An huge earthquake, then a huge tsunami. And hell, past designs (just more recent than the damage reactors) would make things safer.
But don't fool yourself. Just because you have more confidence in nuclear power, you better believe most people aren't going to see it that way. The people that already think Three Mile Island proves nuclear is too dangerous are going to see this -- which is indeed worse than TMI -- as ultra-super-undeniable proof that nuclear power will kill us all.
All because -- ONCE AGAIN -- we (human kind) are too cheap and short-sighted to do something expensive today that will avoid a vastly higher expense in the future. Oh sure this old reactor design requires active coolant pumping at all times, but between the reactor itself and the backup diesel generators, we've got that covered! Sure it'd be a disaster if something somehow knocked out all power, like a giant earthquake or a tsunami or something, but what are the odds of that? Fixing the "problem" would cost too much!
The technology developed in the 80's could have been deployed much sooner and there are designs of plants that are approved (some of which have even been built). There is even new technology that could have been retrofitted on the old reactors to make them safer. The major problem is that it is so hard to build a new plant that we are continuing to milk these old plants for all that they are worth.
That's what I meant by "could have built", as in "we could have new reactors using the 1980s technology built by 2030 if we started today", because the reality is regardless of whether 1980s-tech reactors would have been operational by now is irrelevant because we didn't build them. So we'd have to start from the reality of today, which is no construction and minimal research into these designs in the U.S. It was worded poorly, I know.
Passive cooling has been the hot new thing since, you know, the 80s.
It's funny, because I've seen a couple U.S. nuclear industry representatives/experts on TV being asked about the disaster, could it happen to our reactors, is nuclear power safe? And they'd hem and haw and talk about designing structures around local conditions. Nothing about technology itself. I'm guessing because they don't want to have to talk about how outdated reactor designs in the U.S. are, and how we didn't keep up in research so they're going to be outdated for quite some time. Especially since when your unfortunate take-away message is "Um, yeah, it totally could happen here if there was an unprecedented earthquake", you don't really make people feel much better by saying "But technology developed in the 1980s and which we could have built by the 2030s won't have that problem!"
I don't know that they will, but that's the criterion for judging if it makes sense to do it. Obviously it would be more likely with twice as much sun, but that doesn't mean it isn't net-positive here.
As they're already doing like 50 "green" things to the tower, it wouldn't make sense to just throw this one on the pile for a trivial shift in perception, if it wasn't worth it economically.
So, like I said, I don't know that it is worth it, but it is not impossible, and I'm certainly not going to take the lack of specific engineering figures in a news article to imply that it isn't.
This is nothing at all like a major landmark being renamed by a megacorporation. In fact, renaming Denali to McKinley is akin to renaming the Sears Tower to Willis Tower. Changing McKinley back to Denali would be like changing Willis Tower back to Sears Tower.
Heh. I'm having a vision of 40 years in the future of someone complaining that the iconic Willis Tower of Chicago is having it's name bastardized and changed to Sears of all things. The nerve!
Only if the net output of the solar cells over their projected lifetime exceeds the energy costs to manufacture them and affix them to the side of the building.
Which, since they are conducting an extensive remodel of the building to improve energy efficiency including replacing the single-pane windows anyway, they most likely will, that makes it a good decision.
Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be -- a good engineer looks for the most efficient means of accomplishing the objective.
Exactly, and that often means making use of multiple techniques in concert, including some smaller optimizations that nevertheless contribute to the overall objective, and ideally take advantage of changes you're already making. For example, you might see that one of the biggest improvements you can make to the building is to replace all the old poorly insulated windows with new efficient ones. And then you can look at whether or not in-window solar would be worth it in the context of having already decided to replace all the windows.
Sure it'd be more efficient to put them on high rises in Phoenix. Sadly, though, the Sears Tower would still be in Chicago, consuming all that energy. The solar panels are just one part of the retrofit designed to reduce the building's external power consumption. And regardless of how much better solar panels perform in Arizona instead of Chicago, as long as they produce enough power to pay for themselves before they need replacing, then it's a good idea.
Even in the case of fission/thermal rockets (e.g., NERVA), only about a third of the thrust of chemical rockets. They are less suitable for getting stuff into orbit than chemical rockets.
The thrust is lower, but so is the mass of the engine and fuel. When used in second or subsequent stages this means you can be carrying a bigger payload and still be traveling faster after the first-stage burn, meaning less thrust is needed from subsequent stages to reach orbit.
However it's hardly a revolution in lift capacity given the revolution in power source. Doubling the payload is an impressive gain, but is it impressive enough to actually build and operate and fight the political battles when instead you could just launch two regular rockets?
But building a spacecraft or spaceship with such a concept in place will take a monumental increase in lifting capacity. We've taken chem rockets about as far as they are going to go - nuclear is the way if we can ever get over our irrational fear of the stuff.
Or we could give up on the idea of lifting entire spacecraft and every component on them in a single launch. Think less like Apollo and more like the ISS. Lift components separately on cheap, commodity rockets, assemble in space, lift water and fuel in separate launches.
It's not as sexy as the giant launcher, but much more flexible. Also more attainable.
We're quite a ways from nuclear rockets even if the environment were politically amenable. I think we'll need quite a while of demonstrating vastly improved safety in rockets and in nuclear power before anyone becomes comfortable with combining them, and I don't think that's an entirely irrational position.
The self-immolation would have meant nothing (and in fact probably never would have happened in the first place) if it hadn't been for the conditions preceding it. Bouazizi was an early indication, not a catalyst.
Actually "catalyst" is what we call the situation you are describing.
A catalyst is useless without the proper reagents. Yet, when the proper reagents are present, the addition of a catalyst can reduce the energy level required for the reaction to begin to the point where it is already met, and the reaction spontaneously begins.
This is both what a catalyst means in chemistry, and in common usage -- something that takes a pre-existing situation, and pushes it over some kind of threshold.
You try dragging a 55 tonne block up an inclined plane using only a wheel.
Um... it's not that hard. That's the whole point of having an inclined plane. I even saw a documentary where a small group of archaeologists were able to do it. It doesn't even take huge numbers of slaves to do it like sibling said; that just helps when the scale of the entire project is so large. There were far fewer slaves and a lot more well-paid skilled workers involved than commonly thought, anyway.
And that astronomical calculator is very impressive. But it doesn't demonstrate any technology we don't already know the Greeks had -- all the necessary geometry, astronomy, and machines were present. It's just remarkable for its degree of sophistication. It does not in any way imply that the Greeks -- much less the Egyptians -- had super-advanced technology. Hell, we know the Greeks had invented the steam engine in the aeolipile, but couldn't think of any practical use for it.
Lol. If Flat Earthers were claiming that on a small enough scale sections of the earth can be described as flat, they wouldn't be called Flat Earthers they'd be called "normal people".
Look, I don't think anyone should be discriminated against based on what they believe. If you believe in Jesus, or Allah, or Krishna, or Xenu, or aliens hiding behind a comet, that's fine, that's just a basic freedom in our country, to believe whatever you want. But how can you research these things outside of the context of history, anthropology, sociology, or psychology? I.e. not as human phenomenon, but physical phenomenon?
I mean, I believe in God and Jesus, but can you imagine if I submitted a paper that was like: "MOSFET in sub-threshold modes modulated by resonance with the Holy Spirit". That paper would, necessarily, be a steaming pile of shit and as unscientific as is possible, and should be rejected. And if I insisted on pursuing that as a line of "research", then damn right I should be disqualified from a research position! That's not discriminating against my religion and beliefs, that's discriminating against my utter suckage at science!
So yeah, it should be (and is) illegal discrimination to reject someone from a job because they say they are a Christian (or Hindu etc), but if they answer "Man was created spontaneously by God, and Woman was crafted from one of his ribs" in a biology exam they should get that question wrong, and if they want to "research" Creationism at a university, the university would be correct to not grant them the chance!
Not to denigrate the ingenuity of the ancients -- they were, after all, essentially identical to us today and no less clever -- but the only advanced technology evidenced by the Pyramids is the technology of the inclined plane and the wheel. There's a reason ancient pyramid-shaped buildings are found around the world, and it's because it's amenable to ramps.
There are no legends of Atlantis, except those created in the last couple centuries. There is, however, the writings of Plato where he created the concept of Atlantis, and explicitly said it was a made-up thought experiment and totally not real. For over a thousand years, everyone knew that. But then people who had never read Plato decided it must be a real place, and invented all kinds of stuff like that nonsense about "crystals".
The hieroglyphs(new link to get past Tripod) are just a case of your brain pattern matching for you. You forgot to mention the jet craft that doesn't look like it'd fly very well, and the "UFO" that would make the helicopter and jet plane obsolete. It's not like in context it says "Then we used our awesome [helicoptor glyph] to fight against the enemy's [jet fighter glyph], with the help of our friends from the sky in their [UFO glyph]. It only makes sense as language if you interpret as the Egyptologists do, as one set of writing superimposed on another. But I guess this is the one place where evidence for the Egyptian helicopter exists, in the middle of a bunch of gibberish babbling, and such fundamental technology just wasn't mentioned anywhere else.
And no, they did not know about genetics. The X and Y chromosomes differ by a lot more than a "rib". What they "knew" was that what they were writing was not intended to be taken as a science textbook.
They had a few centrifuges, out of the hundreds needed to produce significant enriched uranium, which there was no evidence they had any of. And even that was a surprise because we didn't know they had done that much until Qadhafi invited the inspectors into facilities we didn't know existed.
Which means if he'd been anywhere near developing a bomb, he could have kept quiet for a while and caught the world off-guard by announcing a nuclear deterrent. If he felt threatened by the example of Iraq, it's because he had no chance of following the example of North Korea. Since as we all know by now, the one state in the Axis of Evil that was attacked was the one that didn't have an active nuclear program.
So instead, Qadhafi gave up something that wasn't going anywhere or doing him any good anyway and got in exchange, because he'd technically done as we asked and come clean, the grudging support of the U.S.A. Pure win for Libya. A demonstration of the positive effects of invading Iraq? Ha! We got played.
Which, by the way, is always how Qadhafi deals. The reason Libya has so few allies is because every ally they've had, they've screwed over.
So what I'm saying is that back in 2003 (Libya actually initiated talks well before Saddam was captured, which was in Dec 2003), when Libya and only Libya came forward and said they were abandoning their weapons program, your response should have been suspicion, not "yay, the domino theory works!"
Also, and more importantly for today, be highly suspicious of any deals Qadhafi tries to make.
I only hope that this decision isn't too late for the rebellion. U.N./U.S. support for a home-grown revolution is the way things should be done, and can end with us being well-loved by the people. If it doesn't work, we'll be thought of as the too-little too-late do-nothings who didn't help and let them be crushed.
I think you exemplify the fundamental open source attitude, namely that only people who know how to code deserve to have a working computer, and everyone else has to pay through the nose that the coders may deign to help them.
Which is why Ubuntu is dedicated to making a simple Linux desktop that "just works" and requires no programming or even enthusiast system administration knowledge, and is still free in both senses of the word.
Go ahead and criticize how they're doing at attaining that goal, because it doesn't change that they are working for it and thus your characterization of "the fundamental open source attitude" is wrong.
But on the subject of reaching that goal, my ex-roomate, a complete computer neophyte, has been using Ubuntu for several years and hasn't had many problems that he wouldn't have had equally in Windows, and no problems requiring technical abilities aside from before when the driver for his wireless card was not included in the distro, and working around failing hardware. It's hardly perfect, but doing much, much better than I expected and lends (anecdotal) support to the idea that Windows only seems easier to use if it's what you learned first.
Running through Wine frequently means a loss of performance.
For WoW in particular, to get it to work stably and with everything looking correct you need to use the OpenGL render path, which Blizzard did not optimize as well as the DirectX path. People running WoW on a Mac have essentially the same problem.
For those few games which have native Linux versions, and where the OpenGL render path is a first-class citizen, Linux has been roughly equal to Windows (sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better) for a long, long time.
* Install NVIDIA drivers (slightly less easy; you have to shut down X and run one command line to install the drivers
In recent versions of Ubuntu, I haven't even had to do that.
I can't remember the exact procedure, mostly because it's easy enough to figure out the specifics next time, but the gist was:
Ubuntu desktop -> System menu -> Administration -> Hardware -> Enable or Detect Proprietary Drivers -> NVIDIA driver pops up in menu -> Install (downloads the driver for you and installs it) -> X restarts -> Done.
Yeah, but why isn't it *always* "loser pays"? Then, as a defendant, there is an incentive to settle if you already know you're guilty (it will cost you even more money), and there's an incentive to keep going if you know you are innocent (your costs will eventually be covered by the loser), and for the accuser to settle or not bring the case in the first place.
Because the first thing any decent lawyer is going to tell you when you sit down in their office is to forget this notion that because you "know" you are innocent, you "will" eventually win and your court costs "will" be covered. The world simply doesn't work that way.
The number of cases where you can be 100% certain that you are legally in the clear is vanishingly small. Even seemingly clear-cut cases of a Fair Use defense against infringement can hinge on subtle points of previous precedents that you know nothing about and your lawyer hasn't researched yet because at this point they haven't even taken the case. Especially in the general case, it is absolutely the case that just because you think you are in the right -- even if you are in the right -- that doesn't mean you will prevail in court.
So you, Average Joe, are being sued by a big corporation for twenty grand. You know you might lose, and you know that if you go to court, the corporation will do just about anything to win and avoid a negative precedent. Their legal costs could be many times what they're suing you for -- especially because if they win, you foot the bill. The twenty grand would be a severe hardship, but their legal fees would crush you. They're offering an out-of-court settlement of three grand, which sucks but you can manage.
How do you think most people are going to see this? They're no longer just gambling the cost of the suit, but the cost of a high-priced corporate legal team.
Universal "loser pays" would not encourage most people to stand up to lawsuits. It would have a severe chilling effect. It would give the big corporations an even bigger advantage, beyond already having more expensive lawyers than you. Because they could trivially pay for your lawyer fees, but you could not come close to paying for theirs. Any decent lawyer would tell you to be extremely careful when deciding to stand up to them, and any sane client would listen.
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Dude, it should only take 60 seconds to refill your screwdriver if you've already thrown back a half dozen.
We all did, but once we grow up, we have to realize that not every problem can be solved by liberal application of the Spread Gun.
Though I'll admit it's at least worth trying.
An huge earthquake, then a huge tsunami. And hell, past designs (just more recent than the damage reactors) would make things safer.
But don't fool yourself. Just because you have more confidence in nuclear power, you better believe most people aren't going to see it that way. The people that already think Three Mile Island proves nuclear is too dangerous are going to see this -- which is indeed worse than TMI -- as ultra-super-undeniable proof that nuclear power will kill us all.
All because -- ONCE AGAIN -- we (human kind) are too cheap and short-sighted to do something expensive today that will avoid a vastly higher expense in the future. Oh sure this old reactor design requires active coolant pumping at all times, but between the reactor itself and the backup diesel generators, we've got that covered! Sure it'd be a disaster if something somehow knocked out all power, like a giant earthquake or a tsunami or something, but what are the odds of that? Fixing the "problem" would cost too much!
Duh, everyone knows that you can solve that problem with counter-rotating flywheels.
Oh no, I've already had enough of this "Contras will fix everything" philosophy.
The technology developed in the 80's could have been deployed much sooner and there are designs of plants that are approved (some of which have even been built). There is even new technology that could have been retrofitted on the old reactors to make them safer. The major problem is that it is so hard to build a new plant that we are continuing to milk these old plants for all that they are worth.
That's what I meant by "could have built", as in "we could have new reactors using the 1980s technology built by 2030 if we started today", because the reality is regardless of whether 1980s-tech reactors would have been operational by now is irrelevant because we didn't build them. So we'd have to start from the reality of today, which is no construction and minimal research into these designs in the U.S. It was worded poorly, I know.
Yeah, as in all other modern designs.
Passive cooling has been the hot new thing since, you know, the 80s.
It's funny, because I've seen a couple U.S. nuclear industry representatives/experts on TV being asked about the disaster, could it happen to our reactors, is nuclear power safe? And they'd hem and haw and talk about designing structures around local conditions. Nothing about technology itself. I'm guessing because they don't want to have to talk about how outdated reactor designs in the U.S. are, and how we didn't keep up in research so they're going to be outdated for quite some time. Especially since when your unfortunate take-away message is "Um, yeah, it totally could happen here if there was an unprecedented earthquake", you don't really make people feel much better by saying "But technology developed in the 1980s and which we could have built by the 2030s won't have that problem!"
I don't know that they will, but that's the criterion for judging if it makes sense to do it. Obviously it would be more likely with twice as much sun, but that doesn't mean it isn't net-positive here.
As they're already doing like 50 "green" things to the tower, it wouldn't make sense to just throw this one on the pile for a trivial shift in perception, if it wasn't worth it economically.
So, like I said, I don't know that it is worth it, but it is not impossible, and I'm certainly not going to take the lack of specific engineering figures in a news article to imply that it isn't.
This is nothing at all like a major landmark being renamed by a megacorporation. In fact, renaming Denali to McKinley is akin to renaming the Sears Tower to Willis Tower. Changing McKinley back to Denali would be like changing Willis Tower back to Sears Tower.
Heh. I'm having a vision of 40 years in the future of someone complaining that the iconic Willis Tower of Chicago is having it's name bastardized and changed to Sears of all things. The nerve!
Only if the net output of the solar cells over their projected lifetime exceeds the energy costs to manufacture them and affix them to the side of the building.
Which, since they are conducting an extensive remodel of the building to improve energy efficiency including replacing the single-pane windows anyway, they most likely will, that makes it a good decision.
Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be -- a good engineer looks for the most efficient means of accomplishing the objective.
Exactly, and that often means making use of multiple techniques in concert, including some smaller optimizations that nevertheless contribute to the overall objective, and ideally take advantage of changes you're already making. For example, you might see that one of the biggest improvements you can make to the building is to replace all the old poorly insulated windows with new efficient ones. And then you can look at whether or not in-window solar would be worth it in the context of having already decided to replace all the windows.
Sure it'd be more efficient to put them on high rises in Phoenix. Sadly, though, the Sears Tower would still be in Chicago, consuming all that energy. The solar panels are just one part of the retrofit designed to reduce the building's external power consumption. And regardless of how much better solar panels perform in Arizona instead of Chicago, as long as they produce enough power to pay for themselves before they need replacing, then it's a good idea.
And here I always thought Chicago's John Hancock building, which was built first, was known as the John Hancock.
Even in the case of fission/thermal rockets (e.g., NERVA), only about a third of the thrust of chemical rockets. They are less suitable for getting stuff into orbit than chemical rockets.
The thrust is lower, but so is the mass of the engine and fuel. When used in second or subsequent stages this means you can be carrying a bigger payload and still be traveling faster after the first-stage burn, meaning less thrust is needed from subsequent stages to reach orbit.
However it's hardly a revolution in lift capacity given the revolution in power source. Doubling the payload is an impressive gain, but is it impressive enough to actually build and operate and fight the political battles when instead you could just launch two regular rockets?
But building a spacecraft or spaceship with such a concept in place will take a monumental increase in lifting capacity. We've taken chem rockets about as far as they are going to go - nuclear is the way if we can ever get over our irrational fear of the stuff.
Or we could give up on the idea of lifting entire spacecraft and every component on them in a single launch. Think less like Apollo and more like the ISS. Lift components separately on cheap, commodity rockets, assemble in space, lift water and fuel in separate launches.
It's not as sexy as the giant launcher, but much more flexible. Also more attainable.
We're quite a ways from nuclear rockets even if the environment were politically amenable. I think we'll need quite a while of demonstrating vastly improved safety in rockets and in nuclear power before anyone becomes comfortable with combining them, and I don't think that's an entirely irrational position.
The self-immolation would have meant nothing (and in fact probably never would have happened in the first place) if it hadn't been for the conditions preceding it. Bouazizi was an early indication, not a catalyst.
Actually "catalyst" is what we call the situation you are describing.
A catalyst is useless without the proper reagents. Yet, when the proper reagents are present, the addition of a catalyst can reduce the energy level required for the reaction to begin to the point where it is already met, and the reaction spontaneously begins.
This is both what a catalyst means in chemistry, and in common usage -- something that takes a pre-existing situation, and pushes it over some kind of threshold.
Coffee for everyone!
[circa 1870] Rich Texans are complaining that they now have to pay the 'Help'.
Which was why they wanted to leave Mexico in the first place.
You try dragging a 55 tonne block up an inclined plane using only a wheel.
Um... it's not that hard. That's the whole point of having an inclined plane. I even saw a documentary where a small group of archaeologists were able to do it. It doesn't even take huge numbers of slaves to do it like sibling said; that just helps when the scale of the entire project is so large. There were far fewer slaves and a lot more well-paid skilled workers involved than commonly thought, anyway.
And that astronomical calculator is very impressive. But it doesn't demonstrate any technology we don't already know the Greeks had -- all the necessary geometry, astronomy, and machines were present. It's just remarkable for its degree of sophistication. It does not in any way imply that the Greeks -- much less the Egyptians -- had super-advanced technology. Hell, we know the Greeks had invented the steam engine in the aeolipile, but couldn't think of any practical use for it.
They did not have helicopters.
Lol. If Flat Earthers were claiming that on a small enough scale sections of the earth can be described as flat, they wouldn't be called Flat Earthers they'd be called "normal people".
Look, I don't think anyone should be discriminated against based on what they believe. If you believe in Jesus, or Allah, or Krishna, or Xenu, or aliens hiding behind a comet, that's fine, that's just a basic freedom in our country, to believe whatever you want. But how can you research these things outside of the context of history, anthropology, sociology, or psychology? I.e. not as human phenomenon, but physical phenomenon?
I mean, I believe in God and Jesus, but can you imagine if I submitted a paper that was like: "MOSFET in sub-threshold modes modulated by resonance with the Holy Spirit". That paper would, necessarily, be a steaming pile of shit and as unscientific as is possible, and should be rejected. And if I insisted on pursuing that as a line of "research", then damn right I should be disqualified from a research position! That's not discriminating against my religion and beliefs, that's discriminating against my utter suckage at science!
So yeah, it should be (and is) illegal discrimination to reject someone from a job because they say they are a Christian (or Hindu etc), but if they answer "Man was created spontaneously by God, and Woman was crafted from one of his ribs" in a biology exam they should get that question wrong, and if they want to "research" Creationism at a university, the university would be correct to not grant them the chance!
Not to denigrate the ingenuity of the ancients -- they were, after all, essentially identical to us today and no less clever -- but the only advanced technology evidenced by the Pyramids is the technology of the inclined plane and the wheel. There's a reason ancient pyramid-shaped buildings are found around the world, and it's because it's amenable to ramps.
There are no legends of Atlantis, except those created in the last couple centuries. There is, however, the writings of Plato where he created the concept of Atlantis, and explicitly said it was a made-up thought experiment and totally not real. For over a thousand years, everyone knew that. But then people who had never read Plato decided it must be a real place, and invented all kinds of stuff like that nonsense about "crystals".
The hieroglyphs(new link to get past Tripod) are just a case of your brain pattern matching for you. You forgot to mention the jet craft that doesn't look like it'd fly very well, and the "UFO" that would make the helicopter and jet plane obsolete. It's not like in context it says "Then we used our awesome [helicoptor glyph] to fight against the enemy's [jet fighter glyph], with the help of our friends from the sky in their [UFO glyph]. It only makes sense as language if you interpret as the Egyptologists do, as one set of writing superimposed on another. But I guess this is the one place where evidence for the Egyptian helicopter exists, in the middle of a bunch of gibberish babbling, and such fundamental technology just wasn't mentioned anywhere else.
And no, they did not know about genetics. The X and Y chromosomes differ by a lot more than a "rib". What they "knew" was that what they were writing was not intended to be taken as a science textbook.
They had a few centrifuges, out of the hundreds needed to produce significant enriched uranium, which there was no evidence they had any of. And even that was a surprise because we didn't know they had done that much until Qadhafi invited the inspectors into facilities we didn't know existed.
Which means if he'd been anywhere near developing a bomb, he could have kept quiet for a while and caught the world off-guard by announcing a nuclear deterrent. If he felt threatened by the example of Iraq, it's because he had no chance of following the example of North Korea. Since as we all know by now, the one state in the Axis of Evil that was attacked was the one that didn't have an active nuclear program.
So instead, Qadhafi gave up something that wasn't going anywhere or doing him any good anyway and got in exchange, because he'd technically done as we asked and come clean, the grudging support of the U.S.A. Pure win for Libya. A demonstration of the positive effects of invading Iraq? Ha! We got played.
Which, by the way, is always how Qadhafi deals. The reason Libya has so few allies is because every ally they've had, they've screwed over.
So what I'm saying is that back in 2003 (Libya actually initiated talks well before Saddam was captured, which was in Dec 2003), when Libya and only Libya came forward and said they were abandoning their weapons program, your response should have been suspicion, not "yay, the domino theory works!"
Also, and more importantly for today, be highly suspicious of any deals Qadhafi tries to make.
I only hope that this decision isn't too late for the rebellion. U.N./U.S. support for a home-grown revolution is the way things should be done, and can end with us being well-loved by the people. If it doesn't work, we'll be thought of as the too-little too-late do-nothings who didn't help and let them be crushed.
I think you exemplify the fundamental open source attitude, namely that only people who know how to code deserve to have a working computer, and everyone else has to pay through the nose that the coders may deign to help them.
Which is why Ubuntu is dedicated to making a simple Linux desktop that "just works" and requires no programming or even enthusiast system administration knowledge, and is still free in both senses of the word.
Go ahead and criticize how they're doing at attaining that goal, because it doesn't change that they are working for it and thus your characterization of "the fundamental open source attitude" is wrong.
But on the subject of reaching that goal, my ex-roomate, a complete computer neophyte, has been using Ubuntu for several years and hasn't had many problems that he wouldn't have had equally in Windows, and no problems requiring technical abilities aside from before when the driver for his wireless card was not included in the distro, and working around failing hardware. It's hardly perfect, but doing much, much better than I expected and lends (anecdotal) support to the idea that Windows only seems easier to use if it's what you learned first.
Running through Wine frequently means a loss of performance.
For WoW in particular, to get it to work stably and with everything looking correct you need to use the OpenGL render path, which Blizzard did not optimize as well as the DirectX path. People running WoW on a Mac have essentially the same problem.
For those few games which have native Linux versions, and where the OpenGL render path is a first-class citizen, Linux has been roughly equal to Windows (sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better) for a long, long time.
* Install NVIDIA drivers (slightly less easy; you have to shut down X and run one command line to install the drivers
In recent versions of Ubuntu, I haven't even had to do that.
I can't remember the exact procedure, mostly because it's easy enough to figure out the specifics next time, but the gist was:
Ubuntu desktop -> System menu -> Administration -> Hardware -> Enable or Detect Proprietary Drivers -> NVIDIA driver pops up in menu -> Install (downloads the driver for you and installs it) -> X restarts -> Done.
Yeah, but why isn't it *always* "loser pays"? Then, as a defendant, there is an incentive to settle if you already know you're guilty (it will cost you even more money), and there's an incentive to keep going if you know you are innocent (your costs will eventually be covered by the loser), and for the accuser to settle or not bring the case in the first place.
Because the first thing any decent lawyer is going to tell you when you sit down in their office is to forget this notion that because you "know" you are innocent, you "will" eventually win and your court costs "will" be covered. The world simply doesn't work that way.
The number of cases where you can be 100% certain that you are legally in the clear is vanishingly small. Even seemingly clear-cut cases of a Fair Use defense against infringement can hinge on subtle points of previous precedents that you know nothing about and your lawyer hasn't researched yet because at this point they haven't even taken the case. Especially in the general case, it is absolutely the case that just because you think you are in the right -- even if you are in the right -- that doesn't mean you will prevail in court.
So you, Average Joe, are being sued by a big corporation for twenty grand. You know you might lose, and you know that if you go to court, the corporation will do just about anything to win and avoid a negative precedent. Their legal costs could be many times what they're suing you for -- especially because if they win, you foot the bill. The twenty grand would be a severe hardship, but their legal fees would crush you. They're offering an out-of-court settlement of three grand, which sucks but you can manage.
How do you think most people are going to see this? They're no longer just gambling the cost of the suit, but the cost of a high-priced corporate legal team.
Universal "loser pays" would not encourage most people to stand up to lawsuits. It would have a severe chilling effect. It would give the big corporations an even bigger advantage, beyond already having more expensive lawyers than you. Because they could trivially pay for your lawyer fees, but you could not come close to paying for theirs. Any decent lawyer would tell you to be extremely careful when deciding to stand up to them, and any sane client would listen.