More importantly, anything that the stolen item is used for is potential forfeit or criminal itself. The woman was stupid enough to put nude photos of herself on a computer. Did she not expect other people to see them? She should be a lot more worried about distribution by the boyfriend or someday-ex-boyfriend than she should be by the police or the laptop recovery company.
If anything, she should consider herself lucky that the rightful owners of the computer aren't going to push for a transfer of copyright of all images that were made or stored on the computer, which I could see them managing to succeed with. Call it reparations for the criminal act of receiving stolen property.
Exactly. Some months ago there was an article about an errant satellite in geostationary orbit, and the submitter suggested sending the shuttle up to fix it. The submitter obviously hadn't considered the fuel requirements to put something as heavy as a crewed space shuttle to that high of an orbit, nor had the submitter accounted for the lack of launch vehicle to even put something that massive into that orbit.
But, on the other hand, a lot of people immediately pounced, citing the relevant math and why this wasn't going to work. Had this been talking heads on a 24 hour news station, they would have figured they'd solved the world's problems that day, while failing to understand the most basic problems in attempting what they'd be discussing. And, the viewers would have started bugging their congresscritters about why they hadn't sent the shuttle to do that thing that the talking heads brought up.
Yeah, I got that part. I was marveling that anyone would even reasonably expect cooling towers, AT ALL in a vacuum. Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work.
I don't see how traditional cooling towers would work for anything in a vacuum, as they're designed as heat exchangers against ambient air, and use convection to draw fresh air in for dumping waste heat into, exhausting it out the top...
If anything, they'd need to do a geothermal-style ground-loop system, where they drill several boreholes, plumb them with loops, and then fill in the extra space with the regolith they originally bored out. Use the ground as a heatsink for the hot water from the secondary exchanger, possibly switching between several ground loops depending on how well the heat dissipates and how quickly a given area is saturated.
On the other hand, if this technology can be developed, then we'll have the vaunted suitcase nuke always talked about, albeit with a significantly different function than normally ascribed...
Donno if I should compare Superpoke to a VW Superbeetle with upgraded front suspension and a redesigned front clip, or if I should think of it as an orgy relative to the Poke's sexual overtone...
Yes, because *one* example succeeded, automatically all idiotic schemes will. Got it!
No, but some "idiotic schemes" will succeed, even if the vast majority don't. Look at the personal computer itself. In the first hobbyist, non-kit computers came out in the mid seventies, and various other hobbyists worked on their own over the years. Xerox got interested but not enough to release a finished product, and Apple, IBM, and Microsoft all got involved. IBM bowed out, Apple almost died several times, and Microsoft became the Evil Empire, but the PC ultimately took off despite all of the suits who claimed no one would ever want one and there would be no use for them.
Now, it'll be up to history to decide how much we've wasted versus gained by the widespread adoption of the PC, but sometimes cockamamie ideas will take off and will cause revolution.
As far as the law is concerned the stop line prior to the crosswalk is the boundary of the intersection. If you cross that while presented with a stop sign or red light, then you have technically run the light/sign. The first hit for a google search for "stop-line crosswalk" is the NY state drivers manual...
Here, it's the curb on one side parallel with the intersecting road to the curb on the other side in parallel with the intersecting road. At the few intersections without curbs, I believe it's defined by the white line of the intersecting road.
It's NOT the crosswalk.
You'd better check your actual laws, not just the driver's manual. You're supposed to stop before blocking the crosswalk here too, but you technically haven't run the red light until you've actually entered the intersection as defined by the positions of the curbs. Blocking the crosswalk is a different violation here.
...Bloomberg will probably get booted out next opportunity, but the cameras would of course still stay.
Not necessarily. They had speed cameras on the highways and freeways here in Arizona, and once Janet Napolitano left as Governor to be Secretary of Homeland Security at the Federal level, the new Governor, Jan Brewer, removed them.
In the City of Tempe, they had an agreement with Redflex Traffic Systems for red-light cameras, but that agreement has ended and the cameras have been shut off. Granted, the agreement's end happened in part because Redflex was too stupid to stipulate that they got a cut when an offender went to traffic school and got the fine scrubbed from their record, as opposed to having an actual ticket, so when they pushed that Tempe just nixed the entire arrangement at the next opportunity. The lawsuit is still pending.
One problem with photo enforcement is that the camera doesn't stop you and serve you a ticket like police officer does when pulling you over. Instead, they mail the fine to you, but because you haven't been officially and legally served yet, if you ignore the mailing then they have to actually send a person to serve you the ticket in the manner of a process server. Here, a LOT of people have been ignoring the mailings, and they're considering changing the law to not require the in-person serving, but they're receiving resistance to that. So, if a bargain-basement process server costs $40 for three attempts, it's difficult to argue the cost of the process server should be added to the ticket since the complainant didn't pull over the defendant and serve them a ticket in the first place.
I think that if they're going to institute Red Light Photo Enforcement, they need to paint an actual intersection-entering stop line prominently on the ground. The stop line for the crosswalk isn't the start of the intersection, it's further forward. One might assume one's in the clear if one is crossing the crosswalk, but they technically haven't entered the intersection yet.
Of course in my world, I'd define the start of the intersection as the stop line before the crosswalk. But I guess we don't care about pedestrians...
I had also figured that it would be a great way to see some portions of the world in relative safety and comfort. It might even be practical to treat a train of such similar to a cruise ship, where one takes the train overnight between regions, sleeping, and gets off at stations of interest along the way. Of course, for this to be practical, they'd either need a siding for the train, or they'd need a hop-on-hop-off system where one catches the next train that evening, has one's belongings loaded into one's cabin, etc. If the logistics of such a route could be determined and found manageable, that would be a cool way to see Western Canada, Alaska, and Eurasia.
On a serious note, the Standard Gauge of 4 ft 8 12 in that North America uses is narrower than the old Soviet 4 ft 11 56 in gauge in Russia and many of the former Soviet bloc states. Negotiations between the US, Russia, and Canada to a lesser extent would have to happen to determine which gauge would be used, or if an attempt for dual-gauge (probably requiring four rails due to the closeness of the two gauges) would be made. It would potentially be an option to use bogies capable of being adjusted between the two gauges as well.
It would be pretty kick ass to be able to take the train all of the way from Boston to London, by way of Canada, the US, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Belgium, and France...
For me, a home is where I spend much of my time. I don't see how a personal website or a profile page would be home to me- it'd be more accurate to say that Slashdot or some other site used day in, day out would be my "home"...
Hell, for that logic, "www.google.com" is my home.
Another change Facebook is introducing is allowing users to modify the audience of a post after it's published, which they couldn't do before.
I've never tried to stuff a cat back into a bag, but I suppose it had to get there somehow in the first place.
I guess as long as no one has seen it while out of the bag then you're okay.
I do wonder what this'll mean for replies to posts. I never signed up for facebook, but it was a fun prank on IPB forums to delete posts when it made a reply look naughty or silly.
Reminds me of a hypothetical Microsoft purchase of Sun Microsystems. The headline would have read, "Microsoft Buys Sun", and thousands of people would look up into the sky and think, "I hope it doesn't crash..."
My nondiscussion on ethanol and the like is because I do not know, so I do not bring it into the conversation. If you have something to contribute I'd be happy to hear it. That is the whole point on being able to reply to one another.
I won't disagree that fossil fuels are one of the least expensive sources of energy. What I don't understand is why we have to subsidize these massive international megacorporations who are making money hand over fist, while on the other side we allow them to dump the environmental costs off on to us. At this point they'd do just fine without taking our subsidy as raw profit to to tune of a couple billion dollars a year.
Yes, solar has manufacturing byproducts. But, it has no byproducts in use. Get the panels efficient enough and you incur the byproducts issue once, at manufacture, not twice, like fossil fuels, where you incur them both at manufacture and at use. There are also other forms of solar, more suited to industrial scale, like liquid sodium systems and reflector/boiler systems, which also don't exactly generate a lot of use-based waste. There are even other non-fossil technologies like geothermal. An entire island nation powers their fixed infrastructure completely that way.
If you want to be an independent, self-sufficient kind of person who doesn't require society and wants to go lone-wolf, you should be chomping at the bit for Solar. Solar allows you to give the bird to the utility company potentially. Compared to government infrastructure costs, utility charges, and dependency, solar should look great.
A stumbling block, for me, is the fact that no matter what time of year, the electric company here will only pay their absolute lowest rate to a solar electric producer for the excess power sold to the grid, even though with time-of-use plans they're charging an arm and a leg for it, and even though on the exchange market it's going for quite a bit more than that minimal amount. I wouldn't expect a 1:1 situation, but if they'd pay something approaching fair market value when the demand is there then it'd be easier to justify selling power to them, and thus easier to justify buying solar without otherwise adequate subsidy. But, when the utility company, who cries about excessive demand one minute and cries about the threat of independent producers the next can't manage to figure out which it cares more about, it's hard to jump in. Make it easier and suddenly the whole thing opens up. Leave it hard and you're left with difficult to manage power grid with the Sword of Damocles in the form of a massive disruption and blackout just waiting to drop. It's irresponsible.
I wonder when Dragon will be ready for human "payload"?
That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated. I'd bet that many of the systems require for human use will be installed on the demonstrator even if it's going up with a bunch of cargo, just to prove those systems work, and to assist in achieving certification for use for people. What I wonder, though, is how many launches, how many non-launched capsules, and how many years would be required to certify the design, even if it never suffers a failure in the testing process.
Space is a dangerous business and we've been lucky in the US that we've never had a vacuum-based death. We've been limited to launch and return deaths only, but those have been over with comparatively quickly. It's tough to say how people would react if astronauts died aboard a craft that failed slowly, with nothing that could be done about it. That's probably a big reason for the schedule and why it takes so long. I just hope the process isn't far too unnecessarily inefficient.
Opportunity Cost is not the same for everyone. I've never said that it was, nor have I ever expected that solar panels, wind generators, or any other particular technology is better for anyone. Lots of people use a diesel-similar oil to heat their homes. Some use pipe delivered natural gas. Some use truck delivered propane. Some use electricity because they barely need to generate heat at all.
Some use natural gas clothes dryers, some use electric. Some line-dry their clothes.
Some use electric air conditioners, some use natural gas air conditioners. Some don't use air conditioners at all.
Certainly high-density housing dwellers, owners of small houses, owners of mobile homes, and people in weather-ill-suited places are probably not capable of personally owning any significant solar or wind. But, there are lots and lots and lots of people who own individual single-family homes in places where they truly can benefit from solar. Would even at little as 20% of residential power generated through solar be worth it? I personally think so. Unfortunately, when we're subsidizing nonrenewable resources like we are now, we'll never get there, even when the real benefits are very possible.
I wouldn't be surprised if a "mil spec" power supply, converter, or whatnot is very heavily shielded. Military radios are, as are military computers. Think of a Panasonic Toughbook on steroids.
Thing is, I'd bet some of the weight comes from cobbling things together without a thorough redesign. Frequently military systems are expanded and added on to without a thorough enough redesign, so weight can increase dramatically. This is in part because we don't want to break existing tried and true functionality, but it requires time and testing. It's possible that this slightly more radical redesign is simply in line with a regular redesign to more properly integrate cobbled-together systems.
Yes, it's Opportunity Cost. Long established economics concept used to weigh the various costs for various competing possible installations or concepts for achieving similar, compatible results.
The beef that many of us have with this is not in the raw idea, which is generally sound, but in manipulation of markets that modify opportunity cost by pushing costs off on to others.
There are two fossil-fuel costs one can consider as being pushed off. One is pollution or ecological damage pushed on to society and environment, which some will argue isn't a cost, and the other is subsidy granted to industry by government, which is itself a function of society, which ultimately pays for it.
If subsidies for fossil fuel power sources ended and if the cost to obtain mineral rights both protected the surface owner and required payment to repair the ecological damage caused by exploration and extraction then obviously producing oil or coal would cost a LOT more than they do now. That's not even factoring other pollution generated by the refining or use. Granted, any power source requiring raw materials would incur some of these costs, like raw materials for the manufacture of solar panels or wind turbines, but the costs would be amortized across the years and years that the generating method were in place.
Limited benefits like you discuss, like solar panels in places where achieving grid connectivity is hard, or adding limited wind generation can help, but fixing the markets to reduce subsidy could dramatically skew the numbers in favor of non-fossil-fuel means. There doesn't seem to the be the political will to actually do it though.
Somehow I don't think you'd get any successful prosecutions if you did that. Additionally, you'd discredit any possible hot-spot monitoring program for the same reasons.
This only works if you let the perpetrator actually become a perpetrator. If you stop them before they've provided evidence of an intent to commit or evidence in the commission, you'll get thrown out of court, and if you do it way too much and catch too much public attention, you'll have other law enforcement entities investigating you, probably for civil rights violations.
First the version number is important so we bump it up a few notches. Now it's not?
That's what I'm trying to understand.
I guess it's their way of trying to get us to stop being so angry by their versioning scheme.
The thing that is really getting on my nerves, though, is that they seem to be out-of-touch with the way big web developer groups work, which is to write to version numbers, kind of like how older developers wrote to RFC. There are some fairly big software packages like OnBase that probably will break with this, or will run right back to IE-only.
I've been a faithful Mozilla user since the old days, when the Mozilla project spun off from the Netscape browser. This is giving me serious pause.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, anything that the stolen item is used for is potential forfeit or criminal itself. The woman was stupid enough to put nude photos of herself on a computer. Did she not expect other people to see them? She should be a lot more worried about distribution by the boyfriend or someday-ex-boyfriend than she should be by the police or the laptop recovery company.
If anything, she should consider herself lucky that the rightful owners of the computer aren't going to push for a transfer of copyright of all images that were made or stored on the computer, which I could see them managing to succeed with. Call it reparations for the criminal act of receiving stolen property.
Exactly. Some months ago there was an article about an errant satellite in geostationary orbit, and the submitter suggested sending the shuttle up to fix it. The submitter obviously hadn't considered the fuel requirements to put something as heavy as a crewed space shuttle to that high of an orbit, nor had the submitter accounted for the lack of launch vehicle to even put something that massive into that orbit.
But, on the other hand, a lot of people immediately pounced, citing the relevant math and why this wasn't going to work. Had this been talking heads on a 24 hour news station, they would have figured they'd solved the world's problems that day, while failing to understand the most basic problems in attempting what they'd be discussing. And, the viewers would have started bugging their congresscritters about why they hadn't sent the shuttle to do that thing that the talking heads brought up.
Yeah, I got that part. I was marveling that anyone would even reasonably expect cooling towers, AT ALL in a vacuum. Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work.
I don't see how traditional cooling towers would work for anything in a vacuum, as they're designed as heat exchangers against ambient air, and use convection to draw fresh air in for dumping waste heat into, exhausting it out the top...
If anything, they'd need to do a geothermal-style ground-loop system, where they drill several boreholes, plumb them with loops, and then fill in the extra space with the regolith they originally bored out. Use the ground as a heatsink for the hot water from the secondary exchanger, possibly switching between several ground loops depending on how well the heat dissipates and how quickly a given area is saturated.
On the other hand, if this technology can be developed, then we'll have the vaunted suitcase nuke always talked about, albeit with a significantly different function than normally ascribed...
You should be okay as long as they practice safe Hex...
Donno if I should compare Superpoke to a VW Superbeetle with upgraded front suspension and a redesigned front clip, or if I should think of it as an orgy relative to the Poke's sexual overtone...
Clbuttic overaction, in my opinion. This buttbuttination of our writing by computers is out of hand. I don't know if my consbreastution can take it...
No, but some "idiotic schemes" will succeed, even if the vast majority don't. Look at the personal computer itself. In the first hobbyist, non-kit computers came out in the mid seventies, and various other hobbyists worked on their own over the years. Xerox got interested but not enough to release a finished product, and Apple, IBM, and Microsoft all got involved. IBM bowed out, Apple almost died several times, and Microsoft became the Evil Empire, but the PC ultimately took off despite all of the suits who claimed no one would ever want one and there would be no use for them.
Now, it'll be up to history to decide how much we've wasted versus gained by the widespread adoption of the PC, but sometimes cockamamie ideas will take off and will cause revolution.
Here, it's the curb on one side parallel with the intersecting road to the curb on the other side in parallel with the intersecting road. At the few intersections without curbs, I believe it's defined by the white line of the intersecting road.
It's NOT the crosswalk.
You'd better check your actual laws, not just the driver's manual. You're supposed to stop before blocking the crosswalk here too, but you technically haven't run the red light until you've actually entered the intersection as defined by the positions of the curbs. Blocking the crosswalk is a different violation here.
Not necessarily. They had speed cameras on the highways and freeways here in Arizona, and once Janet Napolitano left as Governor to be Secretary of Homeland Security at the Federal level, the new Governor, Jan Brewer, removed them.
In the City of Tempe, they had an agreement with Redflex Traffic Systems for red-light cameras, but that agreement has ended and the cameras have been shut off. Granted, the agreement's end happened in part because Redflex was too stupid to stipulate that they got a cut when an offender went to traffic school and got the fine scrubbed from their record, as opposed to having an actual ticket, so when they pushed that Tempe just nixed the entire arrangement at the next opportunity. The lawsuit is still pending.
One problem with photo enforcement is that the camera doesn't stop you and serve you a ticket like police officer does when pulling you over. Instead, they mail the fine to you, but because you haven't been officially and legally served yet, if you ignore the mailing then they have to actually send a person to serve you the ticket in the manner of a process server. Here, a LOT of people have been ignoring the mailings, and they're considering changing the law to not require the in-person serving, but they're receiving resistance to that. So, if a bargain-basement process server costs $40 for three attempts, it's difficult to argue the cost of the process server should be added to the ticket since the complainant didn't pull over the defendant and serve them a ticket in the first place.
I think that if they're going to institute Red Light Photo Enforcement, they need to paint an actual intersection-entering stop line prominently on the ground. The stop line for the crosswalk isn't the start of the intersection, it's further forward. One might assume one's in the clear if one is crossing the crosswalk, but they technically haven't entered the intersection yet.
Of course in my world, I'd define the start of the intersection as the stop line before the crosswalk. But I guess we don't care about pedestrians...
Just don't mis-aim the laser. I'd hate for my city to blow up like in Sim City 2000 when the orbiting solar plant's beam goes off-kilter...
I had also figured that it would be a great way to see some portions of the world in relative safety and comfort. It might even be practical to treat a train of such similar to a cruise ship, where one takes the train overnight between regions, sleeping, and gets off at stations of interest along the way. Of course, for this to be practical, they'd either need a siding for the train, or they'd need a hop-on-hop-off system where one catches the next train that evening, has one's belongings loaded into one's cabin, etc. If the logistics of such a route could be determined and found manageable, that would be a cool way to see Western Canada, Alaska, and Eurasia.
On a serious note, the Standard Gauge of 4 ft 8 12 in that North America uses is narrower than the old Soviet 4 ft 11 56 in gauge in Russia and many of the former Soviet bloc states. Negotiations between the US, Russia, and Canada to a lesser extent would have to happen to determine which gauge would be used, or if an attempt for dual-gauge (probably requiring four rails due to the closeness of the two gauges) would be made. It would potentially be an option to use bogies capable of being adjusted between the two gauges as well.
It would be pretty kick ass to be able to take the train all of the way from Boston to London, by way of Canada, the US, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Belgium, and France...
For me, a home is where I spend much of my time. I don't see how a personal website or a profile page would be home to me- it'd be more accurate to say that Slashdot or some other site used day in, day out would be my "home"...
Hell, for that logic, "www.google.com" is my home.
I've never tried to stuff a cat back into a bag, but I suppose it had to get there somehow in the first place.
I guess as long as no one has seen it while out of the bag then you're okay.
I do wonder what this'll mean for replies to posts. I never signed up for facebook, but it was a fun prank on IPB forums to delete posts when it made a reply look naughty or silly.
I donno, that might have been a very gouda pun...
The punchline to the joke, "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?" comes to mind...
None. They just declare darkness the new standard...
Fuck you, Oracle!
Reminds me of a hypothetical Microsoft purchase of Sun Microsystems. The headline would have read, "Microsoft Buys Sun", and thousands of people would look up into the sky and think, "I hope it doesn't crash..."
My nondiscussion on ethanol and the like is because I do not know, so I do not bring it into the conversation. If you have something to contribute I'd be happy to hear it. That is the whole point on being able to reply to one another.
I won't disagree that fossil fuels are one of the least expensive sources of energy. What I don't understand is why we have to subsidize these massive international megacorporations who are making money hand over fist, while on the other side we allow them to dump the environmental costs off on to us. At this point they'd do just fine without taking our subsidy as raw profit to to tune of a couple billion dollars a year.
Yes, solar has manufacturing byproducts. But, it has no byproducts in use. Get the panels efficient enough and you incur the byproducts issue once, at manufacture, not twice, like fossil fuels, where you incur them both at manufacture and at use. There are also other forms of solar, more suited to industrial scale, like liquid sodium systems and reflector/boiler systems, which also don't exactly generate a lot of use-based waste. There are even other non-fossil technologies like geothermal. An entire island nation powers their fixed infrastructure completely that way.
If you want to be an independent, self-sufficient kind of person who doesn't require society and wants to go lone-wolf, you should be chomping at the bit for Solar. Solar allows you to give the bird to the utility company potentially. Compared to government infrastructure costs, utility charges, and dependency, solar should look great.
A stumbling block, for me, is the fact that no matter what time of year, the electric company here will only pay their absolute lowest rate to a solar electric producer for the excess power sold to the grid, even though with time-of-use plans they're charging an arm and a leg for it, and even though on the exchange market it's going for quite a bit more than that minimal amount. I wouldn't expect a 1:1 situation, but if they'd pay something approaching fair market value when the demand is there then it'd be easier to justify selling power to them, and thus easier to justify buying solar without otherwise adequate subsidy. But, when the utility company, who cries about excessive demand one minute and cries about the threat of independent producers the next can't manage to figure out which it cares more about, it's hard to jump in. Make it easier and suddenly the whole thing opens up. Leave it hard and you're left with difficult to manage power grid with the Sword of Damocles in the form of a massive disruption and blackout just waiting to drop. It's irresponsible.
That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated. I'd bet that many of the systems require for human use will be installed on the demonstrator even if it's going up with a bunch of cargo, just to prove those systems work, and to assist in achieving certification for use for people. What I wonder, though, is how many launches, how many non-launched capsules, and how many years would be required to certify the design, even if it never suffers a failure in the testing process.
Space is a dangerous business and we've been lucky in the US that we've never had a vacuum-based death. We've been limited to launch and return deaths only, but those have been over with comparatively quickly. It's tough to say how people would react if astronauts died aboard a craft that failed slowly, with nothing that could be done about it. That's probably a big reason for the schedule and why it takes so long. I just hope the process isn't far too unnecessarily inefficient.
Opportunity Cost is not the same for everyone. I've never said that it was, nor have I ever expected that solar panels, wind generators, or any other particular technology is better for anyone. Lots of people use a diesel-similar oil to heat their homes. Some use pipe delivered natural gas. Some use truck delivered propane. Some use electricity because they barely need to generate heat at all.
Some use natural gas clothes dryers, some use electric. Some line-dry their clothes.
Some use electric air conditioners, some use natural gas air conditioners. Some don't use air conditioners at all.
Certainly high-density housing dwellers, owners of small houses, owners of mobile homes, and people in weather-ill-suited places are probably not capable of personally owning any significant solar or wind. But, there are lots and lots and lots of people who own individual single-family homes in places where they truly can benefit from solar. Would even at little as 20% of residential power generated through solar be worth it? I personally think so. Unfortunately, when we're subsidizing nonrenewable resources like we are now, we'll never get there, even when the real benefits are very possible.
I wouldn't be surprised if a "mil spec" power supply, converter, or whatnot is very heavily shielded. Military radios are, as are military computers. Think of a Panasonic Toughbook on steroids.
Thing is, I'd bet some of the weight comes from cobbling things together without a thorough redesign. Frequently military systems are expanded and added on to without a thorough enough redesign, so weight can increase dramatically. This is in part because we don't want to break existing tried and true functionality, but it requires time and testing. It's possible that this slightly more radical redesign is simply in line with a regular redesign to more properly integrate cobbled-together systems.
Yes, it's Opportunity Cost. Long established economics concept used to weigh the various costs for various competing possible installations or concepts for achieving similar, compatible results.
The beef that many of us have with this is not in the raw idea, which is generally sound, but in manipulation of markets that modify opportunity cost by pushing costs off on to others.
There are two fossil-fuel costs one can consider as being pushed off. One is pollution or ecological damage pushed on to society and environment, which some will argue isn't a cost, and the other is subsidy granted to industry by government, which is itself a function of society, which ultimately pays for it.
If subsidies for fossil fuel power sources ended and if the cost to obtain mineral rights both protected the surface owner and required payment to repair the ecological damage caused by exploration and extraction then obviously producing oil or coal would cost a LOT more than they do now. That's not even factoring other pollution generated by the refining or use. Granted, any power source requiring raw materials would incur some of these costs, like raw materials for the manufacture of solar panels or wind turbines, but the costs would be amortized across the years and years that the generating method were in place.
Limited benefits like you discuss, like solar panels in places where achieving grid connectivity is hard, or adding limited wind generation can help, but fixing the markets to reduce subsidy could dramatically skew the numbers in favor of non-fossil-fuel means. There doesn't seem to the be the political will to actually do it though.
Somehow I don't think you'd get any successful prosecutions if you did that. Additionally, you'd discredit any possible hot-spot monitoring program for the same reasons.
This only works if you let the perpetrator actually become a perpetrator. If you stop them before they've provided evidence of an intent to commit or evidence in the commission, you'll get thrown out of court, and if you do it way too much and catch too much public attention, you'll have other law enforcement entities investigating you, probably for civil rights violations.
That's what I'm trying to understand.
I guess it's their way of trying to get us to stop being so angry by their versioning scheme.
The thing that is really getting on my nerves, though, is that they seem to be out-of-touch with the way big web developer groups work, which is to write to version numbers, kind of like how older developers wrote to RFC. There are some fairly big software packages like OnBase that probably will break with this, or will run right back to IE-only.
I've been a faithful Mozilla user since the old days, when the Mozilla project spun off from the Netscape browser. This is giving me serious pause.