the point of them being a corporation is to make money.
NO! Quit repeating that. The point is to create wealth, add value to society. It is not just to "make money". Money is only a proxy, an imperfect measure of value. Why imperfect? Because there are all kinds of destructive actions that make one small group or individual richer, or only seemingly richer, at the expense of everyone else. The simplest way is outright theft. Lying is another popular one. Bribery is yet another ancient practice. Obtaining a monopoly and gouging the public is the holy grail of profit, and far too many corporations strive for that. Recently we've seen another way: Too Big to Fail. Corporations, to their shame, do all that and more, all the time. Worse, they think that's just life. It need not be! We try to maintain some civility, outlaw destructive actions, and police our corporate citizens, but it isn't easy. There will always be some crime, of course. But we must keep the fraud and deceit in check, or the system will collapse. Damn near happened in 2008, but we were able to bail everyone out. We didn't do it for their sakes, but for our own. Next time, we might not be able to, and then what? I'm not impressed with their behavior. We suffer their existence because they do add value. If ever they fail us, make such a mess that the damage they cause exceeds all possible future value, and we know of it, we can sink them. They know that. But we are very forgiving, maybe too forgiving, and they know that too. For instance, I doubt that BP could survive another disaster like the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Perhaps BP should have been liquidated, and their management thrown in jail.
I really don't see what your problem with Geohot is. Even if he's an attention whore, as you allege, so what? Blaming him for Sony's actions is ridiculous. He didn't "make" them do anything. He has every right to do anything he wants with his property, EULAs be damned. And to exercise his right to free speech. All he did was point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes. Their DRM is a joke and a fraud, just like the Emperor's clothes.
The pro nuclear power crowd was very vocal last month. I was amazed at the number of posts and variety of poor arguments they trotted out: Coal is radioactive (it's not), and/or pollutes worse than nuclear power (as if the only options are nuclear or coal), the media is exaggerating (perhaps, but Fukushima doesn't need exaggerating), the containment did not fail (not immediately, but it sure has now), nuclear power plants can be safe (yet this one wasn't safe enough), and newer designs could have handled even this disaster and it's the fault of the anti-nuclear zealots we aren't using them. And it's the fault of the natural disaster for being too big. Perhaps most frightening of all was the incredibly weak rationale that this was no Chernobyl, as if that set a tough standard to exceed!
Now they're a bit quieter. Maybe there's some hope after all. Keeps getting harder to excuse this nuclear mess. Now we're hearing 30 years and 1 trillion yen to clean up? And it still isn't over?! How much worse is this going to get?
A lot of the trouble comes down to the terms. Many people aren't clear on the definitions of the words "theory", "faith", "fact", "truth", "science", and most especially "proof". "Believe" is another troublesome word. Anymore, I cringe whenever I see phrasing similar to "researchers believe that...", as if what they do really is faith based. There are many people who are too quick to read into the use of "believe" an admittance that it's all based on faith, that science is just another religion. They're in a terrible hurry to move past this point that they feel doesn't need more thought, and get on to the case that their religion has all the answers and the best answers, and certainly better answers than that fake religion known as science! When someone asks if I "believe" in Global Warming or Climate Change, I find they're trying to trick me. If I answer the seemingly straightforward question, they pounce. So the first thing I tell them is that "believe" is not the correct term.
For "proof", when someone asserts that there is no proof that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, or that species can change through Evolution, or other such denial nonsense, I often find that their standards of proof are so high that nothing can be proven, and I tell them this. Just the other day some missionaries came to the door, and I hit them with the question of how old the Earth is. Waste of time I suppose, but what the heck. Their answers-- non answers, more like-- were a) That's not important (what the Bible says is what's important), and b) No one knows, and we can't know, and c) Well, how old did I think the Earth was? When I answered that last with 4.5 billion years, they asserted that I actually didn't know! What did they mean I don't know?? I just told them! I didn't get to follow up on that and find out whether they thought I was making it all up or repeating what others had made up, or that because we haven't narrowed it down to plus or minus 1 year means we don't know, or what.
They refuse to understand what constitutes proof. And it's awfully convenient. Anything they don't want to believe can't be proven. But by their lights, they can't prove that they're over the age of 5 minutes, as an Omnipotent Being could have created everything 5 minutes ago, complete with humans who have memories from years ago and "believe" that their memories are largely accurate, but which are in fact all wrong. They can't even be sure that water is wet, or the sky is blue. How can anyone know that their eyes are working correctly, and work like everyone else's eyes, or that the sky is the same to everyone, or that there isn't a color filter hanging over their heads, or for that matter, even define what "blue" and "sky" is? They've heard of Occam's Razor, but they don't grasp it. "It's turtles all the way down!" Sigh.
I've had decent service from Amazon. They could be the most beloved of all the large companies. Which maybe is saying they're the nicest turd in the latrine. That a Worst Company contest exists is merely emphasizing what we all know, which is that large corporations have far too much power. As the saying goes, power corrupts. We do have problems getting these 900 pound gorillas to behave responsibly, and not lobby for unfairly favorable treatment and sweet rent seeking or monopolistic arrangements, or just plain stupid laws, such as ACTA. They get their way on such matters far too often.
Guess your uncle doesn't know about ACM's Transactions on Mathematical Software. Hundreds of routines for all sorts of math. And it's mostly FORTRAN. Here's one for Delaunay Triangulation. Made in '96. Sadly, it's behind a pay wall.
Hacking up your own routine is all very well, and knowing how to do it is important. But actually doing it is a waste of time, unless you need the practice, or it's something real simple. Yes, some people will go hunting for a library routine to find the maximum of two values, or something else really basic. Or they'll write some serious overkill without realizing it, use a gigantic routine for something short and easy. A common one is to use a string append function complete with automatic dynamic allocation and reallocation of more memory, to build a string one character at a time. Talk about slow. But for the rest... You know, the old expression "reinventing the wheel". There's a huge difference in quality, too. Your hack job will have bugs both subtle and gross, and will be a minimal effort with minimal or no testing that barely does the job. The library code will have fewer bugs, and probably be able to handle more and weirder data, be more stable (numerical stability), and faster. The whole focus of most software engineering paradigms is "reuse"!
Some of the shortest path algorithms I've seen in commercial software is downright shameful. They aren't hard algorithms. Maybe a game designer can be excused for a crap pathing algorithm, but how about a map application? No excuse for that.
This line of reasoning is what most recent US Supreme Court nominees have used in their hearings. They say their job is to determine the meaning of the law impartially, according to precedent, and the wording of statutes. Congress makes the law, they do not. They do not "legislate from the bench", that is, make things up or creatively interpret wording in predictably biased ways. Of course this impartiality is an idealistic view.
I would be more concerned with the quality of her reasoning and thinking than her career. But I fear that her choice of employer is indicative of poor judgement and poor critical thinking skills. Possibly she may rise above her chosen indoctrination, having always secretly doubted her employer's sophistries and rationalizations, and recognized their real motives, seeing through them. Or she may suffer a revelation and a change of heart. But I doubt it. Much more likely she is of one mind with the music industry's view. So she will sally forth to tilt against windmills on a new battleground.
Legal professionals are annoyed that geeks believe they by and large do not understand the implications of technology. But until they demonstrate better understanding, by never again attempting such obviously bad legislation as ACTA, COICA, DMCA, and others, we are correct to view the legal profession with skepticism on this matter. Until the day comes that it is unthinkable for a judge to say we "created a monster", over mere P2P software, they should be doubted. That's the sort of language that should be saved for nuclear weapons. If they do sort of understand, they are entirely too reluctant to admit it. Perhaps they fear losing their livelihood, have some unworthy ulterior motive for their actions. The IP lawyers and proponents are self interested, greedy, manipulative fools. They're only too willing to take music industry money in exchange for bad service, trying to bend nature with laws, trying to do what cannot be done. Better to have someone with competence but no legal experience, than one who is either an idiot or a cheat.
We hear this all the time. Successful business leaders are smart, extremely hard working, driven, greedy sociopaths. These MS guys of course are the most extreme of them all. Seems most tech business is this way.
There's a species of small marsupial in which the males compete so fiercely, even suicidally, for mates that the ones who survive the fights all die anyway after their first mating season. They're burned up from the constant, intense, no holds barred fighting, and the toll of their raging hormones. They plunder their own bodies for the energy and strength to win. Take them out of this environment and away from the fighting, and they can last as long as 5 years, same as the females.
Just what has Gates, Allen, Ballmer and company proven with all this ruthlessness, this extreme Protestant Work Ethic? That the ultimate measure of success is money? That education is not everywhere useful? Sad. What have they accomplished? Brought cheap computing to the world, which is something. But not availed themselves of it terribly well. Strangely for a tech company, MS has never been known as particularly innovative. They've been better than most at choosing among and running with ideas, not coming up with them. Gates is a Rockefeller sort, not an Einstein. They also try to grab, claim and lock down things. Many of their actions are done without much regard for ethics, as that whole OOXML fiasco showed. They really seem not to get it about DRM, and have aligned their views with, of all organizations, the RIAA's! Stupid. Perhaps if they respected education and philosophy more, they would act in more enlightened ways. Note that the early days of MS, as Allen describes it, is death marches and hell bent hacking, not research and definitely not study except where it had immediate practical application. It is Google that has been markedly more innovative.
I'll accept the exclusion of Chernobyl, with a proviso. Is anyone anywhere insane enough to run a nuclear power plant that doesn't have a containment vessel? If no such plants are operating today, nor will ever again be operated, then excluding Chernobyl is acceptable. The difference between Chernobyl and your exterior nitroglycerin fuel tank on a car, is that the latter is not going to cause damage on the same scale.
The human element is what worries me the most. Honest mistakes are not the problem. Except for the issue of storing fuel in a nearby pool while performing maintenance, I am mostly satisfied we have carefully considered the dangers, and have designed robustly enough to avert them. No, it is the potential for lying and cheating that worries me. After a disaster is a hell of a time to find out about "deficiencies" in inspections or maintenance, or changes in the plans during construction, or that the actual procedures being followed varied dangerously from the recommended. Just as we are now hearing all about the deficiencies in the design used at Fukushima. Very few endeavors are less tolerant and consequences more devastating than operating a nuclear power plant. Deep Horizon was very bad, but at least it wasn't radioactive. Nevertheless, a ban on offshore oil drilling is always in the cards. If offshore oil drilling is so bad that maybe we shouldn't do it, then surely nuclear power qualifies. We cannot have shoddy, sloppy, careless, or reckless operation, not with something as dangerous as radioactive material. And I am not satisfied that we can keep out the sort of people who would gamble the future for a few more pennies today, or for not even that reason, but just out of sheer laziness or ineptitude.
If we cannot discipline ourselves well enough to handle nuclear power safely, then we shouldn't use it at all.
You threw in lots of disclaimers, like this whopper: "outside the Soviet Union". Sure, if we exclude every accident that ever happened in the largest nation in the world, which includes Chernobyl, nuclear power looks much safer. Anything would look much safer if you did that! And what's this about "oldest containment designs" holding up better than expected? Uh, why were we still using those designs? We have a frightening proclivity for continuing to run plants well after they should have been decommissioned, as you indicate with this nice little phrase: "originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended". Why? Nuclear plants don't age well.
the original designs were impressive
Obviously, they weren't impressive enough. Nor were the operators paranoid enough.
Wind and solar aren't ready? We need massive improvements in energy storage to make them usable? We're using wind and solar right now! What's needed is transmission more than storage. You talk as if these are problems are worse than the problems with nuclear, coal, and gas. You mention peaking as if that's a problem with this kind of power. To the contrary, they are excellent solutions. Solar is particularly good for peaking.
Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power
You can't compare the dangers of nuclear power on such a simplistic basis. I'm sure people moved right back in after the dam burst. The land was not contaminated in such a way as to be unsafe for centuries. Any comparison that does not account for that is not a good comparison.
Yes, fracking has been done in a highly irresponsible manner. The idiots have used toxic waste as their "fracking fluid", a term expressly designed to cover that up. Is that a reason to use more nuclear power? Not hardly! If they'd do that with fracking, how do you suppose they would operate a nuclear power plant? An inspection found that many of these backup diesel generators were not in working order, and that records concerning them had been falsified. That's just one example of the routine corner cutting that goes on even in nuclear power plants. Some people are far too quick to do a 180 on the paranoia and take crazy risks. The only incentive needed to bring out such behavior is money.
The Republicans have yet to figure out how to reach the younger demographic of net users
That's a symptom of the main problem, which is this distressing anti intellectual, anti science attitude that the Republican Party has embraced.
They won't inquire into the facts of matters. They won't listen to anyone who has, preferring instead to make accusations of bias, ulterior motives, corruption, and lack of patriotism when they can't simply ignore the pesky researchers. They shape policy in deliberate ignorance. They act as if science is a big hoax, a diabolically clever machine for manufacturing rationales and manipulating the public. They set up their own institutes to manufacture rationales they like, and think that is science, that they're just doing the same thing that the other guys do. The manipulators among them think Big Tobacco's "Doubt is our product" campaign against the dangers of smoking is a great model to follow, and the idiots are only too happy to embrace the conclusions uncritically. Scary.
In case you think that does not matter, that it all works out, consider the biggest blunder in recent times. I refer to the accusation that Iraq had WMDs. That was the excuse for the Iraq War, and it turned out to be wrong. The costs are more than money, which is itself extremely large, estimated to be at a minimum a staggering $3 trillion. The West lost a lot of credibility, strained a lot of friendships. All that isn't enough to bring us down, nowhere close, but we can't keep making mistakes like that. The Republicans are supposed to be the party of fiscal prudence, but when they were in power, they couldn't abandon fiscal sanity fast enough. This sudden new concern the Republicans have for the budget, after that financial disaster (note that it's far more than the bailout), looks like empty posturing, deserving of the most cynical view possible. Do the Republicans have any principles left, or have they sunk to the party of Greed and Ignorance?
The Democrats, despite their many faults (such as supporting ACTA), have seldom interfered with scientists.
What do you call a percentage? 18.4 cents per gallon is a fixed amount per gallon. Doesn't matter if a gallon of gas costs $1 or $10, the tax is 18.4 cents either way. If it was a percentage such as 10%, the tax would be $0.10 or $1 respectively. Sales tax is a percentage. Income tax is a percentage-- several percentages, really. The gas tax is not a percentage. And it should be.
What to practice is a moving target. A fast moving target. But the underlying principles will serve you well no matter what paradigms, methodology, language, environment, tools, or libraries you use.
As an example, it's still useful to know how to do basic arithmetic by hand, not because you need to know that specifically, but because you ought to know a few examples to help you understand the concept of an algorithm. This is repeated on a higher level because these days, application developers seldom implement algorithms themselves, instead they use implementations others have written and bundled into libraries. But it is still useful to understand the notions, and some stock techniques used in algorithms, things like "divide and conquer".
Don't worry too much about the more esoteric lingo of programming paradigms, things like "currying", "message passing", or "lazy evaluation". Which of those are useful, and even more, which of those are expressed as well as possible, is far from settled. We have not come up with anything that everyone agrees is a universal improvement in all circumstances, though Structured Programming is close.
I've been thinking about what it means to know a programming language. For example, I know Java, but I have not used it in a long time, and have never used any of the newer libraries. Does that mean I actually don't know Java? Some would say that I have not maintained my skills. Then there are all sorts of other things to know about. Such as, source control. Ever used or heard of that? Another is knowing that UNIX systems put libraries in several standard locations, with/usr/lib/ being the most common. Do you know how to install a missing library? Then there's the build process, with such things as the "make" utility, and autoconf. Precious little agreement there also-- Java has its own tool analogous to "make", called Ant. That's the sort of thing the average textbook does not cover. It's messy, and you just have to play around to learn about some of these things.
One goal of OOP was to increase modularity. It didn't entirely succeed, and can make things worse. Classes themselves are fine. It's the relationships between classes that lead to trouble. The classic OOP thinking is that, when there is a relationship between 2 classes, these are how they can be related: "has a", "is a", and "knows a", which is composition, inheritance, and what amounts to a catch all for neither of the others. Particularly, I find inheritance dangerous.
Inheritance needlessly forces a hierarchy on a set of classes. Great, if a hierarchy is a good representation, but often it is not. As one example of why inheritance is trouble, there's been an ongoing argument about multiple inheritance. Is multiple inheritance necessary? Is it a kludge? Multiple inheritance is the symbolic link of OOP. It's a nasty hack to patch up the shortcomings of trying to impose a hierarchy, same as links are in file systems. "is a" is not an accurate representation of the actual relationship, inheritance maybe ought to be described with "exemplifies a" or "typifies a", something that shows this is not a relationship between peers.
OOP also seemed an attempt to make bad programmers better, by imposing discipline, as Structured Programming did. OOP failed miserably there, providing entirely new ways for a bad designer to bog down in a mess.
Finally, many so called OOP languages, such as C++, do a terrible job of realizing OOP. Programmers shouldn't have to mess with templates at all. The language ought to handle that. Operator overloading is another controversial piece of OOP.
OOP was supposed to be modular, sure. But in some ways it made modularity harder to achieve. Relationships between "modules" aren't as simple as they could be. Talk of it being anti-modular is not at all ridiculous.
And this is what makes politics so difficult. When no one knows anything. Your speculation is typical of the sort of thinking that infests our politics. Sorry, but the reasons you're thinking about are trivial next to the main causes of road damage. Trucking companies would be very happy to have you inadvertently defend them.
The 2 things that cause the bulk of the damage to our roads are water and heavy vehicles. 1 heavy truck can do as much damage as 10000 cars. It matters very little whether the cars are SUVs or subcompacts. We've been working on making the roads better able to handle 80000 pound trucks, but there are still many old roads that weren't designed for that kind of use. And we have all these weigh stations and inspections, because truckers will cheat on weight limits.
As for the idea that poor people get stuck with less efficient cars, this is not really the case. The cheapest cars are often the most efficient. Hybrids have changed that because they are very costly, but this is a recent, and still small segment. A much bigger expense for poor people is being forced to live further from work to get affordable housing. Fix that, and you will do far more for the poor than any fooling around with the gas tax could.
This whole proposal sounds like pure politicking, principally backed by Big Oil. What of the huge costs in monitoring everyone so that a mileage based tax could be assessed? The thing I dislike most about toll roads, even more than the dodgy privatization schemes, is the expense of collecting the tolls. It's very expensive to have dozens of toll booths manned 24/7. Automated collection is cheaper, but still far more expensive than the gas tax.
The most shameful thing about the US gas tax is that it is a fixed amount! Been 18.4 or 18.3 cents per gallon since 1993, and inflation has not been 0% all that time. It should be a percentage, like income tax.
Seriously, the light pollution around DFW is so bad I can't see much more than Orion and the Big Dipper. During last night's super moon, the faintest star of the Big Dipper was hard to see. Couldn't make out the Little Dipper at all.
They ditched MNG because it was too big. And I can understand that. Last time I looked, the code was very redundant. Made a good case for an old programming technique known as multiple entry points. And if that redundancy wasn't bad enough, there was considerable duplicated functionality between the MPG and PNG libraries. They thought about dumping libpng and using MNG on PNG images.
We're still using animated GIFs. Even in the browser itself, the throbber was one. Will we ever be able to retire those? At the least move that functionality to an add on?
I used to read a lot of fiction. I started when a paperback was $1.95. Got to know the SF/Fantasy section fairly well, and could quickly scan to see what was new. and had an idea what was coming, Then they began raising prices in $0.50 increments every 6 to 12 months. When the average paperback exceeded $5, I quit. And my familiarity faded. Now the selections available are almost all strange to me.
Digital might persuade me to read fiction again. But only if the prices are sane and they lay off the DRM.
I've been seeing rather too much of this stupid revision of American history. Where are you people getting this crap? Why are you listening to it so uncritically? If you'd think about it a little, you should see that it is nonsense.
Consider these basic facts: All the free states were on one side, and most of the slave states were on the other side. The free states won the war, and afterwards, there was no more slavery in the US. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed immediately after the war, and formally abolished slavery.
What all this is really saying is that our systems aren't working. If it's any good at all, less than $10K for a book is horrible. I think everyone agrees valuable works are, or ought to be, worth more than that. But you can't get more, whether you self publish and ask for donations, experiment with print on demand, or try to interest a traditional publisher. The fact that authors do them for the reputation and similar not so tangible benefits is telling. Also telling is that hundreds of thousands of people were at least interested enough to download a copy. Our systems are not compensating the authors with what these works are really worth.
There are very, very few technical books I have found worth owning. And quite a few that ended up wasting space on my shelf. Any more, on the rare occasions I set foot in a physical bookstore, I don't even look at that section. Don't spend much time looking online either. Too much crap to wade through. You know a book is terrible when you flip to a random page, and see blatant errors that could have been uncovered with about 10 seconds of testing. I'd love to have good reference manuals, but they simply don't exist. Maybe if authors could earn a bit more from their efforts, we'd have them. And we wouldn't have hastily thrown together untested garbage filling the pages. When the source code is the best reference, that's bad. Doxygen, bleh. We don't yet have programming languages that are so awesome that nothing more needs to be said.
Scarceness is the applicable distinction. Obviously, physical goods are scarce. Information is not scarce. But, attribution IS scarce. Someone offering a copy of a Beatles song is one thing, someone who is not the Beatles claiming to be the author of that song is quite another.
Suppose we set up new systems to compensate authors for their works, in which copying, freely copying, is good. The more your work is copied, the more you receive from various funds. Such systems would break down if others could, fraudulently and without permission, claim authorship of something they did not create, and get away with it.
This is not just copyright infringement. This is plagiarism and misappropriation. Criminals are claiming other's work as their own. And they are capitalizing on this fraudulent claim to take money that should go to the real authors. This is quite different from random persons copying songs. This is actual theft.
Be careful with the terminology. Big Media likes the conflation of plagiarism and counterfeiting with mere copying. They want to be able to hit someone who snagged a copy of some tune off a P2P service with the same punishment as these software thieves deserve.
You could find all this out for yourself easily enough. You could hardly have failed to hear about it, unless you've kept your head buried in sand for the past 25 years. That's why you're being accused of shilling. But fine, let's suppose you genuinely don't know. Why is MS evil? Here's a partial list.
OOXML
File format lock in
Forced upgrades
SCO
WGA
DRM
The Microsoft Tax
ActiveX
J
There aren't any significant standards that MS hasn't attempted to either take over or wreck. They add proprietary extensions not for altruistic reasons, but only to gain an unfair advantage over the competition, and ultimately to create a monopoly for themselves. OOXML is a fairly recent example of this. Was a patently obvious attempt to derail adoption of a standard file format for office software suites. When they tried this tactic with Java, Sun sued them, and they lost. That's where J comes from. Many websites quite deliberately work only with IE because of such efforts. ActiveX is double nastiness on that front. IE only websites generally achieve that dubious distinction by requiring ActiveX. And then, ActiveX is an appalling security hole that makes it very easy to infect the OS with all sorts of viruses. You should have at least heard about the big antitrust case MS went through. The government wasn't making baseless accusations, you know. MS has sided with and adopted the MAFIAA's ridiculous and untenable views on intellectual property, as so loudly demonstrated with their whole WGA effort. Music executives can be forgiven for not getting it, but a software company ought to know better. MS managed to bury Ogg Vorbis in the US, and they did so because the format didn't have DRM built in. They would have done the same to mp3 if they could. As it is, they got in trouble in court for that. There was another lawsuit over the "Microsoft Tax", and the manner in which they forced retailers to impose that on all customers.
MS is the company that inspired the term "FUD". MS has consistently demonstrated anti-competitive behavior for years. The above list is only some of the most prominent examples. These are not isolated incidents, MS has always acted this way. Despite the legal troubles they've made for themselves, MS is still doing it today.
And I think we willfully blind ourselves to many of the collateral problems of nuclear power. It's like offshore oil drilling.
Can you be sure a nuclear plant will always be operated safely? What if a bunch of incompetent. thieving, corrupt cronies are put in charge?
Even if grossly criminal behavior can be kept at a safe distance, there's still unwarranted optimism, group think, and other human failings that can lead to disaster. They said the Titanic was unsinkable. When it sank, it was seen that we engaged in a number of foolish actions. The unsinkability was revealed as a bunch of hype and marketing propaganda. But the ship's operators were mesmerized, befuddled, and pressured, and so they took a number of risks and skimped on tests they wouldn't have otherwise. Twice have Space Shuttles failed, and we are at last retiring them. Yet risky though the shuttles are, the consequences are insignificant next to a nuclear disaster. Can we be sure we won't ever make such mistakes with nuclear power? That we won't be fooled by vested interests deliberately misleading us with biased and cooked evaluations and "scientific" results and reports, PR campaigns, and the like?
What if terrorists bomb it? Or steal some radioactive waste, in order to make a dirty bomb?
Which brings up the waste storage problem. How severe is that?
Or what if a nation such as Iran uses them to create weapons grade material? How do you like North Korea continually blackmailing us with nukes? What could we see in the future? Threats to dump nuclear waste in the ocean, unless we buy them off?
Perhaps nuclear power is better than coal. But is that really a good reason to use it? There are so many other things that are better than coal. I very much disagree with the assertion that alternative energy is impractical.
And of course, as we are seeing right now in Japan, natural disasters can still overcome safety measures. You can argue that the containment structures are holding, that the radioactive releases are minor, but the fact is, they happened! And this isn't over with yet. The plant could still experience catastrophic failure.
That was my conclusion also. Add to that the high chance your investment will become obsolete, and photovoltaics are really not worth doing. I'd like the payback to be no more than 10 years.
Solar thermal, that is, heating water, is a better bet. No $10000 inverter and battery system needed to collect all those DC outputs and convert them to 120V AC or whatever standard you're on. Efficiency is much higher too. Last I heard, commercially available photovoltaics are still around only 15% to 20%, while thermal can conceivably reach 100%. At the least, I'm waiting for those 40% efficiencies labs are reporting on experimental photovoltaics. And better batteries, and cheaper inverters.
Had quite a few storm window salespeople try to persuade me to upgrade the cruddy original windows on our 70's house. I worked out the math for a 10 year return, and concluded the absolute most I could justify was $4000, and that was pushing it, being very generous with the estimates on energy savings and supposed increase in the value of the home. If it could be done for $2000, it was definitely worth doing. But they couldn't get under $6000. That we already have a fairly efficient A/C (12 SEER, not quite up to the current mandated minimum of 13 SEER) doesn't help their case.
I did convert a 40 watt fluorescent fixture to the newer slimmer 32 watt standard. That wasn't worth doing either, but it didn't cost much, and I was curious. 32 watts works great.
Does your HOA allow clotheslines? I use a rack indoors. Ditching the clothes dryer is huge, and most people have no idea. But when I mention it, I always see the knee jerk refusal to change kick in. People love the damn things.
I'm thinking nothing less than a constitutional amendment is needed to stop this kind of bull, and to radically reform intellectual property law which, since it is in the US Constitution, can only be changed by constitutional amendment. The original argument against the Bill of Rights was that it was unnecessary, that everything granted in there was already implicitly granted in the Constitution. Over the years, we've seen how fools twist and outright invent interpretations and expansions for their own ends, and how vital the explicit language of the Bill of Rights has been in stopping much of that. It is almost inconceivable that the venerable idea of the public library could be threatened, yet this is not impossible in the current climate.
We have Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion, and Assembly. We need a Freedom of Knowledge Amendment.
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the point of them being a corporation is to make money.
NO! Quit repeating that. The point is to create wealth, add value to society. It is not just to "make money". Money is only a proxy, an imperfect measure of value. Why imperfect? Because there are all kinds of destructive actions that make one small group or individual richer, or only seemingly richer, at the expense of everyone else. The simplest way is outright theft. Lying is another popular one. Bribery is yet another ancient practice. Obtaining a monopoly and gouging the public is the holy grail of profit, and far too many corporations strive for that. Recently we've seen another way: Too Big to Fail. Corporations, to their shame, do all that and more, all the time. Worse, they think that's just life. It need not be! We try to maintain some civility, outlaw destructive actions, and police our corporate citizens, but it isn't easy. There will always be some crime, of course. But we must keep the fraud and deceit in check, or the system will collapse. Damn near happened in 2008, but we were able to bail everyone out. We didn't do it for their sakes, but for our own. Next time, we might not be able to, and then what? I'm not impressed with their behavior. We suffer their existence because they do add value. If ever they fail us, make such a mess that the damage they cause exceeds all possible future value, and we know of it, we can sink them. They know that. But we are very forgiving, maybe too forgiving, and they know that too. For instance, I doubt that BP could survive another disaster like the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Perhaps BP should have been liquidated, and their management thrown in jail.
I really don't see what your problem with Geohot is. Even if he's an attention whore, as you allege, so what? Blaming him for Sony's actions is ridiculous. He didn't "make" them do anything. He has every right to do anything he wants with his property, EULAs be damned. And to exercise his right to free speech. All he did was point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes. Their DRM is a joke and a fraud, just like the Emperor's clothes.
The pro nuclear power crowd was very vocal last month. I was amazed at the number of posts and variety of poor arguments they trotted out: Coal is radioactive (it's not), and/or pollutes worse than nuclear power (as if the only options are nuclear or coal), the media is exaggerating (perhaps, but Fukushima doesn't need exaggerating), the containment did not fail (not immediately, but it sure has now), nuclear power plants can be safe (yet this one wasn't safe enough), and newer designs could have handled even this disaster and it's the fault of the anti-nuclear zealots we aren't using them. And it's the fault of the natural disaster for being too big. Perhaps most frightening of all was the incredibly weak rationale that this was no Chernobyl, as if that set a tough standard to exceed!
Now they're a bit quieter. Maybe there's some hope after all. Keeps getting harder to excuse this nuclear mess. Now we're hearing 30 years and 1 trillion yen to clean up? And it still isn't over?! How much worse is this going to get?
A lot of the trouble comes down to the terms. Many people aren't clear on the definitions of the words "theory", "faith", "fact", "truth", "science", and most especially "proof". "Believe" is another troublesome word. Anymore, I cringe whenever I see phrasing similar to "researchers believe that...", as if what they do really is faith based. There are many people who are too quick to read into the use of "believe" an admittance that it's all based on faith, that science is just another religion. They're in a terrible hurry to move past this point that they feel doesn't need more thought, and get on to the case that their religion has all the answers and the best answers, and certainly better answers than that fake religion known as science! When someone asks if I "believe" in Global Warming or Climate Change, I find they're trying to trick me. If I answer the seemingly straightforward question, they pounce. So the first thing I tell them is that "believe" is not the correct term.
For "proof", when someone asserts that there is no proof that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, or that species can change through Evolution, or other such denial nonsense, I often find that their standards of proof are so high that nothing can be proven, and I tell them this. Just the other day some missionaries came to the door, and I hit them with the question of how old the Earth is. Waste of time I suppose, but what the heck. Their answers-- non answers, more like-- were a) That's not important (what the Bible says is what's important), and b) No one knows, and we can't know, and c) Well, how old did I think the Earth was? When I answered that last with 4.5 billion years, they asserted that I actually didn't know! What did they mean I don't know?? I just told them! I didn't get to follow up on that and find out whether they thought I was making it all up or repeating what others had made up, or that because we haven't narrowed it down to plus or minus 1 year means we don't know, or what.
They refuse to understand what constitutes proof. And it's awfully convenient. Anything they don't want to believe can't be proven. But by their lights, they can't prove that they're over the age of 5 minutes, as an Omnipotent Being could have created everything 5 minutes ago, complete with humans who have memories from years ago and "believe" that their memories are largely accurate, but which are in fact all wrong. They can't even be sure that water is wet, or the sky is blue. How can anyone know that their eyes are working correctly, and work like everyone else's eyes, or that the sky is the same to everyone, or that there isn't a color filter hanging over their heads, or for that matter, even define what "blue" and "sky" is? They've heard of Occam's Razor, but they don't grasp it. "It's turtles all the way down!" Sigh.
You want polls? Here's a bunch: the Worst Company in America tournament. Amazon isn't in it.
I've had decent service from Amazon. They could be the most beloved of all the large companies. Which maybe is saying they're the nicest turd in the latrine. That a Worst Company contest exists is merely emphasizing what we all know, which is that large corporations have far too much power. As the saying goes, power corrupts. We do have problems getting these 900 pound gorillas to behave responsibly, and not lobby for unfairly favorable treatment and sweet rent seeking or monopolistic arrangements, or just plain stupid laws, such as ACTA. They get their way on such matters far too often.
Guess your uncle doesn't know about ACM's Transactions on Mathematical Software. Hundreds of routines for all sorts of math. And it's mostly FORTRAN. Here's one for Delaunay Triangulation. Made in '96. Sadly, it's behind a pay wall.
Hacking up your own routine is all very well, and knowing how to do it is important. But actually doing it is a waste of time, unless you need the practice, or it's something real simple. Yes, some people will go hunting for a library routine to find the maximum of two values, or something else really basic. Or they'll write some serious overkill without realizing it, use a gigantic routine for something short and easy. A common one is to use a string append function complete with automatic dynamic allocation and reallocation of more memory, to build a string one character at a time. Talk about slow. But for the rest... You know, the old expression "reinventing the wheel". There's a huge difference in quality, too. Your hack job will have bugs both subtle and gross, and will be a minimal effort with minimal or no testing that barely does the job. The library code will have fewer bugs, and probably be able to handle more and weirder data, be more stable (numerical stability), and faster. The whole focus of most software engineering paradigms is "reuse"!
Some of the shortest path algorithms I've seen in commercial software is downright shameful. They aren't hard algorithms. Maybe a game designer can be excused for a crap pathing algorithm, but how about a map application? No excuse for that.
This line of reasoning is what most recent US Supreme Court nominees have used in their hearings. They say their job is to determine the meaning of the law impartially, according to precedent, and the wording of statutes. Congress makes the law, they do not. They do not "legislate from the bench", that is, make things up or creatively interpret wording in predictably biased ways. Of course this impartiality is an idealistic view.
I would be more concerned with the quality of her reasoning and thinking than her career. But I fear that her choice of employer is indicative of poor judgement and poor critical thinking skills. Possibly she may rise above her chosen indoctrination, having always secretly doubted her employer's sophistries and rationalizations, and recognized their real motives, seeing through them. Or she may suffer a revelation and a change of heart. But I doubt it. Much more likely she is of one mind with the music industry's view. So she will sally forth to tilt against windmills on a new battleground.
Legal professionals are annoyed that geeks believe they by and large do not understand the implications of technology. But until they demonstrate better understanding, by never again attempting such obviously bad legislation as ACTA, COICA, DMCA, and others, we are correct to view the legal profession with skepticism on this matter. Until the day comes that it is unthinkable for a judge to say we "created a monster", over mere P2P software, they should be doubted. That's the sort of language that should be saved for nuclear weapons. If they do sort of understand, they are entirely too reluctant to admit it. Perhaps they fear losing their livelihood, have some unworthy ulterior motive for their actions. The IP lawyers and proponents are self interested, greedy, manipulative fools. They're only too willing to take music industry money in exchange for bad service, trying to bend nature with laws, trying to do what cannot be done. Better to have someone with competence but no legal experience, than one who is either an idiot or a cheat.
We hear this all the time. Successful business leaders are smart, extremely hard working, driven, greedy sociopaths. These MS guys of course are the most extreme of them all. Seems most tech business is this way.
There's a species of small marsupial in which the males compete so fiercely, even suicidally, for mates that the ones who survive the fights all die anyway after their first mating season. They're burned up from the constant, intense, no holds barred fighting, and the toll of their raging hormones. They plunder their own bodies for the energy and strength to win. Take them out of this environment and away from the fighting, and they can last as long as 5 years, same as the females.
Just what has Gates, Allen, Ballmer and company proven with all this ruthlessness, this extreme Protestant Work Ethic? That the ultimate measure of success is money? That education is not everywhere useful? Sad. What have they accomplished? Brought cheap computing to the world, which is something. But not availed themselves of it terribly well. Strangely for a tech company, MS has never been known as particularly innovative. They've been better than most at choosing among and running with ideas, not coming up with them. Gates is a Rockefeller sort, not an Einstein. They also try to grab, claim and lock down things. Many of their actions are done without much regard for ethics, as that whole OOXML fiasco showed. They really seem not to get it about DRM, and have aligned their views with, of all organizations, the RIAA's! Stupid. Perhaps if they respected education and philosophy more, they would act in more enlightened ways. Note that the early days of MS, as Allen describes it, is death marches and hell bent hacking, not research and definitely not study except where it had immediate practical application. It is Google that has been markedly more innovative.
I'll accept the exclusion of Chernobyl, with a proviso. Is anyone anywhere insane enough to run a nuclear power plant that doesn't have a containment vessel? If no such plants are operating today, nor will ever again be operated, then excluding Chernobyl is acceptable. The difference between Chernobyl and your exterior nitroglycerin fuel tank on a car, is that the latter is not going to cause damage on the same scale.
The human element is what worries me the most. Honest mistakes are not the problem. Except for the issue of storing fuel in a nearby pool while performing maintenance, I am mostly satisfied we have carefully considered the dangers, and have designed robustly enough to avert them. No, it is the potential for lying and cheating that worries me. After a disaster is a hell of a time to find out about "deficiencies" in inspections or maintenance, or changes in the plans during construction, or that the actual procedures being followed varied dangerously from the recommended. Just as we are now hearing all about the deficiencies in the design used at Fukushima. Very few endeavors are less tolerant and consequences more devastating than operating a nuclear power plant. Deep Horizon was very bad, but at least it wasn't radioactive. Nevertheless, a ban on offshore oil drilling is always in the cards. If offshore oil drilling is so bad that maybe we shouldn't do it, then surely nuclear power qualifies. We cannot have shoddy, sloppy, careless, or reckless operation, not with something as dangerous as radioactive material. And I am not satisfied that we can keep out the sort of people who would gamble the future for a few more pennies today, or for not even that reason, but just out of sheer laziness or ineptitude.
If we cannot discipline ourselves well enough to handle nuclear power safely, then we shouldn't use it at all.
You scare me.
You threw in lots of disclaimers, like this whopper: "outside the Soviet Union". Sure, if we exclude every accident that ever happened in the largest nation in the world, which includes Chernobyl, nuclear power looks much safer. Anything would look much safer if you did that! And what's this about "oldest containment designs" holding up better than expected? Uh, why were we still using those designs? We have a frightening proclivity for continuing to run plants well after they should have been decommissioned, as you indicate with this nice little phrase: "originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended". Why? Nuclear plants don't age well.
the original designs were impressive
Obviously, they weren't impressive enough. Nor were the operators paranoid enough.
Wind and solar aren't ready? We need massive improvements in energy storage to make them usable? We're using wind and solar right now! What's needed is transmission more than storage. You talk as if these are problems are worse than the problems with nuclear, coal, and gas. You mention peaking as if that's a problem with this kind of power. To the contrary, they are excellent solutions. Solar is particularly good for peaking.
Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power
You can't compare the dangers of nuclear power on such a simplistic basis. I'm sure people moved right back in after the dam burst. The land was not contaminated in such a way as to be unsafe for centuries. Any comparison that does not account for that is not a good comparison.
Yes, fracking has been done in a highly irresponsible manner. The idiots have used toxic waste as their "fracking fluid", a term expressly designed to cover that up. Is that a reason to use more nuclear power? Not hardly! If they'd do that with fracking, how do you suppose they would operate a nuclear power plant? An inspection found that many of these backup diesel generators were not in working order, and that records concerning them had been falsified. That's just one example of the routine corner cutting that goes on even in nuclear power plants. Some people are far too quick to do a 180 on the paranoia and take crazy risks. The only incentive needed to bring out such behavior is money.
The Republicans have yet to figure out how to reach the younger demographic of net users
That's a symptom of the main problem, which is this distressing anti intellectual, anti science attitude that the Republican Party has embraced.
They won't inquire into the facts of matters. They won't listen to anyone who has, preferring instead to make accusations of bias, ulterior motives, corruption, and lack of patriotism when they can't simply ignore the pesky researchers. They shape policy in deliberate ignorance. They act as if science is a big hoax, a diabolically clever machine for manufacturing rationales and manipulating the public. They set up their own institutes to manufacture rationales they like, and think that is science, that they're just doing the same thing that the other guys do. The manipulators among them think Big Tobacco's "Doubt is our product" campaign against the dangers of smoking is a great model to follow, and the idiots are only too happy to embrace the conclusions uncritically. Scary.
In case you think that does not matter, that it all works out, consider the biggest blunder in recent times. I refer to the accusation that Iraq had WMDs. That was the excuse for the Iraq War, and it turned out to be wrong. The costs are more than money, which is itself extremely large, estimated to be at a minimum a staggering $3 trillion. The West lost a lot of credibility, strained a lot of friendships. All that isn't enough to bring us down, nowhere close, but we can't keep making mistakes like that. The Republicans are supposed to be the party of fiscal prudence, but when they were in power, they couldn't abandon fiscal sanity fast enough. This sudden new concern the Republicans have for the budget, after that financial disaster (note that it's far more than the bailout), looks like empty posturing, deserving of the most cynical view possible. Do the Republicans have any principles left, or have they sunk to the party of Greed and Ignorance?
The Democrats, despite their many faults (such as supporting ACTA), have seldom interfered with scientists.
What do you call a percentage? 18.4 cents per gallon is a fixed amount per gallon. Doesn't matter if a gallon of gas costs $1 or $10, the tax is 18.4 cents either way. If it was a percentage such as 10%, the tax would be $0.10 or $1 respectively. Sales tax is a percentage. Income tax is a percentage-- several percentages, really. The gas tax is not a percentage. And it should be.
What to practice is a moving target. A fast moving target. But the underlying principles will serve you well no matter what paradigms, methodology, language, environment, tools, or libraries you use.
As an example, it's still useful to know how to do basic arithmetic by hand, not because you need to know that specifically, but because you ought to know a few examples to help you understand the concept of an algorithm. This is repeated on a higher level because these days, application developers seldom implement algorithms themselves, instead they use implementations others have written and bundled into libraries. But it is still useful to understand the notions, and some stock techniques used in algorithms, things like "divide and conquer".
Don't worry too much about the more esoteric lingo of programming paradigms, things like "currying", "message passing", or "lazy evaluation". Which of those are useful, and even more, which of those are expressed as well as possible, is far from settled. We have not come up with anything that everyone agrees is a universal improvement in all circumstances, though Structured Programming is close.
I've been thinking about what it means to know a programming language. For example, I know Java, but I have not used it in a long time, and have never used any of the newer libraries. Does that mean I actually don't know Java? Some would say that I have not maintained my skills. Then there are all sorts of other things to know about. Such as, source control. Ever used or heard of that? Another is knowing that UNIX systems put libraries in several standard locations, with /usr/lib/ being the most common. Do you know how to install a missing library? Then there's the build process, with such things as the "make" utility, and autoconf. Precious little agreement there also-- Java has its own tool analogous to "make", called Ant. That's the sort of thing the average textbook does not cover. It's messy, and you just have to play around to learn about some of these things.
One goal of OOP was to increase modularity. It didn't entirely succeed, and can make things worse. Classes themselves are fine. It's the relationships between classes that lead to trouble. The classic OOP thinking is that, when there is a relationship between 2 classes, these are how they can be related: "has a", "is a", and "knows a", which is composition, inheritance, and what amounts to a catch all for neither of the others. Particularly, I find inheritance dangerous.
Inheritance needlessly forces a hierarchy on a set of classes. Great, if a hierarchy is a good representation, but often it is not. As one example of why inheritance is trouble, there's been an ongoing argument about multiple inheritance. Is multiple inheritance necessary? Is it a kludge? Multiple inheritance is the symbolic link of OOP. It's a nasty hack to patch up the shortcomings of trying to impose a hierarchy, same as links are in file systems. "is a" is not an accurate representation of the actual relationship, inheritance maybe ought to be described with "exemplifies a" or "typifies a", something that shows this is not a relationship between peers.
OOP also seemed an attempt to make bad programmers better, by imposing discipline, as Structured Programming did. OOP failed miserably there, providing entirely new ways for a bad designer to bog down in a mess.
Finally, many so called OOP languages, such as C++, do a terrible job of realizing OOP. Programmers shouldn't have to mess with templates at all. The language ought to handle that. Operator overloading is another controversial piece of OOP.
OOP was supposed to be modular, sure. But in some ways it made modularity harder to achieve. Relationships between "modules" aren't as simple as they could be. Talk of it being anti-modular is not at all ridiculous.
And this is what makes politics so difficult. When no one knows anything. Your speculation is typical of the sort of thinking that infests our politics. Sorry, but the reasons you're thinking about are trivial next to the main causes of road damage. Trucking companies would be very happy to have you inadvertently defend them.
The 2 things that cause the bulk of the damage to our roads are water and heavy vehicles. 1 heavy truck can do as much damage as 10000 cars. It matters very little whether the cars are SUVs or subcompacts. We've been working on making the roads better able to handle 80000 pound trucks, but there are still many old roads that weren't designed for that kind of use. And we have all these weigh stations and inspections, because truckers will cheat on weight limits.
You ask for a paper? Here's one.
As for the idea that poor people get stuck with less efficient cars, this is not really the case. The cheapest cars are often the most efficient. Hybrids have changed that because they are very costly, but this is a recent, and still small segment. A much bigger expense for poor people is being forced to live further from work to get affordable housing. Fix that, and you will do far more for the poor than any fooling around with the gas tax could.
This whole proposal sounds like pure politicking, principally backed by Big Oil. What of the huge costs in monitoring everyone so that a mileage based tax could be assessed? The thing I dislike most about toll roads, even more than the dodgy privatization schemes, is the expense of collecting the tolls. It's very expensive to have dozens of toll booths manned 24/7. Automated collection is cheaper, but still far more expensive than the gas tax.
The most shameful thing about the US gas tax is that it is a fixed amount! Been 18.4 or 18.3 cents per gallon since 1993, and inflation has not been 0% all that time. It should be a percentage, like income tax.
Seriously, the light pollution around DFW is so bad I can't see much more than Orion and the Big Dipper. During last night's super moon, the faintest star of the Big Dipper was hard to see. Couldn't make out the Little Dipper at all.
They ditched MNG because it was too big. And I can understand that. Last time I looked, the code was very redundant. Made a good case for an old programming technique known as multiple entry points. And if that redundancy wasn't bad enough, there was considerable duplicated functionality between the MPG and PNG libraries. They thought about dumping libpng and using MNG on PNG images.
We're still using animated GIFs. Even in the browser itself, the throbber was one. Will we ever be able to retire those? At the least move that functionality to an add on?
I used to read a lot of fiction. I started when a paperback was $1.95. Got to know the SF/Fantasy section fairly well, and could quickly scan to see what was new. and had an idea what was coming, Then they began raising prices in $0.50 increments every 6 to 12 months. When the average paperback exceeded $5, I quit. And my familiarity faded. Now the selections available are almost all strange to me.
Digital might persuade me to read fiction again. But only if the prices are sane and they lay off the DRM.
I've been seeing rather too much of this stupid revision of American history. Where are you people getting this crap? Why are you listening to it so uncritically? If you'd think about it a little, you should see that it is nonsense.
Consider these basic facts: All the free states were on one side, and most of the slave states were on the other side. The free states won the war, and afterwards, there was no more slavery in the US. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed immediately after the war, and formally abolished slavery.
Yeah, the Civil War was all about slavery.
What all this is really saying is that our systems aren't working. If it's any good at all, less than $10K for a book is horrible. I think everyone agrees valuable works are, or ought to be, worth more than that. But you can't get more, whether you self publish and ask for donations, experiment with print on demand, or try to interest a traditional publisher. The fact that authors do them for the reputation and similar not so tangible benefits is telling. Also telling is that hundreds of thousands of people were at least interested enough to download a copy. Our systems are not compensating the authors with what these works are really worth.
There are very, very few technical books I have found worth owning. And quite a few that ended up wasting space on my shelf. Any more, on the rare occasions I set foot in a physical bookstore, I don't even look at that section. Don't spend much time looking online either. Too much crap to wade through. You know a book is terrible when you flip to a random page, and see blatant errors that could have been uncovered with about 10 seconds of testing. I'd love to have good reference manuals, but they simply don't exist. Maybe if authors could earn a bit more from their efforts, we'd have them. And we wouldn't have hastily thrown together untested garbage filling the pages. When the source code is the best reference, that's bad. Doxygen, bleh. We don't yet have programming languages that are so awesome that nothing more needs to be said.
ps. Sorry, haven't heard of you or your book.
Scarceness is the applicable distinction. Obviously, physical goods are scarce. Information is not scarce. But, attribution IS scarce. Someone offering a copy of a Beatles song is one thing, someone who is not the Beatles claiming to be the author of that song is quite another.
Suppose we set up new systems to compensate authors for their works, in which copying, freely copying, is good. The more your work is copied, the more you receive from various funds. Such systems would break down if others could, fraudulently and without permission, claim authorship of something they did not create, and get away with it.
This is not just copyright infringement. This is plagiarism and misappropriation. Criminals are claiming other's work as their own. And they are capitalizing on this fraudulent claim to take money that should go to the real authors. This is quite different from random persons copying songs. This is actual theft.
Be careful with the terminology. Big Media likes the conflation of plagiarism and counterfeiting with mere copying. They want to be able to hit someone who snagged a copy of some tune off a P2P service with the same punishment as these software thieves deserve.
You could find all this out for yourself easily enough. You could hardly have failed to hear about it, unless you've kept your head buried in sand for the past 25 years. That's why you're being accused of shilling. But fine, let's suppose you genuinely don't know. Why is MS evil? Here's a partial list.
There aren't any significant standards that MS hasn't attempted to either take over or wreck. They add proprietary extensions not for altruistic reasons, but only to gain an unfair advantage over the competition, and ultimately to create a monopoly for themselves. OOXML is a fairly recent example of this. Was a patently obvious attempt to derail adoption of a standard file format for office software suites. When they tried this tactic with Java, Sun sued them, and they lost. That's where J comes from. Many websites quite deliberately work only with IE because of such efforts. ActiveX is double nastiness on that front. IE only websites generally achieve that dubious distinction by requiring ActiveX. And then, ActiveX is an appalling security hole that makes it very easy to infect the OS with all sorts of viruses. You should have at least heard about the big antitrust case MS went through. The government wasn't making baseless accusations, you know. MS has sided with and adopted the MAFIAA's ridiculous and untenable views on intellectual property, as so loudly demonstrated with their whole WGA effort. Music executives can be forgiven for not getting it, but a software company ought to know better. MS managed to bury Ogg Vorbis in the US, and they did so because the format didn't have DRM built in. They would have done the same to mp3 if they could. As it is, they got in trouble in court for that. There was another lawsuit over the "Microsoft Tax", and the manner in which they forced retailers to impose that on all customers.
MS is the company that inspired the term "FUD". MS has consistently demonstrated anti-competitive behavior for years. The above list is only some of the most prominent examples. These are not isolated incidents, MS has always acted this way. Despite the legal troubles they've made for themselves, MS is still doing it today.
And I think we willfully blind ourselves to many of the collateral problems of nuclear power. It's like offshore oil drilling.
Can you be sure a nuclear plant will always be operated safely? What if a bunch of incompetent. thieving, corrupt cronies are put in charge?
Even if grossly criminal behavior can be kept at a safe distance, there's still unwarranted optimism, group think, and other human failings that can lead to disaster. They said the Titanic was unsinkable. When it sank, it was seen that we engaged in a number of foolish actions. The unsinkability was revealed as a bunch of hype and marketing propaganda. But the ship's operators were mesmerized, befuddled, and pressured, and so they took a number of risks and skimped on tests they wouldn't have otherwise. Twice have Space Shuttles failed, and we are at last retiring them. Yet risky though the shuttles are, the consequences are insignificant next to a nuclear disaster. Can we be sure we won't ever make such mistakes with nuclear power? That we won't be fooled by vested interests deliberately misleading us with biased and cooked evaluations and "scientific" results and reports, PR campaigns, and the like?
What if terrorists bomb it? Or steal some radioactive waste, in order to make a dirty bomb?
Which brings up the waste storage problem. How severe is that?
Or what if a nation such as Iran uses them to create weapons grade material? How do you like North Korea continually blackmailing us with nukes? What could we see in the future? Threats to dump nuclear waste in the ocean, unless we buy them off?
Perhaps nuclear power is better than coal. But is that really a good reason to use it? There are so many other things that are better than coal. I very much disagree with the assertion that alternative energy is impractical.
And of course, as we are seeing right now in Japan, natural disasters can still overcome safety measures. You can argue that the containment structures are holding, that the radioactive releases are minor, but the fact is, they happened! And this isn't over with yet. The plant could still experience catastrophic failure.
That was my conclusion also. Add to that the high chance your investment will become obsolete, and photovoltaics are really not worth doing. I'd like the payback to be no more than 10 years.
Solar thermal, that is, heating water, is a better bet. No $10000 inverter and battery system needed to collect all those DC outputs and convert them to 120V AC or whatever standard you're on. Efficiency is much higher too. Last I heard, commercially available photovoltaics are still around only 15% to 20%, while thermal can conceivably reach 100%. At the least, I'm waiting for those 40% efficiencies labs are reporting on experimental photovoltaics. And better batteries, and cheaper inverters.
Had quite a few storm window salespeople try to persuade me to upgrade the cruddy original windows on our 70's house. I worked out the math for a 10 year return, and concluded the absolute most I could justify was $4000, and that was pushing it, being very generous with the estimates on energy savings and supposed increase in the value of the home. If it could be done for $2000, it was definitely worth doing. But they couldn't get under $6000. That we already have a fairly efficient A/C (12 SEER, not quite up to the current mandated minimum of 13 SEER) doesn't help their case.
I did convert a 40 watt fluorescent fixture to the newer slimmer 32 watt standard. That wasn't worth doing either, but it didn't cost much, and I was curious. 32 watts works great.
Does your HOA allow clotheslines? I use a rack indoors. Ditching the clothes dryer is huge, and most people have no idea. But when I mention it, I always see the knee jerk refusal to change kick in. People love the damn things.
I'm thinking nothing less than a constitutional amendment is needed to stop this kind of bull, and to radically reform intellectual property law which, since it is in the US Constitution, can only be changed by constitutional amendment. The original argument against the Bill of Rights was that it was unnecessary, that everything granted in there was already implicitly granted in the Constitution. Over the years, we've seen how fools twist and outright invent interpretations and expansions for their own ends, and how vital the explicit language of the Bill of Rights has been in stopping much of that. It is almost inconceivable that the venerable idea of the public library could be threatened, yet this is not impossible in the current climate.
We have Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion, and Assembly. We need a Freedom of Knowledge Amendment.