They don't? Many disagree. Here's A Solar Grand Plan, published in Scientific American, which claims that by 2050 we can get most of our energy from solar. There are many other similar ideas.
If we had to, we most certainly could go 100% green! If we ran out of fossil fuels and uranium next year, we would very quickly have alternatives in place. We wouldn't go back to 17th century technology. We only use coal because it's cheap and easy, not because we have no choice.
Even if you live, losing your home and your land is a lot more traumatic than a "bank account" matter.
I'm not saying that nuclear can't be safe. I'm saying that it won't be run safely. Human nature is the biggest danger. It's like computer security-- the least secure part is the idiot behind the keyboard. After 20 years or more of no accidents, people become complacent. It's very easy to start skimping on maintenance and feel like you are not taking much of a risk. We have a bunch of aging nuclear power plants. Some of them should have been taken off line already. They were not meant to be operated more than 30 or so years. But when the scheduled time to shut down and decommission neared, they asked for and got extensions. They also have a history of keeping less than honest records about minor incidents. They cover things up. We keep doing this, and someday, we'll push it too far and a worn out plant will fail and we'll have another nuclear disaster.
Speaking of conflation, you trot out another classic one when you lump fossil fuel energy with all other sources. Lot of nuclear proponents talk as if coal is the only real alternative. Yes, coal is very bad, with ocean acidification and global warming looming as big, big problems. If the choice was between coal or nuclear, I would pick nuclear despite the dangers.
But there are many more choices than that, and not just choices in energy sources, but also options for much more conservation. US buildings and cities are designed so wastefully. Suburban sprawl full of McMansions really costs us. Why did we do it? In part because subsidized energy made it cheap to drive long distances. In the 20th century we also adopted very energy intensive habits. Cheap power let us indulge in ways that weren't always good. The freezer is wonderful. But clothes dryers are totally unnecessary. A clothes line or rack is a bit slower but gets the clothes just as dry. We've gone nuts with the cleanliness and hygiene. Body odor is now considered unpleasant and offensive, and everyone is expected to have a hot shower every day. The powered lawn mower has enabled us to become fanatical about mowing the grass, and what for? Central heating and A/C is great, but we've become intolerant of so much as a 5 degree swing in temperatures. Then there's the matter of artificial lighting which on the whole is fantastic, but it has been overused and enabled us to screw up our sleeping patterns.
And what I see in your posts is the disingenuous use of a very incomplete picture that considers only one statistic, the number of deaths. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew was insignificant. After all, Andrew killed only 39 people, not much more than one person going postal.
Consider instead the area of land that was rendered unfit for other uses for years. For nuclear power, that's thousands of sq km. Coal mining has been done in a reckless and damaging manner, so it could probably not be said to be zero. Then there's the contamination of groundwater by fracking. And oil spills. But we don't have to get fuel that way. For other sorts of energy, it's zero. At any time, we can remove a dam and put the flooded land back to any other use we want. You should also remember that hydroelectric generation is just one purpose of dams. They also tame floods and store water for the dry times, enabling more agriculture.
Or consider the economic costs. What will the total cost of the Fukushima disaster be? Could be more than $1 trillion. Nuclear does not do so well on that.
And the burned hand teaches best. Children do not understand the dangers. Your hypothetical odds are way off. Perhaps you shouldn't play with sharp knives either, except in D&D. The odds against disaster rested almost entirely on the odds that a tsunami wouldn't happen. Because they were not prepared, the odds of a nuclear disaster were very high once the earthquake happened. And the earthquake and tsunami themselves were going to happen some year, it was only a matter of when.
And why were they not prepared? Not because we didn't know about the possibility. Not because they weren't warned, repeatedly. And not because the warnings were just so much hysteria and not based on hard facts, no. We had good information and solid science. You can't even really chalk this up to blind optimism. Their behavior goes beyond that. They were willfully ignorant, greedy fools. And a whole lot of innocent people paid for that.
We shouldn't play with nuclear power. Too many adults have demonstrated that they aren't mature enough to be responsible. For those who don't carefully keep the knives out of reach of kids, a few cuts are no big deal. Even an accidental amputation of a finger is not the end of the world. If steamship lines make a practice of charging recklessly through ice fields to save a few measly hours on an Atlantic crossing, the consequences of a disaster, while tragic and devastating to the company, will not wreck the economy. But millions of cancer cases and the loss of large areas of land for centuries is too high a price to pay. Suppose Tokyo had gotten irradiated. For that reason, we shouldn't allow fools to show the world the hard way that nuclear power will not be used responsibly.
Handicapped? Is that like Washington D.C. speak in which a "cut" means that a program suffered a smaller increase than wanted?
There isn't room for exponential growth. Doesn't matter what we do, such growth can never be more than temporary. We've expanded hugely over most of our history, and become accustomed and habituated to seemingly unending growth. We'll have to decide how we want to live with the space and resources we have. Do we push beyond the limits (if we haven't already) until nature reins us in with a horrifying collapse? Eat our seed corn and then starve? That's how they do it in Haiti. Do we follow the Afghanistan model and have constant fighting, bringing our population down that way? Very manly, builds character. Can this happen without someone reaching for the nuclear weapons, bringing on nuclear winter, and killing us all off? Do we push population right to the edge of disaster and then hang there, living a miserable life in as much discomfort as we can bear while staying alive? Or are we going to restrain ourselves?
Global population doesn't have to exceed 10 billion, that is totally up to us all. You speak of population "increasing too rapidly" in a very passive way, as if there's nothing we can do about it and it's not even our fault! Of course, some groups will not restrain themselves, what will we do about that? Beat them up? Or join them in a massive Tragedy of the Commons?
What do you mean "only" 10%? That is huge! Why do you act so unimpressed? What on earth do you expect, what counts as huge in your book?
You think it shows that conservation will only go so far? That Japan could cut energy use by that much that quickly shows just how wasteful we really are. Roughly 50% of our energy is used for simple heating and cooling. We could be comfortable and use far less if only we would build buildings right. Should be able to cut energy use for heating and cooling by at least 50%. And for a net gain-- the slightly higher cost of the buildings would be more than made up in lower heating and cooling costs. But we're too focused on the upfront cost. Obviously Japan can't just rebuild all their buildings overnight, so they have to compromise and live with a bit more temperature swing than they'd like.
First, you're half right. The Americans who whine don't appreciate how good we still have it in the US. We expect too much of ourselves. Just have to have the big house and not just one big car but at least 2, can't have the neighbors thinking a family is poor, oh no! The people struggling to maintain this unrealistic image of wealth often trap themselves, and then they're stuck in an underwater home and can't move where there are jobs should they lose them. Stupid? Irresponsible? Yes, but our society is harsh.
The other thing is that instead of fostering a sense of financial responsibility, helping people avoid traps, and going after the scoundrels who set them, we encourage excess, and blame the victims when it doesn't work. Excess is good for the economy. Any slightest suggestion that we should live less large is met with furious denial and all kinds of accusations. People who say such things are viewed as snotty, pessimistic, unpatriotic, wrong, dangerous, and weak. Being compared to former president Carter is an insult. Our elites subtly encourage that. Everything is skewed towards more sales. News is made more dramatic because that's what sells. People are bombarded with advertising. The medical community pushes drugs and treatments regardless of necessity. We like to think we're self reliant, but business has done everything possible to make us more dependent. And we love being mentally lazy in equating wealth with worth. We're far too respectful of the rich just for being rich.
In short, although we still do have it pretty good, and we should cut back, and we revere self made millionaires, that's no reason to let those criminals in the finance sector off and to bail them out.
You can see the pressure is getting to people. But instead of lashing out against our insane consumerism, they target intellectuals and scientists of all people. The cost of education certainly ought to be questioned, but to question the value of education is nuts. The Republican party in particular used to be the sober, responsible, fiscally prudent, level headed, smart and brainy party restraining the wooly-thinking and misty-eyed Democrats from going on expensive and useless crusades against intractable problems such as poverty. And Republicans were also not wimpy, foolishly appeasing hippy commie peaceniks, not afraid to use force against our enemies. How things have changed! Now reality, despite actually being pretty good, isn't good enough for the greedy Republicans. They've become the party of dangerous and wrong fantasies, too eager to tell the public everything is still golden, we're still on top of the world, and we don't have to change a thing. And to uphold this illusion, they've thrown all responsibility and scientific integrity under the bus. Then they have the chutzpah to compound their hypocrisy by bashing the Democrats for that. Wall Street is Too Big To Fail! (But screw Main Street. They're a bunch of lazy, entitled, moronic whiners.) Global warming isn't real! Or if it is, it's not our fault! And we can't do anything about it anyway, it's God's will! That is not the attitude we should expect of mature realists. Shameful. Bush II blew through our surplus in his first term, and rushed into a very expensive and completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Only after the Democrats swept in did the Republicans suddenly rediscover their fiscal prudence. They make hippy peaceniks look good. They're dangerous like a loose cannon. They tried to beat up Obama for fighting in Libya, and today McCain did a massive flip flop to urge that we intervene in Syria.
Recall that SCO launched a direct attack, and MS backed them. SCO demanded a $699 license fee from every Linux user, alleging that there was patented technology in the Linux kernel. It was highly improper of SCO to hit up users, but MS did not discourage SCO from trying that, far from it. If there were any merits to their claims, SCO should have pursued developers and perhaps distributors, not end users. To use a car analogy, what SCO tried was like demanding payment from everyone who ever drove a Ford over some patents that Ford allegedly violated.
The entire affair was based on the idea that software should be patentable. SCO was soundly defeated (thank you PJ!), but sadly, software is still patentable in the US. MS bears a great deal of blame for that. They have not lobbied for that fundamental change. Instead, they've bought into the insanity, going so far as to agree with those idiots running the entertainment industry. I can understand Big Media not getting it, but MS is supposed to be a savvy tech company. We all laugh when trolls like Eolas score big wins against MS.
Oh, I've found CPU bugs before. But I never found one others hadn't already found. The 16MHz 80386 had a bug with counters. If you did a REP MOVSW or similar instruction in a 16 bit mode, starting on an odd address, and you made the pointer registers roll over, the CPU would lock up. Couldn't handle the transition from 0xFFFF to 0x0001 in either direction. That was fixed in all the faster 386's. As I recall, there were about a dozen bugs in the 386. Of course later processors were all checked for those specific bugs, so they never happened again.
Then there's unintended features such as pipeline oddities. If you have self modifying code, and it changes the destination of a jump instruction immediately before executing it, the computer will jump to the old address. Step through those same instructions in a debugger, and it will jump to the new address. Strictly speaking, jumping to the old address is incorrect, but it doesn't break any good code and fixing it would wreck pipelining. This behavior has been known for a long time, and every CPU from at least the 386 to the Pentium 4 behaves this way. It wasn't an important problem because so little code was self modifying. Wasn't any good as a copy protection method either, as only an amateur would be fooled by it. I think it's been resolved in at least 2 ways. First, by amending the documentation for the instruction set to expressly state that behavior is undefined in such a case, and second, by proving that there is never any need for self modifying code. And making the separation between code and data explicit. Now we have No eXecution bits.
There are sometimes even Easter eggs. For some processors, a few unassigned opcodes performed a useful operation. It wasn't by design. Is that a bug? Another case was the use of out of bounds values. For instance, the ancient 6502 supports this packed decimal arithmetic mode, in which 0x99 meant 99. So what happened when some joker gave it an illegal value such as 0xFF? 0xFF was interpreted as 15*10+15 = 165, and one could perform some math on it and get correct results. Divide 0xFF by 2 (shift right), and it would compute the correct result of 0x82. That sort of thing makes life tough for emulators, and I have yet to find an Apple II emulator that reproduces that behavior faithfully.
its where capitalism and government collide that we have problems.
No, I'd say it's when they don't collide that we have problems. When they get too cozy, when government allows or even helps establish a monopoly, then we have problems.
Private schools in most parts of this nation spending drastically less per student
And that should make them drastically worse, should it not?
They also achieve consistently better results.
No, they don't. I went to a private school for a few years. They don't do a better job of education, and they aren't magically more effective and efficient. They only score better because they cherry pick their students. Most shocking of all was discovering that education was not the top priority of this much vaunted private school. It's all about not wasting time on the children of riffraff and other losers, so the students can spend their time forging connections with people who very likely will matter, who will one day be rich and powerful whether or not they merit it.
This whole issue is shy of the mark. Traditional publishers are doomed, and pushing garbage textbooks only hastens the reckoning. Eventually, textbooks that are copyleft, open source, and online will be the rule. Private schools have many unfair advantages, but before much longer, better textbooks will not be one of them.
I've run Firefox on very old machines, and I can tell you that 192M is about the lower limit for version 10. Firefox 4 was a memory pig, but they started this Memshrink program. Firefox 10 really does not take much more than Firefox 3.6, and it's getting better. Currently, for memory usage, Firefox is the best of all the big browsers, better than Chrome, Opera, and IE.
Firefox 10 works okay on a 350MHz Pentium II with 192M RAM, but is unusably slow and flogs swap mercilessly if the computer has only 128M. I have run Firefox 3.5 on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M of RAM, and it's barely usable-- takes 30 seconds to launch, but it does work on simple web sights. So, yes, 3.6 is still the leanest reasonably modern version.
You can find computers with more than 192M RAM in the trash. I suggest the poster go dumpster diving. Or if he's just a few megabytes short, grab an alpha of Firefox 13. Or use Dillo. Or live with a text based browser such as lynx or links. Or use wget or curl.
Hybrids are all the rage. But they really aren't that green. Batteries use metals that can be difficult to obtain and energy intensive to produce. They take far too long to recharge. And then they don't last. Pure electric would be the way to go if we had decent batteries, by which I mean batteries that approach the convenience of the humble gas tank. So we have this hybrid approach which uses both gas and electricity in combination. And it still needs a bit of battery capacity. All the expense, trouble and weight of both kinds of drive in one package!
As if battery troubles aren't bad enough, a conventional gas powered direct drive vehicle is quite capable of beating the fuel economy of a hybrid. There's lots of low hanging fruit that manufacturers are still ignoring. They are finally improving transmissions, putting in more gears and dumping that huge, huge waste of gas known as the torque converter. Took them long enough, and there's plenty more. Aerodynamics could so easily be much better. Instant on/off for the gas engine would save big time, and erase the one big advantage hybrids do have: the better city fuel economy. Put up with bad batteries, and then not even get better fuel economy?!
Oh, I remember that all right. What I remember is that circa 1989, the vi editor Minix had could not handle text files larger than 32k! Our first assignment was to hack on some source that was, of course, in a file larger than 32k, so we had to use split to break it into pieces, then cat to join everything together. Compiling might fail because you ran out of hard drive space, or memory, or file handles, process table entries, or who knows what. Over and over, Minix told its users that their cheesy consumer PCs just weren't big and good enough for a real OS. Lame!
In short, in those days Minix was a horrible OS. Made DOS + Windows 3.1 look like a model of usability by comparison. And now, Minix is the hotness in microkernels and embedded devices? Disorienting indeed.
That was a long time ago. I'd like to see Minix improve and succeed. And that because I feel nearly everything about computing has become seriously bloated. How did libc get so gigantic? Despite the bloat, computers are still so inflexibly, unthinkingly literal they make the most severe autism patients look like they gush with empathy and understanding.
I wonder if there could be some advantages to mortality. It just seems it would be easier (take less energy) to keep an existing organism in good repair indefinitely, compared to starting over with a new generation. If so, then lifespans evolved to be deliberately shorter than need be. If a tree can live 5000 years, why not an animal?
Shorter generations allow faster adaptation and evolution. Maybe immortality makes organisms so risk adverse that it becomes detrimental to the survival of the species. More adventurous creatures have more successes, even if half of them die of bad luck. New generations more readily learn new ideas, more easily abandon or never learn old ideas that no longer work. Or perhaps the demands and rigors of living set the odds of living more than a few decades so low that investing in repairs isn't worthwhile.
What makes you think that you are somehow entitled to "the full power" of the information age
What makes you think anyone has any right or power to deny us this? You talk as if sharing is some sort of privilege. I view sharing as a fundamental right, every bit as fundamental as the right to free speech.
Also, look at it from a practical viewpoint. Can copyright be enforced? No! DRM does not work. Counting on respect for the law does not work. Threatening enforcement and trying to back that with massive surveillance does not work. Moralizing works better, but still does not really work. Trying to figure some way to somehow make this system work has failed again and again, for the simple reason that it is impossible. Therefore, we should put our energies towards creating a new system.
Joe's invention went from worth doing because it was potentially able to earn to repay him for his invention work, to not being able to earn
Your entire scenario about Joe's financial injury is based on the thinking that IP law is the only way to compensate Joe. If we could have a system that not only lets Larry copy with a will but encourages that because it boosts Joe's numbers, and compensates Joe fairly and even better than Joe would be compensated under the current system, think you could support that? Because we can have such a system. I won't go into the details of it here, but I think it is both possible and necessary.
Sharing will be the way of the future. Consider how much easier copying has gotten over the years. Used to take a while to share music with friends. Before mp3's, we fooled around with cassette tapes and dubbing and the inevitable degradation of quality that caused. Now entire music libraries of digitally perfect recordings can be traded in seconds with a quick exchange of flash drives, and with less risk of discovery or negative consequences than if the two people traded drugs or had sex consensually. Unlike those others, sharing of the immaterial can even be done remotely and anonymously. Most laws restricting and regulating those other more easily monitored activities have been miserable failures, with the little success they've had entirely dependent on one of the parties repenting and willing to turn state's evidence. Copying is incredibly easy now. It will become even easier as technology continues to advance. Rather than continue to bang on about piracy not being okay, it is the law that is not okay.
You do not want to piss the people in power off.
No, it's the other way around. When the change comes, and it will, the people in power had better be ready to flip flop. Or they will piss us all off and then they won't be in power any more. They are not so powerful that they can warp reality. Do you think I am all alone in this thinking about IP law? To be sure there are diverging opinions about the best solutions, but enough people to move Congress agreed that the current system is broken and that proposals like ACTA will not fix matters while making other problems much worse. The politicians have been served notice that standing with the copyright extremists could put them on the wrong side of history. ACTA was handled in such a loser's fashion anyway, with the scandalous attempts to keep it all in the dark and to bypass due process.
you have to come up with a worthy replacement
I have. But I know that today it is too radical for most people. It will take years and generations. Meantime, what's wrong with a little civil disobedience? In fact, such is our duty, to keep the powerful on notice that they will not get away with every abuse of power. Should those naughty Yanks have not thrown tea into Boston harbor back in 1773? If we don't indulge ourselves, the powerful might be deluded into thinking everything is fine and no changes are needed. Change does not always come about because it will make things better,
First, on the definition of harm: Just what is a "financial injury"? Does your business suffer a financial injury if I could have done business with you but I chose one of your competitors? If I do business with you, have I inflicted a financial injury on your competitors? No matter who I chose, I am inflicting financial injury on someone? Also, I am injuring myself am I not, by parting with some of my hard earned money? Or perhaps it is you who are injuring me by demanding payment? You can't lose what you never had. If this is harm, this is wholly acceptable harm, and indeed unavoidable harm.
I realize businesses require income, same as animals require air, water, and food. And that not having these things causes harm. But if a business creates value and is unable to generate income because there are free alternatives to their preferred mechanism, and suffers harm thereby, that's not the fault of the would-be customers, that's the fault of the mechanism and the system behind it. These businesses can scream and hyperventilate about rape, strangulation, and theft all they like, try to blame and shame the entire public for being greedy, immoral, anti-capitalist, lazy, freeloading, thieving scum, and try to browbeat, threaten, sucker, and bribe people and lawmakers into supporting their broken vision, but that will not change the facts. No one can change reality with mere legislation.
It gets worse. We have hypothetical harm. As has been pointed out many times, we don't know what price a pirate would have paid if it was somehow possible to stop a work from being copyable for free. Maybe the pirate wouldn't have bought it at all. Almost certainly it would not be full price. It should be possible to come up with pretty good estimates, but sadly there is too much political opposition towards such studies. Seems the content cartels are afraid of that knowledge, as if they already know quite well the answer would not be to their liking.
And then, what of the harm the copyright extremists have done to artists? And to us all? The ridiculous and blatant lies they've tried to pass off on the public? The outright terrorism they've indulged in, so that the epithet MAFIAA is well deserved? It's a huge harm to keep us from realizing the full power of the Information Age. I keep imagining how much, much less costly, larger, more efficient, robust, searchable, and all around better public libraries could be if they could go entirely digital. But they can't, thanks to IP law. I also think of all the money we've wasted on DRM nonsense and legal terrorism. I don't like it that all HDTVs are a few percent more expensive in order to incorporate completely worthless, annoying, and ineffective DRM. Very wasteful are the court cases involving some ordinary citizen who was accused of sharing a few files. That could have been any one of us. Chilling effects. Copyright is far less valuable than the Internet. If we are forced to choose between the two, I'd put my money on the Internet.
Then there's the implication of uniqueness, and the common use of that as further justification for strict and strong IP law. Lot of people so unthinkingly feel that ideas, styles, stories and other art cannot be independently duplicated. Not true. Of course not every detail would be duplicated, but in fact neither art nor any individual is nearly so unique as we would like to think. We have this term "genre" that sort of acknowledges there is a whole lot of copying of artistic ideas going on, but this copying is somehow completely legitimate and accepted, even flattering and helpful because it serves as advertisement. Also, there isn't a single work that does not owe a huge debt to our culture. An example is the 1950s era genre of nuclear apocalypse stories such as Shute's On the Beach, Burdick's Fail-Safe book and film adaptation, and Peter George's Red Alert which was the basis for the famous movie Dr. Strangelove.
While on the subject of proper terminology, ESR blew it when he talked of piracy = stealing near the end of his letter.
ESR, copying is not stealing. Maybe copying is illegal, maybe it's immoral, but it is not stealing. And you should make that very clear in your writing. As it is, it's not clear whether you are only restating their incorrect beliefs or whether you accept their proposition that copying is stealing. If our supposed "elders" can't get that straight, we have further to go than I thought.
That's what I was thinking. Since this ruling is unenforceable, what do they mean by it? That they're stupid? That they hope the targets of this ruling will meekly submit out of fear or mistaken belief in their powers of enforcement, or even respect for the law? That they're just trying to score points with the gullible among the public, pump up their crime fighting stats and burnish a tough-on-crime image?
File this with the proposals of copyright extremists and patents on perpetual motion.
You think Obama is worse than Bush? Worse than Cheney??
The $4/gallon gas of 2008 may be one of the best things that happened. Woke up the auto manufacturers, got them to pay attention to fuel economy, and be ready to produce gas sippers to meet sudden surges in demand for such vehicles. We're in much better shape for the next gas price spike. Gas is even higher than $8/gallon in Britain. Somehow, their economy still functions. I love the way you all scream about the economy as if it's such a delicate flower. Are you expressing a lack of faith in capitalism, I wonder? Fear that we no longer have the ingenuity to adapt, and to solve problems? That we can't ramp up production of alternative sources of energy? Why isn't our economy wrecked right now because gas is higher than $1/gallon? Why not argue the price should be 50 cents per gallon, or, heck, 10 cents per gallon? If the economy is not doing as well as it ought right now, that's because we're still hung over from the massive financial fraud in subprime mortgages, not the price of gas.
All these facts, which may indeed be true, are not in context and not particularly relevant. I have noticed that the deniers are masterly at taking statements out of context. I would prefer to hear what these scientists have to say on global warming, not what mud they may be slinging at each other. That is, do they conclude that we are indeed experiencing global warming, and that we are causing it? And most importantly, why do they think so?
Zorita thinks we are seeing AGW. Read this quote from the paper "Detection of Human Influence on a New, Validated 1500-Year
Temperature Reconstruction":
".. about a third of the warming in the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions. The estimated magnitude of the anthropogenic signal is consistent with most of the warming in
the second half of the twentieth century being anthropogenic."
Details of the data which they use to reach their conclusions are in the paper.
JSON sucks too. Binary JSON doesn't address the problem that JSON is fundamentally hierarchical and small time, it just packs the data in better. BSON, as used in MongoDB? Better than JSON, but still bad. Try to format several terabytes of data for JSON and use it, and you'll see how bad even binary JSON can be. HDF5 was made for huge amounts of data, but has its limitations too.
Maybe you think YAML is the answer? YAML is a superset of JSON, in case you didn't know. And no, sorry, still very wasteful, though much better than XML.
Then change the action the special device takes. Instead of reporting you, how about it shuts off the engine? Is that closer to what DRM really does? Much worse, wouldn't you say? Probably would happen all the time when someone is rushing a friend or relative to the hospital. Perhaps it could be programmed to prevent the car from starting so that you could finish your current trip, thus avoiding dangers such as losing the power steering while taking a sharp turn, or losing power while at the bottom of a valley with a heavy truck on your bumper. But plenty of big problems with that idea too. If all this sounds stupid, that's because DRM is inherently stupid.
I'm with you on the auto insurance. Saw a few of those offers for lower rates in exchange for allowing tracking, and didn't like the idea.
Dear Rockoon. Don't use it? If only it was so easy.
I don't like High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. It's a total waste, as it accomplishes nothing. It sometimes causes problems unrelated to any violations of licenses. It slows things down. Devices with HDCP are more costly. Can I buy HDMI TVs or monitors without HDCP? I don't think so. If I don't want HDCP, what do I do? Don't watch TV? Use an old analog TV, and add a digital signal receiver to it? I also don't like Content Scramble System, or Region Encoding. Guess that means I shouldn't use DVDs either. I resent being forced to buy additional features that make things more expensive and less useful.
Suppose we have a big problem with people not paying for their use of a toll road. The solution to this problem that is equivalent to DRM is to install a special device on cars so your car can turn traitor on you, for your own good of course. Because how can you benefit from toll roads if toll road builders can't make any money? A weak old red light camera can't even come close to the monitoring your own car could do. Now, surely you can imagine all kinds of problems with such a scheme.
How'd you like it if in addition to watching for failure to pay tolls, your car reported you every time you exceeded the speed limit by so much as 1 kph, every time you didn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, or changed lanes without signaling, and so on? When you next check your email, there will be a nice one informing you that you broke the law and you have to pay a fine. That special device wouldn't last a New York minute once the public got wise to the scheme. Of course disseminating information on how to disable the device would be illegal, but that wouldn't stop anyone. Probably they would also require that all older vehicles be retrofitted. If the enforcement had any teeth, lot of people would be looking for alternative transportation. Horses might make a comeback.
Slashdot Mirror
s/Government/business interests/
FTFY
Renewables do not scale big enough or fast enough
They don't? Many disagree. Here's A Solar Grand Plan, published in Scientific American, which claims that by 2050 we can get most of our energy from solar. There are many other similar ideas.
If we had to, we most certainly could go 100% green! If we ran out of fossil fuels and uranium next year, we would very quickly have alternatives in place. We wouldn't go back to 17th century technology. We only use coal because it's cheap and easy, not because we have no choice.
Even if you live, losing your home and your land is a lot more traumatic than a "bank account" matter.
I'm not saying that nuclear can't be safe. I'm saying that it won't be run safely. Human nature is the biggest danger. It's like computer security-- the least secure part is the idiot behind the keyboard. After 20 years or more of no accidents, people become complacent. It's very easy to start skimping on maintenance and feel like you are not taking much of a risk. We have a bunch of aging nuclear power plants. Some of them should have been taken off line already. They were not meant to be operated more than 30 or so years. But when the scheduled time to shut down and decommission neared, they asked for and got extensions. They also have a history of keeping less than honest records about minor incidents. They cover things up. We keep doing this, and someday, we'll push it too far and a worn out plant will fail and we'll have another nuclear disaster.
Speaking of conflation, you trot out another classic one when you lump fossil fuel energy with all other sources. Lot of nuclear proponents talk as if coal is the only real alternative. Yes, coal is very bad, with ocean acidification and global warming looming as big, big problems. If the choice was between coal or nuclear, I would pick nuclear despite the dangers.
But there are many more choices than that, and not just choices in energy sources, but also options for much more conservation. US buildings and cities are designed so wastefully. Suburban sprawl full of McMansions really costs us. Why did we do it? In part because subsidized energy made it cheap to drive long distances. In the 20th century we also adopted very energy intensive habits. Cheap power let us indulge in ways that weren't always good. The freezer is wonderful. But clothes dryers are totally unnecessary. A clothes line or rack is a bit slower but gets the clothes just as dry. We've gone nuts with the cleanliness and hygiene. Body odor is now considered unpleasant and offensive, and everyone is expected to have a hot shower every day. The powered lawn mower has enabled us to become fanatical about mowing the grass, and what for? Central heating and A/C is great, but we've become intolerant of so much as a 5 degree swing in temperatures. Then there's the matter of artificial lighting which on the whole is fantastic, but it has been overused and enabled us to screw up our sleeping patterns.
And what I see in your posts is the disingenuous use of a very incomplete picture that considers only one statistic, the number of deaths. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew was insignificant. After all, Andrew killed only 39 people, not much more than one person going postal.
Consider instead the area of land that was rendered unfit for other uses for years. For nuclear power, that's thousands of sq km. Coal mining has been done in a reckless and damaging manner, so it could probably not be said to be zero. Then there's the contamination of groundwater by fracking. And oil spills. But we don't have to get fuel that way. For other sorts of energy, it's zero. At any time, we can remove a dam and put the flooded land back to any other use we want. You should also remember that hydroelectric generation is just one purpose of dams. They also tame floods and store water for the dry times, enabling more agriculture.
Or consider the economic costs. What will the total cost of the Fukushima disaster be? Could be more than $1 trillion. Nuclear does not do so well on that.
And the burned hand teaches best. Children do not understand the dangers. Your hypothetical odds are way off. Perhaps you shouldn't play with sharp knives either, except in D&D. The odds against disaster rested almost entirely on the odds that a tsunami wouldn't happen. Because they were not prepared, the odds of a nuclear disaster were very high once the earthquake happened. And the earthquake and tsunami themselves were going to happen some year, it was only a matter of when.
And why were they not prepared? Not because we didn't know about the possibility. Not because they weren't warned, repeatedly. And not because the warnings were just so much hysteria and not based on hard facts, no. We had good information and solid science. You can't even really chalk this up to blind optimism. Their behavior goes beyond that. They were willfully ignorant, greedy fools. And a whole lot of innocent people paid for that.
We shouldn't play with nuclear power. Too many adults have demonstrated that they aren't mature enough to be responsible. For those who don't carefully keep the knives out of reach of kids, a few cuts are no big deal. Even an accidental amputation of a finger is not the end of the world. If steamship lines make a practice of charging recklessly through ice fields to save a few measly hours on an Atlantic crossing, the consequences of a disaster, while tragic and devastating to the company, will not wreck the economy. But millions of cancer cases and the loss of large areas of land for centuries is too high a price to pay. Suppose Tokyo had gotten irradiated. For that reason, we shouldn't allow fools to show the world the hard way that nuclear power will not be used responsibly.
Handicapped? Is that like Washington D.C. speak in which a "cut" means that a program suffered a smaller increase than wanted?
There isn't room for exponential growth. Doesn't matter what we do, such growth can never be more than temporary. We've expanded hugely over most of our history, and become accustomed and habituated to seemingly unending growth. We'll have to decide how we want to live with the space and resources we have. Do we push beyond the limits (if we haven't already) until nature reins us in with a horrifying collapse? Eat our seed corn and then starve? That's how they do it in Haiti. Do we follow the Afghanistan model and have constant fighting, bringing our population down that way? Very manly, builds character. Can this happen without someone reaching for the nuclear weapons, bringing on nuclear winter, and killing us all off? Do we push population right to the edge of disaster and then hang there, living a miserable life in as much discomfort as we can bear while staying alive? Or are we going to restrain ourselves?
Global population doesn't have to exceed 10 billion, that is totally up to us all. You speak of population "increasing too rapidly" in a very passive way, as if there's nothing we can do about it and it's not even our fault! Of course, some groups will not restrain themselves, what will we do about that? Beat them up? Or join them in a massive Tragedy of the Commons?
What do you mean "only" 10%? That is huge! Why do you act so unimpressed? What on earth do you expect, what counts as huge in your book?
You think it shows that conservation will only go so far? That Japan could cut energy use by that much that quickly shows just how wasteful we really are. Roughly 50% of our energy is used for simple heating and cooling. We could be comfortable and use far less if only we would build buildings right. Should be able to cut energy use for heating and cooling by at least 50%. And for a net gain-- the slightly higher cost of the buildings would be more than made up in lower heating and cooling costs. But we're too focused on the upfront cost. Obviously Japan can't just rebuild all their buildings overnight, so they have to compromise and live with a bit more temperature swing than they'd like.
I'm of 2 minds on this.
First, you're half right. The Americans who whine don't appreciate how good we still have it in the US. We expect too much of ourselves. Just have to have the big house and not just one big car but at least 2, can't have the neighbors thinking a family is poor, oh no! The people struggling to maintain this unrealistic image of wealth often trap themselves, and then they're stuck in an underwater home and can't move where there are jobs should they lose them. Stupid? Irresponsible? Yes, but our society is harsh.
The other thing is that instead of fostering a sense of financial responsibility, helping people avoid traps, and going after the scoundrels who set them, we encourage excess, and blame the victims when it doesn't work. Excess is good for the economy. Any slightest suggestion that we should live less large is met with furious denial and all kinds of accusations. People who say such things are viewed as snotty, pessimistic, unpatriotic, wrong, dangerous, and weak. Being compared to former president Carter is an insult. Our elites subtly encourage that. Everything is skewed towards more sales. News is made more dramatic because that's what sells. People are bombarded with advertising. The medical community pushes drugs and treatments regardless of necessity. We like to think we're self reliant, but business has done everything possible to make us more dependent. And we love being mentally lazy in equating wealth with worth. We're far too respectful of the rich just for being rich.
In short, although we still do have it pretty good, and we should cut back, and we revere self made millionaires, that's no reason to let those criminals in the finance sector off and to bail them out.
You can see the pressure is getting to people. But instead of lashing out against our insane consumerism, they target intellectuals and scientists of all people. The cost of education certainly ought to be questioned, but to question the value of education is nuts. The Republican party in particular used to be the sober, responsible, fiscally prudent, level headed, smart and brainy party restraining the wooly-thinking and misty-eyed Democrats from going on expensive and useless crusades against intractable problems such as poverty. And Republicans were also not wimpy, foolishly appeasing hippy commie peaceniks, not afraid to use force against our enemies. How things have changed! Now reality, despite actually being pretty good, isn't good enough for the greedy Republicans. They've become the party of dangerous and wrong fantasies, too eager to tell the public everything is still golden, we're still on top of the world, and we don't have to change a thing. And to uphold this illusion, they've thrown all responsibility and scientific integrity under the bus. Then they have the chutzpah to compound their hypocrisy by bashing the Democrats for that. Wall Street is Too Big To Fail! (But screw Main Street. They're a bunch of lazy, entitled, moronic whiners.) Global warming isn't real! Or if it is, it's not our fault! And we can't do anything about it anyway, it's God's will! That is not the attitude we should expect of mature realists. Shameful. Bush II blew through our surplus in his first term, and rushed into a very expensive and completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Only after the Democrats swept in did the Republicans suddenly rediscover their fiscal prudence. They make hippy peaceniks look good. They're dangerous like a loose cannon. They tried to beat up Obama for fighting in Libya, and today McCain did a massive flip flop to urge that we intervene in Syria.
Recall that SCO launched a direct attack, and MS backed them. SCO demanded a $699 license fee from every Linux user, alleging that there was patented technology in the Linux kernel. It was highly improper of SCO to hit up users, but MS did not discourage SCO from trying that, far from it. If there were any merits to their claims, SCO should have pursued developers and perhaps distributors, not end users. To use a car analogy, what SCO tried was like demanding payment from everyone who ever drove a Ford over some patents that Ford allegedly violated.
The entire affair was based on the idea that software should be patentable. SCO was soundly defeated (thank you PJ!), but sadly, software is still patentable in the US. MS bears a great deal of blame for that. They have not lobbied for that fundamental change. Instead, they've bought into the insanity, going so far as to agree with those idiots running the entertainment industry. I can understand Big Media not getting it, but MS is supposed to be a savvy tech company. We all laugh when trolls like Eolas score big wins against MS.
Oh, I've found CPU bugs before. But I never found one others hadn't already found. The 16MHz 80386 had a bug with counters. If you did a REP MOVSW or similar instruction in a 16 bit mode, starting on an odd address, and you made the pointer registers roll over, the CPU would lock up. Couldn't handle the transition from 0xFFFF to 0x0001 in either direction. That was fixed in all the faster 386's. As I recall, there were about a dozen bugs in the 386. Of course later processors were all checked for those specific bugs, so they never happened again.
Then there's unintended features such as pipeline oddities. If you have self modifying code, and it changes the destination of a jump instruction immediately before executing it, the computer will jump to the old address. Step through those same instructions in a debugger, and it will jump to the new address. Strictly speaking, jumping to the old address is incorrect, but it doesn't break any good code and fixing it would wreck pipelining. This behavior has been known for a long time, and every CPU from at least the 386 to the Pentium 4 behaves this way. It wasn't an important problem because so little code was self modifying. Wasn't any good as a copy protection method either, as only an amateur would be fooled by it. I think it's been resolved in at least 2 ways. First, by amending the documentation for the instruction set to expressly state that behavior is undefined in such a case, and second, by proving that there is never any need for self modifying code. And making the separation between code and data explicit. Now we have No eXecution bits.
There are sometimes even Easter eggs. For some processors, a few unassigned opcodes performed a useful operation. It wasn't by design. Is that a bug? Another case was the use of out of bounds values. For instance, the ancient 6502 supports this packed decimal arithmetic mode, in which 0x99 meant 99. So what happened when some joker gave it an illegal value such as 0xFF? 0xFF was interpreted as 15*10+15 = 165, and one could perform some math on it and get correct results. Divide 0xFF by 2 (shift right), and it would compute the correct result of 0x82. That sort of thing makes life tough for emulators, and I have yet to find an Apple II emulator that reproduces that behavior faithfully.
its where capitalism and government collide that we have problems.
No, I'd say it's when they don't collide that we have problems. When they get too cozy, when government allows or even helps establish a monopoly, then we have problems.
Private schools in most parts of this nation spending drastically less per student
And that should make them drastically worse, should it not?
They also achieve consistently better results.
No, they don't. I went to a private school for a few years. They don't do a better job of education, and they aren't magically more effective and efficient. They only score better because they cherry pick their students. Most shocking of all was discovering that education was not the top priority of this much vaunted private school. It's all about not wasting time on the children of riffraff and other losers, so the students can spend their time forging connections with people who very likely will matter, who will one day be rich and powerful whether or not they merit it.
This whole issue is shy of the mark. Traditional publishers are doomed, and pushing garbage textbooks only hastens the reckoning. Eventually, textbooks that are copyleft, open source, and online will be the rule. Private schools have many unfair advantages, but before much longer, better textbooks will not be one of them.
I've run Firefox on very old machines, and I can tell you that 192M is about the lower limit for version 10. Firefox 4 was a memory pig, but they started this Memshrink program. Firefox 10 really does not take much more than Firefox 3.6, and it's getting better. Currently, for memory usage, Firefox is the best of all the big browsers, better than Chrome, Opera, and IE.
Firefox 10 works okay on a 350MHz Pentium II with 192M RAM, but is unusably slow and flogs swap mercilessly if the computer has only 128M. I have run Firefox 3.5 on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M of RAM, and it's barely usable-- takes 30 seconds to launch, but it does work on simple web sights. So, yes, 3.6 is still the leanest reasonably modern version.
You can find computers with more than 192M RAM in the trash. I suggest the poster go dumpster diving. Or if he's just a few megabytes short, grab an alpha of Firefox 13. Or use Dillo. Or live with a text based browser such as lynx or links. Or use wget or curl.
This!
Hybrids are all the rage. But they really aren't that green. Batteries use metals that can be difficult to obtain and energy intensive to produce. They take far too long to recharge. And then they don't last. Pure electric would be the way to go if we had decent batteries, by which I mean batteries that approach the convenience of the humble gas tank. So we have this hybrid approach which uses both gas and electricity in combination. And it still needs a bit of battery capacity. All the expense, trouble and weight of both kinds of drive in one package!
As if battery troubles aren't bad enough, a conventional gas powered direct drive vehicle is quite capable of beating the fuel economy of a hybrid. There's lots of low hanging fruit that manufacturers are still ignoring. They are finally improving transmissions, putting in more gears and dumping that huge, huge waste of gas known as the torque converter. Took them long enough, and there's plenty more. Aerodynamics could so easily be much better. Instant on/off for the gas engine would save big time, and erase the one big advantage hybrids do have: the better city fuel economy. Put up with bad batteries, and then not even get better fuel economy?!
The Yaris is a start, but it is only a start.
Oh, I remember that all right. What I remember is that circa 1989, the vi editor Minix had could not handle text files larger than 32k! Our first assignment was to hack on some source that was, of course, in a file larger than 32k, so we had to use split to break it into pieces, then cat to join everything together. Compiling might fail because you ran out of hard drive space, or memory, or file handles, process table entries, or who knows what. Over and over, Minix told its users that their cheesy consumer PCs just weren't big and good enough for a real OS. Lame!
In short, in those days Minix was a horrible OS. Made DOS + Windows 3.1 look like a model of usability by comparison. And now, Minix is the hotness in microkernels and embedded devices? Disorienting indeed.
That was a long time ago. I'd like to see Minix improve and succeed. And that because I feel nearly everything about computing has become seriously bloated. How did libc get so gigantic? Despite the bloat, computers are still so inflexibly, unthinkingly literal they make the most severe autism patients look like they gush with empathy and understanding.
I wonder if there could be some advantages to mortality. It just seems it would be easier (take less energy) to keep an existing organism in good repair indefinitely, compared to starting over with a new generation. If so, then lifespans evolved to be deliberately shorter than need be. If a tree can live 5000 years, why not an animal?
Shorter generations allow faster adaptation and evolution. Maybe immortality makes organisms so risk adverse that it becomes detrimental to the survival of the species. More adventurous creatures have more successes, even if half of them die of bad luck. New generations more readily learn new ideas, more easily abandon or never learn old ideas that no longer work. Or perhaps the demands and rigors of living set the odds of living more than a few decades so low that investing in repairs isn't worthwhile.
What makes you think that you are somehow entitled to "the full power" of the information age
What makes you think anyone has any right or power to deny us this? You talk as if sharing is some sort of privilege. I view sharing as a fundamental right, every bit as fundamental as the right to free speech.
Also, look at it from a practical viewpoint. Can copyright be enforced? No! DRM does not work. Counting on respect for the law does not work. Threatening enforcement and trying to back that with massive surveillance does not work. Moralizing works better, but still does not really work. Trying to figure some way to somehow make this system work has failed again and again, for the simple reason that it is impossible. Therefore, we should put our energies towards creating a new system.
Joe's invention went from worth doing because it was potentially able to earn to repay him for his invention work, to not being able to earn
Your entire scenario about Joe's financial injury is based on the thinking that IP law is the only way to compensate Joe. If we could have a system that not only lets Larry copy with a will but encourages that because it boosts Joe's numbers, and compensates Joe fairly and even better than Joe would be compensated under the current system, think you could support that? Because we can have such a system. I won't go into the details of it here, but I think it is both possible and necessary.
Sharing will be the way of the future. Consider how much easier copying has gotten over the years. Used to take a while to share music with friends. Before mp3's, we fooled around with cassette tapes and dubbing and the inevitable degradation of quality that caused. Now entire music libraries of digitally perfect recordings can be traded in seconds with a quick exchange of flash drives, and with less risk of discovery or negative consequences than if the two people traded drugs or had sex consensually. Unlike those others, sharing of the immaterial can even be done remotely and anonymously. Most laws restricting and regulating those other more easily monitored activities have been miserable failures, with the little success they've had entirely dependent on one of the parties repenting and willing to turn state's evidence. Copying is incredibly easy now. It will become even easier as technology continues to advance. Rather than continue to bang on about piracy not being okay, it is the law that is not okay.
You do not want to piss the people in power off.
No, it's the other way around. When the change comes, and it will, the people in power had better be ready to flip flop. Or they will piss us all off and then they won't be in power any more. They are not so powerful that they can warp reality. Do you think I am all alone in this thinking about IP law? To be sure there are diverging opinions about the best solutions, but enough people to move Congress agreed that the current system is broken and that proposals like ACTA will not fix matters while making other problems much worse. The politicians have been served notice that standing with the copyright extremists could put them on the wrong side of history. ACTA was handled in such a loser's fashion anyway, with the scandalous attempts to keep it all in the dark and to bypass due process.
you have to come up with a worthy replacement
I have. But I know that today it is too radical for most people. It will take years and generations. Meantime, what's wrong with a little civil disobedience? In fact, such is our duty, to keep the powerful on notice that they will not get away with every abuse of power. Should those naughty Yanks have not thrown tea into Boston harbor back in 1773? If we don't indulge ourselves, the powerful might be deluded into thinking everything is fine and no changes are needed. Change does not always come about because it will make things better,
Lot of notions and assumptions in your post.
First, on the definition of harm: Just what is a "financial injury"? Does your business suffer a financial injury if I could have done business with you but I chose one of your competitors? If I do business with you, have I inflicted a financial injury on your competitors? No matter who I chose, I am inflicting financial injury on someone? Also, I am injuring myself am I not, by parting with some of my hard earned money? Or perhaps it is you who are injuring me by demanding payment? You can't lose what you never had. If this is harm, this is wholly acceptable harm, and indeed unavoidable harm.
I realize businesses require income, same as animals require air, water, and food. And that not having these things causes harm. But if a business creates value and is unable to generate income because there are free alternatives to their preferred mechanism, and suffers harm thereby, that's not the fault of the would-be customers, that's the fault of the mechanism and the system behind it. These businesses can scream and hyperventilate about rape, strangulation, and theft all they like, try to blame and shame the entire public for being greedy, immoral, anti-capitalist, lazy, freeloading, thieving scum, and try to browbeat, threaten, sucker, and bribe people and lawmakers into supporting their broken vision, but that will not change the facts. No one can change reality with mere legislation.
It gets worse. We have hypothetical harm. As has been pointed out many times, we don't know what price a pirate would have paid if it was somehow possible to stop a work from being copyable for free. Maybe the pirate wouldn't have bought it at all. Almost certainly it would not be full price. It should be possible to come up with pretty good estimates, but sadly there is too much political opposition towards such studies. Seems the content cartels are afraid of that knowledge, as if they already know quite well the answer would not be to their liking.
And then, what of the harm the copyright extremists have done to artists? And to us all? The ridiculous and blatant lies they've tried to pass off on the public? The outright terrorism they've indulged in, so that the epithet MAFIAA is well deserved? It's a huge harm to keep us from realizing the full power of the Information Age. I keep imagining how much, much less costly, larger, more efficient, robust, searchable, and all around better public libraries could be if they could go entirely digital. But they can't, thanks to IP law. I also think of all the money we've wasted on DRM nonsense and legal terrorism. I don't like it that all HDTVs are a few percent more expensive in order to incorporate completely worthless, annoying, and ineffective DRM. Very wasteful are the court cases involving some ordinary citizen who was accused of sharing a few files. That could have been any one of us. Chilling effects. Copyright is far less valuable than the Internet. If we are forced to choose between the two, I'd put my money on the Internet.
Then there's the implication of uniqueness, and the common use of that as further justification for strict and strong IP law. Lot of people so unthinkingly feel that ideas, styles, stories and other art cannot be independently duplicated. Not true. Of course not every detail would be duplicated, but in fact neither art nor any individual is nearly so unique as we would like to think. We have this term "genre" that sort of acknowledges there is a whole lot of copying of artistic ideas going on, but this copying is somehow completely legitimate and accepted, even flattering and helpful because it serves as advertisement. Also, there isn't a single work that does not owe a huge debt to our culture. An example is the 1950s era genre of nuclear apocalypse stories such as Shute's On the Beach, Burdick's Fail-Safe book and film adaptation, and Peter George's Red Alert which was the basis for the famous movie Dr. Strangelove.
While on the subject of proper terminology, ESR blew it when he talked of piracy = stealing near the end of his letter.
ESR, copying is not stealing. Maybe copying is illegal, maybe it's immoral, but it is not stealing. And you should make that very clear in your writing. As it is, it's not clear whether you are only restating their incorrect beliefs or whether you accept their proposition that copying is stealing. If our supposed "elders" can't get that straight, we have further to go than I thought.
That's what I was thinking. Since this ruling is unenforceable, what do they mean by it? That they're stupid? That they hope the targets of this ruling will meekly submit out of fear or mistaken belief in their powers of enforcement, or even respect for the law? That they're just trying to score points with the gullible among the public, pump up their crime fighting stats and burnish a tough-on-crime image?
File this with the proposals of copyright extremists and patents on perpetual motion.
You think Obama is worse than Bush? Worse than Cheney??
The $4/gallon gas of 2008 may be one of the best things that happened. Woke up the auto manufacturers, got them to pay attention to fuel economy, and be ready to produce gas sippers to meet sudden surges in demand for such vehicles. We're in much better shape for the next gas price spike. Gas is even higher than $8/gallon in Britain. Somehow, their economy still functions. I love the way you all scream about the economy as if it's such a delicate flower. Are you expressing a lack of faith in capitalism, I wonder? Fear that we no longer have the ingenuity to adapt, and to solve problems? That we can't ramp up production of alternative sources of energy? Why isn't our economy wrecked right now because gas is higher than $1/gallon? Why not argue the price should be 50 cents per gallon, or, heck, 10 cents per gallon? If the economy is not doing as well as it ought right now, that's because we're still hung over from the massive financial fraud in subprime mortgages, not the price of gas.
Garbage.
All these facts, which may indeed be true, are not in context and not particularly relevant. I have noticed that the deniers are masterly at taking statements out of context. I would prefer to hear what these scientists have to say on global warming, not what mud they may be slinging at each other. That is, do they conclude that we are indeed experiencing global warming, and that we are causing it? And most importantly, why do they think so?
Zorita thinks we are seeing AGW. Read this quote from the paper "Detection of Human Influence on a New, Validated 1500-Year Temperature Reconstruction":
".. about a third of the warming in the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The estimated magnitude of the anthropogenic signal is consistent with most of the warming in the second half of the twentieth century being anthropogenic."
Details of the data which they use to reach their conclusions are in the paper.
JSON sucks too. Binary JSON doesn't address the problem that JSON is fundamentally hierarchical and small time, it just packs the data in better. BSON, as used in MongoDB? Better than JSON, but still bad. Try to format several terabytes of data for JSON and use it, and you'll see how bad even binary JSON can be. HDF5 was made for huge amounts of data, but has its limitations too.
Maybe you think YAML is the answer? YAML is a superset of JSON, in case you didn't know. And no, sorry, still very wasteful, though much better than XML.
Then change the action the special device takes. Instead of reporting you, how about it shuts off the engine? Is that closer to what DRM really does? Much worse, wouldn't you say? Probably would happen all the time when someone is rushing a friend or relative to the hospital. Perhaps it could be programmed to prevent the car from starting so that you could finish your current trip, thus avoiding dangers such as losing the power steering while taking a sharp turn, or losing power while at the bottom of a valley with a heavy truck on your bumper. But plenty of big problems with that idea too. If all this sounds stupid, that's because DRM is inherently stupid.
I'm with you on the auto insurance. Saw a few of those offers for lower rates in exchange for allowing tracking, and didn't like the idea.
Dear Rockoon. Don't use it? If only it was so easy.
I don't like High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. It's a total waste, as it accomplishes nothing. It sometimes causes problems unrelated to any violations of licenses. It slows things down. Devices with HDCP are more costly. Can I buy HDMI TVs or monitors without HDCP? I don't think so. If I don't want HDCP, what do I do? Don't watch TV? Use an old analog TV, and add a digital signal receiver to it? I also don't like Content Scramble System, or Region Encoding. Guess that means I shouldn't use DVDs either. I resent being forced to buy additional features that make things more expensive and less useful.
Let's try a car analogy.
Suppose we have a big problem with people not paying for their use of a toll road. The solution to this problem that is equivalent to DRM is to install a special device on cars so your car can turn traitor on you, for your own good of course. Because how can you benefit from toll roads if toll road builders can't make any money? A weak old red light camera can't even come close to the monitoring your own car could do. Now, surely you can imagine all kinds of problems with such a scheme.
How'd you like it if in addition to watching for failure to pay tolls, your car reported you every time you exceeded the speed limit by so much as 1 kph, every time you didn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, or changed lanes without signaling, and so on? When you next check your email, there will be a nice one informing you that you broke the law and you have to pay a fine. That special device wouldn't last a New York minute once the public got wise to the scheme. Of course disseminating information on how to disable the device would be illegal, but that wouldn't stop anyone. Probably they would also require that all older vehicles be retrofitted. If the enforcement had any teeth, lot of people would be looking for alternative transportation. Horses might make a comeback.