I am generally in favor of megacorps getting hit with huge penalties. We don't do near enough of that. How else can they be deterred from trying the kind of b.s. Ticketmaster has pulled over the years? If they start whining about the size of a penalty, I would point out that judging from the amount of compensation they pay their executives, they obviously are not hurting for money, and I will never believe otherwise until executive compensation changes.
Instead, we bitch and moan about banks, telecoms, ISPs, oil companies, and other near monopolies, then pony up and move on with life because we need their products and services (or think we do) and we don't have time to fight over a few pennies or some deliberately overcomplicated condition in the fine print that boils down to more costs for us. I wish more people would boycott these predatory businesses.
But I'm not so keen on seeing the lawyers benefit the most. Perhaps the state should get a share. Bad though it might be, the state is after all the best representation of the people that we have.
You talk of products and of counterfeiting. You are once again conflating the material with the immaterial. Although the term "product" does apply to a movie, there are better terms, such as "data". Nor is piracy is the same as counterfeiting. Counterfeiting also means that the origin of a product is being misrepresented, similar to plagiarism. Pirates aren't claiming to be the authors of a Beatles' song.
You speak of "allowing", as if the default is that copying is hard, and as if some human agency has the power to grant people the ability to make copies, and can take that privilege away anytime. And as if the US has authority over Korea.
Nor do you know what effect it all has on jobs. For all you know, your way would kill jobs, not create them. Your way certainly would hurt the economy, benefiting a few monopolies a little in exchange for a lot of expense for everyone.
Your point about murder, and your assertion that morals are all relative, makes the same sort of mistake the copyright extremists make. You've simplified the argument too much and made an equivalence between things that aren't equivalent at all. Yes indeed, both murder and copying are easy to commit, the first time. We all must sleep sometime. It is even easier to cut off your own hand, or commit suicide. But there, the similarities end. Unlike copying, murder is not easy to get away with. Nor is it so easy to make a net profit from murder. Hardest of all is to make a business of it, to do it repeatedly, for gain. The easiest people to murder are the ones who trust you. But they are members of your group, and they will no longer be able to contribute to the welfare of same, so you've suffered a clear loss, whatever the deed gained you. And for so long as you are suspected, you will not be trusted, by anyone, which is a huge, huge hit to your welfare, as well as the opportunity to commit murder again. We didn't really choose to be this way. Evolution has shaped us so. Anyone who trusts a known murderer is likely to become a candidate for a Darwin Award. The universe does not make prevention so easy. It's rather like karma. The chickens will come home to roost.
A better comparison is between copying and sex. From time to time, authorities have attempted to regulate sex in various ways. They've ranged from the ridiculous and unenforceable such as anti-sodomy laws, to China's one child policy, which is not a law against sex per se, but only a consequence of sex, and one that cannot be easily denied, which makes the law enforceable. Copying is even easier to commit and harder to enforce against than sex. Two people can have sex, and if they keep it private and don't tell, no one else will ever know unless there are consequences such as a baby or a debilitating disease. Copying has no equivalent consequences.
You are the one who is out of your mind. You don't get it. Complain to the universe about how easy it is to copy. It won't listen. Information is not scarce. And no petty human laws or technology can make it scarce. Moralizing to us will not change that. You deserve derision for demanding that we all conform to this view of how you think things should work, at great cost to us all, especially as you are totally unable to suggest any credible way to enforce this vision. Can't be done. Good thing too-- it's a horrible vision. When you were little, did you get really bent out of shape when your younger sibling copied everything you did?
You seem to have utterly failed to grasp that life is a bit more complicated than property rights and material goods, that there could exist things that do not fit those concepts. Just as you have failed to grasp that stealing is not the only kind of crime there is. Nor have you apparently listened to the various suggestions of how we could do it all. We can both freely copy information and fairly compensate creators for their work. But you don't believe that. Perhaps you think your livelihood depends on refusing to accept such a possibility.
Because the order and method in which formulations are calculated can matter to the computer, but not to the mathematician who just wants the result of a few calculations. Such issues as whether a computer had to do a few hundred iterations of the Gauss-Seidel method are simply not relevant to someone trying to solve a system of differential equations. Yes, we now have computers that crunch numbers so efficiently that we no longer need books of log tables, sines, and such, but to the mathematician, these are only improved tools.
To use a car analogy, a mechanic does not care about the details of how a wrench was forged. Even if the mechanic designs a new tool, the only things that matter is whether there are materials capable of realizing the tool. If there are, just how that's done is someone else's problem. You would not consider metallurgy a mere branch of mechanical engineering, or of chemistry, would you?
This seems like a half baked solution to one aspect of a bad idea. At least it's not as bad a "solution" as installing red light enforcement cameras everywhere. Intersections are just plain bad. Yellows are often too short for a variety of reasons, and that is the number one cause of red light running. After improving the signal timing, which shouldn't be hard, roundabouts may be the most practical alternative.
Then there's the interchange, which is unfortunately very expensive. Yet it's crazy the way we spend millions on a limited access highway, and then go only halfway, and make the crossroads stop for the exits. For a more exotic idea, what if the vehicles did the bridging, instead of the road? Have vehicles be long enough to span at least 2 columns at all times, then make an overpass with just columns, no bridge deck. Could make interchanges cheap enough that we would never use intersections, and never need traffic lights.
NKS does not make a good case for Wolfram's genius, but rather for his arrogance and ignorance. It's good work, from the point of view of being correct, and being about a significant subject. It's not so good from the point of view of originality. Nor is it a superior treatment of a known subject. It's not even a novel approach. Wolfram really went gaga over cellular automata, and they've been well known ever since Conway's Game of Life popularized them in 1970, and studied well before that. He talks as if the subject had languished, and his research singlehandedly revived interest in them. Perhaps so, among physicists. He also excuses his failure to understand its significance as the consequence of it being presented as just a game. Obviously, he didn't talk with any computer scientists before writing that book. He merely rediscovered what computer scientists have known for decades. Worse, he's not even the first physicist to have rediscovered computer science! That man, and his arrogant physicist buddies need to get out of their bubble more often. I've seen this kind of thing before, where the people at the top of a particular discipline start acting as if all other science is secondary, is only an aspect of their chosen discipline. Saw that attitude towards Computer Science in professors and students of Electrical Engineering. They didn't get it that algorithms were more than simple, trivial little lists of instructions for hooking up logic gates. Mathematicians also have this tendency to view CS as just a branch of math, and algorithms as something that can be expressed as "just" a series of formulas. It's like the view that a person is only a bag of water with a few other chemicals mixed in, or the "Big Iron" implication that a computer is only a lump of metals. Goes over the top in overlooking the organization.
Wolfram's work illustrates that Computer Science should be a discipline of its own, on the same level as Math. The concept of the computer algorithm ranks with the mathematical formula in importance. You can't do any serious physics without advanced math. These days, you also need advanced computer science to do physics. His much vaunted NKS is in fact Computer Science.
It took genius to invent the wheel. In that sense, Wolfram is a genius. What does it take to avoid reinventing the wheel? Wisdom.
Suppose I want to use a particular library with a particular language. The standard for libraries is still C, not some language independent standard. To find out the details of the functions and parameters, I have to look at C header files.
For instance, if I want to use OpenSceneGraph from Perl, so I can do cool graphics quickly, there is no good choice. Here are the options:
Write my own wrappers. There aren't any for OSG on the Perl website, CPAN.
Use SWIG to glue OSG and Perl together.
Use a beta of Perl 6. Perl 6 supposedly makes calling C library code much easier.
Use a different library with similar capabilities, for which there are wrappers. Perl has wrappers for OGRE.
Go lower level, and use OpenGL with Perl, reimplementing the parts of OSG functionality that are wanted.
Dump Perl, and just use the native language of OSG, which is C++. Toss in the PCRE library, and use the associative arrays of the C++ Standard Library to approach the convenience of Perl's regular expressions and hash data type.
Dump Perl and C++ both, and hunt up another modern language that has a decent interface with OSG. There is Python.
So it seems the best choice is Python with OSG, or Perl with OGRE. I also wanted to use a GUI library. Which one? GNOME, KDE (Qt), or something else? I went with FLTK. I'll give you 1 guess what language is the native language for all those libraries. Perl has bindings for FLTK, on CPAN. Does Python? Why, yes, there's a pyfltk project. It was created with... SWIG! Ugh. Then, will these libraries play nice together? It's a bit tricky as both use the event model with callbacks to handle keyboard and mouse events. Just have to pick one for that job.
That's an example of what I mean about the messiness inherent in our code ecosystem. I don't know Ruby, but I expect it too cannot escape these issues.
What programming languages do many generic algorithms textbooks use? Pseudocode! Why? Because real code is 1) still full of useless boilerplate that has to be there for the benefit of the compiler/interpreter, not the software engineer, 2) overcomplicates the syntax, again for the benefit of the compiler, and most of all, 3) still stinks up code reuse!
Back in the day, Pascal was the teaching language of choice, and BASIC was the default option for amateurs. Pascal started as an improvement on Algol, which is perhaps the original structured programming language. Pascal has quite a number of ugly design decisions. First, it's too verbose and English centric, using "begin" and "end" for blocks. C's curly braces are much, much better. Pascal's data types are very limited. In at least the Turbo Pascal compilers, Pascal's string type was limited to 255 characters because they used a single byte to store the length. Strong typing may be good for keeping novices out of trouble, but it's simply a puritanical limitation for experienced programmers.
As for C, what I mean by boilerplate is stuff like "int main(int argc, char **argv)". And that also demonstrates what I mean about overcomplicated syntax. We know main takes 2 arguments. Why do we have to put parentheses around them? We don't put parentheses around an operator just for that. It's ugly to have to do something like "assign(&c,add(a,b))" instead of "c=a+b". Then there's the redundant requirement for a semicolon. In school, we pound on students to use proper indentation, and to put statements on separate lines. But most languages still require that extra bit of punctuation. May sound like trivial issues, but these little things matter. There's also the pointer nastiness, with those ugly '*' and '&' symbols everywhere. At least C++ cleaned that up a little bit, with the use of '&' for variables named in function prototypes, and Java went a bit further yet. But it all adds up to making programming more tedious than necessary.
The LISP proponents might be feeling a bit smug and superior by now. But you know what? Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses also blows it on these issues. To do that simple bit of math, have to say "(= c (+ a b))" Make the programmer do it in prefix order. The advantage is that unlike infix, no parentheses are required to unambiguously state a mathematical formula, but then the language requires the miserable parentheses anyway! Ok, so you can have variable numbers of parameters, and say stuff like "(+ a b c d)", but that little compensation is not worth being required to use parentheses everywhere.
The humble command line has its own issues. It has become customary to flag all the parameters with letters of the alphabet, instead of requiring all the parameters be passed, and passed in a specific order. I always struggle to remember inconsistencies like the stream parameter being the first parameter in fprintf, but the last parameter in fputs. They messed themselves up with that one. I suspect they wanted to put the stream parameter at the end to be consistent with fputs, but could not because fprintf is one of the few library functions that takes a variable number of parameters, and the ad hoc way they enabled that meant the stream had to go at the front. This is not an issue with the command line. Scripting has had a revival of sorts, but is still looked upon with contempt. Perhaps Perl is the current scripting language of choice. It has many improvements over bash. I really like the built in hash data type, and everyone likes the regular expression syntax. But it sure borrowed a whopper from shell scripting, requiring these funny glyphs ($, @, and % mostly) for every single use of a variable name.
As for code reuse, look at the mess we have with libraries. OOP couldn't solve this problem, wasn't good enough. I think where OOP really missed was the entire idea of imposing a hierarchy on classes. Ideas such as CORBA didn't cut it either. C is perhaps the clo
I shouldn't bother after that "logical structure" troll. Shouldn't have bothered at the outset as you made it obvious you are not willing to acknowledge opposing points. But I'll give it one more go.
You haven't addressed the total cost measure. You keep insisting on deaths as a good measure, when we have all these better measures. Many things can cause all kinds of damage while killing relatively few people. Hurricanes, for instance. You're doing the very thing you accuse the greenies of. You're not listening. I don't think so, but it may be that in spite of the dangers, nuclear power is worth using. We can't know that if we won't do an honest assessment of all the factors we know of. And honesty is in short supply.
There is another matter we haven't yet touched upon about nuclear power: weaponization. That's a big factor in why we aren't using some kinds of nuclear power. I understand that thorium is an excellent fuel. It's much more plentiful, and quite a bit safer than uranium. And we can reduce waste. Why aren't we doing this? Because we can't make powerful bombs from it? Funny how every country that wants to use nuclear power always chooses varieties that are more difficult for power generation and waste problems, but that can be more easily weaponized, Yes, honesty is in short supply.
Photovoltaic is NOT the only option in urban settings, nor is it the best. Your first use of home solar should be for light and for heating water. And the hot water is not for steam turbines (although that's a conceivable use), but simply to have hot water. That's a far more efficient use of sunlight than electricity generation, and needs no semiconductors, no precious rare earths. Whatever roof space is left after taking care of skylights and water heating can then be used for generating electricity.
And why do you imply that windmills can't be used in urban settings? They don't take much space. They can be made quieter. Even the air noise can be reduced. I know what you mean about the shadow of the blades, having been in restaurants that have a ceiling fan set right under a fluorescent light fixture. Annoying, but this too can be handled. Just have to choose sites with that in mind. No one will care if the shadows fall upon the blank wall of a warehouse.
As for the contention that nuclear power is the best when it comes to watts generated per unit of area occupied, yes, but we have enough land for significant solar and wind power operations, and we have power lines. And we can operate those offshore. I don't see land use as a showstopper for wind or solar, or enough of a reason to prefer nuclear.
Your complaints about the pollution generated by semiconductor manufacturing, LEDs, and especially about 1 GHz chips, are wandering from the discussion, which is power generation. Most incandescent lights used tungsten. CFLs use mercury. Yes, materials for manufacturing is a factor, for nuclear power plants as well as windmills, solar panels, and your light source of choice, but are most times not as significant as materials needed for regular operation.
Any measure that omits significant effects, as "number of deaths" does, is not a good measure.
Your arguments are not persuasive. You're really reaching with that complaint about rare earths. Like windmills, nuclear power plants are also built with all kinds of materials obtained from mining. Yes I know windmills use rare earth magnets, but nuclear power plants need radiation shielding which is often made with rare earths. Windmills also use gears, which can be noisy. They don't have to be designed that way. I would guess the gears are straight toothed, not helical, as that is cheaper to manufacture. Change to helical gears, and perhaps add in a bit of sound absorbing material to fix that problem.
However, unlike windmills, the fuel for nuclear power plants must also be mined. Then there is the big problem of disposing of the waste. Windmills simply don't have those problems.
Semiconductor production does not have to be as dirty as it is. Nor is that the only way to harness solar power. Dams serve many purposes, such as flood control and water storage for cities and agriculture. Some are primarily for power, but many are not. If you are already damming a river to create a reservoir, might as well get some electricity from it while you're at it. You can't blame all the bad things about semiconductors and dams entirely on power generation. Radioisotopes are used in medicine and for a few other purposes, but on the whole, nuclear byproducts are not that useful.
Number of deaths is not a good measure of safety. You nuclear proponents trot that measure out every time we have this debate. You bias even that pitiful measure by throwing out every death that cannot absolutely positively beyond 100% certainty be pinned on nuclear accidents. By that measure, Deepwater Horizon was a relatively minor event, as it killed only 11 people. Many commercial plane crashes would be considered worse disasters. Obviously, Deepwater Horizon was far worse. Look at the damage it did to the economy and property: $4.7 billion paid out just from BP's fund.
Chernobyl's damages to Belarus alone are estimated at $235 billion. And Fukushima? Let's look at only the land that must be abandoned for decades at the least: the 20 km zone around the plant. Roughly half of that is ocean, leaving about 700 sq km of land that must be abandoned. Land is very valuable in Japan. Cheapest prices I saw came out to $84 per sq meter. The lost land is worth at least $60 billion.
Can nuclear power still be safe in the face of the all too human failings of greed and neglect?
Some operators cut corners on safety features and maintenance to save a little money. They falsify safety reports. Someday, somewhere, a rusting tank or pipe will fail, or a backup engine will not start, and we won't be able to shut things down. Then we will lose another 3000 sq km to radiation contamination for a few centuries. They will build plants in unsafe locations, to save a little up front cost. Why didn't Fukushima have high enough tsunami walls? They knew there could be tsunamis as high as the one that hit. Anyone claiming they didn't know is merely excusing dangerous irresponsibility. Why was it even on the coast at all? So that in an emergency, they could use seawater to cool the reactors? We saw how well that plan worked. I count irresponsibility a bigger danger than terrorism and natural disasters.
Are you seriously trying to claim that nuclear power is safer than wind power? Seriously?
It's not that nuclear power can't be reasonably safe, it's that people can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants safely. They will skimp on maintenance to save a little money, and one day, we will all be very sorry they did so.
The way you wrote your first comment you asked to be pushed into a box. You acted all concerned about environmentalism destroying the economy, while saying nothing about Wall Street. That's typical of our lunatic right. Claim whatever they're against will destroy the economy even in the face of all logic and evidence to the contrary, while conveniently overlooking those "giant sucking sounds" still reverberating from Wall Street. Let me repeat: environmentalism will stimulate our economy, not destroy it. "Think of the economy" is an even more disingenuous argument than "think of the children".
The right let Bush do the War of Choice, which as well as embarrassing ourselves over getting Iraq's WMD capabilities wrong and taking a big hit to our reputation, is estimated will cost us at least $3 trillion by the time we're all done. The most insane part of that whole affair was that we were already involved in Afghanistan! Just a basic principle of running a nation that you don't go picking another fight when you are already in one. I suspect that had we done nothing more than simply maintain the no fly zones at a fraction of the cost of that war, Saddam Hussein would have fallen to the Arab Spring that started this year. And this year, the right acted all concerned over the national debt and forced a showdown over the debt ceiling as Obama tried to spend a few hundred billion more to get us out of the Great Recession. A very simple fix to much of the problem is the restoration of taxes on the rich, but they will not even consider it. Makes me sick to hear that a good number of large corporations such as GE paid $0 in taxes while we're hurting for money. Any sudden concern about the economy from them just looks so fake. The robbers are walking away with our wealth, and we're being diverted into fights over the scraps. Seems all they're really trying to do is stop all possibility of restoring the taxes on their rich campaign contributors. Mind you, I don't want to see Obama giving away the store to his rich buddies either, though the outrage over Solyndra is looking overdone. I think Solyndra was not a mere con, was more than pushing bad solar panels that were simply too good to be true and they knew it. Yes, they should have been more careful, shouldn't have been so credulous of Solyndra's claims, which like nearly all such claims were inflated to the bounds of believability. Now they want Stephen Chu's head, but Geithner is still okay with them.
I agree about AT&T and T-mobile. We are back under AT&T's boot. And I agree that gradual changes are better. For instance, don't want to shock the economy by suddenly doubling the gas tax. However, that should have been a percentage like nearly every other tax. Instead, the gas tax is a fixed amount. Been 18 cents per gallon since 1993. That has put billions into Big Oil's coffers, not our pockets. Should change it to a percentage that matches the current amount, then gradually raise that percentage until it matches 1993 values, or, better, until it matches the expenses it causes us all. Nor do I like "forced moves". Restore the gas tax, stop subsidizing Big Oil, and don't mandate anything. Tax coal the correct amount to repair the damages its mining and use causes. That would do way more for the environment and our finances than any silly and overly complex carbon trading scheme. The market will respond. We wouldn't need to mandate fuel economy standards if only we taxed gas appropriately. We should stop distorting the market in favor of the status quo.
If you're so worried about the economy being wrecked, you ought to pay more attention to Wall Street's crimes and excesses than to some environmental bogeyman. Unlike environmentalism, Wall Street actually wrecked the economy. We're still in the Great Recession, unemployment is still very high, and the government seems both too weak and too much in cahoots to go after these financial bandits who caused the mess. They're still sucking the life out of the economy. In contrast, after jailing these Wall Street thieves, a burst of investment in infrastructure, particularly green infrastructure, is the very thing we ought to do to get the economy going again. Since you express doubts about AGW, think of this: Green is still a good idea whether or not AGW is real, and even apart from cleaning up pollution so you don't have to breathe it. Done properly, it saves us money.
You don't have to give up your grill, buy a hybrid, or convert to E85. That's just grandstanding. Doubtful that a hybrid can earn back the extra costs. Ethanol from corn takes so much energy to produce it's not saving us anything. Do something real, something that actually matters. What really counts is all quiet, small stuff, like changing your bulbs to CFLs. Or, might hold off for even better LED lighting to become economical. If you are still using CRTs, change to flat screens already. Perhaps the biggest saver of all is nudging that thermostat setting closer to the outdoor temperature. Do you know it actually is healthier to let temperatures swing a bit, let your body become acclimatized to the season? Shouldn't try to maintain 75F year round. We spend about 50% of our energy on simple heating and cooling. Yes, it would be nice to have double pane windows, better insulation and thermal mass, better ventilation for attics, etc. We should push for new housing to have that. But all that is so expensive to do to existing homes that it's not worth it. Home improvement businesses push that stuff hard, but they aren't doing it for you, they're doing it for their own profit, never mind whether it is a real benefit to you or the environment. Much more sensible to throw up some heavy curtains, and maybe add awnings on western and southern exposures. We planted deciduous trees all along the southern side of the house.
As for what science and technology can do, how about brains for stoplights? Most cities, can't drive 3 miles without getting nailed by some brainless stoplight that is totally oblivious to adjacent lights and approaching traffic. Think what that could do for the economy. The savings in money and time could be like lowering gas prices by 10%. Why aren't you yelling for better traffic control? Do you hate the economy that much?
McCaffrey's love scenes, wooing, and relationships were very different from typical SF fare. Typical for a romance novel, perhaps? (I wouldn't know, don't read that genre.) Some people don't care for that in their SF, but I enjoyed the novelty.
Most SF leans towards casual, kinky sex, like Niven's interspecies sex on the Ringworld. Treats it all technically and distantly, or as a tool for manipulation or sealing deals. In Star Trek, seems the crew is often getting drugged with strange fluids, hit with plant spores, tempted with sexy robots, shapeshifting aliens, holodeck creations, or otherwise being enticed or forced into some sort of quickie, cheapie when they are busy with other matters. Sex as a mere plot device, and love as an impediment that could interfere with your duties, an inconvenient holdover from primitive times that has little place in modern life. Worst of all, you always knew almost all the changes in relationships would be rebooted for the next episode. True, the dragons of Pern imposed upon human sex life. However, McCaffrey cared enough about it not to do stuff like reboots.
Yes, connect the 2nd, or 3rd, stories of buildings.
Surely, housing and roads for automobiles are more expensive than elevated walkways? Yet we build housing and roads. 2 story houses are quite common, and demonstrate that spans can be built. One number I heard is that a pedestrian bridge over a multilane highway costs around $30000 for the span, plus another $70000 for the approaches. That's quite a bit less than a typical suburban house. Don't know what a driveway costs these days, but think it's about equivalent.
Anyway, you could never get the residents of an existing city to agree to such a radical remodeling. The default position is always to reject any change. Calling them eyesores is merely part of that resistance, an excuse to reject the idea whatever its actual merits. Same with zoning regulations. Would have to start fresh, with a new city. Would certainly want to position the buildings so they are closer and spans can be shorter, and design them for the walkways. The more compact the city is, the better such an idea works. Anyplace unsuited for public transport would also not be a good candidate for walkways.
They aren't computer scientists, or perhaps they'd have a different attitude. It takes shockingly little in the way of logic to create the equivalent of a Turing Machine. Just NAND gates are enough. Are we a superior kind of computer? Do we possess to ability to solve some problems faster, algorithmically faster that is, than a computer could? Is a Turing Machine incapable of duplicating a living creature? I think the answer to all those questions is no. I expect that there are many environments that could support such simple logic functions. Life as we know it is based on carbon. And so, we may find life all over the place when we get better at recognizing it. However, it will probably be relatively simple stuff similar to Earthly bacteria. After all, it took approximately 3 billion years here for multicellular life to evolve from those humble beginnings.
We humans have this tendency and desire to think we're special. Today, the Middle Ages idea that the Earth is the center of the universe seems so naive and revealing. In the future, the idea that we are alone might seem similarly foolish.
Blame it on Texas politics, particularly Governor Perry's ambition to privatize all our highways. If you want to know, it is TX state highway 121, near Dallas. The intersection is a major street with the "service road" of the tollway, which replaced an existing state highway. Normally, a tollway has to be an all new road. Can't just convert an existing major public road to private like that, so they weaseled around the pesky laws against the taking of public property by providing 3 lane service roads on each side, and labeling that with the old state highway designation. This is no wandering, twisting side road, this is a major state highway, that's why the high speed limits.
They also neglected the timing of the lights, and why not? There is a powerful private interest that would prefer that people take the tollway, and is quite happy to let a trip on the old road be as awkward and tricky as they can get away with. Can't have anyone wasting money studying and adjusting the timing of these lights. There is another private interest that wants to collect ticket revenue from the red light cameras that city was persuaded to install. Safety is secondary to profits. Anyone turning left off the service road after waiting for the green, and passing under the tollway usually encounters a red light at the opposite service road, which is not what people expect. When a light has just turned green, you don't expect the light just around the corner to be red. Since that accident, several times I've seen oblivious drivers run that light.
As another example of what these businesses do, there is an interchange where the new toll road road bypasses a city while the old road (now designated "business 121") continues in. The westbound exit is a straightforward fork in the service road. Bear right to take the old route, and left to stay on the new service road. But the eastbound entrance forces drivers on to the tollway, where they get charged a toll of course. Eastbound even used to send drivers onto the eastbound service road, for free, before that little revenue boosting change was made. Now to legally avoid the toll in the eastbound direction, have to turn right and leave the business route before it reaches the tollway, taking a street which interchanges with the tollway a few exits before the business road intersects, and turn left there. The equivalent interchange on the other side of the bypassed city has no such trick to it. Then there is the street that was cut off from the eastbound direction when the tollway was built, because it would cost too much money to add an interchange there. Drivers who used to turn left there must now go 1 mile west to a u-turn, and then of course another 1 mile east to get back to where the intersection used to be. There is no other route at present, but they are working on this problem-- only 5 years after creating it.
A few years ago, I was in an accident in which another driver ran a red light, right in front of me. This was not someone trying to beat the light, this was a young, inexperienced driver's total failure to see the signal. I t-boned him. It was lucky for them that I drive a small, light car, and was going a bit under the posted speed limit of 55 mph. I was bruised badly enough that it took 3 months to fully heal. But I didn't need medical treatment. My elderly and frailer passengers didn't fare as well, with one broken ankle and some cuts that needed stitches.
If my preference for small, light, fuel efficient cars saved lives that day, I count that a big win.
It's a dumb problem (ok, pun intended), and a dumb answer to it. If pedestrians didn't have to cross streets, this wouldn't be a problem. Why not design neighborhoods so pedestrians don't have to cross so many streets, instead of solving it by making the noise pollution problem worse?
I'd like to see cities use the 3rd dimension more. Have all buildings be at least 3 stories, and close enough to be connected with walkways. Pedestrians could navigate the entire city above street level. Could also have tunnels, which might be better for places with rough weather. Could add a 4th story, putting bike routes on a level of their own.
Of course cost is a big reason why we don't see much of that. But in the US at least, there's also a stigma against walking, this notion that the only reason someone would walk is because they're too poor, too much of a loser to maintain a car.
Should be easy to beat PNG's compression. Offhand, I can think of several ideas that should improve on PNG:
1. Use bzip2 or xzip compression. PNG's compression is pretty much the same as gzip.
2. More compressible representation of the data. RGB values of individual pixels is really not very good for compression. There's stuff like YUV of course, but what I mean is some kind of transform to a frequency domain somewhat like what JPEG does. Then compress the data. This has been tried often before, without much effect. Too much work for too little gain.
3. Better filters. PNG's filters are fairly good and very simple. A little more sophistication and variety could pay off.
4. Most images compress better when oriented sideways. Why isn't this very simple 90 degree rotation transform used more often?
Which ideas does webp use? Haven't found anything that really says. Hoped the source code might have some of these details, but so far, haven't seen anything.
And why is it people, even highly technical people don't have the right of it? Because Microsoft and friends persist in calling 2 very different things by the same name. To hear them tell it, "security" is both security against malware, and malware in the form of "security" against piracy of their products, also known as DRM. They spin it out of all recognition when they make the absurd claim that the DRM is for your own good, that it "protects" you from piracy. Yeah, just like the Mafia protects their customers from crime.
Until MS changes their tune, and stops trying to push baloney, they deserve spirited opposition. It's not rabid at all to call out anyone for that kind of garbage. MS has pulled whopper after whopper for years. OOXML and MS Office file format lock in, Windows Vista's extreme DRM, Windows XP's phone home, J, IE, asserting patents on DOS FAT, the Microsoft tax (on CPUs), trying to kill off Ogg Vorbis. This is more of the same. They can't just let a secure boot system do its job, they've got to screw it up with DRM. How can you continue to excuse MS, be a MS apologist? Are we so accustomed to outright criminal behavior from big corporations that we hardly notice anymore?
How? In a word, patronage. It doesn't necessarily have to be government patronage. Only other way that might work is to do nothing, and leave it to artists and scientists to get what they can from the first mover advantage and from keeping secrets. That's why we might prefer some kind of patronage, to pay out money in exchange for going public, and because it is very difficult to keep recipes secret.
As for the details of how a patronage system might work, it may be best to have many different public and private organizations. They could all work differently. Raise funds in different ways, and use different criteria for giving out awards. We actually do have a good bit of that now. Most major cities support orchestras. There are all kinds of prizes, such as the X prize. Even now, most of the funding for science comes from the public, through government. We need to expand on what we already have. Set up free digital notaries to head off any problems with plagiarism, and free digital libraries to make everything available to the public.
Keep in mind that these drug companies are more parasitic than original. Those pictures of thousands of test tubes with samples are real enough, but it's as much propaganda to convince you that they did all the work as anything real. They often do not create drugs themselves. They lean more on university research, and the knowledge of native peoples. Then they patent all these drugs that they did not invent, while those who actually originated the drug get nothing. They also externalize much testing, leaving it to the FDA to figure out if a drug is safe. Or they experiment on the public!
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I am generally in favor of megacorps getting hit with huge penalties. We don't do near enough of that. How else can they be deterred from trying the kind of b.s. Ticketmaster has pulled over the years? If they start whining about the size of a penalty, I would point out that judging from the amount of compensation they pay their executives, they obviously are not hurting for money, and I will never believe otherwise until executive compensation changes.
Instead, we bitch and moan about banks, telecoms, ISPs, oil companies, and other near monopolies, then pony up and move on with life because we need their products and services (or think we do) and we don't have time to fight over a few pennies or some deliberately overcomplicated condition in the fine print that boils down to more costs for us. I wish more people would boycott these predatory businesses.
But I'm not so keen on seeing the lawyers benefit the most. Perhaps the state should get a share. Bad though it might be, the state is after all the best representation of the people that we have.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
You talk of products and of counterfeiting. You are once again conflating the material with the immaterial. Although the term "product" does apply to a movie, there are better terms, such as "data". Nor is piracy is the same as counterfeiting. Counterfeiting also means that the origin of a product is being misrepresented, similar to plagiarism. Pirates aren't claiming to be the authors of a Beatles' song.
You speak of "allowing", as if the default is that copying is hard, and as if some human agency has the power to grant people the ability to make copies, and can take that privilege away anytime. And as if the US has authority over Korea.
Nor do you know what effect it all has on jobs. For all you know, your way would kill jobs, not create them. Your way certainly would hurt the economy, benefiting a few monopolies a little in exchange for a lot of expense for everyone.
Your point about murder, and your assertion that morals are all relative, makes the same sort of mistake the copyright extremists make. You've simplified the argument too much and made an equivalence between things that aren't equivalent at all. Yes indeed, both murder and copying are easy to commit, the first time. We all must sleep sometime. It is even easier to cut off your own hand, or commit suicide. But there, the similarities end. Unlike copying, murder is not easy to get away with. Nor is it so easy to make a net profit from murder. Hardest of all is to make a business of it, to do it repeatedly, for gain. The easiest people to murder are the ones who trust you. But they are members of your group, and they will no longer be able to contribute to the welfare of same, so you've suffered a clear loss, whatever the deed gained you. And for so long as you are suspected, you will not be trusted, by anyone, which is a huge, huge hit to your welfare, as well as the opportunity to commit murder again. We didn't really choose to be this way. Evolution has shaped us so. Anyone who trusts a known murderer is likely to become a candidate for a Darwin Award. The universe does not make prevention so easy. It's rather like karma. The chickens will come home to roost.
A better comparison is between copying and sex. From time to time, authorities have attempted to regulate sex in various ways. They've ranged from the ridiculous and unenforceable such as anti-sodomy laws, to China's one child policy, which is not a law against sex per se, but only a consequence of sex, and one that cannot be easily denied, which makes the law enforceable. Copying is even easier to commit and harder to enforce against than sex. Two people can have sex, and if they keep it private and don't tell, no one else will ever know unless there are consequences such as a baby or a debilitating disease. Copying has no equivalent consequences.
You are the one who is out of your mind. You don't get it. Complain to the universe about how easy it is to copy. It won't listen. Information is not scarce. And no petty human laws or technology can make it scarce. Moralizing to us will not change that. You deserve derision for demanding that we all conform to this view of how you think things should work, at great cost to us all, especially as you are totally unable to suggest any credible way to enforce this vision. Can't be done. Good thing too-- it's a horrible vision. When you were little, did you get really bent out of shape when your younger sibling copied everything you did?
You seem to have utterly failed to grasp that life is a bit more complicated than property rights and material goods, that there could exist things that do not fit those concepts. Just as you have failed to grasp that stealing is not the only kind of crime there is. Nor have you apparently listened to the various suggestions of how we could do it all. We can both freely copy information and fairly compensate creators for their work. But you don't believe that. Perhaps you think your livelihood depends on refusing to accept such a possibility.
Because the order and method in which formulations are calculated can matter to the computer, but not to the mathematician who just wants the result of a few calculations. Such issues as whether a computer had to do a few hundred iterations of the Gauss-Seidel method are simply not relevant to someone trying to solve a system of differential equations. Yes, we now have computers that crunch numbers so efficiently that we no longer need books of log tables, sines, and such, but to the mathematician, these are only improved tools.
To use a car analogy, a mechanic does not care about the details of how a wrench was forged. Even if the mechanic designs a new tool, the only things that matter is whether there are materials capable of realizing the tool. If there are, just how that's done is someone else's problem. You would not consider metallurgy a mere branch of mechanical engineering, or of chemistry, would you?
This seems like a half baked solution to one aspect of a bad idea. At least it's not as bad a "solution" as installing red light enforcement cameras everywhere. Intersections are just plain bad. Yellows are often too short for a variety of reasons, and that is the number one cause of red light running. After improving the signal timing, which shouldn't be hard, roundabouts may be the most practical alternative.
Then there's the interchange, which is unfortunately very expensive. Yet it's crazy the way we spend millions on a limited access highway, and then go only halfway, and make the crossroads stop for the exits. For a more exotic idea, what if the vehicles did the bridging, instead of the road? Have vehicles be long enough to span at least 2 columns at all times, then make an overpass with just columns, no bridge deck. Could make interchanges cheap enough that we would never use intersections, and never need traffic lights.
NKS does not make a good case for Wolfram's genius, but rather for his arrogance and ignorance. It's good work, from the point of view of being correct, and being about a significant subject. It's not so good from the point of view of originality. Nor is it a superior treatment of a known subject. It's not even a novel approach. Wolfram really went gaga over cellular automata, and they've been well known ever since Conway's Game of Life popularized them in 1970, and studied well before that. He talks as if the subject had languished, and his research singlehandedly revived interest in them. Perhaps so, among physicists. He also excuses his failure to understand its significance as the consequence of it being presented as just a game. Obviously, he didn't talk with any computer scientists before writing that book. He merely rediscovered what computer scientists have known for decades. Worse, he's not even the first physicist to have rediscovered computer science! That man, and his arrogant physicist buddies need to get out of their bubble more often. I've seen this kind of thing before, where the people at the top of a particular discipline start acting as if all other science is secondary, is only an aspect of their chosen discipline. Saw that attitude towards Computer Science in professors and students of Electrical Engineering. They didn't get it that algorithms were more than simple, trivial little lists of instructions for hooking up logic gates. Mathematicians also have this tendency to view CS as just a branch of math, and algorithms as something that can be expressed as "just" a series of formulas. It's like the view that a person is only a bag of water with a few other chemicals mixed in, or the "Big Iron" implication that a computer is only a lump of metals. Goes over the top in overlooking the organization.
Wolfram's work illustrates that Computer Science should be a discipline of its own, on the same level as Math. The concept of the computer algorithm ranks with the mathematical formula in importance. You can't do any serious physics without advanced math. These days, you also need advanced computer science to do physics. His much vaunted NKS is in fact Computer Science.
It took genius to invent the wheel. In that sense, Wolfram is a genius. What does it take to avoid reinventing the wheel? Wisdom.
Suppose I want to use a particular library with a particular language. The standard for libraries is still C, not some language independent standard. To find out the details of the functions and parameters, I have to look at C header files.
For instance, if I want to use OpenSceneGraph from Perl, so I can do cool graphics quickly, there is no good choice. Here are the options:
So it seems the best choice is Python with OSG, or Perl with OGRE. I also wanted to use a GUI library. Which one? GNOME, KDE (Qt), or something else? I went with FLTK. I'll give you 1 guess what language is the native language for all those libraries. Perl has bindings for FLTK, on CPAN. Does Python? Why, yes, there's a pyfltk project. It was created with ... SWIG! Ugh. Then, will these libraries play nice together? It's a bit tricky as both use the event model with callbacks to handle keyboard and mouse events. Just have to pick one for that job.
That's an example of what I mean about the messiness inherent in our code ecosystem. I don't know Ruby, but I expect it too cannot escape these issues.
What programming languages do many generic algorithms textbooks use? Pseudocode! Why? Because real code is 1) still full of useless boilerplate that has to be there for the benefit of the compiler/interpreter, not the software engineer, 2) overcomplicates the syntax, again for the benefit of the compiler, and most of all, 3) still stinks up code reuse!
Back in the day, Pascal was the teaching language of choice, and BASIC was the default option for amateurs. Pascal started as an improvement on Algol, which is perhaps the original structured programming language. Pascal has quite a number of ugly design decisions. First, it's too verbose and English centric, using "begin" and "end" for blocks. C's curly braces are much, much better. Pascal's data types are very limited. In at least the Turbo Pascal compilers, Pascal's string type was limited to 255 characters because they used a single byte to store the length. Strong typing may be good for keeping novices out of trouble, but it's simply a puritanical limitation for experienced programmers.
As for C, what I mean by boilerplate is stuff like "int main(int argc, char **argv)". And that also demonstrates what I mean about overcomplicated syntax. We know main takes 2 arguments. Why do we have to put parentheses around them? We don't put parentheses around an operator just for that. It's ugly to have to do something like "assign(&c,add(a,b))" instead of "c=a+b". Then there's the redundant requirement for a semicolon. In school, we pound on students to use proper indentation, and to put statements on separate lines. But most languages still require that extra bit of punctuation. May sound like trivial issues, but these little things matter. There's also the pointer nastiness, with those ugly '*' and '&' symbols everywhere. At least C++ cleaned that up a little bit, with the use of '&' for variables named in function prototypes, and Java went a bit further yet. But it all adds up to making programming more tedious than necessary.
The LISP proponents might be feeling a bit smug and superior by now. But you know what? Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses also blows it on these issues. To do that simple bit of math, have to say "(= c (+ a b))" Make the programmer do it in prefix order. The advantage is that unlike infix, no parentheses are required to unambiguously state a mathematical formula, but then the language requires the miserable parentheses anyway! Ok, so you can have variable numbers of parameters, and say stuff like "(+ a b c d)", but that little compensation is not worth being required to use parentheses everywhere.
The humble command line has its own issues. It has become customary to flag all the parameters with letters of the alphabet, instead of requiring all the parameters be passed, and passed in a specific order. I always struggle to remember inconsistencies like the stream parameter being the first parameter in fprintf, but the last parameter in fputs. They messed themselves up with that one. I suspect they wanted to put the stream parameter at the end to be consistent with fputs, but could not because fprintf is one of the few library functions that takes a variable number of parameters, and the ad hoc way they enabled that meant the stream had to go at the front. This is not an issue with the command line. Scripting has had a revival of sorts, but is still looked upon with contempt. Perhaps Perl is the current scripting language of choice. It has many improvements over bash. I really like the built in hash data type, and everyone likes the regular expression syntax. But it sure borrowed a whopper from shell scripting, requiring these funny glyphs ($, @, and % mostly) for every single use of a variable name.
As for code reuse, look at the mess we have with libraries. OOP couldn't solve this problem, wasn't good enough. I think where OOP really missed was the entire idea of imposing a hierarchy on classes. Ideas such as CORBA didn't cut it either. C is perhaps the clo
I shouldn't bother after that "logical structure" troll. Shouldn't have bothered at the outset as you made it obvious you are not willing to acknowledge opposing points. But I'll give it one more go.
You haven't addressed the total cost measure. You keep insisting on deaths as a good measure, when we have all these better measures. Many things can cause all kinds of damage while killing relatively few people. Hurricanes, for instance. You're doing the very thing you accuse the greenies of. You're not listening. I don't think so, but it may be that in spite of the dangers, nuclear power is worth using. We can't know that if we won't do an honest assessment of all the factors we know of. And honesty is in short supply.
There is another matter we haven't yet touched upon about nuclear power: weaponization. That's a big factor in why we aren't using some kinds of nuclear power. I understand that thorium is an excellent fuel. It's much more plentiful, and quite a bit safer than uranium. And we can reduce waste. Why aren't we doing this? Because we can't make powerful bombs from it? Funny how every country that wants to use nuclear power always chooses varieties that are more difficult for power generation and waste problems, but that can be more easily weaponized, Yes, honesty is in short supply.
Photovoltaic is NOT the only option in urban settings, nor is it the best. Your first use of home solar should be for light and for heating water. And the hot water is not for steam turbines (although that's a conceivable use), but simply to have hot water. That's a far more efficient use of sunlight than electricity generation, and needs no semiconductors, no precious rare earths. Whatever roof space is left after taking care of skylights and water heating can then be used for generating electricity.
And why do you imply that windmills can't be used in urban settings? They don't take much space. They can be made quieter. Even the air noise can be reduced. I know what you mean about the shadow of the blades, having been in restaurants that have a ceiling fan set right under a fluorescent light fixture. Annoying, but this too can be handled. Just have to choose sites with that in mind. No one will care if the shadows fall upon the blank wall of a warehouse.
As for the contention that nuclear power is the best when it comes to watts generated per unit of area occupied, yes, but we have enough land for significant solar and wind power operations, and we have power lines. And we can operate those offshore. I don't see land use as a showstopper for wind or solar, or enough of a reason to prefer nuclear.
Your complaints about the pollution generated by semiconductor manufacturing, LEDs, and especially about 1 GHz chips, are wandering from the discussion, which is power generation. Most incandescent lights used tungsten. CFLs use mercury. Yes, materials for manufacturing is a factor, for nuclear power plants as well as windmills, solar panels, and your light source of choice, but are most times not as significant as materials needed for regular operation.
Any measure that omits significant effects, as "number of deaths" does, is not a good measure.
Your arguments are not persuasive. You're really reaching with that complaint about rare earths. Like windmills, nuclear power plants are also built with all kinds of materials obtained from mining. Yes I know windmills use rare earth magnets, but nuclear power plants need radiation shielding which is often made with rare earths. Windmills also use gears, which can be noisy. They don't have to be designed that way. I would guess the gears are straight toothed, not helical, as that is cheaper to manufacture. Change to helical gears, and perhaps add in a bit of sound absorbing material to fix that problem.
However, unlike windmills, the fuel for nuclear power plants must also be mined. Then there is the big problem of disposing of the waste. Windmills simply don't have those problems.
Semiconductor production does not have to be as dirty as it is. Nor is that the only way to harness solar power. Dams serve many purposes, such as flood control and water storage for cities and agriculture. Some are primarily for power, but many are not. If you are already damming a river to create a reservoir, might as well get some electricity from it while you're at it. You can't blame all the bad things about semiconductors and dams entirely on power generation. Radioisotopes are used in medicine and for a few other purposes, but on the whole, nuclear byproducts are not that useful.
Number of deaths is not a good measure of safety. You nuclear proponents trot that measure out every time we have this debate. You bias even that pitiful measure by throwing out every death that cannot absolutely positively beyond 100% certainty be pinned on nuclear accidents. By that measure, Deepwater Horizon was a relatively minor event, as it killed only 11 people. Many commercial plane crashes would be considered worse disasters. Obviously, Deepwater Horizon was far worse. Look at the damage it did to the economy and property: $4.7 billion paid out just from BP's fund.
Chernobyl's damages to Belarus alone are estimated at $235 billion. And Fukushima? Let's look at only the land that must be abandoned for decades at the least: the 20 km zone around the plant. Roughly half of that is ocean, leaving about 700 sq km of land that must be abandoned. Land is very valuable in Japan. Cheapest prices I saw came out to $84 per sq meter. The lost land is worth at least $60 billion.
Can nuclear power still be safe in the face of the all too human failings of greed and neglect?
Some operators cut corners on safety features and maintenance to save a little money. They falsify safety reports. Someday, somewhere, a rusting tank or pipe will fail, or a backup engine will not start, and we won't be able to shut things down. Then we will lose another 3000 sq km to radiation contamination for a few centuries. They will build plants in unsafe locations, to save a little up front cost. Why didn't Fukushima have high enough tsunami walls? They knew there could be tsunamis as high as the one that hit. Anyone claiming they didn't know is merely excusing dangerous irresponsibility. Why was it even on the coast at all? So that in an emergency, they could use seawater to cool the reactors? We saw how well that plan worked. I count irresponsibility a bigger danger than terrorism and natural disasters.
Are you seriously trying to claim that nuclear power is safer than wind power? Seriously?
It's not that nuclear power can't be reasonably safe, it's that people can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants safely. They will skimp on maintenance to save a little money, and one day, we will all be very sorry they did so.
The way you wrote your first comment you asked to be pushed into a box. You acted all concerned about environmentalism destroying the economy, while saying nothing about Wall Street. That's typical of our lunatic right. Claim whatever they're against will destroy the economy even in the face of all logic and evidence to the contrary, while conveniently overlooking those "giant sucking sounds" still reverberating from Wall Street. Let me repeat: environmentalism will stimulate our economy, not destroy it. "Think of the economy" is an even more disingenuous argument than "think of the children".
The right let Bush do the War of Choice, which as well as embarrassing ourselves over getting Iraq's WMD capabilities wrong and taking a big hit to our reputation, is estimated will cost us at least $3 trillion by the time we're all done. The most insane part of that whole affair was that we were already involved in Afghanistan! Just a basic principle of running a nation that you don't go picking another fight when you are already in one. I suspect that had we done nothing more than simply maintain the no fly zones at a fraction of the cost of that war, Saddam Hussein would have fallen to the Arab Spring that started this year. And this year, the right acted all concerned over the national debt and forced a showdown over the debt ceiling as Obama tried to spend a few hundred billion more to get us out of the Great Recession. A very simple fix to much of the problem is the restoration of taxes on the rich, but they will not even consider it. Makes me sick to hear that a good number of large corporations such as GE paid $0 in taxes while we're hurting for money. Any sudden concern about the economy from them just looks so fake. The robbers are walking away with our wealth, and we're being diverted into fights over the scraps. Seems all they're really trying to do is stop all possibility of restoring the taxes on their rich campaign contributors. Mind you, I don't want to see Obama giving away the store to his rich buddies either, though the outrage over Solyndra is looking overdone. I think Solyndra was not a mere con, was more than pushing bad solar panels that were simply too good to be true and they knew it. Yes, they should have been more careful, shouldn't have been so credulous of Solyndra's claims, which like nearly all such claims were inflated to the bounds of believability. Now they want Stephen Chu's head, but Geithner is still okay with them.
I agree about AT&T and T-mobile. We are back under AT&T's boot. And I agree that gradual changes are better. For instance, don't want to shock the economy by suddenly doubling the gas tax. However, that should have been a percentage like nearly every other tax. Instead, the gas tax is a fixed amount. Been 18 cents per gallon since 1993. That has put billions into Big Oil's coffers, not our pockets. Should change it to a percentage that matches the current amount, then gradually raise that percentage until it matches 1993 values, or, better, until it matches the expenses it causes us all. Nor do I like "forced moves". Restore the gas tax, stop subsidizing Big Oil, and don't mandate anything. Tax coal the correct amount to repair the damages its mining and use causes. That would do way more for the environment and our finances than any silly and overly complex carbon trading scheme. The market will respond. We wouldn't need to mandate fuel economy standards if only we taxed gas appropriately. We should stop distorting the market in favor of the status quo.
If you're so worried about the economy being wrecked, you ought to pay more attention to Wall Street's crimes and excesses than to some environmental bogeyman. Unlike environmentalism, Wall Street actually wrecked the economy. We're still in the Great Recession, unemployment is still very high, and the government seems both too weak and too much in cahoots to go after these financial bandits who caused the mess. They're still sucking the life out of the economy. In contrast, after jailing these Wall Street thieves, a burst of investment in infrastructure, particularly green infrastructure, is the very thing we ought to do to get the economy going again. Since you express doubts about AGW, think of this: Green is still a good idea whether or not AGW is real, and even apart from cleaning up pollution so you don't have to breathe it. Done properly, it saves us money.
You don't have to give up your grill, buy a hybrid, or convert to E85. That's just grandstanding. Doubtful that a hybrid can earn back the extra costs. Ethanol from corn takes so much energy to produce it's not saving us anything. Do something real, something that actually matters. What really counts is all quiet, small stuff, like changing your bulbs to CFLs. Or, might hold off for even better LED lighting to become economical. If you are still using CRTs, change to flat screens already. Perhaps the biggest saver of all is nudging that thermostat setting closer to the outdoor temperature. Do you know it actually is healthier to let temperatures swing a bit, let your body become acclimatized to the season? Shouldn't try to maintain 75F year round. We spend about 50% of our energy on simple heating and cooling. Yes, it would be nice to have double pane windows, better insulation and thermal mass, better ventilation for attics, etc. We should push for new housing to have that. But all that is so expensive to do to existing homes that it's not worth it. Home improvement businesses push that stuff hard, but they aren't doing it for you, they're doing it for their own profit, never mind whether it is a real benefit to you or the environment. Much more sensible to throw up some heavy curtains, and maybe add awnings on western and southern exposures. We planted deciduous trees all along the southern side of the house.
As for what science and technology can do, how about brains for stoplights? Most cities, can't drive 3 miles without getting nailed by some brainless stoplight that is totally oblivious to adjacent lights and approaching traffic. Think what that could do for the economy. The savings in money and time could be like lowering gas prices by 10%. Why aren't you yelling for better traffic control? Do you hate the economy that much?
McCaffrey's love scenes, wooing, and relationships were very different from typical SF fare. Typical for a romance novel, perhaps? (I wouldn't know, don't read that genre.) Some people don't care for that in their SF, but I enjoyed the novelty.
Most SF leans towards casual, kinky sex, like Niven's interspecies sex on the Ringworld. Treats it all technically and distantly, or as a tool for manipulation or sealing deals. In Star Trek, seems the crew is often getting drugged with strange fluids, hit with plant spores, tempted with sexy robots, shapeshifting aliens, holodeck creations, or otherwise being enticed or forced into some sort of quickie, cheapie when they are busy with other matters. Sex as a mere plot device, and love as an impediment that could interfere with your duties, an inconvenient holdover from primitive times that has little place in modern life. Worst of all, you always knew almost all the changes in relationships would be rebooted for the next episode. True, the dragons of Pern imposed upon human sex life. However, McCaffrey cared enough about it not to do stuff like reboots.
Yes, connect the 2nd, or 3rd, stories of buildings.
Surely, housing and roads for automobiles are more expensive than elevated walkways? Yet we build housing and roads. 2 story houses are quite common, and demonstrate that spans can be built. One number I heard is that a pedestrian bridge over a multilane highway costs around $30000 for the span, plus another $70000 for the approaches. That's quite a bit less than a typical suburban house. Don't know what a driveway costs these days, but think it's about equivalent.
Anyway, you could never get the residents of an existing city to agree to such a radical remodeling. The default position is always to reject any change. Calling them eyesores is merely part of that resistance, an excuse to reject the idea whatever its actual merits. Same with zoning regulations. Would have to start fresh, with a new city. Would certainly want to position the buildings so they are closer and spans can be shorter, and design them for the walkways. The more compact the city is, the better such an idea works. Anyplace unsuited for public transport would also not be a good candidate for walkways.
They aren't computer scientists, or perhaps they'd have a different attitude. It takes shockingly little in the way of logic to create the equivalent of a Turing Machine. Just NAND gates are enough. Are we a superior kind of computer? Do we possess to ability to solve some problems faster, algorithmically faster that is, than a computer could? Is a Turing Machine incapable of duplicating a living creature? I think the answer to all those questions is no. I expect that there are many environments that could support such simple logic functions. Life as we know it is based on carbon. And so, we may find life all over the place when we get better at recognizing it. However, it will probably be relatively simple stuff similar to Earthly bacteria. After all, it took approximately 3 billion years here for multicellular life to evolve from those humble beginnings.
We humans have this tendency and desire to think we're special. Today, the Middle Ages idea that the Earth is the center of the universe seems so naive and revealing. In the future, the idea that we are alone might seem similarly foolish.
Blame it on Texas politics, particularly Governor Perry's ambition to privatize all our highways. If you want to know, it is TX state highway 121, near Dallas. The intersection is a major street with the "service road" of the tollway, which replaced an existing state highway. Normally, a tollway has to be an all new road. Can't just convert an existing major public road to private like that, so they weaseled around the pesky laws against the taking of public property by providing 3 lane service roads on each side, and labeling that with the old state highway designation. This is no wandering, twisting side road, this is a major state highway, that's why the high speed limits.
They also neglected the timing of the lights, and why not? There is a powerful private interest that would prefer that people take the tollway, and is quite happy to let a trip on the old road be as awkward and tricky as they can get away with. Can't have anyone wasting money studying and adjusting the timing of these lights. There is another private interest that wants to collect ticket revenue from the red light cameras that city was persuaded to install. Safety is secondary to profits. Anyone turning left off the service road after waiting for the green, and passing under the tollway usually encounters a red light at the opposite service road, which is not what people expect. When a light has just turned green, you don't expect the light just around the corner to be red. Since that accident, several times I've seen oblivious drivers run that light.
As another example of what these businesses do, there is an interchange where the new toll road road bypasses a city while the old road (now designated "business 121") continues in. The westbound exit is a straightforward fork in the service road. Bear right to take the old route, and left to stay on the new service road. But the eastbound entrance forces drivers on to the tollway, where they get charged a toll of course. Eastbound even used to send drivers onto the eastbound service road, for free, before that little revenue boosting change was made. Now to legally avoid the toll in the eastbound direction, have to turn right and leave the business route before it reaches the tollway, taking a street which interchanges with the tollway a few exits before the business road intersects, and turn left there. The equivalent interchange on the other side of the bypassed city has no such trick to it. Then there is the street that was cut off from the eastbound direction when the tollway was built, because it would cost too much money to add an interchange there. Drivers who used to turn left there must now go 1 mile west to a u-turn, and then of course another 1 mile east to get back to where the intersection used to be. There is no other route at present, but they are working on this problem-- only 5 years after creating it.
Depends on how you define winning.
A few years ago, I was in an accident in which another driver ran a red light, right in front of me. This was not someone trying to beat the light, this was a young, inexperienced driver's total failure to see the signal. I t-boned him. It was lucky for them that I drive a small, light car, and was going a bit under the posted speed limit of 55 mph. I was bruised badly enough that it took 3 months to fully heal. But I didn't need medical treatment. My elderly and frailer passengers didn't fare as well, with one broken ankle and some cuts that needed stitches.
If my preference for small, light, fuel efficient cars saved lives that day, I count that a big win.
It's a dumb problem (ok, pun intended), and a dumb answer to it. If pedestrians didn't have to cross streets, this wouldn't be a problem. Why not design neighborhoods so pedestrians don't have to cross so many streets, instead of solving it by making the noise pollution problem worse?
I'd like to see cities use the 3rd dimension more. Have all buildings be at least 3 stories, and close enough to be connected with walkways. Pedestrians could navigate the entire city above street level. Could also have tunnels, which might be better for places with rough weather. Could add a 4th story, putting bike routes on a level of their own.
Of course cost is a big reason why we don't see much of that. But in the US at least, there's also a stigma against walking, this notion that the only reason someone would walk is because they're too poor, too much of a loser to maintain a car.
Should be easy to beat PNG's compression. Offhand, I can think of several ideas that should improve on PNG:
1. Use bzip2 or xzip compression. PNG's compression is pretty much the same as gzip.
2. More compressible representation of the data. RGB values of individual pixels is really not very good for compression. There's stuff like YUV of course, but what I mean is some kind of transform to a frequency domain somewhat like what JPEG does. Then compress the data. This has been tried often before, without much effect. Too much work for too little gain.
3. Better filters. PNG's filters are fairly good and very simple. A little more sophistication and variety could pay off.
4. Most images compress better when oriented sideways. Why isn't this very simple 90 degree rotation transform used more often?
Which ideas does webp use? Haven't found anything that really says. Hoped the source code might have some of these details, but so far, haven't seen anything.
And why is it people, even highly technical people don't have the right of it? Because Microsoft and friends persist in calling 2 very different things by the same name. To hear them tell it, "security" is both security against malware, and malware in the form of "security" against piracy of their products, also known as DRM. They spin it out of all recognition when they make the absurd claim that the DRM is for your own good, that it "protects" you from piracy. Yeah, just like the Mafia protects their customers from crime.
Until MS changes their tune, and stops trying to push baloney, they deserve spirited opposition. It's not rabid at all to call out anyone for that kind of garbage. MS has pulled whopper after whopper for years. OOXML and MS Office file format lock in, Windows Vista's extreme DRM, Windows XP's phone home, J, IE, asserting patents on DOS FAT, the Microsoft tax (on CPUs), trying to kill off Ogg Vorbis. This is more of the same. They can't just let a secure boot system do its job, they've got to screw it up with DRM. How can you continue to excuse MS, be a MS apologist? Are we so accustomed to outright criminal behavior from big corporations that we hardly notice anymore?
How? In a word, patronage. It doesn't necessarily have to be government patronage. Only other way that might work is to do nothing, and leave it to artists and scientists to get what they can from the first mover advantage and from keeping secrets. That's why we might prefer some kind of patronage, to pay out money in exchange for going public, and because it is very difficult to keep recipes secret.
As for the details of how a patronage system might work, it may be best to have many different public and private organizations. They could all work differently. Raise funds in different ways, and use different criteria for giving out awards. We actually do have a good bit of that now. Most major cities support orchestras. There are all kinds of prizes, such as the X prize. Even now, most of the funding for science comes from the public, through government. We need to expand on what we already have. Set up free digital notaries to head off any problems with plagiarism, and free digital libraries to make everything available to the public.
Keep in mind that these drug companies are more parasitic than original. Those pictures of thousands of test tubes with samples are real enough, but it's as much propaganda to convince you that they did all the work as anything real. They often do not create drugs themselves. They lean more on university research, and the knowledge of native peoples. Then they patent all these drugs that they did not invent, while those who actually originated the drug get nothing. They also externalize much testing, leaving it to the FDA to figure out if a drug is safe. Or they experiment on the public!