So techniques for control have got more sophisticated over the centuries. Big deal. It's still control without political representation. i.e. it is undemocratic.
Scarily, the US government and US culture's most effective tool for projection of influence and hegemony these days is probably its corporate-cabal mainstream media. Did you notice how they unleashed project brainwash on their own population and the rest of the world's population in unison in the lead-up to the (second) Iraq war? It was enough to influence gullible puppy puppets like Tony Blair into committing his nation's forces to the biggest windmill-tilting exercise since the crusades.
Could you just clarify for me what the military threat is to Europe that would make it need "$500-1000bn of its annual budget on defense, creates a nuclear arsenal, and greatly increases its troop strength."
Last I heard, the iron curtain was pulled back (and the wall fell) around 1989, and the countries on the other side of it are now just democracies, or crimino-capitalist-libertarian-mafia-dictatorship states (pretty much the same kind of state the US tends to create in Latin America so it should be comfortable with them.) No red menace there. As for the occasional leftover nuke in private hands. Send in Jack Bauer or 007 if you must. Anyway. Curious on your perspective on the imminent threat menacing Europe.
"For one, the US has not added to its directly controlled territory since WW2 regardless of numerous opportunities to do so"
- Unless you count active covert ops and financial support for the overthrow/assassination of disagreeable governments throughout Latin America. That's pretty direct control of the territory if you ask me.
- Unless you count the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
- Unless you count the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
- Unless you count the economic blackmail (threats of trade restrictions) of countries around the world to force them to adopt equivalent laws to US laws on topics such as drug enforcement, copyright, rights of unfettered operation of US companies etc.
When evaluating the effect of passage type on reading rates, the narrative passages were read significantly faster than the news articles. in this experiment the 35 characters per line condition resulted in the highest comprehension score for the narrative passages. In the news article condition, the best comprehension score was at 75 cpl.
The United States is so clearly the new Roman Empire that it makes it almost cute that they keep denying it.
There is no clearer sign than this agreement that we are officially living in a PAX AMERICANA in the 21st century.
I guess we better hope that the guy with the somewhat forced smile is nice to us.
If the US wants to have jurisdiction over the populations of the world though, wouldn't it be only fair ("all men are equal...") to give citizens of the colonies (= world - China) a vote in the US presidential election?
"What if I don't give a crap about carbon footprints?"
Thinking-impaired and/or social-conscience impaired people like you are the whole reason why we can't just do this obviously necessary change through voluntary measures, but are going to have to go with tax shift measures and/or regulations.
Could you be any more of a stereotypical redneck ***hole? Seriously?
I didn't actually say that efficiency doesn't matter. Because obviously it impacts the amount of electrical generating capacity you have to build for a certain amount of transportation utility.
My main point was that assessing the environmental impact of an electrically-based technology based on today's way of generating the electricity is misleading and shortsighted, especially when we already have much of the technology we need to shift the electrical generation method. We just need to make the morally necessary investment in doing it.
For the record, my bet goes with a combination of new battery technologies and ultracapacitors in the short term, and some hydrogen fuel cell stuff in the longer term.
Science like anything else powerful, will be abused and distorted by some to gain advantage.
Knowing humans, this might very well happen more often than not.
However, that is not really a criticism of the pure abstract principles that define the scientific method and process. It's just another valid criticism of human being. (We are right dishonest greedy bastards a lot of the time.)
Scientific process (and its underlying use of techniques/technologies such as logic, probability theory, empirical observation, organized critique), is as good a way as we have of building reliable information.
The most powerful thing about the body of well-accepted scientific knowledge as a whole is not what it says, but the fact that most of the facts, theorems, and predictions hang together without logically contradicting each other, and that the sheer number of those facts, theorems and predictions which work keeps growing and growing, while maintaining overall logical consistency. That makes scientific knowledge very robust, and, justifiably, very hard to assail. Yes, there is a churn at the edges, and new paradigms, but they are all pretty well structured and well tested models of reality by the time they become well accepted science. Remember that Newton was not fundamentally wrong in his physics. He was just able to look at what later turned out to be an important special case of relativistic physics. And while a few details of Darwin's theories have had to be adjusted slightly in 150 years, the gist of it is still correct.
There is no other boat in the water that has the potential to systematically improve the veracity of our information about the world.
The significant fact about electric (or hydrogen fuel cell), or electrically compressed air vehicles is that electricity (and hence hydrogen via electrolysis, or compressed air tanks) can be generated in all manner of relatively or completely "green" ways, whereas fossil-fuel transportation is at least presently restricted to getting its fuel by digging up stored carbon from the Earth at unsustainable rates.
So electric vehicles (or hydrogen fuel cell, or even relatively inefficient compressed air) vehicles, are stepping stones on the path to a non-GHG producing future energy system.
So the "green-ness" or carbon footprint of these electrically based technologies should be measured with two separate baselines:
1. What would their carbon footprint be if all electricity was generated with carbon-neutral generation methods such as wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear.
2. What is the carbon footprint assuming the US continues to maintain arguably the most carbon-dirty electrical generating mix in the world.
Measured in this light, it can be seen that the complete issue is changing the electrical power source for the US, in parallel with adopting one or multiple forms of transportation technology that is electrically based. Either change without the other does not work. Both are necessary for effective improvement in emissions reduction of transportation.
I analyze the fundamental meta-problem we have here as follows:
Our powerful technology and organized global-scale economy is, apart from making us rich and comfortable temporarily, also causing global-scale, very-long-term problems. These problems are predictable IN GENERAL TERMS by identifying the most fundamental driver forces in simple models of the processes, but there are admittedly going to be many twists and turns in the match of reality to these simplistic models.
Examples of such problems: 1. Atmospheric chemistry change leads to more greenhouse warming of climate. Timeframe for problem: 100 to 200 years. Inertial lag of adjustments we make: 50 years give or take. 2. Bio-diversity reduction of animal and plant species and varieties, due to deforestation, overfishing, rapid climate change, other land-use changes, pollution. Probable loss of 50% or more species in short term. Time frame: 100 to 500 years. 3. Terrestrial soil biomass reduction (in forests, farmland etc) due to deforestation and conversion of biomass to other uses by people. Time frame for problem: 100 - 600 years. 6 generations of temperate forest are about 600 years, and harvesting all of those generations will significantly deplete the forest-supporting soil in those regions.
So we know or believe, in general and probabilistic terms, that our large-scale semi-organized economic processes are causing these problems. But because of the spatial and temporal scale of the problems, you are right, we are unable to plan solutions to the problems, or even to convince ourselves, collectively, that action is required.
In summary: We have the power to cause very large, very long-term problems these days. We do not have the metaphysics or cultural maturity to be able to judge or solve these problems in advance of the problems being way out of control.
I find it troubling and enlightening that a truthful post like the parent of this reply is modded down to troll.
I find it particularly scary that a post which is merely pointing out the obvious; that powerful interests deliberately manipulate the popular media and the stories they carry, would be considered merely provocative propaganda.
If people by and large are believing that the big stories of the day just come to them randomly, that is a very frightening situation, because it means that you don't have democracy. You have a mass of gullible, highly influenceable sheep, who can be heavily influenced as to how to vote, without even realizing they are being heavily influenced.
I know this partly from personal experience. I was quite a while back an environmental activist fighting deforestation in my region. We had planning meetings. We planned (non-violent but dramatic) protests with the purpose of capturing media attention. That worked. In conjunction with each protest, we fed carefully crafted one-page press releases to the local and national media, and often, we watched, satisfied, as our press releases, lightly edited, became the headline news of the next day on TV and newspapers.
And we weren't professionals at this. We weren't even very good at it. But it worked like a charm. Probably around 1/3 of the prominant news stories on any given day are fed to lazy media organizations by interest groups. Most of those groups, and the ones with the most funding by far, work for large corporate interests. This is not a troll for **** sake. This is just obvious basic present day reality. Please wake up. Look around.
The upcoming failure of the Copenhagen climate meetings is now well known and openly admitted by the world leaders.
In short, every part of the parent post is true and useful information. If that is a troll, I am truly frightened about our society.
Just a little analogous story from my city. 25 years ago, there was a "sustainable region" plan, created with tons of public input, and it said: DONT build new highways or widen them (because they encourage urban sprawl and pollution and GHGs), DO Build lots of transit and live-work mini city-centres at transit hubs.
So developer-led councils and right-wing state-level government went ahead building highways and outlying subdivisions for 25 years, ignoring the plan. So now we come to developing a new region plan aimed at 2040 or some such. And what do they say?
Well, we didn't follow the plan before, so we've got lots of people living all over the place in widespread suburbs, so transit will be too expensive, so we have to widen the f**ing highways, and build new wider bridges.
By analogy, those who know how to know, and know what sorts of things to pay attention to, knew about AGW in 1980, and told governments: Hey, you better plan to avoid this. If action had been taken then, it would have been inexpensive, relatively non-disruptive, and quite possibly effective. Now that we've ignored the warnings and rampaged ahead with a way more energy-intensive economy for 30 years, people are saying: Shit, it's too hard to fix this. We have to adapt.
In both cases, what can you say? F***ing pathetic! It may as well be bacteria in charge cause the brainy humans sure aren't thinking as they act.
Humans are the "system builder" species. That's our survival strategy, like beavers on a grand and generalized scale. And individually, we claim to have the ability to change things. To think. To plan. To change our future. But collectively, we have yet to demonstrate that we can think. Plan effectively. Change things intentionally at the scale that we are entropizing things unintentionally.
I see it exactly the other way around. Obama, bright lad that he is and understanding the implications of AGW and what needs to be done about it, is faced with the puzzle of how to sell the tough measures that need to be taken.
How do you sell a change in how we do energy to the red-state cowboys and wall street geckos?
SECURITY! That's the ticket! It's not altruistic wimpo pinko greenie hippy policy, it's red-blooded, self-interested ENERGY SECURITY policy.
Now that's some brilliant political framing for you.
Just might work too. American's are sick of the Iraq war, and this is being carefully positioned to look like a solution that will reduce the need for foreign adventures in the middle east.
Well it goes kind of like this: People say the scientists are in it (proving global warming) for the money, but they are scientists. They are PhDs. Well qualified. Most of them have tenure. These people can get a job whether they are studying global warming, or ocean currents, or dust storms on Mars. And the total amounts of grant money for research in this whole area is completely insignificant compared to the potential profit loss of business-as-usual industries and economic sectors. I don't have those numbers exactly, but it would surprise me if there was not from 1000 times more money to 1 million times more money at stake on the part of fossil fuel industries and cheap-fossil-fuel-reliant industries, than there is money at stake in the science community.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say I should see about a 1000-fold to 1 million fold greater inclination to lie about the situation on the part of those who think the status quo is just dandy.
These numbers, as you will point out, are made up for illustrative purposes, but I would be surprised if my off the top of my head ranges of financial risk ratios was off by an order of magnitude.
The mainstream of scientists in the field were convinced of the truth of global warming and the likelihood of anthropogenic global warming back around 1980. It is only in the last few years since Al Gore's movie that the mainstream media and some of the public have come over to this viewpoint. So you misrepresent the history of the politics of this issue. The financially driven denier camp has had the floor for most of the time that the debate has existed.
1. Sun heats Earth with radiation in many wavelengths. Lots of optical-band + ultraviolet. 2. Solar radiation interacts with matter on Earth and heats Earth. 3. Some of the heat re-radiates upwards away from Earth, but much of the radiation is now in the lower energy infrared band, since some energy has gone into heating Earth. 4. CO2, methane etc molecules in atmosphere reflect infrared radiation back down to Earth, heating Earth more. 5. Humans are pumping lots of carbon out of the ground, and burning forests that store carbon. This carbon is being released into atmosphere as CO2, methane etc. Increasing CO2, methane etc concentrations in atmosphere (concentration of these molecules in atmosphere is roughly doubled so far compared to recent thousands/10s of thousands of years.) 6. So there is now net heating of the Earth, due to this excess trapping of Infrared radiation by reflection.
Theory 2: 1. Oil companies and large corporate interests whose businesses rely on cheap fossil fuel energy are upset at the prospect of having to change their ways. They will lose profits. 2. "Fat and happy" western consumers are enjoying their easy lifestyles fueled by a fossil-fuel burn of 400 years worth of stored carbon per year. They don't want to have to walk or bus more, or eat local, even though it would prevent them getting diabetes or a heart attack. It's too much work. Let the oil do the work. 3. Both of these interests are screaming in anger and denial that their comfy lifestyles need serious adjustment. Both of them are in denial so they won't have to admit that they have been guilty of robbing future generations. Both of them are pleading ignorance of the consequences, when the only way they could be that ignorant is by keeping their eyes shut and yelling really loud.
in advance of the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference, there is clearly a campaign on to discredit evidence for global warming. Watch for a continuing stream of new news stories on the issue, questioning the science, in the next few weeks. I have already noticed two very blatant examples in the last few days.
One science that is more certain, I will admit, these days than the science of global climate is the science of swaying public opinion through careful PR and "news" management. It's scary good. You have to be on the lookout for it at all times. Anytime you find yourself agreeing with the most recent conventional wisdom, give yourself a slap, and start looking for who is feeding you that conventional wisdom and why. Hint. Follow the money.
Copenhagen is apparently going to be a total failure. The politicians are all gutless wimps. So this PR campaign is softening up the target of your mind to make it easier for you to accept that failure.
Worst: Originally erroneous or out of date therefore erroneous comments. Actively destructive to comprehension of the program, and once detected, causes all other comments in the program to be rejected as untrustworthy and worse than useless. "Comment Bug".
2nd Worst: No comments - indicates the developer either does not understand the purpose or method in their madness, or is lazy and sloppy. Either is very bad.
3rd worst: Redundant comments:/** Gets the Foo! */ Foo getFoo() See Java api documentation for prime examples.
I would much rather read a long rambling philosophical comment that was essentially correct and did add some information than to deal with any of the above slackerware.
A friend of mine was uncomfortable with using the pirated s/w at her company and so switched her computer and work products from (pirated) Office to OpenOffice, (pirated) MatLab to Octave, and VBA to python. She also brought the overall issue up with the CEO, suggesting that the company should pay for its payware, or switch to FOSS.
Needless to say, not long afterwards, she was terminated with some lame excuse but it's clear it was for not being a "team player".
The 95% of the technology startups in our town are laughingly underfunded (e.g. reverse mortgage on CEO's house and small contribution from Aunt Tilly's bakery), so they have no money for legit licenses. Unfortunately, the management at many are too stupid to understand that there are perfectly good FOSS alternatives for all of it.
Java failed on the desktop largely because Microsoft wouldn't let it operate there in any standard way. Microsoft was DAMN scared of it when it first came out. It prodded the whole.NET initiative. The last thing Microsoft wanted was a neutral development platform that actually worked on their platform.
When Java first came out, technical people thought it would be a good idea to just include a standard java environment with every OS, so that those Applets would actually work without requiring a massive JRE download before starting.
Of course, a better class-file and jar-file caching standard included in the java standards as part of every jre would also have helped, so that large applet code could be cached, but Microsoft would have sabotaged that as well.
By my reckoning, AI, Thin clients (now known as using the cloud or SAAS (Gmail etc) or other webapps on a laptop), CASE (What do you think Eclipse with GIT or Subversion is?), and ERP are all going strong.
I think that A. the hype is not usually generated by the majority of people working in the field, and B. how strong the hype is is kind of random compared to the progress that's actually going on. Perception != Reality.
Best to investigate deeper in each case, rather than believing either the hype or the anti-hype.
After indexing it for search and ad-serving purposes, it should then be encrypted on their disks. This would circumvent the judge's argument.
If this sort of encryption is not done, all people and businesses that use software as a service to for example write and store their intended-private documents are in legal jeopardy.
Any time you read "peer to peer software" in a RIAA statement or legal proposal, you should substitute "open information networks", because there is no essential difference between those concepts.
So what the RIAA is saying is: "the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on open information networks to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."
Slashdot Mirror
unless you have a PhD or M.Sc. in a relevant scientific field.
You are just making yourself look like an idiot.
You are free to argue about what should be done about it, as that is a values-based political judgement.
Keep the distinction straight, and we're all good.
So techniques for control have got more sophisticated over the centuries. Big deal. It's still control without political representation. i.e. it is undemocratic.
Scarily, the US government and US culture's most effective tool for projection of influence and hegemony these days is probably its corporate-cabal mainstream media. Did you notice how they unleashed project brainwash on their own population and the rest of the world's population in unison in the lead-up to the (second) Iraq war? It was enough to influence gullible puppy puppets like Tony Blair into committing his nation's forces to the biggest windmill-tilting exercise since the crusades.
Could you just clarify for me what the military threat is to Europe that would make it need "$500-1000bn of its annual budget on defense, creates a nuclear arsenal, and greatly increases its troop strength."
Last I heard, the iron curtain was pulled back (and the wall fell) around 1989, and the countries on the other side of it are now just democracies, or crimino-capitalist-libertarian-mafia-dictatorship states (pretty much the same kind of state the US tends to create in Latin America so it should be comfortable with them.) No red menace there. As for the occasional leftover nuke in private hands. Send in Jack Bauer or 007 if you must. Anyway. Curious on your perspective on the imminent threat menacing Europe.
"For one, the US has not added to its directly controlled territory since WW2 regardless of numerous opportunities to do so"
- Unless you count active covert ops and financial support for the overthrow/assassination of disagreeable governments throughout Latin America. That's pretty direct control of the territory if you ask me.
- Unless you count the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
- Unless you count the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
- Unless you count the economic blackmail (threats of trade restrictions) of countries around the world to force them to adopt equivalent laws to US laws on topics such as drug enforcement, copyright, rights of unfettered operation of US companies etc.
When evaluating the effect of passage type on reading rates, the narrative passages were read significantly faster than the news articles. in this experiment the 35 characters per line condition resulted in the highest comprehension score for the narrative passages. In the news article condition, the best comprehension score was at 75 cpl.
from: http://soar.wichita.edu/dspace/bitstream/10057/482/1/grasp0637.pdf
The United States is so clearly the new Roman Empire that it makes it
almost cute that they keep denying it.
There is no clearer sign than this agreement that we are
officially living in a PAX AMERICANA in the 21st century.
I guess we better hope that the guy with the somewhat forced
smile is nice to us.
If the US wants to have jurisdiction over the populations of the
world though, wouldn't it be only fair ("all men are equal...")
to give citizens of the colonies (= world - China) a vote in the
US presidential election?
"What if I don't give a crap about carbon footprints?"
Thinking-impaired and/or social-conscience impaired people like you are the whole reason why
we can't just do this obviously necessary change through voluntary measures, but are going to
have to go with tax shift measures and/or regulations.
Could you be any more of a stereotypical redneck ***hole? Seriously?
I didn't actually say that efficiency doesn't matter.
Because obviously it impacts the amount of electrical generating capacity you have to build
for a certain amount of transportation utility.
My main point was that assessing the environmental impact of an electrically-based technology
based on today's way of generating the electricity is misleading and shortsighted, especially when
we already have much of the technology we need to shift the electrical generation method. We just
need to make the morally necessary investment in doing it.
For the record, my bet goes with a combination of new battery technologies and ultracapacitors
in the short term, and some hydrogen fuel cell stuff in the longer term.
Science like anything else powerful, will be abused and distorted by some to gain advantage.
Knowing humans, this might very well happen more often than not.
However, that is not really a criticism of the pure abstract principles that define the
scientific method and process. It's just another valid criticism of human being.
(We are right dishonest greedy bastards a lot of the time.)
Scientific process (and its underlying use of techniques/technologies such as
logic, probability theory, empirical observation, organized critique), is as good a way
as we have of building reliable information.
The most powerful thing about the body of well-accepted scientific knowledge as a whole is
not what it says, but the fact that most of the facts, theorems, and predictions hang together without
logically contradicting each other, and that the sheer number of those facts, theorems and
predictions which work keeps growing and growing, while maintaining overall logical consistency.
That makes scientific knowledge very robust, and, justifiably, very hard to assail. Yes, there is
a churn at the edges, and new paradigms, but they are all pretty well structured and well tested
models of reality by the time they become well accepted science. Remember that Newton was not
fundamentally wrong in his physics. He was just able to look at what later turned out to be an important
special case of relativistic physics. And while a few details of Darwin's theories have had to be adjusted
slightly in 150 years, the gist of it is still correct.
There is no other boat in the water that has the potential to systematically
improve the veracity of our information about the world.
The significant fact about electric (or hydrogen fuel cell), or electrically compressed air vehicles
is that electricity (and hence hydrogen via electrolysis, or compressed air tanks) can be generated
in all manner of relatively or completely "green" ways, whereas fossil-fuel transportation is
at least presently restricted to getting its fuel by digging up stored carbon from the Earth at
unsustainable rates.
So electric vehicles (or hydrogen fuel cell, or even relatively inefficient compressed air) vehicles,
are stepping stones on the path to a non-GHG producing future energy system.
So the "green-ness" or carbon footprint of these electrically based technologies should be
measured with two separate baselines:
1. What would their carbon footprint be if all electricity was generated with carbon-neutral generation
methods such as wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear.
2. What is the carbon footprint assuming the US continues to maintain arguably the most carbon-dirty
electrical generating mix in the world.
Measured in this light, it can be seen that the complete issue is changing the electrical power source for the
US, in parallel with adopting one or multiple forms of transportation technology that is electrically based.
Either change without the other does not work. Both are necessary for effective improvement in emissions
reduction of transportation.
I analyze the fundamental meta-problem we have here as follows:
Our powerful technology and organized global-scale economy is, apart from making us rich and comfortable temporarily, also causing global-scale, very-long-term problems. These problems are predictable IN GENERAL TERMS by identifying the most fundamental driver forces in simple models of the processes, but there are admittedly going to be many twists and turns in the match of reality to these simplistic models.
Examples of such problems:
1. Atmospheric chemistry change leads to more greenhouse warming of climate. Timeframe for problem: 100 to 200 years. Inertial lag of adjustments we make: 50 years give or take.
2. Bio-diversity reduction of animal and plant species and varieties, due to deforestation, overfishing, rapid climate change, other land-use changes, pollution. Probable loss of 50% or more species in short term. Time frame: 100 to 500 years.
3. Terrestrial soil biomass reduction (in forests, farmland etc) due to deforestation and conversion of biomass to other uses by people. Time frame for problem: 100 - 600 years. 6 generations of temperate forest are about 600 years, and harvesting all of those generations will significantly deplete the forest-supporting soil in those regions.
So we know or believe, in general and probabilistic terms, that our large-scale semi-organized economic processes are causing these problems. But because of the spatial and temporal scale of the problems, you are right, we are unable to plan solutions to the problems, or even to convince ourselves, collectively, that action is required.
In summary:
We have the power to cause very large, very long-term problems these days.
We do not have the metaphysics or cultural maturity to be able to judge or solve these problems
in advance of the problems being way out of control.
Our reach has exceeded our grasp.
I find it troubling and enlightening that a truthful post like the parent of this reply is modded down to troll.
I find it particularly scary that a post which is merely pointing out the obvious; that
powerful interests deliberately manipulate the popular media and the stories they carry,
would be considered merely provocative propaganda.
If people by and large are believing that the big stories of the day just come to them randomly,
that is a very frightening situation, because it means that you don't have democracy. You
have a mass of gullible, highly influenceable sheep, who can be heavily influenced as to how
to vote, without even realizing they are being heavily influenced.
I know this partly from personal experience. I was quite a while back an environmental
activist fighting deforestation in my region. We had planning meetings. We planned (non-violent but dramatic)
protests with the purpose of capturing media attention. That worked.
In conjunction with each protest, we fed carefully crafted one-page press releases to the local
and national media, and often, we watched, satisfied, as our press releases, lightly edited, became
the headline news of the next day on TV and newspapers.
And we weren't professionals at this. We weren't even very good at it. But it worked like a charm.
Probably around 1/3 of the prominant news stories on any given day are fed to lazy media organizations
by interest groups. Most of those groups, and the ones with the most funding by far, work for large
corporate interests. This is not a troll for **** sake. This is just obvious basic present day reality.
Please wake up. Look around.
The upcoming failure of the Copenhagen climate meetings is now well known and
openly admitted by the world leaders.
In short, every part of the parent post is true and useful information. If that is a troll, I am truly
frightened about our society.
Just a little analogous story from my city. 25 years ago, there was a "sustainable region" plan, created with tons of public input, and it said:
DONT build new highways or widen them (because they encourage urban sprawl and pollution and GHGs),
DO Build lots of transit and live-work mini city-centres at transit hubs.
So developer-led councils and right-wing state-level government went ahead building highways and outlying subdivisions for 25 years, ignoring the plan.
So now we come to developing a new region plan aimed at 2040 or some such. And what do they say?
Well, we didn't follow the plan before, so we've got lots of people living all over the place in widespread suburbs, so transit will be too expensive, so we have to widen the f**ing highways, and build new wider bridges.
By analogy, those who know how to know, and know what sorts of things to pay attention to, knew about AGW in 1980, and told governments: Hey, you better plan to avoid this. If action had been taken then, it would have been inexpensive, relatively non-disruptive, and quite possibly effective. Now that we've ignored the warnings and rampaged ahead with a way more energy-intensive economy for 30 years, people are saying: Shit, it's too hard to fix this. We have to adapt.
In both cases, what can you say? F***ing pathetic! It may as well be bacteria in charge cause the brainy humans sure aren't thinking as they act.
Humans are the "system builder" species. That's our survival strategy, like beavers on a grand and generalized scale. And individually, we claim to have the ability to change things. To think. To plan. To change our future. But collectively, we have yet to demonstrate that we can think. Plan effectively. Change things intentionally at the scale that we are entropizing things unintentionally.
I see it exactly the other way around. Obama, bright lad that he is and understanding the implications of AGW and what needs to be done about it, is faced with the puzzle of how to sell the tough measures that need to be taken.
How do you sell a change in how we do energy to the red-state cowboys and wall street geckos?
SECURITY! That's the ticket! It's not altruistic wimpo pinko greenie hippy policy, it's
red-blooded, self-interested ENERGY SECURITY policy.
Now that's some brilliant political framing for you.
Just might work too. American's are sick of the Iraq war, and this is being carefully positioned to
look like a solution that will reduce the need for foreign adventures in the middle east.
Whatever works to get the change done, I say.
Well it goes kind of like this:
People say the scientists are in it (proving global warming) for the money, but they are scientists. They are PhDs. Well
qualified. Most of them have tenure. These people can get a job whether they are studying global warming, or ocean
currents, or dust storms on Mars. And the total amounts of grant money for research in this whole area is completely
insignificant compared to the potential profit loss of business-as-usual industries and economic sectors. I don't
have those numbers exactly, but it would surprise me if there was not from 1000 times more money to 1 million times
more money at stake on the part of fossil fuel industries and cheap-fossil-fuel-reliant industries, than there is money
at stake in the science community.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say I should see about a 1000-fold to 1 million fold greater inclination to lie about
the situation on the part of those who think the status quo is just dandy.
These numbers, as you will point out, are made up for illustrative purposes, but I would be surprised if my
off the top of my head ranges of financial risk ratios was off by an order of magnitude.
The mainstream of scientists in the field were convinced of the truth of global warming and the
likelihood of anthropogenic global warming back around 1980. It is only in the last few years since Al Gore's movie
that the mainstream media and some of the public have come over to this viewpoint. So you misrepresent the history
of the politics of this issue. The financially driven denier camp has had the floor for most of the time that the
debate has existed.
Here are two really simple theories:
1. Sun heats Earth with radiation in many wavelengths. Lots of optical-band + ultraviolet. /10s of thousands of years.)
2. Solar radiation interacts with matter on Earth and heats Earth.
3. Some of the heat re-radiates upwards away from Earth, but much of the radiation is now in
the lower energy infrared band, since some energy has gone into heating Earth.
4. CO2, methane etc molecules in atmosphere reflect infrared radiation back down to Earth, heating Earth more.
5. Humans are pumping lots of carbon out of the ground, and burning forests that store carbon. This carbon is being
released into atmosphere as CO2, methane etc. Increasing CO2, methane etc concentrations in atmosphere
(concentration of these molecules in atmosphere is roughly doubled so far compared to recent thousands
6. So there is now net heating of the Earth, due to this excess trapping of Infrared radiation by reflection.
Theory 2:
1. Oil companies and large corporate interests whose businesses rely on cheap fossil fuel energy are upset at the
prospect of having to change their ways. They will lose profits.
2. "Fat and happy" western consumers are enjoying their easy lifestyles fueled by a fossil-fuel burn of 400 years worth of stored
carbon per year. They don't want to have to walk or bus more, or eat local, even though it would prevent them getting diabetes
or a heart attack. It's too much work. Let the oil do the work.
3. Both of these interests are screaming in anger and denial that their comfy lifestyles need serious adjustment. Both of them
are in denial so they won't have to admit that they have been guilty of robbing future generations. Both of them are pleading
ignorance of the consequences, when the only way they could be that ignorant is by keeping their eyes shut and yelling really
loud.
in advance of the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference, there is clearly a campaign
on to discredit evidence for global warming. Watch for a continuing stream of new news stories
on the issue, questioning the science, in the next few weeks. I have already noticed two very
blatant examples in the last few days.
One science that is more certain, I will admit, these days than the science of global climate is the science
of swaying public opinion through careful PR and "news" management. It's scary good. You have
to be on the lookout for it at all times. Anytime you find yourself agreeing with the most recent
conventional wisdom, give yourself a slap, and start looking for who is feeding you that conventional
wisdom and why. Hint. Follow the money.
Copenhagen is apparently going to be a total failure. The politicians are all gutless wimps.
So this PR campaign is softening up the target of your mind to make it easier for you to accept
that failure.
Worst: Originally erroneous or out of date therefore erroneous comments. Actively destructive to comprehension of the program, and once detected, causes all other comments in the program to be rejected as untrustworthy and worse than useless. "Comment Bug".
2nd Worst: No comments - indicates the developer either does not understand the purpose or method in their madness, or is lazy and sloppy. Either is very bad.
3rd worst: Redundant comments: /** Gets the Foo! */ Foo getFoo() See Java api documentation for prime examples.
I would much rather read a long rambling philosophical comment that was essentially correct and did add some information than to deal with any of the above slackerware.
At least roughly,
And what their work means for your programs?
If not, perhaps you need some "book larnin'"
before rolling up your sleeves and hitting
the keyboard.
A friend of mine was uncomfortable with using the pirated s/w at her company and so switched her computer and work products
from (pirated) Office to OpenOffice, (pirated) MatLab to Octave, and VBA to python. She also brought the overall issue up with the CEO, suggesting
that the company should pay for its payware, or switch to FOSS.
Needless to say, not long afterwards, she was terminated with some lame excuse but it's clear it was for not being a "team player".
The 95% of the technology startups in our town are laughingly underfunded
(e.g. reverse mortgage on CEO's house and small contribution from Aunt Tilly's bakery), so they have no
money for legit licenses. Unfortunately, the management at many are too stupid to understand that there are perfectly good FOSS
alternatives for all of it.
That can look for a signature in the uploaded file bytes that means the file is a swf? or a swf-readable policy xml file?
Anyone know of code that does that? Maybe Adobe would be kind enough to release some Java code and python
code for detecting their own files.
Java failed on the desktop largely because Microsoft wouldn't let it operate there in any standard way. .NET initiative. The last thing
Microsoft was DAMN scared of it when it first came out. It prodded the whole
Microsoft wanted was a neutral development platform that actually worked on their platform.
When Java first came out, technical people thought it would be a good idea to just include a standard java
environment with every OS, so that those Applets would actually work without requiring a massive JRE
download before starting.
Of course, a better class-file and jar-file caching standard included in the java standards as part of every jre
would also have helped, so that large applet code could be cached, but Microsoft would have sabotaged that as well.
By my reckoning,
AI,
Thin clients (now known as using the cloud or SAAS (Gmail etc) or other webapps on a laptop),
CASE (What do you think Eclipse with GIT or Subversion is?),
and ERP are all going strong.
I think that A. the hype is not usually generated by the majority of people working in the field,
and B. how strong the hype is is kind of random compared to the progress that's actually going
on. Perception != Reality.
Best to investigate deeper in each case, rather than believing either the hype or
the anti-hype.
After indexing it for search and ad-serving purposes, it should then be encrypted on their disks.
This would circumvent the judge's argument.
If this sort of encryption is not done, all people and businesses that use software as a service to
for example write and store their intended-private documents are in legal jeopardy.
Any time you read "peer to peer software" in a RIAA statement or legal proposal, you should
substitute "open information networks", because there is no essential difference between those
concepts.
So what the RIAA is saying is:
"the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on open information networks to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."
That allows us to frame the debate properly.