Stop the subsidies, tax carbon to account for externalities, and then let the market decide.
The market is drive by wealthy profiteers generally. They have no morals beyond profit. Profits don't care about the future.
The shift from fossil fuel to plant-based fuel is troubling. Rather than do the right thing, keep population from growing, live sustainably; rather than that now we're after the surface resources. Unfortunately the rich will keep using and abusing and poor will keep dying.
People don't starve to death because of lack of food in the world. Yes, that makes no sense. They starve because of lack of infrastructure to get them food.
Unfortunately the ROI on the food distribution infrastructure is non existent. Capitalism treats man as a commodity. There's plenty of people and hence there is no return on saving some. The most efficient way of supplying food would be, IMO, to produce it locally - such a globabl system would even out wealth.
The problem with evening out wealth is that (at least) 99.9% of us here will get poorer. We tend not to like that idea.
So you end up with one person/family owning and profiting from the land while the rest of the village/region starve and/or live in poverty.
Your view is too naive (I don't mean stupid, I mean naive). Why do you suppose that any local person profits, that assumes they own the land. If lands are ancestral then most locals will have land (smallholdings) and so profits will be shared. Even if one family grows the crops then that wealth will be dispersed amongst the others.
Crops generally grow better if they aren't grown alone. Companion crops can help the soil, or help with pollination, etc.. Apparently alfalfa is good with palm oil, it fixes nitrogen and can be eaten young as a salad crop or used as a cattle feed.
If a person owns the land they don't have to put it all to cash-crops, they can choose to subsist first - but usually it's better to grow a cash-crop and use the money to buy food, this is one of the efficiencies of capitalism. Where it fails is when the market price is dropped; why fair trade is so important.
Finally, I can't believe a poorer landowner will plant a crop that they have to wait 5 years for. They'll plant some alongside current crops (or other land use), then as they grow they'll plant more, etc. - the harvest will be spread out.
Perhaps you were just being brief.
As for "the effect of any combustion fuels" - if you grow the fuel and then burn it you're returning the carbon to the cycle that you've extracted (from the local ecosystem) whilst growing the crops. The energy released is solar energy which would have otherwise only been used as a heat source.
Fossil fuels take carbon that has been sequestered in the process of making the planet habitable to us, and other life, by releasing that carbon we're potentially altering the ecosystem such that the planet will no longer be habitable.
Food as fuel is not so bad when you consider we grow more food than is needed to feed the planet.
Sustainability is the key problem as corporations get in on the act and clear forest for plantations.
The government most certainly failed *because* both parties who run it are a bunch of money grubbing grab asses. But you want to know who's really at fault? The voter. Some how in some places, we collectively keep voting these bastards back in office.
Sorry, I can't tell from your comment - which government did you mean?
TC presented evidence. You may not find it convincing, but that is entirely different to it not existing.
What evidence? Undocumented claims by anonymous sources? That's not evidence, that's hearsay at best.
Then you could have said "the evidence TC presented is hearsay at best" rather than claiming there was none.
Personally (having stopped using last.fm a while back in favour of Grooveshark) it seems that TC are acting in good faith. The only options as I see it are that Last.fm were done over by CBS selling user info to RIAA, or TC's informant was nobbled by someone with a huge grudge.
Me: "I see. Well, delete the page and start again. This time, copy the stuff from Word, then open Notepad, past the text from Word into Notepad, then copy/paste into the CMS from there instead."
Content editor: "Oooh, voodoo!"
Me: "Indeed."
There are a couple of steps you can miss. Don't open MS Word, use Notepad (or Notepad++ or something) and copy-paste from there instead.
I don't personally know the folk involved, I'll assume that "Russ" is a Last.fm guy. Last.fm didn't know that the parent company, CBS, had sold them out to RIAA in contravention of the user agreement. If you read the TechCrunch info you'll note that a spokesman for CBS said that they didn't know the info was being passed on to the RIAA - then the spokesman called to say "that statement was on behalf of last.fm, not CBS". Dead giveaway.
It wouldn't be that hard to add a unique reference in the error correction fields - this would only show on bitwise copies of course not in re-encodings (MP3, etc.) nor would it allow CDs to be pressed.
No they don't, I implemented a last.fm plugin, so I know what I'm talking about. The only data sent are : title, artist, album, length and track number. And of course, the data we send doesn't prove anything, as we can put whatever data we want.
Erm, you send the data, therefore you send them your IP address. Which with most ISPs is traceable to an account and user (if you gave them proper info), it's at least traceable to a physical address for the court summons.
Sibling: an inaccurately tagged track is one that wasn't purchased but was ripped. Ripping your own music is a breach of copyright in the UK where backups etc. aren't allowed as we do not have a "fair use" exception (at least not in the way the US has). We also don't have the RIAA, but we have a slightly less lawsuit happy bunch of our own, BPI.
I've got two ideas on this: 1) the US part was not designed to be maintained whilst the Russian part was, it would thus cost too much to service the US part; 2) USA would rather it burnt up than give it away.
How about if whilst you were asleep your friends smashed your hand with a sledgehammer (blindfold him first so he doesn't know who it was!)... then whilst you were at hospital having all your fingers repositioned and hand plastercast they wiped your computer (I'd probably take a backup; or maybe just wipe his profile).
Do you think not being able to play for a month would have helped?
Also, the Army is paying attention; both XP and Office 2K3 are in extended support. Microsoft's policy is that they will provide security updates.....unless the problem is going to cost them too much to fix.
Can't the army just requisition the code on the basis of national security and fix the bug themselves...?
I'd have thought too that even MS would be willing to extend support for a client spending 10s of millions of USD? They must have a couple of people who can code somewhere amongst all the marketeers and patent lawyers?
Shh, you'll anger the computer geeks. They think everyone in academia admin's their own computers and prefer to use vi/emacs for writing and marking up their papers (LyX is for jocks).
The publishers probably just copy-paste into word when they get the tex submissions anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop the subsidies, tax carbon to account for externalities, and then let the market decide.
The market is drive by wealthy profiteers generally. They have no morals beyond profit. Profits don't care about the future.
The shift from fossil fuel to plant-based fuel is troubling. Rather than do the right thing, keep population from growing, live sustainably; rather than that now we're after the surface resources. Unfortunately the rich will keep using and abusing and poor will keep dying.
People don't starve to death because of lack of food in the world. Yes, that makes no sense. They starve because of lack of infrastructure to get them food.
Unfortunately the ROI on the food distribution infrastructure is non existent. Capitalism treats man as a commodity. There's plenty of people and hence there is no return on saving some. The most efficient way of supplying food would be, IMO, to produce it locally - such a globabl system would even out wealth.
The problem with evening out wealth is that (at least) 99.9% of us here will get poorer. We tend not to like that idea.
So you end up with one person/family owning and profiting from the land while the rest of the village/region starve and/or live in poverty.
Your view is too naive (I don't mean stupid, I mean naive). Why do you suppose that any local person profits, that assumes they own the land. If lands are ancestral then most locals will have land (smallholdings) and so profits will be shared. Even if one family grows the crops then that wealth will be dispersed amongst the others.
Crops generally grow better if they aren't grown alone. Companion crops can help the soil, or help with pollination, etc.. Apparently alfalfa is good with palm oil, it fixes nitrogen and can be eaten young as a salad crop or used as a cattle feed.
If a person owns the land they don't have to put it all to cash-crops, they can choose to subsist first - but usually it's better to grow a cash-crop and use the money to buy food, this is one of the efficiencies of capitalism. Where it fails is when the market price is dropped; why fair trade is so important.
Finally, I can't believe a poorer landowner will plant a crop that they have to wait 5 years for. They'll plant some alongside current crops (or other land use), then as they grow they'll plant more, etc. - the harvest will be spread out.
Perhaps you were just being brief.
As for "the effect of any combustion fuels" - if you grow the fuel and then burn it you're returning the carbon to the cycle that you've extracted (from the local ecosystem) whilst growing the crops. The energy released is solar energy which would have otherwise only been used as a heat source.
Fossil fuels take carbon that has been sequestered in the process of making the planet habitable to us, and other life, by releasing that carbon we're potentially altering the ecosystem such that the planet will no longer be habitable.
Food as fuel is not so bad when you consider we grow more food than is needed to feed the planet.
Sustainability is the key problem as corporations get in on the act and clear forest for plantations.
The government most certainly failed *because* both parties who run it are a bunch of money grubbing grab asses. But you want to know who's really at fault? The voter. Some how in some places, we collectively keep voting these bastards back in office.
Sorry, I can't tell from your comment - which government did you mean?
TC presented evidence. You may not find it convincing, but that is entirely different to it not existing.
What evidence? Undocumented claims by anonymous sources? That's not evidence, that's hearsay at best.
Then you could have said "the evidence TC presented is hearsay at best" rather than claiming there was none.
Personally (having stopped using last.fm a while back in favour of Grooveshark) it seems that TC are acting in good faith. The only options as I see it are that Last.fm were done over by CBS selling user info to RIAA, or TC's informant was nobbled by someone with a huge grudge.
Me: "I see. Well, delete the page and start again. This time, copy the stuff from Word, then open Notepad, past the text from Word into Notepad, then copy/paste into the CMS from there instead."
Content editor: "Oooh, voodoo!"
Me: "Indeed."
There are a couple of steps you can miss. Don't open MS Word, use Notepad (or Notepad++ or something) and copy-paste from there instead.
why are you cancelling now when there is really no new evidence, just a new variation on an old story?
TC presented evidence. You may not find it convincing, but that is entirely different to it not existing.
Oh, for mod points.
The one thing that surprises me is that Russ Garrett says that legal action isn't possible.
A statement is not libellous if it is true. Hence ...
Who do you trust more... Michael Arrington, or Russ Garrett?
Russ' rebuttal is here.
I don't personally know the folk involved, I'll assume that "Russ" is a Last.fm guy. Last.fm didn't know that the parent company, CBS, had sold them out to RIAA in contravention of the user agreement. If you read the TechCrunch info you'll note that a spokesman for CBS said that they didn't know the info was being passed on to the RIAA - then the spokesman called to say "that statement was on behalf of last.fm, not CBS". Dead giveaway.
why would a user stick with last.fm after it sold out to a CBS?
Because the T&C say they won't do this sort of thing and consumers are naively apt to trust [pseudo-]legal agreements.
It wouldn't be that hard to add a unique reference in the error correction fields - this would only show on bitwise copies of course not in re-encodings (MP3, etc.) nor would it allow CDs to be pressed.
No they don't, I implemented a last.fm plugin, so I know what I'm talking about.
The only data sent are : title, artist, album, length and track number.
And of course, the data we send doesn't prove anything, as we can put whatever data we want.
Erm, you send the data, therefore you send them your IP address. Which with most ISPs is traceable to an account and user (if you gave them proper info), it's at least traceable to a physical address for the court summons.
Sibling: an inaccurately tagged track is one that wasn't purchased but was ripped. Ripping your own music is a breach of copyright in the UK where backups etc. aren't allowed as we do not have a "fair use" exception (at least not in the way the US has). We also don't have the RIAA, but we have a slightly less lawsuit happy bunch of our own, BPI.
Because the lens was incorrectly ground due to an error in the software that ran the grinding process.
Wouldn't you test a lens that you were going to send into orbit?
I've got two ideas on this: 1) the US part was not designed to be maintained whilst the Russian part was, it would thus cost too much to service the US part; 2) USA would rather it burnt up than give it away.
No substantiation.
How about if whilst you were asleep your friends smashed your hand with a sledgehammer (blindfold him first so he doesn't know who it was!) ... then whilst you were at hospital having all your fingers repositioned and hand plastercast they wiped your computer (I'd probably take a backup; or maybe just wipe his profile).
Do you think not being able to play for a month would have helped?
[I think I'm joking, not sure]
Mod parent up.
Also, the Army is paying attention; both XP and Office 2K3 are in extended support. Microsoft's policy is that they will provide security updates.....unless the problem is going to cost them too much to fix.
Can't the army just requisition the code on the basis of national security and fix the bug themselves ...?
I'd have thought too that even MS would be willing to extend support for a client spending 10s of millions of USD? They must have a couple of people who can code somewhere amongst all the marketeers and patent lawyers?
Vista just hit sp2
But the SP3 will be out soon, they're calling it Windows 7 ...
<first post />
Surely
<first post="post" onclick="alert('i am a dick');"></first>
?
CSS has some nasty cross-browser problems that tables do not, making them far easier than CSS for many things, assuming you can do them in CSS at all.
You mean IE is still rubbish?
(Actually I think IE8 is bareable)
The GP has to be a troll ... surely? Love to see some of those pages, do you think they have "made for IE5" buttons?
WTH: WTF for Christians.
Why replace "what-the-flip" with "what-the-heck"?
What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?
You sound like a Congressman discussing the budget.
or an MP discussing their expenses claim ...
But if you mix cola and uncola, they annihilate each other, producing huge amounts of pure energy. Be careful!
But if you mix cola and uncola, they annihilate each other, producing huge amounts of pure energy^W colons. Be careful!
Shh, you'll anger the computer geeks. They think everyone in academia admin's their own computers and prefer to use vi/emacs for writing and marking up their papers (LyX is for jocks).
The publishers probably just copy-paste into word when they get the tex submissions anyway.
Lol, you're right, I did fall for that one.