If you are referring to the warming that occurs before they have completely oxidized, sure. But that's a temporary effect. Mining and burning them is way worse than keeping them on the ocean floor, and only slightly better than them releasing into the atmosphere due to warming.
If you don't burn methane and just release it into the atmosphere, it oxidizes over the course of about seven years. So whether you burn it or it just escapes on its own, the long-term effect is simply to increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Huge solar arrays in space also double as an excellent weapons platform. I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon, even though it's a cool idea in principle. In any case, it's not needed—we can generate what we need on the ground. Mr. Fusion would be nice too...
Well, methane hydrates are actually a pretty plausible energy source, since if we don't mine them and global temperatures continue to go up, they will eventually wind up in the atmosphere anyway. Of course, burning them will make the CO2 situation even worse.
The bottom line is that taking refuge in the idea that "peak oil will save us from destroying the environment" is incredibly wrong-headed. If we are concerned about global warming, we need to deal with it now and not wait. Getting rid of subsidies for oil exploration would help—a lot of this stuff would be economically infeasible compared to solar if the producers couldn't deduct the recovery costs on their taxes.
This is kind of ridiculous. Just insulate and seal your house properly and use a heat recovery ventilator, and you won't need fancy heat storage systems, because your house won't cool off as much overnight. If you're going to do a big engineering project, you might as well actually _save_ energy rather than putting in a huge energy storage system and bleeding all that energy out into the night through your poorly insulated, badly sealed walls.
I live in a Passive House in southern Vermont; we spent about $125 on power (total, not just heating) this winter, and it was a reasonably cold winter.
This is a really lame straw-man. Of course in the middle of winter in Alaska solar isn't going to work, but I've been to Anchorage. It's about the size of Brattleboro. We can keep running Anchorage off of fossil fuels while we work on an alternative, while still substantially reducing our carbon footprint in the lower 48. I have no idea what the winds are like up there in the winter, so whether you can generate wind power I don't know, but there's certainly plenty of wide open space to put the turbines.
It would also help if people weren't told to go work in the buildings when they were showing signs of imminent failure. Robotic snakes are great, but I don't need cheap jeans badly enough that people need to *die* for it!
Of course you can store the power. What an absurd assertion. We may not have the storage set up right now, but it is eminently storable. You can't run a truck on it, but you certainly _can_ run trains on it.
I don't think you're making a very interesting point here. Only one person has to rip the Blu-Ray. If you want to pirate the movie, you can. The reason you don't is because you don't mind buying the disc, not because the DRM stopped you from getting it for free. The outcome would have been the same whether the Blu-ray was DRM'd or not.
DRM doesn't effectively control reproduction. It never has. Everything that is released on blu-ray is torrented immediately. DRM schemes are routinely cracked. What DRM does is to prevent people from selling better solutions, because they can be sued for doing so. So if I want to sell a DVD player that skips ads, I can't, because that's a violation of the license. If I want to sell a video device that interpolates blu-ray to paint a broader background, or that de-shakey-cams movies like the Bourne Conspiracy, I can't, because it violates the license.
DRM is all about controlling the marketplace, and not at all about preventing piracy, nor about helping the artist, who is generally also being royally screwed by what is known in the legal profession (I'm not kidding) as "Hollywood Accounting."
Right, that's encryption. DRM doesn't actually do that, because the key is widely shared. The government, as well as your neighborhood DRM cracker, will have no trouble reading the message.
You may not realize this, but you haven't contradicted with the person you are arguing with said. S/he didn't say that fertilizer doesn't work. S/he said that it's environmentally destructive. How much starvation are you willing to put up with in 25 years to get that 25% improvement now? Particularly given that we don't need it to feed the world?
I'm anti-food-crop patents, anti-seed-licensing, and anti-pesticide. I've got no problem with GMOs in principle, but right now the only bandwagon to hop on is the anti-GMO bandwagon. I'd much rather that we had an anti-abuse bandwagon to jump on. But I consider the patent issues, licensing issues and pesticide issues important enough to trump my distaste for the "throw everything into one bucket" solution.
The only time I've ever had a TSA person give me a hard time about opting out was in the International terminal in San Francisco, and the hard time he gave me was "oh come on, it's perfectly safe"—once he got that I wasn't going to give in, he stopped hassling me. Just be polite, act like you're sympathetic rather than annoyed, and it's very unlikely that you will have a bad time of it.
I don't think that it actually makes us any safer to have these searches, but that's an argument to have at a policy level, not with the folks at the TSA checkpoint.
OMG, Wikipedia doesn't affirm our right to commit acts of terror^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hjustified attacks on civilian populations! They think it doesn't matter who commits that attack—that it's always wrong. Where are the moral relativists when you need them?
If you stick your finger into the mouth of a snapping turtle, and the snapping turtle bites it off, and then I point out that in retrospect sticking your finger in the mouth of the snapping turtle was a bad idea, am I "defending" the snapping turtle? If you cut down a tree while standing where it's going to fall, and it falls on you, and I point out that it's best to figure out where the tree is going to fall before you start cutting, are you going to accuse me of "defending" the tree?
Inflicting mayhem on large populations will, statistically, produce some number of people who are so pissed off that they will strike back. This is true whether they are Muslin, Christian, Buddhist, Cult of the Yellow Sign or Pastafarian. The people from these populations who subsequently act on their anger and inflict new mayhem on new innocents don't get to say "it's okay, we're just getting revenge." But we can certainly say "gosh, it might have been better not to inflict that kind of damage on a large population; maybe we should try to fix what damage we can, and not do that in the future." That's not "defending terrorists."
I think the key takeaway from this and other abuses we've seen in the past is that no matter how much you try to hide behind the "I was just doing my job" shield, if you commit socially unacceptable acts, the shield won't be effective. That is, government employees should not just think that they can do whatever they want and not face the social consequences of doing so.
This is really frustrating; the continued bad behavior of government employees in the presence of bad laws that allow for prosecutorial misconduct is bad; the reaction to it is equally bad. Lawlessness on the part of government leads to escalating lawlessness in society. The prosecutors keep saying that what they did was fine, but it wasn't. We need to do an about-face and start writing laws more carefully and enforcing them fairly, or this is just going to keep getting worse. This is just a continuation of the trend that started with the War on Some Drugs and the National Motor Speed Law. I saw the repeal of the NMSL as a hopeful sign, but it's looking more and more like an anomaly.
Or, it might be done by your JVM or in Javascript. It really varies a lot. But hopefully you are right, and at least on the server side they are using AES hardware.
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If you are referring to the warming that occurs before they have completely oxidized, sure. But that's a temporary effect. Mining and burning them is way worse than keeping them on the ocean floor, and only slightly better than them releasing into the atmosphere due to warming.
To be clear, my point here is that if the methane stays in the form of clathrates on the ocean floor, that's the best possible outcome.
If you don't burn methane and just release it into the atmosphere, it oxidizes over the course of about seven years. So whether you burn it or it just escapes on its own, the long-term effect is simply to increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Storage is the problem. There are lots of solutions, but they haven't been implemented yet.
Huge solar arrays in space also double as an excellent weapons platform. I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon, even though it's a cool idea in principle. In any case, it's not needed—we can generate what we need on the ground. Mr. Fusion would be nice too...
Well, methane hydrates are actually a pretty plausible energy source, since if we don't mine them and global temperatures continue to go up, they will eventually wind up in the atmosphere anyway. Of course, burning them will make the CO2 situation even worse.
The bottom line is that taking refuge in the idea that "peak oil will save us from destroying the environment" is incredibly wrong-headed. If we are concerned about global warming, we need to deal with it now and not wait. Getting rid of subsidies for oil exploration would help—a lot of this stuff would be economically infeasible compared to solar if the producers couldn't deduct the recovery costs on their taxes.
This is kind of ridiculous. Just insulate and seal your house properly and use a heat recovery ventilator, and you won't need fancy heat storage systems, because your house won't cool off as much overnight. If you're going to do a big engineering project, you might as well actually _save_ energy rather than putting in a huge energy storage system and bleeding all that energy out into the night through your poorly insulated, badly sealed walls.
I live in a Passive House in southern Vermont; we spent about $125 on power (total, not just heating) this winter, and it was a reasonably cold winter.
This is a really lame straw-man. Of course in the middle of winter in Alaska solar isn't going to work, but I've been to Anchorage. It's about the size of Brattleboro. We can keep running Anchorage off of fossil fuels while we work on an alternative, while still substantially reducing our carbon footprint in the lower 48. I have no idea what the winds are like up there in the winter, so whether you can generate wind power I don't know, but there's certainly plenty of wide open space to put the turbines.
It would also help if people weren't told to go work in the buildings when they were showing signs of imminent failure. Robotic snakes are great, but I don't need cheap jeans badly enough that people need to *die* for it!
Of course you can store the power. What an absurd assertion. We may not have the storage set up right now, but it is eminently storable. You can't run a truck on it, but you certainly _can_ run trains on it.
That's because you live in the suburbs. He's talking about moving out of the metropolitan area. In DC, 30 minutes isn't enough.
But also, if what gets your groove on is going to single's bars, his solution isn't going to work for you anyway.
Unlike Britain...
I don't think you're making a very interesting point here. Only one person has to rip the Blu-Ray. If you want to pirate the movie, you can. The reason you don't is because you don't mind buying the disc, not because the DRM stopped you from getting it for free. The outcome would have been the same whether the Blu-ray was DRM'd or not.
DRM doesn't effectively control reproduction. It never has. Everything that is released on blu-ray is torrented immediately. DRM schemes are routinely cracked. What DRM does is to prevent people from selling better solutions, because they can be sued for doing so. So if I want to sell a DVD player that skips ads, I can't, because that's a violation of the license. If I want to sell a video device that interpolates blu-ray to paint a broader background, or that de-shakey-cams movies like the Bourne Conspiracy, I can't, because it violates the license.
DRM is all about controlling the marketplace, and not at all about preventing piracy, nor about helping the artist, who is generally also being royally screwed by what is known in the legal profession (I'm not kidding) as "Hollywood Accounting."
Right, that's encryption. DRM doesn't actually do that, because the key is widely shared. The government, as well as your neighborhood DRM cracker, will have no trouble reading the message.
You may not realize this, but you haven't contradicted with the person you are arguing with said. S/he didn't say that fertilizer doesn't work. S/he said that it's environmentally destructive. How much starvation are you willing to put up with in 25 years to get that 25% improvement now? Particularly given that we don't need it to feed the world?
I'm anti-food-crop patents, anti-seed-licensing, and anti-pesticide. I've got no problem with GMOs in principle, but right now the only bandwagon to hop on is the anti-GMO bandwagon. I'd much rather that we had an anti-abuse bandwagon to jump on. But I consider the patent issues, licensing issues and pesticide issues important enough to trump my distaste for the "throw everything into one bucket" solution.
Cojones, dude. Cojones.
The only time I've ever had a TSA person give me a hard time about opting out was in the International terminal in San Francisco, and the hard time he gave me was "oh come on, it's perfectly safe"—once he got that I wasn't going to give in, he stopped hassling me. Just be polite, act like you're sympathetic rather than annoyed, and it's very unlikely that you will have a bad time of it.
I don't think that it actually makes us any safer to have these searches, but that's an argument to have at a policy level, not with the folks at the TSA checkpoint.
OMG, Wikipedia doesn't affirm our right to commit acts of terror^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hjustified attacks on civilian populations! They think it doesn't matter who commits that attack—that it's always wrong. Where are the moral relativists when you need them?
If you stick your finger into the mouth of a snapping turtle, and the snapping turtle bites it off, and then I point out that in retrospect sticking your finger in the mouth of the snapping turtle was a bad idea, am I "defending" the snapping turtle? If you cut down a tree while standing where it's going to fall, and it falls on you, and I point out that it's best to figure out where the tree is going to fall before you start cutting, are you going to accuse me of "defending" the tree?
Inflicting mayhem on large populations will, statistically, produce some number of people who are so pissed off that they will strike back. This is true whether they are Muslin, Christian, Buddhist, Cult of the Yellow Sign or Pastafarian. The people from these populations who subsequently act on their anger and inflict new mayhem on new innocents don't get to say "it's okay, we're just getting revenge." But we can certainly say "gosh, it might have been better not to inflict that kind of damage on a large population; maybe we should try to fix what damage we can, and not do that in the future." That's not "defending terrorists."
To claim that it "fell as a defense," you would have to show that it didn't work for the DA in this case. But it did.
I think the key takeaway from this and other abuses we've seen in the past is that no matter how much you try to hide behind the "I was just doing my job" shield, if you commit socially unacceptable acts, the shield won't be effective. That is, government employees should not just think that they can do whatever they want and not face the social consequences of doing so.
This is really frustrating; the continued bad behavior of government employees in the presence of bad laws that allow for prosecutorial misconduct is bad; the reaction to it is equally bad. Lawlessness on the part of government leads to escalating lawlessness in society. The prosecutors keep saying that what they did was fine, but it wasn't. We need to do an about-face and start writing laws more carefully and enforcing them fairly, or this is just going to keep getting worse. This is just a continuation of the trend that started with the War on Some Drugs and the National Motor Speed Law. I saw the repeal of the NMSL as a hopeful sign, but it's looking more and more like an anomaly.
You have no idea. They even have bacon flavored chocolate.
Or, it might be done by your JVM or in Javascript. It really varies a lot. But hopefully you are right, and at least on the server side they are using AES hardware.