What do you mean, he wasn't hosting anything? That is patently incorrect. He was hosting a webpage which contained links to material which was copyright. He wasn't directly hosting material which was copyright, but he was aiding and abetting the unauthorized publishing by the third party sites of material which was copyright. I guess if it was a few random links in a sea of unrelated links, most of them untainted (as is the case with Google), he wouldn't be in a pile of trouble. After all, he wasn't just helping people who asked him how to find certain specific files (like Google does), he was proactively telling them through his site.
Look, I take violent exception to the DMCA, too, but it's the law of the land. The DMCA is what specifically criminalizes this kind of marginal act. The courts can imagine responsibility where you may not, and they are guided by the law. In this case, a benighted, immoral law. But unless we can get it ruled unconstitutional, or repealed, we're stuck with it.
The US voters are responsible for putting into office the knaves who were responsible for doing the bidding of mega corporations by passing the DMCA.
Your left wing slant is no better than right wing slant. I'll see your anecdote with my own. The Reagan years were by far the best of my life. The atmosphere was fresh and filled with hope, and the economy was suited and rewarding to entrepreneurship, and I was an (extremely petty) entrepreneur. OK, I was a one man contractor. The Reagan years followed the abject tumble into misery that was the Carter years, and preceded the long, burned-out, no-prospects, exhausted period that was the Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and is the Obama years. You can't deny the facts of my life, just like I can't deny those of yours. And you know what we both are? INDIVIDUAL cases. Big deal.
I'm with you on that. I want ONLY a consumption tax, provided there is an annual prebate for reasonable amounts of food, clothing, housing. It has the nice feature that interest on indebtedness automatically gets exempted by definition (it's not consumption). And interest on savings doesn't enter into it at all, any more than income. I can control my elective spending; I don't have the option of controlling my income because I need almost all of it for those essentials, including interest on indebtedness.
The other huge plus of a consumption tax is that you don't need a million pages of special rules, definitions, and loopholes. You buy it, you get taxed. Period. If Joe Average buys $1000 worth of Beefaroni and Spam (or tofu and sprouts if you prefer) in a year, it's all covered by the prebate. If Harry Billionaire buys $1 million worth of caviar, he gets taxed on almost the entire amount. Same with clothing and housing.
This is all so obvious, I'm afraid I can't help but attribute to malice the resistance to it.
So let me get this straight. The statement you are contesting says "the USA has had a deficit for almost every year of its existence." Your reference to "misleading" aside, you say the statement is "completely" false. Well, it is false for any reasonable definition of "almost every", but suppose it had said "a majority of the years" instead of "almost every year." Then it would be true, wouldn't it? And it would certainly be true for "almost every" when restricted to the range from 1960 through 2011, with covers the entire lifetimes of a majority of slashdot readers. Anyway, the simple fact is that, while significant deficits have been run in the past to cover the War of 1812, Civil War, WW I, Great Depression, and WW II, since 1970 we have had a huge run of deficits incurred without any such excuse, simply to cover normal operations.
As for the rest, let's leave tweedledee Democrat and tweedledum Republican out of it, shall we? Both have been approximately equally destructive and craven in the way they will not face reality.
There is no need to be vague or uncertain with the facts; the information is readily available right here. Here's the summary one can make of that data:
Longest run of DEFICIT years: 28 (1970-1997), integrating to 81.91% GDP Longest run of surplus years: 18 (1875-1892), integrating to 72.30% GDP Do you see a trend in terms of timeline?
First year of DEFICIT >10% GDP when not fully mobilized for an existential war: 2009. Didn't happen in the Great Depression, or at any other time since the founding of the Republic. We're going to duplicate that feat again this very year.
Integrated value of (DEFICITS as %GDP) since the founding: 301.69 Integrated value of (surpluses as %GDP) since the founding : 40.52
Years of DEFICIT since the founding: 117 Years of surplus since the founding: 104
Years of DEFICIT since 1960: 46 Years of surplus since 1960: 6 (SIX) (1 Bush 2, 3 Clinton, 1 Nixon, 1 Eisenhower)
Decades of net DEFICIT since the founding: 13 Decades of net surplus since the founding: 8
Decades of net DEFICIT since 1960: ALL OF THEM!!!
Decades of >10% integrated value of (DEFICIT as %GDP): 8 Decades of >10% integrated value of (surplus as %GDP): 0 (ZERO)
In the following tables all DEFICIT values are expressed as positive numbers and surpluses as negative numbers.
NOTE: I couldn't include the tables because slashdot has a STUPID AS SHIT lameass lines-too-short filter. I'll see if there's some way to put them in my profile.
Is there really any difference between the government owning industry and industry owning the government? Either way, they are in league, and to hell with the people. It seems to me, in both cases, it's more a case of them lying in the same bed than one owning the other.
This particular objection is childishly simple to address. Simply require that the principle make a living will in the presence of signed witnesses, spelling out in reasonable precision what his wishes are in the case where he becomes disabled and no longer able to make his wishes known. In the absence of such a living having been made, let the present status quo obtain.
Methinks the legal situation regarding this subject, in UK and many other jurisdictions, is more about institutional cravenness than about valid objections.
Straw man. Nobody is considering taking anyone's right to life away. Try dealing with the matter under consideration here. The right to autonomy of one's own person includes the right to decide the manner and timing of one's own passing. To try to withhold that most fundamental of all rights is the most cynical, domineering, and evil of all acts and policies.
Actually, your hasty speculation is incorrect. LWATCDR appears from his profile to be from the US, and the US imports essentially no coal. We are a slight exporter, but mostly just self sufficient in that particular resource. So no, there are no miners in third world countries laboring in terrible conditions, being injured and dying, to run our coal plants. At least use our REAL weaknesses against us, not fictional ones. God knows, we have enough real ones.
Yes, if they had located their backup power high in the air, they would have escaped the tsunami, but maybe terrorists would have used demolition charges to knock down the stuff that was up in the air. Or, if talking about these Gen II plants in the US, maybe a tornado would have carried them away. Oh, you designed it to withstand an EF3 tornado? Oops. That's an EF5 over there headed our way. Oh, you designed against an EF5? Hate to tell ya, but looks like this EF5 is twice the intensity of a threshold book-definition EF5. Designed to withstand a hit by a 747 at 250 mph? Oops, I think I see an A380 diving at 500 mph towards us. Designed to withstand a Richter 9 earthquake? Oops, the earthquake we're having right now seems to be opening a fissure in the ground right under the structure of the building. By the way, is that a volcano I see opening up under us? Oh oh, I think we've just been struck by a small meteor traveling at several kilometers per second.
You say all of that stuff is unlikely? That it is only expected once in a million years or ten million years? You're right, except looks like that millionth year is randomly happening right now.
I agree that the operating crew at Fukushima, higher management at the home office, and the government all appeared to behave like keystone cops in those critical first hours when anyone with half a brain knew they were looking at a nightmare scenario being played out. I can't promise you that appearance was an illusion to us on the outside, but I'm pretty confident that even if it had been managed perfectly the outcome would have been almost as bad. It was a simple case of old man reality throwing conditions at them that nobody was prepared to design against initially.
That would have resulted in no more than the most local and confined consequences if it had been a coal, gas, or oil plant, or a skyscraper, but nukes are dramataically and rather uniquely less well bounded in terms of potential effects.
This frustrates me. Anything humans do, and a lot of events not traceable to humans, have an ecological effect. You have to weigh the benefits against the costs. Not all impacts are negative impacts. A dam reduces habitat for ground plants and animals, but increases it for aquatic organisms. Wind turbines, solar, coal, and gas plants all have an impact. It's for goddam sure nuclear has an impact. A really unimaginable one when something goes wrong, and a huge one even when nothing goes wrong. Why, you can't even turn the goddam thing off and walk away when its life is over. You have gigantic decommissioning costs and ongoing waste management questions for a long period after that day. So stop trying to find a solution with no impact, and stop pretending that anyone serious is doing so.
And, yeah, I realize hydro can't be the sole answer.
I think you ask the wrong question. What I think is the right question is: "why do 19 of 20 voters disagree with what I think is the right position?" And the answer to that is pretty obvious. The answer is "because you and your fellow adherents/believers failed dramatically to convince them yours was the right position." It's called leadership. It's not that I think the people need to be led by a ring in the nose, but it's a forum of ideas and conceptions out there, and you have to compete in that arena, else be on the losing end of decisions which matter to you. Berlusconi failed spectacularly and abjectly in that arena. Pro-nukes are failing spectacularly and abjectly.
I'm not even sure any more that nukes are practical in the widest sense of the term. I could maybe be [re-]convinced, but that ain't gonna be because a beam of light from the sky falls on me and a deep voice says "believe, my child." What I am very, very sure of is that no one is even trying seriously to make the case.
Wrong rhetorical question. I think what you meant to ask was "when are the fat corporate pricks who market incompetently designed operating systems which no professional of reasonable competence would want his name associated with - when do we hold them accountable?"
Paul Gilding - "We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid."
"We" may not be stupid, but Paul Gilding shows every sign of being stupid. Catastrophes are not "chosen;" they happen (the Black Death of 1348). The race of mankind has no history of undertaking global strategic decisions for the benefit of the whole. Certainly the response to hypothesized anthropogenic global warming is not such a strategic decision in any positive way, since the consequences of the proposed cure will be far worse than the disease.
The time to tackle the question of "what is a desirable global population level and how do we maintain it" is long since past.
Individuals are smart or stupid. Races just ARE. A race is not a person. To make that mistake is truly anthropomorphising on a grand scale.
So many of the quacks trying to push their perpetual motion machines claim they are harnessing the "power of magnetism", at which point the experts swoop in and point out you can't extract energy from a magnet.
Magnetic energy is real.
This may seem like a minor quibble, but in fact you can definitely extract energy from a magnet. Just let it attract a magnetically attractable object (iron ball), and harness the force it exerts on that object over a distance while it "falls" into the magnet. Work is just the integral of the dot product of force times distance, integrated over distance, and energy is the ability of a physical system (the magnet) to do work on another physical system (a magnetically attractable object).
It's not perpetual motion, because you have to exert a like amount of work externally to pry the object away again before you can repeat the process, but it is energy being released.
What you want is a Pebble Bed reactor. "A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none."
There are other issues to address with pebble bed designs (mostly to do with decommissioning), but it meets your requirement. It CANNOT melt down. Even if ALL systems fail and the operating personnel run away.
2009 figures for U.S.: more than 2/3 from fossil fuels: coal 44.9% natural gas 23.4% nuclear 20.3% hydroelectric 6.9% other renewables 3.6% petroleum 1.0%
Jeeze; overreaction much? Google merely reported in what city of what part of the world the attack appeared to originate. How does that bear on what google does or doesn't think of the Chinese government?
Oh, and some of the rest of us DO care about both government and mega corporations, because both of them have vast potential to harm our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean, he wasn't hosting anything? That is patently incorrect. He was hosting a webpage which contained links to material which was copyright. He wasn't directly hosting material which was copyright, but he was aiding and abetting the unauthorized publishing by the third party sites of material which was copyright. I guess if it was a few random links in a sea of unrelated links, most of them untainted (as is the case with Google), he wouldn't be in a pile of trouble. After all, he wasn't just helping people who asked him how to find certain specific files (like Google does), he was proactively telling them through his site.
Look, I take violent exception to the DMCA, too, but it's the law of the land. The DMCA is what specifically criminalizes this kind of marginal act. The courts can imagine responsibility where you may not, and they are guided by the law. In this case, a benighted, immoral law. But unless we can get it ruled unconstitutional, or repealed, we're stuck with it.
The US voters are responsible for putting into office the knaves who were responsible for doing the bidding of mega corporations by passing the DMCA.
Your left wing slant is no better than right wing slant. I'll see your anecdote with my own. The Reagan years were by far the best of my life. The atmosphere was fresh and filled with hope, and the economy was suited and rewarding to entrepreneurship, and I was an (extremely petty) entrepreneur. OK, I was a one man contractor. The Reagan years followed the abject tumble into misery that was the Carter years, and preceded the long, burned-out, no-prospects, exhausted period that was the Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and is the Obama years. You can't deny the facts of my life, just like I can't deny those of yours. And you know what we both are? INDIVIDUAL cases. Big deal.
I'm with you on that. I want ONLY a consumption tax, provided there is an annual prebate for reasonable amounts of food, clothing, housing. It has the nice feature that interest on indebtedness automatically gets exempted by definition (it's not consumption). And interest on savings doesn't enter into it at all, any more than income. I can control my elective spending; I don't have the option of controlling my income because I need almost all of it for those essentials, including interest on indebtedness.
The other huge plus of a consumption tax is that you don't need a million pages of special rules, definitions, and loopholes. You buy it, you get taxed. Period. If Joe Average buys $1000 worth of Beefaroni and Spam (or tofu and sprouts if you prefer) in a year, it's all covered by the prebate. If Harry Billionaire buys $1 million worth of caviar, he gets taxed on almost the entire amount. Same with clothing and housing.
This is all so obvious, I'm afraid I can't help but attribute to malice the resistance to it.
I'm afraid it went over his head.
So let me get this straight. The statement you are contesting says "the USA has had a deficit for almost every year of its existence." Your reference to "misleading" aside, you say the statement is "completely" false. Well, it is false for any reasonable definition of "almost every", but suppose it had said "a majority of the years" instead of "almost every year." Then it would be true, wouldn't it? And it would certainly be true for "almost every" when restricted to the range from 1960 through 2011, with covers the entire lifetimes of a majority of slashdot readers. Anyway, the simple fact is that, while significant deficits have been run in the past to cover the War of 1812, Civil War, WW I, Great Depression, and WW II, since 1970 we have had a huge run of deficits incurred without any such excuse, simply to cover normal operations.
As for the rest, let's leave tweedledee Democrat and tweedledum Republican out of it, shall we? Both have been approximately equally destructive and craven in the way they will not face reality.
There is no need to be vague or uncertain with the facts; the information is readily available right here. Here's the summary one can make of that data:
Longest run of DEFICIT years: 28 (1970-1997), integrating to 81.91% GDP
Longest run of surplus years: 18 (1875-1892), integrating to 72.30% GDP
Do you see a trend in terms of timeline?
First year of DEFICIT >10% GDP when not fully mobilized for an existential war: 2009. Didn't happen in the Great Depression, or at any other time since the founding of the Republic. We're going to duplicate that feat again this very year.
Integrated value of (DEFICITS as %GDP) since the founding: 301.69
Integrated value of (surpluses as %GDP) since the founding : 40.52
Years of DEFICIT since the founding: 117
Years of surplus since the founding: 104
Years of DEFICIT since 1960: 46
Years of surplus since 1960: 6 (SIX) (1 Bush 2, 3 Clinton, 1 Nixon, 1 Eisenhower)
Decades of net DEFICIT since the founding: 13
Decades of net surplus since the founding: 8
Decades of net DEFICIT since 1960: ALL OF THEM!!!
Decades of >10% integrated value of (DEFICIT as %GDP): 8
Decades of >10% integrated value of (surplus as %GDP): 0 (ZERO)
In the following tables all DEFICIT values are expressed as positive numbers and surpluses as negative numbers.
NOTE: I couldn't include the tables because slashdot has a STUPID AS SHIT lameass lines-too-short filter. I'll see if there's some way to put them in my profile.
Is there really any difference between the government owning industry and industry owning the government? Either way, they are in league, and to hell with the people. It seems to me, in both cases, it's more a case of them lying in the same bed than one owning the other.
This particular objection is childishly simple to address. Simply require that the principle make a living will in the presence of signed witnesses, spelling out in reasonable precision what his wishes are in the case where he becomes disabled and no longer able to make his wishes known. In the absence of such a living having been made, let the present status quo obtain.
Methinks the legal situation regarding this subject, in UK and many other jurisdictions, is more about institutional cravenness than about valid objections.
Straw man. Nobody is considering taking anyone's right to life away. Try dealing with the matter under consideration here. The right to autonomy of one's own person includes the right to decide the manner and timing of one's own passing. To try to withhold that most fundamental of all rights is the most cynical, domineering, and evil of all acts and policies.
Actually, your hasty speculation is incorrect. LWATCDR appears from his profile to be from the US, and the US imports essentially no coal. We are a slight exporter, but mostly just self sufficient in that particular resource. So no, there are no miners in third world countries laboring in terrible conditions, being injured and dying, to run our coal plants. At least use our REAL weaknesses against us, not fictional ones. God knows, we have enough real ones.
Yeah, you're right. Most issues have only one side. The CNN side.
Yes, if they had located their backup power high in the air, they would have escaped the tsunami, but maybe terrorists would have used demolition charges to knock down the stuff that was up in the air. Or, if talking about these Gen II plants in the US, maybe a tornado would have carried them away. Oh, you designed it to withstand an EF3 tornado? Oops. That's an EF5 over there headed our way. Oh, you designed against an EF5? Hate to tell ya, but looks like this EF5 is twice the intensity of a threshold book-definition EF5. Designed to withstand a hit by a 747 at 250 mph? Oops, I think I see an A380 diving at 500 mph towards us. Designed to withstand a Richter 9 earthquake? Oops, the earthquake we're having right now seems to be opening a fissure in the ground right under the structure of the building. By the way, is that a volcano I see opening up under us? Oh oh, I think we've just been struck by a small meteor traveling at several kilometers per second.
You say all of that stuff is unlikely? That it is only expected once in a million years or ten million years? You're right, except looks like that millionth year is randomly happening right now.
I agree that the operating crew at Fukushima, higher management at the home office, and the government all appeared to behave like keystone cops in those critical first hours when anyone with half a brain knew they were looking at a nightmare scenario being played out. I can't promise you that appearance was an illusion to us on the outside, but I'm pretty confident that even if it had been managed perfectly the outcome would have been almost as bad. It was a simple case of old man reality throwing conditions at them that nobody was prepared to design against initially.
That would have resulted in no more than the most local and confined consequences if it had been a coal, gas, or oil plant, or a skyscraper, but nukes are dramataically and rather uniquely less well bounded in terms of potential effects.
This frustrates me. Anything humans do, and a lot of events not traceable to humans, have an ecological effect. You have to weigh the benefits against the costs. Not all impacts are negative impacts. A dam reduces habitat for ground plants and animals, but increases it for aquatic organisms. Wind turbines, solar, coal, and gas plants all have an impact. It's for goddam sure nuclear has an impact. A really unimaginable one when something goes wrong, and a huge one even when nothing goes wrong. Why, you can't even turn the goddam thing off and walk away when its life is over. You have gigantic decommissioning costs and ongoing waste management questions for a long period after that day. So stop trying to find a solution with no impact, and stop pretending that anyone serious is doing so.
And, yeah, I realize hydro can't be the sole answer.
I think you ask the wrong question. What I think is the right question is: "why do 19 of 20 voters disagree with what I think is the right position?" And the answer to that is pretty obvious. The answer is "because you and your fellow adherents/believers failed dramatically to convince them yours was the right position." It's called leadership. It's not that I think the people need to be led by a ring in the nose, but it's a forum of ideas and conceptions out there, and you have to compete in that arena, else be on the losing end of decisions which matter to you. Berlusconi failed spectacularly and abjectly in that arena. Pro-nukes are failing spectacularly and abjectly.
I'm not even sure any more that nukes are practical in the widest sense of the term. I could maybe be [re-]convinced, but that ain't gonna be because a beam of light from the sky falls on me and a deep voice says "believe, my child." What I am very, very sure of is that no one is even trying seriously to make the case.
Thank you for making it clear to me who the candidate with a working thought process is. Ha, that didn't go the way you expected it, did it?
You opt not to drive, you are opting to figure out what to do to get around. It's not up to other citizens to solve your problem.
At least get the goddam title right. It isn't Ubuntu 11.4, timothy, it's 11.04 . The referenced article does have it right.
Wrong rhetorical question. I think what you meant to ask was "when are the fat corporate pricks who market incompetently designed operating systems which no professional of reasonable competence would want his name associated with - when do we hold them accountable?"
Paul Gilding - "We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid."
"We" may not be stupid, but Paul Gilding shows every sign of being stupid. Catastrophes are not "chosen;" they happen (the Black Death of 1348). The race of mankind has no history of undertaking global strategic decisions for the benefit of the whole. Certainly the response to hypothesized anthropogenic global warming is not such a strategic decision in any positive way, since the consequences of the proposed cure will be far worse than the disease.
The time to tackle the question of "what is a desirable global population level and how do we maintain it" is long since past.
Individuals are smart or stupid. Races just ARE. A race is not a person. To make that mistake is truly anthropomorphising on a grand scale.
But that only occurs if you open up the closed system.
Hence the "other issues." But the contamination only occurs when you open up the closed system.
So many of the quacks trying to push their perpetual motion machines claim they are harnessing the "power of magnetism", at which point the experts swoop in and point out you can't extract energy from a magnet.
Magnetic energy is real.
This may seem like a minor quibble, but in fact you can definitely extract energy from a magnet. Just let it attract a magnetically attractable object (iron ball), and harness the force it exerts on that object over a distance while it "falls" into the magnet. Work is just the integral of the dot product of force times distance, integrated over distance, and energy is the ability of a physical system (the magnet) to do work on another physical system (a magnetically attractable object).
It's not perpetual motion, because you have to exert a like amount of work externally to pry the object away again before you can repeat the process, but it is energy being released.
What you want is a Pebble Bed reactor. "A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none."
There are other issues to address with pebble bed designs (mostly to do with decommissioning), but it meets your requirement. It CANNOT melt down. Even if ALL systems fail and the operating personnel run away.
SD crap is just boring. Wake me up when you can do HD.
2009 figures for U.S.: more than 2/3 from fossil fuels:
coal 44.9%
natural gas 23.4%
nuclear 20.3%
hydroelectric 6.9%
other renewables 3.6%
petroleum 1.0%
Jeeze; overreaction much? Google merely reported in what city of what part of the world the attack appeared to originate. How does that bear on what google does or doesn't think of the Chinese government?
Oh, and some of the rest of us DO care about both government and mega corporations, because both of them have vast potential to harm our lives.