Rights? Entitled? You're looking at the problem wrong. In nature, copying happens all the time. Millions of times every second, bacteria divide. Any number of radios with recorders can tune into 1 radio station. A large crowd of people can gather around 1 radio, and remember what they hear. You might as well try to outlaw gravity or sex or breathing as outlaw copying. In the face of how nature really works, rights mean nothing. You can't realistically control copying, in order to monetize information or for any other purpose. We can compensate artists, just not that way, not by putting a toll on copying.
We are all "entitled" to free content. You know, stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Mozart, which is old enough to have remained out of copyright despite massive grabs of the public domain.
What's broken is the business model, not the software or drug industries. You can't own ideas. You can't control what others make of an idea. You can't peddle individual copies as if they were scarce. You can't even draw clear boundaries. Our whole treatment has been twisted towards the presumption that these things can be done, that we can treat an idea like a piece of land.
Do you think Einstein should have patented e=mc^2? If you think yes, you think wrong. That is a mathematical formula, and is therefore not patentable. Software is also entirely independent of a medium. To be eligible for a patent, you are supposed to fix your grand idea to a medium, embody it in hardware. Software should not be patentable. We should never have let the special interests slip that change past us back in the 1970s.
I want to know how the research you fund will be published. Will it be freely available, published under some kind of copyleft license? A quick skim of the site didn't turn up anything on that one way or another. Until I have assurances that I will be able to read any research I might help fund, that it won't end up locked away behind some miserable journal's outrageous paywall, I'm not too excited about funding anything. The research projects themselves all look pretty cool.
It's a start. A start towards a patronage system of many parts.
I think we need to make radical changes, or, at the least undo the radical changes that have snuck in. The idea of trying to directly profit from science through lock down and denial by means of patents isn't working. It is also a relatively recent phenomenon, this huge expansion in the things that are considered patentable, and the even bigger leap from covering a specific implementation of an idea to all manifestations of an idea. However, patent reform alone isn't enough. Even if the system worked as intended, it would still be a drag and a hindrance. What we really need is to bring back patronage in a big way. I'd like to scrap the patent system first, but that doesn't look realistic. It will only go after a new system has been established and made patents irrelevant. The law doesn't lead, it follows.
We can do patronage so much better than was possible centuries ago. Have many organizations covering every angle. Each would be specialized in raising funds in a particular way, and in awarding funding in another particular way. #SciFund would be only one of many. Then, for some infrastructure for everyone, really need the digital notary to make plagiarism and other forms of cheating very hard, and hopefully nigh impossible. And, we really, really need a digital library, to serve up any research anyone might want to see.
Hah! World Climate Report is part of the oil industry's propaganda machine to deny that there is any problem. Without even looking at their so-called data, I could tell they weren't interested in real science. Consider this gem from WCR's about us page:
a concise, hard-hitting and scientifically correct response
Says who? Those sort of claims ought to be made by independent experts. They sure are over the top! "Hard-hitting", yeah right. The whole thing is absolutely packed with hot air. "nation's leading publication", "exhaustively researched", "impeccably referenced", "definitive and unimpeachable", "acclaimed by those on both sides". If you can't see what utter trash that is, I feel sorry for you. Anybody can say that crap about themselves. And speaking of "impeccably" referenced, fine, who are these guys? Who says all that about them, and why? They don't say! So much for references! Looking a bit more, I see 4 names listed on the staff page. No credentials. No degrees in meteorology, climatology, or any kind of science. For all they say, they might not have even graduated from high school! They're just cheap salesmen. And we should believe these guys? Checking around a bit more, I learned that the editor, this Patrick Michaels, is from the Cato Institute, which has close ties with none other than the notorious Koch brothers. WCR was published by the so called "Greening Earth Society", a name which screams with propaganda. That in turn is backed by the Western Fuels Association. Yep, oil industry propaganda. Before that, Michaels was a research professor in climatology. Has a PhD in ecological climatology. Aha! Why doesn't WCR mention this? And why isn't he still a professor? Did they fire him? Oh right, of course he left voluntarily. There's more yet. Seems Michaels is a bad scientist, and has published papers about the climate that misrepresent and mislead. Roy Spencer, another crackpot climate change denier with a few scientific credentials and papers, likes Michaels' work.
WUWT would seem to be more reputable, but it too has problems.
Where's your sense of responsibility? It's one thing to shrug off problems we didn't cause or which we can't handle. If a relatively near giant star points its poles at us as it goes supernova, and bathes Earth with gamma radiation, we're all dead. Really nothing we can do about that. Eta Carinae could do that, but fortunately its poles do not face us. That would seem to be extremely unlikely, as it hasn't ever happened in Earth's entire history as far as we know.
But we are causing this problem. And we can do things about it. We ought to take responsibility for it.
I fear so too. We have such fools leading our nations and large corporations. Trolls like Rupert Murdoch are deliberately confusing the public, sowing doubts about science itself, not only climate science, and telling outright lie after lie. In 1993, I personally heard a speech from the CEO of Lennox to employees in which he said that 1) he didn't believe in global warming, but 2) if global warming was real, then good, because it would be good for Lennox's business of selling more A/C's! (He also complained that he would have made more money in the stock market than he made having it all tied up in Lennox, implying that the employees didn't work hard enough or something, but for the sake of everyone's jobs, he stayed with the company. What a guy!) They ought to be our best and brightest people. They evidently believe they are, the way they carry on. But they don't seem to understand something basic that separates children from adults, which is that you can't make problems go away by ignoring them. They've done worse. They've actively worked to deny everything, actually spent money that they are so greedy to have, on propaganda dressed up as science. What the hell! We have a huge, huge leadership problem. In Lennox's case, I know that CEO inherited the company. He didn't win his position on any sort of merit at all. He was the son of the previous leader, that's all.
What a bunch of lying, smug, lazy hedonists. Every generation can use a challenge, to keep life from becoming too easy and boring. We ought to embrace this problem. We could solve it. The US didn't go AWOL for WWII, didn't chicken out and let Japan grab half the Pacific, didn't leave the Brits to the Nazis. We demonstrated to the world that democracy is superior to fascism. Now we call them the Greatest Generation. If Rupert Murdoch had been a media mogul then, I can imagine he'd have spewed ridiculous pro-Nazi propaganda, maybe suggest that the US ought to cut a deal to sell Hawaii to Japan in exchange for peace. Solving global warming doesn't require the sacrifice that war did. Yet, we're running away from it. We don't deserve to stay #1 with that attitude. Our parents would be ashamed. All the work and sacrifice they did so we'd have a better life, and this is how we repay that.
So, we won't do enough to address this problem, not until it's far too late. Greenland will melt, and maybe western Antarctica will too, most of Florida and Bangladesh will drown, and the Netherlands may find it impossible to raise the dikes high enough. Then we'll engage in recriminations as we fight over higher ground and food. There will be war, maybe even WWIII and use of nuclear weapons. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And note this is a very nuanced result. It's not the optimum answer to all cases of the sphere packing problem, complete with proof of optimality. It is only a fast way to find a good answer in some cases. So many people expect such absolute, complete, and progressive answers from science. The media likes to spin things that way. Science fiction is full of such fantastically powerful technology that it warps expectations. We have no idea how some of these technologies could ever plausibly be built, we strongly suspect many of them are just flat impossible, but we've gotten so used to seeing them in SF we hardly even notice. Our brave heroes have 1 hour to save the ship, planet, or galaxy from certain doom, and they always succeed, always hit on the right answer just in time. Sure, scientists want those kinds of answers too. But we understand it's not that easy. The public really doesn't.
Why do you value attitude so highly? Because you believe it's unteachable? You know what has the best attitude of all? A robot. Never gets tired, doesn't need a vacation, no whining or complaining, no family emergencies, or loyalty or pay issues. You are pretty dismissive of tech skills, the way you claim anyone can learn them. And intelligence? You talk as if brains are commodities. At least you think education is worth mentioning.
The sort of programming most businesses do is "widget assembly", which is not much of a real challenge. Just string together a bunch of libraries and function calls. At most, grind out some actual logic to reformat and repackage data to accommodate the different requirements of the various bits of code that do the heavy lifting. Takes time, sure, but not inspiration. Maybe you think the way you do because that's the sort of business you do. If your bright-eyed attitude star actually had to solve a hard problem, I'm sure he'd be real cheery the whole time he was stuck in the mud. I know what that's like because I've worked with someone like that. The upbeat attitude and work ethic were admirable, and he was a competent enough programmer, but he wasn't up to solving some fundamental problems we faced. Not imaginative or perceptive enough for that, though he did try. The man was a great foot soldier, but the business needed good guidance, not cheerleading and servility.
Many bosses like it that way. Surround themselves with pleasant people, and more critically, people who aren't quite as smart as they are. Amazing how many managers can't stand working over people smarter than they are, out of fear that their leadership might be questioned, perhaps.
Why was this modded down? It's all too true. Don't unsubscribe, don't call. All that does is confirm that you look at their spam. Mark the offending messages as spam, and filter them out, that's all.
Security seems to be extra vulnerable to fraud. Many times, I saw military customers wooed by vendors who are perfectly willing to give them a load of bull about how they can't explain why their devices, software, and ideas are secure, because that would compromise the security. Then the military goes a step further, and abuses their secret classification system to cover up security problems, keeping important information even from their own people. They base security decisions on politics. They are more interested in getting a system approved as secure, than in whether it is actually secure. and will lean on people to just rubberstamp systems. They play favorites. They like Windows, because they find it more user friendly, so they push to have it declared secure. Systems they don't like are held up to extremely difficult standards, the better to reject them. They engage in plenty of their own bull to pull that off. For instance, Linux is coded by foreigners, which they deem automatically makes it insecure. How can they know some foreign programmer won't put a back door into the Linux kernel? Never mind that Microsoft might employ Indians to work on Windows. And who's to say that US citizen programmers would never sell out?
They want COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf), to save money, but there is no COTS that meets their needs. They play a funny game with contractors too. Employ people as contractors and treat them with deep suspicion, but won't employ them as their own experts who just might possibly be a touch more committed and loyal.
No surprise that the military stinks up their security.
Are you saying that any other way of compensating artists is somehow not capitalist? That's another common and wrong argument. Or did it not occur to you that there could be other ways to compensate artists? Or you don't believe any other way can possibly work? Well, I've got news for you: copyright isn't working. Copyright extremists suffer from such narrow thinking.
We should not try to treat information with the same laws, customs, and expectations that apply to material goods. We cannot force information to be scarce, as goods are, and we shouldn't try. Our efforts to do so have been a huge waste of resources, not to mention good will. Information and goods are fundamentally different from each other. Yes, both are valuable. But one is easy to copy, and the other is not. Surely we are not too stupid to handle more than one kind of concept, even in the face of efforts by cunning, self-interested parties to confuse us on these points? You know the saying: to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even the narrow world view of "this for that" is broader than material goods, as it values services and favors as well as goods.
Makes sense? No it doesn't. You talk as if it's obvious that piracy is immoral and unethical. Other than the hypothetical harm from lost sales, piracy does no harm. The supposed harm is not the fault of piracy, it is the fault of antiquated, obsolete, and plain wrong ideas of how artists should be compensated. Sharing should never have been criminalized. It's impossible to force society and nature to treat information as if it were material. It isn't. Anytime anyone calls copyright infringement "stealing", they are making this fundamental error. Difficult to have a reasoned discussion of the real problems until people stop listening to the intellectual property extremists, stop agreeing to pretend the universe works differently than it obviously does.
Once it's admitted that sharing is good, then we see all this talk of it being reasonable to silence mere messengers is wrong. Ought to be able to see that regardless. "Shoot the messenger" is a classic mistake still commonly made today.
Their entire approach is useless. They could buy the entire government, write all the laws and criminalize all forms of sharing, sue and arrest millions, spy on everyone, shut down the Internet, force manufacturers to DRM everything, brainwash half the public, and still not stop piracy. Might as well try to outlaw sex and knowledge. Swapping flash drives in proverbial back alleys and unlocking hardware are just 2 ways of sharing that would be practically unstoppable even under such an extreme environment.
They won't find anything even 90% effective. There isn't any such thing. However, you're right about the damage they can do. They shouldn't be allowed to vandalize civilization. We shouldn't indulge them and their sick fantasies. Nor should we believe them when they claim they are only fighting the good fight, trying to stop bad old piracy. They lie, and we all know it. Piracy is not evil. And they have no principles, only greed. They've demonstrated this time and again by cheating the very artists they claim to be defending, hypocritically using the very technology they want to ban, and trampling upon laws they don't find convenient even as they seek to use the law against us all.
What kills me is people thinking a few executives earning ridiculous pay is not significant because there are so few of them. You are wrong.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.
I hear that at the big financial institutions, pay of $50 billion (that's billion, not million) goes to executive cadres numbering around 100 people.
These guys are colluding with boards to loot our businesses, and no one is seeing or stopping them. Then they go cry loudly about how they're burdened with regulations and uncertainty. I'll believe all that when they make serious cuts to executive pay. Until then, nothing they say should have any credibility.
We can and do have objective measures. No need for conspiracy theories. And by these objective measures, the wealthy and powerful have pushed the rest of us down as a side effect of them lining their own pockets. Wages for the 99% have gone nowhere since the 1970s, while the super rich have gotten far richer.
I understand very well that the US is still quite wealthy, and life is still good here. And that we are very wasteful. (I think I am considerably less wasteful than most of my fellows. My cars are small and fuel efficient, I dry clothes on a rack, not in a dryer, I set the thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer, and other things.) Nevertheless, financial institutions have committed a great deal of fraud, and our own wastefulness and wealth is no excuse for that. When someone steals a little from us, we should do nothing because we are still rich? If a few leeches and mosquitos want a few drops of our blood, we should let the poor hungry things eat? Just forgive, forget, and move on with life? Or ignore them because the effects of their acts are small and insignificant next to the scale of the economy? Too Big To Fail lied about the "big" part? Let poor Madoff out of prison with a pardon? I don't think so! What happy drugs are you on that you can just shrug this all off? Don't you want our laws upheld? You ought to thank us for holding rich bankers to account. If we can. Or when you said you were the 1%, could you mean that you are one of those executives or financial professionals who receives 7 figure pay?
I know what you mean. Had one professor who decided I was a B student, so I could never get an A from the guy. Though I could and did get worse grades than a B from him. The department head admitted his grading was completely arbitrary. In other words, he gave out whatever grade he wanted, never mind how the student actually did. Another professor felt that an A ought to take 10 times the effort as a B, and that grades should be handed out on a logarithmic basis. 1 A for every 10 Bs. In the class I took from him, no one got an A, 2 students earned Bs, and the rest of us got C's or worse. Another time, had a final grade of 91 turned into an 89 because there were too many A's. And so on. Strange how common that is. Seems every department has at least one professor with some serious hangups and issues.
I had the extra misfortune to be in a department at a bad time. They had recently created the department and needed professors in a hurry. They raided related disciplines, and those departments all used it as an opportunity to dump their worst. Big, big mistake on the school's part. Instead of just 1 or 2 bad teachers, the whole department was rotten. If I had known, I would have certainly chosen a different school. These professors were all bitter about being rejected by their chosen discipline and hated their new one, didn't feel it counted as real science and engineering. They hated each other too. That tends to happen when a bunch of incompetents are thrown together. And they viewed the students with contempt. Anyone who would actually choose that fake discipline had to be a moron! Fun times. Graduation rate in that dysfunctional department was 5%. I was one of the few who made it. Every other department in the school of engineering was graduating 20%. Finally the dean told them to shape up or he would kill the whole department.
My god, the powerful never, ever take advantage. Systems are never rigged. Bank fees are totally fair, because they have the right to make a profit. Bureaucracies are never wrong. Schools would never encourage professors to give out any grades not consistent with what the students earned. Any misfortune that happens to you is obviously all your fault. You should have known better!
1. Larger address spaces. That has nearly doubled code size. The 6502 used in the Apple II was 8-bit and could address only a 16bit space, 64K of memory. Instructions were much smaller. A 3 byte instruction (1 byte opcode plus a 2 byte address) could do a load/store anywhere in memory, and if that wasn't good enough, it had these "zero page" 2 byte instructions that accessed only the first 256 bytes of RAM. To do random access anywhere in a 32bit, 4G address space takes a 5 byte instruction. Now with RAM creeping over 4G, need even bigger addresses. The x86 architecture used this "segment" idea to work around it. A 32 bit address was split into 2 16 bit parts, with the high half in a "segment" register, and the low half in the instruction so that instructions could still be 3 bytes. But it was necessary to change segments constantly, so this idea didn't help much and sure made life rough for compiler designers. Borland C++ was notorious for bungling the handling of segments.
2. Bigger numbers. Used to have limits like 32767 all over the place on game scores, spread sheet cell numbers, and such. And there was the infamous Y2K bug. Now use of 32bit integers is standard, and 64bit integers are common. Doubles or quadruples the number of bytes needed for math.
3. GUIs. We went from terminal I/O with printf and friends to specifying dozens of options for window layouts, and keyboard and mouse event callbacks. Just dealing with typical resolutions forced the use of bigger numbers, as we went from 80x25 which fits in 1 byte each, to 640x480. Quite likely that some ancient terminal software cannot handle more than 256 columns. The big memory user is of course graphics. An XWindows "Hello World" program in xlib is insanely huge, at over 100 lines. Things have gotten better, but still nowhere near the 1 liner for terminal I/O. Even when a program can create a pop up window with one line of code, it still requires huge libraries.
4. Error checking and security. We don't live as dangerously as we used to. Can trim quite a bit of code if you don't check for buffer overruns, array bounds, numeric overflow, stack overflow, running out of memory, pointers out of range, etc.
And yes, less attention is given to memory usage. Not worth our time to sweat over a few bytes. But I wanted to point out that there are good reasons why code has increased in size, that it isn't all programmers being sloppy and wasteful. If Turbo Pascal 3 was recompiled for a 64bit machine, it would certainly be much larger than the original binary.
This whole discussion seems off to me. We have compulsory education through 12th grade, and we pay for this entirely through taxes. We don't charge minors for their education, though of course there are private schools which are optional. Regardless, the minor does not end up in debt, and is not required through force of law to be gratefully repaying society for suffering their existence and education.
Then suddenly, the high school grads are adults, and the costs of further education is ultimately their problem, because we say so. The only realistic source of money for this very expensive education are one's parents. The pay from most jobs a college student can get is a joke. We've been seeing that going the loan route breaks down when graduates are unable to get jobs. The military way is very costly. Grants and scholarships have so many requirements that they are sometimes in the embarrassing position of not having awarded any money because no one qualified, or they have to bend the rules. I've also seen the kind of scholarship that is merely bait to get a student to attend. Once students have invested a year or 2 towards a degree, they discover that the requirements are too much and they are unable to keep the scholarship, and once lost, it cannot be regained. A requirement that one must maintain a 3.5 GPA doesn't seem unreasonable, until one is victimized by a few bad professors who relish handing out F's to people they just plain don't like regardless of or perhaps even because of merit, or weed-out classes where the game is to be tough on everyone to get rid of the weak students and never mind whether they're being fair with the tough love, or a department that is so afraid of grade inflation that almost no one receives an A even when they have earned it.
Once in a 1000 year quake? What are you saying here? You think once in 1000 years is an acceptable risk for a disaster that could render land uninhabitable for centuries? It isn't!
And where did you get that 1000 year figure? What if the people who made that estimate were wrong? No I don't mean that they can't do statistics and math,
I mean that they were highly motivated to fudge the numbers.
Perhaps all this could have been avoided if the plant had not been located right on the coast, or if the tsunami wall had been just a little higher. Such simple things to do, for such tiny amounts of money, but they didn't do it. Why? Gross stupidity and reckless gambling, that's why. And now that it has happened, operators and proponents are treating us to a load of bull about how they had no idea such large tsunamis could hit there, that the whole thing was just "bad luck". In fact, we did know that beforehand. They might as well say they can't or won't properly assess risk. The tsunami is the cause, but is not a good excuse for why this happened. They have no good excuse, and they shouldn't be excused.
People are not to be trusted to run such dangerous operations. Cutting corners on safety to save a little money is all too common. They get away with it almost every time. Got away with it until Fukushima. But, the very first time any nuclear power plant's safety features are tested against an earthquake and tsunami, it fails big. A 100% failure rate is not encouraging. It scared a few people into behaving more responsibly, for a while. But it's only a matter of time before the return of carelessness and lying about the risks. Then sooner or later, we will be "unlucky" again, and have another big disaster. We cannot make good policy on biased and bad data. If it wasn't for human nature, I would feel a lot better about nuclear power.
I read that it is impossible to travel or even send information faster than light. But the explanations are bad. If you are in a car traveling at 50% of light speed (0.5c) and you turn on the headlights, for you the light will move away from you at lightspeed because your time is slowed. To stationary (relatively speaking) observers, you will be traveling at 0.5c and the light from your headlights will look like it is traveling at c from their point of view, instead of 1.5c, because time is moving faster for them.
A simple extrapolation has your time moving backward if you should somehow be able to move faster than the light from your own headlights, so that it will still look to you as if that light is moving away from you at lightspeed. Then we detour into all sorts of causality problems, and this often gets held up as the explanation, when it seems more like a consequence. Common sense suggests FTL signals should be possible without violating causality, without it being necessary to run time backwards. Of course something else would have to give. Perhaps vacuum is not the fastest medium, and signals can travel faster when in a special conduit.
This advice is 15 years too late. Wall Street is so yesterday. They're struggling not to implode under all the fraud that still hasn't been cleaned up. The pendulum is swinging against them. You always want to be ahead of the next game, whatever that is, and I'd say it's not Wall Street. Wall Street won't be a good playground again until the toxic waste is cleaned up and polluters are actually held accountable and made to really hurt.
It's you talking nonsense. Electric motors require considerably less work to manufacture. No, we shouldn't burn oil to charge batteries, we should get that energy from sunlight, wind, and water. I didn't say anything about "cap and trade". That is in any case a lame substitute for what we should really be doing, which is make the price of various kinds of energy reflect their actual costs. And by costs, I don't mean just the cost from oil well to pump, I also mean the costs of cleaning up after disasters such as Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, and the costs of ozone days, asthma and other health issues. Plus political and social issues such as wars over oil, corruption, lobbying, weaseling around in court and dragging issues out forever to get out of paying for damages, hoking up fake research to confuse the public about climate science, and suburban sprawl that cheap gas did much to enable. And don't forget the roads. The gas tax is supposed to pay for roads. Any time we chip in from the general funds for things such as emergency bridge repair on I35 in Minneapolis, we're subsidizing oil. When you speak of scams, keep in mind all the ones Big Oil has pulled. I love how you imply that alternative energy is inherently prone to scams, while you turn a blind eye to Big Oil's considerable record of lying, cheating, and fraud. While the costs of all that are hard to nail down exactly, it can be estimated fairly well. Fossil fuels get a huge free ride on all that. Stop subsidizing oil, and alternative energy won't need help either.
I don't care for mandates and "control" either, but too often we end up there out of compromise. I'd rather not have fuel economy standards, so long as the price of gas reflects the costs.
And you speak of jobs and the economy? Converting to cleaner forms of energy would increase employment, not decrease it. It would make the economy more efficient. We should be fixing up our roads right now, while labor is cheap. Instead, we're being treated to this huge manufactured controversy over the debt "crisis". There wouldn't be a debt crisis if our corporate citizens paid taxes instead of buying and using loopholes.
Do you know what Los Angeles and London were like in the 1980s? In those days, you could park a white car outdoors in the L.A. area, and by the next day it would be coated with a thin layer of dark grey soot that accompanied the morning dew. Breathe the air in 1980's London for a few days, and soon you'll be turning tissues black when you blow your nose. That kind of crap is why California went ape over pollution. Today, L.A. is considerably cleaner.
You and people like you are the ones with agendas. If you can blow off global warming, then you can keep right on living large and wastefully, diverting our resources to peacock like displays of virility and vanity, and the propping up of obsolete businesses and ideas so that you don't have to change. Because then you might actually have to think, heaven forbid! After all, you have to show the neighbors that you're rich and important, don't you? And you sure don't want anyone changing the rules on how best to do that.
So you go down the classic route of "offense is the best defense", and make ridiculous claims that scientists are stupid and wrong, or have joined in a vast conspiracy to extract grant money from governments. You cry about the "sacrifice", but you won't go live next to a coal power plant on the downwind side, will you? But it's okay with you if poor people get shoved into such locations, and have to deal with the resulting health problems themselves. And you ignore that we have that thing known as progress. You surely don't want to give up the LCD monitor, and go back to CRTs? How about leaded gas? Do you understand what that stuff did to us all, and how simple it was to ditch? Just need hardened steel valve seats, that's all. Just a few more pennies per engine, and we saved many dollars on health and pollution problems. If we ever get some good batteries, or fuel cells, I promise you that almost no one will ever want to use a combustion engine vehicle again, global warming or no. A combustion engine is awful compared to an electric motor. They will be relegated to museums, much like the old railroad steamers. But we won't ever get there, unless we research it.
I agree. I bogged down about 2/3rds of the way through Red Mars. I find the politics and cheating depressing, in that I can see people behaving that stupidly. It's Heart of Darkness on Mars. And it's simply not interesting. Mars is such an extreme environment that the first colonists there absolutely will not be able to cheat each other without getting everyone killed. One suicidal depressive, hothead, or love triangle going postal and taking out the air supply would do it. Even playing it straight, a colony may fail anyway. The way the book should end is that everyone dies for being so stupid. The Byzantine Empire failed thanks to treachery. The generals and wealthy families were fighting over the empire while Islamic fanatics were carving it up. Even used the invading hordes against one another.
After everyone dies and thereby provides a compelling object lesson, the next group to try it will be a bit more evolved, won't be prone to that kind of deadly rashness. The engineering problems are quite fascinating and challenging enough, and that's what they will need to solve to make it. Can we create soil out of Martian dirt? Grow crops in it? Would there be enough sunlight? Is it practical to even think of colonizing Mars? It would be an experiment worth doing, no doubt, but can we get mroe out of Mars than we would put into any effort to maintain a colony? Maybe not.
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Rights? Entitled? You're looking at the problem wrong. In nature, copying happens all the time. Millions of times every second, bacteria divide. Any number of radios with recorders can tune into 1 radio station. A large crowd of people can gather around 1 radio, and remember what they hear. You might as well try to outlaw gravity or sex or breathing as outlaw copying. In the face of how nature really works, rights mean nothing. You can't realistically control copying, in order to monetize information or for any other purpose. We can compensate artists, just not that way, not by putting a toll on copying.
We are all "entitled" to free content. You know, stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Mozart, which is old enough to have remained out of copyright despite massive grabs of the public domain.
What's broken is the business model, not the software or drug industries. You can't own ideas. You can't control what others make of an idea. You can't peddle individual copies as if they were scarce. You can't even draw clear boundaries. Our whole treatment has been twisted towards the presumption that these things can be done, that we can treat an idea like a piece of land.
Do you think Einstein should have patented e=mc^2? If you think yes, you think wrong. That is a mathematical formula, and is therefore not patentable. Software is also entirely independent of a medium. To be eligible for a patent, you are supposed to fix your grand idea to a medium, embody it in hardware. Software should not be patentable. We should never have let the special interests slip that change past us back in the 1970s.
I want to know how the research you fund will be published. Will it be freely available, published under some kind of copyleft license? A quick skim of the site didn't turn up anything on that one way or another. Until I have assurances that I will be able to read any research I might help fund, that it won't end up locked away behind some miserable journal's outrageous paywall, I'm not too excited about funding anything. The research projects themselves all look pretty cool.
It's a start. A start towards a patronage system of many parts.
I think we need to make radical changes, or, at the least undo the radical changes that have snuck in. The idea of trying to directly profit from science through lock down and denial by means of patents isn't working. It is also a relatively recent phenomenon, this huge expansion in the things that are considered patentable, and the even bigger leap from covering a specific implementation of an idea to all manifestations of an idea. However, patent reform alone isn't enough. Even if the system worked as intended, it would still be a drag and a hindrance. What we really need is to bring back patronage in a big way. I'd like to scrap the patent system first, but that doesn't look realistic. It will only go after a new system has been established and made patents irrelevant. The law doesn't lead, it follows.
We can do patronage so much better than was possible centuries ago. Have many organizations covering every angle. Each would be specialized in raising funds in a particular way, and in awarding funding in another particular way. #SciFund would be only one of many. Then, for some infrastructure for everyone, really need the digital notary to make plagiarism and other forms of cheating very hard, and hopefully nigh impossible. And, we really, really need a digital library, to serve up any research anyone might want to see.
Hah! World Climate Report is part of the oil industry's propaganda machine to deny that there is any problem. Without even looking at their so-called data, I could tell they weren't interested in real science. Consider this gem from WCR's about us page:
a concise, hard-hitting and scientifically correct response
Says who? Those sort of claims ought to be made by independent experts. They sure are over the top! "Hard-hitting", yeah right. The whole thing is absolutely packed with hot air. "nation's leading publication", "exhaustively researched", "impeccably referenced", "definitive and unimpeachable", "acclaimed by those on both sides". If you can't see what utter trash that is, I feel sorry for you. Anybody can say that crap about themselves. And speaking of "impeccably" referenced, fine, who are these guys? Who says all that about them, and why? They don't say! So much for references! Looking a bit more, I see 4 names listed on the staff page. No credentials. No degrees in meteorology, climatology, or any kind of science. For all they say, they might not have even graduated from high school! They're just cheap salesmen. And we should believe these guys? Checking around a bit more, I learned that the editor, this Patrick Michaels, is from the Cato Institute, which has close ties with none other than the notorious Koch brothers. WCR was published by the so called "Greening Earth Society", a name which screams with propaganda. That in turn is backed by the Western Fuels Association. Yep, oil industry propaganda. Before that, Michaels was a research professor in climatology. Has a PhD in ecological climatology. Aha! Why doesn't WCR mention this? And why isn't he still a professor? Did they fire him? Oh right, of course he left voluntarily. There's more yet. Seems Michaels is a bad scientist, and has published papers about the climate that misrepresent and mislead. Roy Spencer, another crackpot climate change denier with a few scientific credentials and papers, likes Michaels' work.
WUWT would seem to be more reputable, but it too has problems.
Where's your sense of responsibility? It's one thing to shrug off problems we didn't cause or which we can't handle. If a relatively near giant star points its poles at us as it goes supernova, and bathes Earth with gamma radiation, we're all dead. Really nothing we can do about that. Eta Carinae could do that, but fortunately its poles do not face us. That would seem to be extremely unlikely, as it hasn't ever happened in Earth's entire history as far as we know.
But we are causing this problem. And we can do things about it. We ought to take responsibility for it.
I fear so too. We have such fools leading our nations and large corporations. Trolls like Rupert Murdoch are deliberately confusing the public, sowing doubts about science itself, not only climate science, and telling outright lie after lie. In 1993, I personally heard a speech from the CEO of Lennox to employees in which he said that 1) he didn't believe in global warming, but 2) if global warming was real, then good, because it would be good for Lennox's business of selling more A/C's! (He also complained that he would have made more money in the stock market than he made having it all tied up in Lennox, implying that the employees didn't work hard enough or something, but for the sake of everyone's jobs, he stayed with the company. What a guy!) They ought to be our best and brightest people. They evidently believe they are, the way they carry on. But they don't seem to understand something basic that separates children from adults, which is that you can't make problems go away by ignoring them. They've done worse. They've actively worked to deny everything, actually spent money that they are so greedy to have, on propaganda dressed up as science. What the hell! We have a huge, huge leadership problem. In Lennox's case, I know that CEO inherited the company. He didn't win his position on any sort of merit at all. He was the son of the previous leader, that's all.
What a bunch of lying, smug, lazy hedonists. Every generation can use a challenge, to keep life from becoming too easy and boring. We ought to embrace this problem. We could solve it. The US didn't go AWOL for WWII, didn't chicken out and let Japan grab half the Pacific, didn't leave the Brits to the Nazis. We demonstrated to the world that democracy is superior to fascism. Now we call them the Greatest Generation. If Rupert Murdoch had been a media mogul then, I can imagine he'd have spewed ridiculous pro-Nazi propaganda, maybe suggest that the US ought to cut a deal to sell Hawaii to Japan in exchange for peace. Solving global warming doesn't require the sacrifice that war did. Yet, we're running away from it. We don't deserve to stay #1 with that attitude. Our parents would be ashamed. All the work and sacrifice they did so we'd have a better life, and this is how we repay that.
So, we won't do enough to address this problem, not until it's far too late. Greenland will melt, and maybe western Antarctica will too, most of Florida and Bangladesh will drown, and the Netherlands may find it impossible to raise the dikes high enough. Then we'll engage in recriminations as we fight over higher ground and food. There will be war, maybe even WWIII and use of nuclear weapons. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Then take this!
I'd like to see even more.
And note this is a very nuanced result. It's not the optimum answer to all cases of the sphere packing problem, complete with proof of optimality. It is only a fast way to find a good answer in some cases. So many people expect such absolute, complete, and progressive answers from science. The media likes to spin things that way. Science fiction is full of such fantastically powerful technology that it warps expectations. We have no idea how some of these technologies could ever plausibly be built, we strongly suspect many of them are just flat impossible, but we've gotten so used to seeing them in SF we hardly even notice. Our brave heroes have 1 hour to save the ship, planet, or galaxy from certain doom, and they always succeed, always hit on the right answer just in time. Sure, scientists want those kinds of answers too. But we understand it's not that easy. The public really doesn't.
Why do you value attitude so highly? Because you believe it's unteachable? You know what has the best attitude of all? A robot. Never gets tired, doesn't need a vacation, no whining or complaining, no family emergencies, or loyalty or pay issues. You are pretty dismissive of tech skills, the way you claim anyone can learn them. And intelligence? You talk as if brains are commodities. At least you think education is worth mentioning.
The sort of programming most businesses do is "widget assembly", which is not much of a real challenge. Just string together a bunch of libraries and function calls. At most, grind out some actual logic to reformat and repackage data to accommodate the different requirements of the various bits of code that do the heavy lifting. Takes time, sure, but not inspiration. Maybe you think the way you do because that's the sort of business you do. If your bright-eyed attitude star actually had to solve a hard problem, I'm sure he'd be real cheery the whole time he was stuck in the mud. I know what that's like because I've worked with someone like that. The upbeat attitude and work ethic were admirable, and he was a competent enough programmer, but he wasn't up to solving some fundamental problems we faced. Not imaginative or perceptive enough for that, though he did try. The man was a great foot soldier, but the business needed good guidance, not cheerleading and servility.
Many bosses like it that way. Surround themselves with pleasant people, and more critically, people who aren't quite as smart as they are. Amazing how many managers can't stand working over people smarter than they are, out of fear that their leadership might be questioned, perhaps.
Why was this modded down? It's all too true. Don't unsubscribe, don't call. All that does is confirm that you look at their spam. Mark the offending messages as spam, and filter them out, that's all.
Frank discussion? That's the 1st problem.
Security seems to be extra vulnerable to fraud. Many times, I saw military customers wooed by vendors who are perfectly willing to give them a load of bull about how they can't explain why their devices, software, and ideas are secure, because that would compromise the security. Then the military goes a step further, and abuses their secret classification system to cover up security problems, keeping important information even from their own people. They base security decisions on politics. They are more interested in getting a system approved as secure, than in whether it is actually secure. and will lean on people to just rubberstamp systems. They play favorites. They like Windows, because they find it more user friendly, so they push to have it declared secure. Systems they don't like are held up to extremely difficult standards, the better to reject them. They engage in plenty of their own bull to pull that off. For instance, Linux is coded by foreigners, which they deem automatically makes it insecure. How can they know some foreign programmer won't put a back door into the Linux kernel? Never mind that Microsoft might employ Indians to work on Windows. And who's to say that US citizen programmers would never sell out?
They want COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf), to save money, but there is no COTS that meets their needs. They play a funny game with contractors too. Employ people as contractors and treat them with deep suspicion, but won't employ them as their own experts who just might possibly be a touch more committed and loyal.
No surprise that the military stinks up their security.
Are you saying that any other way of compensating artists is somehow not capitalist? That's another common and wrong argument. Or did it not occur to you that there could be other ways to compensate artists? Or you don't believe any other way can possibly work? Well, I've got news for you: copyright isn't working. Copyright extremists suffer from such narrow thinking.
We should not try to treat information with the same laws, customs, and expectations that apply to material goods. We cannot force information to be scarce, as goods are, and we shouldn't try. Our efforts to do so have been a huge waste of resources, not to mention good will. Information and goods are fundamentally different from each other. Yes, both are valuable. But one is easy to copy, and the other is not. Surely we are not too stupid to handle more than one kind of concept, even in the face of efforts by cunning, self-interested parties to confuse us on these points? You know the saying: to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even the narrow world view of "this for that" is broader than material goods, as it values services and favors as well as goods.
Makes sense? No it doesn't. You talk as if it's obvious that piracy is immoral and unethical. Other than the hypothetical harm from lost sales, piracy does no harm. The supposed harm is not the fault of piracy, it is the fault of antiquated, obsolete, and plain wrong ideas of how artists should be compensated. Sharing should never have been criminalized. It's impossible to force society and nature to treat information as if it were material. It isn't. Anytime anyone calls copyright infringement "stealing", they are making this fundamental error. Difficult to have a reasoned discussion of the real problems until people stop listening to the intellectual property extremists, stop agreeing to pretend the universe works differently than it obviously does.
Once it's admitted that sharing is good, then we see all this talk of it being reasonable to silence mere messengers is wrong. Ought to be able to see that regardless. "Shoot the messenger" is a classic mistake still commonly made today.
Their entire approach is useless. They could buy the entire government, write all the laws and criminalize all forms of sharing, sue and arrest millions, spy on everyone, shut down the Internet, force manufacturers to DRM everything, brainwash half the public, and still not stop piracy. Might as well try to outlaw sex and knowledge. Swapping flash drives in proverbial back alleys and unlocking hardware are just 2 ways of sharing that would be practically unstoppable even under such an extreme environment.
They won't find anything even 90% effective. There isn't any such thing. However, you're right about the damage they can do. They shouldn't be allowed to vandalize civilization. We shouldn't indulge them and their sick fantasies. Nor should we believe them when they claim they are only fighting the good fight, trying to stop bad old piracy. They lie, and we all know it. Piracy is not evil. And they have no principles, only greed. They've demonstrated this time and again by cheating the very artists they claim to be defending, hypocritically using the very technology they want to ban, and trampling upon laws they don't find convenient even as they seek to use the law against us all.
What kills me is people thinking a few executives earning ridiculous pay is not significant because there are so few of them. You are wrong.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.
I hear that at the big financial institutions, pay of $50 billion (that's billion, not million) goes to executive cadres numbering around 100 people.
These guys are colluding with boards to loot our businesses, and no one is seeing or stopping them. Then they go cry loudly about how they're burdened with regulations and uncertainty. I'll believe all that when they make serious cuts to executive pay. Until then, nothing they say should have any credibility.
We can and do have objective measures. No need for conspiracy theories. And by these objective measures, the wealthy and powerful have pushed the rest of us down as a side effect of them lining their own pockets. Wages for the 99% have gone nowhere since the 1970s, while the super rich have gotten far richer.
I understand very well that the US is still quite wealthy, and life is still good here. And that we are very wasteful. (I think I am considerably less wasteful than most of my fellows. My cars are small and fuel efficient, I dry clothes on a rack, not in a dryer, I set the thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer, and other things.) Nevertheless, financial institutions have committed a great deal of fraud, and our own wastefulness and wealth is no excuse for that. When someone steals a little from us, we should do nothing because we are still rich? If a few leeches and mosquitos want a few drops of our blood, we should let the poor hungry things eat? Just forgive, forget, and move on with life? Or ignore them because the effects of their acts are small and insignificant next to the scale of the economy? Too Big To Fail lied about the "big" part? Let poor Madoff out of prison with a pardon? I don't think so! What happy drugs are you on that you can just shrug this all off? Don't you want our laws upheld? You ought to thank us for holding rich bankers to account. If we can. Or when you said you were the 1%, could you mean that you are one of those executives or financial professionals who receives 7 figure pay?
I know what you mean. Had one professor who decided I was a B student, so I could never get an A from the guy. Though I could and did get worse grades than a B from him. The department head admitted his grading was completely arbitrary. In other words, he gave out whatever grade he wanted, never mind how the student actually did. Another professor felt that an A ought to take 10 times the effort as a B, and that grades should be handed out on a logarithmic basis. 1 A for every 10 Bs. In the class I took from him, no one got an A, 2 students earned Bs, and the rest of us got C's or worse. Another time, had a final grade of 91 turned into an 89 because there were too many A's. And so on. Strange how common that is. Seems every department has at least one professor with some serious hangups and issues.
I had the extra misfortune to be in a department at a bad time. They had recently created the department and needed professors in a hurry. They raided related disciplines, and those departments all used it as an opportunity to dump their worst. Big, big mistake on the school's part. Instead of just 1 or 2 bad teachers, the whole department was rotten. If I had known, I would have certainly chosen a different school. These professors were all bitter about being rejected by their chosen discipline and hated their new one, didn't feel it counted as real science and engineering. They hated each other too. That tends to happen when a bunch of incompetents are thrown together. And they viewed the students with contempt. Anyone who would actually choose that fake discipline had to be a moron! Fun times. Graduation rate in that dysfunctional department was 5%. I was one of the few who made it. Every other department in the school of engineering was graduating 20%. Finally the dean told them to shape up or he would kill the whole department.
My god, the powerful never, ever take advantage. Systems are never rigged. Bank fees are totally fair, because they have the right to make a profit. Bureaucracies are never wrong. Schools would never encourage professors to give out any grades not consistent with what the students earned. Any misfortune that happens to you is obviously all your fault. You should have known better!
Must be one of the patsies for the 1%.
Do you know why things have become so bloated?
1. Larger address spaces. That has nearly doubled code size. The 6502 used in the Apple II was 8-bit and could address only a 16bit space, 64K of memory. Instructions were much smaller. A 3 byte instruction (1 byte opcode plus a 2 byte address) could do a load/store anywhere in memory, and if that wasn't good enough, it had these "zero page" 2 byte instructions that accessed only the first 256 bytes of RAM. To do random access anywhere in a 32bit, 4G address space takes a 5 byte instruction. Now with RAM creeping over 4G, need even bigger addresses. The x86 architecture used this "segment" idea to work around it. A 32 bit address was split into 2 16 bit parts, with the high half in a "segment" register, and the low half in the instruction so that instructions could still be 3 bytes. But it was necessary to change segments constantly, so this idea didn't help much and sure made life rough for compiler designers. Borland C++ was notorious for bungling the handling of segments.
2. Bigger numbers. Used to have limits like 32767 all over the place on game scores, spread sheet cell numbers, and such. And there was the infamous Y2K bug. Now use of 32bit integers is standard, and 64bit integers are common. Doubles or quadruples the number of bytes needed for math.
3. GUIs. We went from terminal I/O with printf and friends to specifying dozens of options for window layouts, and keyboard and mouse event callbacks. Just dealing with typical resolutions forced the use of bigger numbers, as we went from 80x25 which fits in 1 byte each, to 640x480. Quite likely that some ancient terminal software cannot handle more than 256 columns. The big memory user is of course graphics. An XWindows "Hello World" program in xlib is insanely huge, at over 100 lines. Things have gotten better, but still nowhere near the 1 liner for terminal I/O. Even when a program can create a pop up window with one line of code, it still requires huge libraries.
4. Error checking and security. We don't live as dangerously as we used to. Can trim quite a bit of code if you don't check for buffer overruns, array bounds, numeric overflow, stack overflow, running out of memory, pointers out of range, etc.
And yes, less attention is given to memory usage. Not worth our time to sweat over a few bytes. But I wanted to point out that there are good reasons why code has increased in size, that it isn't all programmers being sloppy and wasteful. If Turbo Pascal 3 was recompiled for a 64bit machine, it would certainly be much larger than the original binary.
This whole discussion seems off to me. We have compulsory education through 12th grade, and we pay for this entirely through taxes. We don't charge minors for their education, though of course there are private schools which are optional. Regardless, the minor does not end up in debt, and is not required through force of law to be gratefully repaying society for suffering their existence and education.
Then suddenly, the high school grads are adults, and the costs of further education is ultimately their problem, because we say so. The only realistic source of money for this very expensive education are one's parents. The pay from most jobs a college student can get is a joke. We've been seeing that going the loan route breaks down when graduates are unable to get jobs. The military way is very costly. Grants and scholarships have so many requirements that they are sometimes in the embarrassing position of not having awarded any money because no one qualified, or they have to bend the rules. I've also seen the kind of scholarship that is merely bait to get a student to attend. Once students have invested a year or 2 towards a degree, they discover that the requirements are too much and they are unable to keep the scholarship, and once lost, it cannot be regained. A requirement that one must maintain a 3.5 GPA doesn't seem unreasonable, until one is victimized by a few bad professors who relish handing out F's to people they just plain don't like regardless of or perhaps even because of merit, or weed-out classes where the game is to be tough on everyone to get rid of the weak students and never mind whether they're being fair with the tough love, or a department that is so afraid of grade inflation that almost no one receives an A even when they have earned it.
Once in a 1000 year quake? What are you saying here? You think once in 1000 years is an acceptable risk for a disaster that could render land uninhabitable for centuries? It isn't!
And where did you get that 1000 year figure? What if the people who made that estimate were wrong? No I don't mean that they can't do statistics and math, I mean that they were highly motivated to fudge the numbers.
Perhaps all this could have been avoided if the plant had not been located right on the coast, or if the tsunami wall had been just a little higher. Such simple things to do, for such tiny amounts of money, but they didn't do it. Why? Gross stupidity and reckless gambling, that's why. And now that it has happened, operators and proponents are treating us to a load of bull about how they had no idea such large tsunamis could hit there, that the whole thing was just "bad luck". In fact, we did know that beforehand. They might as well say they can't or won't properly assess risk. The tsunami is the cause, but is not a good excuse for why this happened. They have no good excuse, and they shouldn't be excused.
People are not to be trusted to run such dangerous operations. Cutting corners on safety to save a little money is all too common. They get away with it almost every time. Got away with it until Fukushima. But, the very first time any nuclear power plant's safety features are tested against an earthquake and tsunami, it fails big. A 100% failure rate is not encouraging. It scared a few people into behaving more responsibly, for a while. But it's only a matter of time before the return of carelessness and lying about the risks. Then sooner or later, we will be "unlucky" again, and have another big disaster. We cannot make good policy on biased and bad data. If it wasn't for human nature, I would feel a lot better about nuclear power.
I read that it is impossible to travel or even send information faster than light. But the explanations are bad. If you are in a car traveling at 50% of light speed (0.5c) and you turn on the headlights, for you the light will move away from you at lightspeed because your time is slowed. To stationary (relatively speaking) observers, you will be traveling at 0.5c and the light from your headlights will look like it is traveling at c from their point of view, instead of 1.5c, because time is moving faster for them.
A simple extrapolation has your time moving backward if you should somehow be able to move faster than the light from your own headlights, so that it will still look to you as if that light is moving away from you at lightspeed. Then we detour into all sorts of causality problems, and this often gets held up as the explanation, when it seems more like a consequence. Common sense suggests FTL signals should be possible without violating causality, without it being necessary to run time backwards. Of course something else would have to give. Perhaps vacuum is not the fastest medium, and signals can travel faster when in a special conduit.
How would you explain the cosmic speed limit?
This advice is 15 years too late. Wall Street is so yesterday. They're struggling not to implode under all the fraud that still hasn't been cleaned up. The pendulum is swinging against them. You always want to be ahead of the next game, whatever that is, and I'd say it's not Wall Street. Wall Street won't be a good playground again until the toxic waste is cleaned up and polluters are actually held accountable and made to really hurt.
It's you talking nonsense. Electric motors require considerably less work to manufacture. No, we shouldn't burn oil to charge batteries, we should get that energy from sunlight, wind, and water. I didn't say anything about "cap and trade". That is in any case a lame substitute for what we should really be doing, which is make the price of various kinds of energy reflect their actual costs. And by costs, I don't mean just the cost from oil well to pump, I also mean the costs of cleaning up after disasters such as Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, and the costs of ozone days, asthma and other health issues. Plus political and social issues such as wars over oil, corruption, lobbying, weaseling around in court and dragging issues out forever to get out of paying for damages, hoking up fake research to confuse the public about climate science, and suburban sprawl that cheap gas did much to enable. And don't forget the roads. The gas tax is supposed to pay for roads. Any time we chip in from the general funds for things such as emergency bridge repair on I35 in Minneapolis, we're subsidizing oil. When you speak of scams, keep in mind all the ones Big Oil has pulled. I love how you imply that alternative energy is inherently prone to scams, while you turn a blind eye to Big Oil's considerable record of lying, cheating, and fraud. While the costs of all that are hard to nail down exactly, it can be estimated fairly well. Fossil fuels get a huge free ride on all that. Stop subsidizing oil, and alternative energy won't need help either.
I don't care for mandates and "control" either, but too often we end up there out of compromise. I'd rather not have fuel economy standards, so long as the price of gas reflects the costs.
And you speak of jobs and the economy? Converting to cleaner forms of energy would increase employment, not decrease it. It would make the economy more efficient. We should be fixing up our roads right now, while labor is cheap. Instead, we're being treated to this huge manufactured controversy over the debt "crisis". There wouldn't be a debt crisis if our corporate citizens paid taxes instead of buying and using loopholes.
Do you know what Los Angeles and London were like in the 1980s? In those days, you could park a white car outdoors in the L.A. area, and by the next day it would be coated with a thin layer of dark grey soot that accompanied the morning dew. Breathe the air in 1980's London for a few days, and soon you'll be turning tissues black when you blow your nose. That kind of crap is why California went ape over pollution. Today, L.A. is considerably cleaner.
You and people like you are the ones with agendas. If you can blow off global warming, then you can keep right on living large and wastefully, diverting our resources to peacock like displays of virility and vanity, and the propping up of obsolete businesses and ideas so that you don't have to change. Because then you might actually have to think, heaven forbid! After all, you have to show the neighbors that you're rich and important, don't you? And you sure don't want anyone changing the rules on how best to do that.
So you go down the classic route of "offense is the best defense", and make ridiculous claims that scientists are stupid and wrong, or have joined in a vast conspiracy to extract grant money from governments. You cry about the "sacrifice", but you won't go live next to a coal power plant on the downwind side, will you? But it's okay with you if poor people get shoved into such locations, and have to deal with the resulting health problems themselves. And you ignore that we have that thing known as progress. You surely don't want to give up the LCD monitor, and go back to CRTs? How about leaded gas? Do you understand what that stuff did to us all, and how simple it was to ditch? Just need hardened steel valve seats, that's all. Just a few more pennies per engine, and we saved many dollars on health and pollution problems. If we ever get some good batteries, or fuel cells, I promise you that almost no one will ever want to use a combustion engine vehicle again, global warming or no. A combustion engine is awful compared to an electric motor. They will be relegated to museums, much like the old railroad steamers. But we won't ever get there, unless we research it.
I agree. I bogged down about 2/3rds of the way through Red Mars. I find the politics and cheating depressing, in that I can see people behaving that stupidly. It's Heart of Darkness on Mars. And it's simply not interesting. Mars is such an extreme environment that the first colonists there absolutely will not be able to cheat each other without getting everyone killed. One suicidal depressive, hothead, or love triangle going postal and taking out the air supply would do it. Even playing it straight, a colony may fail anyway. The way the book should end is that everyone dies for being so stupid. The Byzantine Empire failed thanks to treachery. The generals and wealthy families were fighting over the empire while Islamic fanatics were carving it up. Even used the invading hordes against one another.
After everyone dies and thereby provides a compelling object lesson, the next group to try it will be a bit more evolved, won't be prone to that kind of deadly rashness. The engineering problems are quite fascinating and challenging enough, and that's what they will need to solve to make it. Can we create soil out of Martian dirt? Grow crops in it? Would there be enough sunlight? Is it practical to even think of colonizing Mars? It would be an experiment worth doing, no doubt, but can we get mroe out of Mars than we would put into any effort to maintain a colony? Maybe not.