimension time, as you're only in one place at a time) and volition. I am this person, I am in this place, and I wish to initiate the thing that's being done. I think it would make sense to pay more attention to the latter two than to try to come up with ever more clever key-based identity checks.
Re:How would Cringely's model work?
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Own the Last Mile
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Imagine 5 years from now when all the new fibre needs to be replaced and the Government's already spent all the tax dollars set aside for it.
Though I suspect from the tone of your post that we disagree on most things government, I happen to agree with you on this one. I just came from a presentation last Wednesday from the American Society of Civil Engineers about the state of our roads, and it is ugly. Like bridges near collapse ugly. Same for sewer and water systems, navigable waterways, dams, railroads and many other public infrastructure items. The ASCE has a simple solution to that - raise gas taxes, but people presently don't like taxes. Or more precisely they don't have confidence that taxes will go to the specific priorities they approved. This while real estate developers essentially rely on free roads, sewers, power lines for their margins on exurban development, and while the increase in miles driven has vastly outstripped the increase in population. Americans are overconsuming roads because the marginal cost of roads to them is a whopping $0.00, and at the same time building up vast deferred maintenance costs. Just like with software development, people like the upfront parts and don't enjoy the maintenance phase. And every time someone builds a new set of houses in a subdivision, they are bringing new obligations to municipalities,counties, states, and the federal government. Unless there's a big shift in the political climate I'm apt to believe that people will not want a new tax to pay for all the routers than need to be upgraded in 5 years, and this will be one more item of infrastructure that sits crumbling under the weight of demands to build yet more new infrastructure.
This leaves me in a bit of a bind, because I have long believed that Cringely and his friend are right - the main problem with American telecom service is that telcos have a government enforced, infrastructure-based monopoly on the last mile. So as Cringely points out, this makes telcos gatekeepers rather than bidders to provide service. Really what's happened is that telcos have steadily chipped away at their part of the bargain struck with government: we'll give you a monopoly in return for regulating your rates and service and you giving service to everybody (which is now passed on to consumer as an add-on fee). Cringely is right that private capital will not be interested in building freely available infrastructure, so I'd say that part does merit co-op or public investment to create it. What we need to do is let people compete to run that infrastructure, making sure to cultivate competition. That means overruling the telcos and specifically allowing all kinds of different ways to providing access and bandwidth: copper pair, power lines, wireless, ultrasound through water pipes, etc. With luck this will result in a durable competitive market for access as well as bandwidth, without adding yet one more item to the long list of infrastructure improvements the government and taxpayers have deferred.
While it's certainly true that people don't often agree, even in the face of a serious problem, I think you're being a bit cynical. The last really apocalyptic event we had on this planet was the Second World War. Most of those who emerged from that war were determined to improve civilization so that that kind of war would never happen again. Did they suceeed? Hard to tell, but they did have some pretty notable accomplishments: the U.N., the two major instigators and losing nations were aided in becoming free and peaceful, and ultimately there has been a great increase in democracy and human rights arising from those organizations and treaties. That's not to minimize the possibilites for armageddon now, but a lot was accomplished in that face of that kind of armageddon. So it's probably unrealistic to expect that people will all come together and hold hands and stop emitting, but if that same fire gets lit, a lot could be changed. So I've obviously established myself as an optimist about societal action, but as with the creation of the U.N., it's not just about noble ideas, there's also a lot of upside. If we could really transition off our oil economy, the leap in standards of living would be similar in scope to the introduction of oil: vast gains in efficiency, distributed production subject to less instability and price gouging, not to mention the environmental consequences. Your cynicism is not unfounded, but it's persistence in the face of that cynicism that makes great human projects possible.
Give me a set of criteria that, if they are satisfied, you will regard as sufficent evidence for taking action against global warming and I will accept that you may have a pont. Otherwise, all you're doing is saying "Bah! Youse scientist dunt never nothing nowhow" only in an fancy accent.
Amen! The whole bogus "controversy" on the subject is deeply disrespectful to climate scientists: the papers gladly report the opinion of some hack from the American Energy Trade Association basically accusing the entire climate science community of being woolly-headed hippies, and this is followed up a professor of an unrelated subject who is quoted so the editors don't have to endure abuse for fact-based reporting. The following is a bit I wrote up ona crystal-clear example of this.
Here's a 2004 essay that analyzed the scientific literature and quite justifiably concluded that there was scientific consensus. Even if you dispute her study methodology, the fact that all of the import climate science organizations have endorsed this view is in itself nearly enough to claim consensus.
The paper was followed in short measure by this CBS article, in which various right-wing think tanks and a contrarian British anthropologist dismiss the study via comparisons to Stalin.
So if you're a non-climate scientist, or someone who's generally not comfortable with reading science magazines, and you try to read the papers to find out what's going on, you get the wrong story, the one about "controversy" over whether climate change is real, not the one about science concluding people are affecting the Earth's climate. Note also that the two links at the bottom of the story are also from climate change "skeptics". If you read the story from the second of those links, you'll see the same raft of quotes from the same set of players, plus a new contrarian scientist with this recently debunked plum: "Antarctica has been cooling for the last 50 years. Most of the Arctic has not warmed over long time scales," Baliunas told CNSNews.com. Baliunas also serves as the enviro-science editor for Tech Central Station.
This claim has been debunked by a recent study which concluded that Antartica is in fact losing mass to melting, and in any it was known at the time that the center is cooling and the edges are melting. A reputable scientist would haev distinguished the mean from overall behavior.
And par usuel, the article neglects to mention that Tech Central Station is a basically a lobbyist funded rag, and nor that the people who do these kinds of studies work at the most reputable places in the world. The gravity measurement came from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the first institutions to develop a Global Climate Model, and still one of world's finest climate science institutions.
The bottom line is that the scientific consensus has emerged and strengthened. I was consistently criticized in grad school for holding the view that you can't distinguish between anthropogenic temperature change and natural variability, and though I might well have been behind the times then, I would say I was exercising healthy scientific skepticism until I learned more. That's particularly true with regards to the so-called "hockey stick" in temperature change - several years of debate have done a lot to test the theory. And I continue to think it's fair and constructive for actual climate scientists like Richard Lindzen or even to some extent this VWRC-funded William Gray character at the University of Colorado to challenge the anthropogenic nature of warming, but why does every scientific development require a counter-quote from AEI on the fabricated "controversy"?
I can't fathom how a political movement whose basis was a reaction to disregard fo
1) Create and enforce real liability for loss of personal data. After that it may make sense to introduce "safe harbor" general privacy regulation (unlike domain-specific regulation like HIPAA) where if you comply with the regs, you get relief from liability in the event of a genuine mistake or contingency.
2) Create and enforce real responsibility of credit providers and credit bureaus. Allow consumers to immediately suspend any line of credit, and require true checks before issuing credit (no more instant credit). No more endless paper battles to get credit ratings fixed, charges rescinded, etc. [These previous two were cribbed from Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com. He expouns on this subject quite regularly]. Liability for failing to properly check that credit is properly issued or used, which is supposed to be the reason why vendors and buyers pay exorbitant credit card rates in the first place.
Get the liability in order and regulation will the preferable alternative.
bodies of water do not become anoxic because of CO_2 emissions
True, but I didn't say this. Destruction of marine ecosystems as a consequence of the extraction of the oil does contribute to anoxia and to less carbon sequestration.
Acidification of aquifers is more due to sulfates and nitrates than CO_2,
I'll take your word for it and concede that this part was probably overstated.
Human civilization is what's at risk (which is why I support major environmental reform).
In a general sense, probably true (see below). I don't think I disputed this.
More CO_2 means more photosynthesis (which benefits plants), warmer temperatures (which benefits plants), and more rain (which benefits plants). The planet might start seeing the kind of fantastic biomass that hasn't existed for hundreds of millions of years, when the rise of angiosperms depleted atmospheric CO_2 levels to never-before-seen levels.
Well, that's an interesting question. AFAIK James Lovelock thinks "Gaia" is at its most healthy when much of the earth is covered in ice. I don't really know why he thinks that but I'd speculate that it's when the earth's climate is most controlled by the biosphere. I also have know idea to what extent CO2 is a limiting nutrient for plant growth as opposed to phosphorus or other soil-based nutrients.
We could start switching to nuclear breeder reactors and hydrogen-powered cars, but the extremists would shit a brick - probably even become violent - if we did so. They have to have it THEIR way, for theirs is the One True And Right Path(TM), and anyone who disagrees with them is a fucking halfwit who needs to be FORCED onto said Path for his/her own good. All hail the great goddess Gaia, and the rest of that horseshit.
I pretty much agree, though I think nuclear's really only an interim solution until we can figure out some kind of workable solar (thinking Asimov-nerd futuristically, we pretty clearly ought to be harvesting solar energy in space and bringing it down here, but that's a century or two away at least). After all, uranium is not endless either, and we like energy. A lot of energy. Yeah, the environmental movement somehow became a repository for a lot of bucolic nostalgia and Luddism, and a good measure of countercultural purity-seeking, and that has definitely made it hard for them to recognize when the perfect is the enemy of the good.
While I agree that the notion that somehow we're going to go back to basically pre-industrial levels of energy consumption is absurd, there's an awful lot we could do short of that, many of which involves devices which truly throttle or switch themselves off while not in use. I also think as our standard of living continues to rise, people are going to value good stuff over more stuff, and that provides an opportunity for performance and branding around greenness. So there are ways to reduce our energy consumption (or at least its rate of growth) which do not imply return to agrarian dystopia.
As for hydrogen vehicles, I'd prefer to directly use electricity myself, because a) it's very modular, and b) once present, electricity is very good at making motion, c) electric engines are quiet and d) we have already got one (a massive electrical energy distribution system, that is). I realize I'm probably a bit on the optimistic side about the state and pace of development of batteries, as a friend just pointed out to me that people like to do a lot of heating and cooling in their cars. Nonetheless, I agree with the basic idea.
Same way an oil analyst can predict shortages of oil. See Deffeyes, Kenneth. Or, to turn things around, perhaps you might explain how someone in the military can not share the paranoia that spies are everywhere and destruction is imminent. It's an absurd and slightly insulting assertion - of course there are plenty of rational, level-headed folks in our military, and they can and do distinguish real threats from paranoia. Are you asserting that climate scientists are not rational or level-headed? On what basis is that assertion made?
Look, people disagree - that's part of science. And obviously these "anti chicken little" folks continue to be tenured and funded - and get in the newspaper for chrissakes - that's hardly a campaign to repress them. But when an issue is settled, the fact that a few holdouts disagree maketh not a controversy. There is no controversy.
My mother's husband, a high level hydrologist in the US government, is totally unafraid to rebut the wrong points about the hydrologic cycle that are put forth by those concerned about emissions and global warming. And until about a year or two ago, he (like myself) did not agree that anthropogenic warming could be unequivocally separated from natural variability. The "hockey stick" was unproven at the time (and still has some issues, IMHO) and in itself is not conclusive evidence one way or the other. But in those intervening 5 years, a lot of the science has been filled in, from higher resolution GCMs to more refined ice measurements to better proxy data. So unless you have personal experience to bring to bear, please leave the insulting assertions about chicken little at home.
It's fine for these guys to continue to cry out if that's what they believe. Bully for them. But we're a long way for the 1500's. Recall that people were still dealing with whether the heavens had substance at that time, and Galileo threw that into question as well. And the numbers of scientists studying that phenomenon numbered in the 10s or maybe 100s. Tens of thousands of people have studied climate change using all the tools of modern science. And all but these few guys agree that anthropogenic carbon is notably affecting temperature. There's plenty that folks aren't certain about, but when you reject the consensus of a modern scientific community, you are calling into question the efficacy of the scientific process. This same phenomenon is exactly why science rejects ID: notwithstanding a few Discovery Institute fellows, there is really not enough disagreement about evolution to call its legitimacy into question. There is no real controversy.
This is why I end up posting furiously on Slashdot: there's a continuing cycle of some contrarian getting the limelight and people end up suggesting that the consensus is wrong not based on the merits of any science but on the appeal of swimming against the current. So why exactly are the tens of thousands of people who've studied this subject wrong? It's like me saying that we're past peak oil - I hold it as an opinion and I've done my reading, but the reality is that there is not "large controversy" among oil analysts about this subject: many, many people basically think that between shale, oil sands and "sludge oil" like Venezuela has there's quite a bit more oil to be had. Is Kenneth Deffeyes a "lone voice crying out" or is a member of a vocal minority who believe's we've past peak oil? I happen to believe him, but I recognize that he is in fact the latter, and as such I'd do well to listen to the views of the rest of the community.
While I do have strong opinions on the subject, I mostly just get frustrated that the same misinformation keeps coming out, and people keep bringing up the same objections. I would have to disagree with you that this article is representative of the overall state of climate-related sciences - the IPCC and most other scientific organizations have been reflecting consensus on anthropogenic carbon as an import driver of climate change for some time. And while any field will have its share of minority views and contrarians (and those people are welcome to their opinions), in this area these types of folks seem to get a disproportionate amount of press and one is not left with the true consensus view. As far as I know there are two major areas where the field has not reached consensus. One is how quickly temperatures will rise, and the second is the global climate patterns over the medium and long term. But nearly everyone agrees that: with unchecked emissions global temperatures will rise enough that the Arctic could be ice-free on a timescale of about a century, and that would shut down thermohaline circulation as it functions now, as well as raising sea level dramatically. Some say those changes might be irreversible, though if you subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis (i.e. the cumulative effect of living things on Earth is to control climate - pretty plausible when you think about it) we may be able to reverse that by enlisting the biosphere to sequester carbon again.
You're right that there are other ways to deal with metals in emissions and with the air quality issue in general. I was mainly pointing out that there are a large number of positive side effects that offset the "wasted" money should we decide to take action on global climate change. As for the hypoxia, yes, much of it is attributable to agricultural runoff but it's also been sped along by the destruction of benthic ecosystems that accompanies extensive oil extraction activites in the Gulf. Again, ending fossil fuel burning would have amelioration of this problem as a beneficial side effect.
I would call myself a fairly non-histrionic lefty. The main reason I feel a strong sense of urgency on this subject is twofold. One is, as you mention, the economic and geopolitical considerations - this is what I was alluding to in talking about energy being made in a more distributed way. I believe this presents an extraordinary set of opportunities that we should be rushing to capitalize on. The second is that the emissions problem is a result of economies built around a 19th century industrial view: the world and its resources are essentially infinite, so people should make good use of the Earth's bounty and not worry about waste and by-products. That entire model will have to change as the scale of human activity nears the scale of Earth's resources (copper and oil are the most immediate example of such limitations). Where I part company with most conservatives is that I believe the US government needs to kick this process ahead by 20-50 years, through investment and emissions taxes (and/or some kind of cap and trade idea). Nearly everyone technological revolution US business has brought to market has had the government as a strong partner: from securing right-of-ways for railroads to agriculture in the West to highways to the Internet, the government has stepped in and taken risks and built infrastructure before companies were ready to put capital on the line. And the result has been extraordinary growth as companies move in to build on that infrastructure. If we do it again we will preserve our leadership in the world economy - if not, I find it hard to believe the Chinesse or someone else won't capitalize on the opportunity. Call those histrionics if you will but that's my sense of urgency.
CCEs don't doubt the existance of climate change or global warming, but there is a tremendous amount of discourse about the causes and cures.
No, in fact there really isn't that much disagreement among the climate science community about causes - anthropogenic emissions are nearly universally acknowledged as a very important contribution to the current warming trend. There is, however, an active effort by people opposed to any common-sense measures to mitigate the risks to make distinctly minority viewpoints appear common. This is abetted by our media's desire to play up any controversy. As in "Is global warming real? Tonight at 11 we find out ask our viewers. We report, you decide."
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I would say we're basically in agreement on nuclear. I will say, however, the energy industry is notoriously bad about reaching out to the general public to establish trust in their motivations, and nuclear has been among the worst. Just as environmentalists are learning to look for business arguments to persuade businesses to go green, the nuclear industry needs to make a concerted, sustained effort to go meet some Sierra and Greenpeace folks and listen carefully to their concerns.
I was not intending to counter your argument that population declines could be economically problematic for many countries. I do have some firsthand experience with that, living as I do in a city that has lost a good fraction of its population. It was indeed ugly. The disparate nature of the population growth suggests that there will probably be vast overpopulation going on at the same time as substantial population loss, so all I'm saying is we can't overlook problems associated with population growth. And I certainly am all for countries trying to plan early to mitigate these kinds of risks. However, I don't think economic collapse is in store either. Europe, for example, has mostly levelled off, and while it is not the economic powerhouse of yore, it's still getting along pretty well.
I'd say 6% of GDP on insurance which keeps nearly everyone out of poverty in old age is actually a pretty darn efficient program. Social security is fixed-benefit insurance against poverty due to old age or disability. While it may have been considered a pension of sorts at one time (when standards of living were much, much lower), it's clearly not meant to be enough for a comfortable retirement now. It's meant to give you a place to live, keep the lights on, and some groceries, and by doing exactly that, it has spared 3 generations of families the stress of having to house, clothe, feed "someone living off the work of others". This is why people are committed to it as a defined-benefit program. The fact that many people pay more in payroll taxes than income tax is a sign of how much undermining of the progressive tax system has occurred, rather than a fundamental weakness in SS. And likewise, the fact that the retirement age has been gradually raised (entirely appropriate, in my view, because there are plenty more jobs you can do until you're 72 now than in the 30s) to me is evidence that the tune-ups the system has been given have worked pretty well. My point was really just that people who ideologically want to eliminate SS tend to overlook a lot of stabilizing factors about SS, and therefore characterize it as in much worse shape than it is.
Medicare is doubtless a bigger problem, but mainly because we have such a clusterfuck of a healthcare system: we spend nearly twice as much as any other developed country (including those with "socialized" medicine) and have generally worse health outcomes. The main thing we have not really addressed is the issue of cost control. You might argue that having private payers provides cost control, and it does in some small measure. As in most other businesses, however, payers largely just tack margins onto the basket of services they are selling and pass the bill on to the buyer. So we need to seriously reckon with how medicine is administered, and how much treatment is given. I ran into this just recently when my doctor asked my to get an MRI for a garden-variety ankle sprain. But his facility sunk money into a costly MRI facility, and now they need to be billing it. And since I can't unbundle that from the rest of my healthcare basket, I don't work that hard to avoid it. I work at a biomedical startup, and Medicare is presently the hardest entity from which to get payment - which is basically as it should be. The other question you have to ask as total wealth goes up is whether rising costs in healthcare and retirement are all that bad - I mean, the calculus of whether you want to spend your money on cars, health, or old age insurance changes a lot as people keep getting more
I think you and the parent might just be getting ahead of yourselves.
a) Nuclear is still a good idea, even as it needs careful stewardship. It was probably rushed to market rather quickly after the heady days of discovery at Los Alamos, and there was certainly no effective dialogue between engineers and environmentalists or others with legitimate concerns about the risks. It's still reasonable to be concerned about it, but to dismiss it because the breathless futurism about it was too optimistic is too doom nearly everything before it matures.
b) Population is still projected to double or more globally before it falls. Yes, you're right than contracting population poses some real challenges, but there's a lot of reason to be concerned about what happens between here and 10+ billion people, even growth levels. The US has done just fine making up for its native fertility shortfall with immigration, sans riots - until people like Tancredo pushed needlessly obnoxious and punitive legislation on the subject there weren't even demonstrations, and even then there was no violence. Yes, immigration is hard, but so is growth of all kinds.
And while you're correct that an aging populace implies definite changes in income and wealth cycles, no Social Security argument is complete without noting that productivity gains have made Social Security quite stable over its 60 year lifetime. When you get past press releases from Republicans ideologically driven to abolish Social Security (after all, nothing infuriates a conservative ideologue more than a smooth, well-functioning government program), there's a pretty good argument to be made that the SS Trust Fund will work exactly as intended, absorbing the wave of retirement at the front edge of the Baby Boom, and allowing gradual productivity growth to take up the slack. In other words, if Social Security is inherently at the mercy of demographic shifts towards older age, why hasn't it fallen victim to them already?
Sigh*. Once again, I'm struck by how people who frequent a nerd site can be so ignorant of what the science community says. Look, the climate science community has spoken on this subject in about as much unison as a bunch of cranky scientists ever get to: a substantial component of warming is due to anthropogenic carbon inputs (read any statements or reports from climate science organizations and this will be evident). If you've got substantial evidence to the contrary, please do publish it in a peer-reviewed journal immediately, as it is doubtless an important part of the scientific discussion. Otherwise please do us the favor of noting that your statements are discordant with 30+ years of scientific research.
I happen to think your UNIX analogy is a rather good one, but its present version relies on a critical faulty assumption, and that is that continue the current trajectory is "doing nothing". We are quite clearly not doing nothing, we are pushing a major lever of climate with increasing strength. The right way to analogize what we're doing is changing and deleting files from
You point out that Earth has done a good job moderating climate for millions of years. That's true, and it's due to a robust biosphere. As humans have grown to be the most populous macrofauna, we have dramatically changed a lot of those balances. In particular, since the industrial revolution our capacity to change those balances has grown dramatically, but our understanding and willingness to preserve them has moved much more slowly. Earth has never naturally produced hypoxic zones hundreds of kilometers across, nor has it dried out an ocean and filled it with chemical residues. These are unbalancing events due to changes to the environment not well integrated with the biosphere's functioning. That's not to say that sort of thing should never be done or can't be remediated, it's just to say that our ability to cause change in the environment around is now so great that we need to integrate better with the "legacy" functioning of the biosphere in our designs, or we're wreck the whole infrastructure. Throwing a nuke down a volcano is not a good example of this. Improving the natural capacity of algae to fix CO2 into cellulose and oils is a good example. Genetic modification of food is probably more in the middle - it's sometimes an effective enhancement to natural systems, and other times radically damaging. That's why I tend to be very skeptical of these geo-engineering projects that have very little component of restoring or enhancing biosphere functioning.
That's a thoughtful point, so I'll try to elucidate what I mean along two lines. When push comes to shove, science is a little vague on the subject of truth. That's because any really strong claim of truth begins to involve metaphysics, and science has historically - and mostly wisely, I believe - steered clear of metaphysical claims. That's what leads me to my admitted slippery-slope assertion that what we are pretty sure we know now is what we call fact. For example, up until this year, I probably would have counted on lactic acid's tiring effects on muscles as a fact, even though that fact has reversed itself, and I'd defend having made decisions on the "old fact". Think of consensus as the current best effort. It's not perfect but you work with it. As that best effort ages, it's either turned over in favor of a new paradigm or it matures into a very solid law-type fact. If you believe that climate scientists have been doing good science for the last several decades, you've gotta think that their consensus that humans are responsible for the current warming are pretty well baked.
Certainly being skeptical is part of the process of science. And certainly the peer scrutiny that Michael Mann's "hockey stick" claims got was totally merited and has been an effective demonstration of the role of skepticism in the scientific process. Von Storch and the other Canadian guy wrote some scathing papers attacking the concept, and Mann and several other groups addressed most of the criticisms - case mostly closed. Totally healthy. Do I consider claims like the hockey stick in league with conservation of energy or the theory of relativity in "factiness"? No way. But the best efforts we have now are telling us we need to make changes, and as scientist I have a hard time accepting the notion that we should bet on something overturning decades of climate science work (which is what led to consensus 3 or 4 years ago) or bet on doing nothing over betting on climate science being basically right. The latter is a far better bet.
By no means does that mean people should stop asking questions or stop challenging science. And if they manage to put together a repeatable, credible alterative that upends the current consensus, so much the better. But there's also a lot of crap out there, particularly around a politicized issue like this one. Remember the Irish guys claiming to have gotten free energy? Does that upend the consensus about conservation of energy? My reaction is "not so fast" to those Irish guys, and likewise to people who claim that the AGU, American Meteorological Society, and National Academy of Sciences have it wrong after 30 years of work and debate. And the fact that Crichton is a non-climate scientist has quite clearly subbed in to the political game makes it hard to take his claim as real challenges. Richard Lindzen, maybe - certainly he's a real climate scientist with real accomplishments. William Gray, maybe as well - although it's worth noting that both of these characters are avowedly old guard. But Crichton? He's a raconteur.
I also have a very hard time stomaching the claims about the huge downside risk of reducing carbon emissions and the miniscule upside potential. Every time humanity has come up with big changes in its basic technology, vast improvements in human wealth and well-being have quickly followed. By nature any investment is uncertain, and it nearly always comes with unexpected costs and benefits. But if you don't make investments, you don't move forward.
How's that?
Now that's still a defensible position - most climate scientists agree about the approximate magnitude (several 2.5-4 degrees C) and timescale (a century or two), but not about the intermediate path to that, and certain not about localized phenomena.
Yes, by definition. When a scientific community comes to consesus, whatever it presently concludes is accepted as correct until it's proven wrong. That's how science works. If you don't believe the climate science community, you don't believe science.
A signification proportion? Let's be realistic here - we're talking about taxing emissions at the level of a sales tax. That's what we've always been talking about. While we've been sitting on our thumbs, gas has increased in price far more than any proposed carbon taxation would have done. And shockingly, the sky hasn't fallen.
Why should you wear a seat belt? After all, there's no evidence you're going to get in a crash today, and you're a safe driver. The reason is that the risk is non-negligible and the consequences are extremely severe. And nobody forbids you to drive on account of the risk, just to take some mitigating steps by buckling up. That's what the climate science community is saying - take mitigating steps: reduce emissions as quickly as is feasible, without draconian economic measures (e.g. bans on oil) or other measures that might shock the world's economy.
As it happens, most human infrastructure on the planet has been developed in an extraordinarily short period of time, and hence we have felt approximately zero climate change on our timescale. So maybe, just perhaps a good place to start protecting ourselves from global warming is to stop causing it in the first place. Like, ya know, if you're slipping on the ice out front, maybe turn the hose off or something.
Two reasons:
One is that it shows that water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. If the supply wasn't constantly being refreshed it would fall out in a matter of weeks. That's basically saying it's a transient phenomenon representing an adjustment to equilibrium. This is unlike carbon, where if the supply wasn't constantly refreshed it would fall out on timescale far longer than those of present interest to humans (and as far as we know this essentially requires biota to sequester it, hence the Gaia hypothesis). This timescale distinction is frequently used to distinguish between forcing and response in a system (waves generally being considered response, and other changes forcing).
The second is that on human-centric timescales there is a clearly a large-amplitude "sink" of water (i.e. lots of water leaves the atmosphere). The amplitude of the natural sink of carbon is much lower and therefore we can accumulate a meaningful amount more easily.
Sorry, big guy - dude and spoken for. This is Sausagedot, though, so getting your hopes up is a dangerous thing.
The problem isn't really that it's someone else's money, cause that's true at all companies. How much of your company's market cap did you or your boss or your boss's boss put in? In most cases, approximately 0 - it's Wall Street's money, which means it's millions of pension-payers' money rather than millions of tax-payers' money.
The driving problem is the rigidness and stagnation of the government's bureaucracy. The impulse to build this kind of lumbering bureaucracy was a good one - it's called civil service, and it's basically a way to insulate long-term government functions from short-term politicians, keep government employees from becoming the minions of whichever politician wants to build a personal empire. There's no question that the limitations of that approach are killing government. On the other hand, do you really want a civil service that can be downsized or force to work on producing bogus intelligence so we can invade 17 more countries? Or a government whose job is to buy as many copies of Microsoft Vapor Server as it can possibly cram into an appropriations bill? The idea that the government is fundamentally incapable is a useless one, sorta like existentialism, in that it fails to answer the question of what we DO as a result of that insight. Do you seriously propose that the FBI be run by a private interest? I'd rather not have someone like Verizon or ChoicePoint watching my back, thank you - at least the government has a mandate to protect people and not just make money off of them. And there's a name for the head of an large private armed force: warlord.
The article touches on the fact that government has progressively become a comparatively worse place to work than the private sector, because of the bureaucracy and because the salaries don't keep pace with the private sector. A friend of mine is working on Sentinel, and he's been really surprised to find an FBI-side partner who actually wants to oversee the work. If you do think that police work at the federal level should be the job of government, then how do we go about really fixing the FBI?
Government is what citizens make it. And here's the rub: under the past 25 years of leadership of the small-government zealots, we managed to prevent government from making important investments - e.g.: roads (any idea how many bridges in this country haven't been maintained in decades, and what the long-term maintenance will cost on the vast numbers of roads we've built?), emergency planning, a healthy population, an educated workforce, etc. These investments are the infrastructure on which the economy is built. And this stellar leadership has not only managed to give short shrift to the future, but it's utterly failed to address the real problems they correctly identified with government. Anti-government conservatism is a bankrupt ideology - it's nice to kick the government for it's failures real and perceived, but when push comes to shove, it offers no real alternative for building the public underpinnings of our economy and our lives, just faith that the free market fairy will come fix all our problems. We live in an extraordinarily pragmatic age: one where you can assemble data on a large scale to decide if something works or doesn't. It's time to stop carping and give our government a mandate to do this and find its way out of quandaries like the civil service vs. Tamany Hall problem.
Sorry for the rant. Somebody talk to me about fixing the FBI.
I use Linux at home and on my servers, but unless someone can come up with a spreadsheet package remotely approaching the utility of Excel, I simply don't see getting rid of Office. Excel is great software.
While I agree that the attitude that open source fixes all vulnerabilities is blasee, your statement is also a bit too broad. Secure projects are generally those that have been engineered to be secure from start to finish. Apache is quite secure, and OpenBSD sets the bar there. This is because these projects are carefully designed and managed for security. MS Office's general insecurity comes from its incredibly ugly code base - apparently it is just a mess in there - which is due to the product having been munged together by acquisition rather than engineered from scratch. Sadly, OpenOffice appears to have nearly the same problem - the original code base was very ugly, and while some cleanup has been done, there has been no general design process to ensure that problems are fixed at a broad level rather than an individual one. So there's very likely a lot of merit to MoD's claims.
Application security will always be a problem, both in terms of modifying or misusing the OS, and in terms of wrecking users data. The former can and will be mitigated by better sandboxing (e.g. some sort of Zones or virtual machine approach for each app), while continuous backups and shadow copies may help the latter. I suspect you'll see security evolve in two ways - one it will take on much more importance, but two it will also move towards the "plan for flaws and keep things working" approach you hear Amazon, Google and others adopt these days. If OOo can move towards that model, it continue to be a fine alternative, but that requires somebody rescueing it from its enduring stepchild status. Time will tell whether that turns out to happen.
I think you're on to something that's the key all this (I haven't read the book, so I'm probably making a weak version of the points the author makes):
What do people do when they can choose from everything?
I mean seriously, what if you could go anywhere, see anything,listen to anything, etc.
This explosion of choice is partly a product of the internet, but also a product of dropping prices on consumer items. Most middle class Americans can now afford any work of music they want, plus with a little scrimping and prioritization, about 80% of the dishwashers, washers, dryers, bedding, etc, they could want. In the example of the CD store the choice the "price" is the effort it would have taken to find the rare album, and the "price cut" is really that the track is just as easy to find as anything else. But so is moving - you can now pretty much move to any major American city and make it - find work, make a few friends, rent or buy a place. Find a job, an apartment, a girlfriend, and a restaurant - all of which you can afford or borrow to afford if you're reasonably well educated - and you're off to the races.
Here's a speculation: I would bet that the long tail effect is dwarfed by the "all the water sloshing the same way" effect - because choices and changes are so much easier these days, a vast number of people can all make the same choice at once, and swamp something. Hence the pile-ups of people trying to find work in San Francisco, Boston, DC, Seattle and driving rents and home prices up. Had moving been harder, more of these folks would have ended up doing something different than all doing the same thing, and the markets wouldn't have been quite as overwhlemed. OK, fire away on that one...
IANAL, but as far as I know, destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice in general is a pretty serious crime. And no worthwhile lawyer will ignore a good, winnable charge like that unless the other charges are completely airtight. If SCO had this from the getgo, wouldn't they have made this charge after the first round of discovery or so? Can anyone who IAL attest to this?
I've been giving some thought to this lately, and there's literally no indentifier that you can use on a long-term basis that does not lend itself to being captured or mimicked in some way. Fingerprints, retina, DNA, secure key, password, etc. What it really comes down to is verifying not only identity but location (which uniquely identifies you in a way that incorporates the dimension time, as you're only in one place at a time) and volition. I am this person, I am in this place, and I wish to initiate the thing that's being done. I think it would make sense to pay more attention to the latter two than to try to come up with ever more clever key-based identity checks.
This leaves me in a bit of a bind, because I have long believed that Cringely and his friend are right - the main problem with American telecom service is that telcos have a government enforced, infrastructure-based monopoly on the last mile. So as Cringely points out, this makes telcos gatekeepers rather than bidders to provide service. Really what's happened is that telcos have steadily chipped away at their part of the bargain struck with government: we'll give you a monopoly in return for regulating your rates and service and you giving service to everybody (which is now passed on to consumer as an add-on fee). Cringely is right that private capital will not be interested in building freely available infrastructure, so I'd say that part does merit co-op or public investment to create it. What we need to do is let people compete to run that infrastructure, making sure to cultivate competition. That means overruling the telcos and specifically allowing all kinds of different ways to providing access and bandwidth: copper pair, power lines, wireless, ultrasound through water pipes, etc. With luck this will result in a durable competitive market for access as well as bandwidth, without adding yet one more item to the long list of infrastructure improvements the government and taxpayers have deferred.
While it's certainly true that people don't often agree, even in the face of a serious problem, I think you're being a bit cynical. The last really apocalyptic event we had on this planet was the Second World War. Most of those who emerged from that war were determined to improve civilization so that that kind of war would never happen again. Did they suceeed? Hard to tell, but they did have some pretty notable accomplishments: the U.N., the two major instigators and losing nations were aided in becoming free and peaceful, and ultimately there has been a great increase in democracy and human rights arising from those organizations and treaties. That's not to minimize the possibilites for armageddon now, but a lot was accomplished in that face of that kind of armageddon. So it's probably unrealistic to expect that people will all come together and hold hands and stop emitting, but if that same fire gets lit, a lot could be changed. So I've obviously established myself as an optimist about societal action, but as with the creation of the U.N., it's not just about noble ideas, there's also a lot of upside. If we could really transition off our oil economy, the leap in standards of living would be similar in scope to the introduction of oil: vast gains in efficiency, distributed production subject to less instability and price gouging, not to mention the environmental consequences. Your cynicism is not unfounded, but it's persistence in the face of that cynicism that makes great human projects possible.
Sorry, here's the link to the essay - it didn't come through before.0 2/1686
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
Amen! The whole bogus "controversy" on the subject is deeply disrespectful to climate scientists: the papers gladly report the opinion of some hack from the American Energy Trade Association basically accusing the entire climate science community of being woolly-headed hippies, and this is followed up a professor of an unrelated subject who is quoted so the editors don't have to endure abuse for fact-based reporting. The following is a bit I wrote up ona crystal-clear example of this.
I can't fathom how a political movement whose basis was a reaction to disregard fo
There are two simple prescriptions for this:
1) Create and enforce real liability for loss of personal data. After that it may make sense to introduce "safe harbor" general privacy regulation (unlike domain-specific regulation like HIPAA) where if you comply with the regs, you get relief from liability in the event of a genuine mistake or contingency.
2) Create and enforce real responsibility of credit providers and credit bureaus. Allow consumers to immediately suspend any line of credit, and require true checks before issuing credit (no more instant credit). No more endless paper battles to get credit ratings fixed, charges rescinded, etc. [These previous two were cribbed from Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com. He expouns on this subject quite regularly]. Liability for failing to properly check that credit is properly issued or used, which is supposed to be the reason why vendors and buyers pay exorbitant credit card rates in the first place.
Get the liability in order and regulation will the preferable alternative.
I'll take your word for it and concede that this part was probably overstated.
In a general sense, probably true (see below). I don't think I disputed this.
Well, that's an interesting question. AFAIK James Lovelock thinks "Gaia" is at its most healthy when much of the earth is covered in ice. I don't really know why he thinks that but I'd speculate that it's when the earth's climate is most controlled by the biosphere. I also have know idea to what extent CO2 is a limiting nutrient for plant growth as opposed to phosphorus or other soil-based nutrients.
While I agree that the notion that somehow we're going to go back to basically pre-industrial levels of energy consumption is absurd, there's an awful lot we could do short of that, many of which involves devices which truly throttle or switch themselves off while not in use. I also think as our standard of living continues to rise, people are going to value good stuff over more stuff, and that provides an opportunity for performance and branding around greenness. So there are ways to reduce our energy consumption (or at least its rate of growth) which do not imply return to agrarian dystopia.
As for hydrogen vehicles, I'd prefer to directly use electricity myself, because a) it's very modular, and b) once present, electricity is very good at making motion, c) electric engines are quiet and d) we have already got one (a massive electrical energy distribution system, that is). I realize I'm probably a bit on the optimistic side about the state and pace of development of batteries, as a friend just pointed out to me that people like to do a lot of heating and cooling in their cars. Nonetheless, I agree with the basic idea.
Same way an oil analyst can predict shortages of oil. See Deffeyes, Kenneth. Or, to turn things around, perhaps you might explain how someone in the military can not share the paranoia that spies are everywhere and destruction is imminent. It's an absurd and slightly insulting assertion - of course there are plenty of rational, level-headed folks in our military, and they can and do distinguish real threats from paranoia. Are you asserting that climate scientists are not rational or level-headed? On what basis is that assertion made?
Look, people disagree - that's part of science. And obviously these "anti chicken little" folks continue to be tenured and funded - and get in the newspaper for chrissakes - that's hardly a campaign to repress them. But when an issue is settled, the fact that a few holdouts disagree maketh not a controversy. There is no controversy.
My mother's husband, a high level hydrologist in the US government, is totally unafraid to rebut the wrong points about the hydrologic cycle that are put forth by those concerned about emissions and global warming. And until about a year or two ago, he (like myself) did not agree that anthropogenic warming could be unequivocally separated from natural variability. The "hockey stick" was unproven at the time (and still has some issues, IMHO) and in itself is not conclusive evidence one way or the other. But in those intervening 5 years, a lot of the science has been filled in, from higher resolution GCMs to more refined ice measurements to better proxy data. So unless you have personal experience to bring to bear, please leave the insulting assertions about chicken little at home.
It's fine for these guys to continue to cry out if that's what they believe. Bully for them. But we're a long way for the 1500's. Recall that people were still dealing with whether the heavens had substance at that time, and Galileo threw that into question as well. And the numbers of scientists studying that phenomenon numbered in the 10s or maybe 100s. Tens of thousands of people have studied climate change using all the tools of modern science. And all but these few guys agree that anthropogenic carbon is notably affecting temperature. There's plenty that folks aren't certain about, but when you reject the consensus of a modern scientific community, you are calling into question the efficacy of the scientific process. This same phenomenon is exactly why science rejects ID: notwithstanding a few Discovery Institute fellows, there is really not enough disagreement about evolution to call its legitimacy into question. There is no real controversy.
This is why I end up posting furiously on Slashdot: there's a continuing cycle of some contrarian getting the limelight and people end up suggesting that the consensus is wrong not based on the merits of any science but on the appeal of swimming against the current. So why exactly are the tens of thousands of people who've studied this subject wrong? It's like me saying that we're past peak oil - I hold it as an opinion and I've done my reading, but the reality is that there is not "large controversy" among oil analysts about this subject: many, many people basically think that between shale, oil sands and "sludge oil" like Venezuela has there's quite a bit more oil to be had. Is Kenneth Deffeyes a "lone voice crying out" or is a member of a vocal minority who believe's we've past peak oil? I happen to believe him, but I recognize that he is in fact the latter, and as such I'd do well to listen to the views of the rest of the community.
While I do have strong opinions on the subject, I mostly just get frustrated that the same misinformation keeps coming out, and people keep bringing up the same objections. I would have to disagree with you that this article is representative of the overall state of climate-related sciences - the IPCC and most other scientific organizations have been reflecting consensus on anthropogenic carbon as an import driver of climate change for some time. And while any field will have its share of minority views and contrarians (and those people are welcome to their opinions), in this area these types of folks seem to get a disproportionate amount of press and one is not left with the true consensus view. As far as I know there are two major areas where the field has not reached consensus. One is how quickly temperatures will rise, and the second is the global climate patterns over the medium and long term. But nearly everyone agrees that: with unchecked emissions global temperatures will rise enough that the Arctic could be ice-free on a timescale of about a century, and that would shut down thermohaline circulation as it functions now, as well as raising sea level dramatically. Some say those changes might be irreversible, though if you subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis (i.e. the cumulative effect of living things on Earth is to control climate - pretty plausible when you think about it) we may be able to reverse that by enlisting the biosphere to sequester carbon again.
You're right that there are other ways to deal with metals in emissions and with the air quality issue in general. I was mainly pointing out that there are a large number of positive side effects that offset the "wasted" money should we decide to take action on global climate change. As for the hypoxia, yes, much of it is attributable to agricultural runoff but it's also been sped along by the destruction of benthic ecosystems that accompanies extensive oil extraction activites in the Gulf. Again, ending fossil fuel burning would have amelioration of this problem as a beneficial side effect.
I would call myself a fairly non-histrionic lefty. The main reason I feel a strong sense of urgency on this subject is twofold. One is, as you mention, the economic and geopolitical considerations - this is what I was alluding to in talking about energy being made in a more distributed way. I believe this presents an extraordinary set of opportunities that we should be rushing to capitalize on. The second is that the emissions problem is a result of economies built around a 19th century industrial view: the world and its resources are essentially infinite, so people should make good use of the Earth's bounty and not worry about waste and by-products. That entire model will have to change as the scale of human activity nears the scale of Earth's resources (copper and oil are the most immediate example of such limitations). Where I part company with most conservatives is that I believe the US government needs to kick this process ahead by 20-50 years, through investment and emissions taxes (and/or some kind of cap and trade idea). Nearly everyone technological revolution US business has brought to market has had the government as a strong partner: from securing right-of-ways for railroads to agriculture in the West to highways to the Internet, the government has stepped in and taken risks and built infrastructure before companies were ready to put capital on the line. And the result has been extraordinary growth as companies move in to build on that infrastructure. If we do it again we will preserve our leadership in the world economy - if not, I find it hard to believe the Chinesse or someone else won't capitalize on the opportunity. Call those histrionics if you will but that's my sense of urgency.
No, in fact there really isn't that much disagreement among the climate science community about causes - anthropogenic emissions are nearly universally acknowledged as a very important contribution to the current warming trend. There is, however, an active effort by people opposed to any common-sense measures to mitigate the risks to make distinctly minority viewpoints appear common. This is abetted by our media's desire to play up any controversy. As in "Is global warming real? Tonight at 11 we find out ask our viewers. We report, you decide."