California has excess generating capacity, had excess generating capacity during the blackouts, and is building more plants. I'm not sure what your point is.
The blackouts were caused by scads of plants being pulled off the grid at the same time, which was a result of deregulation -- there were no controls in place to prevent plants from pulling off the grid at the same time. Analysis has shown there was economic incentive for plants to do this -- pulling one generator off-line would spike prices enough that they made more money on the rest of their generators. Unlike other markets, the power grid does not degrade smoothly when the supply is limited -- it fails catastrophically. California's deregulation plan allowed producers to basically hold the state hostage, probably without even realizing that's what they were doing -- they merely had to act in their own economic self interest.
This situation was made worse by the criminals at Enron -- who were closely involved in California's deregulation plan. Internal memos were discovered during their collapse describing how they milked California dry without actually helping to keep the grid up. This is last year's news.
He's pretty bad. He has a long history of publishing ignorant bullshit marketed to unwary parents, under the guise of "informing" them about music, books, or what-have-you.
In regard to "objectionable" media, he's definately from the "lock the kid in a box" school of parenting, rather than the "teach them to develop their critical thinking skills" school of parenting.
It can keep our air clean, but it's not "clean" in any form that I'm aware of. Most fusion scenarios still involve generating a lot of radioactive waste.
Given the choice of viable fusion and viable solar, solar is clearly the better option for most applications. It remains to be seen which will be viable first, though there's a huge amount of clean solar technology available today that's simply not being used -- thermal applications of solar, for example, are cheap and effective.
> (where zero means we moved the emmissions out of our neighborhood and over to the poor area where the power plants are located).
A single point of emission is easier to clean than millions of points of emission, and there are advantages of scale.
There are also higher air quality demands in high population areas that are better addressed by zero emissions vehicles. With millions of cars in a city, it makes sense to move the points of emission such that air quality is safe in all of California, instead of having localized unsafe areas.
While at school at Caltech, I got an up-close and personal view of the problems in LA. The mountains trap the air, leading to a thick haze right over Pasadena. Zero emissions vehicles are a very good technology to address this problem.
The only thing they're saying is that using a carbon based fuel to generate hydrogen isn't better than using the fuel directly. This isn't terribly surprising. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, since we don't have piles of it ready to burn. The only way it will be a clear win is if there is a viable way to generate it without using carbon fuels, e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
Wow. I've had exactly the opposite experience. Maybe it's because I mostly use older hardware. I also haven't tried anything later than Win2k, but up to that point all the Win* GUIs ran veerrry slooowly on my machines. Linux performance was dramatically faster, though it could be pulled down by turning on enough features (like pixmap GUI themes).
> Oh, and the bit about terrorism? Americans are well aware that our actions in Afghanistan were motivated by 9/11, but that our actions in Iraq basically are not.
What do you base this on? Polls on the subject have shown that Americans are dramatically misinformed on this subject, with huge numbers of them believing that there were Iraq citizens among the 9/11 criminals, and more believing in evidence tying Iraq to Bin Laden that, in fact, doesn't exist.
> I think this interview with Ray Bradbury [theavclub.com] sums up my opinions nicely.
Wow. There went my respect for Ray Bradbury. That rant of an interview was pathetic. He is seriously disconnected from reality. Sounds like his passion for working all the time hasn't left him any time to find out what's actually happening in the world.
Funny, FOTR was much more faithful to the story, and it was compelling to people who hadn't read the books.
I just don't buy they "they HAD to change it" excuse, especially since the changed parts of the plot were just unwatchable. They made no sense; they were ham-handed; the acting was horrible; and they ate up so much screen time that critical parts of the plot were left out. The resulting story was full of plot gaps, and consistency errors; it was cut like a music video. It was more like watching a video from the soundtrack to "Sweet Valley High: The Two Towers" than watching a film adaptation of the book.
It's "problems" are 1) electing Pete Wilson, screwball conservative who destroyed the power infrastructure through cracked deregulation schemes advocated by energy companies (notably Enron), 2) criminals in Enron gaming the market after Wilson set it up, and 3) King George refusing to do anything about his home-grown Texas criminals.
> California hadn't built any plants for years before the power crisis, possibly a decade or more. The main reasons are all the environmental studies, regulations, NIMBYism, and protestors.
This is dead wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. There have been zero plants denied for environmental reasons.
California has more generating capacity than it needs. The "crisis" was created by Enron gaming the markets.
You absolutely don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
There haven't been any proposed powerplants denied due to environmental concerns.
The laws regarding deregulation were written by industry insiders and pushed through by Pete Wilson.
And the energy crisis that put California in debt was manufactured by Bush's pet criminals at Enron, as was detailed when that company finally imploded.
Ford's current management seems to be sincerely interested in the environment. They're sinking huge amounts of cash into environmental clean-up of their factory sites, including taking comprehensive assessments of their environmental impact. Standard Detroit practice has been to never make an impact assessment that isn't required by law, because it opens you up to liability suits. Knowing you're making a mess is more legally dangerous than "accidentally" making one.
Ford is also spending tons of money on redesigning their factories to have low environmental impact in the long-term. They really are going out on a limb to address environmental concerns in a number of ways.
That's not to say they're flawless, but they should be praised in the cases where they're doing the right thing. This car design looks very significant to me. I might be more cynical if it were a different car company, but I think Ford has shown some sincerity on this subject.
> cars have been mostly recycleable for awhile. they're stripped of useable parts and then salvaged for metal. I think I read somewhere that they're the most recycled consumer product.
The point of cradle-to-cradle design is that the quality of the materials doesn't degrade with reuse. So you can make them into cars again, rather than using them in less demanding applications. McDonough says of typical recycling that it's really "down-cycling". The materials lose quality with each cycle, and are still headed for landfill. They're just taking a slightly longer time to get there.
In contrast, cradle-to-cradle design plans for zero landfill, by using materials that don't lose value during manufacturing or recycling. That's what is meant by "technical nutrient" -- a raw material that can be completely reclaimed and reused essentially forever.
This has a lot to do with whether the manufacturing techniques are reversible. If your materials have to be conditioned by mixing with things you can't easily remove, it's not recyclable, even if you can melt it down and use it for radiators, or guitar picks, or something, before it finally ends up in a dump.
> However inaccurate the counting in Florida is - and I think virtually everyone agrees it was a close run thing, however you count it
This just isn't true. It wasn't close. Between the "Jews for Buchanan" vote and the Democratic voters that brother Jeb arbitrarily threw off the voter rolls, Florida overwhelmingly tried to vote for Gore.
In any case, the voting results weren't used. The Supreme Court justified installing Bush by pointing to press accounts of the election. Bush was elected by Fox News.
The take-home lesson: your vote doesn't count; what the media report counts.
or, you know, if it was decided by the voting system we have Gore would have won. But it wasn't. Between the "Jews for Buchanan" vote, the black voters that Jeb tossed off the voting rolls without cause, and black voters that were harassed on election day there were about 60k Gore votes uncounted. And in any case the election wasn't decided by votes, it was decided by judicial fiat.
Most often this technology is just tossed over the wall to teachers. They didn't ask for it, don't know what is possible with it, and don't know how to integrate it usefully in their classroom.
That's not to say they can't be useful -- they can. The shrill voices condemning computers are not materially different than those that condemned ball-point pens a few generations ago (ignorance of quill pens would be the end of education, don't you know).
Professional training is a minimum requirement for computers to be useful in the classroom. In most places it's not available. Where it is available, it's typically unpaid, or comes out of time the teachers are using for lesson planning -- so they have to choose whether to be prepared for class or to get computer training.
A typical teacher works tons of unpaid overtime, gets paid next to nothing, and pays for classroom materials out of their own paycheck. Without a substantial training program computers are just a burden.
You can't get remotely close to a top flight private school for half of what California spends. You can, however, send them to a fundamentalist workbook "school", where their faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics.
Wow. I've had exactly the opposite experience. Fast, effective help. No odd looks about running linux. The installer was actually pretty interested, and asked for info on configuring the network settings so he could help less experienced linux users.
piffle. The questions were embarrassingly bad. Questions about his reputation as a poor actor? Two questions about parodies of Star Trek? These questions did not attempt to engage him at all, with one or two exceptions (when he actually gave longer responses). Instead they merely trolled for a titillating display of angst or anger.
I'm impressed at how good natured his responses were, given the questions.
Slashdot Mirror
California has excess generating capacity, had excess generating capacity during the blackouts, and is building more plants. I'm not sure what your point is.
The blackouts were caused by scads of plants being pulled off the grid at the same time, which was a result of deregulation -- there were no controls in place to prevent plants from pulling off the grid at the same time. Analysis has shown there was economic incentive for plants to do this -- pulling one generator off-line would spike prices enough that they made more money on the rest of their generators. Unlike other markets, the power grid does not degrade smoothly when the supply is limited -- it fails catastrophically. California's deregulation plan allowed producers to basically hold the state hostage, probably without even realizing that's what they were doing -- they merely had to act in their own economic self interest.
This situation was made worse by the criminals at Enron -- who were closely involved in California's deregulation plan. Internal memos were discovered during their collapse describing how they milked California dry without actually helping to keep the grid up. This is last year's news.
He's pretty bad. He has a long history of publishing ignorant bullshit marketed to unwary parents, under the guise of "informing" them about music, books, or what-have-you.
In regard to "objectionable" media, he's definately from the "lock the kid in a box" school of parenting, rather than the "teach them to develop their critical thinking skills" school of parenting.
> Nuclear CAN be clean. Give it a chance.
It can keep our air clean, but it's not "clean" in any form that I'm aware of. Most fusion scenarios still involve generating a lot of radioactive waste.
Given the choice of viable fusion and viable solar, solar is clearly the better option for most applications. It remains to be seen which will be viable first, though there's a huge amount of clean solar technology available today that's simply not being used -- thermal applications of solar, for example, are cheap and effective.
> (where zero means we moved the emmissions out of our neighborhood and over to the poor area where the power plants are located).
A single point of emission is easier to clean than millions of points of emission, and there are advantages of scale.
There are also higher air quality demands in high population areas that are better addressed by zero emissions vehicles. With millions of cars in a city, it makes sense to move the points of emission such that air quality is safe in all of California, instead of having localized unsafe areas.
While at school at Caltech, I got an up-close and personal view of the problems in LA. The mountains trap the air, leading to a thick haze right over Pasadena. Zero emissions vehicles are a very good technology to address this problem.
The only thing they're saying is that using a carbon based fuel to generate hydrogen isn't better than using the fuel directly. This isn't terribly surprising. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, since we don't have piles of it ready to burn. The only way it will be a clear win is if there is a viable way to generate it without using carbon fuels, e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.
The headline is a bit misleading.
Wow. I've had exactly the opposite experience. Maybe it's because I mostly use older hardware. I also haven't tried anything later than Win2k, but up to that point all the Win* GUIs ran veerrry slooowly on my machines. Linux performance was dramatically faster, though it could be pulled down by turning on enough features (like pixmap GUI themes).
Great post, but the moderators seem to have missed the quote.
This has been false for years, and it gets +4 insightful?
> Oh, and the bit about terrorism? Americans are well aware that our actions in Afghanistan were motivated by 9/11, but that our actions in Iraq basically are not.
What do you base this on? Polls on the subject have shown that Americans are dramatically misinformed on this subject, with huge numbers of them believing that there were Iraq citizens among the 9/11 criminals, and more believing in evidence tying Iraq to Bin Laden that, in fact, doesn't exist.
> I think this interview with Ray Bradbury [theavclub.com] sums up my opinions nicely.
Wow. There went my respect for Ray Bradbury. That rant of an interview was pathetic. He is seriously disconnected from reality. Sounds like his passion for working all the time hasn't left him any time to find out what's actually happening in the world.
Funny, FOTR was much more faithful to the story, and it was compelling to people who hadn't read the books.
I just don't buy they "they HAD to change it" excuse, especially since the changed parts of the plot were just unwatchable. They made no sense; they were ham-handed; the acting was horrible; and they ate up so much screen time that critical parts of the plot were left out. The resulting story was full of plot gaps, and consistency errors; it was cut like a music video. It was more like watching a video from the soundtrack to "Sweet Valley High: The Two Towers" than watching a film adaptation of the book.
It's "problems" are 1) electing Pete Wilson, screwball conservative who destroyed the power infrastructure through cracked deregulation schemes advocated by energy companies (notably Enron), 2) criminals in Enron gaming the market after Wilson set it up, and 3) King George refusing to do anything about his home-grown Texas criminals.
> California hadn't built any plants for years before the power crisis, possibly a decade or more. The main reasons are all the environmental studies, regulations, NIMBYism, and protestors.
This is dead wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. There have been zero plants denied for environmental reasons.
California has more generating capacity than it needs. The "crisis" was created by Enron gaming the markets.
You absolutely don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
There haven't been any proposed powerplants denied due to environmental concerns.
The laws regarding deregulation were written by industry insiders and pushed through by Pete Wilson.
And the energy crisis that put California in debt was manufactured by Bush's pet criminals at Enron, as was detailed when that company finally imploded.
> Get off the Red Hat reservation, pal. ... or install apt.
Ford's current management seems to be sincerely interested in the environment. They're sinking huge amounts of cash into environmental clean-up of their factory sites, including taking comprehensive assessments of their environmental impact. Standard Detroit practice has been to never make an impact assessment that isn't required by law, because it opens you up to liability suits. Knowing you're making a mess is more legally dangerous than "accidentally" making one.
Ford is also spending tons of money on redesigning their factories to have low environmental impact in the long-term. They really are going out on a limb to address environmental concerns in a number of ways.
That's not to say they're flawless, but they should be praised in the cases where they're doing the right thing. This car design looks very significant to me. I might be more cynical if it were a different car company, but I think Ford has shown some sincerity on this subject.
> cars have been mostly recycleable for awhile. they're stripped of useable parts and then salvaged for metal. I think I read somewhere that they're the most recycled consumer product.
The point of cradle-to-cradle design is that the quality of the materials doesn't degrade with reuse. So you can make them into cars again, rather than using them in less demanding applications. McDonough says of typical recycling that it's really "down-cycling". The materials lose quality with each cycle, and are still headed for landfill. They're just taking a slightly longer time to get there.
In contrast, cradle-to-cradle design plans for zero landfill, by using materials that don't lose value during manufacturing or recycling. That's what is meant by "technical nutrient" -- a raw material that can be completely reclaimed and reused essentially forever.
This has a lot to do with whether the manufacturing techniques are reversible. If your materials have to be conditioned by mixing with things you can't easily remove, it's not recyclable, even if you can melt it down and use it for radiators, or guitar picks, or something, before it finally ends up in a dump.
> However inaccurate the counting in Florida is - and I think virtually everyone agrees it was a close run thing, however you count it
This just isn't true. It wasn't close. Between the "Jews for Buchanan" vote and the Democratic voters that brother Jeb arbitrarily threw off the voter rolls, Florida overwhelmingly tried to vote for Gore.
In any case, the voting results weren't used. The Supreme Court justified installing Bush by pointing to press accounts of the election. Bush was elected by Fox News.
The take-home lesson: your vote doesn't count; what the media report counts.
> If you are wondering what all the hubbub is about, read the book and make up your mind for yourself.
Uh, NO. Read the book, AND read the critics, and read their sources if there is dispute about them, and then make up your mind for yourself.
Unfortunately, your technique (read authors that affirm your political position, and then decide that you're done) seems to be quite popular.
or, you know, if it was decided by the voting system we have Gore would have won. But it wasn't. Between the "Jews for Buchanan" vote, the black voters that Jeb tossed off the voting rolls without cause, and black voters that were harassed on election day there were about 60k Gore votes uncounted. And in any case the election wasn't decided by votes, it was decided by judicial fiat.
Most often this technology is just tossed over the wall to teachers. They didn't ask for it, don't know what is possible with it, and don't know how to integrate it usefully in their classroom.
That's not to say they can't be useful -- they can. The shrill voices condemning computers are not materially different than those that condemned ball-point pens a few generations ago (ignorance of quill pens would be the end of education, don't you know).
Professional training is a minimum requirement for computers to be useful in the classroom. In most places it's not available. Where it is available, it's typically unpaid, or comes out of time the teachers are using for lesson planning -- so they have to choose whether to be prepared for class or to get computer training.
A typical teacher works tons of unpaid overtime, gets paid next to nothing, and pays for classroom materials out of their own paycheck. Without a substantial training program computers are just a burden.
Hm. Well, all of your facts are wrong.
I d= 52
http://www.stateline.org/header_facts.do?header
You can't get remotely close to a top flight private school for half of what California spends. You can, however, send them to a fundamentalist workbook "school", where their faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics.
Wow. I've had exactly the opposite experience. Fast, effective help. No odd looks about running linux. The installer was actually pretty interested, and asked for info on configuring the network settings so he could help less experienced linux users.
... my own experience. Ahh, the smell of burning cow entrails! It's enough to make one go veg.
piffle. The questions were embarrassingly bad. Questions about his reputation as a poor actor? Two questions about parodies of Star Trek? These questions did not attempt to engage him at all, with one or two exceptions (when he actually gave longer responses). Instead they merely trolled for a titillating display of angst or anger.
I'm impressed at how good natured his responses were, given the questions.