What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
That's all well and good, but at the same time it's going to cause a *huge* hassle for ISPs, a *huge* hassle for content providers, and a *huge* hassle for end users. Sure, the bleeding edge geeks will have workarounds (the simplest being to set up your own name server).
But it's going to make deploying DNSSEC a nightmare, because now we're going to have court orders requiring ISPs to break DNSSEC. Ultimately every customer router box will have to be a DNSSEC resolver, and will have to go to the root to get correct information. Home router vendors have not covered themselves in glory with previous DNS work they've done; there's no reason to expect that they'll do a good job this time either. The bottom line is that if this passes, the result will be:
an added degree of flakiness in the network which will be completely inexplicable to the average end user.
huge cost increase for ISPs
substantially increased load on root and TLD servers
more DNS traffic on the network (this one probably isn't a big deal, except...)
The legal framework is the diverse collection of treaties that the U.S. signed with various Indian nations. And of course it's a time-honored tactic to kill everyone who lives in an area so that their legal system no longer exists. What do you think happened to the Etruscans?
I'm not convinced that this is true. All the evidence that's turned up so far is that nobody legal is willing to do the work for a price that allows people to pay for the produce. I'm right there with you on the slave wages, and I'd really like to see this disproven. But do you honestly think that farmers would let produce rot in the field rather than sell it, if they could get enough money selling it to pay for the labor it took to harvest it?
Farm subsidies ought to end because they subsidize the wrong things. Indian subsidies are reparations, so it's kind of a different thing. The way they are administered doesn't seem right to me, but it's hard to argue against the reparations because we did basically steal all their land.
Like you, I find it reprehensible that people have so little respect for the farmers who put food on their table. The latest insult, of course, being the anti-immigrant laws that have resulted in millions of dollars worth of food crops rotting in the fields because there's no-one available to pick them.
California is broke because they're not allowed to raise taxes on anything ever without a two-thirds majority, but it only takes a 50%+1 vote for citizens to vote in new spending using the proposition system. Also, California is actually not as broke as they thought, because despite this tax revenues were a lot higher this year than was projected.
I have no idea about the state of Massachusetts' finances, but I given how well-informed you are about California, I suspect you are similarly poorly-informed about Massachusetts.
I don't know what being god has to do with it. Do you mean that we shouldn't have any laws at all? That murder should be okay? Or is it only laws that restrain corporations that are a problem? Maybe it should be okay for corporations to poison people, but not for individual people to poison people? It should be okay for corporations to defraud people, but not for people to defraud people?
China's birth control laws are nominally voluntary. I'm sure there are abuses, but the same can be said of the U.S. There's a lot of *social* pressure on Chinese citizens who work for the government (which is a *lot* of Chinese citizens) not to have a second child, but it is possible to have a second child if you are willing to buck the social pressure, and particularly if you work in private industry.
Actually no, you can't start your own corporation. I mean, you can, but it won't protect your personal assets if the person suing you can show that the corporation exists only to serve as a firewall. If the corporation is a real company that employs real people, that's a different story, but if it's just a shell, it's of very limited value. The only lawsuit it will protect you from is one where the additional cost of making the case that the corporate veil should be pierced is prohibitive. That's not the sort of situation that you'd be in if a patent troll came after you and you had significant assets.
Think about how it looks to a court: you make a corporation, and the corporation makes a bunch of money, infringing some patent in the process. All of that money is paid out to you, or else goes to pay the minimal expenses that are involved in operating a corporation of this type. And then when someone comes after the corporation to be made whole as a result of the patent infringement, there's no money, because it's all been drained into one bank account: yours. Making the case to pierce the corporate veil here is a slam-dunk.
You know, when I see a 700 million dollar settlement over a garbage patent that was later overturned, and I think about how that would have affected me as a small software developer, what I do *not* think is "all hype and no bite." What I think is "I could lose my house." And so I work for a corporation, so that if/when that corporation gets sued out of existence, I will be on the far side of the firewall, and all I will lose is my job.
People who say this is a small issue that won't effect them either aren't software developers, or are whistling past the graveyard.
Um, but Google *is* definitely lying to you. You don't need to compare reputations. What Google is saying is simply, obviously wrong: that you can trust them with read/write access to your data. Sure, if your data is something that would be of minimal value, there's no harm in it leaking. But if your data is sensitive, then unless Google is willing to indemnify you for whatever damages you'll be liable for if the data leaks, you have a fiduciary responsibility not to store your data on a Google server. And as far as I understand it, Google is not willing to indemnify you for that (realistically, how could they?).
So independent of anything Gartner says, what Google is saying is at the very least misleading for the application they are talking about. The sense in which Google is right is that if you aren't taking any precautions to protect the security of your data, either because you can't afford to or because you don't know how to, then it may well be no *worse* for you to store your data on a Google server. But if that's the case, you don't care about security anyway, so Google's entire claim is moot.
If you are asserting here that this tornado season was not unusual, your argument is weak. This tornado season *has* been unusual. Whether it's been unusual as a result of global warming is a topic reasonable people can debate, but whether it's been unusual is not.
Hm. No, he actually gave a reason: he attributed it to La Niña. Your argument is weak. Demanding that people accept weak arguments is a great way to give global warming theory a bad name. Please try to use better arguments, rather than pounding on the table in a vain attempt to support your position.
I'm surprised nobody's tried a heat exchanger and a different medium of evaporation, like alcohol. If you have a source of heat that will boil alcohol, you can generate electricity with it, and you don't need to clean your turbine blades. Using impure water water directly on turbines is a terrible idea.
It might not even be that expensive--a lot of those suburban homes are really poorly built, and will be ready for the bulldozer in 20 or 30 years. The main problem is going to be the foundations, but I don't think they'll be all that big of a problem.
It's really easy to blame people for being irrational in the abstract, but if you take into account real-world problems, it's not at all clear that people *are* being irrational. Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't mean that person is irrational.
If nuclear power were safe, it would be possible for utilities to build nuclear power plants without government indemnification. Insurance companies would weigh the risks, and write the policy, charging the appropriate market price. This cost would be assumed by the ratepayer, who would consider it a bargain because it would be cheaper than alternatives. The reason that doesn't happen is that if you factor in the cost of indemnification, it is *not* cheaper than the alternatives.
It's true that it's difficult to model the risks of global warming, but we have pretty good models. It's possible that if nuclear and carbon were competing head-to-head, the numbers for nuclear would turn out to be lower than the numbers for carbon. If you really want to see nuclear advance, work on getting the externalities out of carbon. My intuition is that if the true cost of nuclear and carbon were actually accounted for, a lot of those supposedly marginal forms of "green" generation would suddenly look a lot more attractive.
But you may be right. If you want to find out, stop complaining about how unfair things are and work to make things more fair.
The two questions are orthogonal. And you'll be dead by the time this has played out, of old age, not weather. If you have something useful to say, say that, instead of making smartass remarks. Otherwise you're just another useless couch potato complaining about the declining quality of potato chips.
Weather patterns are driven by convection cycles. The convection cycles have a lot to do with lattitude and proximity to the tropics. When you add heat to the convection cycle, it changes shape in a fairly predictable way, just like when you turn up the gas on your stove, the burner doesn't suddenly explode, but rather the flame expands. It is in fact possible to push the cycle past a point where it does change dramatically, but dramatically here is a bit of an understatement. It's the kind of drama you are unlikely to live through.
The reason it seems like an oversimplification is that while geography does play a part, the convection cycle is a consistent process that does not vary with geography, but rather is perturbed by it.
The main reason people fear nuclear power irrationally is that it's very difficult to model the risk of nuclear power, and proponents of nuclear power have gone out of their way to make it harder. And of course the risk of an abstract, ideal nuclear power plant is different than the risk of a nuclear power plant built by the lowest bidder, publicly rather than privately indemnified.
So whine about it if you want, but the situation exists for a reason, and whining about it doesn't change that.
Winter wasn't *colder* than normal. It was *wetter* than normal. You're freezing your ass off because your house isn't properly insulated (not your fault--very few houses are, but that's why). You've been cold because it's been wet, and we've been having a lot of weather coming down from the north, rather than up from the south. The lack of sun due to all the cloudy weather has protected your house from solar gain, and kept it cool. The cold night temperatures, which are typical in may, have cooled the outside of your house further, and the thermal delay of the walls means that that cold works its way into your house over the course of the morning. This month, it's typically been warmer during the day *outside* of the Victorian-era house I'm renting than inside, because of this effect, although the last three days that hasn't been the case because it's gotten sunny.
The reason they call it "global warming" is that the average temperature goes up. The effect on local climates varies. Having said that, I'm not convinced that this is going to be a cold summer in New England. It was bloody hot on Sunday. It's not June yet, so it's not surprising that the cold trend is breaking now, and not earlier.
Tends to exacerbate drying and wetting conditions. So you get persistent droughts in places that were arid, and persistent flooding in places that were wet to begin with. Sea levels rise, meaning that you now have levee walls to protect cities that used to be dry. Storms have more energy (more heat == more energy) and therefore do more damage.
Slashdot Mirror
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
That's all well and good, but at the same time it's going to cause a *huge* hassle for ISPs, a *huge* hassle for content providers, and a *huge* hassle for end users. Sure, the bleeding edge geeks will have workarounds (the simplest being to set up your own name server).
But it's going to make deploying DNSSEC a nightmare, because now we're going to have court orders requiring ISPs to break DNSSEC. Ultimately every customer router box will have to be a DNSSEC resolver, and will have to go to the root to get correct information. Home router vendors have not covered themselves in glory with previous DNS work they've done; there's no reason to expect that they'll do a good job this time either. The bottom line is that if this passes, the result will be:
The legal framework is the diverse collection of treaties that the U.S. signed with various Indian nations. And of course it's a time-honored tactic to kill everyone who lives in an area so that their legal system no longer exists. What do you think happened to the Etruscans?
It's owed by treaty. Germany doesn't still claim the land in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic, so that's a really different situation.
I'm not convinced that this is true. All the evidence that's turned up so far is that nobody legal is willing to do the work for a price that allows people to pay for the produce. I'm right there with you on the slave wages, and I'd really like to see this disproven. But do you honestly think that farmers would let produce rot in the field rather than sell it, if they could get enough money selling it to pay for the labor it took to harvest it?
Farm subsidies ought to end because they subsidize the wrong things. Indian subsidies are reparations, so it's kind of a different thing. The way they are administered doesn't seem right to me, but it's hard to argue against the reparations because we did basically steal all their land.
Like you, I find it reprehensible that people have so little respect for the farmers who put food on their table. The latest insult, of course, being the anti-immigrant laws that have resulted in millions of dollars worth of food crops rotting in the fields because there's no-one available to pick them.
California is broke because they're not allowed to raise taxes on anything ever without a two-thirds majority, but it only takes a 50%+1 vote for citizens to vote in new spending using the proposition system. Also, California is actually not as broke as they thought, because despite this tax revenues were a lot higher this year than was projected.
I have no idea about the state of Massachusetts' finances, but I given how well-informed you are about California, I suspect you are similarly poorly-informed about Massachusetts.
I don't know what being god has to do with it. Do you mean that we shouldn't have any laws at all? That murder should be okay? Or is it only laws that restrain corporations that are a problem? Maybe it should be okay for corporations to poison people, but not for individual people to poison people? It should be okay for corporations to defraud people, but not for people to defraud people?
China's birth control laws are nominally voluntary. I'm sure there are abuses, but the same can be said of the U.S. There's a lot of *social* pressure on Chinese citizens who work for the government (which is a *lot* of Chinese citizens) not to have a second child, but it is possible to have a second child if you are willing to buck the social pressure, and particularly if you work in private industry.
Actually no, you can't start your own corporation. I mean, you can, but it won't protect your personal assets if the person suing you can show that the corporation exists only to serve as a firewall. If the corporation is a real company that employs real people, that's a different story, but if it's just a shell, it's of very limited value. The only lawsuit it will protect you from is one where the additional cost of making the case that the corporate veil should be pierced is prohibitive. That's not the sort of situation that you'd be in if a patent troll came after you and you had significant assets.
Think about how it looks to a court: you make a corporation, and the corporation makes a bunch of money, infringing some patent in the process. All of that money is paid out to you, or else goes to pay the minimal expenses that are involved in operating a corporation of this type. And then when someone comes after the corporation to be made whole as a result of the patent infringement, there's no money, because it's all been drained into one bank account: yours. Making the case to pierce the corporate veil here is a slam-dunk.
You know, when I see a 700 million dollar settlement over a garbage patent that was later overturned, and I think about how that would have affected me as a small software developer, what I do *not* think is "all hype and no bite." What I think is "I could lose my house." And so I work for a corporation, so that if/when that corporation gets sued out of existence, I will be on the far side of the firewall, and all I will lose is my job.
People who say this is a small issue that won't effect them either aren't software developers, or are whistling past the graveyard.
Um, but Google *is* definitely lying to you. You don't need to compare reputations. What Google is saying is simply, obviously wrong: that you can trust them with read/write access to your data. Sure, if your data is something that would be of minimal value, there's no harm in it leaking. But if your data is sensitive, then unless Google is willing to indemnify you for whatever damages you'll be liable for if the data leaks, you have a fiduciary responsibility not to store your data on a Google server. And as far as I understand it, Google is not willing to indemnify you for that (realistically, how could they?).
So independent of anything Gartner says, what Google is saying is at the very least misleading for the application they are talking about. The sense in which Google is right is that if you aren't taking any precautions to protect the security of your data, either because you can't afford to or because you don't know how to, then it may well be no *worse* for you to store your data on a Google server. But if that's the case, you don't care about security anyway, so Google's entire claim is moot.
Dude, it's way worse than that. Slashdot doesn't work unless you enable IPv4. I'm posting this using IP-over-carrier-pigeon!
(I'm really disappointed that slashdot, supposedly a geek site, didn't bother to enable IPv6 for World IPv6 day.)
If you are asserting here that this tornado season was not unusual, your argument is weak. This tornado season *has* been unusual. Whether it's been unusual as a result of global warming is a topic reasonable people can debate, but whether it's been unusual is not.
Hm. No, he actually gave a reason: he attributed it to La Niña. Your argument is weak. Demanding that people accept weak arguments is a great way to give global warming theory a bad name. Please try to use better arguments, rather than pounding on the table in a vain attempt to support your position.
Yeah, cuz people are getting rich doing global warming research. Oh wait, no, they are not. Next red herring, please.
I'm surprised nobody's tried a heat exchanger and a different medium of evaporation, like alcohol. If you have a source of heat that will boil alcohol, you can generate electricity with it, and you don't need to clean your turbine blades. Using impure water water directly on turbines is a terrible idea.
It might not even be that expensive--a lot of those suburban homes are really poorly built, and will be ready for the bulldozer in 20 or 30 years. The main problem is going to be the foundations, but I don't think they'll be all that big of a problem.
It's really easy to blame people for being irrational in the abstract, but if you take into account real-world problems, it's not at all clear that people *are* being irrational. Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't mean that person is irrational.
If nuclear power were safe, it would be possible for utilities to build nuclear power plants without government indemnification. Insurance companies would weigh the risks, and write the policy, charging the appropriate market price. This cost would be assumed by the ratepayer, who would consider it a bargain because it would be cheaper than alternatives. The reason that doesn't happen is that if you factor in the cost of indemnification, it is *not* cheaper than the alternatives.
It's true that it's difficult to model the risks of global warming, but we have pretty good models. It's possible that if nuclear and carbon were competing head-to-head, the numbers for nuclear would turn out to be lower than the numbers for carbon. If you really want to see nuclear advance, work on getting the externalities out of carbon. My intuition is that if the true cost of nuclear and carbon were actually accounted for, a lot of those supposedly marginal forms of "green" generation would suddenly look a lot more attractive.
But you may be right. If you want to find out, stop complaining about how unfair things are and work to make things more fair.
The two questions are orthogonal. And you'll be dead by the time this has played out, of old age, not weather. If you have something useful to say, say that, instead of making smartass remarks. Otherwise you're just another useless couch potato complaining about the declining quality of potato chips.
Weather patterns are driven by convection cycles. The convection cycles have a lot to do with lattitude and proximity to the tropics. When you add heat to the convection cycle, it changes shape in a fairly predictable way, just like when you turn up the gas on your stove, the burner doesn't suddenly explode, but rather the flame expands. It is in fact possible to push the cycle past a point where it does change dramatically, but dramatically here is a bit of an understatement. It's the kind of drama you are unlikely to live through.
The reason it seems like an oversimplification is that while geography does play a part, the convection cycle is a consistent process that does not vary with geography, but rather is perturbed by it.
The main reason people fear nuclear power irrationally is that it's very difficult to model the risk of nuclear power, and proponents of nuclear power have gone out of their way to make it harder. And of course the risk of an abstract, ideal nuclear power plant is different than the risk of a nuclear power plant built by the lowest bidder, publicly rather than privately indemnified.
So whine about it if you want, but the situation exists for a reason, and whining about it doesn't change that.
You are fortunate to live in an economy where you can afford to adjust your air conditioner...
Winter wasn't *colder* than normal. It was *wetter* than normal. You're freezing your ass off because your house isn't properly insulated (not your fault--very few houses are, but that's why). You've been cold because it's been wet, and we've been having a lot of weather coming down from the north, rather than up from the south. The lack of sun due to all the cloudy weather has protected your house from solar gain, and kept it cool. The cold night temperatures, which are typical in may, have cooled the outside of your house further, and the thermal delay of the walls means that that cold works its way into your house over the course of the morning. This month, it's typically been warmer during the day *outside* of the Victorian-era house I'm renting than inside, because of this effect, although the last three days that hasn't been the case because it's gotten sunny.
The reason they call it "global warming" is that the average temperature goes up. The effect on local climates varies. Having said that, I'm not convinced that this is going to be a cold summer in New England. It was bloody hot on Sunday. It's not June yet, so it's not surprising that the cold trend is breaking now, and not earlier.
Tends to exacerbate drying and wetting conditions. So you get persistent droughts in places that were arid, and persistent flooding in places that were wet to begin with. Sea levels rise, meaning that you now have levee walls to protect cities that used to be dry. Storms have more energy (more heat == more energy) and therefore do more damage.
The worst thing though: no skiing.
(Okay, that's not really the worst thing)
Stereotype much?