Plants take nutrients from the soil. The primary need of plants is water, nitrogen, and carbon, which they get from CO2 in the air, not from carbon in the soil, but there are many other necessary elements available only in the soil. Only need traces of these elements, but if there is no mechanism to replenish the soils, eventually, the soil will have too little of some vital nutrient for plants to grow. Mechanisms that replenish nutrients are decay of dead plants, floods, burrowing animals, glaciation, mountain building through uplift and subsequent erosion, and volcanism. In short, most anything that changes the soil. Wind is more of a variable agent, in some cases bringing in nutrient rich dust, in other cases stripping nutrient rich topsoil away. Most of those methods need water. Also may need to flush salts from the soil, which accumulate in dry places with high rates of evaporation. Australia shows what happens when soil isn't replenished well. The soil there is very old, and most of the continent is desert. For millions of years, there has been no volcanism or glaciation in Australia, and little of the other mechanisms thanks to the lack of rainfall. Even in many places where there is enough rain there are still mineral deficiencies. Sheep need fortified diets, and become sick if they don't get it. There was an area known as the 90 mile desert where plants would not grow, despite the rainfall being sufficient. Turned out the soil there had practically no selenium.
If He is such a good idea, why not pure nitrogen? Lot cheaper than He.
Race cars use pure nitrogen for tires. It's a tiny bit lighter, it's less corrosive, and less thermodynamically expansive. Although, that would've killed James Bond-- there's a scene where the bad guys dump his car into a lake with him in it, and he survives by breathing the air from the tires.
A week ago, I was logged into Gmail and looking at Youtube when this window popped up asking which name I wanted to use. I didn't look that closely at it, as I was busy. Just quickly clicked on what I thought would maintain the status quo. Now my Youtube handle has replaced my name in Gmail. I didn't want my Youtube and Gmail accounts linked. It seems the actions that one time popup started can't be undone. Attempting to delete the Google+ profile that was automatically created somehow isn't working.
How did you delete Google+ without losing Gmail? Or did you delete everything?
Google made a mess, and I'm not happy about it. Keep hearing all these stories about Google doing questionable things, even slightly evil things, but until this happened to me, I didn't pay much attention. And now they're rolling out this tool that could unfairly affect employment prospects. What are they thinking these days?
Niven's World out of Time story had a plausible method for boosting the Earth to a higher orbit. Drag it behind a gas giant. Moving the gas giant itself was a bit more of a problem, but he had this magical planetary sized fusion rocket motor that used the gas of the gas giant as its fuel. His Known Space and Ringworld stories have the Puppeteer civlization's planets on an interstellar trip powered by some magical motor provided by extremely advanced aliens.
Don't know if the energy required to move the Earth would be better spent on terraforming efforts. Probably would be. But if not, and assuming we don't kill ourselves off, our descendents, Homo Sapiens XLII or whatever, will probably find a way to move the Earth.
Errors is putting it kindly. People lie about paternity. They have skeletons they want firmly kept in closets. And they have no compunction about falsifying all the records. Genealogists were disliked for being nosy, and the entire field was slandered as something only weirdos could find interesting. There was a medical study done back in the 1940's that as an aside also could determine paternity. What they found was a whopping 10% of the babies were fathered by someone other than the husband. They kept that finding quiet, as it would have caused a huge ruckus back then. Further research has found the illegitimacy rate varies from 5% all the way up to 30%.
Historic periods? Humanity hasn't changed that much. This is still going on today, count on it. Though with paternity testing becoming easier and easier, sneaking around behind the barn may be in for a permanent decline. Too easy for the cheaters to be found out today.
If a mutual fund formed for the express purpose of buying out the music industry and releasing their entire catalogs to the public domain, I'd buy. True, the share value of the fund might tank once they achieve 50% ownership and the power to force the release of all the music, but share value wouldn't be the point of it. It might also not tank, to the vast surprise of the old guard predicting doom.
One thing I like to do in discussions of this subject is check out links to music. So please, post some links. Since you've blown your cover anyway, might as well.
Health insurers are destroying themselves. Why do you think people like me don't have insurance? We've figured out the game. If they are willing to insure a person, it can only be because that person doesn't need health care. So those who need it are denied, and those who don't shouldn't buy insurance because it is a ripoff. Either way, no one should be a customer of a health insurance company.
If you get insurance anyway, should change insurers about every 2 years so you don't get charged a huge "inertia tax", the penalty they love to levy on loyal customers for being loyal and not changing. And changing is only if you haven't developed some problem they can claim is a pre-existing condition that they shouldn't have to cover. And be ready to get a lawyer to sue them if you are injured and actually need health care. They will deny half the claims on various technicalities. They're testing you, seeing if you'll roll over, play dead, and let them get away with it. If you have family and friends to help you fight back, or aren't too beat up to fight back yourself, then they try to walk the fine line of denying just enough that it's not quite worth suing them. They'll try to wear you down, bury you in paperwork. They'll occasionally take your side and save you from an outrageous bill here and there.
The medical community's outrageous prices are the only thing keeping insurance going. If not for that, it'd be better to deal directly with the doctors. You still can, so I've heard. Have to do a lot of haggling, but it can be done. You may also need the leverage of not having any money, to get them to cut you some deals. They'd rather get some money than no money, if you should go bankrupt and get all those medical debts erased. Of course if you're hurt or sick, haggling sessions are the last thing you need on your plate. Medical debt is the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US. Medical debt is also quite peculiar-- it doesn't seem to count the same as other kinds of debt, and I've heard it is possible to defer paying it and still be able to buy the basic necessities and even have a credit card. For this reason, many doctors won't even see you if you don't have insurance. Too easy to stiff them entirely.
Except that many desktops have bugs that make suspending and resuming dicey propositions. If that's not enough, the kernel has quite a few bugs in this area as well. Nice when your desktop takes over a minute to resume, and then fails to enable the networking hardware, forcing you to power cycle anyway. Would have been faster to just turn the computer off.
I've done some work as a government contractor. It's messy. They demand that you account for every hour. If you are working on 3 different projects, you have to fill out a timesheet in which you detail which hours of every day you spent on each of those 3 projects. This sort of thing misses the point that it's results that count, not hours.
They are keenly aware of the public perception of them as bungling bureaucrats. Consequently, they can be extremely pushy and demanding. Often they bear down so hard that it is counterproductive.
They're also paranoid control freaks. They want contractors to work on computer systems that are under their control. Instead of working on your own equipment in your own offices, they'll insist you use their facilities. Then they provide antiquated, slow computers with ancient versions of Windows, and take weeks to getting around to details like installing a phone line. There are also a ton of rules. They'll want you to pay for a cell phone, but they don't want your cell phone to have any privacy. You basically need permission to sneeze, and more permission to wipe your nose. Want to encrypt a hard drive? Maybe just keep a few encrypted files on a hard drive? Can't do that without authorization.
It takes a good contractor to stop them from hamstringing a project with red tape. You have to trample upon all sorts of rules to get anything done, and you need a smooth management team to keep the bureaucrats from worrying about violations. They will overlook all kinds of petty violations as long as there are good results. Let a project falter though, and the piranhas come out.
Yes, avoid inkjets. Don't get one thinking you can beat the manufacturers' outrageous ink prices with 3rd party cartridges or ink. Too much trouble and expense even when it works.
You can fool the printers about the cartridges some of the time, but they're programmed to give you grief about it. They'll claim cartridges are empty when they aren't, claim the ink is too old when it isn't, insist that you provide working cartridges of every color even when you only want and need black, and other things. They waste ink on routine cleaning cycles. HP has all these scary messages about how you could damage your printer and void your warranty if you don't replace that out of date cartridge that is still more than half full of perfectly good ink. I've heard some printers (Lexmark) use encryption on the cartridges to lock out 3rd parties. Even if you have some luck with refilled or 3rd party cartridges, at about half the price of new name brand ones they still cost too much.
Even if the manufacturers played no games, inkjets would still be a bad deal.
I avoid the problem by simply not using or having the damn printers. Unfortunately, my aged parents have never grasped that printing can be avoided entirely, and my father insists on having a printer. He hardly ever uses it, but he wants one handy. He will create a handwritten document on paper instead of using a word processor, then use the all-in-one device as a copying machine. I've told him many times that he should use a word processor, but he just doesn't understand. I tell him time and again where the office program is, and when prodded to try it, he still hunts through Firefox's menus trying to find the office program. The closest he gets to using a word processor is an input box in Firefox, which causes other problems. The worst is that it is too easy to lose a document. Sometimes just navigating to another page, even with just the back button, is enough to lose an hour of labor. I've tried this Lazarus plugin to deal with that, but it doesn't always work and sometimes makes the input box behave weirdly. Especially aggravating are those occasions when he wants one of his handwritten documents emailed. He resorts to retyping the whole thing into Firefox. I wonder how much the manufacturers count on seniors to be stuck on their printed paper ways.
The Actual Data, huh? Take a look at this. I'll quote the relevant part:
Unlike other stories (specifically, John O'Sullivan's) that improperly cite this study as evidence for global warming deniers, the real story behind this study is that climate scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using satellite data.
The link you gave shows all the classic hallmarks of denial. It twists the interpretation of the data to claim something that the data does not support. It spends very little time on that part. Can't be glib if you dwell on something. Spends all its words on a pretty facade, and skimps on making sure the foundation is solid. Even gets rather emotional. Reads like one of those bad sales pitches in midnight TV commercials. What I mean is wording like this:
astonishing story
scorched an indelible hole
Sassano turned greenhouse gas theory on it's head
the IBUKI maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations
No, the story isn't astonishing. The article is wrong. No it didn't "scorch a hole" in "global warming theory". No, Sassano didn't upend decades of research with a 5 minute long sound bite. And no, the maps don't prove exactly the opposite of expectations. I could go on, because there's a lot more just plain wrong assertions in there, but I'm not going to bother.
Why can't you see that this O'Sullivan guy is a snake oil peddler? A demagogue? There may be grounds for skepticism, but this guy isn't providing them.
The problem isn't government per se, it's concentration of power. There are always those who want to abuse power. Government is a concentration of power that is all too easy for such people to abuse. A few bribes in the right places can pay all kinds of dividends, such as favorable regulation, cushy jobs for close relatives, and troubles for competitors.
When you're the one suffering over a favor handed out to someone else, it's very easy to blame the government. If we can create a society that works, and governs itself without concentrating power, then we wouldn't have this problem any more. Is that even possible? One way to find out is to try.
What's it to you whether climate disruption is real or not? Why are you so hot to deny it? You don't want to feel guilty for living a western lifestyle that generates lots of CO2, something like that? Makes you angry that you could be accused of contributing to the problem? You'd really throw our future away over such a petty emotional response? Really?
We're looking at the facts. And the facts say that big changes are happening, that we're the cause, and some of those changes are very bad. Yes, so bad that civilization could collapse. I know you think that's alarmist. You'd better wake up and pay attention. Do you understand why civil war is raging in Syria now? At the root it is crop failures thanks to an extended drought. If our food production falters, watch out. As Syria goes, so we all might go if we screw this up. Climate disruption has destabilized many civilizations in the past. The Mayas and the Pueblo Indians fell, and even the Roman Empire took a hit. If you think we are immune to that, because we're much more technologically advanced than those ancient civilizations, think again.
As to the accusations that scientists are making this all up to secure more funding, think more carefully about that. Not saying that such pressures can't lead to the production of less than stellar science, but this is beyond ridiculous. Any scientists who could show that climate disruption is not caused by us, and convince others because they are right, would publish in a heartbeat. The rewards for such groundbreaking work would be so great that some would break ranks to publish. There are so many organizations eager to publicize such work that it would be no problem finding a publisher. Yet this has not happened. Why? Because climate disruption is real.
Now, many of the more rabid environmentalists indulge in shaming. That's counterproductive. Try to get past that, and let's look at the problems, and think what is best to do about it. It's not only climate disruption, there is also ocean acidification. It may be that we need not be proactive, and the problem will fade away thanks to peak oil. We may be able to engineer our way out of this. Build dikes, scrub CO2 from the air, build more canals to maintain water supplies, and other measures of that sort. We can also act now, try to shift our energy production towards carbon neutrality. We will have to eventually anyway, so why not start now? We certainly should shift towards processes that save us money regardless of whether climate disruption is a problem or not.
I've looked into solar water heating. It's not so easy as you might think. Texas has a real dearth of reasonable solar water heating products. You have to do it yourself, or pay a lot of money. One company had a solar water heater sytem for only $17,000. Used lots of copper piping and sheets. That's crazy. With government incentives and discounts they got it down to a bit over $5000. Stlll too high, I can get a low end, 6 year warranty gas powered tank water heater for $350. Probably last 10 years. Gas bills for hot water run about $20/month. At about $300 a year for hot water with my current setup, it would take at least 15 years to earn back that up front cost for switching to solar. That's too long. Assumes the solar system would last that long, not to mention the house. Probably be stolen by copper thieves in the first 5 years.
Solar water heating can be done much cheaper. It's frustrating that reasonably priced systems are simply not available where I live. I see no reason why solar water heating can't be done for $1000. I'm hoping there will be a price breakthrough before I need a new water heater. The cheap tank was my way of buying time for that to happen.
Estimates? How long does it take to solve a maze? Take all the correct turns, and you'll be done in a few minutes. One wrong turn, and it could take hours. How do you estimate that?
A big reason why estimates tend to be low is the tendency to overlook all the little problems that shouldn't happen but do. It's not just that libraries have bugs too. Systems sometimes go down. Networks can corrupt data. I could never get any programming or system administration work done quickly, because I'd always run into 3 or 4 other things that I had to fix or work around first. A hard drive crash is when you find out that the DVD drive which was fine for light usage overheats during an install, that the updated OS breaks part of the software, and that it was only inertia keeping the server on the misconfigured network and once it was powered down another server grabs its IP address, and so on. Once had to work around the libpng site being blocked for "inappropriate content" by the latest update of the company's web monitoring software. But those are relatively trivial problems that don't blow estimates by orders of magnitude.
Your advice is fine for hacks who need to grind out simple business logic, or glue a few well tested and thoroughly traveled library functions together, and who don't have to think much about performance or memory constraints. There's very little uncertainty in that kind of work. But when you're trying to do new things, trying out new algorithms, and you have no idea whether they will even work, let alone be fast enough, you're back in the maze. We could have got astronauts to the moon 5 years sooner if we knew beforehand which directions were blind alleys.
Despite appearances, copyright really is dead. Yes, the law still exists, courts try to enforce it, and many people still think it's a shame that copyright doesn't work and fantasize that they could someday produce something that can be "protected" by copyright, instead of unreservedly celebrating the vastly expanded capabilities technology gives us for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. And yes, the GPL relies on copyright, and I know Stallman supports it for that reason. Doesn't change that copyright is now hopelessly unrealistic. If the Internet could be kept under such extreme surveillance that records of every byte transmitted could be kept and analyzed, it wouldn't be enough to squash all online piracy. If it was possible to prevent encryption from ever being used, it would not make piracy impossible to hide. If the Internet could be shut down, there are stll things like sneakernet with flash drives.
It's not just that piracy can't be stopped. It's that we shouldn't want to stop piracy even if it was possible. The very term "piracy" is a pejorative, just another piece of the huge propaganda effort to convince the public that sharing is bad and will cost jobs, destroy art, and ruin the economy and all that. Sharing is good. Sharing is a public good. Sharing of knowledge made us, and is very nearly as vital as breathing to the survival of civilization. For any small group to attempt to arrogate to themselves the right to decide what and how knowledge shall and shall not be shared is not just rent seeking profiteering, it is nothing less than treason against all humanity. It would be a huge tragedy if we came up with means to soften or avert Climate Disruption, but failed to employ them because of trivial intellectual property concerns until it was too late and as a result lost our civilization. Climate has killed many civilizations. Don't make the mistake of thinking our current civilization is so much stronger and smarter that it can't happen to us. And there are surely other perils. We know intellectual property law is routinely abused to cover up problems, hide things that the public needs and deserves to know. It's entirely too convenient for the propaganda pushers; they can't resist using it especially to suppress information. Fukushima is just one of many examples of that, with TEPCO repeatedly refusing to talk and when that wasn't accepted, lying to cover up the extent of the damage. Bisphenol A is another. A classic that everyone should be aware of is the years long attempt to deny the addictiveness of tobacco. Suppression of knowledge, which is what copyright really does, can only aid propaganda.
The RIAA and brethen have campaigned long and hard to stamp out piracy, and have failed miserably. They overreached hugely, succeeding only in turning a whole generation of fans against them, and in ironically raising awareness that copyright really stinks, and that the issue isn't about starving artists but instead is all about controlling what people are allowed to see and hear, and what artists are allowed to produce. Their propaganda was so far out it was comical. Captain Copyright was a farce. Does the outcome, still ongoing, of their efforts not convincingly demonstrate that copyright is a lost cause? It should.
MIT professor says messengers shouldn't be so naive. They should know that recipients have the right to strike off their heads for delivering bad news. Their trainers should have told them that.
Oh, the message? Copyright is dead. And what is MIT doing about that fact? Getting chummy with the likes of the RIAA and Elsevier? The RIAA is a confused and vicious organization that is in deep denial about copyright.
Shutting down websites is mostly political grandstanding. What does it cost to leave a website up, let it run on autopilot for a while, and not update any content? Just bandwidth and electricity. The new healthcare sites got over 1 million hits, but most of the time, most sites are nowhere near that busy. Probably cost more to have their website administrators change the sites to throw up a "sorry, we're closed" page. Saves a little on bandwidth. Doesn't save much on electricity.
When Wikipedia and other majors sites went dark for 1 day, they didn't give us any bull about why. They said it was all about SOPA and PIPA, and they meant exactly what they said.
From what I've read, there is a difference, and the Republicans are worse. There has been hysteria whipped up over supposed voter fraud, without any proof that it's a big problem. The Republicans are responsible for ramming through a bunch of laws requiring photo ID to vote. Democrats haven't done anything similar.
Photo IDs don't help much with fraud. All that really does is put more barriers between voters and the voting booth, as they know very well. They've erected other barriers, made people fill out more paperwork and do more legwork to "prove" their eligibility to vote, and they've done this disproportionately in Democratic leaning areas. They've arranged for fewer, older, slower, and more trouble prone voting machines in those areas, in hopes that the long lines would discourage Democratic voters. They've also tried scare tactics, such as a big billboard warning people that voting under a false identity is a felony. It's Jim Crow all over again.
I don't see any admission that the government is incompetent. He said "the US", not "the US government". Granted, he did say "tax dollars". Should have said just "dollars".
Yes, this health care act leaves a lot to be desired. The Republicans have done their utmost to muck it up. The original plan was to have a default single payer system. People would be automatically enrolled in it if they had no other insurance, and the costs would be added to their taxes. The Republicans forced a change to have that be a tax penalty instead, and no single payer option. That's a lot worse than the original idea. And why did the Republicans do that? They're trying to make it as hateful and obnoxious as possible, in hopes that will goad the people to rise up and reject the whole thing.
These politicans are like the most corrupt local police force you've ever heard of, setting speed traps, pulling people over and breaking their taillights then ticketing them for broken taillights, employing Mafia tactics to wring revenue from local merchants, putting opponents in prison on trumped up charges, planting drugs and confiscating property for auction for a tidy profit, blackmailing prostitutes for sex, and so on.
upon seeing the incredible wealth inequity of this country
But taking a job in "security", as they define it, won't help with that. When the security apparatus gets used to secure the elite against the masses, what then? Why do you think they're so hot for more security? It's the very inequality they caused that scares them. The whole thing is a wrong turn for any nation. The political hacks they dig up to run these agencies have a lamentable tendency to be really dumb about certain things. They are too easily swayed by copyright extremists, prone to thinking they really can win the war against piracy. They will dash off to try to enforce some impossible law, and keep trying as long as the legislature funds them, no matter how often people point out the impossiblities.
Security in software has been justly criticised for years now. MS Windows is so difficult to secure for many political reasons. MS keeps dabbling in security for them against "pirates" (their own users), to the detriment of security for users. Remember Windows Genuine Advantage? Time and again they've rolled out new features that throw security out for convenience. Autoplay for CDs. ActiveX. Excel macros.
Then you have the spooks demanding that software engineers add back doors, and watering down the strength of encryption to breakable levels. There was that whole idiotic export regime against anything that terrorists might be able to use to communicate more securely. Way back in the early 1990s, you had to swear that you were a US citizen before you could download the Netscape browser with the stronger encryption. In the click through agreement, they demanded that you not export it from the US, under penalty of law.
I really dislike how security has become such an overriding concern. Seems nearly everything can be considered a security issue. Patches are divided into security patches, and all others. For many problems, turning them into a security issue is the wrong approach. Prevent bugs, and a lot of security will take care of itself.
But I suppose it's the easiest way to get funding. Exploring space and doing pure science are so pre 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
Plants take nutrients from the soil. The primary need of plants is water, nitrogen, and carbon, which they get from CO2 in the air, not from carbon in the soil, but there are many other necessary elements available only in the soil. Only need traces of these elements, but if there is no mechanism to replenish the soils, eventually, the soil will have too little of some vital nutrient for plants to grow. Mechanisms that replenish nutrients are decay of dead plants, floods, burrowing animals, glaciation, mountain building through uplift and subsequent erosion, and volcanism. In short, most anything that changes the soil. Wind is more of a variable agent, in some cases bringing in nutrient rich dust, in other cases stripping nutrient rich topsoil away. Most of those methods need water. Also may need to flush salts from the soil, which accumulate in dry places with high rates of evaporation. Australia shows what happens when soil isn't replenished well. The soil there is very old, and most of the continent is desert. For millions of years, there has been no volcanism or glaciation in Australia, and little of the other mechanisms thanks to the lack of rainfall. Even in many places where there is enough rain there are still mineral deficiencies. Sheep need fortified diets, and become sick if they don't get it. There was an area known as the 90 mile desert where plants would not grow, despite the rainfall being sufficient. Turned out the soil there had practically no selenium.
If He is such a good idea, why not pure nitrogen? Lot cheaper than He.
Race cars use pure nitrogen for tires. It's a tiny bit lighter, it's less corrosive, and less thermodynamically expansive. Although, that would've killed James Bond-- there's a scene where the bad guys dump his car into a lake with him in it, and he survives by breathing the air from the tires.
Yes, and if you take a conventional spinning platter hard drive to high altitudes, they will fail. At 17,000 ft, the atmosphere is too thin for them.
A week ago, I was logged into Gmail and looking at Youtube when this window popped up asking which name I wanted to use. I didn't look that closely at it, as I was busy. Just quickly clicked on what I thought would maintain the status quo. Now my Youtube handle has replaced my name in Gmail. I didn't want my Youtube and Gmail accounts linked. It seems the actions that one time popup started can't be undone. Attempting to delete the Google+ profile that was automatically created somehow isn't working.
How did you delete Google+ without losing Gmail? Or did you delete everything?
Google made a mess, and I'm not happy about it. Keep hearing all these stories about Google doing questionable things, even slightly evil things, but until this happened to me, I didn't pay much attention. And now they're rolling out this tool that could unfairly affect employment prospects. What are they thinking these days?
Niven's World out of Time story had a plausible method for boosting the Earth to a higher orbit. Drag it behind a gas giant. Moving the gas giant itself was a bit more of a problem, but he had this magical planetary sized fusion rocket motor that used the gas of the gas giant as its fuel. His Known Space and Ringworld stories have the Puppeteer civlization's planets on an interstellar trip powered by some magical motor provided by extremely advanced aliens.
Don't know if the energy required to move the Earth would be better spent on terraforming efforts. Probably would be. But if not, and assuming we don't kill ourselves off, our descendents, Homo Sapiens XLII or whatever, will probably find a way to move the Earth.
Errors is putting it kindly. People lie about paternity. They have skeletons they want firmly kept in closets. And they have no compunction about falsifying all the records. Genealogists were disliked for being nosy, and the entire field was slandered as something only weirdos could find interesting. There was a medical study done back in the 1940's that as an aside also could determine paternity. What they found was a whopping 10% of the babies were fathered by someone other than the husband. They kept that finding quiet, as it would have caused a huge ruckus back then. Further research has found the illegitimacy rate varies from 5% all the way up to 30%.
Historic periods? Humanity hasn't changed that much. This is still going on today, count on it. Though with paternity testing becoming easier and easier, sneaking around behind the barn may be in for a permanent decline. Too easy for the cheaters to be found out today.
If a mutual fund formed for the express purpose of buying out the music industry and releasing their entire catalogs to the public domain, I'd buy. True, the share value of the fund might tank once they achieve 50% ownership and the power to force the release of all the music, but share value wouldn't be the point of it. It might also not tank, to the vast surprise of the old guard predicting doom.
One thing I like to do in discussions of this subject is check out links to music. So please, post some links. Since you've blown your cover anyway, might as well.
Health insurers are destroying themselves. Why do you think people like me don't have insurance? We've figured out the game. If they are willing to insure a person, it can only be because that person doesn't need health care. So those who need it are denied, and those who don't shouldn't buy insurance because it is a ripoff. Either way, no one should be a customer of a health insurance company.
If you get insurance anyway, should change insurers about every 2 years so you don't get charged a huge "inertia tax", the penalty they love to levy on loyal customers for being loyal and not changing. And changing is only if you haven't developed some problem they can claim is a pre-existing condition that they shouldn't have to cover. And be ready to get a lawyer to sue them if you are injured and actually need health care. They will deny half the claims on various technicalities. They're testing you, seeing if you'll roll over, play dead, and let them get away with it. If you have family and friends to help you fight back, or aren't too beat up to fight back yourself, then they try to walk the fine line of denying just enough that it's not quite worth suing them. They'll try to wear you down, bury you in paperwork. They'll occasionally take your side and save you from an outrageous bill here and there.
The medical community's outrageous prices are the only thing keeping insurance going. If not for that, it'd be better to deal directly with the doctors. You still can, so I've heard. Have to do a lot of haggling, but it can be done. You may also need the leverage of not having any money, to get them to cut you some deals. They'd rather get some money than no money, if you should go bankrupt and get all those medical debts erased. Of course if you're hurt or sick, haggling sessions are the last thing you need on your plate. Medical debt is the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US. Medical debt is also quite peculiar-- it doesn't seem to count the same as other kinds of debt, and I've heard it is possible to defer paying it and still be able to buy the basic necessities and even have a credit card. For this reason, many doctors won't even see you if you don't have insurance. Too easy to stiff them entirely.
Except that many desktops have bugs that make suspending and resuming dicey propositions. If that's not enough, the kernel has quite a few bugs in this area as well. Nice when your desktop takes over a minute to resume, and then fails to enable the networking hardware, forcing you to power cycle anyway. Would have been faster to just turn the computer off.
How much of such fees go to the authors? 0%. Zero. Nothing. Nada.
I've done some work as a government contractor. It's messy. They demand that you account for every hour. If you are working on 3 different projects, you have to fill out a timesheet in which you detail which hours of every day you spent on each of those 3 projects. This sort of thing misses the point that it's results that count, not hours.
They are keenly aware of the public perception of them as bungling bureaucrats. Consequently, they can be extremely pushy and demanding. Often they bear down so hard that it is counterproductive.
They're also paranoid control freaks. They want contractors to work on computer systems that are under their control. Instead of working on your own equipment in your own offices, they'll insist you use their facilities. Then they provide antiquated, slow computers with ancient versions of Windows, and take weeks to getting around to details like installing a phone line. There are also a ton of rules. They'll want you to pay for a cell phone, but they don't want your cell phone to have any privacy. You basically need permission to sneeze, and more permission to wipe your nose. Want to encrypt a hard drive? Maybe just keep a few encrypted files on a hard drive? Can't do that without authorization.
It takes a good contractor to stop them from hamstringing a project with red tape. You have to trample upon all sorts of rules to get anything done, and you need a smooth management team to keep the bureaucrats from worrying about violations. They will overlook all kinds of petty violations as long as there are good results. Let a project falter though, and the piranhas come out.
Yes, avoid inkjets. Don't get one thinking you can beat the manufacturers' outrageous ink prices with 3rd party cartridges or ink. Too much trouble and expense even when it works.
You can fool the printers about the cartridges some of the time, but they're programmed to give you grief about it. They'll claim cartridges are empty when they aren't, claim the ink is too old when it isn't, insist that you provide working cartridges of every color even when you only want and need black, and other things. They waste ink on routine cleaning cycles. HP has all these scary messages about how you could damage your printer and void your warranty if you don't replace that out of date cartridge that is still more than half full of perfectly good ink. I've heard some printers (Lexmark) use encryption on the cartridges to lock out 3rd parties. Even if you have some luck with refilled or 3rd party cartridges, at about half the price of new name brand ones they still cost too much.
Even if the manufacturers played no games, inkjets would still be a bad deal.
I avoid the problem by simply not using or having the damn printers. Unfortunately, my aged parents have never grasped that printing can be avoided entirely, and my father insists on having a printer. He hardly ever uses it, but he wants one handy. He will create a handwritten document on paper instead of using a word processor, then use the all-in-one device as a copying machine. I've told him many times that he should use a word processor, but he just doesn't understand. I tell him time and again where the office program is, and when prodded to try it, he still hunts through Firefox's menus trying to find the office program. The closest he gets to using a word processor is an input box in Firefox, which causes other problems. The worst is that it is too easy to lose a document. Sometimes just navigating to another page, even with just the back button, is enough to lose an hour of labor. I've tried this Lazarus plugin to deal with that, but it doesn't always work and sometimes makes the input box behave weirdly. Especially aggravating are those occasions when he wants one of his handwritten documents emailed. He resorts to retyping the whole thing into Firefox. I wonder how much the manufacturers count on seniors to be stuck on their printed paper ways.
The Actual Data, huh? Take a look at this. I'll quote the relevant part:
Unlike other stories (specifically, John O'Sullivan's) that improperly cite this study as evidence for global warming deniers, the real story behind this study is that climate scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using satellite data.
The link you gave shows all the classic hallmarks of denial. It twists the interpretation of the data to claim something that the data does not support. It spends very little time on that part. Can't be glib if you dwell on something. Spends all its words on a pretty facade, and skimps on making sure the foundation is solid. Even gets rather emotional. Reads like one of those bad sales pitches in midnight TV commercials. What I mean is wording like this:
No, the story isn't astonishing. The article is wrong. No it didn't "scorch a hole" in "global warming theory". No, Sassano didn't upend decades of research with a 5 minute long sound bite. And no, the maps don't prove exactly the opposite of expectations. I could go on, because there's a lot more just plain wrong assertions in there, but I'm not going to bother.
Why can't you see that this O'Sullivan guy is a snake oil peddler? A demagogue? There may be grounds for skepticism, but this guy isn't providing them.
The problem isn't government per se, it's concentration of power. There are always those who want to abuse power. Government is a concentration of power that is all too easy for such people to abuse. A few bribes in the right places can pay all kinds of dividends, such as favorable regulation, cushy jobs for close relatives, and troubles for competitors.
When you're the one suffering over a favor handed out to someone else, it's very easy to blame the government. If we can create a society that works, and governs itself without concentrating power, then we wouldn't have this problem any more. Is that even possible? One way to find out is to try.
What's it to you whether climate disruption is real or not? Why are you so hot to deny it? You don't want to feel guilty for living a western lifestyle that generates lots of CO2, something like that? Makes you angry that you could be accused of contributing to the problem? You'd really throw our future away over such a petty emotional response? Really?
We're looking at the facts. And the facts say that big changes are happening, that we're the cause, and some of those changes are very bad. Yes, so bad that civilization could collapse. I know you think that's alarmist. You'd better wake up and pay attention. Do you understand why civil war is raging in Syria now? At the root it is crop failures thanks to an extended drought. If our food production falters, watch out. As Syria goes, so we all might go if we screw this up. Climate disruption has destabilized many civilizations in the past. The Mayas and the Pueblo Indians fell, and even the Roman Empire took a hit. If you think we are immune to that, because we're much more technologically advanced than those ancient civilizations, think again.
As to the accusations that scientists are making this all up to secure more funding, think more carefully about that. Not saying that such pressures can't lead to the production of less than stellar science, but this is beyond ridiculous. Any scientists who could show that climate disruption is not caused by us, and convince others because they are right, would publish in a heartbeat. The rewards for such groundbreaking work would be so great that some would break ranks to publish. There are so many organizations eager to publicize such work that it would be no problem finding a publisher. Yet this has not happened. Why? Because climate disruption is real.
Now, many of the more rabid environmentalists indulge in shaming. That's counterproductive. Try to get past that, and let's look at the problems, and think what is best to do about it. It's not only climate disruption, there is also ocean acidification. It may be that we need not be proactive, and the problem will fade away thanks to peak oil. We may be able to engineer our way out of this. Build dikes, scrub CO2 from the air, build more canals to maintain water supplies, and other measures of that sort. We can also act now, try to shift our energy production towards carbon neutrality. We will have to eventually anyway, so why not start now? We certainly should shift towards processes that save us money regardless of whether climate disruption is a problem or not.
I've looked into solar water heating. It's not so easy as you might think. Texas has a real dearth of reasonable solar water heating products. You have to do it yourself, or pay a lot of money. One company had a solar water heater sytem for only $17,000. Used lots of copper piping and sheets. That's crazy. With government incentives and discounts they got it down to a bit over $5000. Stlll too high, I can get a low end, 6 year warranty gas powered tank water heater for $350. Probably last 10 years. Gas bills for hot water run about $20/month. At about $300 a year for hot water with my current setup, it would take at least 15 years to earn back that up front cost for switching to solar. That's too long. Assumes the solar system would last that long, not to mention the house. Probably be stolen by copper thieves in the first 5 years.
Solar water heating can be done much cheaper. It's frustrating that reasonably priced systems are simply not available where I live. I see no reason why solar water heating can't be done for $1000. I'm hoping there will be a price breakthrough before I need a new water heater. The cheap tank was my way of buying time for that to happen.
Nuclear or coal? False dichotomy!
Solar, wind, and water are better choices.
Estimates? How long does it take to solve a maze? Take all the correct turns, and you'll be done in a few minutes. One wrong turn, and it could take hours. How do you estimate that?
A big reason why estimates tend to be low is the tendency to overlook all the little problems that shouldn't happen but do. It's not just that libraries have bugs too. Systems sometimes go down. Networks can corrupt data. I could never get any programming or system administration work done quickly, because I'd always run into 3 or 4 other things that I had to fix or work around first. A hard drive crash is when you find out that the DVD drive which was fine for light usage overheats during an install, that the updated OS breaks part of the software, and that it was only inertia keeping the server on the misconfigured network and once it was powered down another server grabs its IP address, and so on. Once had to work around the libpng site being blocked for "inappropriate content" by the latest update of the company's web monitoring software. But those are relatively trivial problems that don't blow estimates by orders of magnitude.
Your advice is fine for hacks who need to grind out simple business logic, or glue a few well tested and thoroughly traveled library functions together, and who don't have to think much about performance or memory constraints. There's very little uncertainty in that kind of work. But when you're trying to do new things, trying out new algorithms, and you have no idea whether they will even work, let alone be fast enough, you're back in the maze. We could have got astronauts to the moon 5 years sooner if we knew beforehand which directions were blind alleys.
Despite appearances, copyright really is dead. Yes, the law still exists, courts try to enforce it, and many people still think it's a shame that copyright doesn't work and fantasize that they could someday produce something that can be "protected" by copyright, instead of unreservedly celebrating the vastly expanded capabilities technology gives us for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. And yes, the GPL relies on copyright, and I know Stallman supports it for that reason. Doesn't change that copyright is now hopelessly unrealistic. If the Internet could be kept under such extreme surveillance that records of every byte transmitted could be kept and analyzed, it wouldn't be enough to squash all online piracy. If it was possible to prevent encryption from ever being used, it would not make piracy impossible to hide. If the Internet could be shut down, there are stll things like sneakernet with flash drives.
It's not just that piracy can't be stopped. It's that we shouldn't want to stop piracy even if it was possible. The very term "piracy" is a pejorative, just another piece of the huge propaganda effort to convince the public that sharing is bad and will cost jobs, destroy art, and ruin the economy and all that. Sharing is good. Sharing is a public good. Sharing of knowledge made us, and is very nearly as vital as breathing to the survival of civilization. For any small group to attempt to arrogate to themselves the right to decide what and how knowledge shall and shall not be shared is not just rent seeking profiteering, it is nothing less than treason against all humanity. It would be a huge tragedy if we came up with means to soften or avert Climate Disruption, but failed to employ them because of trivial intellectual property concerns until it was too late and as a result lost our civilization. Climate has killed many civilizations. Don't make the mistake of thinking our current civilization is so much stronger and smarter that it can't happen to us. And there are surely other perils. We know intellectual property law is routinely abused to cover up problems, hide things that the public needs and deserves to know. It's entirely too convenient for the propaganda pushers; they can't resist using it especially to suppress information. Fukushima is just one of many examples of that, with TEPCO repeatedly refusing to talk and when that wasn't accepted, lying to cover up the extent of the damage. Bisphenol A is another. A classic that everyone should be aware of is the years long attempt to deny the addictiveness of tobacco. Suppression of knowledge, which is what copyright really does, can only aid propaganda.
The RIAA and brethen have campaigned long and hard to stamp out piracy, and have failed miserably. They overreached hugely, succeeding only in turning a whole generation of fans against them, and in ironically raising awareness that copyright really stinks, and that the issue isn't about starving artists but instead is all about controlling what people are allowed to see and hear, and what artists are allowed to produce. Their propaganda was so far out it was comical. Captain Copyright was a farce. Does the outcome, still ongoing, of their efforts not convincingly demonstrate that copyright is a lost cause? It should.
MIT professor says messengers shouldn't be so naive. They should know that recipients have the right to strike off their heads for delivering bad news. Their trainers should have told them that.
Oh, the message? Copyright is dead. And what is MIT doing about that fact? Getting chummy with the likes of the RIAA and Elsevier? The RIAA is a confused and vicious organization that is in deep denial about copyright.
Shutting down websites is mostly political grandstanding. What does it cost to leave a website up, let it run on autopilot for a while, and not update any content? Just bandwidth and electricity. The new healthcare sites got over 1 million hits, but most of the time, most sites are nowhere near that busy. Probably cost more to have their website administrators change the sites to throw up a "sorry, we're closed" page. Saves a little on bandwidth. Doesn't save much on electricity.
When Wikipedia and other majors sites went dark for 1 day, they didn't give us any bull about why. They said it was all about SOPA and PIPA, and they meant exactly what they said.
From what I've read, there is a difference, and the Republicans are worse. There has been hysteria whipped up over supposed voter fraud, without any proof that it's a big problem. The Republicans are responsible for ramming through a bunch of laws requiring photo ID to vote. Democrats haven't done anything similar.
Photo IDs don't help much with fraud. All that really does is put more barriers between voters and the voting booth, as they know very well. They've erected other barriers, made people fill out more paperwork and do more legwork to "prove" their eligibility to vote, and they've done this disproportionately in Democratic leaning areas. They've arranged for fewer, older, slower, and more trouble prone voting machines in those areas, in hopes that the long lines would discourage Democratic voters. They've also tried scare tactics, such as a big billboard warning people that voting under a false identity is a felony. It's Jim Crow all over again.
I don't see any admission that the government is incompetent. He said "the US", not "the US government". Granted, he did say "tax dollars". Should have said just "dollars".
Yes, this health care act leaves a lot to be desired. The Republicans have done their utmost to muck it up. The original plan was to have a default single payer system. People would be automatically enrolled in it if they had no other insurance, and the costs would be added to their taxes. The Republicans forced a change to have that be a tax penalty instead, and no single payer option. That's a lot worse than the original idea. And why did the Republicans do that? They're trying to make it as hateful and obnoxious as possible, in hopes that will goad the people to rise up and reject the whole thing.
These politicans are like the most corrupt local police force you've ever heard of, setting speed traps, pulling people over and breaking their taillights then ticketing them for broken taillights, employing Mafia tactics to wring revenue from local merchants, putting opponents in prison on trumped up charges, planting drugs and confiscating property for auction for a tidy profit, blackmailing prostitutes for sex, and so on.
upon seeing the incredible wealth inequity of this country
But taking a job in "security", as they define it, won't help with that. When the security apparatus gets used to secure the elite against the masses, what then? Why do you think they're so hot for more security? It's the very inequality they caused that scares them. The whole thing is a wrong turn for any nation. The political hacks they dig up to run these agencies have a lamentable tendency to be really dumb about certain things. They are too easily swayed by copyright extremists, prone to thinking they really can win the war against piracy. They will dash off to try to enforce some impossible law, and keep trying as long as the legislature funds them, no matter how often people point out the impossiblities.
Security in software has been justly criticised for years now. MS Windows is so difficult to secure for many political reasons. MS keeps dabbling in security for them against "pirates" (their own users), to the detriment of security for users. Remember Windows Genuine Advantage? Time and again they've rolled out new features that throw security out for convenience. Autoplay for CDs. ActiveX. Excel macros.
Then you have the spooks demanding that software engineers add back doors, and watering down the strength of encryption to breakable levels. There was that whole idiotic export regime against anything that terrorists might be able to use to communicate more securely. Way back in the early 1990s, you had to swear that you were a US citizen before you could download the Netscape browser with the stronger encryption. In the click through agreement, they demanded that you not export it from the US, under penalty of law.
I really dislike how security has become such an overriding concern. Seems nearly everything can be considered a security issue. Patches are divided into security patches, and all others. For many problems, turning them into a security issue is the wrong approach. Prevent bugs, and a lot of security will take care of itself.
But I suppose it's the easiest way to get funding. Exploring space and doing pure science are so pre 9/11.