I can only guesse you live in a rural setting. I am speaking of the majority of cases. The vast majority of people live in or near a city.
I live in Tampa, Florida. It's not a big city, but that *is* a city.
And what I said is true, traffic condition durring most of the day will eventually cause the lane jocky trying to do +20 (when most everyone else is doing +0 to +5) to get stuck in the right lane on most two lane highways, or in the case of one lane roads this idiot will crowd the 'slowpoke' ahead of him causing the 'slowpoke' to slow down to safer speeds.
Not where I live.
Not to mention the fact that stop lights are often close enough and stay red long enough to kill most if not all of any gain.
Well, first of all, you said there was no gain, not little gain. In fact, you seemed to imply there was actually a loss of time. Secondly, I was mainly talking about the highway. If you're just talking about a four lane road complete with traffic lights, then for the most part you're right. I used to be an ambulance driver, and even with the flashing lights and siren you still rarely go very fast when getting from place to place safely.
I've litterly been behind someone for 20 miles along one two lane state highway and watched him jocky back and forth to gain two car lengths by the time we reached the next red light, and do this repeatedly untill he got all of 6 or seven cars ahead of where he started, ten to twenty minutes ago.
It has been very rare that I've been on a highway with many traffic lights for 20 miles. If I'm going that far, I'm generally going to take a divided road without any traffic lights, or at least with very rare traffic lights.
It is more like running a splitter and a cable and stealing your neighbors cable TV.
Morally, I agree, it's the same thing. Legally, it's much different though, as the cable companies have convinced the government to pass laws protecting them, and cable television is usually copyrighted, whereas internet traffic may or may not be (and usually the receiver has permission to access that content).
Or running an extension cord to a backyard outlet and stealing power.
Using someone's power directly costs them money.
Or perhaps a cordless phone.
If you're just using local calls, and they don't pay for those local calls, then yes, this is probably the best analogy.
People accept that they have to pay for electricity, phone, but the internet should be free? why?
Phones should be free too. Like the Internet, and unlike electricity, they are a peer to peer based system.
Assuming normal traffic conditions, there is an optimal speed, above this and traffic conditions slow you down, below this and you slow yourself down.
You must live in LA, or consider rush hour traffic conditions to be normal. In normal traffic conditions where I live there is usually an open lane available to go pretty much as fast as you want. Obviously this is only true to some extent, and if you go 5000 mph you're going to die and never reach your destination, but the optimal speed to increase your expected time to arrive is generally much faster than that of the traffic around you.
Not to mention that to think one has the right to demand someone speed up past the lawfull limit or change lanes to get out of your way if not is the sign of an asshole.
I think I have the right to demand someone not use the left hand lane except for passing. What speed the person is going is irrelevant.
And according to you the person is already past the lawful limit. So demanding that they switch lanes is merely demanding that they revert to breaking one law instead of two.
Now, if I really understood what you said, USA and China should be entitled to equal pollution because they have equal area.
I think that's more fair than counting population and then going with a per capita figure. Especially since all but the most lunatic of alleged affects of global warming are based on property. If the earth heats up and the sealevel rises, most of my home state of Florida is going to be under water. I seriously doubt that large a proportion of China is going to be gone, and certainly not as large a proportion as comparing population would suggest.
Again with the same analogy, but phrased differently, if I damage my neighbors' car, should I pay five times as much if there are 5 people who use that car as if there is one?
Call that international communism if you like. I call it fair.
Maybe so, but it's not realistic. China and the US don't have a single government. To expect us to unify on one particular issue, such as the distribution of land, but not on any others, such as taxation, freedom, capitalism, etc., is not at all realistic.
Fairness should apply to individuals because individuals are not responsible for their ancestors' actions or their country's land area or administration.
I disagree, because even if you're going to call CO2 a pollutant, it's not a standard one, since CO2 is a necessary part of the earth's atmosphere. And in fact, roughly the same amount of CO2 is needed in the US as is needed in China. If the US suddenly cut its per capita production to match that of China it'd probably have more harmful effects than positive.
But even then, if you're going to apply the tax to individuals, then apply the tax to individuals, directly, not to countries. Make everyone pay $1 per ton of CO2 or whatever. And then take all the money and hire people to plant trees or do research or whatever. Get approval of the specifics by a vote based by people, not by countries. In other words, every person in the United States gets an equal vote to every person in the EU. Don't dillute the votes of the Americans just because the union our states formed happens to be a little bit stronger and older. The way the system is now it's rather blatant that it hasn't been designed to solve an actual problem, but to transfer wealth from one country to another.
Maybe I'm just confused about what you say. Yes, in order to get from one point to another as fast as you can you have to be smart. But 9 times out of 10, you have to speed as well.
I never said it can't be done. But it's not feasible for me to buy a computer with two double-width PCMCIA ports *plus* carry that computer around with me everywhere, just so I can access the Internet via Verizon's BroadbandAccess service. For a modem this is slightly more feasible, but for wireless Internet we're talking about spending hundreds of dollars on a firewall which would still be rather bulky to carry around everywhere.
Sounds like a software issue, not a hardware one. If your clock consistently needs to be adjusted by 0.31xxx seconds, then ntpd should be automatically adjusting by 0.31 seconds every 4 hours. ntpd will do this if it is run in daemon mode.
OK, the easiest way to secure Windows from most attacks is to be behind a physical firewall. But what can be done when that isn't feasible, for instance, when connecting through a modem, wifi, etc? I know there are commercial software firewalls out there, but is there anything available for free, say on Windows 2000?
Microsoft has $33.8 billion in short term investments. Since interest payments are calculated by the day, and not the second, at an interest rate of 3% Microsoft will lose $1929 in interest due to this leap second.
Actually you'd just set the NTP server you're syncing with one second ahead.
That simple solution will cause one of two problems: either your time will be off by one second, or the calculation of the number of seconds between two events crossing the leap second will be off by one second.
I don't think that a once-every-seven-year event is going to be worthy of kernel changes, especially since your time is probably off by more than one second as it is.
If you're regularly using NTPD your time is probably not off by more than one second, and if you've got a GPS receiver it almost certainly isn't. But I agree with you that a kernel change isn't necessary, in fact, the kernel shouldn't be involved with terrestial time at all.
From what I understand, at least some standard libraries do need to be changed because they do not correctly measure time intervals crossing leap second boundaries. But once that is resolved, making sure that your calculations and time displays are correct should be a simple matter of downloading a file containing all the historical leap seconds.
According to a link I just read, POSIX doesn't handle leap seconds. So yes, if you use NTP, like someone else suggested, your time will be correct, but any measurements of time crossing leap seconds won't.
The correct solution in my opinion would be to store leap seconds along with the timezone information. That's really what they are. Unix time could be stored in TAI instead of UTC, and thus subtracting two times from each other would still give the correct result.
Whenever a leap second was announced you'd have to download a new timezone file, and if you didn't download the file in time your displayed time would be off by a second. Alternatively, if you synced using NTP, which is in UTC, and you didn't update your timezone file, then your computer would incorrectly slow down the clock by one second. Once you installed the timezone file, and resynced with NTP, this would be corrected.
Eventually NTP should probably be switched over to TAI. I see a proposal for this in a mailing list in January 2004. Would have been nice to do it before the leap second, but that's probably too soon to expect many people to change at this point.
Seriously, you'd think they'd pick a less conspicuous second to make the switch. Instead they picked the one second of the year that people notice more than any other. At least it'll only affect the New Year's count for the Brits. Here in the US we won't even be heading to the party yet.
Repeat after me - "There is only one Earth, it's atmosphere and oceans do not recognise national borders, we are ALL in this together".
I agree we're all in this together, but that doesn't mean I advocate international communism. As I said in another post, the output of CO2 in China and the United States would be roughly equal ''even in the absense of mankind''. Whether you're "damaging the Earth" through overpopulation or through innovation and productivity shouldn't matter.
No, it's not at all just as true. If your employer mandates that you work certain hours, then you are by definition a non-exempt employee.
If you're exempt and don't work the hours your employer wants, you probably will be fired.
I'm not sure where you work, but that hasn't been true in any of the salaried jobs I've had. But more to the point, if you are fired for not working the hours your employer wants, then you're not exempt.
The parent poster should have said "mandatory UNPAID overtime", which is typical in software development shops. And "exempt" means that you are exempt from the wage/price laws which require payment for overtime.
It also means that you can't be forced to work a certain number of hours. If you are an exempt employee, then you are paid based on the job, not how many hours you work. IOW, there is no "mandatory overtime" for exempt employees.
And once those problems are solved, then you'll see resistance to the treaty go away.
The "second biggest procucer", China, has its per capita carbon emissions at one tenth of that of USA and one of the lowest in the world, which really, well, destroys your point.
I don't see the sense in that. You say "I think it's sensible to make people pay for the damage they do to other people's property." Why should it matter what the per capita damage rate is? If 10 people damage your property, is that somehow better than 1 person damaging it? I also don't see the point of using a per capita figure. The United States has roughly the same land mass as China. In the absense of mankind, we'd output roughly the same amount of CO2, so I don't see why we have to cut our relative output just because China is overpopulated.
I think the per capita figure really is the one you should be looking at and I think you can agree.
No, I don't agree at all. If China has ten times as many people as the US, and as a whole those people pollute half as much, then China as a whole should pay half as much. So each individual would pay 1/20th the amount as the costs would be spread out over ten times as many people, but that's not the same as saying US citizens should pay but Chinese citizens shouldn't. And yes, my numbers aren't correct, but I think you get the idea.
A-ha, you seem to think carbon dioxide doesn't do any harm. Well, it is a greenhouse gas so we know at least one method in which it is capable of doing harm.
I'm not sure what you mean that it's "capable of doing harm". Being capable of doing harm and being a pollutant are entirely different things. A pollutant is something which necessarily does harm.
We don't have a perfect understanding of the workings of this planet here. As such I'd rather not double or triple any number about it.
I think not doubling or tripling *any* number is just silly. It depends on what the number is. Further, I think you've got to have more than just an ambiguous feeling that something might happen in order to suggest that nations should sign treaties agreeing to transfer wealth between each other.
So if a company employs 60 people, management says to 40 of the people, work at 1.5 times your current effort and lays off the other 20 people, the demand for goods and services goes up?
That said, it's logical to assume each person "owns" the same amount of it or has an equal right to natural resources.
That's just not true, though. US citizens own roughly the same amount of natural resources as Chinese citizens, and there are far fewer of us.
If you'd count emissions per nation people living in places like Monaco could spend all they want while people in China would be entitled to one cigarette a day max. Hardly fair. And everybody arrogant and selfish enough would start one-person states to sell emission rights and pollute all they want.
I'm not the one suggesting that we should "count" CO2 emissions at all.
Why should per capita emissions matter? That certainly wasn't part of the stated goal. If my family has 5 people in it, should I be allowed to cause 5 times as much damage to my neighbors property?
Employment isn't the best measure of unemployment. If families are making more while working less, this is a good thing, at least from my point of view.
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I can only guesse you live in a rural setting. I am speaking of the majority of cases. The vast majority of people live in or near a city.
I live in Tampa, Florida. It's not a big city, but that *is* a city.
And what I said is true, traffic condition durring most of the day will eventually cause the lane jocky trying to do +20 (when most everyone else is doing +0 to +5) to get stuck in the right lane on most two lane highways, or in the case of one lane roads this idiot will crowd the 'slowpoke' ahead of him causing the 'slowpoke' to slow down to safer speeds.
Not where I live.
Not to mention the fact that stop lights are often close enough and stay red long enough to kill most if not all of any gain.
Well, first of all, you said there was no gain, not little gain. In fact, you seemed to imply there was actually a loss of time. Secondly, I was mainly talking about the highway. If you're just talking about a four lane road complete with traffic lights, then for the most part you're right. I used to be an ambulance driver, and even with the flashing lights and siren you still rarely go very fast when getting from place to place safely.
I've litterly been behind someone for 20 miles along one two lane state highway and watched him jocky back and forth to gain two car lengths by the time we reached the next red light, and do this repeatedly untill he got all of 6 or seven cars ahead of where he started, ten to twenty minutes ago.
It has been very rare that I've been on a highway with many traffic lights for 20 miles. If I'm going that far, I'm generally going to take a divided road without any traffic lights, or at least with very rare traffic lights.
It is more like running a splitter and a cable and stealing your neighbors cable TV.
Morally, I agree, it's the same thing. Legally, it's much different though, as the cable companies have convinced the government to pass laws protecting them, and cable television is usually copyrighted, whereas internet traffic may or may not be (and usually the receiver has permission to access that content).
Or running an extension cord to a backyard outlet and stealing power.
Using someone's power directly costs them money.
Or perhaps a cordless phone.
If you're just using local calls, and they don't pay for those local calls, then yes, this is probably the best analogy.
People accept that they have to pay for electricity, phone, but the internet should be free? why?
Phones should be free too. Like the Internet, and unlike electricity, they are a peer to peer based system.
Assuming normal traffic conditions, there is an optimal speed, above this and traffic conditions slow you down, below this and you slow yourself down.
You must live in LA, or consider rush hour traffic conditions to be normal. In normal traffic conditions where I live there is usually an open lane available to go pretty much as fast as you want. Obviously this is only true to some extent, and if you go 5000 mph you're going to die and never reach your destination, but the optimal speed to increase your expected time to arrive is generally much faster than that of the traffic around you.
Not to mention that to think one has the right to demand someone speed up past the lawfull limit or change lanes to get out of your way if not is the sign of an asshole.
I think I have the right to demand someone not use the left hand lane except for passing. What speed the person is going is irrelevant.
And according to you the person is already past the lawful limit. So demanding that they switch lanes is merely demanding that they revert to breaking one law instead of two.
Now, if I really understood what you said, USA and China should be entitled to equal pollution because they have equal area.
I think that's more fair than counting population and then going with a per capita figure. Especially since all but the most lunatic of alleged affects of global warming are based on property. If the earth heats up and the sealevel rises, most of my home state of Florida is going to be under water. I seriously doubt that large a proportion of China is going to be gone, and certainly not as large a proportion as comparing population would suggest.
Again with the same analogy, but phrased differently, if I damage my neighbors' car, should I pay five times as much if there are 5 people who use that car as if there is one?
Call that international communism if you like. I call it fair.
Maybe so, but it's not realistic. China and the US don't have a single government. To expect us to unify on one particular issue, such as the distribution of land, but not on any others, such as taxation, freedom, capitalism, etc., is not at all realistic.
Fairness should apply to individuals because individuals are not responsible for their ancestors' actions or their country's land area or administration.
I disagree, because even if you're going to call CO2 a pollutant, it's not a standard one, since CO2 is a necessary part of the earth's atmosphere. And in fact, roughly the same amount of CO2 is needed in the US as is needed in China. If the US suddenly cut its per capita production to match that of China it'd probably have more harmful effects than positive.
But even then, if you're going to apply the tax to individuals, then apply the tax to individuals, directly, not to countries. Make everyone pay $1 per ton of CO2 or whatever. And then take all the money and hire people to plant trees or do research or whatever. Get approval of the specifics by a vote based by people, not by countries. In other words, every person in the United States gets an equal vote to every person in the EU. Don't dillute the votes of the Americans just because the union our states formed happens to be a little bit stronger and older. The way the system is now it's rather blatant that it hasn't been designed to solve an actual problem, but to transfer wealth from one country to another.
Maybe I'm just confused about what you say. Yes, in order to get from one point to another as fast as you can you have to be smart. But 9 times out of 10, you have to speed as well.
You're basically telling the Chinese that each person in USA is worth ten times what a Chinaman is.
I don't see how it's like that at all.
I never said it can't be done. But it's not feasible for me to buy a computer with two double-width PCMCIA ports *plus* carry that computer around with me everywhere, just so I can access the Internet via Verizon's BroadbandAccess service. For a modem this is slightly more feasible, but for wireless Internet we're talking about spending hundreds of dollars on a firewall which would still be rather bulky to carry around everywhere.
Sounds like a software issue, not a hardware one. If your clock consistently needs to be adjusted by 0.31xxx seconds, then ntpd should be automatically adjusting by 0.31 seconds every 4 hours. ntpd will do this if it is run in daemon mode.
OK, the easiest way to secure Windows from most attacks is to be behind a physical firewall. But what can be done when that isn't feasible, for instance, when connecting through a modem, wifi, etc? I know there are commercial software firewalls out there, but is there anything available for free, say on Windows 2000?
Microsoft has $33.8 billion in short term investments. Since interest payments are calculated by the day, and not the second, at an interest rate of 3% Microsoft will lose $1929 in interest due to this leap second.
Actually you'd just set the NTP server you're syncing with one second ahead.
That simple solution will cause one of two problems: either your time will be off by one second, or the calculation of the number of seconds between two events crossing the leap second will be off by one second.
I don't think that a once-every-seven-year event is going to be worthy of kernel changes, especially since your time is probably off by more than one second as it is.
If you're regularly using NTPD your time is probably not off by more than one second, and if you've got a GPS receiver it almost certainly isn't. But I agree with you that a kernel change isn't necessary, in fact, the kernel shouldn't be involved with terrestial time at all.
From what I understand, at least some standard libraries do need to be changed because they do not correctly measure time intervals crossing leap second boundaries. But once that is resolved, making sure that your calculations and time displays are correct should be a simple matter of downloading a file containing all the historical leap seconds.
According to a link I just read, POSIX doesn't handle leap seconds. So yes, if you use NTP, like someone else suggested, your time will be correct, but any measurements of time crossing leap seconds won't.
The correct solution in my opinion would be to store leap seconds along with the timezone information. That's really what they are. Unix time could be stored in TAI instead of UTC, and thus subtracting two times from each other would still give the correct result.
Whenever a leap second was announced you'd have to download a new timezone file, and if you didn't download the file in time your displayed time would be off by a second. Alternatively, if you synced using NTP, which is in UTC, and you didn't update your timezone file, then your computer would incorrectly slow down the clock by one second. Once you installed the timezone file, and resynced with NTP, this would be corrected.
Eventually NTP should probably be switched over to TAI. I see a proposal for this in a mailing list in January 2004. Would have been nice to do it before the leap second, but that's probably too soon to expect many people to change at this point.
Seriously, you'd think they'd pick a less conspicuous second to make the switch. Instead they picked the one second of the year that people notice more than any other. At least it'll only affect the New Year's count for the Brits. Here in the US we won't even be heading to the party yet.
Repeat after me - "There is only one Earth, it's atmosphere and oceans do not recognise national borders, we are ALL in this together".
I agree we're all in this together, but that doesn't mean I advocate international communism. As I said in another post, the output of CO2 in China and the United States would be roughly equal ''even in the absense of mankind''. Whether you're "damaging the Earth" through overpopulation or through innovation and productivity shouldn't matter.
So not being totally biased towards the US is "anti American"?
That's not at all what I said.
If Wikipedia was anti-American, wouldn't everything be expected to be in International English?
If "Wikipedia was anti-American", maybe. But all I said was that "there is somewhat of an anti-American culture within Wikipedia".
I'm an hourly employee, so I don't need to explain it to my boss, he already knows.
Well, that's just as true if you're non-exempt.
No, it's not at all just as true. If your employer mandates that you work certain hours, then you are by definition a non-exempt employee.
If you're exempt and don't work the hours your employer wants, you probably will be fired.
I'm not sure where you work, but that hasn't been true in any of the salaried jobs I've had. But more to the point, if you are fired for not working the hours your employer wants, then you're not exempt.
So, what, those 20 people are going to die?
No, they're going to get another job.
The parent poster should have said "mandatory UNPAID overtime", which is typical in software development shops. And "exempt" means that you are exempt from the wage/price laws which require payment for overtime.
It also means that you can't be forced to work a certain number of hours. If you are an exempt employee, then you are paid based on the job, not how many hours you work. IOW, there is no "mandatory overtime" for exempt employees.
True, the Kyoto protocol has its problems.
And once those problems are solved, then you'll see resistance to the treaty go away.
The "second biggest procucer", China, has its per capita carbon emissions at one tenth of that of USA and one of the lowest in the world, which really, well, destroys your point.
I don't see the sense in that. You say "I think it's sensible to make people pay for the damage they do to other people's property." Why should it matter what the per capita damage rate is? If 10 people damage your property, is that somehow better than 1 person damaging it? I also don't see the point of using a per capita figure. The United States has roughly the same land mass as China. In the absense of mankind, we'd output roughly the same amount of CO2, so I don't see why we have to cut our relative output just because China is overpopulated.
I think the per capita figure really is the one you should be looking at and I think you can agree.
No, I don't agree at all. If China has ten times as many people as the US, and as a whole those people pollute half as much, then China as a whole should pay half as much. So each individual would pay 1/20th the amount as the costs would be spread out over ten times as many people, but that's not the same as saying US citizens should pay but Chinese citizens shouldn't. And yes, my numbers aren't correct, but I think you get the idea.
A-ha, you seem to think carbon dioxide doesn't do any harm. Well, it is a greenhouse gas so we know at least one method in which it is capable of doing harm.
I'm not sure what you mean that it's "capable of doing harm". Being capable of doing harm and being a pollutant are entirely different things. A pollutant is something which necessarily does harm.
We don't have a perfect understanding of the workings of this planet here. As such I'd rather not double or triple any number about it.
I think not doubling or tripling *any* number is just silly. It depends on what the number is. Further, I think you've got to have more than just an ambiguous feeling that something might happen in order to suggest that nations should sign treaties agreeing to transfer wealth between each other.
I never suggested that emission quotas should be assigned in the first place.
So if a company employs 60 people, management says to 40 of the people, work at 1.5 times your current effort and lays off the other 20 people, the demand for goods and services goes up?
Correct.
That said, it's logical to assume each person "owns" the same amount of it or has an equal right to natural resources.
That's just not true, though. US citizens own roughly the same amount of natural resources as Chinese citizens, and there are far fewer of us.
If you'd count emissions per nation people living in places like Monaco could spend all they want while people in China would be entitled to one cigarette a day max. Hardly fair. And everybody arrogant and selfish enough would start one-person states to sell emission rights and pollute all they want.
I'm not the one suggesting that we should "count" CO2 emissions at all.
Why should per capita emissions matter? That certainly wasn't part of the stated goal. If my family has 5 people in it, should I be allowed to cause 5 times as much damage to my neighbors property?
Employment isn't the best measure of unemployment. If families are making more while working less, this is a good thing, at least from my point of view.