Democrats!=liberal. The sooner everybody realizes this, the sooner we can actually have a liberal party in the US.
However:
- Democrats = Liberal, but
- liberal != Liberal
Closest idology and party to classical liberals these days are the large-L and small-L (Ll)ibertarians, respectively.
Too bad the Libertarians are clueless about order dependencies in achieving their goals and take any advance they can get.
Example: They're willing to go for open borders BEFORE fixing (or eliminating) the social welfare programs. Doing things in that order makes things worse rather than better.
(That's why I sometimes style myself as a law-n-order anarchist. I think it would be good to repeal all the laws, but in the correct order.)
OK, as a bleeding heart liberal... I'll take McCain, even though I disagree with him on several issues, over Hillary any day.
McCain hasn't a chance of a Republican presidential nomination. (He might manage one if he switches to the Democrats and both Hillary and Obama self-destruct.)
McCain blew it a couple election cycles ago when he sold out the gunnies. He's also a liberal on a number of other issues. (Major exception being the war in Iraq.)
There's a term of art in US politics: "RINO". Stands for "Republican In Name Only" - a politician who is a member of the Republican party but has liberal opinions. At the state level the poster-child RINO is Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the federal level it's McCain
... we only allow automotive analogies here. Please rephrase.
It's analogous to a car designed so that, when you mount the new model tires, the axles break and the wheels fall off. Then you can't drive the car until you install the new "free" axle/wheel set - which is designed to break when the NEXT tire "upgrade" is installed.
Or a car with an engine control computer designed so that, when you fill the tank with the EPA-mandated "environmentally safe" goofy gas (winter 2007 version), detects the formulation and stops firing the spark plugs - remembering not to fire the plugs even if you pump out all the gas and refill it with old gas from a gas can. Then you can't run it until you install a new firmware module in the engine control computer - which in turn is designed to do the same thing when the summer 2008 gas formulation is detected (and also to keep you from driving more than 55 MPH or more than 10 hours in any week...).
In courts, patents are given the binding effect of a law---with the same rules for statutory interpretation, etc. So, if you patent an illegal thing, then it would be legal.
Not at all.
A patent is a license to sue anyone who "practices an invention" without the permission of the patent holder. It is NOT a license to practice the invention despite laws to the contrary. (It can't. Laws are made and repealed by the legislative branch. Patents are issued by the executive branch, which does not have the authority to make or repeal law.)
Imagine, for instance, a patent on a new way of killing a person using electricity. Killing people is illegal, right? Yet Edison was able to get a patent on the electric chair.
But it's legal for the government to kill convicted prisoners? Well, sometimes. (For a while there it wasn't.) Which gets us back to my original assertion: Practicing some particular invention may be legal in some circumstances and not in others, or illegal in ALL circumstances at some TIMES but not others.
The patent office's job is not to pass judgment on the legality of the practice of the invention. That's reserved for the courts (while changing what is legal is reserved to the legislature - with some input from the chief executive). The Patent office's job is to certify the novelty of the invention, reserve practice of it, for a time, to its inventor and his licenses (rather than anyone who could do it), and publish a description of the method. If there are no circumstances where it can be practiced without breaking one law or another, that's an issue between the inventor and law enforcement.
The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority.
Meanwhile you could sue everybody accused of breaking the law in your particular way.
The police do your investigating and the prosecutor does the work of putting the information together for you, too. And the jailers keep the infringer in a known place for your process server. How convenient.
But the RIAA *can* lose its ability to enforce the copyrights at all.... the companies would have to come after you individually - at least until they get a new method in place.
I can definitely see a judge thinking this way.
Since acting as its members' copyright-enforcement organization is virtually the entire function of the RIAA such a decision would utterly sink it.
Leaving exactly the decision-makers who chose to proceed with these tactics, along with the hirelings who implemented their policy when they should have known it was wrong, looking for work.
If the RIAA did only once or twice, the RIAA could say it was a simple mistake and/or blame it on the lawyer. With many cases in many states, it establishes a pattern. They don't do their homework. They sue people without cause. They do it often.
More importantly:
- They continue to initiate new suits doing the same thing after it has been established that they're doing things wrong, and
- they admitted in public that they knew they were hurting innocents and that they considered this collateral damage legitimate.
I suspect that these were the last two ducklings that had to fall in line. Once they were in position the EFF could fire their shot the next time a case got to the stage that exposed the target.
Danger danger, Will Robinson! Mixed metaphors off the starboard bow!
Sunspots correspond to increased solar activity, which in turn translates to more solar wind arriving at Earth. This is what is thought to affect Earth's weather.
One theory on how this might happen is that:
- Increased solar activity
- Increases the solar mag field near earth, which
- Increases deflection of incoming primary cosmic rays, which
- Reduces incoming primary and secondary cosmic rays, which
- Reduces ionization in the troposphere, which
- Reduces cloud formation, which
- Reduces reflection of incoming sunlight, which
- Warms the Earth. Meanwhile the solar wind particles on a collision course with Earth get deflected by the Earth's own field, creating nice lights in the upper atmosphere near the poles but not making it down to the troposphere and thus not affecting cloud cover directly.
Of course this doesn't explain why Mars is also warming lately.
... the "blockage" isn't at all a blockage,... there is no "sapping" of power. This gives you the entire center cavity for payload, instead of making it a hollow cylinder like a ducted fan would require.
It also causes the lift (and thrust) to appear distributed over the surface of the fuselage (except for the very center), where it can be easily transferred to support the payload.
With a helicopter lift appears on the rotor. It must first be focussed on the rotor shaft, then passed through a bearing, and finally distributed to the airframe via a skeleton that is hung from the bearing. Here there is a local tug-of-war between the rotor and the center of the fuselage, then the lift appears in a ring around it.
Same idea as the "flying wing". Or Bucky Fuller's "all the strength is distributed through the skin" geodesic designs, with their fantastic strength-to-weight ratios.
Also:
- The system is more stable with the lift appearing in the outer regions rather than at the center.
- With a broad lifting surface (like an airplane wing) more ordinary control surfaces can manage the craft's flight - or you can modulate the lift in patches by valving in air leaks to selectively break the airstream attachment.
- In a helicopter much of the control is done by dynamically adjusting the pitch of the blades using a complicated control structure and shafts in bearings that constantly dither once per rotor rotation - then the forces must be transferred by applying bending stress to the rotor shaft! With the coanda saucer the blades are a solid structure that only creates an airflow, while the control structures only move when the control parameters change.
- Unlike a helicopter, lift can be adjusted to trim out major offsets of the load's center of gravity.
The "Club of Rome" models were available, too. Yet their predictions of global disaster from overpopulation and pollution didn't come to pass.
At the time it took a mainframe surrounded by "priests in white coats" to run the models. With the advent of personal computers and broad programming education the models were run by people not part of the "club": They tracked the historical record up to the release date then diverged drastically.
So their guts were examined and they were found to have built-in assumptions that were flat out false (to the point that some consider them to be rigged).
The biggest false assumptions related to technology and invention: Major inventions were modeled as dated switch functions. Of course these all stopped at the date of the work - implying no future inventions. (And how WOULD you predict invention?) Increase in the use of technology was assumed to proportionally increase pollution, and so on.
(In fact what happened was technology continued to improve, and pollution was minimized in the process: Combustion was optimized - eliminating energy lost creating nitrogen oxides and "acid rain". Scrubbers pulled sulfur, ash, and other garbage from stacks - and they were sold as feedstocks for other processes - building material, chemical processing, etc. Recaptured sulfur alone would have paid for the equipment investment if it hadn't driven the price down to the point that sulfur mining essentally ended - another environmental benefit.
The new global warming models may be more honest. For starters, they don't track the historical record, which implies that they weren't tweaked to produce the desired result. B-) But it will take a while for the rest of the world to run them, examine them, and see whether they have flaws.
Meanwhile (like the Club of Rome's models) the agencies funding their development have an incentive to produce "scientific predictions" that can serve as an excuse for increased governmental power. Even if this doesn't bias the awarding of contracts, the perception that it might may affect the work of researchers. The models already say what the funding agencies want, so don't expect the
The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate.
So? The human contribution to CO2 is miniscule compared to the natural emissions. Water vapor is a far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide and the water vapor content of the atmosphere swings wildly. Water condensed into clouds and fog is an even greater modulator of solar input.
Climate is complicated. There's no reason to assume that a miniscule push given by one aspect of human activity is the cause of any observed change in temperature - even if the change happens to be in the direction of the push.
Meanwhile those models don't match the historical record. Some particulars if interest:
- CO2 rise LAGS (by a considerable amount) global temperature.
- Global temperature tightly tracks sunspot activity (without significant lag). (Can you tell me how CO2 "pollution" affects sunspots?) IMHO this is more consistent with the idea that the sun is the major controller of global temparature, with CO2 levels primarily an effect rather than a cause - driven by the reduced solubility of CO2 in warmer ocean water (which only changes temperature on millennial time scales).
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong,
We're on the same page there.
but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
When it comes to making policy that involves massive government intervention in economic activity and private lives - from crashing economies through taxing fuels into unavailability to mandating types of light bulbs - the burden of proof that there really IS a "disease" worse than the "cure" is on those who want to seize the power and use it to make the intervention.
I can see the value (not necessarily M$'s offering) for telecoms like Cingular, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc.
They've been doing "cell cite in a container" for years.
- Bring in the power and fiber or whatever (assuming it's not going to use a directional microwave link for the uplink side). - Pour a slab for the tower and container foundation.
- Erect a fence.
- Bolt the tower / antenna assembly onto the slab.
- Deliver the container to the slab and bolt THAT down.
- Hook up the power, landline, and antenna cabling.
- Turn on and configure.
- Lock up and leave.
I know that, some years ago, the Internet Archive people were looking into building archive mirror sites into containers, then shipping them to distant parts of the globe.
Idea was multifold:
- Backup against natural disasters,
- eliminating transcontinental bandwidth bottlenecks for archive users,
- having a cheap, easy-to-build-and-deploy datacenter (Build, test, and load initial content where convenient, then ship it cheap, install it, check it out), and
- have a low-profile site to avoid vandalism and theft of equipment (a container on a slab with a fiber and a power drop).
- having
But until a commercial product is being produced and some sensible grasp of the scale economies involved can be determined, any cost projections are pie in the sky.
Also: You need to know how long the technology's panels will last.
At the current interest rates it does you no good to pay only a tenth the cost if it stops working in a thirtieth of the time. Not to mention that having to replace your shingles and siding every couple years because it quit generating adds still more costs - not all of them directly economic.
What are chances that the geographical areas where these contraptions are installed get hit by bad weather (i.e. typhoons, tornados, hurricanes, hailstorms, lightning, etc)?
They're in the jet stream. That's up at the TOP of the troposphere. The turbulent violence you're talking about happens further down - the top mostly just has winds, and the jet stream is already the worst of it.
Assuming the power station comes down in any uncontrolled fashion, and from the heights they are talking about and the strong jet stream winds they are dealing with, the power generation station could potentially travel many miles before it hits ground, endangering a very very large area below.
Now that would depend on the type of elevated structure. But most of them have acceptable failure mechanisms.
For instance: The four-bladed "helicopter" should auto-gyro nicely. If it loses its tether the blades keep spinning and keep providing lift - in the correct direction even. By transferring power from one blade to another as needed you can navigate it like a glider - even upwind, trading altitude for blade momentum as you drop. This lets you fly it to a landing area, landing vertically and quite gently, even without any additional power source onboard. Or find an updraft and soar until any crummy weather at ground level has moved on.
Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
Even of the wind that actually passes through the area "swept" by the blades, the max it can harvest is about 59.3%. This is the "Betz Limit", the aerodynamic counterpart of the Laugher Curve of government revenue versus tax rates:
- Extracting power slows and deflects the air.
- Slowing and deflecting the air reduces the amount of moving air you can extract power from.
- Don't slow/deflect it and you get no power, stop it completely and you get no air - and thus no power. Zero at both ends, non-zero between. Somewhere there's a maximum.
- The maximum (for compressible fluids in free space) is where you extract 16/27ths of the energy from the air you affect (which is essentially the stream of air that passes through the area swept by the blades).
Real turbines can get very close to that, and most of the shortfall is a bit of energy left as rotation and turbulence in the wake.
I often thought that it likely the really, really poor quality sound you'll find in drive-ins
Near the end of the era they were also using carrier-current FM transmission of the sound. Park next to the post with the crummy speaker and turn on your car's sound system: Bingo! Dolby stereo HiFi. (Nowadays they could also be sending surround sound.)
And you can't really have a drive-in multiplex.
As of maybe a year ago there was one of those operating near Sacremento. Four screens on four sides of the lot, with parking spaces facing each, projector house and concession stand in the middle.
Drive in theaters would still be viable if there was enough people-awake dark time during decent weather for people to use them. As it is they're mostly gone, and the few that continue are mainly in places that have warm winters.
If they insert patented software into a GPL project, they still have to license the new patent-encumbered version to other users under the GPL.
And they do. No problem there.
My issue is with OTHER people taking the stuff they modified (which thus carries a license to the patents they intended to license) and inserting MORE code in a way that infringes OTHER of their patents that they DIDN'T intend to license. They should still be able to sue over THOSE infringements.
If they can't, releasing GPLed code would become a big risk for them. That would greatly retard the adoption by large corporations of GPLed code and contributions by them - of code and patent licenses - back to the community.
Taking code a corporation once touched and hacking it totally out of shape mustn't confer a license to raid their entire patent portfolio.
GPLv3 is intended to keep a company from inserting covered by one or more of their patents from then suing downstream users of the modified code. As such it effectively lets them waive SELECTED patents.
But does it also prevent them from suing somebody downstream who inserts (or uses/distributes code where some middle-man inserted) additional code that infringes on OTHER patents than the ones covering what they themselves inserted?
IMHO it SHOULD do the former and not the latter. Otherwise distributing GPLv3ed code would effectively wipe out a company's entire patent portfolio - which would inhibit companies who have and value such a patent collection (if only for defense against others) from using GPLv3.
But IANAL - and haven't even studied the draft. Can someone who understands law AND has studied the draft tell us if this pitfall was avoided?
Perhaps you have not read the first chapter of "Distress" by Greg Egan. He presents a version of resurrection that few of us would wish on ourselves, our friends, or even our enemies.
Thanks for the reference. I'll try to give it a read once (if ever?) things get less hectic.
Meanwhile, the resurrection I'm referring to is just an extreme version of resussicitation and medical repair: Going beyond the half-hour of clinical death of a drowning victim in cold water and patching broken bones to hauling somebody's head out of the liquid nitrogen and rebuilding him/her into an idealization of the body he/she had (or should have) at 18 - with a few tweaks to hold off disease, reduce aging, etc. B-)
And one spring, back when radio synchronized clocks were new stuff, the guy responsible forgot to flip the toggle switch.
At least one major city's traffic lights had been converted to using the shiny new radio clocks for synchronization (so they could stop paying the tellco by the month for a copper pair to each traffic light control box). So the traffic lights stayed on the "night" schedule for an hour into the morning rush, utterly fouling traffic. It took 'em hours to figure out what the heck had happened.
alternatively...we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.
Getting rid of it altogether requires far less IT effort than moving it. Most systems can just be configured to run on standard rather than auto-daylight time. The rest you can just strip it out - much easier than putting it in or tweaking it every time the legislature gets another hive of bees in their bonnets.
Staying with DST means a major ongoing hassle for any new scheduling application. Do you have any IDEA what a pain it is to program those with DST changes? *I* do: I had to do it for a client. What do you do with the 25 hour day - especially the hour that happens twice? What do you do with the 23 hour day?
I hear the railroads handle it like this:
- In the spring all the trains are suddenly an hour late, and try to make up the time over the next day.
- In the fall they actually STOP them and let them SIT for an hour.
I hear the worst day for commuter traffic deaths is the first Monday of DST. (It's rush hour with ALL the drivers jet-lagged simultaneously.)
I don't [like the extra daylight]. In fact, I fucking hate it. The sun is trying to kill me, and giving it any more opportunities to do that doesn't make me any happier.
I'm with you.
In the summer we already have extra sunlight. Why try to "save" more? What we're short of is night time - sunless recreation time. That puts a crimp on "night people" like me, and "daylight savings time" steals ANOTHER hour of the scarce resource.
It seems to me that the institution of permanent DST was the major factor in the demise of the drive in theaters, just for starters. (But DST is really handy for crooks because it results in far fewer people being alert when many of them ply their trades.)
So IMHO what we need to do is turn the clocks BACK during the summer, to get access to more of the scarce and valuable dark hours.
Since when is Global Warming even remotely related to science?
Perhaps it's related to science the same way as the Piltdown Man. B-)
But it's "News for Nerds" whether it's good science, bad science, or a hoax in science clothing. For different reasons in each case, perhaps, but "News for Nerds" nonetheless.
It's really "The Courts". (Unfortunately that seems to be lumped into YRO.)
How is it News for "Nerds" ?
- It's regulation of tech.
- It's related to science.
- It's going to require major technological innovation.
- It's likely to drastically affect nerds' ability to use technology and/or energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Democrats!=liberal. The sooner everybody realizes this, the sooner we can actually have a liberal party in the US.
However:
- Democrats = Liberal, but
- liberal != Liberal
Closest idology and party to classical liberals these days are the large-L and small-L (Ll)ibertarians, respectively.
Too bad the Libertarians are clueless about order dependencies in achieving their goals and take any advance they can get.
Example: They're willing to go for open borders BEFORE fixing (or eliminating) the social welfare programs. Doing things in that order makes things worse rather than better.
(That's why I sometimes style myself as a law-n-order anarchist. I think it would be good to repeal all the laws, but in the correct order.)
OK, as a bleeding heart liberal ... I'll take McCain, even though I disagree with him on several issues, over Hillary any day.
McCain hasn't a chance of a Republican presidential nomination. (He might manage one if he switches to the Democrats and both Hillary and Obama self-destruct.)
McCain blew it a couple election cycles ago when he sold out the gunnies. He's also a liberal on a number of other issues. (Major exception being the war in Iraq.)
There's a term of art in US politics: "RINO". Stands for "Republican In Name Only" - a politician who is a member of the Republican party but has liberal opinions. At the state level the poster-child RINO is Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the federal level it's McCain
... we only allow automotive analogies here. Please rephrase.
It's analogous to a car designed so that, when you mount the new model tires, the axles break and the wheels fall off. Then you can't drive the car until you install the new "free" axle/wheel set - which is designed to break when the NEXT tire "upgrade" is installed.
Or a car with an engine control computer designed so that, when you fill the tank with the EPA-mandated "environmentally safe" goofy gas (winter 2007 version), detects the formulation and stops firing the spark plugs - remembering not to fire the plugs even if you pump out all the gas and refill it with old gas from a gas can. Then you can't run it until you install a new firmware module in the engine control computer - which in turn is designed to do the same thing when the summer 2008 gas formulation is detected (and also to keep you from driving more than 55 MPH or more than 10 hours in any week...).
In courts, patents are given the binding effect of a law---with the same rules for statutory interpretation, etc. So, if you patent an illegal thing, then it would be legal.
Not at all.
A patent is a license to sue anyone who "practices an invention" without the permission of the patent holder. It is NOT a license to practice the invention despite laws to the contrary. (It can't. Laws are made and repealed by the legislative branch. Patents are issued by the executive branch, which does not have the authority to make or repeal law.)
Imagine, for instance, a patent on a new way of killing a person using electricity. Killing people is illegal, right? Yet Edison was able to get a patent on the electric chair.
But it's legal for the government to kill convicted prisoners? Well, sometimes. (For a while there it wasn't.) Which gets us back to my original assertion: Practicing some particular invention may be legal in some circumstances and not in others, or illegal in ALL circumstances at some TIMES but not others.
The patent office's job is not to pass judgment on the legality of the practice of the invention. That's reserved for the courts (while changing what is legal is reserved to the legislature - with some input from the chief executive). The Patent office's job is to certify the novelty of the invention, reserve practice of it, for a time, to its inventor and his licenses (rather than anyone who could do it), and publish a description of the method. If there are no circumstances where it can be practiced without breaking one law or another, that's an issue between the inventor and law enforcement.
Can you patent an illegal process?
Why not?
The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority.
Meanwhile you could sue everybody accused of breaking the law in your particular way.
The police do your investigating and the prosecutor does the work of putting the information together for you, too. And the jailers keep the infringer in a known place for your process server. How convenient.
But the RIAA *can* lose its ability to enforce the copyrights at all. ... the companies would have to come after you individually - at least until they get a new method in place.
I can definitely see a judge thinking this way.
Since acting as its members' copyright-enforcement organization is virtually the entire function of the RIAA such a decision would utterly sink it.
Leaving exactly the decision-makers who chose to proceed with these tactics, along with the hirelings who implemented their policy when they should have known it was wrong, looking for work.
How perfectly right!
If the RIAA did only once or twice, the RIAA could say it was a simple mistake and/or blame it on the lawyer. With many cases in many states, it establishes a pattern. They don't do their homework. They sue people without cause. They do it often.
More importantly:
- They continue to initiate new suits doing the same thing after it has been established that they're doing things wrong, and
- they admitted in public that they knew they were hurting innocents and that they considered this collateral damage legitimate.
I suspect that these were the last two ducklings that had to fall in line. Once they were in position the EFF could fire their shot the next time a case got to the stage that exposed the target.
Danger danger, Will Robinson! Mixed metaphors off the starboard bow!
Sunspots correspond to increased solar activity, which in turn translates to more solar wind arriving at Earth. This is what is thought to affect Earth's weather.
One theory on how this might happen is that:
- Increased solar activity
- Increases the solar mag field near earth, which
- Increases deflection of incoming primary cosmic rays, which
- Reduces incoming primary and secondary cosmic rays, which
- Reduces ionization in the troposphere, which
- Reduces cloud formation, which
- Reduces reflection of incoming sunlight, which
- Warms the Earth.
Meanwhile the solar wind particles on a collision course with Earth get deflected by the Earth's own field, creating nice lights in the upper atmosphere near the poles but not making it down to the troposphere and thus not affecting cloud cover directly.
Of course this doesn't explain why Mars is also warming lately.
... the "blockage" isn't at all a blockage, ... there is no "sapping" of power. This gives you the entire center cavity for payload, instead of making it a hollow cylinder like a ducted fan would require.
It also causes the lift (and thrust) to appear distributed over the surface of the fuselage (except for the very center), where it can be easily transferred to support the payload.
With a helicopter lift appears on the rotor. It must first be focussed on the rotor shaft, then passed through a bearing, and finally distributed to the airframe via a skeleton that is hung from the bearing. Here there is a local tug-of-war between the rotor and the center of the fuselage, then the lift appears in a ring around it.
Same idea as the "flying wing". Or Bucky Fuller's "all the strength is distributed through the skin" geodesic designs, with their fantastic strength-to-weight ratios.
Also:
- The system is more stable with the lift appearing in the outer regions rather than at the center.
- With a broad lifting surface (like an airplane wing) more ordinary control surfaces can manage the craft's flight - or you can modulate the lift in patches by valving in air leaks to selectively break the airstream attachment.
- In a helicopter much of the control is done by dynamically adjusting the pitch of the blades using a complicated control structure and shafts in bearings that constantly dither once per rotor rotation - then the forces must be transferred by applying bending stress to the rotor shaft! With the coanda saucer the blades are a solid structure that only creates an airflow, while the control structures only move when the control parameters change.
- Unlike a helicopter, lift can be adjusted to trim out major offsets of the load's center of gravity.
The models are available for you to play with.
The "Club of Rome" models were available, too. Yet their predictions of global disaster from overpopulation and pollution didn't come to pass.
At the time it took a mainframe surrounded by "priests in white coats" to run the models. With the advent of personal computers and broad programming education the models were run by people not part of the "club": They tracked the historical record up to the release date then diverged drastically.
So their guts were examined and they were found to have built-in assumptions that were flat out false (to the point that some consider them to be rigged).
The biggest false assumptions related to technology and invention: Major inventions were modeled as dated switch functions. Of course these all stopped at the date of the work - implying no future inventions. (And how WOULD you predict invention?) Increase in the use of technology was assumed to proportionally increase pollution, and so on.
(In fact what happened was technology continued to improve, and pollution was minimized in the process: Combustion was optimized - eliminating energy lost creating nitrogen oxides and "acid rain". Scrubbers pulled sulfur, ash, and other garbage from stacks - and they were sold as feedstocks for other processes - building material, chemical processing, etc. Recaptured sulfur alone would have paid for the equipment investment if it hadn't driven the price down to the point that sulfur mining essentally ended - another environmental benefit.
The new global warming models may be more honest. For starters, they don't track the historical record, which implies that they weren't tweaked to produce the desired result. B-) But it will take a while for the rest of the world to run them, examine them, and see whether they have flaws.
Meanwhile (like the Club of Rome's models) the agencies funding their development have an incentive to produce "scientific predictions" that can serve as an excuse for increased governmental power. Even if this doesn't bias the awarding of contracts, the perception that it might may affect the work of researchers. The models already say what the funding agencies want, so don't expect the
The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate.
So? The human contribution to CO2 is miniscule compared to the natural emissions. Water vapor is a far more powerful "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide and the water vapor content of the atmosphere swings wildly. Water condensed into clouds and fog is an even greater modulator of solar input.
Climate is complicated. There's no reason to assume that a miniscule push given by one aspect of human activity is the cause of any observed change in temperature - even if the change happens to be in the direction of the push.
Meanwhile those models don't match the historical record. Some particulars if interest:
- CO2 rise LAGS (by a considerable amount) global temperature.
- Global temperature tightly tracks sunspot activity (without significant lag).
(Can you tell me how CO2 "pollution" affects sunspots?) IMHO this is more consistent with the idea that the sun is the major controller of global temparature, with CO2 levels primarily an effect rather than a cause - driven by the reduced solubility of CO2 in warmer ocean water (which only changes temperature on millennial time scales).
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong,
We're on the same page there.
but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
When it comes to making policy that involves massive government intervention in economic activity and private lives - from crashing economies through taxing fuels into unavailability to mandating types of light bulbs - the burden of proof that there really IS a "disease" worse than the "cure" is on those who want to seize the power and use it to make the intervention.
I can see the value (not necessarily M$'s offering) for telecoms like Cingular, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc.
They've been doing "cell cite in a container" for years.
- Bring in the power and fiber or whatever (assuming it's not going to use a directional microwave link for the uplink side). - Pour a slab for the tower and container foundation.
- Erect a fence.
- Bolt the tower / antenna assembly onto the slab.
- Deliver the container to the slab and bolt THAT down.
- Hook up the power, landline, and antenna cabling.
- Turn on and configure.
- Lock up and leave.
I know that, some years ago, the Internet Archive people were looking into building archive mirror sites into containers, then shipping them to distant parts of the globe.
Idea was multifold:
- Backup against natural disasters,
- eliminating transcontinental bandwidth bottlenecks for archive users,
- having a cheap, easy-to-build-and-deploy datacenter (Build, test, and load initial content where convenient, then ship it cheap, install it, check it out), and
- have a low-profile site to avoid vandalism and theft of equipment (a container on a slab with a fiber and a power drop).
- having
But until a commercial product is being produced and some sensible grasp of the scale economies involved can be determined, any cost projections are pie in the sky.
Also: You need to know how long the technology's panels will last.
At the current interest rates it does you no good to pay only a tenth the cost if it stops working in a thirtieth of the time. Not to mention that having to replace your shingles and siding every couple years because it quit generating adds still more costs - not all of them directly economic.
What are chances that the geographical areas where these contraptions are installed get hit by bad weather (i.e. typhoons, tornados, hurricanes, hailstorms, lightning, etc)?
They're in the jet stream. That's up at the TOP of the troposphere. The turbulent violence you're talking about happens further down - the top mostly just has winds, and the jet stream is already the worst of it.
Assuming the power station comes down in any uncontrolled fashion, and from the heights they are talking about and the strong jet stream winds they are dealing with, the power generation station could potentially travel many miles before it hits ground, endangering a very very large area below.
Now that would depend on the type of elevated structure. But most of them have acceptable failure mechanisms.
For instance: The four-bladed "helicopter" should auto-gyro nicely. If it loses its tether the blades keep spinning and keep providing lift - in the correct direction even. By transferring power from one blade to another as needed you can navigate it like a glider - even upwind, trading altitude for blade momentum as you drop. This lets you fly it to a landing area, landing vertically and quite gently, even without any additional power source onboard. Or find an updraft and soar until any crummy weather at ground level has moved on.
Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
Even of the wind that actually passes through the area "swept" by the blades, the max it can harvest is about 59.3%. This is the "Betz Limit", the aerodynamic counterpart of the Laugher Curve of government revenue versus tax rates:
- Extracting power slows and deflects the air.
- Slowing and deflecting the air reduces the amount of moving air you can extract power from.
- Don't slow/deflect it and you get no power, stop it completely and you get no air - and thus no power. Zero at both ends, non-zero between. Somewhere there's a maximum.
- The maximum (for compressible fluids in free space) is where you extract 16/27ths of the energy from the air you affect (which is essentially the stream of air that passes through the area swept by the blades).
Real turbines can get very close to that, and most of the shortfall is a bit of energy left as rotation and turbulence in the wake.
I often thought that it likely the really, really poor quality sound you'll find in drive-ins
Near the end of the era they were also using carrier-current FM transmission of the sound. Park next to the post with the crummy speaker and turn on your car's sound system: Bingo! Dolby stereo HiFi. (Nowadays they could also be sending surround sound.)
And you can't really have a drive-in multiplex.
As of maybe a year ago there was one of those operating near Sacremento. Four screens on four sides of the lot, with parking spaces facing each, projector house and concession stand in the middle.
Drive in theaters would still be viable if there was enough people-awake dark time during decent weather for people to use them. As it is they're mostly gone, and the few that continue are mainly in places that have warm winters.
EMS (peering into GPL's eyes) I'm sorry, I'm not seeing any Linus signs whatsoever.
No Linus signs? Didn't Linus say that draft 2 was enough better than draft 1 that he was actually considering using it?
Like last Thursday or so?
If they insert patented software into a GPL project, they still have to license the new patent-encumbered version to other users under the GPL.
And they do. No problem there.
My issue is with OTHER people taking the stuff they modified (which thus carries a license to the patents they intended to license) and inserting MORE code in a way that infringes OTHER of their patents that they DIDN'T intend to license. They should still be able to sue over THOSE infringements.
If they can't, releasing GPLed code would become a big risk for them. That would greatly retard the adoption by large corporations of GPLed code and contributions by them - of code and patent licenses - back to the community.
Taking code a corporation once touched and hacking it totally out of shape mustn't confer a license to raid their entire patent portfolio.
GPLv3 is intended to keep a company from inserting covered by one or more of their patents from then suing downstream users of the modified code. As such it effectively lets them waive SELECTED patents.
But does it also prevent them from suing somebody downstream who inserts (or uses/distributes code where some middle-man inserted) additional code that infringes on OTHER patents than the ones covering what they themselves inserted?
IMHO it SHOULD do the former and not the latter. Otherwise distributing GPLv3ed code would effectively wipe out a company's entire patent portfolio - which would inhibit companies who have and value such a patent collection (if only for defense against others) from using GPLv3.
But IANAL - and haven't even studied the draft. Can someone who understands law AND has studied the draft tell us if this pitfall was avoided?
Perhaps you have not read the first chapter of "Distress" by Greg Egan. He presents a version of resurrection that few of us would wish on ourselves, our friends, or even our enemies.
Thanks for the reference. I'll try to give it a read once (if ever?) things get less hectic.
Meanwhile, the resurrection I'm referring to is just an extreme version of resussicitation and medical repair: Going beyond the half-hour of clinical death of a drowning victim in cold water and patching broken bones to hauling somebody's head out of the liquid nitrogen and rebuilding him/her into an idealization of the body he/she had (or should have) at 18 - with a few tweaks to hold off disease, reduce aging, etc. B-)
And do you know how the bit is set?
A toggle switch.
And one spring, back when radio synchronized clocks were new stuff, the guy responsible forgot to flip the toggle switch.
At least one major city's traffic lights had been converted to using the shiny new radio clocks for synchronization (so they could stop paying the tellco by the month for a copper pair to each traffic light control box). So the traffic lights stayed on the "night" schedule for an hour into the morning rush, utterly fouling traffic. It took 'em hours to figure out what the heck had happened.
alternatively...we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.
Getting rid of it altogether requires far less IT effort than moving it. Most systems can just be configured to run on standard rather than auto-daylight time. The rest you can just strip it out - much easier than putting it in or tweaking it every time the legislature gets another hive of bees in their bonnets.
Staying with DST means a major ongoing hassle for any new scheduling application. Do you have any IDEA what a pain it is to program those with DST changes? *I* do: I had to do it for a client. What do you do with the 25 hour day - especially the hour that happens twice? What do you do with the 23 hour day?
I hear the railroads handle it like this:
- In the spring all the trains are suddenly an hour late, and try to make up the time over the next day.
- In the fall they actually STOP them and let them SIT for an hour.
I hear the worst day for commuter traffic deaths is the first Monday of DST. (It's rush hour with ALL the drivers jet-lagged simultaneously.)
I don't [like the extra daylight]. In fact, I fucking hate it. The sun is trying to kill me, and giving it any more opportunities to do that doesn't make me any happier.
I'm with you.
In the summer we already have extra sunlight. Why try to "save" more? What we're short of is night time - sunless recreation time. That puts a crimp on "night people" like me, and "daylight savings time" steals ANOTHER hour of the scarce resource.
It seems to me that the institution of permanent DST was the major factor in the demise of the drive in theaters, just for starters. (But DST is really handy for crooks because it results in far fewer people being alert when many of them ply their trades.)
So IMHO what we need to do is turn the clocks BACK during the summer, to get access to more of the scarce and valuable dark hours.
I call it "Nightlife Savings Time".
= = = =
Take Back the Night!
Since when is Global Warming even remotely related to science?
Perhaps it's related to science the same way as the Piltdown Man. B-)
But it's "News for Nerds" whether it's good science, bad science, or a hoax in science clothing. For different reasons in each case, perhaps, but "News for Nerds" nonetheless.
How is this Your Rights Online?
It's really "The Courts". (Unfortunately that seems to be lumped into YRO.)
How is it News for "Nerds" ?
- It's regulation of tech.
- It's related to science.
- It's going to require major technological innovation.
- It's likely to drastically affect nerds' ability to use technology and/or energy.
Just for starters