I did a quick lookup, and it seems like modern bullet trains travel at around 300 km/h, while Boeing travels at 900 km/h (high sub-sonic speeds). However, you'd also have to take into account the time it takes to get to the airport, getting checked, waiting at the terminal, getting over-booked, getting delayed due to poor weather, the frequency and cost of flights. It also takes time away from your online time if you take the plane. Cost/convenience can differ greatly between regions.
Train stations tend to exist at more convenient locations. There's less security and safety hassle/worries, I never get "over-booked" (North Western Airlines is EVIL!!), and I can usually cancel my trip and get a full refund on my ticket, no questions asked. I think this is partly due to the fact that government funding gives them the leisure to focus on providing transportation as opposed to sucking every last penny out of consumers and over-booking them in return.
I agree that flights are definitely better than train rides when it comes to trans-continental travel. That's why I think Amtrack isn't even trying to provide competition at that kind of distances. What Americans consider as "short distance" is often long distance in another country, though.
Maybe there are other government spending task payers should be more concerned about. Even after Bush's spending costs, highway spending is projected to be around 256 billion USD. Yes, Amtrak does get funding, but we have to look at it relativistically, and see a cost/benefit comparison first. Even if the gov't cuts spending on train transportation, I hope train transportation will continue to exist because what's for sure is that trains can add a valuable transportation alternative. I think that a DC-NYC bullet train link can be very beneficial to that region if it existed; there just isn't that many great lines in the States yet that consumers can take advantage of.
So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then? That's good to hear, otherwise you would be a hypocrite.
There are some differences. WMA is a problem because if you encode something in WMA, then transcode it to MP3, for example, you lose quality. If you convert Apple Lossless to MP3, you don't lose any quality compared to encoding it directly to MP3 without the ALAC step. Apple lossless doesn't lock-in because it can be a reasonable intermediary step. Every iTunes with an Apple Lossless encoder has had a decoder with it. iTunes has been available for both x86 and PowerPC platforms, while on the other hand AVI files that use Windows Media codec have not been supported on Macs because of Microsoft's refusal to support AVIs (along with MPG, MP3) on their media player for the Macs. MS VCM on the other hand creates WMV files that lock in users to the Windows operating system.
The asian mindset doesn't really understand the open source concept and would prefer reliable software with a strong manufacture behind it. I don't see this working too well.
The asian mindset doesn't exist. If it did, there'd only be one language, one country, one party, and no murder. Cops will then go unemployed since everyone agrees with each other.
The truth is, if you take a survey of ten people, there's bound to be a disagreement on something. Some get open source (does Ruby mean anything to you?), most have never heard about it.
Try to bundle two billion people's mindset into one, and there is no way you can succeed, no matter what your anecdotal evidence says.
As for things like nudity, I must admit that watching nekkid women turns me on, and causes me to think about things I know I shouldn't, but that's why I make it a point not to watch nekkid women.
Isn't that more about your marital commitment, as opposed to whether or not something should be censored from everyone?
I think skin and slang tend to become inappropriate only when they are restricted. What constitutes as indecent differs with what people are used to.
To many muslims, a woman not wearing a hijab is considered indecent. To the English in the 1600s, showing leg or shoulder skin was considered indecent while what was appropriate and fashionable for women at that time was fully exposing their breasts. People can say "sexual intercourse" and "feces" openly on the media, but "fuck" and "shit" is not okay, only because it's lower class.
Decency is not maintained, but defined, by censorship. So the question is how we want to define decency. How much shame do we want to put on skin and slang? How much do we want to discourage breastfeeding, and the health benefits associated with that, by making the act more socially unacceptable? etc.
Increasing censorship to me sounds like more laws being legislated without a problem to solve.
"The more laws, the less justice." Marcus Tullius Cicero
IIRC they ooo has had a light bulb instead of the clippy. It's pretty much the same, just without all the animation.
I've been ignoring OO.o mostly because it is horible on OS X. For example, it inexplicably shows two concurrent menubars instead of one. Copy and paste of text doesn't work with non-ooo apps. The Save As dialog box starts at the root - not even the user's home directory. The general feeling that I got was that Sun et al won't be working on a decent OS X port. Maybe after two years or so they might focus on OS X, but their version numbers seem to me a bit inflated. Their 1.1.1 were probably equivalent to Mozilla's old milestone releases. Maybe this 2.0 version would be around Mozilla's 0.7 in terms of how well polished it is.
Well if you take a diameter of about 3844 km (30% of Earth's diameter) on the curved surface of Earth, then the ratio of circumference to diameter would be about 3 (according to my calculations).
Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? What ever happened to just expanding your own mind, and your own understanding of the world? That was originally the role of Universities - a place to go and learn. The things you learned at University didn't used to have to have any relevance to practical life, or employment; It used to be acceptable to just go and learn something simply because you wanted to know about it.
A University's board of trustees wants to see higher returns on their investments. Schools are raking in more and more money from students by upping the number of required general education hours. Even after adjusting for inflation, college tuition per student has been soaring with no sign of stopping. Also, and I don't mean to be randomly Bush-bashing, however the reality is that Bush tax cuts have resulted in states having less funding they can divert to state Universities. Universities in turn have to cramp their classes more at the same time raising tuition. Students have their time taken away with more gen-ed classes and more part-time jobs.
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job.
This results in more stress put on already cramped universities, because more youth have little option than to go to universities. It also keeps poor families poor, etc. Wealth stratification is stronger now than America one hundred years ago; what some call the American dream is realised less often: that is, going from poor to rich through hard work.
Now that we're in the information age, there are educational materials under Creative Commons Licenses, Free Document License, etc. In the age where required reading materials are over-priced textbooks that the professors themselves have authored. The increasing cost gap between going to a college for learning versus going online for free information is stunning.
In the 1600s, breast-baring was popular fashion in the Netherlands and England. However, when it came to exposing womens' bare shoulders and bare legs -- who would think of the children! -- children had to be protected from such indecencies.
Janet Jackson's boob was a wardrobe malfunction, right? So what was she punished for? Having nipples? This is sad.
is it slower to sync a FAT -formatted ipod on a mac? I heard it was an hence I havent changed from HFS
That's probably true, but probably only slightly different. I have an HFS formatted iPod mini. Finder gave an approximate time of six minutes for a 1 GB download from the mini. If iPod mini can transfer at the maximum possible speed over FireWire (400 Mbit/s), then 1 GB should take only 20 seconds. My guess is that there's a hardware limit, and therefore firmware, disk format, or cable won't improve the speed by a whole lot. I don't know the speeds for other iPods though.
A problem with FAT formatted iPods is that you can't do firmware update of the iPod on OS X, so I'd recommend sticking with HFS if transferring between Windows and Mac with iPod isn't a priority for you.
Yup, they left out the dock ($39), the A/V cable ($19), and the firewire cable ($19). That's $77 of accessories. Plus, what good is the photo if there is no way to output to a TV?
You aren't paying extra for choosing the 30 GB photo model since it's half way between the 20 GB and 40 GB monocrhome models. You get to view album art with each song on the device's screen. You're probably not going to be plugging it into the TV very often anyway, but that would be a nice feature if your digicam doesn't already do that.
Firewire cable - there are very few computers (mac or win) that both: A) has a Firewire 400 port but not a USB 2.0 port, and B) has an OS that satisfies iTunes system requirements
The speed is about the same between the two, which doesn't matter anyway because iPods don't use up the full possible connection speed anyway. My cellphone had a dock but it was just additional bulk. An iPod seems to work just fine without it. In fact to some more convenient without it. It would certainly suck if I had to pay extra for bundled crap that I didn't want to begin with. Even if I wanted accessories, third party vendors (which there are many for iPods) tend to be able to produce cheaper ones.
What's the point of going out of their way to pre-bundle FireWire which most customers don't have to begin with?
USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 speeds are about the same, and besides, iPods don't use the full speed capacity (not nearly for the mini).
They also offer HFS formatted iPods for Mac users. The "feature" being that, oh you know, just in case you wanted to copy files from a Mac to a PC, YOU CAN'T because it's not FAT/FAT32/NTFS formatted. Gee thanks.
One thing I liked about the iPod mini over my Rio Volt MP3 CD player is - besides the fact that it fits in a pocket - power management. Amazingly, the Volt would crash if you plugged in the DC power cord, so you'd have to restart the player. When I plug in the DC power cord into my iPod, on the other hand, the power indicator icon changes, and that's all -- the audio still plays smoothly, no crashing involved. The iPod just works.
It was more like, "You pay to support your elders, and your youngers will pay to support you".
That sounds like a flawed system, because obviously population fluctuations will continue to exist. There should be a transition to a system where one generation pays for their own generation's retirement, as opposed to another generation's. I can't believe why any country wouldn't do it this way.
Apple should provide a killer X11 SDK which would allow porting of X11 apps to an Apple "look and feel". That might bring in a lot of competition and piss off loyal Mac developers.
(sorry, messed up the HTML) Iceland (and Hawaii) are on geothermal hotspots, which aren't man-made. It will be very difficult for non-Hawaii USA to pull off the same stunt.
The protocol is defined too arbitrarily.
That's the way it is with most government. For example, the penalty for a rape crime is pretty arbitrary. If you weren't aware of how penalty for rape was decided, will you be opposed to laws against rape? You can't just object to protocols by saying that it's questionable, you have to point out where you think it went wrong, and we could start from there. In the case of Kyoto it's possible that scientists and economists came up with values that they thought would be most effective and practical. But that's not the main point. The UN isn't going to sit everyone down and make us scientists and mathematicians so each of us can understand the calculations.
I'm too lazy so I'm going to ask a bunch of questions and hopefully someone will answer them.
It almost sounds like this is your main objective, I only list this as a possibility of what you're trying to say because I'm not too sure what else you're trying to say.
The protocol is too hard to comprehend.
Really? Twenty pages is really too much? Is this really your main point? You said: 2. What constitutes an "Emission" ?
For starters, you might check the line that you just quoted: 'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.' You can get a start with the part where I bolded. Look practically anywhere else and you can find out exactly what those six gases are. Since we're talking about the Kyoto Protocol, you might want to check out what UNFCCC says. Just start reading the framework convention and bam right in the beginning is a list of definitions only a page or two long. It's defined there. "Sinks" are a part of the Kyoto protocol, which is when greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere, so it's not just reducing emissions. I happened to be doing a little research on this a few day ago, so here's a list that may be useful in gathering info:
ON top of Progman.exe, might I also recommend geoshell? Litestep is a well-developed shell replacement as well - seems to have plenty of themes. for people who like skinning. Darkstep has some scripting support (supports JScript and VBScript, IIRC). Geoshell, Litestep, and Darkstep are 3rd party software that doesn't come with Windows, btw.
The corrupt governments of developing nations will also be encouraged to
1. Sell credits that their people need, for the benefit of the elite (think Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il).
Governments can already distribute wealth to the elite only and not to those in need, using taxes. While I agree that Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il are bad people, their countries haven't signed up for the treaty, and signing for the treaty closed in 1999.
I don't see why a taxing system is less evil or less corrupt than a "subsidy regime," although they both create incentives to keep the air cleaner. If countries further want to encourage companies to try to actually remove green house gases from the air, as opposed to create less, they have to end up paying them anyway. Kind of like getting paid for collecting empty bottles and cans for recycling.
>> Also, the protocol is not so socialistic because it creates incentive for nations to reduce emissions.
> No, it's socialist because it creates an artificial (and easily forged, mind you) good, exchangeable for cash, and attempts to distribute it on a per-capita basis. Why is that so hard to understand?
I understood your point of view that being tougher on developed nations is socialistic. A common argument against socialism is that it kills incentive. However in this case Kyoto protocol is incentive-creating where there were practically no incentive before. The protocol progressively puts a greater demand on developed nations because they have more capital including technology and intellectual property to tackle the problem.
So the morally-unencumbered countries buy those credits instead, perhaps at a discount. The dictators still get money for doing nothing, just like they skim international aid payments today.
Yes, the morally-unencumbered countries can always do business with oppressive regimes, this has been true, and it seems like the Kyoto protocol doesn't target oppresive regimes but instead global emissions. You say dictators get money for doing nothing, but the idea is that it isn't getting rewarded for doing just nothing, it's getting rewarded for each amount it reduces emissions. The kyoto protocol doesn't take away a nation's right to embargo.
While subsidies in general often aren't without loopholes and waste, with the case of the environment I think there has to be artificial incentives because there aren't a whole lot of natural incentives for companies to keep clean.
As with the comparison with the "UNIFORM $X/TON CARBON TAX" idea, I'll have to think about that some other time becaue that's a bit more complicated but I get a feeling that these things should have been thought out by economists by now... Gah, politics. Takes forever to get things done.
Oops, so I seem to have misread your post - you actually didn't miss emission trading.
Yes, the Kyoto protocol doesn't attack dictatorships. However, under the protocol, the dictatorships aren't necessarily "collecting fees" from the rest of the world. While dictatorships can sell (if no embargos exist) extra quotas for the amount of emissions they have cut, morally concious countries don't have to do business with them at all. Kyoto Protocol just creates another way the rest of the world can motivate even dictatorships to cut emissions. It's a carrot and stick scheme for the whole world.
Also, the protocol is not so socialistic because it creates incentive for nations to reduce emissions. What we have now is little to no incentive - everyone is equal no matter how lazy we are at making the world cleaner.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a quick lookup, and it seems like modern bullet trains travel at around 300 km/h, while Boeing travels at 900 km/h (high sub-sonic speeds). However, you'd also have to take into account the time it takes to get to the airport, getting checked, waiting at the terminal, getting over-booked, getting delayed due to poor weather, the frequency and cost of flights. It also takes time away from your online time if you take the plane. Cost/convenience can differ greatly between regions.
Train stations tend to exist at more convenient locations. There's less security and safety hassle/worries, I never get "over-booked" (North Western Airlines is EVIL!!), and I can usually cancel my trip and get a full refund on my ticket, no questions asked. I think this is partly due to the fact that government funding gives them the leisure to focus on providing transportation as opposed to sucking every last penny out of consumers and over-booking them in return.
I agree that flights are definitely better than train rides when it comes to trans-continental travel. That's why I think Amtrack isn't even trying to provide competition at that kind of distances. What Americans consider as "short distance" is often long distance in another country, though.
Maybe there are other government spending task payers should be more concerned about. Even after Bush's spending costs, highway spending is projected to be around 256 billion USD. Yes, Amtrak does get funding, but we have to look at it relativistically, and see a cost/benefit comparison first. Even if the gov't cuts spending on train transportation, I hope train transportation will continue to exist because what's for sure is that trains can add a valuable transportation alternative. I think that a DC-NYC bullet train link can be very beneficial to that region if it existed; there just isn't that many great lines in the States yet that consumers can take advantage of.
So you don't think that WMA or WMV locks in customers either, then? That's good to hear, otherwise you would be a hypocrite.
There are some differences. WMA is a problem because if you encode something in WMA, then transcode it to MP3, for example, you lose quality. If you convert Apple Lossless to MP3, you don't lose any quality compared to encoding it directly to MP3 without the ALAC step. Apple lossless doesn't lock-in because it can be a reasonable intermediary step. Every iTunes with an Apple Lossless encoder has had a decoder with it. iTunes has been available for both x86 and PowerPC platforms, while on the other hand AVI files that use Windows Media codec have not been supported on Macs because of Microsoft's refusal to support AVIs (along with MPG, MP3) on their media player for the Macs. MS VCM on the other hand creates WMV files that lock in users to the Windows operating system.
Thanks, I made it up.
The asian mindset doesn't really understand the open source concept and would prefer reliable software with a strong manufacture behind it. I don't see this working too well.
The asian mindset doesn't exist. If it did, there'd only be one language, one country, one party, and no murder. Cops will then go unemployed since everyone agrees with each other.
The truth is, if you take a survey of ten people, there's bound to be a disagreement on something. Some get open source (does Ruby mean anything to you?), most have never heard about it.
Try to bundle two billion people's mindset into one, and there is no way you can succeed, no matter what your anecdotal evidence says.
As for things like nudity, I must admit that watching nekkid women turns me on, and causes me to think about things I know I shouldn't, but that's why I make it a point not to watch nekkid women.
Isn't that more about your marital commitment, as opposed to whether or not something should be censored from everyone?
I think skin and slang tend to become inappropriate only when they are restricted. What constitutes as indecent differs with what people are used to.
To many muslims, a woman not wearing a hijab is considered indecent. To the English in the 1600s, showing leg or shoulder skin was considered indecent while what was appropriate and fashionable for women at that time was fully exposing their breasts. People can say "sexual intercourse" and "feces" openly on the media, but "fuck" and "shit" is not okay, only because it's lower class.
Decency is not maintained, but defined, by censorship. So the question is how we want to define decency. How much shame do we want to put on skin and slang? How much do we want to discourage breastfeeding, and the health benefits associated with that, by making the act more socially unacceptable? etc.
Increasing censorship to me sounds like more laws being legislated without a problem to solve.
"The more laws, the less justice." Marcus Tullius Cicero
IIRC they ooo has had a light bulb instead of the clippy. It's pretty much the same, just without all the animation.
I've been ignoring OO.o mostly because it is horible on OS X. For example, it inexplicably shows two concurrent menubars instead of one. Copy and paste of text doesn't work with non-ooo apps. The Save As dialog box starts at the root - not even the user's home directory. The general feeling that I got was that Sun et al won't be working on a decent OS X port. Maybe after two years or so they might focus on OS X, but their version numbers seem to me a bit inflated. Their 1.1.1 were probably equivalent to Mozilla's old milestone releases. Maybe this 2.0 version would be around Mozilla's 0.7 in terms of how well polished it is.
Well if you take a diameter of about 3844 km (30% of Earth's diameter) on the curved surface of Earth, then the ratio of circumference to diameter would be about 3 (according to my calculations).
ActiveBuddy may not have invented it, but they could have bought the rights to a patent from someone else.
Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? What ever happened to just expanding your own mind, and your own understanding of the world? That was originally the role of Universities - a place to go and learn. The things you learned at University didn't used to have to have any relevance to practical life, or employment; It used to be acceptable to just go and learn something simply because you wanted to know about it.
A University's board of trustees wants to see higher returns on their investments. Schools are raking in more and more money from students by upping the number of required general education hours. Even after adjusting for inflation, college tuition per student has been soaring with no sign of stopping. Also, and I don't mean to be randomly Bush-bashing, however the reality is that Bush tax cuts have resulted in states having less funding they can divert to state Universities. Universities in turn have to cramp their classes more at the same time raising tuition. Students have their time taken away with more gen-ed classes and more part-time jobs.
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job.
This results in more stress put on already cramped universities, because more youth have little option than to go to universities. It also keeps poor families poor, etc. Wealth stratification is stronger now than America one hundred years ago; what some call the American dream is realised less often: that is, going from poor to rich through hard work.
Now that we're in the information age, there are educational materials under Creative Commons Licenses, Free Document License, etc. In the age where required reading materials are over-priced textbooks that the professors themselves have authored. The increasing cost gap between going to a college for learning versus going online for free information is stunning.
In the 1600s, breast-baring was popular fashion in the Netherlands and England. However, when it came to exposing womens' bare shoulders and bare legs -- who would think of the children! -- children had to be protected from such indecencies.
Janet Jackson's boob was a wardrobe malfunction, right? So what was she punished for? Having nipples? This is sad.
is it slower to sync a FAT -formatted ipod on a mac? I heard it was an hence I havent changed from HFS
That's probably true, but probably only slightly different. I have an HFS formatted iPod mini. Finder gave an approximate time of six minutes for a 1 GB download from the mini. If iPod mini can transfer at the maximum possible speed over FireWire (400 Mbit/s), then 1 GB should take only 20 seconds. My guess is that there's a hardware limit, and therefore firmware, disk format, or cable won't improve the speed by a whole lot. I don't know the speeds for other iPods though.
A problem with FAT formatted iPods is that you can't do firmware update of the iPod on OS X, so I'd recommend sticking with HFS if transferring between Windows and Mac with iPod isn't a priority for you.
Yup, they left out the dock ($39), the A/V cable ($19), and the firewire cable ($19). That's $77 of accessories. Plus, what good is the photo if there is no way to output to a TV?
You aren't paying extra for choosing the 30 GB photo model since it's half way between the 20 GB and 40 GB monocrhome models. You get to view album art with each song on the device's screen. You're probably not going to be plugging it into the TV very often anyway, but that would be a nice feature if your digicam doesn't already do that.
Firewire cable - there are very few computers (mac or win) that both:
A) has a Firewire 400 port but not a USB 2.0 port, and
B) has an OS that satisfies iTunes system requirements
The speed is about the same between the two, which doesn't matter anyway because iPods don't use up the full possible connection speed anyway. My cellphone had a dock but it was just additional bulk. An iPod seems to work just fine without it. In fact to some more convenient without it. It would certainly suck if I had to pay extra for bundled crap that I didn't want to begin with. Even if I wanted accessories, third party vendors (which there are many for iPods) tend to be able to produce cheaper ones.
What's the point of going out of their way to pre-bundle FireWire which most customers don't have to begin with?
USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 speeds are about the same, and besides, iPods don't use the full speed capacity (not nearly for the mini).
They also offer HFS formatted iPods for Mac users. The "feature" being that, oh you know, just in case you wanted to copy files from a Mac to a PC, YOU CAN'T because it's not FAT/FAT32/NTFS formatted. Gee thanks.
One thing I liked about the iPod mini over my Rio Volt MP3 CD player is - besides the fact that it fits in a pocket - power management. Amazingly, the Volt would crash if you plugged in the DC power cord, so you'd have to restart the player. When I plug in the DC power cord into my iPod, on the other hand, the power indicator icon changes, and that's all -- the audio still plays smoothly, no crashing involved. The iPod just works.
It was more like, "You pay to support your elders, and your youngers will pay to support you".
That sounds like a flawed system, because obviously population fluctuations will continue to exist. There should be a transition to a system where one generation pays for their own generation's retirement, as opposed to another generation's. I can't believe why any country wouldn't do it this way.
Apple should provide a killer X11 SDK which would allow porting of X11 apps to an Apple "look and feel".
That might bring in a lot of competition and piss off loyal Mac developers.
(sorry, messed up the HTML)
Iceland (and Hawaii) are on geothermal hotspots, which aren't man-made. It will be very difficult for non-Hawaii USA to pull off the same stunt.
Iceland (and Hawaii) are on , which aren't man-made. It will be very difficult for non-Hawaii USA to pull off the same stunt.
2. What constitutes an "Emission" ?
From the HTML that you cite:
Greenhouse gases
Carbon dioxide (CO2)
Methane (CH4)
Nitrous oxide (N2O)
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
Perfluorocarbons (PFCs)
Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6)
3. Why those six particular greenhouse gasses?
Because they are the major greenhouse gases. What I'm more curious about is what are you trying to say? Legal papers are hard to read?
That's the way it is with most government. For example, the penalty for a rape crime is pretty arbitrary. If you weren't aware of how penalty for rape was decided, will you be opposed to laws against rape? You can't just object to protocols by saying that it's questionable, you have to point out where you think it went wrong, and we could start from there. In the case of Kyoto it's possible that scientists and economists came up with values that they thought would be most effective and practical. But that's not the main point. The UN isn't going to sit everyone down and make us scientists and mathematicians so each of us can understand the calculations.
It almost sounds like this is your main objective, I only list this as a possibility of what you're trying to say because I'm not too sure what else you're trying to say.
Really? Twenty pages is really too much? Is this really your main point? You said: 2. What constitutes an "Emission" ? For starters, you might check the line that you just quoted: 'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.' You can get a start with the part where I bolded. Look practically anywhere else and you can find out exactly what those six gases are. Since we're talking about the Kyoto Protocol, you might want to check out what UNFCCC says. Just start reading the framework convention and bam right in the beginning is a list of definitions only a page or two long. It's defined there. "Sinks" are a part of the Kyoto protocol, which is when greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere, so it's not just reducing emissions. I happened to be doing a little research on this a few day ago, so here's a list that may be useful in gathering info:
ON top of Progman.exe, might I also recommend geoshell? Litestep is a well-developed shell replacement as well - seems to have plenty of themes. for people who like skinning. Darkstep has some scripting support (supports JScript and VBScript, IIRC). Geoshell, Litestep, and Darkstep are 3rd party software that doesn't come with Windows, btw.
I think the icon color scheme should make the choice pretty obvious: which one would you rather pick, the blue icon or the red icon? ;-)
The corrupt governments of developing nations will also be encouraged to
1. Sell credits that their people need, for the benefit of the elite (think Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il).
Governments can already distribute wealth to the elite only and not to those in need, using taxes. While I agree that Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il are bad people, their countries haven't signed up for the treaty, and signing for the treaty closed in 1999.
I don't see why a taxing system is less evil or less corrupt than a "subsidy regime," although they both create incentives to keep the air cleaner. If countries further want to encourage companies to try to actually remove green house gases from the air, as opposed to create less, they have to end up paying them anyway. Kind of like getting paid for collecting empty bottles and cans for recycling.
>> Also, the protocol is not so socialistic because it creates incentive for nations to reduce emissions.
> No, it's socialist because it creates an artificial (and easily forged, mind you) good, exchangeable for cash, and attempts to distribute it on a per-capita basis. Why is that so hard to understand?
I understood your point of view that being tougher on developed nations is socialistic. A common argument against socialism is that it kills incentive. However in this case Kyoto protocol is incentive-creating where there were practically no incentive before. The protocol progressively puts a greater demand on developed nations because they have more capital including technology and intellectual property to tackle the problem.
So the morally-unencumbered countries buy those credits instead, perhaps at a discount. The dictators still get money for doing nothing, just like they skim international aid payments today.
Yes, the morally-unencumbered countries can always do business with oppressive regimes, this has been true, and it seems like the Kyoto protocol doesn't target oppresive regimes but instead global emissions. You say dictators get money for doing nothing, but the idea is that it isn't getting rewarded for doing just nothing, it's getting rewarded for each amount it reduces emissions. The kyoto protocol doesn't take away a nation's right to embargo.
While subsidies in general often aren't without loopholes and waste, with the case of the environment I think there has to be artificial incentives because there aren't a whole lot of natural incentives for companies to keep clean.
As with the comparison with the "UNIFORM $X/TON CARBON TAX" idea, I'll have to think about that some other time becaue that's a bit more complicated but I get a feeling that these things should have been thought out by economists by now... Gah, politics. Takes forever to get things done.
Oops, so I seem to have misread your post - you actually didn't miss emission trading.
Yes, the Kyoto protocol doesn't attack dictatorships. However, under the protocol, the dictatorships aren't necessarily "collecting fees" from the rest of the world. While dictatorships can sell (if no embargos exist) extra quotas for the amount of emissions they have cut, morally concious countries don't have to do business with them at all. Kyoto Protocol just creates another way the rest of the world can motivate even dictatorships to cut emissions. It's a carrot and stick scheme for the whole world.
Also, the protocol is not so socialistic because it creates incentive for nations to reduce emissions. What we have now is little to no incentive - everyone is equal no matter how lazy we are at making the world cleaner.