I used to manually run updatedb every once in a while, and shut cron off completely. Like every few weeks, or when I thought what I was looking for was in recently downloaded/created stuff. Running updatedb every day is like a waste. Now I'm back to using Windows 2k, after spending a few months on XP. XP looks nicer than 2k, but the annoyances just add up. Linux I think topped out at Knoppix 3.4/3.6 with kernel 2.4 and KDE 3.5, and after that, near a time of a major gcc version switch, both for Knoppix and other major distros like Fedora, a whole lot of things started either crashing, or going downhill speedwise, or usability wise, or even kernel bloat wise. Kinda like Windows these days. Just very recently the linux kernel doubled in size. Bloat, bugs, less ergonomic interface. Remember how some linux boxes in the 90s were able to maintain years of uptime?
Old electrolytic capacitors leak toxic chemicals. A capacitor popping and drying out is a leading cause of electronics failure. If that stuff gets on you or you inhale the vapors it's bad. How can you make the process safer? Use robots to pick at the stuff? They are too expensive for now, and not smart enough, without enough dexterity.
Maybe use huge smelter to melt down and combust all the epoxy boards, plastic casings and everything, including dioxins to carbon dioxide and slag. The slag will contain mostly oxides of calcium (from plastic fillers), aluminum, silicon, iron, tin, lead, copper, and minute amounts of gold and silver, and some other metals such as tantalum, indium, germanium and gallium and arsenic oxides.
Processing this slag to extract things like tantalum and indium is the same problem as oxygen extraction from lunar anorthite - we basically don't have a good technology to process calcium alumino silicate. And at least the lunar anorthite is a dust, somewhat reactive powder for acid processing, but the slag from this smelter is just going to be a hard chunk of rock.
Moreover oxides of lead, arsenic and chlorides of copper and iron chlorides (especially if burnt with PVC plastic parts) will tend to distill out in the process, and would have to be collected from the vapor. If you can separate the plastic casings, that can cut down on the calcium at least but the electrolytic capacitors are loaded with aluminum, and aluminum oxide is hard to process. Not oxidizing the mixture, and just melting it down anaerobically is not workable, because the epoxy boards would turn into charcoal that absorbs everything else on the surface.
Newer circuits are smaller, more of the components such as capacitors in a circuit are purely silicon on chip, so waste in 2020 will not be as dangerous as the waste from say 1980 to 2010, so investing a lot into a recycling facility that has no future, well. In case a workable semi-economic lunar oxygen extraction is found, that could indiscriminately process and safetify waste of any kind, including medical and biological waste together with electronic waste, that would be a worthy investment. In the meantime slag in a landfill with a plastic sheathing on bottom that doesn't get punctured and leak dissolved lead, arsenic, indium and such into the groundwater table is the answer, and slag is much safer than unsmelted electronics in the same landfill, because at least the toxic organic contaminants such as chlorinated solvents are dealt with, and the slag may leach toxic metals, but do so at an extremely slow rate.
Or just give it to China? Let somebody else deal with the problem, and then there is no problem? The problem starts when we don't live like the Amish, completely organic with all waste naturally recyclable, with no technology, other than say steel, that's still naturally recyclable. Once we hydrogenate vegetable oil, once we make materials such as polyethylene that nature has never seen, nor can digest, once use a cellphone that has indium displays, or gallium arsenide chips, after that the problem is here. We still choose to do it because we derive economic benefit from it, but the real problem comes later. At least steel used by the Amish for nails, horseshoes and plows, is naturally recyclable - it rusts away. There has to be a way to have electronics from the start that will be recyclable later, that's where the problem needs to be attacked. Such as fully miniaturized electronics with everything on-chip, silicon the only raw material, and some board that's easier than epoxy to separate during recycling, such as simple pure polypropylene that can be melted down, then combusted without combusting the silicon, and silicon recycled from the metal through tetrachloride distillation. That's soon doable, unless the "economy" does not allow it.
Ethics is a luxury, and should be done as a showoff of luxury, as opposed to generating massive amounts of waste as a showoff of luxury.
Dude, be careful what you say. There are a lot of people in the world with power who find nothing more amusing than play with the lives of other people like yourself, and make you do things just like you talked about. You think you won't do it?
Well, I said a collapsible structure, it could be opened or collapsed like an umbrella as needed, with transparency mechanically controllable.
Another option, I forgot to say, is a low Earth orbit, which is much cheaper, and overall, average, a satellite could cast shadows to the right spots on Earth. For instance a flyby over the Sahara, or the oceans, or whereever people request just a tad bit a colder day, dependent on weather, could be micromanaged, with umbrellas open and closed as the flyby happens. Weather changes might amount to 1 degree C cooler, or 2 degree C cooler for that one day, but it adds up, and that 1 degree could represent massive amounts of air conditioner resource savings, combating global warming on the not having to burn fossil fuels but instead having a massive cheap diffuse shade above you periodically. Arizona or Las Vegas might pay a lot for such outer space shading, where different satellites with massive superlight umbrellas take turns flying over it, and open their umbrellas on a flyby.
Moreover the global energy budget is so massive, that a 1% change, or a fraction of 1% change is a massive change as far as equilibrium is concerned. As far as the internals of the Earth are concerned, the Le Chatelier principle says that Earth will react to both cooling or warming. Problem is it's easy to cool Earth, but if you overdo it, and temperatures start dropping, there is really no good way to fix that, other than creating a greenhouse atmosphere without any clouds. Combating global warming could be done from outer space, but combating global cooling, such as too many clouds, would mandate messing with the Earths internals.
Perhaps there are easy cloud killers that don't affect much else. You could seed clouds over arid agricultural areas that need precipitation, instead of the mountain slope where it would naturally happen, and you trade a bare mountainside for a fertile plain, and upsets in river patterns. That's very dangerous, the equilibriums in Earth's internals are so complex, that the only safe thing to do is to leave it the heck alone. But you mess with it by simply driving a car, and then leaving it alone as you mess with it on one side, well, that's a question for very careful debate.
One thing is for sure, there would be a limited amount of total global shade tolerable from outer space, and any limited resource, such as lack of parking spots in a city, commands a high price. So municipialities like Las Vegas could vote and pony up the dough for some shade, but a farmer out in nowhere land, he'd pretty much have to pick up whatever is left over and nobody bought.
Managing low Earth orbit satellites is much more complex, because you have to compute interferences from line of sight geostationary satellites, possibly complicating the GPS system, and more possibility for a malfunction. However if a solarstationary object that's very far away malfunctions, it may take months to get it fixed. But the solar stationary object would be fairly fixed, with a relatively constant effect on global warming, with possibly yearly or centennial adjustments needed, and a few months time may not be a big deal with it, compared to a highly complex open/close on flyby type low earth orbit system.
Even if price was not an issue, my favorite is still Office 2k because I click, blink, and when I open my eyes it's there, ready for use. No need to twiddle my thumbs on the table for 5 seconds. (If we only had an operating system like that, kind of like DOS used to be. Click click boom, done, ready, use me. Dehybernation of windows 2000 takes me 20 seconds too, and I only have 512 MB memory to hibernate.) So even Office 2002 is slow. Office 2000 is the optimum balance, tolerable amount of extra garbage compared to Office 97, but the Office 97 bugs have been ironed out from it(Office 97 has two service packs plus a unique identification remover, and it takes some time and a few reboots to install. When you purge your computer every few months to clean up the accumulated trash and reinstall everything from scratch, service packs of O97 compared to straight O2k ain't worth it). I might be able to use office 2002, but can't stand office 2003. I still have to use 2003 at work, at least until the computer gets upgraded to Vista! So anyway, I have clippy, but he politely asks: You've turned me off like 5 times already, do you want to permanently shut me up? And the answer is a wholehearted "YES!"
I forgot to say the most important aspect of it: you can always undo it (on a relative basis, there is nothing you can really undo). Mess with the internals of Earth's functioning, and good luck with trying to fix that.
Easiest way to geoengineer is to leave the Earth alone and control global warming from the radiation input the Earth receives from the Sun, by a small amount of artificial solar eclipse. Take up into space an ultralight collapsible mirror structure, whose transparency is electrically tunable. There is probably an equilibrium point between the Sun and Earth, where an object rotating on a solarstationary orbit at exactly the same speed as Earth receives just the right amount of average solar wind pressure to stay afloat and not fall into the Sun (orbits closer to the Sun need to go faster for the centrifugal force to equilibrate the Sun's attraction, but the extra solar wind force could be it). If part of the panels are solar panels, then possibly a particle capture/acceleration device with superhighspeed ejection toward the Sun could gain extra tunable floating ability. Or it could even be recharged with matter with periodic trips from Earth.
If the system is underfunded because of better mileage, then up the gas tax and retain privacy. At least things like On-Star are voluntarily giving up the right to privacy, or more exactly not giving it up, just not exersizing it.
Looking at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density page, flywheels are in range of batteries. Someone else cited Activepower, who cited 99% energy efficiency on their systems. Wow, so flywheels might be better. On further investigation, http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS179065+30-Jul-2008+BW20080730 http://www.pentadyne.com/site/our-products/faq.html says, as the most efficient magnetically levitated flywheels on the market, they comsume about 300W to maintain power levels of 190kW. (This loss is due to friction, even in a vacuum magnetically levitated device, because there is still eddy current drag - you'd need to spin either a superconductor, or an insulator.) Conventional flywheels need 2.3 kW instead of 300W to do the same.
This 300W represents 0.15% of 190 kW, and because the system is able to deliver 190kW for 10 s, the total energy is 1900 kWs(or kJ)=190/3600 kWh. So 1900 kJ requires 300 J to maintain each second, or 0.015%. Its storing efficiency is therefore 1-0.00015*t(s).
Flywheels are great for extremely short term uses, but in any application you pile on the seconds, the energy storage efficincy is dismal, much less than 99%. In fact 1900000J/300J gives you 6333 seconds, or about 1 hr 45 minutes before the device comes to a complete halt due to friction. Sodium sulfur batteries can store power much longer than 2 hrs.
No, I looked into it, (or tried looking, the data i've found not fully convincing yet) liquid water is very absorbant of high frequency electromagnetic radiation, including microwave, terahertz, infrared, uv, xray and gamma. In fact even the atmosphere is so absorbant of xray and gamma (water absorptivity minimum near 100 MeV) waves that observatories have to be in outer space. The lowest absorbance "window" of liquid water is in the blue range of the visible spectrum, and if a blue laser - such as shooting a blue laser at a satellite - doesn't work, other high data rate electromagnetic waves will probably work even less. So much for EM radiation. Other particles, especially charged ones, interact and get absorbed even stronger than non charged photons. Neutrinos would be the perfect particles, but the very reason that they don't interact much with liquid water, or any matter at all, makes them extremely difficult to detect (cubic km size icecube to detect a few particles), and the immense solar neutrino flux may "hose" any kind of communication attempt to use them.
Actually, now that I think about it, even liquid water might be very penetrable to certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation other than ultralow frequencies - such as terahertz waves, or even xray or gamma ray waves. As long as you have very high frequencies the bandwith and antenna/detector size requirements would be much more practical. At frequencies above normal broadcast frequencies - such as microwave, terahertz, x ray or gamma rays the signal is very directional, meaning you can aim it. You just have to know your own position exactly in 3d space, and the receiving stations position, whether a satellite or land based station. You can simply chop a high frequency signal, such as done with transmitting Morse code via a light source from a ship, or in fiber optic cables.
How else will you put it into plain english terms? Derive your answers from the Maxwell equations? Like people really get the integrating of partial differentials and approximating of certain terms with constants under certain conditions in the equations. Let's start a discussion on how the solutions to the partial differential equations are affected by epsilon, mu, ro and nu - permittivity, permeability, charge density and frequency. I think explaining it like that on here would be more retarded, even though more precise. You always try to understand a problem intuively, and when that fails, you go to the complex math, and see if that helps you gain some intuition. You can't intuit 4d, except by examples of 2d in 3d. The math is always there, you're always free to play with the coordinates and equations, but sometimes people like the example of 2d sheet twisted in 3d as an aid to grasp at a 4d world, even if it's officially retarded way of explaining things, from a 4d mathematicians point of view.
Moreover even if it wasn't silly, and really worked well it would forbid the general public from fighting global warming this way unless a license is obtained from the patent holder, or 20 years wait time expires. How about we want to spend tax money to fight global warming, but an idiot patented the process and wants to charge us 100 trillion dollars - after all what's the planet worth to us? - that we can't afford, so we're forced to wait 20 years to let his patent expire and let the problem grow worse while we wait. But in the name of justice, it's a matter of principle, isn't it?
We're talking superhigh frequencies near 1 GHz. At such frequencies all of the electric/magnetic field generated "current" runs on the surface of wires anyway, not through the bulk, due to "skin effect". Or the electric/magnetic field can simply propagate through free space as electromagnetic radiation, like microwaves in your microwave oven, or light through empty space. Light propagates better through vacuum than through a copper wire, doesn't it?
Calling MS Tech support from a submarine? Or logging on to windows update to patch security holes? Come on now, if the thing works, and you can reinstall it at pleasure without having to activate it each time, then you don't care about support. It doesn't need to be updated if it works right.
Actually, reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines, you can communicate TO a submarine, but NOT FROM it. The reason is the sheer size of the antenna at extremely low frequencies - over 30 miles separation between two electrodes. The US had 72 Hz, Russians 82 Hz, with a data throughput of a few characters a minute.
There are no chatrooms or email or internet in general accessible from underwater, so a backdoor is useless. But there is still probably a way to remotely access a sub computer, but it needs extra gear/antenna to give off EM signals via a 50 bit/sec modem connection. 50 Hz or 60 Hz ultralong wavelength waves travel relatively well in water too, but the bandwith is dismal. Also there is a lot of background noise from the power grid, but that can stealth the unusually high spectral activity there, which is usually ignored anyway from a spectrum scan. Then you're talking about localization - a ship from the surface nearby trying to directionally listen in on the 50 or 60 Hz waves given off by the submarine and filter out the massive noise from the power grid above the surface. Having the sub physically radiate signals needs more than just a port open on an internet connected computer, needs more than just software, it needs hardware - antennas or power supplies that transfer the radio signals onto the power cord, and may also need physical access. So from this point of view, a sub not being connected to the internet at all, subs are safe. The bigger safety issue is that Windows is not a real time operating system - response time is not guaranteed. In control applications, such as nuclear, guaranteed response time is a safety issue, and sometimes you need 20 millisecond response time or so. It's rare that windows doesn't respond to a process for seconds, or minutes, but unless response time is guaranteed, you never know when you're gonna have the bad luck. Of course a system crash gives you no response at all, and that's worse than anything. The safest thing is still a PLC or an assembler programmed microcontroller, because there you know exactly what the computer is doing. Even a mictrocontroller compiled C program with optimizations turned on can pull some unexpected tricks on you, where you think the computer is doing one thing, while the compiler used a trick that may not have been your intention to use in that particular case. What windows does is I think a big mystery, even to their creators. It seems to work, and the rate of finding bugs has been on the decline, so we use it, but to say you know exactly what's going on, that's an overstatement. Put it on a submarine, and it seems to work, cross your fingers, hope it works for as long as you need it, and if not, oh well, there are a whole lot of other things that can miserably fail, life is full of risks, not everything is perfect in real life. Might be the economical way to take risks. Driving cars is a safety hazard, you can die from it, but people do it because of the benefits. Windows is riskier than a PLC, but it may still be the wiser choice, in case you did carefully weigh all the things that matter. But with nuclear things "if things go haywire oh well, tough luck" is usually not the correct strategy. Absolutely certain assurance and multiple redundancy on top of it is more like it.
I would much prefer one who wasn't always happy to clean up after me, but if I asked her to, she'd randomly tell me no. Isn't that so much more fun? There is a reason why women are moody, it's because men love the complexity, despite what all the bitching and complaining would let you believe. Women are lovely because of mental reasons, not simply physical. A simple robot can be programmed to serve you, do anything you want, but that's not gonna stop making you feel lonely. There is no game in that.
Just like there are telesurgeries, maybe one day cybersex will be messing with your own robot whose e-motions are controlled by somebody on the other end of the line. Talk about expensive gear. How about a morphing skin robot that takes on the features and bodily appearance of whoever you see on the webcam, with measurements, size, facial features, including body hair, etc. Get to know each other even before you meet?
How about give them jobs to make better money than having to get involved with stealing copper? People first steal copper because they have to or have nothing better to do, and then once they are hooked on the easy money, it's hard to shed the addiction and the habit.
They could put tracers in it as an alloy, something like 10 ppb samarium, or cerium, especially stuff that doesn't co-occur in copper ores. Different tracers into different end uses. Wait, scratch that, because you can always electrolytically refine melted down copper slabs and then it's all done with, tracers don't follow during electrolysis they either sludge out or stay in solution. Copper is copper and there is nothing exactly like it. Still, aluminum should be good enough, especially for nonflexible conduits.
I somehow wandered over to the Marquis de Sade wikipedia pages today. You may want to check out that page as a counterargument to what you say here. More exactly, an argument about things going out of balance on that side, the other extreme, at least as far as violence/sex is concered. It's interesting though how a lot of feminists in the 20th century became protective of him. The very people protesting objectifying and abusing women. People are difficult creatures to understand. But you're absolutely right otherwise. In everything, balance is the key, if you can find a way to maintain it, including violence/sex/comedy.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to manually run updatedb every once in a while, and shut cron off completely. Like every few weeks, or when I thought what I was looking for was in recently downloaded/created stuff. Running updatedb every day is like a waste. Now I'm back to using Windows 2k, after spending a few months on XP. XP looks nicer than 2k, but the annoyances just add up. Linux I think topped out at Knoppix 3.4/3.6 with kernel 2.4 and KDE 3.5, and after that, near a time of a major gcc version switch, both for Knoppix and other major distros like Fedora, a whole lot of things started either crashing, or going downhill speedwise, or usability wise, or even kernel bloat wise. Kinda like Windows these days. Just very recently the linux kernel doubled in size. Bloat, bugs, less ergonomic interface. Remember how some linux boxes in the 90s were able to maintain years of uptime?
Old electrolytic capacitors leak toxic chemicals. A capacitor popping and drying out is a leading cause of electronics failure. If that stuff gets on you or you inhale the vapors it's bad. How can you make the process safer? Use robots to pick at the stuff? They are too expensive for now, and not smart enough, without enough dexterity.
Maybe use huge smelter to melt down and combust all the epoxy boards, plastic casings and everything, including dioxins to carbon dioxide and slag. The slag will contain mostly oxides of calcium (from plastic fillers), aluminum, silicon, iron, tin, lead, copper, and minute amounts of gold and silver, and some other metals such as tantalum, indium, germanium and gallium and arsenic oxides.
Processing this slag to extract things like tantalum and indium is the same problem as oxygen extraction from lunar anorthite - we basically don't have a good technology to process calcium alumino silicate. And at least the lunar anorthite is a dust, somewhat reactive powder for acid processing, but the slag from this smelter is just going to be a hard chunk of rock. Moreover oxides of lead, arsenic and chlorides of copper and iron chlorides (especially if burnt with PVC plastic parts) will tend to distill out in the process, and would have to be collected from the vapor. If you can separate the plastic casings, that can cut down on the calcium at least but the electrolytic capacitors are loaded with aluminum, and aluminum oxide is hard to process. Not oxidizing the mixture, and just melting it down anaerobically is not workable, because the epoxy boards would turn into charcoal that absorbs everything else on the surface.
Newer circuits are smaller, more of the components such as capacitors in a circuit are purely silicon on chip, so waste in 2020 will not be as dangerous as the waste from say 1980 to 2010, so investing a lot into a recycling facility that has no future, well. In case a workable semi-economic lunar oxygen extraction is found, that could indiscriminately process and safetify waste of any kind, including medical and biological waste together with electronic waste, that would be a worthy investment. In the meantime slag in a landfill with a plastic sheathing on bottom that doesn't get punctured and leak dissolved lead, arsenic, indium and such into the groundwater table is the answer, and slag is much safer than unsmelted electronics in the same landfill, because at least the toxic organic contaminants such as chlorinated solvents are dealt with, and the slag may leach toxic metals, but do so at an extremely slow rate.
Or just give it to China? Let somebody else deal with the problem, and then there is no problem? The problem starts when we don't live like the Amish, completely organic with all waste naturally recyclable, with no technology, other than say steel, that's still naturally recyclable. Once we hydrogenate vegetable oil, once we make materials such as polyethylene that nature has never seen, nor can digest, once use a cellphone that has indium displays, or gallium arsenide chips, after that the problem is here. We still choose to do it because we derive economic benefit from it, but the real problem comes later. At least steel used by the Amish for nails, horseshoes and plows, is naturally recyclable - it rusts away. There has to be a way to have electronics from the start that will be recyclable later, that's where the problem needs to be attacked. Such as fully miniaturized electronics with everything on-chip, silicon the only raw material, and some board that's easier than epoxy to separate during recycling, such as simple pure polypropylene that can be melted down, then combusted without combusting the silicon, and silicon recycled from the metal through tetrachloride distillation. That's soon doable, unless the "economy" does not allow it.
Ethics is a luxury, and should be done as a showoff of luxury, as opposed to generating massive amounts of waste as a showoff of luxury.
Dude, be careful what you say. There are a lot of people in the world with power who find nothing more amusing than play with the lives of other people like yourself, and make you do things just like you talked about. You think you won't do it?
You must have a family or pets. What the heck are you doing on slashdot?
Well, I said a collapsible structure, it could be opened or collapsed like an umbrella as needed, with transparency mechanically controllable.
Another option, I forgot to say, is a low Earth orbit, which is much cheaper, and overall, average, a satellite could cast shadows to the right spots on Earth. For instance a flyby over the Sahara, or the oceans, or whereever people request just a tad bit a colder day, dependent on weather, could be micromanaged, with umbrellas open and closed as the flyby happens. Weather changes might amount to 1 degree C cooler, or 2 degree C cooler for that one day, but it adds up, and that 1 degree could represent massive amounts of air conditioner resource savings, combating global warming on the not having to burn fossil fuels but instead having a massive cheap diffuse shade above you periodically. Arizona or Las Vegas might pay a lot for such outer space shading, where different satellites with massive superlight umbrellas take turns flying over it, and open their umbrellas on a flyby.
Moreover the global energy budget is so massive, that a 1% change, or a fraction of 1% change is a massive change as far as equilibrium is concerned. As far as the internals of the Earth are concerned, the Le Chatelier principle says that Earth will react to both cooling or warming. Problem is it's easy to cool Earth, but if you overdo it, and temperatures start dropping, there is really no good way to fix that, other than creating a greenhouse atmosphere without any clouds. Combating global warming could be done from outer space, but combating global cooling, such as too many clouds, would mandate messing with the Earths internals.
Perhaps there are easy cloud killers that don't affect much else. You could seed clouds over arid agricultural areas that need precipitation, instead of the mountain slope where it would naturally happen, and you trade a bare mountainside for a fertile plain, and upsets in river patterns. That's very dangerous, the equilibriums in Earth's internals are so complex, that the only safe thing to do is to leave it the heck alone. But you mess with it by simply driving a car, and then leaving it alone as you mess with it on one side, well, that's a question for very careful debate.
One thing is for sure, there would be a limited amount of total global shade tolerable from outer space, and any limited resource, such as lack of parking spots in a city, commands a high price. So municipialities like Las Vegas could vote and pony up the dough for some shade, but a farmer out in nowhere land, he'd pretty much have to pick up whatever is left over and nobody bought.
Managing low Earth orbit satellites is much more complex, because you have to compute interferences from line of sight geostationary satellites, possibly complicating the GPS system, and more possibility for a malfunction. However if a solarstationary object that's very far away malfunctions, it may take months to get it fixed. But the solar stationary object would be fairly fixed, with a relatively constant effect on global warming, with possibly yearly or centennial adjustments needed, and a few months time may not be a big deal with it, compared to a highly complex open/close on flyby type low earth orbit system.
Even if price was not an issue, my favorite is still Office 2k because I click, blink, and when I open my eyes it's there, ready for use. No need to twiddle my thumbs on the table for 5 seconds. (If we only had an operating system like that, kind of like DOS used to be. Click click boom, done, ready, use me. Dehybernation of windows 2000 takes me 20 seconds too, and I only have 512 MB memory to hibernate.) So even Office 2002 is slow. Office 2000 is the optimum balance, tolerable amount of extra garbage compared to Office 97, but the Office 97 bugs have been ironed out from it(Office 97 has two service packs plus a unique identification remover, and it takes some time and a few reboots to install. When you purge your computer every few months to clean up the accumulated trash and reinstall everything from scratch, service packs of O97 compared to straight O2k ain't worth it). I might be able to use office 2002, but can't stand office 2003. I still have to use 2003 at work, at least until the computer gets upgraded to Vista! So anyway, I have clippy, but he politely asks: You've turned me off like 5 times already, do you want to permanently shut me up? And the answer is a wholehearted "YES!"
I forgot to say the most important aspect of it: you can always undo it (on a relative basis, there is nothing you can really undo). Mess with the internals of Earth's functioning, and good luck with trying to fix that.
Easiest way to geoengineer is to leave the Earth alone and control global warming from the radiation input the Earth receives from the Sun, by a small amount of artificial solar eclipse. Take up into space an ultralight collapsible mirror structure, whose transparency is electrically tunable. There is probably an equilibrium point between the Sun and Earth, where an object rotating on a solarstationary orbit at exactly the same speed as Earth receives just the right amount of average solar wind pressure to stay afloat and not fall into the Sun (orbits closer to the Sun need to go faster for the centrifugal force to equilibrate the Sun's attraction, but the extra solar wind force could be it). If part of the panels are solar panels, then possibly a particle capture/acceleration device with superhighspeed ejection toward the Sun could gain extra tunable floating ability. Or it could even be recharged with matter with periodic trips from Earth.
If the system is underfunded because of better mileage, then up the gas tax and retain privacy. At least things like On-Star are voluntarily giving up the right to privacy, or more exactly not giving it up, just not exersizing it.
Looking at the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
page, flywheels are in range of batteries. Someone else cited Activepower, who cited 99% energy efficiency on their systems. Wow, so flywheels might be better. On further investigation,
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS179065+30-Jul-2008+BW20080730
http://www.pentadyne.com/site/our-products/faq.html
says, as the most efficient magnetically levitated flywheels on the market, they comsume about 300W to maintain power levels of 190kW. (This loss is due to friction, even in a vacuum magnetically levitated device, because there is still eddy current drag - you'd need to spin either a superconductor, or an insulator.) Conventional flywheels need 2.3 kW instead of 300W to do the same.
This 300W represents 0.15% of 190 kW, and because the system is able to deliver 190kW for 10 s, the total energy is 1900 kWs(or kJ)=190/3600 kWh. So 1900 kJ requires 300 J to maintain each second, or 0.015%. Its storing efficiency is therefore 1-0.00015*t(s).
Flywheels are great for extremely short term uses, but in any application you pile on the seconds, the energy storage efficincy is dismal, much less than 99%. In fact 1900000J/300J gives you 6333 seconds, or about 1 hr 45 minutes before the device comes to a complete halt due to friction. Sodium sulfur batteries can store power much longer than 2 hrs.
No, I looked into it, (or tried looking, the data i've found not fully convincing yet) liquid water is very absorbant of high frequency electromagnetic radiation, including microwave, terahertz, infrared, uv, xray and gamma. In fact even the atmosphere is so absorbant of xray and gamma (water absorptivity minimum near 100 MeV) waves that observatories have to be in outer space. The lowest absorbance "window" of liquid water is in the blue range of the visible spectrum, and if a blue laser - such as shooting a blue laser at a satellite - doesn't work, other high data rate electromagnetic waves will probably work even less. So much for EM radiation. Other particles, especially charged ones, interact and get absorbed even stronger than non charged photons. Neutrinos would be the perfect particles, but the very reason that they don't interact much with liquid water, or any matter at all, makes them extremely difficult to detect (cubic km size icecube to detect a few particles), and the immense solar neutrino flux may "hose" any kind of communication attempt to use them.
You can still play chess or cards face to face with your friends. If you have any.
Actually, now that I think about it, even liquid water might be very penetrable to certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation other than ultralow frequencies - such as terahertz waves, or even xray or gamma ray waves. As long as you have very high frequencies the bandwith and antenna/detector size requirements would be much more practical. At frequencies above normal broadcast frequencies - such as microwave, terahertz, x ray or gamma rays the signal is very directional, meaning you can aim it. You just have to know your own position exactly in 3d space, and the receiving stations position, whether a satellite or land based station. You can simply chop a high frequency signal, such as done with transmitting Morse code via a light source from a ship, or in fiber optic cables.
How else will you put it into plain english terms? Derive your answers from the Maxwell equations? Like people really get the integrating of partial differentials and approximating of certain terms with constants under certain conditions in the equations. Let's start a discussion on how the solutions to the partial differential equations are affected by epsilon, mu, ro and nu - permittivity, permeability, charge density and frequency. I think explaining it like that on here would be more retarded, even though more precise. You always try to understand a problem intuively, and when that fails, you go to the complex math, and see if that helps you gain some intuition. You can't intuit 4d, except by examples of 2d in 3d. The math is always there, you're always free to play with the coordinates and equations, but sometimes people like the example of 2d sheet twisted in 3d as an aid to grasp at a 4d world, even if it's officially retarded way of explaining things, from a 4d mathematicians point of view.
Moreover even if it wasn't silly, and really worked well it would forbid the general public from fighting global warming this way unless a license is obtained from the patent holder, or 20 years wait time expires. How about we want to spend tax money to fight global warming, but an idiot patented the process and wants to charge us 100 trillion dollars - after all what's the planet worth to us? - that we can't afford, so we're forced to wait 20 years to let his patent expire and let the problem grow worse while we wait. But in the name of justice, it's a matter of principle, isn't it?
We're talking superhigh frequencies near 1 GHz. At such frequencies all of the electric/magnetic field generated "current" runs on the surface of wires anyway, not through the bulk, due to "skin effect". Or the electric/magnetic field can simply propagate through free space as electromagnetic radiation, like microwaves in your microwave oven, or light through empty space. Light propagates better through vacuum than through a copper wire, doesn't it?
Calling MS Tech support from a submarine? Or logging on to windows update to patch security holes? Come on now, if the thing works, and you can reinstall it at pleasure without having to activate it each time, then you don't care about support. It doesn't need to be updated if it works right.
Actually, reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines, you can communicate TO a submarine, but NOT FROM it. The reason is the sheer size of the antenna at extremely low frequencies - over 30 miles separation between two electrodes. The US had 72 Hz, Russians 82 Hz, with a data throughput of a few characters a minute.
There are no chatrooms or email or internet in general accessible from underwater, so a backdoor is useless. But there is still probably a way to remotely access a sub computer, but it needs extra gear/antenna to give off EM signals via a 50 bit/sec modem connection. 50 Hz or 60 Hz ultralong wavelength waves travel relatively well in water too, but the bandwith is dismal. Also there is a lot of background noise from the power grid, but that can stealth the unusually high spectral activity there, which is usually ignored anyway from a spectrum scan. Then you're talking about localization - a ship from the surface nearby trying to directionally listen in on the 50 or 60 Hz waves given off by the submarine and filter out the massive noise from the power grid above the surface. Having the sub physically radiate signals needs more than just a port open on an internet connected computer, needs more than just software, it needs hardware - antennas or power supplies that transfer the radio signals onto the power cord, and may also need physical access. So from this point of view, a sub not being connected to the internet at all, subs are safe. The bigger safety issue is that Windows is not a real time operating system - response time is not guaranteed. In control applications, such as nuclear, guaranteed response time is a safety issue, and sometimes you need 20 millisecond response time or so. It's rare that windows doesn't respond to a process for seconds, or minutes, but unless response time is guaranteed, you never know when you're gonna have the bad luck. Of course a system crash gives you no response at all, and that's worse than anything. The safest thing is still a PLC or an assembler programmed microcontroller, because there you know exactly what the computer is doing. Even a mictrocontroller compiled C program with optimizations turned on can pull some unexpected tricks on you, where you think the computer is doing one thing, while the compiler used a trick that may not have been your intention to use in that particular case. What windows does is I think a big mystery, even to their creators. It seems to work, and the rate of finding bugs has been on the decline, so we use it, but to say you know exactly what's going on, that's an overstatement. Put it on a submarine, and it seems to work, cross your fingers, hope it works for as long as you need it, and if not, oh well, there are a whole lot of other things that can miserably fail, life is full of risks, not everything is perfect in real life. Might be the economical way to take risks. Driving cars is a safety hazard, you can die from it, but people do it because of the benefits. Windows is riskier than a PLC, but it may still be the wiser choice, in case you did carefully weigh all the things that matter. But with nuclear things "if things go haywire oh well, tough luck" is usually not the correct strategy. Absolutely certain assurance and multiple redundancy on top of it is more like it.
There must be a whole lot of optical illusion issues with such a dotted design.
I would much prefer one who wasn't always happy to clean up after me, but if I asked her to, she'd randomly tell me no. Isn't that so much more fun? There is a reason why women are moody, it's because men love the complexity, despite what all the bitching and complaining would let you believe. Women are lovely because of mental reasons, not simply physical. A simple robot can be programmed to serve you, do anything you want, but that's not gonna stop making you feel lonely. There is no game in that.
Just like there are telesurgeries, maybe one day cybersex will be messing with your own robot whose e-motions are controlled by somebody on the other end of the line. Talk about expensive gear. How about a morphing skin robot that takes on the features and bodily appearance of whoever you see on the webcam, with measurements, size, facial features, including body hair, etc. Get to know each other even before you meet?
How about give them jobs to make better money than having to get involved with stealing copper? People first steal copper because they have to or have nothing better to do, and then once they are hooked on the easy money, it's hard to shed the addiction and the habit.
They could put tracers in it as an alloy, something like 10 ppb samarium, or cerium, especially stuff that doesn't co-occur in copper ores. Different tracers into different end uses. Wait, scratch that, because you can always electrolytically refine melted down copper slabs and then it's all done with, tracers don't follow during electrolysis they either sludge out or stay in solution. Copper is copper and there is nothing exactly like it. Still, aluminum should be good enough, especially for nonflexible conduits.
I somehow wandered over to the Marquis de Sade wikipedia pages today. You may want to check out that page as a counterargument to what you say here. More exactly, an argument about things going out of balance on that side, the other extreme, at least as far as violence/sex is concered. It's interesting though how a lot of feminists in the 20th century became protective of him. The very people protesting objectifying and abusing women. People are difficult creatures to understand. But you're absolutely right otherwise. In everything, balance is the key, if you can find a way to maintain it, including violence/sex/comedy.