better yet use a splitting mirror like the one at the supermarket checkout to scan all four/eight/sixteen orientations at once. Save on looks and printing costs. If the scanner wobbled as well you could get away with a simple mirror.
alt just spin the mirror. This is old and well developed retail tech. I'm sure they've figured this out already.
There you go again trying to argue logic in a forum* within which it is not regarded as a strong defense. Common problem, often frustratingly hard for the logically minded to come to terms with. Understand that perception is more important than logic and reality is as observed in political debate. Of course in its detatched ignorarance the planet will ignore all that, but then you just have to redifine reality again and the pesky problems once again go away.
* ie head-in-the-sands, not/.
Solution: ?
Escalading transport costs help send the message I guess. But I'm glad I'm not a Polar Bear..
> The people in New Zealand have hardly ever seen a penguin in their life.
Umm, I live in one of the biggest cities in NZ and we have them a 10 minute drive down the beach from here.
> So replace that Tux with a friendly looking Kiwi bird and you'll get much more attention from the people there.
The vast majority of NZ's native fauna (save a few dinasour age reptiles and a single spicies of bat) is made up of different kinds of birds. In the lack of other creatures they adapted to fit almost all niches. The kiwi is the best known internationally, but the country is equally obsessed with all sorts of odd birds.
Less waste and streamlined procedures both helps the Earth and the bottom line.
"Efficiency is the only thing that is 100% efficient" as they* say, and thus you get your best returns from working that aspect. [*] They being the laws of thermodynamics:)
In most cases it makes economic sense to e.g. save money on power costs. The stock holders may not care (as much) about the positive environmental side effects, but who cares about motivations if the result is good.
Interestingly, Big Oil and other "polluters" often have the most low hanging fruit to pluck here, and stand to benefit the most from cleaning up their act (internally). e.g. BP and Shell have both made great strides and are more healthy in a overhead costs and liability sense today than e.g Mobil/Exxon.
What is working against this is head-in-the-sand & it's-less-career-risky-to-do-nothing corporate mentalities. The solution is CEOs with foresight and balls (what they are hired for really) and gov't regulations to give them a kick in the pants to get moving. As long as there is enough lead time and all players are on a somewhat level playing field (why Kyoto needs the US to work as well as it could), it's not a competitive burden within an industry. The buggy whip manufactures get upset sure, but the world moves on.
You don't like gov't regulations as you think they just slow down the efficiency of the market? Well, selling babies on EBay is illegal even though it might be a more efficient form of connecting mothers to adoptive parents. Tough.
the sea surface temperature in the mid-atlantic is now 1 deg F higher on average than it has ever been since we started measuring it.
Topical Storms derive their energy from the surface waters.
This means that more energy is now available to the storms and any given storm is likely to be larger. Just like a fire, more fuel doesn't always mean a bigger burn, but it lifts a limiting factor.
Now even if you take the number of tropical disturbances in any given year to be constant over time, both the frequency and intensity of hurricanes will increase given higher SST. The frequency increases because what we call a hurricane (64kt sustained) is an arbitrary threshold and if each tropical storm is say 5% more intense, then for any given year more tropical storms will graduate into the "hurricane" class.
This increase in sea surface temperature combined with the fact that sea level on the US east coast has been rising by one foot per century since the end of the last glaciation, due to tectonic tilting of the continental plate, in themselves mean that we are much more vulnerable to catastrophic storm surge events. They don't just have to happen at high-tide anymore, +/-2 hrs from high-tide might do the same damage, and smaller storms (say cat-3) might do the same damage as a historical major storm (say cat-5).
That is already extant hard data, as is the worldwide retreat of land based glaciers and ice caps. (Kilimanjaro's snow cap will be gone for the first time in 11,000 years. The Larsen-B ice shelf which is just as old is now gone too..) This has already happened. Can't argue with that. Less surface ice means a change in the Earth's albedo and further warming at high latitudes. Hard to argue with that one to.
Now if you buy the greenhouse gas / climate change scenario that the vast majority of climatologists are so worried about* (or if you are not so self-delusional to at least consider the precautionary principal) you might want to add future sea level rise into that equation. The models say that in the next 100 years the sea level rise due to the melted ice-water and thermal expansion of a warmer ocean will be between 0.1 and 0.9 meters. So say 1/2 a meter or 1.5 foot on top on the historic rise. Also consider that the gradient on the east coast is about 1 in 30, so a 2.5' rise means the sea now goes 75 foot further inland. Also consider that about 50% of Florida is something like less than 15 feet above sea level and that hurricane storm surges are often on the order of 14 feet above SL.
I won't even mention western boundary currents affecting the sea level or the methyl hydrate doomsday scenario (if the deep ocean gets up to 4deg C, an exothermic reaction will take place and we're all fuct)
Hardware:
Get a Garmin handheld GPS with a 12v adaptor & download cable, and probably a crate of AA batts. Stick with consumer stuff. Buying a spare or 3 is cheaper than buying a Trimble survey grade and they all work well enough.
Import and crop with GRASS GIS (r.in.srtm and v.in.ogr modules) and either use with QGIS directly or export into a secondary more popular format for use with other software.
GPS interface programs should work on a Mac, GPStrans is command line only so with some hacking and GPSbabel is well maintained so there should be a Mac port by now.
I hate to tell you this, but straightdope ain't The One Truth. It's very often wrong. Sorry.
In this case, the "rebuttal" piece by Liebowitz and Margolis is actually a slightly bizarre triumph of the free market propaganda essay. Needless to say, it's a load of garbage and the value Dvorak is not at all debunked by it. The definitive (objective) study is yet to be done.
There is quite a lot written on the subject back and forth, VHS winning out over BetaMax proving that the free market doesn't always result in the most efficient solution is the usual example of the economic theory that these guys don't believe in.
Google deeper than straightdope. This one's a strange and twisting path.
In my estimation, learning Dvorak makes you do some mental retraining, which is good for your brain. Just like doing everyday tasks with your non-dominant hand, it's is good thing to do to keep your mind active when you're not a kid anymore and your mind stops learning as it once did. So if only for that, Dvorak is worth it.
You can set up Gnome to have the caps-lock key switch between the two key maps. Because you are touch typing, ie without looking at the keyboard, there is no need to buy anything new.
If we do nothing and the environmentalists turn out to be right, we're screwed.
You are making an important mistake here. It isn't the environmentalist* crowd which are primarily espousing the greenhouse gas - global climate change connection. It is scientists doing so**, and there is infact general consensus on the matter. As opposed to the squeaky wheel climate change deniers, the scientists have hard data, the laws of physics and chemistry, the best predictive computer models, and decades of study on the subject to back them up. The deniers only have self interest and the entrenched status quo on their side.
[*] often code for the tree hugging hippie dope fiend ad hominem attack.
[**] Read this joint press release from the Academy of Sciences of eleven nations from a few weeks ago:
[I am writing this from Dunedin in southern New Zealand (lat ~46) -- "The Riviera of the Antarctic" and have a degree in atmospheric physics ta boot]
No, it isn't the ozone hole. Or at least that is only a tiny part of it. Patagonia gets hit with the outer reaches of the hole sometimes, but southern New Zealand might only experience it a few days a year.
The thing is that the southern hemisphere is mostly water. i.e. there's nothing upwind of us except for us. In Boston you have a continent of cars, industry, and Los Angeles upwind & that haze does a pretty good job of intercepting the incoming rays. The amount of pollution we produce here is pretty embarrassing, but it all blows off to sea so no one cares. But when the air is clear, the sun is more intense than you'll ever experience in the northern hemisphere. It's normal for it to be quite warm out when you are standing in the sun but as soon as you step into a shadow you need a jacket. Weird. The lack of haze also does funny things to the contrast as you look out over the landscape. Much more intense shadows, relief, etc.
Take a bunch of northern europeans adapted for low light, and stick 'em in the middle of the south pacific, give them a nice place to explore, and watch the skin cancer rates shoot up. No big shocker.
Regarding wind power. There was a fairly recent study that showed that there/may/ be some weather effects from very large windmill installations. Nothing concrete yet as far as predictions, but at least this one simulation showed a regional temperature increase due to windfarms.
That "recent study" was totally nuts. They packed wind towers tightly over the entire surface of Canada or something. Reality is wind farms only absorb a drop of piss in the ocean of the energy in the winds. The source (differential solar heating of the lower and higher latitudes) remains untouched even if you did tightly pack towers every 200 hundred feet over the entire surface of the 3rd biggest country in the world.
When a scientist says "may", they mean they think so but there is no statistical proof. Compounded by the absurdity of that study's assumptions, I tend to disregard the results.
To clear up some common misconceptions you listed:
* Wind: Dead birds, intermittency in many areas, large surface areas, noise
Dead bird thing is mostly a myth. You will kill a thousand times more birds of prey by putting in a highway & getting them hit while munching on roadkill. Radio towers and bridges are just as dangerous as wind tubines to birds.
see http://www.homepower.com/files/birds.pdf "Wind Generators and Birds: Power Politics?"
Large surface area: most wind farms are dual use, cows still munch the grass, only a small percent of land is lost to use, and that is mostly from access roads.
Noise: true for 1970's turbines. All new turbines are geared and rotate quite slowly. I've stood under one of the new 200' tall versions in 40mph winds.. you just hear a gentle swoosh. From a 1/4 mile away you don't hear it at all.
* Solar: Sigificant chemical wastes, large surface areas
just to note the really nasty galium arsenide solar cells are a tiny fraction (ie only NASA & similar use them). Most solar cells are made from recycled Si from the chipmaking process. That waste is already being made by computer chip makers; the solar cell manufacture process actually reduces existing industrial waste!
* Tidal: Beach erosion, corrosion of power units
Beach erosion? Please explain how dampening waves causes beach erosion? I just don't see it. Even if you unmix "tides" with "wind waves". Tide power is fairly hard to harness unless you live in an area of freak tidal range.
* Hydroelectric: Large loss of land, high greenhouse gas releases
The "high greenhouse gas releases" is a misleading arguement at best. Long and the short of it is that methane from anoxic lake sediment is not a net change to the carbon budget. Burning fossil fuels is. see this comment for a fuller justification: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144076 &cid=12073778
Stagnant water causes methane producing bacteria to grow at the bottom of the lake, thus producing large amounts of methane.
Yes, but it should be noted that net carbon flux is zero for this case. Methane is in fact about 15? times worse a greenhouse gas than CO2, but the methane bubbling out of the muddy bottom of a dam lake is carbon that is still "in play" in a geologic sense.
We call oil & coal "fossil fuels" because they are made up of carbon which has been taken "out of play" and bring them back into the active carbon budget. Hence the reason for making the fossil/non-fossil distinction in the first place.
So while methane bubbling out of lake beds isn't very nice, it doesn't contribute to the amount of carbon (and thus the CO2 equilibrium point) in the air. The amount of carbon "in play" already, i.e. in the top few feet of the soil and up into the atmosphere, stays the same.
Hydro lakes are still better than pumping new carbon into the system from fossil fuels. 5% worse is still 95% better and not a complete failure of hydro generation as is presented -- the new scientist article is a specious argument of fossil fuel apologists.
My point wasn't that the county residents couldn't write, that's just dumb; it was that it was paid for with a lot of your tax money, and resulted in a broken system with poor quality control [and now with the added bonus of commercials]. Funny for us (as this time it isn't our local politicos), sucks for you.
From an urban-planning geek's perspective, it's one of the coolest local sites I know of. But serving 300,000 a month with what I assume to be an intensive GIS application can't be cheap.
The equivalent ArcWeb system ain't cheap. Like several county employees' salaries uncheap.
I tried to look at their GIS site to see what they were using, and got this error: (Firefox on Debian/G/Linux)
http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/Error.aspx?type =b rowser "This site is best viewed when using Internet Explorer. Your using: Netscape5" [not proceeding]
.. I'm guessing they are not using Free software.
Bonus chuckle [non-county residents only]: Spot the apostrophe disaster in the error message.
Definitional evasion aside, so far CD "copy protection" is mostly about as effective as critics proclaim it to be: ptorrone writes "There has been a lot of talk about the copy protection on the new CD 'Contraband' from Velvet Revolver, but for us we didn't have any problems making MP3s for all our devices despite their efforts to stop us it seems. Here's our story..."
It doesn't matter that it is a joke. What matters to the record companies is that you have to take pro-active measures to defeat it (holding down the shift button included). That is the trigger for the anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA, and that is what they will be able to go after you for. Defeating the anti-circumvention device is a crime they can send you to jail for, as they can't get you for a free-use copy for your car mp3 player, and non-free-use copyright infringement isn't exactly up there with murder in the eyes of most judges/juries or the law.
I guess this means if you rip it with GRIP in Linux or with iTunes on the Mac, you're in the clear DMCA wise.....
Does anyone remember the economy in Texas when oil was a booming industry here? I do, and it was nice. Having jobs to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head...with enough left over to save up for the future or send your kids off to college, that sounds like freedom; and instead of keeping that here in America, we closed down entire towns and exported the jobs to the OPEC nations...the very nations that openly despise us.
The problem here is that Texas is pretty much pumped dry at this point (land reserves anyhow). Well past the point of diminishing returns anyway. Maybe if import costs go way up Texas oil will become viable again, but never again will it see boom times. See the June 2004 National Geographic cover story for some accessible background.
So here it is painfully obvious that just because we went to war, it wasn't to preserve our freedom here in America, but to empower the United Nations. In fact, not only did Desert Storm not have anything to do with our freedom but in all actuality was more so to enslave us than to free us (those employing the term "New World Order" have sought socialism (economic control) and world government (political control) over mankind. This was also the goal of Bush Sr. for our nation and for the world).
The "new world order" means making the world a safe place for US corporations to do business, and thus improve the lot of Americans. A strong & effective UN means that others can bear the financial and military burden for doing this endless & thankless job, instead of having to tax US citizens and corporates for the hastle every time a small-time dictator's ego goes supernova. Fnord.
it is very possible for someone to not support the war and not want to see any harm come to our troops.
e.g., the best way to keep troops healthy being not to stick them way out in the middle of nowhere in front of lots of AK47s and RPGs
vaccines and learns that more children die from taking the vaccines than the diseases they were meant to prevent... But in reality, he doesn't vaccinate his children because he does love them.
You are using a false-logic + a strawman arguement here (bonus points!). On a micro scale this is true, on a macro scale it is false. More children die if no-one is vaccinated than if everone is. The parents here are doing their kid a favor at the expense of everyone else. Classic tragedy of the commons. Strawman: you only tear down the OT "love your kids" arguement you arbitrarialy raised. Conversly, to protest as an individual makes the whole populace stronger; if everyone acts like sheep the republic faulters. You need a new analogy, sorry.
True, there are some left-wing nuts that... do not want to see us keep our freedom
Wha? like those left-wing nuts over at the ACLU wanting to give up our freedoms? Left-wing nuts are secretly behind the PATRIOT act? ??! I have no idea what you are talking about, and I think I am about as left wing as you are right. Not that that means much; my, and I suspect your, greatest wish right now is for the gov't to sit down and reread what the Constition actually says.
As for the Dixie Chicks, all one of them did is say to a foreign crowd that they were sorry for all of the political arrogance + heavy handedness their country was currently engaged in (pre-war). They then got a huge applause, which is what their primary business is. who cares?
Anyway, it was my understanding that this war was all about getting leverage over China by gaining control over her very-near-future energy needs...
Slashdot Mirror
There's a very nice reasearch piece on that at Homepower Magazine:
http://www.homepower.com/files/birds.pdf
long-and-short: Now-a-days it is mostly a myth.
better yet use a splitting mirror like the one at the supermarket checkout to scan all four/eight/sixteen orientations at once.
Save on looks and printing costs. If the scanner wobbled as well you could get away with a simple mirror.
alt just spin the mirror. This is old and well developed retail tech. I'm sure they've figured this out already.
There you go again trying to argue logic in a forum* within which it is not regarded as a strong defense. Common problem, often frustratingly hard for the logically minded to come to terms with. Understand that perception is more important than logic and reality is as observed in political debate. Of course in its detatched ignorarance the planet will ignore all that, but then you just have to redifine reality again and the pesky problems once again go away.
/.
* ie head-in-the-sands, not
Solution: ?
Escalading transport costs help send the message I guess.
But I'm glad I'm not a Polar Bear..
> The people in New Zealand have hardly ever seen a penguin in their life.
Umm, I live in one of the biggest cities in NZ and we have them a 10 minute drive down the beach from here.
> So replace that Tux with a friendly looking Kiwi bird and you'll get much more attention from the people there.
The vast majority of NZ's native fauna (save a few dinasour age reptiles and a single spicies of bat) is made up of different kinds of birds. In the lack of other creatures they adapted to fit almost all niches. The kiwi is the best known internationally, but the country is equally obsessed with all sorts of odd birds.
Less waste and streamlined procedures both helps the Earth and the bottom line.
:)
"Efficiency is the only thing that is 100% efficient" as they* say, and thus you get your best returns from working that aspect. [*] They being the laws of thermodynamics
In most cases it makes economic sense to e.g. save money on power costs. The stock holders may not care (as much) about the positive environmental side effects, but who cares about motivations if the result is good.
Interestingly, Big Oil and other "polluters" often have the most low hanging fruit to pluck here, and stand to benefit the most from cleaning up their act (internally). e.g. BP and Shell have both made great strides and are more healthy in a overhead costs and liability sense today than e.g Mobil/Exxon.
What is working against this is head-in-the-sand & it's-less-career-risky-to-do-nothing corporate mentalities. The solution is CEOs with foresight and balls (what they are hired for really) and gov't regulations to give them a kick in the pants to get moving. As long as there is enough lead time and all players are on a somewhat level playing field (why Kyoto needs the US to work as well as it could), it's not a competitive burden within an industry. The buggy whip manufactures get upset sure, but the world moves on.
You don't like gov't regulations as you think they just slow down the efficiency of the market? Well, selling babies on EBay is illegal even though it might be a more efficient form of connecting mothers to adoptive parents. Tough.
That's not quite true. You can't ski through a revolving door.
Look at the totals on that page. From 1851-2004 there were 3 category-5 storms to hit the US. As of today it looks like there will be 2 this year....
Simply put:
s f/web/climate0 2/1686
the sea surface temperature in the mid-atlantic is now 1 deg F higher on average than it has ever been since we started measuring it.
Topical Storms derive their energy from the surface waters.
This means that more energy is now available to the storms and any given storm is likely to be larger. Just like a fire, more fuel doesn't always mean a bigger burn, but it lifts a limiting factor.
Now even if you take the number of tropical disturbances in any given year to be constant over time, both the frequency and intensity of hurricanes will increase given higher SST. The frequency increases because what we call a hurricane (64kt sustained) is an arbitrary threshold and if each tropical storm is say 5% more intense, then for any given year more tropical storms will graduate into the "hurricane" class.
This increase in sea surface temperature combined with the fact that sea level on the US east coast has been rising by one foot per century since the end of the last glaciation, due to tectonic tilting of the continental plate, in themselves mean that we are much more vulnerable to catastrophic storm surge events. They don't just have to happen at high-tide anymore, +/-2 hrs from high-tide might do the same damage, and smaller storms (say cat-3) might do the same damage as a historical major storm (say cat-5).
That is already extant hard data, as is the worldwide retreat of land based glaciers and ice caps. (Kilimanjaro's snow cap will be gone for the first time in 11,000 years. The Larsen-B ice shelf which is just as old is now gone too..) This has already happened. Can't argue with that. Less surface ice means a change in the Earth's albedo and further warming at high latitudes. Hard to argue with that one to.
Now if you buy the greenhouse gas / climate change scenario that the vast majority of climatologists are so worried about* (or if you are not so self-delusional to at least consider the precautionary principal) you might want to add future sea level rise into that equation. The models say that in the next 100 years the sea level rise due to the melted ice-water and thermal expansion of a warmer ocean will be between 0.1 and 0.9 meters. So say 1/2 a meter or 1.5 foot on top on the historic rise. Also consider that the gradient on the east coast is about 1 in 30, so a 2.5' rise means the sea now goes 75 foot further inland. Also consider that about 50% of Florida is something like less than 15 feet above sea level and that hurricane storm surges are often on the order of 14 feet above SL.
+_____________
This is something to be worried about.
[*] http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
http://www4.nationalacademies.org/onpi/webextra.n
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
I won't even mention western boundary currents affecting the sea level or the methyl hydrate doomsday scenario (if the deep ocean gets up to 4deg C, an exothermic reaction will take place and we're all fuct)
Hardware:
3 .pdf
Get a Garmin handheld GPS with a 12v adaptor & download cable, and probably a crate of AA batts.
Stick with consumer stuff. Buying a spare or 3 is cheaper than buying a Trimble survey grade and they all work well enough.
GPS Software:
Download GPStrans &/or GPSbabel.
http://gpstrans.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gpsbabel.org/
You can load the GPS waypoints/track/routes into a mapping format with GRASS GIS's v.in.garmin or gpsbabel+anything.
Mapping software:
Use QGIS. http://qgis.org/
Use GPS plugin.
Data:
Start by downloading SRTM elevation data and VMAP0 digital chart of the world data. Best there will be publicly available for Africa.
Instructions for converting into a usable format here:
http://grass.ibiblio.org/newsletter/GRASSNews_vol
Import and crop with GRASS GIS (r.in.srtm and v.in.ogr modules) and either use with QGIS directly or export into a secondary more popular format for use with other software.
GRASS works well on a Mac. http://grass.ibiblio.org/
GPS interface programs should work on a Mac, GPStrans is command line only so with some hacking and GPSbabel is well maintained so there should be a Mac port by now.
SRTM: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
VMAP0: http://www.mapability.com/info/vmap0_index.html
I hate to tell you this, but straightdope ain't The One Truth. It's very often wrong. Sorry.
In this case, the "rebuttal" piece by Liebowitz and Margolis is actually a slightly bizarre triumph of the free market propaganda essay. Needless to say, it's a load of garbage and the value Dvorak is not at all debunked by it. The definitive (objective) study is yet to be done.
There is quite a lot written on the subject back and forth, VHS winning out over BetaMax proving that the free market doesn't always result in the most efficient solution is the usual example of the economic theory that these guys don't believe in.
Google deeper than straightdope. This one's a strange and twisting path.
In my estimation, learning Dvorak makes you do some mental retraining, which is good for your brain. Just like doing everyday tasks with your non-dominant hand, it's is good thing to do to keep your mind active when you're not a kid anymore and your mind stops learning as it once did. So if only for that, Dvorak is worth it.
You can set up Gnome to have the caps-lock key switch between the two key maps. Because you are touch typing, ie without looking at the keyboard, there is no need to buy anything new.
You are making an important mistake here. It isn't the environmentalist* crowd which are primarily espousing the greenhouse gas - global climate change connection. It is scientists doing so**, and there is infact general consensus on the matter. As opposed to the squeaky wheel climate change deniers, the scientists have hard data, the laws of physics and chemistry, the best predictive computer models, and decades of study on the subject to back them up. The deniers only have self interest and the entrenched status quo on their side.
[*] often code for the tree hugging hippie dope fiend ad hominem attack.
[**] Read this joint press release from the Academy of Sciences of eleven nations from a few weeks ago:
[HTML]
http://www.mindfully.org/Air/2005/Joint-Science-A
[PDF]
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
[I am writing this from Dunedin in southern New Zealand (lat ~46) -- "The Riviera of the Antarctic" and have a degree in atmospheric physics ta boot]
No, it isn't the ozone hole. Or at least that is only a tiny part of it. Patagonia gets hit with the outer reaches of the hole sometimes, but southern New Zealand might only experience it a few days a year.
The thing is that the southern hemisphere is mostly water. i.e. there's nothing upwind of us except for us. In Boston you have a continent of cars, industry, and Los Angeles upwind & that haze does a pretty good job of intercepting the incoming rays. The amount of pollution we produce here is pretty embarrassing, but it all blows off to sea so no one cares. But when the air is clear, the sun is more intense than you'll ever experience in the northern hemisphere. It's normal for it to be quite warm out when you are standing in the sun but as soon as you step into a shadow you need a jacket. Weird. The lack of haze also does funny things to the contrast as you look out over the landscape. Much more intense shadows, relief, etc.
Take a bunch of northern europeans adapted for low light, and stick 'em in the middle of the south pacific, give them a nice place to explore, and watch the skin cancer rates shoot up. No big shocker.
Better yet, use the free & powerful open-source GRASS GIS to model rainfall patterns, so that you can predict where grass will grow.
Correlation does not predicate causality; just bad statistics.
How true.
That "recent study" was totally nuts. They packed wind towers tightly over the entire surface of Canada or something. Reality is wind farms only absorb a drop of piss in the ocean of the energy in the winds. The source (differential solar heating of the lower and higher latitudes) remains untouched even if you did tightly pack towers every 200 hundred feet over the entire surface of the 3rd biggest country in the world.
When a scientist says "may", they mean they think so but there is no statistical proof. Compounded by the absurdity of that study's assumptions, I tend to disregard the results.
To clear up some common misconceptions you listed:
6 &cid=12073778
* Wind: Dead birds, intermittency in many areas, large surface areas, noise
Dead bird thing is mostly a myth. You will kill a thousand times more birds of prey by putting in a highway & getting them hit while munching on roadkill. Radio towers and bridges are just as dangerous as wind tubines to birds.
see http://www.homepower.com/files/birds.pdf
"Wind Generators and Birds: Power Politics?"
Large surface area: most wind farms are dual use, cows still munch the grass, only a small percent of land is lost to use, and that is mostly from access roads.
Noise: true for 1970's turbines. All new turbines are geared and rotate quite slowly. I've stood under one of the new 200' tall versions in 40mph winds.. you just hear a gentle swoosh. From a 1/4 mile away you don't hear it at all.
* Solar: Sigificant chemical wastes, large surface areas
just to note the really nasty galium arsenide solar cells are a tiny fraction (ie only NASA & similar use them). Most solar cells are made from recycled Si from the chipmaking process. That waste is already being made by computer chip makers; the solar cell manufacture process actually reduces existing industrial waste!
* Tidal: Beach erosion, corrosion of power units
Beach erosion? Please explain how dampening waves causes beach erosion? I just don't see it. Even if you unmix "tides" with "wind waves". Tide power is fairly hard to harness unless you live in an area of freak tidal range.
* Hydroelectric: Large loss of land, high greenhouse gas releases
The "high greenhouse gas releases" is a misleading arguement at best. Long and the short of it is that methane from anoxic lake sediment is not a net change to the carbon budget. Burning fossil fuels is.
see this comment for a fuller justification: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14407
Yes, but it should be noted that net carbon flux is zero for this case. Methane is in fact about 15? times worse a greenhouse gas than CO2, but the methane bubbling out of the muddy bottom of a dam lake is carbon that is still "in play" in a geologic sense.
We call oil & coal "fossil fuels" because they are made up of carbon which has been taken "out of play" and bring them back into the active carbon budget. Hence the reason for making the fossil/non-fossil distinction in the first place.
So while methane bubbling out of lake beds isn't very nice, it doesn't contribute to the amount of carbon (and thus the CO2 equilibrium point) in the air. The amount of carbon "in play" already, i.e. in the top few feet of the soil and up into the atmosphere, stays the same.
Hydro lakes are still better than pumping new carbon into the system from fossil fuels. 5% worse is still 95% better and not a complete failure of hydro generation as is presented -- the new scientist article is a specious argument of
fossil fuel apologists.
-- your friendly neighborhood geophysicist.
That is the i18n of the GRASS GIS software.
http://grass.ibiblio.org/devel/i18n.php
The Secret Service has not yet learnt how to decode the untold mysteries of the
apparently.
try it with gpstrans (set interface protocol to Garmin/Garmin) or in NMEA mode with gpsd.
e rlios.de/
If it doesn't work with gpsd, email the mailing list and it'll probably be sorted in a day or two. they are pretty on to it.
http://gpstrans.sourceforge.net/
http://gpsd.b
gpsd: serve up realtime GPS data
s /html57_us er/v.in.garmin.html
http://gpsd.berlios.de
gpstrans: download/upload Garmin data
http://gpstrans.sourceforge.net
gpsbabel: up/download & convert GPS data
http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net
v.in.garmin + GRASS GIS 5.7: download GPS directly into serious mapping & analysis software
http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass57/manual
http://grass.ibiblio.org
have fun, don't get lost.
My point wasn't that the county residents couldn't write, that's just dumb; it was that it was paid for with a lot of your tax money, and resulted in a broken system with poor quality control [and now with the added bonus of commercials]. Funny for us (as this time it isn't our local politicos), sucks for you.
It can be Free (the software anyway).
UMN Mapserver
+ GRASS GIS
+ FreeGIS tools
The equivalent ArcWeb system ain't cheap. Like several county employees' salaries uncheap.
I tried to look at their GIS site to see what they were using, and got this error:
(Firefox on Debian/G/Linux)
http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/Error.aspx?typ
"This site is best viewed when using Internet Explorer.
Your using: Netscape5"
[not proceeding]
Bonus chuckle [non-county residents only]:
Spot the apostrophe disaster in the error message.
It doesn't matter that it is a joke. What matters to the record companies is that you have to take pro-active measures to defeat it (holding down the shift button included). That is the trigger for the anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA, and that is what they will be able to go after you for. Defeating the anti-circumvention device is a crime they can send you to jail for, as they can't get you for a free-use copy for your car mp3 player, and non-free-use copyright infringement isn't exactly up there with murder in the eyes of most judges/juries or the law.
I guess this means if you rip it with GRIP in Linux or with iTunes on the Mac, you're in the clear DMCA wise.....
The problem here is that Texas is pretty much pumped dry at this point (land reserves anyhow). Well past the point of diminishing returns anyway. Maybe if import costs go way up Texas oil will become viable again, but never again will it see boom times. See the June 2004 National Geographic cover story for some accessible background.
The "new world order" means making the world a safe place for US corporations to do business, and thus improve the lot of Americans. A strong & effective UN means that others can bear the financial and military burden for doing this endless & thankless job, instead of having to tax US citizens and corporates for the hastle every time a small-time dictator's ego goes supernova. Fnord.
e.g., the best way to keep troops healthy being not to stick them way out in the middle of nowhere in front of lots of AK47s and RPGs
You are using a false-logic + a strawman arguement here (bonus points!). On a micro scale this is true, on a macro scale it is false. More children die if no-one is vaccinated than if everone is. The parents here are doing their kid a favor at the expense of everyone else. Classic tragedy of the commons. Strawman: you only tear down the OT "love your kids" arguement you arbitrarialy raised.
Conversly, to protest as an individual makes the whole populace stronger; if everyone acts like sheep the republic faulters. You need a new analogy, sorry.
Wha? like those left-wing nuts over at the ACLU wanting to give up our freedoms? Left-wing nuts are secretly behind the PATRIOT act? ??! I have no idea what you are talking about, and I think I am about as left wing as you are right. Not that that means much; my, and I suspect your, greatest wish right now is for the gov't to sit down and reread what the Constition actually says.
As for the Dixie Chicks, all one of them did is say to a foreign crowd that they were sorry for all of the political arrogance + heavy handedness their country was currently engaged in (pre-war). They then got a huge applause, which is what their primary business is. who cares?
Anyway, it was my understanding that this war was all about getting leverage over China by gaining control over her very-near-future energy needs...