They don't actually have to raise taxes on petroleum. They just have to lower the subsidies. Then the US would be paying the same gas prices Europe and England pay (e.g., $6/gallon).
Allowing a write-off on new energy also helps.
I don't have exact numbers either. However, going by memory, no combustion engine can be more than ~33% efficient.
Now, the complaint against fuel cell efficiency is entirely directed against PEM fuel cells. There are fuel cells which are in the order of 80% efficient, with the more common ones around 60% efficient. However, these high efficiency fuel cells either operate at extremely high temperatures (4000K) or rely on toxic catalysts. The PEM fuel cell is the "breakthrough" technology for consumer fuel cells, as they operate at room temperature range, and rely on no toxic chemicals for catalysts. However, PEM technology is new. The PEM kits you can buy are around 12% efficient. PEM blocks have been constructed that are ~33% efficient, but they're ungodly expensive right now. The majority of PEM being used and proposed right now are about 25% efficient. In theory, 40% efficiency should be easy to achieve soon. In theory, 90% efficiency should be possible at a later date.
You absolutely MUST implement Dasher text input. There's all sorts of stuff on that site, including pre-compiled demos for most every desktop platform.
I have used Wikipedia for research projects at college. I use it as my starting point for any point of research. Then, I check out books or other periodicals to do detailed research. Later, if I have anything to correct or add to wikipedia (after I get my grade back:) I submit revisions. I've gotten some of my humanities teachers interested in wikipedia.
What I think you're missing is how you need to cite wikipedia articles. You don't just cite the URL and the date you visited. You cite the date of the revision you're using. Wikipedia gives you the complete page history--every revision--since creation. You need to cite the date and TIME of the revision you're referencing. If you've got a problem with people writing their own citations, then restrict the currency of the page they can cite to before the assignment.
The point is, you'd also fail someone for only using a single source. Wikipedia is a great source, and an awesome place to start for most topics. It is not, as you say, 100% reliable, like all sources. I'd fail someone for only using a single source too.
Also, the probable validity of citing Wikipedia declines as you reach more esoteric topics. This is true of all secondary sources. You need mutliple sources, and you can't just use secondary sources. Wikipedia is a secondary source. Most of its flaws stem from the fact that early articles are often based on secondary sources instead of primary sources.
This is, however, a correctable flaw, which is constantly being corrected.
Do me and the gaming world a favor and write them a dirty letter. Forward it to all the relevant "departments" on their "Contact Us" pages, including the Corporate Communication person, Susan whatever.
I wrote them a very critical letter, explaining that I was no longer purchasing games from them, and it was a very difficult decision because they have a contract with one of my favorite developers: Bioware. I spelled out the idiocy, referenced articles, and explained in clear language why they are utterly wrong and causing every problem they think they're trying to solve.
I suggest you do similar. One letter is supposedly representative of 40,000. They might just shrug mine off. They might not shrug two off. They won't shrug a dozen off.
Oh, I recommend, if you agree, mentioning that they're being scammed by "copy protection" software companies.
Personally, I find XHTML to be a spiffy markup language just to write web pages in, all XML-like. It's almost trivial to translate (via XSL) XHTML 2.0 to XHTML 1.1 Strict, and that's only a slight nudge (renaming two attributes) to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
There are some things you have to make choices about translating, where a little per-site detailing with classes can help. For example, you can write easily see how to translate: <h src="logo.jpg">My Site</h> to: <h1><img src="logo.jpg" alt="My Site"/></h1> but what do you do for something like: <p src="MapToMyHouse.svg"><span src="MapToMyHouse.png"><span src="MapToMyHouse.gif">Take a left from the second stop light on main street, right on centerfield road, left on abbey drive.</span></span></span></p> Hmm? Ostensibly, you could use nested <object> tags, but this only really works in Mozilla at the moment. IE completely barfs on valid <object> tags, and double barfs on nested <object> tags, or <img> in <object>. A better solution is to not write like that in the first place, and use content negotiation. But, this requires server pre-configuration which might not always be an option. In the case of content negotiation, you'd write: <p src="MapToMyHouse">Blah blah blah blah</p> which would be translated to: <img class="block" src="MapToMyHouse" alt="Blah blah blah blah"/>
Anyhow, those are just problems you run into if you fully exploit the options available to you in XHTML 2.0. Otherwise, it's just a much cleaner and easier way to write the web pages you've been writing, and the documents can be easily translated to XHTML 1.x. I really really love the embedding and hypertext attributes being part of every element, and the <h> and <section> elements to use instead of <h1>-><h6> (although those are still there:( )
Something I learned a while ago is that sometimes when companies merge, they don't merge the way they do on paper. Sometimes, for tax or legal reasons, (and when it's not a hostile take over, kay?) it's better if the superior company is purchased by the inferior company. So, KBR purchases Halliburton, and Caldera purchases SCO. In reality, Halliburton is maintaining its internal structure and KBR is being absorbed; SCO is maintaining its internal structure, and Caldera is absorbed.
I don't think you want my full personal history. They deserve very little.
They have the credit of allowing me free exploration, but they were barely there, and did not provide context. My mother, in fact, was very damaging to my academic career, my emotional development, and social development. I've been able to enact some restitution by neglecting her presence in my life. I occasionally have to put up with some discouragement and "get it over with" advice when she hears about my good grades or desire to attend MIT, but her diminished effect on my personality has been very healthy for me.
I attribute much of my positive development to my sister, NOVA (on PBS), and stubborn hard-headedness. However, that's physical attention and intellectual interest. I've always been empathic.
Censoring children is the indecency argument, abstracted by a generation or two. If you "protect the children" from all the things you don't want anyone to see, with a strong repetitive message about the badness of sneaking a peak of whatever it is, the theory is that most people will grow up not wanting to see it. More likely, they will grow up with an involuntary emotional knee-jerk to the thought of exposure to any of the "bad" things, and actively endorse suppression of such "bad" material. For the children.
I suppose the desire is to have a self-moralizing population, so that as much as society as possible is on auto-pilot on the proper moral course. There are problems with this desire. The first is the emotional and religious nature, or at least the description, of the problems. This prevents objective analysis of effects of content exposure. (Boobs:= Bad.) It also leads to indiscriminate classification, which just means indiscriminate action or inaction regarding content.
Now, there's a lot of research that says that an imbalanced exposure to certain kinds of stimulus, violence for instance, leads to unstable behavior. I've never seen anything concrete that says exposure to such content corrupts; just the natural assessment that too much of anything is a bad thing.
Anyhow, getting back to my original point, the purpose of efforts like this is to form the mental and emotional structure of the generation which will win the battle for morality and indecency. It's not a conspiracy. It's just an emotional desire by a lot of people who've already had such an upbringing, who want to extend it, and have found an outlet for that desire. I consider it insidiously damaging to an enlightened, scientific, [classical] liberal, OR scientific nation, as all four of which the ".us" was founded. That is, the effects are insidious, not the desire or the intentions of those wishing for this.
Personally, I've found that I have a sort of natural morality built into my consciousness. I think it's empathy. It guides my every emotion. Pain, exploitation, deceit, humiliation, they all repel me, probably as I've experienced some very minute facet of them in my life, and I can very clearly read the same feelings in others as if they were my own. I don't hate myself, don't wish to experience that, so I don't wish it on others, so some 9/10ths of all pornography turns me off or does nothing for me. I find empathy, along with reason, to be God's natural gifts to humanity to use to determine morality. Perhaps we took them from the Tree of Knowledge. Either way, I know what's right and wrong, and I've learned to see it in the world through my free exposure to information from an early age. Along with liberty and contextual guidance, a good good prescription of physical touch and affection should give you the greatest and brightest sorts of youth.
This will probably get burried. From reading the slip, it appears the Supreme Court didn't get to see the video of the arrest that most of us saw.
It appears he refused to identify himself only because he thought his name was none of the officer's business. While the Court recognizes his strong belief that he should not have to disclose his identity, the Fifth Amendment does not override the Nevada Legislature's judgment to the contrary absent a reasonable belief that the disclosure would tend to incriminate him.
The court appears to be saying that this thing is up to Nevada's Legislature entirely. This judgment could be corrected in the Nevada Legislature, at least for Nevada. However, because this Supreme Court made this ruling, similar corrections need to be made to laws in all fifty states.
Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances.
So it might be incriminating, so we should just arrest them anyway? But they'd be wrong to arrest in that case? So, according to the supreme court's ruling, you could press charges for being forced to incriminate yourself by revealing your identity. After-the-fact-justice. Give the government a chance to get you somewhere where Haebius Corpus doesn't apply... god that's a frightening thought that such a place exists within US influence.
I've done almost exactly the same thing, only with (it looks like) three to four times as many drops. Large house, did at least two drops per room, also two cat5e and two RG-6.
Trouble is, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to wire phones properly over one of the two cat5e lines. I'd really like to have them terminated in a 48-port patch panel I have, so I can just run around and swap the terminator key jacks on the outlets when I want to go RJ45 everywhere.
So, it looks like this: Top row (24 ports) of the patch panel terminate on RJ-11 jacks on the other end. The bottom row (24 ports) terminate on RJ-11 jacks in the same outlets.
Any advice on what to get to finish this? I've got one Cat5e cable coming into that room, which is the main line[s], and I want all the phone lines to connect to that.
Any advice on the RG-6 would also be dandy. Preferably something that can cope with DirectTV
If they integrated Dasher for an input method (and that control pad is as analog as it looks), this could be hacked into a very respectable PDA. Hell, you could have a decent CLI if you could use Dasher there.
I'd rather iRiver didn't even attempt to make a PDA out of it though. Every PDA/media-player combo attempt I've seen, even the iPaq and half-hearted attempts of the Sony Clie, have been horrible horrible miscarriages. I'd rather they pick up the PDA option later if some people develop something nice after market.
However, Dasher would still be great for inputting metadata.
I realize this is a mental epidemic, and I probably won't cure it here.:P
Liberalism and socialism have next to nothing to do with each other. You'd get very very oddly looks for suggesting it in most countries. You use "liberal" and "social" interchangable. Why? Because the Socialists, if they want ANY political voice at all, have to join one of the two parties.
Just like the economic fascist policy folk had to join the respectable Republicans to have any voice at all.
At the heart of it, we've got liberals in the Democratic party stuck with socialists, and we've got liberals (aka conservatives) in the Republican party stuck with fascists. The love-child of this perverse union is that Republicans tend to emphasis individualist policies and Democrats tend to emphasis common-infrastructure initiatives, and both of their efforts are utterly destroyed by their respective leeches.
I think if we broke the two-party system (Duverger's Law; abandon the Plurality voting system [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law ]), the parties could naturally divide and we could re-unite the classicaly-defined liberal party. Pipe dream, maybe. Ideally, political parties should be banned, but that's a longer post.
Personally, I love remapping ctrl to the capslock space. I have two USB keyboards with CTRL just under TAB. I love it.
However, the keyboard should probably be entirely rethought. Control? Shift? Alt? I've kind of fallen in love with the Apple keyboard's Option, Command, Control and Shift. Now I can type en dashes, em dashes, ligerature, greater/less than equals to, both right and left double and single quotes, and quote braces. This is all stuff that you should be able to do on a standard keyboard without contrievances. Yet, I can still realize the Mac keyboard is suboptimal. It's an improvement, but it could be so much more.
However, it'd just be dandy if we replaced the standard PC keyboard with the Mac Keyboard (with all 15 function keys!), and replaced the capslock with either Command (place-of-interest glyph) or Control.
How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that
doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API?
You contradict yourself later. MacOS X does not have an application installation/uninstallation API. The closest thing they have is their extremely horrible setup script thingy which is for installing programs that have to put things places like/Library/ and/System/. Even that is completely divorced from MacOS X itself, which they just encourage you to use for messy bundles.
Personally, I like the idea of application bundles. However, do not confuse them with anything resembling an API. I think they are also somewhat incompatible with GNOME, although they could be used for a layer on top of GNOME.
That would require setting aside this childish "Linux has to do every single thing that every single person on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues the community.
As opposed to that childish "Windows has to do everything that anyone or any company on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues Microsoft?
I think you're completely missing the point of what's going on in Libre-Desktop Land. GNOME isn't a monstrous application which does everything everyone could want, whose responsibility is the administration of a software system. The current focus is on the model. Gnome can't do all these marvelous things. Gnome can enable all these marvelous things, and then someone goes out and writes a 500 line program to demonstrate it.
Observe the focus on freedesktop.org. They're working on making the design of GNOME communicate with D-BUS. The killer feature of Gnome 2.x is GCONF. They're working out the communications layers of the system. What you COULD do with Gnome is breathtaking at this point. What you COULD do with D-BUS in Gnome 2.8 will be even more so.
So, why can't you yet? Two reasons. First of all, there aren't quite as many developers as in the Windows world, simply due to relative scale. Secondly, the Gnome developers are thinking this through. I mean, they're really thinking this through. Here's an example:
Do you see a Clipboard Viewer yet? No. You won't. The Clipboard Viewer circa Windows 3.1 was a hack to give you access to a feature that hadn't been fully fleshed out. I had to use the clipboard viewer in Windows 3.1. It just didn't work completely right. Drag and drop was a joke, and a major feature of Windows 95 that turned into a gimick for demos of Office 95 that never really worked right, and were stripped out prior to shipping.
There have been very long and surprisingly interesting conversations about the idea of a clipboard, and exactly what it's supposed to accomplish, and what exactly it should do, and especially how. For example, if you copy some data from within an application, and close the application, what happens? What is the status of your copy?
Let me start with something else. Let's say you copy a bit of styled text, with bolds and underlines. Now, you want to paste it into an application that only understands plain text. Should you be denied? Quietly? Loudly? Gnome developers feel you shouldn't be. It's text. You should be able to paste it. The thing is, you can't just go duplicating any bit of data that happens to be selected as "copied". What happens is that when you paste, the application you copied things from has a list of data formats it can export some bit of data out as, and it tries to match the best choice with the application's acceptable list. If you paste that rich text into a hypothetical program that only accepts text/html, it could get converted to HTML 4.0 Transitional.
They're working things like this out. You don't see much of it on top of things. They're doing things like GStreamer, which isn't a program, but there's a program called GStreamer which uses GStreamer. They are, as you contradicted, working out standards. Where applicable, they're working with freedesktop.org to develop and impliment those standards. One day in the not too distant future, you'll probably see Apple, and then Microsoft, announcing support for the industry standard D-BUS Interface, or some such.
Universal fuel from a single hydrocarbon source is a historical economic fluke that's about to flunk.
Or rather, it's not really a fluke, because it's a bloody illusion. Petroleum doesn't make up 80% of our energy supply, but it's pretty close.
What I'm saying is that there won't be a single solution. Fuel cells will have their application in electrical needs. Bio-Diesel can make a wonderful suppliment to gasoline in pretty much every case, and bio-diesel can be made from a vast number of sources--and should be made from all of them.
Bio-diesel will be great at moving us towards energy indepence, which is something we need to bootstrap a hydrogen trading energy economy.
As for fuel-cells... the world is pretty much looking at them as the New Battery. And that's the way they should look at them. It's a wind-up energy process. You wind the energy spring up with electrolyzed water, and let it go by passing the resulting hydrogen through a fuel cell. They're clean, and fuel cells themselves are near 100% efficient. The only problem is the energy to crack hydrogen from whatever molecules. That's what renewable energy is for in a hydrogen economy. Generally, you can't shut off the cleanest sources, so when you produce more electricity than you need, you effectively bottle the energy in hydrogen tanks for later use.
Oil is pre-wound-up energy. But it's also full of useful chemicals that we use for things like anti-biotics, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. We need those chemicals, and probably shouldn't waste them because they make a big poof when burnt.
Listen. I think you're not intentionally trying to be a pessimist but I have to point this out to you.
None of these "alternative" solutions are complete solution. EVERY solution is a solution. Trying to wait until a complete replacement for our current economy to come along is like waiting for all the stop lights for 200 miles to turn green before we start our journey. We need to take steps, and there are a LOT of steps we can take. All together, maybe they won't be enough, but we'd transitioning from an absolute dependence on foreign oil to a luxury surplus. I call that good.
The more domestic energy we can get out of non-depletable sources, the better off we'll be for any eventuality. All that chicken fat is going to waste right now. Why not use it? We've got deserts radiating solar thermal energy. Why not collect the thermal energy? We have the mid-west, where the incesant wind blows constantly just a little too hard to be pleasant. Why not deploy wind farms over the same land as crop farms? We have farmers looking for crops to grow, because we import so much and pay them not to grow stuff. Why don't we grow soy, or even subsidize fruit farms to decrease transportation waste and as part of an effort to increase national health?
It's a lot of little things that will add up the solution. Every one is economical in the long run, and most are economical in the short. Every single one of them increases our economic national security. Every one of them gives us independence. Every one gives more power to individuals, as opposed to international corporations.
That plant you drive by is almost certainly the "Solar II" prototype.:D
Energy export another purpose of hydrogen. Oil is just as regional as these energy sources, if not more so. But there are a lot of options, and usually several solutions are available for any location. And, if local renewable energy sources can't meet the need, as local oil can rarely meet local need, hydrogen can be imported. This is currently an obstacle, as hydrogen is difficult to transport in high density.
Unlike oil, we're not dependent on (1) depletable and (2) fixed reservoirs for energy. Most places have at least one option to generate some energy. e.g., We could generate a great deal of energy from wind throughout the mid-west. Even Virginia has geothermal potential.
And there's more that can be done to offset fuel needs. Every place in the world can use shallow geothermal reservoirs to suppliment air conditioning.
Plus, nobody's saying we have to abandon IC fuel entirely. This is a supplimental process that can eventually replace IC fuels for most processes.
This is something the federal, state, and local governments can help expedite. The network effect needs to be stimulated.
I like your statements, but I think mis-understand the point of a hydrogen economy. In programming terms, it provides an abstraction layer so that a variety of backends can be used to provide energy input. Or, as I frequently hear as a criticism of hydrogen: "Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's an energy carrier, dumbass."
We use oil for two purposes: 1) It's an energy carrier pre-loaded with a great deal of stored energy thanks to heat, pressure, and time, and 2) it's an awesome supply of chemicals we've come to rely on. Hydrogen replaces the first role, and, as you say, the energy has to come from somewhere. It can come from a whole lot of somewheres.
Hydrogen isn't really important to the hydrogen economy. It's just chemically convenient. The point of the hydrogen economy is to derive energy from non-depletable sources to supply electrical needs, and to store excess energy as hydrogen, like a battery, or otherwise export hydrogen as an energy medium. We could export oil instead of hydrogen, but that's more of a pain in the ass to produce, and less efficient to use.
Candidate energy generation techologies include:
Solar Power Towers (thermal energy collection and steam generation): Commercially pioneered by Boeing. Easy to follow technical description of a small scale 10MW retrofitted prototype. Boeing's full-scale designs are 15-100+ MW per installation. They provide power throughout the night, and through inclimate weather.
Tidal Generators
Geothermal Energy
As a suppliment, photovoltaic cells can be used to generate electricity or even extract hydrogen through electrolysis with excess energy during peak hours. As many know, photovoltaics are relatively economically neutral--they don't produce more energy than they cost to produce over 10 years. Of course, photovolatic panels last as long as they aren't destroyed, and after five years continue to produce 60-80% of their initial voltage output until they are destroyed, which can easily be much much much longer than ten years.
Slashdot Mirror
MIT doesn't participate in the whole "with honors" degrees thing.
You protect your music and lyrics from intellectual theft by using copyright law--the way it was supposed to be used.
They don't actually have to raise taxes on petroleum. They just have to lower the subsidies. Then the US would be paying the same gas prices Europe and England pay (e.g., $6/gallon). Allowing a write-off on new energy also helps.
I don't have exact numbers either. However, going by memory, no combustion engine can be more than ~33% efficient.
Now, the complaint against fuel cell efficiency is entirely directed against PEM fuel cells. There are fuel cells which are in the order of 80% efficient, with the more common ones around 60% efficient. However, these high efficiency fuel cells either operate at extremely high temperatures (4000K) or rely on toxic catalysts. The PEM fuel cell is the "breakthrough" technology for consumer fuel cells, as they operate at room temperature range, and rely on no toxic chemicals for catalysts. However, PEM technology is new. The PEM kits you can buy are around 12% efficient. PEM blocks have been constructed that are ~33% efficient, but they're ungodly expensive right now. The majority of PEM being used and proposed right now are about 25% efficient. In theory, 40% efficiency should be easy to achieve soon. In theory, 90% efficiency should be possible at a later date.
You absolutely MUST implement Dasher text input. There's all sorts of stuff on that site, including pre-compiled demos for most every desktop platform.
(cur) (last) 19:25, 28 Jul 2004 Daelin m grammar cleanup
I have used Wikipedia for research projects at college. I use it as my starting point for any point of research. Then, I check out books or other periodicals to do detailed research. Later, if I have anything to correct or add to wikipedia (after I get my grade back :) I submit revisions. I've gotten some of my humanities teachers interested in wikipedia.
What I think you're missing is how you need to cite wikipedia articles. You don't just cite the URL and the date you visited. You cite the date of the revision you're using. Wikipedia gives you the complete page history--every revision--since creation. You need to cite the date and TIME of the revision you're referencing. If you've got a problem with people writing their own citations, then restrict the currency of the page they can cite to before the assignment.
The point is, you'd also fail someone for only using a single source. Wikipedia is a great source, and an awesome place to start for most topics. It is not, as you say, 100% reliable, like all sources. I'd fail someone for only using a single source too.
Also, the probable validity of citing Wikipedia declines as you reach more esoteric topics. This is true of all secondary sources. You need mutliple sources, and you can't just use secondary sources. Wikipedia is a secondary source. Most of its flaws stem from the fact that early articles are often based on secondary sources instead of primary sources.
This is, however, a correctable flaw, which is constantly being corrected.
Do me and the gaming world a favor and write them a dirty letter. Forward it to all the relevant "departments" on their "Contact Us" pages, including the Corporate Communication person, Susan whatever.
I wrote them a very critical letter, explaining that I was no longer purchasing games from them, and it was a very difficult decision because they have a contract with one of my favorite developers: Bioware. I spelled out the idiocy, referenced articles, and explained in clear language why they are utterly wrong and causing every problem they think they're trying to solve.
I suggest you do similar. One letter is supposedly representative of 40,000. They might just shrug mine off. They might not shrug two off. They won't shrug a dozen off.
Oh, I recommend, if you agree, mentioning that they're being scammed by "copy protection" software companies.
Personally, I find XHTML to be a spiffy markup language just to write web pages in, all XML-like. It's almost trivial to translate (via XSL) XHTML 2.0 to XHTML 1.1 Strict, and that's only a slight nudge (renaming two attributes) to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
, you could use nested <object> tags, but this only really works in Mozilla at the moment. IE completely barfs on valid <object> tags, and double barfs on nested <object> tags, or <img> in <object>. A better solution is to not write like that in the first place, and use content negotiation. But, this requires server pre-configuration which might not always be an option.
:( )
There are some things you have to make choices about translating, where a little per-site detailing with classes can help. For example, you can write easily see how to translate:
<h src="logo.jpg">My Site</h>
to:
<h1><img src="logo.jpg" alt="My Site"/></h1>
but what do you do for something like:
<p src="MapToMyHouse.svg"><span src="MapToMyHouse.png"><span src="MapToMyHouse.gif">Take a left from the second stop light on main street, right on centerfield road, left on abbey drive.</span></span></span></p>
Hmm?
Ostensibly
In the case of content negotiation, you'd write:
<p src="MapToMyHouse">Blah blah blah blah</p>
which would be translated to:
<img class="block" src="MapToMyHouse" alt="Blah blah blah blah"/>
Anyhow, those are just problems you run into if you fully exploit the options available to you in XHTML 2.0. Otherwise, it's just a much cleaner and easier way to write the web pages you've been writing, and the documents can be easily translated to XHTML 1.x. I really really love the embedding and hypertext attributes being part of every element, and the <h> and <section> elements to use instead of <h1>-><h6> (although those are still there
Something I learned a while ago is that sometimes when companies merge, they don't merge the way they do on paper. Sometimes, for tax or legal reasons, (and when it's not a hostile take over, kay?) it's better if the superior company is purchased by the inferior company. So, KBR purchases Halliburton, and Caldera purchases SCO. In reality, Halliburton is maintaining its internal structure and KBR is being absorbed; SCO is maintaining its internal structure, and Caldera is absorbed.
Mergers are funny that way.
I don't think you want my full personal history. They deserve very little.
They have the credit of allowing me free exploration, but they were barely there, and did not provide context. My mother, in fact, was very damaging to my academic career, my emotional development, and social development. I've been able to enact some restitution by neglecting her presence in my life. I occasionally have to put up with some discouragement and "get it over with" advice when she hears about my good grades or desire to attend MIT, but her diminished effect on my personality has been very healthy for me.
I attribute much of my positive development to my sister, NOVA (on PBS), and stubborn hard-headedness. However, that's physical attention and intellectual interest. I've always been empathic.
Censoring children is the indecency argument, abstracted by a generation or two. If you "protect the children" from all the things you don't want anyone to see, with a strong repetitive message about the badness of sneaking a peak of whatever it is, the theory is that most people will grow up not wanting to see it. More likely, they will grow up with an involuntary emotional knee-jerk to the thought of exposure to any of the "bad" things, and actively endorse suppression of such "bad" material. For the children.
:= Bad.) It also leads to indiscriminate classification, which just means indiscriminate action or inaction regarding content.
I suppose the desire is to have a self-moralizing population, so that as much as society as possible is on auto-pilot on the proper moral course. There are problems with this desire. The first is the emotional and religious nature, or at least the description, of the problems. This prevents objective analysis of effects of content exposure. (Boobs
Now, there's a lot of research that says that an imbalanced exposure to certain kinds of stimulus, violence for instance, leads to unstable behavior. I've never seen anything concrete that says exposure to such content corrupts; just the natural assessment that too much of anything is a bad thing.
Anyhow, getting back to my original point, the purpose of efforts like this is to form the mental and emotional structure of the generation which will win the battle for morality and indecency. It's not a conspiracy. It's just an emotional desire by a lot of people who've already had such an upbringing, who want to extend it, and have found an outlet for that desire. I consider it insidiously damaging to an enlightened, scientific, [classical] liberal, OR scientific nation, as all four of which the ".us" was founded. That is, the effects are insidious, not the desire or the intentions of those wishing for this.
Personally, I've found that I have a sort of natural morality built into my consciousness. I think it's empathy. It guides my every emotion. Pain, exploitation, deceit, humiliation, they all repel me, probably as I've experienced some very minute facet of them in my life, and I can very clearly read the same feelings in others as if they were my own. I don't hate myself, don't wish to experience that, so I don't wish it on others, so some 9/10ths of all pornography turns me off or does nothing for me. I find empathy, along with reason, to be God's natural gifts to humanity to use to determine morality. Perhaps we took them from the Tree of Knowledge. Either way, I know what's right and wrong, and I've learned to see it in the world through my free exposure to information from an early age. Along with liberty and contextual guidance, a good good prescription of physical touch and affection should give you the greatest and brightest sorts of youth.
This will probably get burried. From reading the slip, it appears the Supreme Court didn't get to see the video of the arrest that most of us saw.
The court appears to be saying that this thing is up to Nevada's Legislature entirely. This judgment could be corrected in the Nevada Legislature, at least for Nevada. However, because this Supreme Court made this ruling, similar corrections need to be made to laws in all fifty states.
So it might be incriminating, so we should just arrest them anyway? But they'd be wrong to arrest in that case? So, according to the supreme court's ruling, you could press charges for being forced to incriminate yourself by revealing your identity. After-the-fact-justice. Give the government a chance to get you somewhere where Haebius Corpus doesn't apply... god that's a frightening thought that such a place exists within US influence.
I've done almost exactly the same thing, only with (it looks like) three to four times as many drops. Large house, did at least two drops per room, also two cat5e and two RG-6.
Trouble is, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to wire phones properly over one of the two cat5e lines. I'd really like to have them terminated in a 48-port patch panel I have, so I can just run around and swap the terminator key jacks on the outlets when I want to go RJ45 everywhere.
So, it looks like this: Top row (24 ports) of the patch panel terminate on RJ-11 jacks on the other end. The bottom row (24 ports) terminate on RJ-11 jacks in the same outlets.
Any advice on what to get to finish this? I've got one Cat5e cable coming into that room, which is the main line[s], and I want all the phone lines to connect to that.
Any advice on the RG-6 would also be dandy. Preferably something that can cope with DirectTV
If they integrated Dasher for an input method (and that control pad is as analog as it looks), this could be hacked into a very respectable PDA. Hell, you could have a decent CLI if you could use Dasher there.
I'd rather iRiver didn't even attempt to make a PDA out of it though. Every PDA/media-player combo attempt I've seen, even the iPaq and half-hearted attempts of the Sony Clie, have been horrible horrible miscarriages. I'd rather they pick up the PDA option later if some people develop something nice after market.
However, Dasher would still be great for inputting metadata.
I realize this is a mental epidemic, and I probably won't cure it here. :P
Liberalism and socialism have next to nothing to do with each other. You'd get very very oddly looks for suggesting it in most countries. You use "liberal" and "social" interchangable. Why? Because the Socialists, if they want ANY political voice at all, have to join one of the two parties.
Just like the economic fascist policy folk had to join the respectable Republicans to have any voice at all.
At the heart of it, we've got liberals in the Democratic party stuck with socialists, and we've got liberals (aka conservatives) in the Republican party stuck with fascists. The love-child of this perverse union is that Republicans tend to emphasis individualist policies and Democrats tend to emphasis common-infrastructure initiatives, and both of their efforts are utterly destroyed by their respective leeches.
I think if we broke the two-party system (Duverger's Law; abandon the Plurality voting system [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law ]), the parties could naturally divide and we could re-unite the classicaly-defined liberal party. Pipe dream, maybe. Ideally, political parties should be banned, but that's a longer post.
Personally, I love remapping ctrl to the capslock space. I have two USB keyboards with CTRL just under TAB. I love it.
However, the keyboard should probably be entirely rethought. Control? Shift? Alt? I've kind of fallen in love with the Apple keyboard's Option, Command, Control and Shift. Now I can type en dashes, em dashes, ligerature, greater/less than equals to, both right and left double and single quotes, and quote braces. This is all stuff that you should be able to do on a standard keyboard without contrievances. Yet, I can still realize the Mac keyboard is suboptimal. It's an improvement, but it could be so much more.
However, it'd just be dandy if we replaced the standard PC keyboard with the Mac Keyboard (with all 15 function keys!), and replaced the capslock with either Command (place-of-interest glyph) or Control.
You contradict yourself later. MacOS X does not have an application installation/uninstallation API. The closest thing they have is their extremely horrible setup script thingy which is for installing programs that have to put things places like /Library/ and /System/. Even that is completely divorced from MacOS X itself, which they just encourage you to use for messy bundles.
Personally, I like the idea of application bundles. However, do not confuse them with anything resembling an API. I think they are also somewhat incompatible with GNOME, although they could be used for a layer on top of GNOME.
As opposed to that childish "Windows has to do everything that anyone or any company on the planet could want it to do, and then some" attitude that plagues Microsoft?
I think you're completely missing the point of what's going on in Libre-Desktop Land. GNOME isn't a monstrous application which does everything everyone could want, whose responsibility is the administration of a software system. The current focus is on the model. Gnome can't do all these marvelous things. Gnome can enable all these marvelous things, and then someone goes out and writes a 500 line program to demonstrate it.
Observe the focus on freedesktop.org. They're working on making the design of GNOME communicate with D-BUS. The killer feature of Gnome 2.x is GCONF. They're working out the communications layers of the system. What you COULD do with Gnome is breathtaking at this point. What you COULD do with D-BUS in Gnome 2.8 will be even more so.
So, why can't you yet? Two reasons. First of all, there aren't quite as many developers as in the Windows world, simply due to relative scale. Secondly, the Gnome developers are thinking this through. I mean, they're really thinking this through. Here's an example:
Do you see a Clipboard Viewer yet? No. You won't. The Clipboard Viewer circa Windows 3.1 was a hack to give you access to a feature that hadn't been fully fleshed out. I had to use the clipboard viewer in Windows 3.1. It just didn't work completely right. Drag and drop was a joke, and a major feature of Windows 95 that turned into a gimick for demos of Office 95 that never really worked right, and were stripped out prior to shipping.
There have been very long and surprisingly interesting conversations about the idea of a clipboard, and exactly what it's supposed to accomplish, and what exactly it should do, and especially how. For example, if you copy some data from within an application, and close the application, what happens? What is the status of your copy?
Let me start with something else. Let's say you copy a bit of styled text, with bolds and underlines. Now, you want to paste it into an application that only understands plain text. Should you be denied? Quietly? Loudly? Gnome developers feel you shouldn't be. It's text. You should be able to paste it. The thing is, you can't just go duplicating any bit of data that happens to be selected as "copied". What happens is that when you paste, the application you copied things from has a list of data formats it can export some bit of data out as, and it tries to match the best choice with the application's acceptable list. If you paste that rich text into a hypothetical program that only accepts text/html, it could get converted to HTML 4.0 Transitional.
They're working things like this out. You don't see much of it on top of things. They're doing things like GStreamer, which isn't a program, but there's a program called GStreamer which uses GStreamer. They are, as you contradicted, working out standards. Where applicable, they're working with freedesktop.org to develop and impliment those standards. One day in the not too distant future, you'll probably see Apple, and then Microsoft, announcing support for the industry standard D-BUS Interface, or some such.
You're right. All the stop lights aren't green yet. We should just stay right here until they are.
Universal fuel from a single hydrocarbon source is a historical economic fluke that's about to flunk.
Or rather, it's not really a fluke, because it's a bloody illusion. Petroleum doesn't make up 80% of our energy supply, but it's pretty close.
What I'm saying is that there won't be a single solution. Fuel cells will have their application in electrical needs. Bio-Diesel can make a wonderful suppliment to gasoline in pretty much every case, and bio-diesel can be made from a vast number of sources--and should be made from all of them.
Bio-diesel will be great at moving us towards energy indepence, which is something we need to bootstrap a hydrogen trading energy economy.
As for fuel-cells... the world is pretty much looking at them as the New Battery. And that's the way they should look at them. It's a wind-up energy process. You wind the energy spring up with electrolyzed water, and let it go by passing the resulting hydrogen through a fuel cell. They're clean, and fuel cells themselves are near 100% efficient. The only problem is the energy to crack hydrogen from whatever molecules. That's what renewable energy is for in a hydrogen economy. Generally, you can't shut off the cleanest sources, so when you produce more electricity than you need, you effectively bottle the energy in hydrogen tanks for later use.
Oil is pre-wound-up energy. But it's also full of useful chemicals that we use for things like anti-biotics, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. We need those chemicals, and probably shouldn't waste them because they make a big poof when burnt.
Listen. I think you're not intentionally trying to be a pessimist but I have to point this out to you.
None of these "alternative" solutions are complete solution. EVERY solution is a solution. Trying to wait until a complete replacement for our current economy to come along is like waiting for all the stop lights for 200 miles to turn green before we start our journey. We need to take steps, and there are a LOT of steps we can take. All together, maybe they won't be enough, but we'd transitioning from an absolute dependence on foreign oil to a luxury surplus. I call that good.
The more domestic energy we can get out of non-depletable sources, the better off we'll be for any eventuality. All that chicken fat is going to waste right now. Why not use it? We've got deserts radiating solar thermal energy. Why not collect the thermal energy? We have the mid-west, where the incesant wind blows constantly just a little too hard to be pleasant. Why not deploy wind farms over the same land as crop farms? We have farmers looking for crops to grow, because we import so much and pay them not to grow stuff. Why don't we grow soy, or even subsidize fruit farms to decrease transportation waste and as part of an effort to increase national health?
It's a lot of little things that will add up the solution. Every one is economical in the long run, and most are economical in the short. Every single one of them increases our economic national security. Every one of them gives us independence. Every one gives more power to individuals, as opposed to international corporations.
That plant you drive by is almost certainly the "Solar II" prototype. :D
Energy export another purpose of hydrogen. Oil is just as regional as these energy sources, if not more so. But there are a lot of options, and usually several solutions are available for any location. And, if local renewable energy sources can't meet the need, as local oil can rarely meet local need, hydrogen can be imported. This is currently an obstacle, as hydrogen is difficult to transport in high density.
Unlike oil, we're not dependent on (1) depletable and (2) fixed reservoirs for energy. Most places have at least one option to generate some energy. e.g., We could generate a great deal of energy from wind throughout the mid-west. Even Virginia has geothermal potential.
And there's more that can be done to offset fuel needs. Every place in the world can use shallow geothermal reservoirs to suppliment air conditioning.
Plus, nobody's saying we have to abandon IC fuel entirely. This is a supplimental process that can eventually replace IC fuels for most processes.
This is something the federal, state, and local governments can help expedite. The network effect needs to be stimulated.
I like your statements, but I think mis-understand the point of a hydrogen economy. In programming terms, it provides an abstraction layer so that a variety of backends can be used to provide energy input. Or, as I frequently hear as a criticism of hydrogen: "Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's an energy carrier, dumbass."
We use oil for two purposes: 1) It's an energy carrier pre-loaded with a great deal of stored energy thanks to heat, pressure, and time, and 2) it's an awesome supply of chemicals we've come to rely on. Hydrogen replaces the first role, and, as you say, the energy has to come from somewhere. It can come from a whole lot of somewheres.
Hydrogen isn't really important to the hydrogen economy. It's just chemically convenient. The point of the hydrogen economy is to derive energy from non-depletable sources to supply electrical needs, and to store excess energy as hydrogen, like a battery, or otherwise export hydrogen as an energy medium. We could export oil instead of hydrogen, but that's more of a pain in the ass to produce, and less efficient to use.
Candidate energy generation techologies include:
As a suppliment, photovoltaic cells can be used to generate electricity or even extract hydrogen through electrolysis with excess energy during peak hours. As many know, photovoltaics are relatively economically neutral--they don't produce more energy than they cost to produce over 10 years. Of course, photovolatic panels last as long as they aren't destroyed, and after five years continue to produce 60-80% of their initial voltage output until they are destroyed, which can easily be much much much longer than ten years.