That happens sometimes on gear you buy direct from cisco, too. The difference is that, if you're legit, you can call TAC and they'll send you replacement GBICs & SPFs.
But then, I guess it might happen more often with some of the counterfitters. And there's no way to know if you're getting 100% cisco-like (except legality) stuff, or the cheapest possible knock-offs.
So, implanted RFID have the same promise as proximity cards did. Just have one card, and open all your locks!
I have six cards now. I've tried to get provider n to use card 1..(n-1), but that's never worked (I guess they sell more cards that way? But then I have to carry more cards!) That's annoying if they're taking up space in my wallet. But if each one had to be injected, I'm thinking this would not work out.
I don't like to be cynical, but I wouldn't get any hopes up over this bill. Remember that this is an election year, so even passing it (and making the FCC "study" the issue) is probably just about making a show of concern, rather than actually changing anything. (Or even heading off any threats before they happen.)
When I get time, I should write a journal entry about how I became a neutrality violator, too. (I promise that the issue is more complex than it might appear.)
I think this is possible only because people confuse information about an identity with that identity, and therefore believe that knowledge of that information proves that the person is who they say they are.
I think there's way too many people and organizations with legitimate access to all kinds of information about me for me to consider that my SSN (or an account number that's printed on every statement that goes through the mail, or 16+4+3 digits on a credit card) is a good shared secret between me and my bank (or employer, or anyone.) Then, there's all the people who have illegitimate access.
We still use this because... it works "well enough." Banks make enough that they can cover the loss from a few fraudulent loans. And a person having to clean up a credit record is a PITA, but it's doable. And it's an externality from the bank's perspective.
Thinking about this, I don't have a real solution. It's advisable to guard your psudo-secrets, when you can. A law or two to help this might help, but not get rid of the problem. Until someone comes up with a good identifier[1], we're stuck with it.
[1] For values of "good identifier" that include a way that one person can prove they are the same person who established the good credit / made the bank deposit / whatever, including letting someone act as a limited agent of another (so the power company can take my electricity bill out of my account, but not let a rogue employee take all my money and buy Enron stock) and also doesn't let someone establish multiple identities with which to keep ripping off banks and others.
Not stories analyzing who is ahead by 3% in the latest poll
And failing to mention that the error margins of the poll are +/- 5%. That always bugs me.
Apparently the news networks think that no one's attention span is greater than 1 minute and 30 seconds
The target audience's attention span can never be longer than a commercial break. You might think you can get away from this by watching public broadcasting -- but then, how long are the pledge breaks?
I think you're mistaken about the 5mw limit. Lasers more powerful than IIIa are indeed available for sale. AFAICT, they just have more strongly worded warning labels on them.
May I direct you to goo
gle. Or even
checking thinkgeek
which was discussed earlier in the thread.
Ruthing happens when someone's connection is flaking out, or your sim's connection to the asset server is flakey. Sometimes that means they're also naked (their clothing and attachments aren't loading properly -- just like their shape and skin).
So... banning them because SL is flaking out on them -- while your right as an estate manager -- seems arbitrary and unfair. (Probably better to send them home -- they either come back unRuthed, or not at all.) Also, better to bug the Lindens (via jira and maybe office hours or concierage) to fix the bugs that lead to this, rather than get annoyed with the Avatars that are victims of the bugs.
I don't know anything about the free411 thing. That might be "Evil" if it is how Cringely suggests. But with no details, it's hard to speculate.
The adSense complaining is in no way an indicator of a Microsoft-like monopoly. Google must balance the interests of users, content-providers, and advertisers. Subsets of all three groups are trying to game Google for their own benefit. Of those three groups, Google seems to be most leery of offending the users -- and this has worked well for them.
The user, really, is in control here. The user could use another search. They could put ads.google.com (or whatever) in their hosts.txt file (like many have done to doubleclick and others). Even for those who can't/won't do that, users can avoid pages they know have ads that are more annoying than the content is good (Otherwise I would read Dilbert every day -- but not with popup-blocker avoiding popunders.) Further, since the other two groups are trying to game google to get the attention
of users, Google acts as a kind of spam filter for the user, only giving them ads that they can manage -- or even ignore. (Thus Google's limits on the number ads per page, etc.)
The content provider wants, simply, to make money. They have content -- which drives page hits -- and want to monetize that. They have some tension with Google over caches and summaries, but Google can make that up to them by increasing their traffic (for free, when the user searches) and maybe by providing money, if they use Google ads.
Advertisers are the loudest complainers, especially those who have chosen to base their business mostly on Google's referals. They also try the hardest to game Google, to get more users. This group seems to think that since they are the ones paying Google, that they're the only customers of Google, and that Google must treat them better than the other two groups. This is also the only group from whose perspective the 'monopoly' claims begin to make sense. If an online business wants traffic, they pretty much have to deal with Google, since Google "controls" so much traffic. Clearly, some of them resent Google for this lack of choice.
The content providers could choose someone other than Google to support their pages, and the users could opt out of google ads if they wanted. But the advertisers are stuck with google. This might allow google to abuse the advertisers if they wanted. I haven't seen them going that far, though. But they are willing to tweak their algorythems in ways that that sometimes hurt advertisers. I don't think it's intentionally "Evil", but the consequences are hard to foresee. (On the other hand, I've never seen google ads screw up a page's layout, much less infect a user's computer with spyware or worse.) I think that Google would love to be completely fair to these customers, but that's "hard," especially since many of these users are trying to be Evil to Google and the other two groups.
Anyway -- this is one way free markets work. The users and content providers have chosen the terms on which they'll deal with advertisers. If you don't like Google, you'll have to come up with something that's more attractive to those groups, in order to compete.
The comparison to Microsoft is there, but pretty weak. Microsoft does have to address the interests of users, 3rd party developers, and hardware manufactures. Microsoft uses its domanance in its OS and office products to keep all three groups locked in to each other and themselves. Microsoft does seem to favor developers over the other two, but only if the developers will lock themselves into the Microsoft-way of doing things (eg, Microsoft APIs instead of portable code.) This locks users in (if the software they want runs only on Windows), which in turn gives MSFT more clout when ordering hardware vendors around. Microsoft lock-in of some users puts pressure on others to do the same (what else do you do when someone sends you a Word2007 or Visio document that needs to be edi
For a long time, my friends kept raving about netflix, but I wouldn't have anything to do with them because of those popunders. I was so happy when blockbuster came out with their service; I'd hate to see them go away. I probabably make tons of money for blockbuster. I pay my money each month, but only watch about 3 movies. I should spend less time in Second Life.
Of course, the future is going to be in downloadable movies. But that either means buying them or DRM, or both. I guess we might hope to buy them cheap?
By posting this, I undo my screwup of moding the parent as flamebait. (The old system at least gave you a chance to realize you'd erred before you clicked "submit.")
Is this really what Microsoft is trying to do? We accuse them of all kinds of evil, but this seems more outlandish than normal.
Ummm, that's an example I made up. If you're going to get so angry over it, at least blame me, not Microsoft.
I understand that you made up the example of the graphs. But... what else do you use it for? Maybe you could figure out that "now" is not the right time to remind the user about rebooting so updates will take effect. Maybe change the background color to something more soothing? Any change to the UI beyond that will probably cause users more stress.
So... if the user is confused because they cannot find the graph their looking for, hide it from them! But when their tech support comes to calmly help the poor user, they just step them through finding the graphs... and there it is. The user feels silly/stupid, and tech support gets more and more calls.
Is this really what Microsoft is trying to do? We accuse them of all kinds of evil, but this seems more outlandish than normal.
Bower and his colleagues came up with a distance of 1,270 light-years, give or take 76 light-years. That compares with the previous estimate of 1,565 light-years, give or take 266.
There's still overlap in the uncertainties of the measurements. So it wasn't incorrectly measured, just measured with a 17% error margin. The only ones who are incorrect are the people who quote the estimate without including the uncertainty.
I can do 30-40 miles on my first 1.5 liters of water +.5 liters of gatoraid. That works out to 57-76 mpg. (calm, cool day, moderate hills)
(But then, that's probably only comparable to cars using up coolant and motor oil; the energy for the trip generally does not come in liquid form, and I don't know the volumentric measurements of bannanas and begals..)
I suspect that there is a high correlation between sites that check SPF and sites that reject (5xx) spam. If not, sites that check SPF are (almost) a proper subset of sites that reject spam. (If I had time and resources to do only one or the other, I'd do the former; I suspect almost anyone else would do the same.) The main place where SPF will help is if software checks it before sending vacation (and similar) messages.
How do you know that the files were shared by the user, not some trojan or other malware?
There are some 'bots that do (phatbot is one, IIRC) include p2p clients and download/share stuff
(whatever the botmaster might like). And some of them clean up after themselves enough that it's
hard to tell that they were there, after the fact. (Slammer didn't do p2p, but it left no trace on
the hard disk, other than that the vulnerable SQL server it infected is still there.)
The USGS release seems to be dammage control. I lack the skills to understand if the new rules are a reasonable way to manage an agency full of scientists (Although it is clear that at least one scientist doesn't like them.)
Scientific-looking "periodic table" -- with no acual periods or relation to chemicals.
Nice job on missing the point. The intention wasn't to present the periodic table. The intention was to present it in an interesting graphical format. You could also call it a little mocking of the political elite. I think the intention was to present it in an eye-catching (graphical) format that tried to borrow some credibility (maybe even authority) from a familliar tool which has symbolic value. I agree that it was mocking; I think we disagree about who the elite that need mocking are.
Only has events begining in 2001, so they only blame Bush and the Republican congress.
Yay, since you try to turn this into a political issue, now you set the scene for the political indoctrinated biases to work their way. The republicans now can just go home and ignore the whole report, because, obviously, they are against republicans so they must be democrats.
The way I see things is that the organization presented their findings now, because they noticed a huge drop of respect for science since the previous administrations. That's only a rep. vs dem. issue if you let it be one.
I think its clear that this site gives that impression. I'm suggesting that it is designed to do so -- a political organization wants to stop Bush from pushing his agenda, finds some scientists to give some stories about government-related badness. You seem to be suggesting that either this is not a political group, or that its politics don't matter in its findings.
How can we know which of us is right?
The articles describing each incident are cleverly weasel-worded, to make it sound like a big conspiracy, but if carefully parsed, doesn't seem to hang togther (That is, if read carefully, it doesn't say very much at all about who told whom say or not say what.)
This description of yours fits into the "it was written by DEMS, don't listen!!!!111" conclusion you seem to be advocating.
Good excuses for not listening to a bunch of Nobel laureates. Especially since because only about 7% of them believe in any personal god at all, so they must be stupid atheist too, right? What do they know?!
If Nobel laureates never had their names on politically-driven documents, then there would be no excuse to ignore them.
The opposite of ignoring the article might be to figure out whats wrong with it, so someone can do better; or it might be to do something about the problem that it brings up.
"What to do about it" is very importaint, and I don't think TFA ever got to it, other than 'Blame Bush' and 'Sign here, if you're a scientist.' And this is exactly my problem with weasel-worded accusations like this. There's no way to counter them if any of them are false or exaggerated. The article is no help in fixing the problem if it is real. Presumeably we'd like for Bush (or someone) to read something like this and say, "Science is being interfered with!? Not on my watch! I will fix this, at once!" But this article is no help in finding the interference (ie, knowing who to fire), or, because of its bias, even in judging how widespread it is.
I was just laughing at how TFA is very clearly an example of itself.
Scientific-looking "periodic table" -- with no acual periods or relation to chemicals.
Only has events begining in 2001, so they only blame Bush and the Republican congress.
The articles describing each incident are cleverly weasel-worded, to make it sound like a big conspiracy, but if carefully parsed, doesn't seem to hang togther (That is, if read carefully, it doesn't say very much at all about who told whom say or not say what.)
I don't doubt that there's politics in science; But TFA is itself a political doument, trying to pose as a consensus of scientists.
It's probably too late for your "upcoming" interview, but if you donate some code to the odd open source project here or there, then you have something you can be proud of -- especially if the prospective employer uses the stuff you helped to write.) Many projects list names of contributors in a "credits" or "release notes" file, which gives you a way to show that the code is yours -- instead of stolen from someone else.
To be "fair" it should be about as much as the "real" cost to the public for using that much carbon. The UK study a few weeks ago (sorry; I'm too lazy to look it up right now) was the first I've seen that tried to put a dollar value on how much carbon emissions cost. I did some napkin-back calculations and came up with about $.75/gallon of gas.
(Am I way off here? You could argue the data (and/or my math) a little either way, but I'm thinking that's a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate.)
I'm thinking that would be an additional 25% cost added to gasoline and simular fuels. I'm thinking this would have a serious short-term ecconomic impact. (Maybe smooth that out by phasing the tax in $0.10 a year over 8 years?)
Another problem is that people are going to be (reasonably) reluctant to throw away their brand-new SUVs as soon as this tax is passed. Nor are they going to abandon their home just because it is fifteen miles away from their workplace. People are making decisions NOW that will have effects for many years. (And, if gas prices jump by $.75, then used SUVs and far-out houses aren't going to sell very well.) (How much energy does it take to make a car, anyway?)
I think other posters have commented that energy taxes are regressive on the theory that poor people can't afford efficient devices (cars, appliances, etc.) In times of shortages, rationing often seems more "fair." But if carbon credits can be traded for money, then they might as well just use money. And if not, then it means that a whole second ecconomy has to be created and regulated.
For example, if a company wants to send someone to another city for a conference, who's carbon credits are used to pay for the jet fuel? The airline gets to choose which plane to fly. The sending company decides to send their employee. Hopefully the employee doesn't have to use personal credits? But the employee is the only natural person in the exchange! Where do the corporations (airline or sender) get their credits? From customers? From investors? Or do you get to manufacture credits just by incorporating?
I think this is problematic from a lot of angles. This is why politicians cook up very complex laws -- to try to cover as many edge and corner cases as they (and their lobyists!) can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
That happens sometimes on gear you buy direct from cisco, too. The difference is that, if you're legit, you can call TAC and they'll send you replacement GBICs & SPFs.
But then, I guess it might happen more often with some of the counterfitters. And there's no way to know if you're getting 100% cisco-like (except legality) stuff, or the cheapest possible knock-offs.
So, implanted RFID have the same promise as proximity cards did. Just have one card, and open all your locks!
I have six cards now. I've tried to get provider n to use card 1..(n-1), but that's never worked (I guess they sell more cards that way? But then I have to carry more cards!) That's annoying if they're taking up space in my wallet. But if each one had to be injected, I'm thinking this would not work out.
I don't like to be cynical, but I wouldn't get any hopes up over this bill. Remember that this is an election year, so even passing it (and making the FCC "study" the issue) is probably just about making a show of concern, rather than actually changing anything. (Or even heading off any threats before they happen.)
When I get time, I should write a journal entry about how I became a neutrality violator, too. (I promise that the issue is more complex than it might appear.)
So, w3c complains about their bandwidth, and the response is: The Slashdot Effect. Doesn't that make the old bandwidth problem seem less of a problem?
I'm just loving the irony in that.
I think this is possible only because people confuse information about an identity with that identity, and therefore believe that knowledge of that information proves that the person is who they say they are.
I think there's way too many people and organizations with legitimate access to all kinds of information about me for me to consider that my SSN (or an account number that's printed on every statement that goes through the mail, or 16+4+3 digits on a credit card) is a good shared secret between me and my bank (or employer, or anyone.) Then, there's all the people who have illegitimate access.
We still use this because... it works "well enough." Banks make enough that they can cover the loss from a few fraudulent loans. And a person having to clean up a credit record is a PITA, but it's doable. And it's an externality from the bank's perspective.
Thinking about this, I don't have a real solution. It's advisable to guard your psudo-secrets, when you can. A law or two to help this might help, but not get rid of the problem. Until someone comes up with a good identifier[1], we're stuck with it.
[1] For values of "good identifier" that include a way that one person can prove they are the same person who established the good credit / made the bank deposit / whatever, including letting someone act as a limited agent of another (so the power company can take my electricity bill out of my account, but not let a rogue employee take all my money and buy Enron stock) and also doesn't let someone establish multiple identities with which to keep ripping off banks and others.
And failing to mention that the error margins of the poll are +/- 5%. That always bugs me.
Apparently the news networks think that no one's attention span is greater than 1 minute and 30 secondsThe target audience's attention span can never be longer than a commercial break. You might think you can get away from this by watching public broadcasting -- but then, how long are the pledge breaks?
The cure for information overload, if you can get past the ponies, it's a very interesting idea. (Just be sure to RTFA.)
I think you're mistaken about the 5mw limit. Lasers more powerful than IIIa are indeed available for sale. AFAICT, they just have more strongly worded warning labels on them.
May I direct you to g oo g l e. Or even checking thinkgeek which was discussed earlier in the thread.
Ruthing happens when someone's connection is flaking out, or your sim's connection to the asset server is flakey. Sometimes that means they're also naked (their clothing and attachments aren't loading properly -- just like their shape and skin).
So... banning them because SL is flaking out on them -- while your right as an estate manager -- seems arbitrary and unfair. (Probably better to send them home -- they either come back unRuthed, or not at all.) Also, better to bug the Lindens (via jira and maybe office hours or concierage) to fix the bugs that lead to this, rather than get annoyed with the Avatars that are victims of the bugs.
I don't know anything about the free411 thing. That might be "Evil" if it is how Cringely suggests. But with no details, it's hard to speculate.
The adSense complaining is in no way an indicator of a Microsoft-like monopoly. Google must balance the interests of users, content-providers, and advertisers. Subsets of all three groups are trying to game Google for their own benefit. Of those three groups, Google seems to be most leery of offending the users -- and this has worked well for them.
The user, really, is in control here. The user could use another search. They could put ads.google.com (or whatever) in their hosts.txt file (like many have done to doubleclick and others). Even for those who can't/won't do that, users can avoid pages they know have ads that are more annoying than the content is good (Otherwise I would read Dilbert every day -- but not with popup-blocker avoiding popunders.) Further, since the other two groups are trying to game google to get the attention of users, Google acts as a kind of spam filter for the user, only giving them ads that they can manage -- or even ignore. (Thus Google's limits on the number ads per page, etc.)
The content provider wants, simply, to make money. They have content -- which drives page hits -- and want to monetize that. They have some tension with Google over caches and summaries, but Google can make that up to them by increasing their traffic (for free, when the user searches) and maybe by providing money, if they use Google ads.
Advertisers are the loudest complainers, especially those who have chosen to base their business mostly on Google's referals. They also try the hardest to game Google, to get more users. This group seems to think that since they are the ones paying Google, that they're the only customers of Google, and that Google must treat them better than the other two groups. This is also the only group from whose perspective the 'monopoly' claims begin to make sense. If an online business wants traffic, they pretty much have to deal with Google, since Google "controls" so much traffic. Clearly, some of them resent Google for this lack of choice.
The content providers could choose someone other than Google to support their pages, and the users could opt out of google ads if they wanted. But the advertisers are stuck with google. This might allow google to abuse the advertisers if they wanted. I haven't seen them going that far, though. But they are willing to tweak their algorythems in ways that that sometimes hurt advertisers. I don't think it's intentionally "Evil", but the consequences are hard to foresee. (On the other hand, I've never seen google ads screw up a page's layout, much less infect a user's computer with spyware or worse.) I think that Google would love to be completely fair to these customers, but that's "hard," especially since many of these users are trying to be Evil to Google and the other two groups.
Anyway -- this is one way free markets work. The users and content providers have chosen the terms on which they'll deal with advertisers. If you don't like Google, you'll have to come up with something that's more attractive to those groups, in order to compete.
The comparison to Microsoft is there, but pretty weak. Microsoft does have to address the interests of users, 3rd party developers, and hardware manufactures. Microsoft uses its domanance in its OS and office products to keep all three groups locked in to each other and themselves. Microsoft does seem to favor developers over the other two, but only if the developers will lock themselves into the Microsoft-way of doing things (eg, Microsoft APIs instead of portable code.) This locks users in (if the software they want runs only on Windows), which in turn gives MSFT more clout when ordering hardware vendors around. Microsoft lock-in of some users puts pressure on others to do the same (what else do you do when someone sends you a Word2007 or Visio document that needs to be edi
For a long time, my friends kept raving about netflix, but I wouldn't have anything to do with them because of those popunders. I was so happy when blockbuster came out with their service; I'd hate to see them go away. I probabably make tons of money for blockbuster. I pay my money each month, but only watch about 3 movies. I should spend less time in Second Life.
Of course, the future is going to be in downloadable movies. But that either means buying them or DRM, or both. I guess we might hope to buy them cheap?
By posting this, I undo my screwup of moding the parent as flamebait. (The old system at least gave you a chance to realize you'd erred before you clicked "submit.")
Sorry about that.
Ummm, that's an example I made up. If you're going to get so angry over it, at least blame me, not Microsoft.
I understand that you made up the example of the graphs. But... what else do you use it for? Maybe you could figure out that "now" is not the right time to remind the user about rebooting so updates will take effect. Maybe change the background color to something more soothing? Any change to the UI beyond that will probably cause users more stress.
So... if the user is confused because they cannot find the graph their looking for, hide it from them! But when their tech support comes to calmly help the poor user, they just step them through finding the graphs... and there it is. The user feels silly/stupid, and tech support gets more and more calls.
Is this really what Microsoft is trying to do? We accuse them of all kinds of evil, but this seems more outlandish than normal.
There's still overlap in the uncertainties of the measurements. So it wasn't incorrectly measured, just measured with a 17% error margin. The only ones who are incorrect are the people who quote the estimate without including the uncertainty.
Does this mean the end of spinning ad farms, and those Avs wandering the infohubs with giant attached signs, getting paid for every person who clicks?
Oooh, I hope so.
(But then, that's probably only comparable to cars using up coolant and motor oil; the energy for the trip generally does not come in liquid form, and I don't know the volumentric measurements of bannanas and begals..)
I suspect that there is a high correlation between sites that check SPF and sites that reject (5xx) spam. If not, sites that check SPF are (almost) a proper subset of sites that reject spam. (If I had time and resources to do only one or the other, I'd do the former; I suspect almost anyone else would do the same.) The main place where SPF will help is if software checks it before sending vacation (and similar) messages.
-
How do you know that the files were shared by the user, not some trojan or other malware?
There are some 'bots that do (phatbot is one, IIRC) include p2p clients and download/share stuff (whatever the botmaster might like). And some of them clean up after themselves enough that it's hard to tell that they were there, after the fact. (Slammer didn't do p2p, but it left no trace on the hard disk, other than that the vulnerable SQL server it infected is still there.)USGS reply
The USGS release seems to be dammage control. I lack the skills to understand if the new rules are a reasonable way to manage an agency full of scientists (Although it is clear that at least one scientist doesn't like them.)
I think the intention was to present it in an eye-catching (graphical) format that tried to borrow some credibility (maybe even authority) from a familliar tool which has symbolic value. I agree that it was mocking; I think we disagree about who the elite that need mocking are. Yay, since you try to turn this into a political issue, now you set the scene for the political indoctrinated biases to work their way. The republicans now can just go home and ignore the whole report, because, obviously, they are against republicans so they must be democrats.
The way I see things is that the organization presented their findings now, because they noticed a huge drop of respect for science since the previous administrations. That's only a rep. vs dem. issue if you let it be one.
I think its clear that this site gives that impression. I'm suggesting that it is designed to do so -- a political organization wants to stop Bush from pushing his agenda, finds some scientists to give some stories about government-related badness. You seem to be suggesting that either this is not a political group, or that its politics don't matter in its findings.
How can we know which of us is right?
This description of yours fits into the "it was written by DEMS, don't listen!!!!111" conclusion you seem to be advocating.Good excuses for not listening to a bunch of Nobel laureates. Especially since because only about 7% of them believe in any personal god at all, so they must be stupid atheist too, right? What do they know?!
If Nobel laureates never had their names on politically-driven documents, then there would be no excuse to ignore them. The opposite of ignoring the article might be to figure out whats wrong with it, so someone can do better; or it might be to do something about the problem that it brings up.
"What to do about it" is very importaint, and I don't think TFA ever got to it, other than 'Blame Bush' and 'Sign here, if you're a scientist.' And this is exactly my problem with weasel-worded accusations like this. There's no way to counter them if any of them are false or exaggerated. The article is no help in fixing the problem if it is real. Presumeably we'd like for Bush (or someone) to read something like this and say, "Science is being interfered with!? Not on my watch! I will fix this, at once!" But this article is no help in finding the interference (ie, knowing who to fire), or, because of its bias, even in judging how widespread it is.
I don't doubt that there's politics in science; But TFA is itself a political doument, trying to pose as a consensus of scientists.
It's probably too late for your "upcoming" interview, but if you donate some code to the odd open source project here or there, then you have something you can be proud of -- especially if the prospective employer uses the stuff you helped to write.) Many projects list names of contributors in a "credits" or "release notes" file, which gives you a way to show that the code is yours -- instead of stolen from someone else.
Obious answer: Yes.
Non-obvious question: How much should the tax be?
To be "fair" it should be about as much as the "real" cost to the public for using that much carbon. The UK study a few weeks ago (sorry; I'm too lazy to look it up right now) was the first I've seen that tried to put a dollar value on how much carbon emissions cost. I did some napkin-back calculations and came up with about $.75/gallon of gas.
(Am I way off here? You could argue the data (and/or my math) a little either way, but I'm thinking that's a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate.)
I'm thinking that would be an additional 25% cost added to gasoline and simular fuels. I'm thinking this would have a serious short-term ecconomic impact. (Maybe smooth that out by phasing the tax in $0.10 a year over 8 years?)
Another problem is that people are going to be (reasonably) reluctant to throw away their brand-new SUVs as soon as this tax is passed. Nor are they going to abandon their home just because it is fifteen miles away from their workplace. People are making decisions NOW that will have effects for many years. (And, if gas prices jump by $.75, then used SUVs and far-out houses aren't going to sell very well.) (How much energy does it take to make a car, anyway?)
I think other posters have commented that energy taxes are regressive on the theory that poor people can't afford efficient devices (cars, appliances, etc.) In times of shortages, rationing often seems more "fair." But if carbon credits can be traded for money, then they might as well just use money. And if not, then it means that a whole second ecconomy has to be created and regulated.
For example, if a company wants to send someone to another city for a conference, who's carbon credits are used to pay for the jet fuel? The airline gets to choose which plane to fly. The sending company decides to send their employee. Hopefully the employee doesn't have to use personal credits? But the employee is the only natural person in the exchange! Where do the corporations (airline or sender) get their credits? From customers? From investors? Or do you get to manufacture credits just by incorporating?
I think this is problematic from a lot of angles. This is why politicians cook up very complex laws -- to try to cover as many edge and corner cases as they (and their lobyists!) can think of.
I like sendmail. (I think there's at least three of us left.)