Should a school employee be publishing this kind of thing while on duty: no.
Was it legal for the editor to report him? Yes.
Was it reasonable for the editor to report him? Probably not.
Yes, I understand that you don't have the legal right to post anything you want from your work computer, and that the editor was within his/her legal rights to report him. But I continue to think that actually turning the guy in was a little over the top, and further, that getting fired is a disproportionate punishment for the "crime" (yes, he resigned. He almost certainly didn't have a choice in the matter).
Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of IE (longtime FF user here). But I have to say that your drawbacks don't seem like terribly big problems for most people.
1) Ok, so don't browse and play a game at the same time. Who does that, anyway?
2) How much more electricity are we really talking here? You could, no doubt, save a lot more energy by doing things like insulating your house, turning down your thermostat, etc; than you could by selecting your browser based on how much electricity it burns. I really can't believe it's significant.
3) This is the same objection as 1), for one thing. And also: what percentage of the time, over the entire user base for IE, is someone going to be watching a video or playing a game at the same time they're actively browsing the web? You yourself don't sound like you do it very often, and I doubt most people do it ever.
I have no idea whether this approach is good or not - but honestly, it's hard to take your objections to it seriously.
... at cost-benefit analysis. Scenario 1) natural death. Cost: a few hundred bucks if you get cremated. Chance of recovery: 0. Benefit: Your estate goes to your heirs or charity. Scenario 2) cryo-preservation. Cost: very high. Chance of recovery: so close to zero it's not worth mentioning. Benefit: probably none, and the cryo company gets your money.
So you do have something to lose. You could have done something worthwhile with your money, but instead you essentially burned it. Cryo-preservation is a scam. They imply that you have a reasonable chance of resurrection, when in fact you don't (burying the truth in legal disclaimers that they know people don't pay attention to).
Sure, you're definitely not coming back if you've been cremated. And no one can say that your chance of revival after freezing is absolutely zero. But come on. The best evidence is that your probability of revival is very, very close to zero. And being frozen costs a significant amount of money. The argument is that the money would be better put to use by being either donated to charity or left to your heirs, rather than giving it to a business which is almost certainly not going to be able to live up to its promises. And don't tell me that they're not promising anything - yes, I'm sure there's fine print saying that nothing is guaranteed. But their advertising materials certainly imply that being revived is a realistic possibility, when in fact, it's anything but realistic. That's why this is a scam.
... is not necessarily what it actually does. There doesn't have to be any logical consistency between the laws concerning incorporation, copyright, etc; and those governing trusts. And it seems that there isn't, in fact, any such consistency.
Imagine Sarah Palin as President, who is to say she wouldn't scramble GPS for France & Germany because they refuse to support her invasion of Canada?
That's really not how selective availability works. You can't just enable SA for certain people - it's either on (in which case nobody but those with the encryption keys gets it, which would black out high precision GPS for all commercial receivers, world wide), or it's off (in which case everyone gets the unencrypted signal). You can't just punish individual countries.
And it's moot anyway, as many of the satellites currently orbiting, and all the new ones, don't even include the feature. I doubt it's even possible to turn on SA at this point.
have parents who whine and cry whenever their little darling get's less than a 100
and this:
I've spoken with college professors who say they get calls from parents complaining about kid's grades
But then:
Maybe if parents actually took an active interest in their kid's education things could get better; but I've come to the conclusion most parent's simply don't care.
Well, which is it? Parents don't care, or they care too much? Ever stop to consider the possibility that maybe it's not all the parents in the world who are screwed up, but you?
The issue isn't that parents don't want their children "degraded", for heaven's sake - I think I speak for most parents when I say that yes, we make our kids help out with cleaning at home. The problem is that we don't send kids to school to learn how to mop the floor - we want them to learn math, reading, etc. And there's precious little time for that already. As for the rest of your moaning about kids today - you forgot to include "get off my lawn".
As for the actual topic at hand, (although IANAL) I suspect that the school district would have at least a reasonable basis to put a claim on money being made with teaching materials. But I think it would be a shame to actually recoup this money while 1) teacher usually incur significant out-of-pocket expenses in buying their own classroom materials and 2) are paid relatively little. The real answer is to fund our schools adequately through appropriations.
You're absolutely right that blogging is not a substitute for actual reporting. My problem is that too little good reporting is being done these days, and when a "professional journalist" does get called out by a blogger for some egregious foolishness, the response isn't to try to improve one's reporting, it's to bemoan the fact that the damn bloggers are ruining everything.
While on one hand, I agree that a bunch of tweets from random people are not all that interesting or newsworthy, I also have to say that Dahl's column reads an awful lot like the same old media elitism we've become used to. Only the opinions of professional journalists are wanted, the unwashed masses should just shut up. It was a lot nicer in the world of journalism when you could say any old stupid thing and not get called on it. Nowadays, if a journalist says something stupid, he can expect to have his ass handed to him from some pajama-wearing blogger - oh, the humanity. But I do agree that it's primarily bloggers fulfilling this function, rather than random Twitterers, who for the most part are not contributing very much value.
... is the moderation system. It's not perfect, but it does improve the signal-to-noise ratio considerably. Maybe the editors at CNN.com or wherever are fulfilling this function over there, but it's not clear to me. In any case, I concur: I'm not really going to CNN to see what a bunch of random people think.
Mostly, it would be much easier to physically damage the transmission lines than it would be to hack into the control systems. Although control system hacking is sexier (at least on Slashdot), it would probably be smarter to focus on the more likely threats.
... at least if they pull into any foreign ports. It's against the law to ship in arms this way in many countries, and it's absolutely routine for your vessel to get searched. If you pulled in somewhere and they found these arms onboard, the captain could wind up in the local jail. This is the main reason why arming merchant vessels isn't done these days. Well, that, and the fact that a crew of Malaysians, Pakistanis, Greeks, and Filipinos (to pick a few random places where merchant seamen are routinely recruited from), who probably don't have any weapons training, would be more of a danger to themselves than to any potential pirates.
... it would be hard to do that without being detected. Not impossible, but hard. It's impossible to be completely invulnerable to any threat, but I think hacking into electrical control systems like this is sufficiently difficult that you'd be better off worrying about someone else. For example, if your aim was to disrupt electrical power, wouldn't it be easier to blow up one or more of the towers that hold up the high-tension lines coming out of a power plant?
... even if they are accessible remotely, are not accessible over the internet. They're done either over dedicated lines, or via wireless connections that are encrypted, use proprietary protocols, or both. So the real threat isn't terrorists or the Russian mafia - it's your standard inside job. That doesn't mean that the vulnerability isn't there, but it mitigates it quite a lot. There are really only a few people with the capability and access to do this kind of thing, and it's relatively easy to watch over them. Just beware of the disgruntled employee/former employee/contractor.
And in a few years even the Catholics will likely be fine with it.
We've been making test tube babies for well over 20 years, and artificial insemination for way longer than that. And not only is the Catholic church still not fine with it, they're probably even less fine with than they were, say, in the 70's. Color me unconvinced that they'll be changing their minds any time soon.
... when I was a physics student. But really, it wasn't a problem - if he tried whipping through the transparencies (which, naturally, consisted of lots of equations) too quickly, someone would just stop him. Then again, our physics classes were pretty small. If you this were happening in Calc 101 in a lecture hall with 250 people, it might be more of a problem to get the speed under control.
If we remain in Afghanistan to stop AQ, then getting supplies into there is hard. A big part of this is fuel for electric power. This is the ideal situation for a small 10-50 MW space generator to beam it into bases, esp. forward bases. We can cut the power to the base, if it is taken. In addition, it prevents fuel from being used as a weapon. We could easily have a small version available within 2 years.
Or, we could just build the solar power stations on the ground for much more cheaply, and bomb them if overrun by the enemy.
In addition, this same idea could be used in the US and other locations to beam 10 MWs into disaster locations. The ability to bring in say 1 MW into multiple locations within 1 hour would make a HUGE difference in say hurricane, earthquake, or even another 9/11.
Provided that whatever disaster occurred didn't also destroy the required ground station. It's not like you're going to put up a rectenna farm in an hour.
You've apparently never seen either a wind or solar establishment. Wind farms are located in one of two areas: 1) open plains, and the surrounding land is farmed, or 2) ridgelines, and the land is too steep/rugged to be used for anything else. Solar plants are built all over the place on roofs, and we have absolutely tons of roof space left. The idea that we're somehow going to run out room to put this stuff is nuts.
1) making long carbon nano-tubes on an industrial scale to build a space elevator. I read somewhere that with such "unobtanium" it would (only) cost 5 Billion to build an initial elevator from which supposedly they could expand.
I saw that estimate too - it came from the company currently trying to raise money to actually build one. When you dig a little deeper, though, it turns out that the $5B number is based on... nothing. They have no idea how much it would cost to develop said elevator, so they pretty much made this up out of whole cloth. Which is why they're not attracting too much financing.
2) support deep space exploration with the goal of eventually mining asteroids. To build a really decent sized elevator you'll need a LOT of material (megatons). Why bother lifting it out of the gravity well if you could just take a passing NEO and nudge it into geo-sync? Good practice for asteroid deflection also.
Not the asteroids again! Before getting into yet another round of "Yeah! let's mine the asteroids!" - sit down and think about this. What the hell are you going to get out of the asteroids that you can't get (much, much, much) more cheaply on earth? Consider that 1) the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is the earth. 2) It's really, really expensive to get to the asteroids - remember, it costs over $10k/kg just to get to LOW EARTH ORBIT. You'd have to bring an entire factory up there, and there's no way that would be cost effective. 3) The asteroids are spread out over quadrillions of cubic miles of space, and their orbits are pretty chaotic. Even if you were somehow to find something more valuable than earth's crustal rocks, how would you return to the same location later? Also, regarding moving an asteroid into earth orbit - to work, a space elevator would have to use some sort of carbon nano-tube cable, and asteroids are made out of... not-carbon (mostly - there are a few carbonaceous ones, but you'd have to find one. And even with these, they're still mostly silicates with some carbon bearing minerals mixed in). And does anyone really think it's a great idea to park a giant rock in orbit and start grinding it up? Holy space debris, Batman.
Bottom line: it is fantastically unlikely that any of these space economy projects will ever get off the ground (so to speak), because there's nothing sufficiently valuable out there to make it worthwhile to go get.
The gist is, if you can pack things to withstand 2,000 Gs of acceleration
Well, that sounds like it should be no problem at all! In reality: read up on the system known as ERGM - the Extended Range Guided Munition. This was to be a rocked-assisted round fired out of a 5" gun barrel. The program was ultimately cancelled in 2008 after almost 14 years of development. The reason: the innards couldn't withstand the G forces involved without malfunctioning. The bottom line here is that packing stuff to withstand very high accelerations is a lot harder than you think.
So call me when 1) we actually know how to build an electrical launcher big enough to launch something the size of a space power satellite and 2) we can do it without pulverizing the payload. Until then, this is about as realistic as planning for invisible unicorns to produce your power.
Or, you can just use nuclear energy. It's much cheaper
[citation needed]. Last I saw that over the entire life-cycle of a nuclear plant, it about broke even with wind and was only a little better than solar. More importantly, the up-front costs of building a nuclear plant are so high that you don't even start making any money until years and years down the line, and as a result, no one is willing to provide financing to build one.
has enormously higher energy density.
So? Nuclear plants produce all their energy at one spot, where as wind plants distribute the generation over a larger area (and you can use all the land around the turbines to grow crops and stuff). This isn't an advantage for nuclear, it's an advantage for wind. A problem at your nuke plant takes all the generating capacity down right now. A power at a single wind turbine barely changes the total generating capacity at all.
I'm not sure who from the wind and/or solar industry pee'd in your cereal, but your objections to the technology are pretty strange.
Wind energy is simply too low density (as is solar) to fully satisfy the world's growing energy needs over even the next couple of centuries.
As the kids say: [citation needed]. Turnabout is only fair play, so here's my citation:
Wind power available in the atmosphere is much greater than current world energy consumption. The most comprehensive study as of 2005 found the potential of wind power on land and near-shore to be 72 TW, equivalent to 54,000 MToE (million tons of oil equivalent) per year, or over five times the world's current energy use in all forms.
And that's just wind. Solar adds a lot more to the available energy. Sure, we'll probably need some base load generating capacity (probably nuclear), but to say that other renewable sources are wholly inadequate to the task is a little off base.
And as for this:
Wind and solar are toy projects pushed by rabid environmentalists' infectious propaganda; they very much realize how adoption of these power sources will force severe limits on human progress by suppressing energy availability. And I've no doubt that's exactly what they want--less technology, back to nature Ludditism and, especially, enabling a socialist reworking of human civilization.
Now I get it: you're nuts. Sorry to have bothered you, might want to mop the spittle off your chin.
I'm betting you could find plenty of rooftop space to solar panels. There are only so many rooftop driving ranges anyone can use. And you could buy out the driving ranges and convert the roofs to solar a HELL of a lot cheaper than this satellite power thing. Or you could put them at sea. I don't think your objections are serious enough to block consideration of land-based solar.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I understand that you don't have the legal right to post anything you want from your work computer, and that the editor was within his/her legal rights to report him. But I continue to think that actually turning the guy in was a little over the top, and further, that getting fired is a disproportionate punishment for the "crime" (yes, he resigned. He almost certainly didn't have a choice in the matter).
Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of IE (longtime FF user here). But I have to say that your drawbacks don't seem like terribly big problems for most people.
1) Ok, so don't browse and play a game at the same time. Who does that, anyway?
2) How much more electricity are we really talking here? You could, no doubt, save a lot more energy by doing things like insulating your house, turning down your thermostat, etc; than you could by selecting your browser based on how much electricity it burns. I really can't believe it's significant.
3) This is the same objection as 1), for one thing. And also: what percentage of the time, over the entire user base for IE, is someone going to be watching a video or playing a game at the same time they're actively browsing the web? You yourself don't sound like you do it very often, and I doubt most people do it ever.
I have no idea whether this approach is good or not - but honestly, it's hard to take your objections to it seriously.
... at cost-benefit analysis. Scenario 1) natural death. Cost: a few hundred bucks if you get cremated. Chance of recovery: 0. Benefit: Your estate goes to your heirs or charity. Scenario 2) cryo-preservation. Cost: very high. Chance of recovery: so close to zero it's not worth mentioning. Benefit: probably none, and the cryo company gets your money.
So you do have something to lose. You could have done something worthwhile with your money, but instead you essentially burned it. Cryo-preservation is a scam. They imply that you have a reasonable chance of resurrection, when in fact you don't (burying the truth in legal disclaimers that they know people don't pay attention to).
Sure, you're definitely not coming back if you've been cremated. And no one can say that your chance of revival after freezing is absolutely zero. But come on. The best evidence is that your probability of revival is very, very close to zero. And being frozen costs a significant amount of money. The argument is that the money would be better put to use by being either donated to charity or left to your heirs, rather than giving it to a business which is almost certainly not going to be able to live up to its promises. And don't tell me that they're not promising anything - yes, I'm sure there's fine print saying that nothing is guaranteed. But their advertising materials certainly imply that being revived is a realistic possibility, when in fact, it's anything but realistic. That's why this is a scam.
... is not necessarily what it actually does. There doesn't have to be any logical consistency between the laws concerning incorporation, copyright, etc; and those governing trusts. And it seems that there isn't, in fact, any such consistency.
That's really not how selective availability works. You can't just enable SA for certain people - it's either on (in which case nobody but those with the encryption keys gets it, which would black out high precision GPS for all commercial receivers, world wide), or it's off (in which case everyone gets the unencrypted signal). You can't just punish individual countries.
And it's moot anyway, as many of the satellites currently orbiting, and all the new ones, don't even include the feature. I doubt it's even possible to turn on SA at this point.
Ok, we have this:
and this:
But then:
Well, which is it? Parents don't care, or they care too much? Ever stop to consider the possibility that maybe it's not all the parents in the world who are screwed up, but you?
The issue isn't that parents don't want their children "degraded", for heaven's sake - I think I speak for most parents when I say that yes, we make our kids help out with cleaning at home. The problem is that we don't send kids to school to learn how to mop the floor - we want them to learn math, reading, etc. And there's precious little time for that already. As for the rest of your moaning about kids today - you forgot to include "get off my lawn".
As for the actual topic at hand, (although IANAL) I suspect that the school district would have at least a reasonable basis to put a claim on money being made with teaching materials. But I think it would be a shame to actually recoup this money while 1) teacher usually incur significant out-of-pocket expenses in buying their own classroom materials and 2) are paid relatively little. The real answer is to fund our schools adequately through appropriations.
You're absolutely right that blogging is not a substitute for actual reporting. My problem is that too little good reporting is being done these days, and when a "professional journalist" does get called out by a blogger for some egregious foolishness, the response isn't to try to improve one's reporting, it's to bemoan the fact that the damn bloggers are ruining everything.
While on one hand, I agree that a bunch of tweets from random people are not all that interesting or newsworthy, I also have to say that Dahl's column reads an awful lot like the same old media elitism we've become used to. Only the opinions of professional journalists are wanted, the unwashed masses should just shut up. It was a lot nicer in the world of journalism when you could say any old stupid thing and not get called on it. Nowadays, if a journalist says something stupid, he can expect to have his ass handed to him from some pajama-wearing blogger - oh, the humanity. But I do agree that it's primarily bloggers fulfilling this function, rather than random Twitterers, who for the most part are not contributing very much value.
... is the moderation system. It's not perfect, but it does improve the signal-to-noise ratio considerably. Maybe the editors at CNN.com or wherever are fulfilling this function over there, but it's not clear to me. In any case, I concur: I'm not really going to CNN to see what a bunch of random people think.
... but dude, it's a novel. I'm not really prepared to take that as evidence that I need to be freaking out about this topic quite yet.
Mostly, it would be much easier to physically damage the transmission lines than it would be to hack into the control systems. Although control system hacking is sexier (at least on Slashdot), it would probably be smarter to focus on the more likely threats.
... at least if they pull into any foreign ports. It's against the law to ship in arms this way in many countries, and it's absolutely routine for your vessel to get searched. If you pulled in somewhere and they found these arms onboard, the captain could wind up in the local jail. This is the main reason why arming merchant vessels isn't done these days. Well, that, and the fact that a crew of Malaysians, Pakistanis, Greeks, and Filipinos (to pick a few random places where merchant seamen are routinely recruited from), who probably don't have any weapons training, would be more of a danger to themselves than to any potential pirates.
... it would be hard to do that without being detected. Not impossible, but hard. It's impossible to be completely invulnerable to any threat, but I think hacking into electrical control systems like this is sufficiently difficult that you'd be better off worrying about someone else. For example, if your aim was to disrupt electrical power, wouldn't it be easier to blow up one or more of the towers that hold up the high-tension lines coming out of a power plant?
... even if they are accessible remotely, are not accessible over the internet. They're done either over dedicated lines, or via wireless connections that are encrypted, use proprietary protocols, or both. So the real threat isn't terrorists or the Russian mafia - it's your standard inside job. That doesn't mean that the vulnerability isn't there, but it mitigates it quite a lot. There are really only a few people with the capability and access to do this kind of thing, and it's relatively easy to watch over them. Just beware of the disgruntled employee/former employee/contractor.
We've been making test tube babies for well over 20 years, and artificial insemination for way longer than that. And not only is the Catholic church still not fine with it, they're probably even less fine with than they were, say, in the 70's. Color me unconvinced that they'll be changing their minds any time soon.
... when I was a physics student. But really, it wasn't a problem - if he tried whipping through the transparencies (which, naturally, consisted of lots of equations) too quickly, someone would just stop him. Then again, our physics classes were pretty small. If you this were happening in Calc 101 in a lecture hall with 250 people, it might be more of a problem to get the speed under control.
Or, we could just build the solar power stations on the ground for much more cheaply, and bomb them if overrun by the enemy.
Provided that whatever disaster occurred didn't also destroy the required ground station. It's not like you're going to put up a rectenna farm in an hour.
I don't think you're serious.
You've apparently never seen either a wind or solar establishment. Wind farms are located in one of two areas: 1) open plains, and the surrounding land is farmed, or 2) ridgelines, and the land is too steep/rugged to be used for anything else. Solar plants are built all over the place on roofs, and we have absolutely tons of roof space left. The idea that we're somehow going to run out room to put this stuff is nuts.
I saw that estimate too - it came from the company currently trying to raise money to actually build one. When you dig a little deeper, though, it turns out that the $5B number is based on... nothing. They have no idea how much it would cost to develop said elevator, so they pretty much made this up out of whole cloth. Which is why they're not attracting too much financing.
Not the asteroids again! Before getting into yet another round of "Yeah! let's mine the asteroids!" - sit down and think about this. What the hell are you going to get out of the asteroids that you can't get (much, much, much) more cheaply on earth? Consider that 1) the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is the earth. 2) It's really, really expensive to get to the asteroids - remember, it costs over $10k/kg just to get to LOW EARTH ORBIT. You'd have to bring an entire factory up there, and there's no way that would be cost effective. 3) The asteroids are spread out over quadrillions of cubic miles of space, and their orbits are pretty chaotic. Even if you were somehow to find something more valuable than earth's crustal rocks, how would you return to the same location later? Also, regarding moving an asteroid into earth orbit - to work, a space elevator would have to use some sort of carbon nano-tube cable, and asteroids are made out of... not-carbon (mostly - there are a few carbonaceous ones, but you'd have to find one. And even with these, they're still mostly silicates with some carbon bearing minerals mixed in). And does anyone really think it's a great idea to park a giant rock in orbit and start grinding it up? Holy space debris, Batman.
Bottom line: it is fantastically unlikely that any of these space economy projects will ever get off the ground (so to speak), because there's nothing sufficiently valuable out there to make it worthwhile to go get.
Well, that sounds like it should be no problem at all! In reality: read up on the system known as ERGM - the Extended Range Guided Munition. This was to be a rocked-assisted round fired out of a 5" gun barrel. The program was ultimately cancelled in 2008 after almost 14 years of development. The reason: the innards couldn't withstand the G forces involved without malfunctioning. The bottom line here is that packing stuff to withstand very high accelerations is a lot harder than you think.
So call me when 1) we actually know how to build an electrical launcher big enough to launch something the size of a space power satellite and 2) we can do it without pulverizing the payload. Until then, this is about as realistic as planning for invisible unicorns to produce your power.
Ok, again:
[citation needed]. Last I saw that over the entire life-cycle of a nuclear plant, it about broke even with wind and was only a little better than solar. More importantly, the up-front costs of building a nuclear plant are so high that you don't even start making any money until years and years down the line, and as a result, no one is willing to provide financing to build one.
So? Nuclear plants produce all their energy at one spot, where as wind plants distribute the generation over a larger area (and you can use all the land around the turbines to grow crops and stuff). This isn't an advantage for nuclear, it's an advantage for wind. A problem at your nuke plant takes all the generating capacity down right now. A power at a single wind turbine barely changes the total generating capacity at all.
I'm not sure who from the wind and/or solar industry pee'd in your cereal, but your objections to the technology are pretty strange.
As the kids say: [citation needed]. Turnabout is only fair play, so here's my citation:
And that's just wind. Solar adds a lot more to the available energy. Sure, we'll probably need some base load generating capacity (probably nuclear), but to say that other renewable sources are wholly inadequate to the task is a little off base.
And as for this:
Now I get it: you're nuts. Sorry to have bothered you, might want to mop the spittle off your chin.
I'm betting you could find plenty of rooftop space to solar panels. There are only so many rooftop driving ranges anyone can use. And you could buy out the driving ranges and convert the roofs to solar a HELL of a lot cheaper than this satellite power thing. Or you could put them at sea. I don't think your objections are serious enough to block consideration of land-based solar.