More and more often these days, I have seen doctors, medical centers, and hospitals grousing about high malpractice insurance. The problem is not that some doctors are being unfairly punished by malpractice litigation, but that ALL doctors within a given specialty within a region face the same rising liability premiums. IMHO, it is really their own fault because they would rather "band together" against public disclosure of malpractice suits, medical board judgements, etc.
Another/. poster indicated that however bad the practice of medicine is within the USA today, that nationalized healthcare would be worse. Yet some of my personal experiences with the USA's medical profession would tend to indicate that it couldn't get much worse. Without time and money to pursue the "bad apples" in the medical profession through the legal system, many patients are treated little better than the "human lab rats" of the Nazi or Manchurian Nippon concentration camps of World War II.
If the state medical boards cannot be convinced that it is in the best interests of their good medical professionals to "weed out" their incompetent or corrupt "brethern", then the states or the national legislatures need to force new laws that create publically available websites that can be used by prospective victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpatients to avoid the bad practitioners. And since it is so easy for a doctor to scoot across state lines and establish a whole new set of victims, a national database would be the better solution.
How very "Polyannaish" of you. Yucca Mountain was picked because it has abandoned salt mines that will be used to store casks of highly radioactive waste. Unfortunately, much radioactive waste has an "active" lifetime of far more than 10,000 years. Pt (or Plutonium) has a half-life of 20,000 years, so it may take 10 iterations of 20,000 years for that portion of the radioactive waste to become (relatively) safe. The storage casks are not designed to last 10,000 years -- the DoE designed "monitoring safegaurds" to detect when a cask starts leaking. And, of course, the DoE HAS projected maintainance costs (labor, materials, and liability) out 10,000 years as part of their budget -- NOT!
Finally, vast portions of the desert Southwest was an inland sea thousands of years ago (hence the source of the salt that was mined there.) There is no guarantee that climactic changes, like global warming, will not turn that desert back into an inland sea well before the radioactivity has reduced to safe levels in those "leak-proof" casks. Nor is there any reason to believe that mankind will advance technologically for another 5,000 years instead of blowing ourselves up and back to a new "stone age". Certainly, this vague hope of advancement cannot be used to justify actions that are already known to be deadly poisonous to every living thing on this planet.
Nuclear power is cheap and convenient only so long as the long term impact (financial and environmental) of the safe disposal of high level radioactive waste is left out of the calculations. Reliance upon unknown future technological advances in the storage of radioactive waste is about as smart as reliance upon the Second Coming of Christ to deal with such human "foolishness". But the regime currently in power apparently subscribes to one or the other (or both) of these "solutions" to the long term safe storage of nuclear waste. I, for one, do not.
Your statement would seem to imply that nuclear technology has advanced so far that there are no longer any issues with this power source. AFAIK there is still a problem concerning high level radioactive waste (spent fuel, core, primary cooling system), since some of it has a half-life of 20,000 years.
Radioactive half-life does NOT mean that in 20,000 years the radiation will automagically disappear -- it only means that just half of the radioactivity will be gone in that time. It might take 10 iterations of 20,000 years for the radiation of some items (like spent nuclear fuel) to decay to the point of relative safety.
No known government or corporation has every existed for 2,000 years, let alone 20,000 or 200,00 years. The only institution that I know of that has lasted that long is the Roman (christian) Church. I have yet to see any politician, Dept of Energy bureaucrat, or nuclear industy spokesperson publically suggest the formation of a "nuclear priesthood" to keep watch over, monitor and maintain radioactive waste casks for the next 100,000 years. Nor, for that matter, have I seen any of these same people incorporate 100,000 years worth of labor, materials, or liability in their claims of "cheap nuclear power". The closest was an early Dept of Energy claim that nuclear power plants would produce electricity that would be "too cheap to meter" (, and this propaganda was found to be completely false.)
Interesting idea about not speculating in real estate due to Global Warming, but I think your premise is incorrect.
If Global Warming is not uniform (likely), there will still be an increase in the number and severity of differential weather patterns -- the result may include wider temperature extremes at a higher average temperature in the atmosphere and oceans. Warmer average air and water temperature means more retained moisture in the air, so some areas may experience more severe droughts while other areas may get far too much rainfall.
As I see it, there are two sometimes conflicting results of (average) Global Warming -- warmer and wetter might mean more glaciation and wintewr snow pack, while colder and drier might result in bloody cold deserts. On the whole, greater temperature and moisture extremes will result in more violent weather, effecting coastal storms as well as tornado activity. Changing weather patterns may shift or expand regions of tornado activity, but without a dramatic rise in sea level, coastal areas are not likely to shift.
The end result, IMHO, is that there will be a greater chance of typhoons and hurricanes hitting coastal regions, while tornados will become less predictable. I, for one, will not be buying retirement property on any coastline.
You have to be aware by now that George W. Bush and his neo-Con(artist) cohorts in the US Congress are not now, and have never been "conservatives" (in the classical definition.) What they are are died-in-the-wool national (corporate) socialist opportunists who are perfectly willing to create new crises, if only to find the profit in it.
The term "penny wise and pound foolish" comes to mind regarding both the optional (and ill-advised, ill-timed, and poorly executed) war in Iraq, AND this administration's focus on reducing Federal expenditures on American infrastructure in favor of tax cuts to their cronies. Failure to spend $500 million USD in a timely manner on the levee system has resulted in a recovery & reconstruction effort that will ultimately cost $250 billion USD.
While no price can be placed on the tragic loss of life in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, you can be fairly certain that far more Democrats than Republicans expired. One subsidiary of Haliburton, KBR, has already snagged contracts from DHS/FEMA for recovery & reconstruction efforts even now. As the GOP might say "Always look for the silver lining...".
"Make the website work for everyone because EVERYONE needs the help. This is aid, not sales."
Wrong! Ever since the GW Bush administration took office, every department of the Executive branch IS INVOLVED IN SALES. Every "talking head" from every department spouts the very same "party line", as defined by the Bush/Cheney master handler (Karl Rove). This has been done under the belief that (1) any lie repeated often enough by enough people will be accepted as the truth, and (2) you really can fool all the people all the time (, or a sufficiently large proportion to make the minority opinion moot).
The only truthful thing that I have ever seen George W. Bush utter was at a political fundraiser, which played (briefly) on a local Metro DC TV station, and then also incorporated in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11": "... some people call you the elite. I call you my base..."
NASA doesn't need less shuttle. NASA needs more funding, and administrators that come from engineering backgrounds, not the political hacks that didn't make large enough campaign contributions to buy an ambassadorship.
The US military and intel agencies work with what is essentially a "blank check". The number and capability of US intel satellites is classified. The American taxpayer has learned (the hard way) that signals intelligence does not replace humint. If 10% of the military's "black budget" were turned over to NASA, we could be back on the Moon in 5 years, and with a permanent Mars colony in 10 years. It is all a matter of setting national goals, and providing the funding needed to match our ambitions.
Leaving space exploration to private enterprise, which has shown a penchant for downsizing and offshore outsourcing strictly for those bigger, better quarterly stock prices (and the bonuses for management they represent) is the very worst of all possible scenarios. It is damn hard to keep track of 5, 10, and 20 year R&D plans while focusing only on quarterly profits.
This is not a new tactic for MSFT, either, although they can (perhaps) lay claim to that prior art. The SUN vs MSFT lawsuit regarding Java is but one shining example. The DoJ vs MSFT lawsuit regarding monopoly status was drawn out until a change of venue^H^H^H^H^Hadministration.
While MSFT does not hold a patent on FUD, they do (apparently) hold the business practices patent on "embrace, extend, extinguish".
I hope the the EU reams MSFT "a new one" in court. If MSFT truly wanted to be interoperable with other OSes and applications, they would not hide "their" protocols behind NDAs that even cover their APIs (, let alone sample source code). Such tactics are directly aimed at the F/OSS competition.
Just how hard would it be for the EU to totally ban all MSFT products from their markets for 5 years? No doubt that the WTO would become involved, but it isn't as if MSFT hasn't "dodged the bullet" of real justice before.
"How exactly is "intellectual property" going to be enforced once you leave the confines of our planet?"
Don't you think that 10 years (2015) is quite long enough for the RIAA, the MPAA, Sony, and Microsoft to attain space travel -- combine MSFT's bankroll, **AA's militant in-your-face attitude, and Sony's robotics, and I would say that that represents one heck of a potent capability (almost Borg-like.)
Of course, by 2015 the USA government itself will be an ineffectual basket-case, having wasted all its resources on the continuing war in the Middle East (Kansas, Nebraska, etcetera) against rising sea levels, as global warming proves to be all too true. The USA's (in)ability to handle natural disasters and civil engineering projects will be legend by then.
Nuclear energy is not now, nor has ever been, cheap. The one major drawback to nuclear energy is the long term disposal and maintanance of the radioactive waste. Considering that much of high level radioactive waste has a half-life of 12,000 years, it could take 100,000 years for the radioactivity to decrease to the point of causing statistically minimal harm to humans or the environment.
Neither the DoE, the nuclear industry, or the current regime in power has bothered to extrapolate the long 50 - 100,000 year cost of maintaining any radioactive waste disposal site. When the nuclear power proponents can accurately project both the timeline and the total cost of dealing with the radioactive waste, then come back and tell us all just how cheap nuclear energy really is. I definitely would like to see those numbers.
(Any Sci-Fi tale that talks about a future "nuclear priesthood" that keeps watch over all the radioactive nuclear waste does not count as a viable business plan!)
The US Army Corpse of Engineers no more "owns" the levee system around New Orleans and the Mississippi River, any more than they "own" the Florida Everglades, right?
No major construction project in the USA that effects waterways, navigable or otherwise, can move out of the "start blocks" without the express approval of the US Army Corpse of Engineers.
They provide the management oversight as well as the basis for funding of all such projects in the USA. Of course, that does not mean that when the excriment hits the fan, that there isn't some other government agency that might take the fall.
After 60 years of the US Army Corpse of Engineers screwing around with the Florida Everglades, they have tacitly admitted that they might have made a mistake with the destruction of the Everglades. The destruction of the mangroves/wetlands is slowly being ameliorated by undoing what the Corpse has done there. And it may well take 100 years or more for the Everglades to heal.
If you think that the state of Louisiana or the Port of New Orleans has final say in what channels get dredged, which water diversion canals get built, or what levees get augmented (or not), you are mistaken. The US Congress provides the funds, under the direction of the Executive Branch (eg. GW Bush) at the recommendation of the US Army Corpse of Engineers.
Not only has the Federal government failed to provide the funding necessary to make recommended improvements to the levee system over the last five years, but they have also failed (miserably) in their timely response to the inevitable disaster that followed. Of course, much of the National Guard manpower, and their equipment, have been siphoned off to augment the badly run optional war in Iraq. NG units are not only being pulled into the Gulf Coast from all over the country, but even some units from the Iraqi war zone.
I don't know too much about the geology surrounding Galveston (TX), but I suspect that it is far less a floodplain/wetlands than New Orleans is. Those parts of New Orleans that hold the greatest tourist interest (the French Quarter) has survived far better than those areas where the poor of New Orleans lived.
Part of the point that I was trying to make (apparently unsuccessfully) is that the Bush administration and the neo-cons in control of Congress seem to spend little time or money on infrastructure (or real security) until disaster strikes. Then there is an almost Sun Tzsu/Confucian ability to make vast sums of money (through private contractors and large commercial interests), often at taxpayer expense. (Disaster equals opportunity.)
The ability of government to seize private property through (commercial) emminent domain has been validated by the very same US Supreme Court that "elected" George W. Bush. The axiom "the greatest good for the greatest number" has been usurped by the modern interpretation of emminent domain to specifically include "commercial interests" at the expense of private citizens' property rights. I expect that many citizens of New Orleans will be finding out that the rationale of emminent domain will be used to separate them from their property. I also fully expect that there will be vast sums of taxpayer money that is diverted to private contractors for the rebuilding of New Orleans. The current regime in power has shown a remarkable distaste for prophilactic public expenditure including infrastructure, in favor of hugely mismanaged spendthrift government spending subsequently. That has been the Bush/neo-con track record thus far, particularly in regard to Iraq.
The hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans at Force 4 levels. The wind, rain, and flooding were all managable, with the city's pumps clearing away the 2 to 3 feet of flood water. It was the storm surge that followed Katrina inland that breached the levees. The levee system, as well as the port facilities, were all "owned" by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and have been for decades.
Dredging of shipping channels, construction of canals for the diversion of water, and continued construction of port facilities brought new economic development to New Orleans. But officials at all levels of government have known for a decade that the levee system needed to be upgraded in order to withstand the worst that nature could wreak on the city. Enough money was never made available for reconstruction of the wetlands or barrier islands, or for improving the levee system.
Three times during the Bush administration funding has been slashed to 1/6th to 1/10th of needed levels to properly address the above issues. The loss of live may climb to ten thousand or more, with property damage in New Orleans proper that could reach $15 Billion USD. It would not be the first time that the neo-conservatives have been exposed to accusations of being "penny wise and pound foolish". The fiscal liability exposure by commercial insurance companies will likely result in several of these companies filing bankruptcy.
Whatever funds that the US Congress and the Bush administration spend on reconstruction in New Orleans will likely be dwarfed by commercial enterprises. The US Supreme Court has opened the way for local/state government to seize private property and turn it over to "more commercially viable" private enterprise. While the taxpayer burdeon may be mitigated by such actions, the notion of private ownership rights, due process, and equal treatment under the law are all due to be sorely tested as the cleanup and rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast proceed. The current regime in power has never made any bones about favoring big commercial interests over those of the individual. Times that try the boundaries of the US Constitution and the Bill or Rights versus the power of big corporate-owned government are coming...
Your assumption regarding corporate motives is essentially correct. The same trend seen in white collar jobs can also be seen regarding blue collar jobs, except that those corporations that do the hiring "don't need no stinkin' visas". Depending upon who you rely upon for statistics, there are between 12 million and 28 million illegal aliens in the USA today. You don't actually think there are that many agricultural "migrant worker" jobs available, do you?
In 2003, 78,000 IT workers in Connecticut were layed off. That same year, Connecticut IT employers requested (and received) 68,000 additional H1-B visa slots from Congress.
In 2000, the Clinton administration prosecuted 334 USA employers for knowingly having hired illegal aliens. In 2003, the Bush administration prosecuted only 13 USA employers for the same criminal activity.
These are neither isolated or unrelated factoids -- they are illustative of what our Federal government, "our" Congress-critters, and our "true-blue" USA corporations are doing every day.
BTW: H1-B visa: foreign white collar worker under contract to a domestic employer.
L1-A visa: foreign white collar worker transferred from domestic employer's overseas subsidiary.
The numbers of both types of white collar worker visas have gone up dramatically in the last five years.
I would like to preface my response to your statement with the ascertion that I DID NOT vote to elect Bush... TWICE! Nor, even, ONCE.
The American people did not elect Bush twice, either. Due to voter disenfranchisement in a number of states (including Florida), a Florida law that prohibited a state-wide vote recount (which violated due process), and ineffective legal council on behalf of Bush's opponent, it was the US Supreme Court that voted George Walker Bush president, not the USA's citizens nor the Electoral College in 2000.
George Walker Bush has aptly demonstrated that (1) fetal alcohol syndrome IS REAL, (2) nepotism and monied interests trump "natural selection" in the vetting of qualified political candidates, (3) that the "Peter Principle" is also applies to political office, and (4) a lie repeated often enough really CAN be mistaken for the truth.
Bush's popularity as POTUS (President Of The United States) only increased AFTER the terrorist acts committed on 9/11/2001. GW Bush has been very busy since that time capitalizing on "wrapping himself in the flag" for a series of political agendas that are not only contrarian, but also antithetical to conservative values.
IMHO, history will eventually correct your (widely accepted) conclusion that the American people actually voted for Bush's "re-election" in 2004, once the breadth of voter disenfranchisement and vote fraud (electronic voting machines), and buying the silence of the major news organizations from a multi-billion dollar slush fund stolen from Iraqi war reconstruction funds are revealed.
Please do not blame me for the Bush presidency, which has been highlighted by one disaster after another.
MSFT's On-line Validation, and MSFT's Update Program. MSFT routinely revises their EULA, to which you must agree in order for service or security patches to install. While a number of states (or nation states) allow the end-user to wiggle out of modified EULAs, the time lost in the courtroom could lead to financial disaster and collapse of the business.
Just because a software OEM has you by the short hairs regarding software licensing & key validation does not mean that they will use this as a means of extortion in the future. But it does mean that they have that capability. And there are no guarantees that their "profit centers" will not shift at some point in the future to make such extortion a reality.
I am glad to see at least one state, the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, resist the siren song of proprietary file formats. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Virginia has taken the exact opposite tact. In fact, VA was one of the leading forces in adoption of software OEM rights over consumer rights, years ahead of the passage of the DMCA at the Federal level.
Do we really need more LEO space junk? The future of manned space flight is doomed if mini-/micro-/nano- satellites become popular. Of course, that could justify a primary mission for the space elevator -- that of a "pool skimmer" to extract space junk. Imagine a beowolf cluster of space elevator "pool skimmers".
Since LEO space junk is travelling at 1800 miles per hour (or better), the "skimmers" will need to be made of depleted uranium armour plating. The impact with space junk would vaporize a good bit of that plating. Ionized depleted uranium trapped within the Van Allen belts should create quite a "light show", which would further screw up ground based telescopes.
Perhaps there really needs to be some kind of international treaty that limits these tiny satellites, as well as an OEM "deposit" to go into a recycling/clean-up fund.
IMHO, there is very little reason to stay with the 2.4 kernel, and many reasons to migrate to the 2.6 kernel. A caveat here, though. It really depends more upon your "comfort level" with tweeking the kernel and rebuilding it, as well as the current distribution you run.
An explaination is in order. Red Hat, as well as some other linux distributions, have a tendency to back-port wanted new features into older kernels. In my experience, the mish-mash of shared libs required to achieve back-porting makes the installation of many other 3rd party software from tarballs unstable, and even unworkable.
OTOH, use of a clean, stable release such as Slackware makes the process of kernel upgrade easy. Versions of Slackware from 9.1 onwards are already kernel 2.6 ready, needing only the download of the latest kernel tarball from "www.kernel.org" to work.
I am running a software ATA RAID 0+1 server using XFS, LDAP and Samba with Slackware 9.1 and the vanilla 2.6.11 kernel. I am also using a software SCSI RAID 5 server using XFS and Postgres 8.0 on an older (440BX) SMP motherboard with Slackware 10.1 and the 2.6.12 kernel. Slackware has been absolutely rock-solid for me.
It helps to know what all your hardware is that you want to support, have some notion of what apps and services you intend to run, as well as being comfortable editing the kernel kconfig and rebuilding the kernel, so your mileage may vary.
and definitely NIH, but use windmills to keep New Orleans dry. That, and some greater effort by the US Army Corp of Engineers regarding a system of dikes.
I'm not talking about the quaint 300 year old design windmill that appears on Dutch postcards. A design more like the vertical "mechanical sail" used by some modern ships can withstand far higher wind speeds than the old windmills.
I speak from personal experience. I once worked for a small company that I wore a variety of hats for -- internal IT & help desk, Novell system administrator, network engineer, sales support engineer, and external help desk. I built several Novell networks from the ground up (v3.12) and migrated a pre-existing Novell server (v2.15) from old & failing hardware. I build the company's first linux dial-up server, using slackware 0.96. I also introduced the sales staff to some of the first Wintel SMP motherboards to hit the market, as well as WinNT 3.51. Then, because I didn't already have enough work to keep me busy 80 hours per week, my boss wanted me to get Novell certified.
The offer was couched in the following terms -- you pay half, and the company will pay half (reimbursed to me). But if I should leave, quit, or be fired within two years of receiving my certification, I would owe the company for their share, plus interest. Somehow that didn't sound very equitable, especially considering that there was no increase in salary. I asked for a while to think it over, over the holidays.
When everyone came back from the holidays, there were 2 company announcements: (1) that the company was going to go public, and we could all buy $00.01 shares in the company for only $15.00 each, and (2) that a 401K plan was now being offered, but with the only investment being either (a) shares in the company or (b) shares in the owner's company that leased us all our business equipment.
I turned down the offer for employee shares in the company, and the offer for the 401K plan, and for the company's 50% "investment" in my Novell certification. And surprise, surprise -- within 6 weeks I was being asked to train my replacement or out the door immediately. Three weeks after I left, a fellow employee contacted me to see if I would consider going back to work for the company. You could perhaps imagine what my reply was...
Which, of course, is what started the latest outbreak of mad cow disease to begin with. Domesticated ruminant animals are not, by their nature, cannibals. Human greed overturned common sense when we started putting bovine blood and bone meal in animal foodstock as "suppliments".
of global warming, regardless of what percentage is caused by human activity, is all the new business opportunities for civil engineers (dikes, dams, canals, roads and seaports), as well as for the construction trades and real estate markets.
Not unlike the USA's present BRAC (military base relocation and closing commission) findings, that (unsurprisingly) would relocate many military units to the state of Texas.
You, sir, are being refreshingly, brutally frank. And IHMO, totally on-target!
Ever since the Reagan presidency, the conservatives have sought to stamp out the labor unions, including Federal employee unions. The recent actions of the GW Bush administration regarding labor rule changes for employees under the umbrella Dept. of Homeland Security is yet the latest salvo.
The destruction of the civilian labor union movement has been accelerated by NAFTA, CAFTA, and globalization. When the jobs are offshore outsourced, the unions start to disintegrate.
Forcing ALL non-management wages lower has been the goal of the USA government, and of the USA's employers. Domestic white collar labor (IT included) keep getting layed off, all while the number of L1-A and H1-B visas keep going up -- every year. (You can "thank" your elected representatives in the next general election.)
Even domestic blue collar jobs are at risk, from illegal aliens. Employers claim that they cannot find American workers to do the jobs that they have, in order to justify hiring illegal aliens. (What they really mean is that they cannot fill the jobs they have at the wages they are now willing to pay.) The Federal government's failure to secure our borders after 9/11/2001, and its failure to enforce existing laws against illegal immigration or hiring illegal aliens is part of the conservatives' new economic program.
Inflation is being kept in check, not by sound fiscal policy but by forcing wages lower (and corporate profits higher.) The destruction of America's middle class is imminent, and certain.
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More and more often these days, I have seen doctors, medical centers, and hospitals grousing about high malpractice insurance. The problem is not that some doctors are being unfairly punished by malpractice litigation, but that ALL doctors within a given specialty within a region face the same rising liability premiums. IMHO, it is really their own fault because they would rather "band together" against public disclosure of malpractice suits, medical board judgements, etc.
/. poster indicated that however bad the practice of medicine is within the USA today, that nationalized healthcare would be worse. Yet some of my personal experiences with the USA's medical profession would tend to indicate that it couldn't get much worse. Without time and money to pursue the "bad apples" in the medical profession through the legal system, many patients are treated little better than the "human lab rats" of the Nazi or Manchurian Nippon concentration camps of World War II.
Another
If the state medical boards cannot be convinced that it is in the best interests of their good medical professionals to "weed out" their incompetent or corrupt "brethern", then the states or the national legislatures need to force new laws that create publically available websites that can be used by prospective victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpatients to avoid the bad practitioners. And since it is so easy for a doctor to scoot across state lines and establish a whole new set of victims, a national database would be the better solution.
How very "Polyannaish" of you. Yucca Mountain was picked because it has abandoned salt mines that will be used to store casks of highly radioactive waste. Unfortunately, much radioactive waste has an "active" lifetime of far more than 10,000 years. Pt (or Plutonium) has a half-life of 20,000 years, so it may take 10 iterations of 20,000 years for that portion of the radioactive waste to become (relatively) safe. The storage casks are not designed to last 10,000 years -- the DoE designed "monitoring safegaurds" to detect when a cask starts leaking. And, of course, the DoE HAS projected maintainance costs (labor, materials, and liability) out 10,000 years as part of their budget -- NOT!
Finally, vast portions of the desert Southwest was an inland sea thousands of years ago (hence the source of the salt that was mined there.) There is no guarantee that climactic changes, like global warming, will not turn that desert back into an inland sea well before the radioactivity has reduced to safe levels in those "leak-proof" casks. Nor is there any reason to believe that mankind will advance technologically for another 5,000 years instead of blowing ourselves up and back to a new "stone age". Certainly, this vague hope of advancement cannot be used to justify actions that are already known to be deadly poisonous to every living thing on this planet.
Nuclear power is cheap and convenient only so long as the long term impact (financial and environmental) of the safe disposal of high level radioactive waste is left out of the calculations. Reliance upon unknown future technological advances in the storage of radioactive waste is about as smart as reliance upon the Second Coming of Christ to deal with such human "foolishness". But the regime currently in power apparently subscribes to one or the other (or both) of these "solutions" to the long term safe storage of nuclear waste. I, for one, do not.
Your statement would seem to imply that nuclear technology has advanced so far that there are no longer any issues with this power source. AFAIK there is still a problem concerning high level radioactive waste (spent fuel, core, primary cooling system), since some of it has a half-life of 20,000 years.
Radioactive half-life does NOT mean that in 20,000 years the radiation will automagically disappear -- it only means that just half of the radioactivity will be gone in that time. It might take 10 iterations of 20,000 years for the radiation of some items (like spent nuclear fuel) to decay to the point of relative safety.
No known government or corporation has every existed for 2,000 years, let alone 20,000 or 200,00 years. The only institution that I know of that has lasted that long is the Roman (christian) Church. I have yet to see any politician, Dept of Energy bureaucrat, or nuclear industy spokesperson publically suggest the formation of a "nuclear priesthood" to keep watch over, monitor and maintain radioactive waste casks for the next 100,000 years. Nor, for that matter, have I seen any of these same people incorporate 100,000 years worth of labor, materials, or liability in their claims of "cheap nuclear power". The closest was an early Dept of Energy claim that nuclear power plants would produce electricity that would be "too cheap to meter" (, and this propaganda was found to be completely false.)
Interesting idea about not speculating in real estate due to Global Warming, but I think your premise is incorrect.
If Global Warming is not uniform (likely), there will still be an increase in the number and severity of differential weather patterns -- the result may include wider temperature extremes at a higher average temperature in the atmosphere and oceans. Warmer average air and water temperature means more retained moisture in the air, so some areas may experience more severe droughts while other areas may get far too much rainfall.
As I see it, there are two sometimes conflicting results of (average) Global Warming -- warmer and wetter might mean more glaciation and wintewr snow pack, while colder and drier might result in bloody cold deserts. On the whole, greater temperature and moisture extremes will result in more violent weather, effecting coastal storms as well as tornado activity. Changing weather patterns may shift or expand regions of tornado activity, but without a dramatic rise in sea level, coastal areas are not likely to shift.
The end result, IMHO, is that there will be a greater chance of typhoons and hurricanes hitting coastal regions, while tornados will become less predictable. I, for one, will not be buying retirement property on any coastline.
You have to be aware by now that George W. Bush and his neo-Con(artist) cohorts in the US Congress are not now, and have never been "conservatives" (in the classical definition.) What they are are died-in-the-wool national (corporate) socialist opportunists who are perfectly willing to create new crises, if only to find the profit in it.
...".
The term "penny wise and pound foolish" comes to mind regarding both the optional (and ill-advised, ill-timed, and poorly executed) war in Iraq, AND this administration's focus on reducing Federal expenditures on American infrastructure in favor of tax cuts to their cronies. Failure to spend $500 million USD in a timely manner on the levee system has resulted in a recovery & reconstruction effort that will ultimately cost $250 billion USD.
While no price can be placed on the tragic loss of life in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, you can be fairly certain that far more Democrats than Republicans expired. One subsidiary of Haliburton, KBR, has already snagged contracts from DHS/FEMA for recovery & reconstruction efforts even now. As the GOP might say "Always look for the silver lining
"Make the website work for everyone because
..."
EVERYONE needs the help. This is aid, not sales."
Wrong! Ever since the GW Bush administration took office, every department of the Executive branch IS INVOLVED IN SALES. Every "talking head" from every department spouts the very same "party line", as defined by the Bush/Cheney master handler (Karl Rove). This has been done under the belief that (1) any lie repeated often enough by enough people will be accepted as the truth, and (2) you really can fool all the people all the time (, or a sufficiently large proportion to make the minority opinion moot).
The only truthful thing that I have ever seen George W. Bush utter was at a political fundraiser, which played (briefly) on a local Metro DC TV station, and then also incorporated in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11": "... some people call you the elite. I call you my base
NASA doesn't need less shuttle. NASA needs more funding, and administrators that come from engineering backgrounds, not the political hacks that didn't make large enough campaign contributions to buy an ambassadorship.
The US military and intel agencies work with what is essentially a "blank check". The number and capability of US intel satellites is classified. The American taxpayer has learned (the hard way) that signals intelligence does not replace humint. If 10% of the military's "black budget" were turned over to NASA, we could be back on the Moon in 5 years, and with a permanent Mars colony in 10 years. It is all a matter of setting national goals, and providing the funding needed to match our ambitions.
Leaving space exploration to private enterprise, which has shown a penchant for downsizing and offshore outsourcing strictly for those bigger, better quarterly stock prices (and the bonuses for management they represent) is the very worst of all possible scenarios. It is damn hard to keep track of 5, 10, and 20 year R&D plans while focusing only on quarterly profits.
This is not a new tactic for MSFT, either, although they can (perhaps) lay claim to that prior art. The SUN vs MSFT lawsuit regarding Java is but one shining example. The DoJ vs MSFT lawsuit regarding monopoly status was drawn out until a change of venue^H^H^H^H^Hadministration.
While MSFT does not hold a patent on FUD, they do (apparently) hold the business practices patent on "embrace, extend, extinguish".
I hope the the EU reams MSFT "a new one" in court. If MSFT truly wanted to be interoperable with other OSes and applications, they would not hide "their" protocols behind NDAs that even cover their APIs (, let alone sample source code). Such tactics are directly aimed at the F/OSS competition.
Just how hard would it be for the EU to totally ban all MSFT products from their markets for 5 years? No doubt that the WTO would become involved, but it isn't as if MSFT hasn't "dodged the bullet" of real justice before.
"How exactly is "intellectual property" going to be enforced once you leave the confines of our planet?"
Don't you think that 10 years (2015) is quite long enough for the RIAA, the MPAA, Sony, and Microsoft to attain space travel -- combine MSFT's bankroll, **AA's militant in-your-face attitude, and Sony's robotics, and I would say that that represents one heck of a potent capability (almost Borg-like.)
Of course, by 2015 the USA government itself will be an ineffectual basket-case, having wasted all its resources on the continuing war in the Middle East (Kansas, Nebraska, etcetera) against rising sea levels, as global warming proves to be all too true. The USA's (in)ability to handle natural disasters and civil engineering projects will be legend by then.
Nuclear energy is not now, nor has ever been, cheap. The one major drawback to nuclear energy is the long term disposal and maintanance of the radioactive waste. Considering that much of high level radioactive waste has a half-life of 12,000 years, it could take 100,000 years for the radioactivity to decrease to the point of causing statistically minimal harm to humans or the environment.
Neither the DoE, the nuclear industry, or the current regime in power has bothered to extrapolate the long 50 - 100,000 year cost of maintaining any radioactive waste disposal site. When the nuclear power proponents can accurately project both the timeline and the total cost of dealing with the radioactive waste, then come back and tell us all just how cheap nuclear energy really is. I definitely would like to see those numbers.
(Any Sci-Fi tale that talks about a future "nuclear priesthood" that keeps watch over all the radioactive nuclear waste does not count as a viable business plan!)
Amen!
The flood surge of Hurricane Katrina has washed away the wool from the eyes of the press, and the teflon flag from the shoulders of King George.
"The emperor has no clothes!"
Oh, sure.
The US Army Corpse of Engineers no more "owns" the levee system around New Orleans and the Mississippi River, any more than they "own" the Florida Everglades, right?
No major construction project in the USA that effects waterways, navigable or otherwise, can move out of the "start blocks" without the express approval of the US Army Corpse of Engineers.
They provide the management oversight as well as the basis for funding of all such projects in the USA. Of course, that does not mean that when the excriment hits the fan, that there isn't some other government agency that might take the fall.
After 60 years of the US Army Corpse of Engineers screwing around with the Florida Everglades, they have tacitly admitted that they might have made a mistake with the destruction of the Everglades. The destruction of the mangroves/wetlands is slowly being ameliorated by undoing what the Corpse has done there. And it may well take 100 years or more for the Everglades to heal.
If you think that the state of Louisiana or the Port of New Orleans has final say in what channels get dredged, which water diversion canals get built, or what levees get augmented (or not), you are mistaken. The US Congress provides the funds, under the direction of the Executive Branch (eg. GW Bush) at the recommendation of the US Army Corpse of Engineers.
Not only has the Federal government failed to provide the funding necessary to make recommended improvements to the levee system over the last five years, but they have also failed (miserably) in their timely response to the inevitable disaster that followed. Of course, much of the National Guard manpower, and their equipment, have been siphoned off to augment the badly run optional war in Iraq. NG units are not only being pulled into the Gulf Coast from all over the country, but even some units from the Iraqi war zone.
I don't know too much about the geology surrounding Galveston (TX), but I suspect that it is far less a floodplain/wetlands than New Orleans is. Those parts of New Orleans that hold the greatest tourist interest (the French Quarter) has survived far better than those areas where the poor of New Orleans lived.
Part of the point that I was trying to make (apparently unsuccessfully) is that the Bush administration and the neo-cons in control of Congress seem to spend little time or money on infrastructure (or real security) until disaster strikes. Then there is an almost Sun Tzsu/Confucian ability to make vast sums of money (through private contractors and large commercial interests), often at taxpayer expense. (Disaster equals opportunity.)
The ability of government to seize private property through (commercial) emminent domain has been validated by the very same US Supreme Court that "elected" George W. Bush. The axiom "the greatest good for the greatest number" has been usurped by the modern interpretation of emminent domain to specifically include "commercial interests" at the expense of private citizens' property rights. I expect that many citizens of New Orleans will be finding out that the rationale of emminent domain will be used to separate them from their property. I also fully expect that there will be vast sums of taxpayer money that is diverted to private contractors for the rebuilding of New Orleans. The current regime in power has shown a remarkable distaste for prophilactic public expenditure including infrastructure, in favor of hugely mismanaged spendthrift government spending subsequently. That has been the Bush/neo-con track record thus far, particularly in regard to Iraq.
The hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans at Force 4 levels. The wind, rain, and flooding were all managable, with the city's pumps clearing away the 2 to 3 feet of flood water. It was the storm surge that followed Katrina inland that breached the levees. The levee system, as well as the port facilities, were all "owned" by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and have been for decades.
Dredging of shipping channels, construction of canals for the diversion of water, and continued construction of port facilities brought new economic development to New Orleans. But officials at all levels of government have known for a decade that the levee system needed to be upgraded in order to withstand the worst that nature could wreak on the city. Enough money was never made available for reconstruction of the wetlands or barrier islands, or for improving the levee system.
Three times during the Bush administration funding has been slashed to 1/6th to 1/10th of needed levels to properly address the above issues. The loss of live may climb to ten thousand or more, with property damage in New Orleans proper that could reach $15 Billion USD. It would not be the first time that the neo-conservatives have been exposed to accusations of being "penny wise and pound foolish". The fiscal liability exposure by commercial insurance companies will likely result in several of these companies filing bankruptcy.
Whatever funds that the US Congress and the Bush administration spend on reconstruction in New Orleans will likely be dwarfed by commercial enterprises. The US Supreme Court has opened the way for local/state government to seize private property and turn it over to "more commercially viable" private enterprise. While the taxpayer burdeon may be mitigated by such actions, the notion of private ownership rights, due process, and equal treatment under the law are all due to be sorely tested as the cleanup and rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast proceed. The current regime in power has never made any bones about favoring big commercial interests over those of the individual. Times that try the boundaries of the US Constitution and the Bill or Rights versus the power of big corporate-owned government are coming...
Your assumption regarding corporate motives is essentially correct. The same trend seen in white collar jobs can also be seen regarding blue collar jobs, except that those corporations that do the hiring "don't need no stinkin' visas". Depending upon who you rely upon for statistics, there are between 12 million and 28 million illegal aliens in the USA today. You don't actually think there are that many agricultural "migrant worker" jobs available, do you?
In 2003, 78,000 IT workers in Connecticut were layed off. That same year, Connecticut IT employers requested (and received) 68,000 additional H1-B visa slots from Congress.
In 2000, the Clinton administration prosecuted 334 USA employers for knowingly having hired illegal aliens. In 2003, the Bush administration prosecuted only 13 USA employers for the same criminal activity.
These are neither isolated or unrelated factoids -- they are illustative of what our Federal government, "our" Congress-critters, and our "true-blue" USA corporations are doing every day.
BTW:
H1-B visa: foreign white collar worker under contract to a domestic employer.
L1-A visa: foreign white collar worker transferred from domestic employer's overseas subsidiary.
The numbers of both types of white collar worker visas have gone up dramatically in the last five years.
I would like to preface my response to your statement with the ascertion that I DID NOT ... TWICE! Nor, even, ONCE.
vote to elect Bush
The American people did not elect Bush twice, either. Due to voter disenfranchisement in a number of states (including Florida), a Florida law that prohibited a state-wide vote recount (which violated due process), and ineffective legal council on behalf of Bush's opponent, it was the US Supreme Court that voted George Walker Bush president, not the USA's citizens nor the Electoral College in 2000.
George Walker Bush has aptly demonstrated that (1) fetal alcohol syndrome IS REAL, (2) nepotism and monied interests trump "natural selection" in the vetting of qualified political candidates, (3) that the "Peter Principle" is also applies to political office, and (4) a lie repeated often enough really CAN be mistaken for the truth.
Bush's popularity as POTUS (President Of The United States) only increased AFTER the terrorist acts committed on 9/11/2001. GW Bush has been very busy since that time capitalizing on "wrapping himself in the flag" for a series of political agendas that are not only contrarian, but also antithetical to conservative values.
IMHO, history will eventually correct your (widely accepted) conclusion that the American people actually voted for Bush's "re-election" in 2004, once the breadth of voter disenfranchisement and vote fraud (electronic voting machines), and buying the silence of the major news organizations from a multi-billion dollar slush fund stolen from Iraqi war reconstruction funds are revealed.
Please do not blame me for the Bush presidency, which has been highlighted by one disaster after another.
MSFT's On-line Validation, and MSFT's Update Program. MSFT routinely revises their EULA, to which you must agree in order for service or security patches to install. While a number of states (or nation states) allow the end-user to wiggle out of modified EULAs, the time lost in the courtroom could lead to financial disaster and collapse of the business.
Just because a software OEM has you by the short hairs regarding software licensing & key validation does not mean that they will use this as a means of extortion in the future. But it does mean that they have that capability. And there are no guarantees that their "profit centers" will not shift at some point in the future to make such extortion a reality.
I am glad to see at least one state, the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, resist the siren song of proprietary file formats. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Virginia has taken the exact opposite tact. In fact, VA was one of the leading forces in adoption of software OEM rights over consumer rights, years ahead of the passage of the DMCA at the Federal level.
Do we really need more LEO space junk? The future of manned space flight is doomed if mini-/micro-/nano- satellites become popular. Of course, that could justify a primary mission for the space elevator -- that of a "pool skimmer" to extract space junk. Imagine a beowolf cluster of space elevator "pool skimmers".
Since LEO space junk is travelling at 1800 miles per hour (or better), the "skimmers" will need to be made of depleted uranium armour plating. The impact with space junk would vaporize a good bit of that plating. Ionized depleted uranium trapped within the Van Allen belts should create quite a "light show", which would further screw up ground based telescopes.
Perhaps there really needs to be some kind of international treaty that limits these tiny satellites, as well as an OEM "deposit" to go into a recycling/clean-up fund.
IMHO, there is very little reason to stay with the 2.4 kernel, and many reasons to migrate to the 2.6 kernel. A caveat here, though. It really depends more upon your "comfort level" with tweeking the kernel and rebuilding it, as well as the current distribution you run.
An explaination is in order. Red Hat, as well as some other linux distributions, have a tendency to back-port wanted new features into older kernels. In my experience, the mish-mash of shared libs required to achieve back-porting makes the installation of many other 3rd party software from tarballs unstable, and even unworkable.
OTOH, use of a clean, stable release such as Slackware makes the process of kernel upgrade easy. Versions of Slackware from 9.1 onwards are already kernel 2.6 ready, needing only the download of the latest kernel tarball from "www.kernel.org" to work.
I am running a software ATA RAID 0+1 server using XFS, LDAP and Samba with Slackware 9.1 and the vanilla 2.6.11 kernel. I am also using a software SCSI RAID 5 server using XFS and Postgres 8.0 on an older (440BX) SMP motherboard with Slackware 10.1 and the 2.6.12 kernel. Slackware has been absolutely rock-solid for me.
It helps to know what all your hardware is that you want to support, have some notion of what apps and services you intend to run, as well as being comfortable editing the kernel kconfig and rebuilding the kernel, so your mileage may vary.
and definitely NIH, but use windmills to keep New Orleans dry. That, and some greater effort by the US Army Corp of Engineers regarding a system of dikes.
I'm not talking about the quaint 300 year old design windmill that appears on Dutch postcards. A design more like the vertical "mechanical sail" used by some modern ships can withstand far higher wind speeds than the old windmills.
lack of one loses you your job.
...
I speak from personal experience. I once worked for a small company that I wore a variety of hats for -- internal IT & help desk, Novell system administrator, network engineer, sales support engineer, and external help desk. I built several Novell networks from the ground up (v3.12) and migrated a pre-existing Novell server (v2.15) from old & failing hardware. I build the company's first linux dial-up server, using slackware 0.96. I also introduced the sales staff to some of the first Wintel SMP motherboards to hit the market, as well as WinNT 3.51. Then, because I didn't already have enough work to keep me busy 80 hours per week, my boss wanted me to get Novell certified.
The offer was couched in the following terms -- you pay half, and the company will pay half (reimbursed to me). But if I should leave, quit, or be fired within two years of receiving my certification, I would owe the company for their share, plus interest. Somehow that didn't sound very equitable, especially considering that there was no increase in salary. I asked for a while to think it over, over the holidays.
When everyone came back from the holidays, there were 2 company announcements: (1) that the company was going to go public, and we could all buy $00.01 shares in the company for only $15.00 each, and (2) that a 401K plan was now being offered, but with the only investment being either (a) shares in the company or (b) shares in the owner's company that leased us all our business equipment.
I turned down the offer for employee shares in the company, and the offer for the 401K plan, and for the company's 50% "investment" in my Novell certification. And surprise, surprise -- within 6 weeks I was being asked to train my replacement or out the door immediately. Three weeks after I left, a fellow employee contacted me to see if I would consider going back to work for the company. You could perhaps imagine what my reply was
"Prions can also be spread via cannibalism-"
Which, of course, is what started the latest outbreak of mad cow disease to begin with. Domesticated ruminant animals are not, by their nature, cannibals. Human greed overturned common sense when we started putting bovine blood and bone meal in animal foodstock as "suppliments".
of global warming, regardless of what percentage is caused by human activity, is all the new business opportunities for civil engineers (dikes, dams, canals, roads and seaports), as well as for the construction trades and real estate markets.
Not unlike the USA's present BRAC (military base relocation and closing commission) findings, that
(unsurprisingly) would relocate many military units to the state of Texas.
Tesla's patent has expired.
"The only game in town now is Feudalism."
You, sir, are being refreshingly, brutally frank. And IHMO, totally on-target!
Ever since the Reagan presidency, the conservatives have sought to stamp out the labor unions, including Federal employee unions. The recent actions of the GW Bush administration regarding labor rule changes for employees under the umbrella Dept. of Homeland Security is yet the latest salvo.
The destruction of the civilian labor union movement has been accelerated by NAFTA, CAFTA, and globalization. When the jobs are offshore outsourced, the unions start to disintegrate.
Forcing ALL non-management wages lower has been the goal of the USA government, and of the USA's employers. Domestic white collar labor (IT included) keep getting layed off, all while the number of L1-A and H1-B visas keep going up -- every year. (You can "thank" your elected representatives in the next general election.)
Even domestic blue collar jobs are at risk, from illegal aliens. Employers claim that they cannot find American workers to do the jobs that they have, in order to justify hiring illegal aliens. (What they really mean is that they cannot fill the jobs they have at the wages they are now willing to pay.) The Federal government's failure to secure our borders after 9/11/2001, and its failure to enforce existing laws against illegal immigration or hiring illegal aliens is part of the conservatives' new economic program.
Inflation is being kept in check, not by sound fiscal policy but by forcing wages lower (and corporate profits higher.) The destruction of America's middle class is imminent, and certain.