Cyanobacteria use phycocyanin for photosynthesis, as an accessory pigment to chlorophyll. A number of pigments can serve accessory to chlorophyll, and there are several types of chlorophyll. Larger multicellular organisms such as trees other macroscopic plants can use a number of these pigments together to capture a broader range of the EM spectrum and therefore more energy from sunlight. Cyanobacteria use only a narrow range of the EM spectrum for photosynthesis because they use only a narrow range of pigments. I was given the benefit of the doubt in my calculation of the best-case scenario, but logically the energy efficiency therefore must be FAR below the photosynthetic limit of ~14%, which makes this company's claims thermodynamically impossible and patently absurd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Efficiencyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteriahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycocyaninhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_pigment
Definitely too good to be true.
The energy contained in 15,000 gallons of biodiesel ~= 10,000 gallons x 133,000 BTU/gallon x.000293 kwh/BTU = 0.58 MM kwh
The energy falling on one acre of land in the tropics ~= 5kwh/m2/day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4 MM kwh/year/acre
So they're capturing 8% of ALL solar energy falling on each acre of land in their fuel, assuming they are in the tropics and not in the continental United States. The efficiency limit for photosynthesis is around 14%, which isn't calculated on a per-acre basis, but on a molecular exposure basis. Even if you could cover each acre with pure chlorophyll, the conversion efficiency would not exceed 14%.
So they are claiming they will exceed 50% of the theoretical photosynthetic limit AFTER all the energy and efficiency loss of processing, for a net yield of 15,000 gallons? Total BS. If they claimed 1000-2000 gallons, maybe, but with their claims you can bet it's a pump-and-dump green stock scam.
Oops, my bad, I read 40,000, not 20,000. So their actually at 10% efficiency, which while unlikely at least has the merit of not being theoretically impossible.
The energy contained in 40,000 gallons of B85 biodiesel = 40,000 gallons x 133,000 BTU/gallon x.000293 kwh/BTU = 1.55 MM kwh
The energy falling on one acre of land ~= 5kwh/m2/day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4 MM kwh/year/acre
So they're capturing 21% of ALL solar energy falling on each acre of land in their fuel. The efficiency limit for photosynthesis is around 15%, which isn't calculated on a per-acre basis, but on a molecular exposure basis. Even if you could cover each acre with pure chlorophyll, the conversion efficiency would not exceed 15%.
This is therefore a green scam, undoubtedly designed to temporarily pump the company's stock. The last big one I heard of to do this was Valcent Technology's subsidiary Global Green Solutions.
Don't believe the hype, especially when it's physically impossible.
I downloaded Windows 7 RC and for most stuff it's actually fine - I'm using it as I write this. Not unbelievable, but quite good... once it's working. Fast, pretty stable, all that stuff. But some serious problems getting it working.
First, the activation key didn't work for me. I did it all legit: downloaded and installed W7 from microsoft.com, created a live.com ID, got the activation key, pasted it in and "we're sorry, the activation key you entered is not valid for this version of Windows". Just plain broken shit, no excuse.
Dude, if you can't fucking get your basic shit together, why wouldn't I just use Ubuntu? With Linux, if it doesn't work at least I have the consolation that it's free.
It's like test driving a prototype Chevy and the fucking _key_ doesn't work. Pro Tip 1, you moron engineers, the FIRST thing you make sure works on a new car/OS/whatever is the FUCKING KEY.
Pro Tip 2, you FUCKING IDIOTS: before you release a new OS for testing, the second thing after making sure the FUCKING KEY works is to make sure YOUR OWN FUCKING SOFTWARE WILL INSTALL ON IT.
Seriously. This is stupidity on the "I forgot to put my pants on before I went to work this morning" level.
"Pass"? That's your argument? It's written on an old piece of paper, therefore you don't need to mount a logical defense of the criticism of privatizing all goods and services in a modern global economy? Since when does any theory, economic or otherwise, get a pass? Oh I know - it's like when Copernicus and Galileo said "The Earth goes around the Sun" and the Church pointed to what was written on an old piece of paper and said "pass".
The truth is, tabloid (i.e. neoclassical) economic theory does a shite job of arguing for privatization of a whole range of public goods and services, particularly those that were traditionally under common property rights regimes.
Any real economist will tell you that most markets must be regulated or else they tend toward inefficiency, that profitable markets are inefficient by definition (because economic rents, aka net profit, can only be extracted from an uncompetitive and opaque market), and many markets - like the ones mentioned by the parent poster - are too inefficient for private ownership at all.
Couldn't agree more. iPhone works like complete shit where I am unless I log into my home wireless network with cable internet. On 3G it's slower than 14.4 modem. The internet is virtually unusable for anything but gmail. Weather info almost never updates. The iPhone has great potential, but in my experience it basically just sucks shit in real life when running on AT&T's network, and isn't worth the money - especially since it's far faster to text with a full qwerty keypad.
I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here
No offense to West Point and the other military academies, but I'd like to see NSA take on the top team from MIT, Cal Tech, etc and see how they fare before putting total confidence in the NSA.
While I agree that the Next Generation lacked depth in the sense that more or less all of its characters were cut from a single moral mold (unlike, say, the new Battlestar Galactica), I think that all the stuff about being needing to be able to 'relate' to characters in order to be interested in them is overrated.
I can't really 'relate' to Superman, Darth Vader, Captain Kirk or Captain Piccard and yet they some of my favorite characters of all time.
I'm far, far less interested in characters who share my own character flaws and would sooner stick pins in my eyes than watch reality shows, dramas or sitcoms about more 'relatable' characters.
My personal take is that the story and character interaction needs to be dynamic, with moral dilmenas and problems that are not simple or black and white enough to be solved with phasers or a punch in the face in order to be interesting. And that's it. I don't need a character to be an alcoholic or a single parent or someone wracked with guilt or a betrayed friend or an embittered rival or any of a hundred other stock cardboard cutouts in order to 'relate' to them. When a person is faced with a tough situation and no easy choices, I find it interesting, whether their own personal backstory (or lack thereof) is one I have firsthand knowledge of or not.
Maybe they should put the review of the 150,000 ideas out to the public as well? They'd probably get a lot of interesting (and some useful) feedback. Crowd-sourcing the review would probably make sure that the best ideas did indeed percolate to the top. They might also attract other sources of funding too. Not sure why Google is playing this all so close to the chest if the goal is to save the world. Seems like they only want to save the world so long as they control the process and get the credit. Hmm...
I recently tried Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 on my older laptop. To my dismay, neither worked out of the box, nor could I overcome driver problems in a reasonable time period (1 hour). So, back to XP. It's frustrating. I haven't tried a slackware distro in ages, so maybe I'll give that a shot but my hopes for working broadcom 43xx wifi drivers aren't high... Harder to understand why radeon xpress cards aren't supported in Windows 7 given that they work fine in Vista...
So, drivers are my first big complaint, but right up there are all the problems of bloat you describe. It just seems ludicrous that MS Office needs GB of RAM to run well. I'm old enough to remember GUI running spreadsheet apps on a C64 (yeah, that would be 64 kilobytes of RAM) using GEOS (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/GEOS).
You make a good point, and provide evidence in favor of the argument against any and all corporate taxes. It makes much more sense all around to simply tax the owners of corporations.
What we need is just what common sense tells us: a heavily progressive income (including capital gains) tax structure, as originally suggested by Thomas Jefferson:"exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
Require companies to generate ONE set of financial statements each year, not two.
At present, companies create one set of financial statements for shareholders (showing big profits) and one statement for the IRS (showing little or no profits). A simple law that forbids this two-faced scheme would do a great deal to bring companies in line.
You miss the point. The details of the Bush administration's restrictions on scientific research are irrelevant.
What is relevant is that the Bush administration crossed the line that separates Church and State by imposing a religiously-based notion of morality on our entire nation. It doesn't matter how, it only matters why the administration interfered with scientific research. Worse still, in a competitive world this put our entire nation at a profound competitive disadvantage for 8 years.
So not only were my rights to religious freedom violated by the Bush administration, my livelihood and that of my children and grandchildren has been threatened as a result. I along with millions of others believe such trampling of constitutional rights to be a crime tantamount to treason, and that the Bush administration should be prosecuted accordingly.
Particulate matter that settles decreases albedo (reflectiveness) of ice, and causes heating. But airborne particulate matter and aerosol emissions _increase_ albedo, making the atmosphere more reflective. The net effect, as I understand it, seems to favor reflectivity, which suggests that cleaning up PM10 and PM20 air pollution, and especially SOx emissions, would result in more rapid warming.
Oh, there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen. It's massively corrosive, for example, and since it's comprised of just protons it's got an amazing ability to escape through microscopic cracks and holes in materials. Add those factors together with the need for 15000 psi and/or cryogenics to get it into a compressed semi-liquid or slush state, and you've got pipe connections that won't last for any significant length of time before becoming so leaky as to be more or less useless.
Hydrogen is absolutely DOA as a combustion fuel, and probably for a fuel-cell based energy source as well.
The total loss of primary energy is around 70%, meaning that, on average, for every joule of energy stored in the fuel (coal, oil, gas, uranium) only 0.3 joules gets delivered to the consumer.
From well to wheel, the energy loss of transmitting electricity is considerably higher than the energy loss of transporting liquid fuel (gasoline, diesel) to the consumer. So much so, in fact, that even though electric drivetrains are much more efficient that ICEs the total fuel cycle efficiency is higher for ICE vehicles given the US's current energy mix (again, on average).
When every state is like Oregon, getting most of its electricity from renewables, then it'll be a different story.
The distinction between value and utility also seems skewed. The two are not remotely the same, even in purely financial transactions. Add to that all other 'transactions' across a 'network', such as me posting this comment to slashdot, that are non-financial but which certainly have utility, and you're nowhere near a meaningful valuation of said network.
So I'm forced to agree with the cynics: this seems to be a put-up job designed to make it easier to assign $$ losses resulting from network outages in court cases.
This is probably dumb, but can't ISPs/networks put spam filtering policies in place and then monitor and enforce their connections?
Say you're Yahoo: put spam filters on all outgoing mail, in addition to those already filtering incoming mail. Now whenever Google gets mail from Yahoo's domain, if something is spam then Yahoo gets a point against it. More than, say, 10,000 points per hour and Google imposes a latency penalty on all its connections to Yahoo. Escalating penalties for ongoing violations.
Think of it like fines: if you don't take care of your spam, your network will run slow as shit when it interfaces with us. Don't like your servers having to wait 10 seconds for each packet/parity test/ping/whatever? Then filter your outgoing mail better. Can't get your filters working up to snuff? Then try making it impossible to do bulk mailing from accounts that aren't at least X months old. etc, etc, etc.
This utilizes the market dominance of the major email providers like Google and Yahoo to impose a penalty on ISPs and anonymizing services that don't police their traffic for spam.
So if you're some seedy ISP in Romania that's pumping billions of message per day into Google's servers, Google effectively caps the bandwidth from that server. If the Romanian ISP's mailserver lets users send everything through a an anonymizing service or proxy, then that anonymizing service or proxy will get hit with the cap instead. Then when the anonymizer service realizes its system is only getting 10kbps to Google, it'll ban all the crap coming from the Romanian ISP. Even if spammers chained stuff through a dozen anonymizers, it'd get back to the Romanian ISP eventually.
If you're really a mathematician and you disagree with the premise that economic growth cannot continue in perpetuity against a finite resource base, then you need to ask for your money back from whatever 'institution' gave you a degree.
Population growth remains the single greatest driver of unsustainability on our planet. To date there is no socially acceptable method for enforcing population growth control anywhere on Earth, whether in Africa as you so disparagingly suggest in your fruitcake allusions to the Club of Rome New World Order conspiracy theory nonsense, or right here in the United States.
Since apparently my imagination is lacking, I invite you to suggest an balancing feedback loop likely to stabilize the system in the face on continue population and economic growth drawing from a finite (and dwindling) resource base. Good luck.
Is that right? Economists don't tell you to, say, work for below a liveable wage? That's funny because they seem to have convinced congress there's no need for a minimum wage in a 'free' market. Maybe that's why congress gave themselves raises every year or two for the last 15 years while the minimum wage stagnated until last year. Economists don't tell you that you don't need universal health care? That's funny, because last time I checked there were 50 million people in this country without health insurance and millions more who have private insurance but who can't get benefits out of their insurers, all while economists say that universal healthcare is the work of the Devil and the free market is the solution to everything. Economists don't tell you to invest in the stock market or in junk securities backed by subprime mortgages? They sure told a lot of investors to do that - millions of people who are just slightly pissed at the moment. Economists don't tell you to buy shoes made in sweatshops by children instead of shoes made sustainably here at home? That's funny, because they sure seem to trumpet the cause of globalization pretty loudly and they seem to have done a good job of convincing congress that it's more important for Phil Knight and other Nike shareholders to make money off of foreign sweatshops than for US citizens to earn a living from jobs at home.
People who see the writing on the wall about climate change and degradation of essential ecosystems services are advocating for personal responsibility. Economists advocate for maximizing self-interest, irrespective of the consequences to others or to future generations.
No one likes to be told what to do. But when our entire society has shifted into a mode where the 'right' thing to do is act like a sociopath, me-me-me-fuck-everyone-else-and-the-planet-and-anything-that-gets-between-me-and-my-latte-and-SUV then it's time to smack some sense into folks before the whole ship goes down.
I think what you mean is that economic theory has proven itself to be completely flawed. Or maybe the Wall Street collapse I recall from a few months ago is just a figment of my imagination. Or maybe the growing gap between rich and poor both in the United States itself and between rich and poor countries over the last 50 years is just a figment of my imagination, despite economic theory claiming that globalization and freeing of markets would close the socioeconomic equity gap.
The reason why climate science has had little impact on human society is that climate changes slowly. Plate tectonics is slow too. I suppose just because you can't see it happening in front of your eyes means it must be false too, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Cyanobacteria use phycocyanin for photosynthesis, as an accessory pigment to chlorophyll. A number of pigments can serve accessory to chlorophyll, and there are several types of chlorophyll. Larger multicellular organisms such as trees other macroscopic plants can use a number of these pigments together to capture a broader range of the EM spectrum and therefore more energy from sunlight. Cyanobacteria use only a narrow range of the EM spectrum for photosynthesis because they use only a narrow range of pigments. I was given the benefit of the doubt in my calculation of the best-case scenario, but logically the energy efficiency therefore must be FAR below the photosynthetic limit of ~14%, which makes this company's claims thermodynamically impossible and patently absurd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycocyanin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_pigment
typo shows "10,000" gallons instead of 15,000, but calculation is still correct...
Definitely too good to be true. The energy contained in 15,000 gallons of biodiesel ~= 10,000 gallons x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 0.58 MM kwh
The energy falling on one acre of land in the tropics ~= 5kwh/m2/day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4 MM kwh/year/acre
So they're capturing 8% of ALL solar energy falling on each acre of land in their fuel, assuming they are in the tropics and not in the continental United States. The efficiency limit for photosynthesis is around 14%, which isn't calculated on a per-acre basis, but on a molecular exposure basis. Even if you could cover each acre with pure chlorophyll, the conversion efficiency would not exceed 14%.
So they are claiming they will exceed 50% of the theoretical photosynthetic limit AFTER all the energy and efficiency loss of processing, for a net yield of 15,000 gallons? Total BS. If they claimed 1000-2000 gallons, maybe, but with their claims you can bet it's a pump-and-dump green stock scam.
Oops, my bad, I read 40,000, not 20,000. So their actually at 10% efficiency, which while unlikely at least has the merit of not being theoretically impossible.
The energy contained in 40,000 gallons of B85 biodiesel = 40,000 gallons x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 1.55 MM kwh
The energy falling on one acre of land ~= 5kwh/m2/day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4 MM kwh/year/acre
So they're capturing 21% of ALL solar energy falling on each acre of land in their fuel. The efficiency limit for photosynthesis is around 15%, which isn't calculated on a per-acre basis, but on a molecular exposure basis. Even if you could cover each acre with pure chlorophyll, the conversion efficiency would not exceed 15%.
This is therefore a green scam, undoubtedly designed to temporarily pump the company's stock. The last big one I heard of to do this was Valcent Technology's subsidiary Global Green Solutions. Don't believe the hype, especially when it's physically impossible.
"We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect"
Because nothing says dignity and respect like working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour...
Not complete? No shit.
I downloaded Windows 7 RC and for most stuff it's actually fine - I'm using it as I write this. Not unbelievable, but quite good ... once it's working. Fast, pretty stable, all that stuff. But some serious problems getting it working.
First, the activation key didn't work for me. I did it all legit: downloaded and installed W7 from microsoft.com, created a live.com ID, got the activation key, pasted it in and "we're sorry, the activation key you entered is not valid for this version of Windows". Just plain broken shit, no excuse.
Dude, if you can't fucking get your basic shit together, why wouldn't I just use Ubuntu? With Linux, if it doesn't work at least I have the consolation that it's free.
It's like test driving a prototype Chevy and the fucking _key_ doesn't work. Pro Tip 1, you moron engineers, the FIRST thing you make sure works on a new car/OS/whatever is the FUCKING KEY.
The comedy continues. There's also a bug in the W7 RC that causes the OS to crash when running installer packages off CDs ... from Microsoft... So I, like hundreds of others, had to do a reg-edit hack to install MICROSOFT OFFICE. http://windows7news.com/2009/01/21/fix-for-installers-and-updates-crashing-in-windows-7/
Pro Tip 2, you FUCKING IDIOTS: before you release a new OS for testing, the second thing after making sure the FUCKING KEY works is to make sure YOUR OWN FUCKING SOFTWARE WILL INSTALL ON IT.
Seriously. This is stupidity on the "I forgot to put my pants on before I went to work this morning" level.
"Pass"? That's your argument? It's written on an old piece of paper, therefore you don't need to mount a logical defense of the criticism of privatizing all goods and services in a modern global economy? Since when does any theory, economic or otherwise, get a pass? Oh I know - it's like when Copernicus and Galileo said "The Earth goes around the Sun" and the Church pointed to what was written on an old piece of paper and said "pass".
The truth is, tabloid (i.e. neoclassical) economic theory does a shite job of arguing for privatization of a whole range of public goods and services, particularly those that were traditionally under common property rights regimes.
Any real economist will tell you that most markets must be regulated or else they tend toward inefficiency, that profitable markets are inefficient by definition (because economic rents, aka net profit, can only be extracted from an uncompetitive and opaque market), and many markets - like the ones mentioned by the parent poster - are too inefficient for private ownership at all.
Couldn't agree more. iPhone works like complete shit where I am unless I log into my home wireless network with cable internet. On 3G it's slower than 14.4 modem. The internet is virtually unusable for anything but gmail. Weather info almost never updates. The iPhone has great potential, but in my experience it basically just sucks shit in real life when running on AT&T's network, and isn't worth the money - especially since it's far faster to text with a full qwerty keypad.
I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here
No offense to West Point and the other military academies, but I'd like to see NSA take on the top team from MIT, Cal Tech, etc and see how they fare before putting total confidence in the NSA.
While I agree that the Next Generation lacked depth in the sense that more or less all of its characters were cut from a single moral mold (unlike, say, the new Battlestar Galactica), I think that all the stuff about being needing to be able to 'relate' to characters in order to be interested in them is overrated.
I can't really 'relate' to Superman, Darth Vader, Captain Kirk or Captain Piccard and yet they some of my favorite characters of all time.
I'm far, far less interested in characters who share my own character flaws and would sooner stick pins in my eyes than watch reality shows, dramas or sitcoms about more 'relatable' characters.
My personal take is that the story and character interaction needs to be dynamic, with moral dilmenas and problems that are not simple or black and white enough to be solved with phasers or a punch in the face in order to be interesting. And that's it. I don't need a character to be an alcoholic or a single parent or someone wracked with guilt or a betrayed friend or an embittered rival or any of a hundred other stock cardboard cutouts in order to 'relate' to them. When a person is faced with a tough situation and no easy choices, I find it interesting, whether their own personal backstory (or lack thereof) is one I have firsthand knowledge of or not.
Maybe they should put the review of the 150,000 ideas out to the public as well? They'd probably get a lot of interesting (and some useful) feedback. Crowd-sourcing the review would probably make sure that the best ideas did indeed percolate to the top. They might also attract other sources of funding too. Not sure why Google is playing this all so close to the chest if the goal is to save the world. Seems like they only want to save the world so long as they control the process and get the credit. Hmm...
I recently tried Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 on my older laptop. To my dismay, neither worked out of the box, nor could I overcome driver problems in a reasonable time period (1 hour). So, back to XP. It's frustrating. I haven't tried a slackware distro in ages, so maybe I'll give that a shot but my hopes for working broadcom 43xx wifi drivers aren't high... Harder to understand why radeon xpress cards aren't supported in Windows 7 given that they work fine in Vista...
So, drivers are my first big complaint, but right up there are all the problems of bloat you describe. It just seems ludicrous that MS Office needs GB of RAM to run well. I'm old enough to remember GUI running spreadsheet apps on a C64 (yeah, that would be 64 kilobytes of RAM) using GEOS (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/GEOS).
You make a good point, and provide evidence in favor of the argument against any and all corporate taxes. It makes much more sense all around to simply tax the owners of corporations.
What we need is just what common sense tells us: a heavily progressive income (including capital gains) tax structure, as originally suggested by Thomas Jefferson:"exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
Here's another option:
Require companies to generate ONE set of financial statements each year, not two.
At present, companies create one set of financial statements for shareholders (showing big profits) and one statement for the IRS (showing little or no profits). A simple law that forbids this two-faced scheme would do a great deal to bring companies in line.
You miss the point. The details of the Bush administration's restrictions on scientific research are irrelevant.
What is relevant is that the Bush administration crossed the line that separates Church and State by imposing a religiously-based notion of morality on our entire nation. It doesn't matter how, it only matters why the administration interfered with scientific research. Worse still, in a competitive world this put our entire nation at a profound competitive disadvantage for 8 years.
So not only were my rights to religious freedom violated by the Bush administration, my livelihood and that of my children and grandchildren has been threatened as a result. I along with millions of others believe such trampling of constitutional rights to be a crime tantamount to treason, and that the Bush administration should be prosecuted accordingly.
That's the issue.
Particulate matter that settles decreases albedo (reflectiveness) of ice, and causes heating. But airborne particulate matter and aerosol emissions _increase_ albedo, making the atmosphere more reflective. The net effect, as I understand it, seems to favor reflectivity, which suggests that cleaning up PM10 and PM20 air pollution, and especially SOx emissions, would result in more rapid warming.
Oh, there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen. It's massively corrosive, for example, and since it's comprised of just protons it's got an amazing ability to escape through microscopic cracks and holes in materials. Add those factors together with the need for 15000 psi and/or cryogenics to get it into a compressed semi-liquid or slush state, and you've got pipe connections that won't last for any significant length of time before becoming so leaky as to be more or less useless.
Hydrogen is absolutely DOA as a combustion fuel, and probably for a fuel-cell based energy source as well.
The total loss of primary energy is around 70%, meaning that, on average, for every joule of energy stored in the fuel (coal, oil, gas, uranium) only 0.3 joules gets delivered to the consumer. From well to wheel, the energy loss of transmitting electricity is considerably higher than the energy loss of transporting liquid fuel (gasoline, diesel) to the consumer. So much so, in fact, that even though electric drivetrains are much more efficient that ICEs the total fuel cycle efficiency is higher for ICE vehicles given the US's current energy mix (again, on average). When every state is like Oregon, getting most of its electricity from renewables, then it'll be a different story.
The distinction between value and utility also seems skewed. The two are not remotely the same, even in purely financial transactions. Add to that all other 'transactions' across a 'network', such as me posting this comment to slashdot, that are non-financial but which certainly have utility, and you're nowhere near a meaningful valuation of said network.
So I'm forced to agree with the cynics: this seems to be a put-up job designed to make it easier to assign $$ losses resulting from network outages in court cases.
This is probably dumb, but can't ISPs/networks put spam filtering policies in place and then monitor and enforce their connections?
Say you're Yahoo: put spam filters on all outgoing mail, in addition to those already filtering incoming mail. Now whenever Google gets mail from Yahoo's domain, if something is spam then Yahoo gets a point against it. More than, say, 10,000 points per hour and Google imposes a latency penalty on all its connections to Yahoo. Escalating penalties for ongoing violations.
Think of it like fines: if you don't take care of your spam, your network will run slow as shit when it interfaces with us. Don't like your servers having to wait 10 seconds for each packet/parity test/ping/whatever? Then filter your outgoing mail better. Can't get your filters working up to snuff? Then try making it impossible to do bulk mailing from accounts that aren't at least X months old. etc, etc, etc.
This utilizes the market dominance of the major email providers like Google and Yahoo to impose a penalty on ISPs and anonymizing services that don't police their traffic for spam.
So if you're some seedy ISP in Romania that's pumping billions of message per day into Google's servers, Google effectively caps the bandwidth from that server. If the Romanian ISP's mailserver lets users send everything through a an anonymizing service or proxy, then that anonymizing service or proxy will get hit with the cap instead. Then when the anonymizer service realizes its system is only getting 10kbps to Google, it'll ban all the crap coming from the Romanian ISP. Even if spammers chained stuff through a dozen anonymizers, it'd get back to the Romanian ISP eventually.
That's my theory. It's probably stupid.
Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin
Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is cool. But I'd still much rather hear that there'd been a breakthrough in making skin from stem cells.
If you're really a mathematician and you disagree with the premise that economic growth cannot continue in perpetuity against a finite resource base, then you need to ask for your money back from whatever 'institution' gave you a degree.
Population growth remains the single greatest driver of unsustainability on our planet. To date there is no socially acceptable method for enforcing population growth control anywhere on Earth, whether in Africa as you so disparagingly suggest in your fruitcake allusions to the Club of Rome New World Order conspiracy theory nonsense, or right here in the United States.
Since apparently my imagination is lacking, I invite you to suggest an balancing feedback loop likely to stabilize the system in the face on continue population and economic growth drawing from a finite (and dwindling) resource base. Good luck.
Economists don't tell me what to do.
Is that right? Economists don't tell you to, say, work for below a liveable wage? That's funny because they seem to have convinced congress there's no need for a minimum wage in a 'free' market. Maybe that's why congress gave themselves raises every year or two for the last 15 years while the minimum wage stagnated until last year. Economists don't tell you that you don't need universal health care? That's funny, because last time I checked there were 50 million people in this country without health insurance and millions more who have private insurance but who can't get benefits out of their insurers, all while economists say that universal healthcare is the work of the Devil and the free market is the solution to everything. Economists don't tell you to invest in the stock market or in junk securities backed by subprime mortgages? They sure told a lot of investors to do that - millions of people who are just slightly pissed at the moment. Economists don't tell you to buy shoes made in sweatshops by children instead of shoes made sustainably here at home? That's funny, because they sure seem to trumpet the cause of globalization pretty loudly and they seem to have done a good job of convincing congress that it's more important for Phil Knight and other Nike shareholders to make money off of foreign sweatshops than for US citizens to earn a living from jobs at home.
People who see the writing on the wall about climate change and degradation of essential ecosystems services are advocating for personal responsibility. Economists advocate for maximizing self-interest, irrespective of the consequences to others or to future generations.
No one likes to be told what to do. But when our entire society has shifted into a mode where the 'right' thing to do is act like a sociopath, me-me-me-fuck-everyone-else-and-the-planet-and-anything-that-gets-between-me-and-my-latte-and-SUV then it's time to smack some sense into folks before the whole ship goes down.
I think what you mean is that economic theory has proven itself to be completely flawed. Or maybe the Wall Street collapse I recall from a few months ago is just a figment of my imagination. Or maybe the growing gap between rich and poor both in the United States itself and between rich and poor countries over the last 50 years is just a figment of my imagination, despite economic theory claiming that globalization and freeing of markets would close the socioeconomic equity gap.
The reason why climate science has had little impact on human society is that climate changes slowly. Plate tectonics is slow too. I suppose just because you can't see it happening in front of your eyes means it must be false too, right?