I can't really find all that much I agree with in your statement, except the last line: I think I'd like to go back to being isolationists, too!:-)
I was being sardonic, actually- sadly, your country has been a colonial power since at least 1899. Likely that event was glossed over in your history books.
I do have a question for you, though... isn't nuclear power our best bet right now? Some places don't have all that much sun and others don't have that much wind, but you can always ship Uranium in.
Supply and demand have to be balanced at the lowest cost- each investment having a capital cost, carbon cost, a lead-time, and a pay-off.
Conservation typically has the lowest capital cost, shortest lead-times and highest pay-offs, with the lowest embedded energy of any solution.
The problem with nuclear is the very long lead-time, and the high capital cost. Natural gas, especially with co-generation, has a great pay-off for a lower TCO, and smaller (and incremental) capital costs with much better lead-times. That's why hardly anyone these days is building nuclear plants: they're just too damned expensive.
Earth-policy.org put out an interesting article on wind energy a few months back. Take a look at the data at the very bottom. The Kilowatt-Hour of electricity has been going down in price precipitously, and it won't be long before it's down to 2 cents.
The most likely course right now as far as straight economics go is natural gas. If pushed by high prices or if political pressure warrants it, we'll see power companies educate customers about efficiency, and governments legislating. In 5-10 years from now, wind will be the cheapest of any energy alternative, with low lead-times, excellent pay-off and carbon balance. Cheap enough that making hydrogen with excess power will be feasible, and capacity can be installed even in lower-wind regions. There's no way nuclear will be able to compete with that unless you can cut its price down by a factor of four.
It's almost inevitable, and since the US is not creating a level-playing field for wind energy producers, you are losing your leadership to the Danes and the Germans.
Your two main candidates not understanding world opinion is going to impose large diplomatic and other costs. Your country is seen as the single biggest threat to world peace and stability by the likes of Mandela and most Europeans I know.
If Chirac and his cabal are getting Europe to compete with the US in armamements, space, materials, energy, basic research, etc, etc... it's because they want to use every opportunity they have to cut you down.
When a country like the US wants to say, dominate world affairs by having space weapon supremacy, other powers naturally don't appreciate that. When the PNAC gets its members in some of the highest offices in the land, it worries other countries that they have declared their intention to cut down any other regional power (read: Europe) that could pose a challenge to their supremacy... Them are fighting words.
A country that doesn't want to pay its dues at the UN but wants to keep running the show is going to face resentment. A country that aligns itself with the Vatican on birth control and dictatorships on international law is going to be isolated.
Some economic costs are going to be indirect: as the US decides to ignore the consensus of the rest of the world on global warming, you are continuing to produce dirty cars and finance coal, oil and nuclear technology. You're going to lose leadership, just as you're losing it to Denmark and Germany for wind, or Japan for solar and cars.
Nope, not a troll, just my developing opinion about the roots of the US crisis.
Maybe in Canada, due to your relative lack of population pressure and reliance on the United States for economic and military security, you can sit in an ivory tower and pretend this ain't so. Please remove your blinders.
Military security? Nah, who's going to attack us? Economic security? With friends like that, we don't need enemies: softwood, grain... The US has consistently tried to bully us around in both arenas, and this is especially evident when the US wants to go to war under false pretenses or start make-work projects for arms dealers - as they are doing with their missile defense shield.
How does one benchmark "happiness"?
All the surveys I've seen indicate that despite a rising GDP, people don't feel that their standard of living has gone up. Your GDP is not being shared equitably, and unlike our grandparents generation, our parents can't say that their children have a better future ahead. Something is amiss. Take a look at the Genuine Progress Indicator, or other benchmarks- the trends are pretty scary.
We're only seeing the beginnings of it, but we're moving towards a new mode of production. Just like the Industrial Revolution, we can expect to see major changes ahead, including in the political structure that had evolved to manage the previous economic system. Our trying to apply Industrial era ideas -like patents- to the new system don't work.
The US will only benefit from this change if it has a clear idea of why it is in its current situation, and what the world around them is like. So far it's not looking great, as your election seems to be showing: both candidates are out of step with the rest of world opinion.
I create IP all the time with my code, and I'm sharing it because I want other people to help me maintain it. That's what Linus did: he's lazy, like any good programmer. I'm just copying his example.
It's not just my world; I'm seeing people succeed with this strategy all around me. Arranging bits in a useful order is not cheap, but for a lot of us they're sunk costs- we had to spend that money regardless.
Expensive IP can still be created by people that have specific needs and the resources to hire programmers to do the bit-arranging. We're only scratching the surface of what we could do, and we'll only be able to get there if we have enough commodity building blocks to glue together into useful one-off developments.
That said, it seems to me that co-ops don't fit in the normal mode. Gift economies can also work, which would include things like OSS, Wikipedia, and the scientific community's publishing. Besides some 10% of my province's economy that is under the aegis of co-ops, the volunteer sector also creates unrecorded value that is significant.
And one should mention that capitalist systems have also been known to use coercion, and it is used to a certain extent with some forms of labour, including in the "developed" countries. Some critics also argue that the wars that capitalism can not survive without war.
It's a grey situation, and I'm not about to forcefully get rid of capitalism, whatever a person's definition might be. I do however think it healthy to keep testing alternatives- the end of history hasn't yet been reached.
The whole problem with other alternative systems, respect based, communism, or whatever is the simple fact that they require people to be better than they are. Unfortunately people are rotten in general.
obviously you're American (honest, that was my first thought!)... wait:
The typical person can convince themselves that any and all action they take is of the highest order. The current election where both parties seem to have betrayed every principle they espouse is a good example.
Right! You are! No one else would talk about the current election with two parties, leaving out the name of the country and other details, and assume to be understood- but an American. (Ok, I'll cut you some slack: this *is* slashdot, which is located in the US;)
Now, you know, a lot of the "rest of the world" isn't quite as paranoid about other people wanting to steal their stuff. A lot of us actually believe that the vast majority of the time, most people like to cooperate. And there are enough people that like to act ethically that things like wikipedia and open-source can actually work. Heck, not just work, they can work better than your cut-throat capitalism.
Oh, I should mention this while I'm ranting: the US economy's fortunes have very little to do with your brand of aggressive capitalism. If anything, you're doing well despite it. In the first part of the last century, you folks had a lot of oil, which is essential for fuelling an industrial economy and war machine. That's all. Just like England became wealthy with coal, you became wealthy because of oil- just an accident of history, really.
I believe St. Francis explained that having wealth made you fearful, and wanting to protect it. It was easier for him just to renounce material wealth, so he wouldn't have to worry.
Now, this is a crucial point: the US has been in decline now for some 30 years as an economic power. Your GDP goes up, but you people aren't any happier. This wealth that you accumulated is causing you some nasty "cognitive dissonnance", and you're choosing to resolve it by believing odd notions- like you're somehow superior, and the rest of the world is after you. Not so.
There is no problem with these other economic systems so long as they do not require coercion. People obviously ARE willing to contribute to things like wikipedia, distributed proofreaders, open source projects, peace brigades international, etc, etc... These things WORK. Who are you to say that human nature is evil, in the face of such feats? Humans sure are capable of incredible, unspeakable barbarity. But that's only human realization, quite distinct from human nature, which includes the possibility of either realization. And some systems invite certain types of realization: authoritarian systems invite barbary, systems that give status in exchange for contribution reward giving.
It's not selfless in the dualistic way that is present in judeo-christian (well, mostly christian) morality. The gift economy can't be seen as either selfless or selfish- more like enlightened self-interest. Contribute to a good OSS project, see your ability to charge high consulting fees go up. Neither selfless, nor selfish (or maybe both?)
Untill you have a literally unlimited production capacity
Ah, there you have it: as far as IP goes, we do have nearly unlimited production capacity. Economists had to come up with the idea of augmenting returns; it's so damned cheap to copy bits that marginal costs keep decreasing. You can't deprive the other guy by making a copy (well, unless you're counting on licensing...).
If you would like to see society get better figure out how to make people a little less rotten.
There's no need. We only need a system that invites better realizations, and that's something that's become possible with a new mode of production. It's a rare thing in human history to be witnesses to such a massive change. That said, I'm afraid a lot of Americans are going to be too afraid to partake in this movement because your accidental wealth has warped your vision, making you see human nature as dark as your leaders manifest it.
I've actually heard of these guys already, and that's precisely the type of company I think is going to create a revolution in the coming years.
Cheap, reliable BIPV can have very low installation costs; along with net metering and favorable mortgages, it could take off faster than a lot of people expect. (Where I live, we don't have net metering yet, and banks aren't happy to lend you the money because they aren't assured of the resale value...)
LOAF sounds wonderful until someone creates a LOAF-exploiting virus
Well, this doesn't create much more incentive than already exists...
Perhaps we could use this to change user culture a bit? People that would use LOAF might come to expect that their friends be patched, and put social pressure (shame) those whose computers get 0wned.
Ok, if it's so damned profitable...
on
The Spyware Inferno
·
· Score: 2, Funny
and people don't seem to care...
I propose we have an OSS implementation (well, likely we'd end up with a dozen, but stay with me), and make absolutely sure that people wanting to get paid for bundling it WARN people. We also give people an easy way to uninstall the software, and design it so that we're not invading people's privacy.
Monies raised could be used to fund OSS projects, marketing, design, usability, librairies, whatever we decide is useful. (Oh, yeah, I can see that forking into a thousand camps!).
Ok, define "small developments". I have a project for a small business owner, and there are 50+ tables in the database, done with MySQL. It's hell.
E.g., the following was not possible: DELETE From table where id in (SELECT id from table1 where child_id = '3')
WTF? It's one thing flying by the seat of your pants and not using foreign keys... it's quite another having to triple your work to do very simple operations that are fairly routine in a moderately normalized database.
And how about transactions? Did they not assure us that they weren't needed? Maybe for most small projects, but even a small shopping cart is vulnerable to data corruption without it: you have to delete the cart, insert the order, send an email to the user, update inventory and advise the owner. They all have to succeed, or you're screwed having to manually clean up. You can play around the order of operations to make things less critical, but you can't have a situation where you can feel confident that nothing awful could happen.
Take the kludge they proposed for getting around their lack of nested SELECTs- when creating reports for a project, that adds a lot of time to development.
I realize those three features are in the "new and improved" MySQL, and that I was constrained to an old -but stable- version (3.23). But I'll be upgrading to PostgreSQL instead- if I'm going to have to do go through the bother of an upgrade, I might as well go with a db that is more standards compliant, and where the people developing it seem to understand my actual needs a tad better.
The shopping cart is not a "big development" by most standards, but it is already constrained by MySQL's poor feature set. If you don't know what database normalization is, google it, learn and apply it. Now try to do anything useful with MySQL. I've seen other developers hit a brick wall after just 10 tables, because of missing issues that are standard on other RDBMSs or MySQL's "gotchas." Stored procedures aren't even something I'm necessarily interested in. It's the rest of the stuff I needed, and I resented being told they weren't important features, or that I could kludge my way around deficiencies through writing more code.
I remember a few years ago, a total nOOb, trying to figure out what's what in the database world. I had read about how we don't really need all those complex features that slow down databases, and believed it.
Then I worked for a company that required Oracle for its database, because nothing else on the market could possibly handle what they needed done. And they put me to work on some of their stored procedures. ouch.
I learned what I needed about database normalization, and I realized just how much of a toy MySQL was.
That they added essential features is great, but that they still think they're unnecessary shows they have NO CLUE what challenges you get in big developments. And if they flip-flopped on the features, will they change the license?
The most promising db right now for people like me is obviously PostgreSQL. No license hassles is just gravy.
Let's be fair here, the original statement I was responding to was this:
one moment you'll have 1.2MW, next moment you'll have 0.9MW as a cloud passes over
Now granted, you can expect fluctuations, but they aren't going to be so damned dramatic that you're going to shed 300kw in the few seconds it takes for a cloud to go by. You could get daytime fluctuations up to 30%, but that's something that can be managed.
Now, since I've visited homes where most of the energy came from solar cells (natural gas cooking/hot water; wood heating), I know it's not such a crazy idea. The moment you are more than a couple miles away from the grid, it can be cheaper to go solar than to pay for the wires to your home. With a few batteries, you can handle nighttime load as well.
The grid is getting old and fragile, but distributed generation should be able to help. By adding new generation capacity in smaller increments, and getting a mix that better correlates with peak load. Solar can help with that, and while 60% sounds a tad high, 10% should be relatively easy to accomplish. Like for your MSSQL example, a grid is far more robust if it has different power sources.
That peak load is damned expensive, and some power companies are willing to help out with the costs of demand management or adding power generators if that can be used to help meet peak load. Solar is no panacea, but it's not useless either.
Do these people even have electricity? Maybe we should be examining our priorities here... Clean drinking water for everyone, or email? I'd don't know about you guys, but I'd take food and water over 32 messages about increasing the size of my pen1s!
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, a lot of those people do have power. It's kind of hard to lump them all in one category though...
Slashdot has covered a number of stories that demonstrated the impact of good communications infrastructure in the "third world". Finding out what the real market rates are for your cash crop (instead of blindly trusting middlemen), getting your land title (instead of going through corrupt notaries), diagnosing diseases in your farm animals, communicating with relatives that are far away, education... the list goes on.
It's not up to this guy that came up with a cool idea to decide between giving people clean water or cheap TV/computers. If we are to treat third-world people as equals, we'll have to trust them to decide whether they want to spend money on this tool or on something else that's more important to them. To decide for them is rather paternalistic, no?
One last point - your pen1s enlArgement emails... we need help runnning this network, cause we're obviously overwhelmed. By inviting more people in, hopefully we'll find talented people- perhaps another Srinivasa Ramanujan?
Let's assume these people can handle most of their problems if we're not fucking with them, and that they may actually help us solve some of our problems.
maybe they should spend their money on food and birth control?
One of the biggest surprises in development work and family planning of the past decade has been the impact of TV on birth rates.
You'll notice the opposite is true here in the "developed" world. Nine months after every major blackout, ice/snow storm, there's a mini baby-boom. People don't get nookie when they're watching Survivor and sitcom reruns (If having sex during Survivor is what turns your crank, I don't want to know).
TV programmes have also had a huge cultural impact- showing financially independent women in their 30's? Downright radical.
The guy who came up with this is a geek, and he's thinking about bringing technology to the masses. There's nothing wrong with that- people ought to contribute to our common advancement with what knowledge they know and are passionate about.
Efficiency doesn't need to go up to make solar cost-effective. The most efficient PV modules are insanely expensive to build; give me 10% efficiency for a dirt cheap thin-film that I can put on my roof and I'll be happy. The sector is growing some 30% a year, and each doubling in production brings prices down. Modules are now around $4/watt, and the Japanese, with their solar roof program, have taken a leadership position and created a huge market. With that comes more incentive to find break-throughs in thin-film technology.
We likely won't have massive farms of the stuff any time soon. Building-integrated photo voltaics (BIPV if you want to google for more info) is one of the more promising avenues. Solar energy and consumption is distributed, as should be its conversion to electricity.
In a distributed generation system, local variations even out on a larger scale so you won't get massive drops as clouds pass over. Even in overcast days you can get 70% of the energy of a bright day, so the energy produced is not going to suddenly drop anywhere. In places where energy use is highly correlated to air conditionning, this is a very useful addition to the power mix.
Solar is a fascinating field, if much smaller than wind. I wish/.'ers would stop it with the over-the-top FUD, and get a bit better informed on the topic.
You're going to pay somewhere...
On your phone bill or through your taxes elsewhere.
Lots of people already answered this one with knee-jerk reactions, but here goes an attempt at reason...
We are already paying for police investigations through our taxes. We do have to pay somewhere- but do we have to pay to sustain numerous bureaucracies? If people don't mind, maybe we should tax dental care to promote dental hygiene, and condoms for sex education? Or, in the same vein, taxing internet access to fund internet surveillance?
To create another special tax just creates more inefficiency in an already complex system, not to mention that consumption taxes are the most regressive of all. We have a tax system that needs fixing, not more regressive, byzantine jerry-rigging.
The police/RCMP/CSIS are already conducting surveillance, and paying for it with their respective budgets. Is this a thinly veiled way of increasing their wiretapping budget and legitimating this practice, and the need for corporate communication? What does this entail for new communications technology -- will all companies be required to create easy backdoors for snooping?
Finally, the very assumption that we'll have to pay is offensive. If we had to pay, it should be done through taxes. But do we need to, and how much should we spend on this priority? I'd like that decision to be made where it ought to be- in the budget debate in our elected parliament. Such a decision ought to be made knowing full well what stupid things our intel services have seen fit to investigate over the years, and whether we ought to trust them to actually recognize a threat without undue harm to civil liberties and privacy. E.g. see Whose national security?
In fact, I would suggest a variation on your scenario: instead of doing this on a highway, doing it in a busy downtown. This can't possibly be guarded against...
Maybe if we point out enough of these, enough people will understand- the only way to deal with this problem is at the source. Hopefully we can also educate them so they know that invading Iraq only makes it worse- hey, I can dream, right?
OK, so I got critical and super-critical confused, and super-critical is not even an option on most modern plants. Good, I guess.
But suppose I (well, not me) dropped a dirty bomb next door to a nuclear power plant. Even if all that happens is the plant goes offline, that's a fairly big blow, no? Not to mention the exodus that will inevitably follow (even if the plant doesn't go Chernobyl, you still have to deal with a dirty bomb).
Just a few more strikes against your energy infrastructure and you're in serious difficulties... the Alaskan pipeline is impossible to defend, and the Strategic Petroleum reserve is only useful if you can get oil out of it and then refined. There are a lot of weak points- and for the record, I think terrorists will go after oil before nuclear assets.
Never mind my ignorance on nuclear issues- that was only one nightmare scenario amongst many. My point is that the US is extremely vulnerable, and there's no way to defend against every attack. Energy is not your only critical infrastructure, think through some of the rest and learn about their key weaknesses... if the US is going to avoid losing, it has to approach the problem from a better angle.
Security by obscurity isn't a good idea. Even in this "special" case.
Yikes... a friend and I were wondering about what terrorists would do- 1 month before 911.
We though a remote-controlled plane sending chemical weapons over the White House would be a sensible choice. Cause mass panic, kill a few high officials... and disorganize things like you wouldn't believe.
OK, so close but no cigar. But a few of us saw *something* coming, knowing an attack was certainly in the works. (Why? Well, some of us that pay attention to the rest of the world and what they're saying.)
Anyhow, since then that same friend and I have been thinking of what type of attacks might be next. A replay of the same type of attack is unlikely, and now we've exposed some of our worst fears. And I've been afraid to even communicate my ideas of how that could work...
One idea involves making a nuclear plant go critical. How long before a plant goes critical without human intervention? Is it possible to infiltrate high-security areas or disable all humans inside a plant?
Knowing that some of our fears gives them ideas (cf. the original message in this thread), I wonder if I should elaborate or even mention some of the scarier scenarios I could cook up. The US is so incredibly opened it scares even me- and I'm neither faint of heart, nor even living in the US.
Anyhow, there are no good defences against all the attacks. Perhaps I should elaborate, just to drive the point home.
Hmm... maybe then we'll be forced to look for coping strategies that delve into cultural issues, dealing with the root causes of the conflict, and policing actions that could take down such a network as Al-Qaeda.
The funny thing is the notes on the computer indicate they never even thought of using chemical weapons because they thought it would be too complicated.
It's absolutely true, the stuff is way too unwieldy.
However, now that they know the US is completely and utterly paranoid about this scenario, they might want to make us believe that it's a possibility.
I doubt it's true they're even preparing to use them, and even if it was we should just calm the fuck down. The terrorist want us to behave irrationally, and so far they're winning.
Geek fandom aside, you don't launch a product (even a beta) and not grab the name. What did they *think* would happen?
My guess is they were NOT thinking, just as they weren't when they put in motion the froogles fiasco.
Or when they dropped people in Serbia and Montenegro from their Adsense program because of sanctions that didn't exist.
Sure, their engineers might be educated and extremely brilliant. But who the heck hired their incompetent lawyers? They're not just botching the IPO, they've been botching a lot of things for a long time now.
The terrorists aren't really interested in casualties. They go after symbols to get you to respond with irrational actions - which so far, they are succeeding at.
If 9/11 had been intended to kill massive amounts of people, they would have waited mid-day, and/or prevented people from leaving the building.
I'm sure if you asked most people in the US what the terrorists wanted, they would claim the destruction of our civilization. In that kind of environment, it's not surprising people would hold absurd ideas about the intentions of terrorists.
With such counter-factual beliefs, you folks unfortunately do not stand a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Supply and demand have to be balanced at the lowest cost- each investment having a capital cost, carbon cost, a lead-time, and a pay-off.
Conservation typically has the lowest capital cost, shortest lead-times and highest pay-offs, with the lowest embedded energy of any solution.
The problem with nuclear is the very long lead-time, and the high capital cost. Natural gas, especially with co-generation, has a great pay-off for a lower TCO, and smaller (and incremental) capital costs with much better lead-times. That's why hardly anyone these days is building nuclear plants: they're just too damned expensive.
Earth-policy.org put out an interesting article on wind energy a few months back. Take a look at the data at the very bottom. The Kilowatt-Hour of electricity has been going down in price precipitously, and it won't be long before it's down to 2 cents.
The most likely course right now as far as straight economics go is natural gas. If pushed by high prices or if political pressure warrants it, we'll see power companies educate customers about efficiency, and governments legislating. In 5-10 years from now, wind will be the cheapest of any energy alternative, with low lead-times, excellent pay-off and carbon balance. Cheap enough that making hydrogen with excess power will be feasible, and capacity can be installed even in lower-wind regions. There's no way nuclear will be able to compete with that unless you can cut its price down by a factor of four.
It's almost inevitable, and since the US is not creating a level-playing field for wind energy producers, you are losing your leadership to the Danes and the Germans.
Your two main candidates not understanding world opinion is going to impose large diplomatic and other costs. Your country is seen as the single biggest threat to world peace and stability by the likes of Mandela and most Europeans I know.
:)
If Chirac and his cabal are getting Europe to compete with the US in armamements, space, materials, energy, basic research, etc, etc... it's because they want to use every opportunity they have to cut you down.
When a country like the US wants to say, dominate world affairs by having space weapon supremacy, other powers naturally don't appreciate that. When the PNAC gets its members in some of the highest offices in the land, it worries other countries that they have declared their intention to cut down any other regional power (read: Europe) that could pose a challenge to their supremacy... Them are fighting words.
A country that doesn't want to pay its dues at the UN but wants to keep running the show is going to face resentment. A country that aligns itself with the Vatican on birth control and dictatorships on international law is going to be isolated.
Some economic costs are going to be indirect: as the US decides to ignore the consensus of the rest of the world on global warming, you are continuing to produce dirty cars and finance coal, oil and nuclear technology. You're going to lose leadership, just as you're losing it to Denmark and Germany for wind, or Japan for solar and cars.
Maybe you'll go back to be isolationists?
Military security? Nah, who's going to attack us? Economic security? With friends like that, we don't need enemies: softwood, grain... The US has consistently tried to bully us around in both arenas, and this is especially evident when the US wants to go to war under false pretenses or start make-work projects for arms dealers - as they are doing with their missile defense shield.
All the surveys I've seen indicate that despite a rising GDP, people don't feel that their standard of living has gone up. Your GDP is not being shared equitably, and unlike our grandparents generation, our parents can't say that their children have a better future ahead. Something is amiss. Take a look at the Genuine Progress Indicator, or other benchmarks- the trends are pretty scary.
We're only seeing the beginnings of it, but we're moving towards a new mode of production. Just like the Industrial Revolution, we can expect to see major changes ahead, including in the political structure that had evolved to manage the previous economic system. Our trying to apply Industrial era ideas -like patents- to the new system don't work.
The US will only benefit from this change if it has a clear idea of why it is in its current situation, and what the world around them is like. So far it's not looking great, as your election seems to be showing: both candidates are out of step with the rest of world opinion.
I create IP all the time with my code, and I'm sharing it because I want other people to help me maintain it. That's what Linus did: he's lazy, like any good programmer. I'm just copying his example.
It's not just my world; I'm seeing people succeed with this strategy all around me. Arranging bits in a useful order is not cheap, but for a lot of us they're sunk costs- we had to spend that money regardless.
Expensive IP can still be created by people that have specific needs and the resources to hire programmers to do the bit-arranging. We're only scratching the surface of what we could do, and we'll only be able to get there if we have enough commodity building blocks to glue together into useful one-off developments.
Depends a bit on how you define Capitalism
That said, it seems to me that co-ops don't fit in the normal mode. Gift economies can also work, which would include things like OSS, Wikipedia, and the scientific community's publishing. Besides some 10% of my province's economy that is under the aegis of co-ops, the volunteer sector also creates unrecorded value that is significant.
And one should mention that capitalist systems have also been known to use coercion, and it is used to a certain extent with some forms of labour, including in the "developed" countries. Some critics also argue that the wars that capitalism can not survive without war.
It's a grey situation, and I'm not about to forcefully get rid of capitalism, whatever a person's definition might be. I do however think it healthy to keep testing alternatives- the end of history hasn't yet been reached.
Right! You are! No one else would talk about the current election with two parties, leaving out the name of the country and other details, and assume to be understood- but an American. (Ok, I'll cut you some slack: this *is* slashdot, which is located in the US
Now, you know, a lot of the "rest of the world" isn't quite as paranoid about other people wanting to steal their stuff. A lot of us actually believe that the vast majority of the time, most people like to cooperate. And there are enough people that like to act ethically that things like wikipedia and open-source can actually work. Heck, not just work, they can work better than your cut-throat capitalism.
Oh, I should mention this while I'm ranting: the US economy's fortunes have very little to do with your brand of aggressive capitalism. If anything, you're doing well despite it. In the first part of the last century, you folks had a lot of oil, which is essential for fuelling an industrial economy and war machine. That's all. Just like England became wealthy with coal, you became wealthy because of oil- just an accident of history, really.
I believe St. Francis explained that having wealth made you fearful, and wanting to protect it. It was easier for him just to renounce material wealth, so he wouldn't have to worry.
Now, this is a crucial point: the US has been in decline now for some 30 years as an economic power. Your GDP goes up, but you people aren't any happier. This wealth that you accumulated is causing you some nasty "cognitive dissonnance", and you're choosing to resolve it by believing odd notions- like you're somehow superior, and the rest of the world is after you. Not so.
There is no problem with these other economic systems so long as they do not require coercion. People obviously ARE willing to contribute to things like wikipedia, distributed proofreaders, open source projects, peace brigades international, etc, etc... These things WORK. Who are you to say that human nature is evil, in the face of such feats? Humans sure are capable of incredible, unspeakable barbarity. But that's only human realization, quite distinct from human nature, which includes the possibility of either realization. And some systems invite certain types of realization: authoritarian systems invite barbary, systems that give status in exchange for contribution reward giving.
It's not selfless in the dualistic way that is present in judeo-christian (well, mostly christian) morality. The gift economy can't be seen as either selfless or selfish- more like enlightened self-interest. Contribute to a good OSS project, see your ability to charge high consulting fees go up. Neither selfless, nor selfish (or maybe both?)
Ah, there you have it: as far as IP goes, we do have nearly unlimited production capacity. Economists had to come up with the idea of augmenting returns; it's so damned cheap to copy bits that marginal costs keep decreasing. You can't deprive the other guy by making a copy (well, unless you're counting on licensing...).
There's no need. We only need a system that invites better realizations, and that's something that's become possible with a new mode of production. It's a rare thing in human history to be witnesses to such a massive change. That said, I'm afraid a lot of Americans are going to be too afraid to partake in this movement because your accidental wealth has warped your vision, making you see human nature as dark as your leaders manifest it.
I've actually heard of these guys already, and that's precisely the type of company I think is going to create a revolution in the coming years.
Cheap, reliable BIPV can have very low installation costs; along with net metering and favorable mortgages, it could take off faster than a lot of people expect. (Where I live, we don't have net metering yet, and banks aren't happy to lend you the money because they aren't assured of the resale value...)
Perhaps we could use this to change user culture a bit? People that would use LOAF might come to expect that their friends be patched, and put social pressure (shame) those whose computers get 0wned.
and people don't seem to care...
:)
I propose we have an OSS implementation (well, likely we'd end up with a dozen, but stay with me), and make absolutely sure that people wanting to get paid for bundling it WARN people. We also give people an easy way to uninstall the software, and design it so that we're not invading people's privacy.
Monies raised could be used to fund OSS projects, marketing, design, usability, librairies, whatever we decide is useful. (Oh, yeah, I can see that forking into a thousand camps!).
Any takers?
Ok, define "small developments". I have a project for a small business owner, and there are 50+ tables in the database, done with MySQL. It's hell.
E.g., the following was not possible:
DELETE From table where id in (SELECT id from table1 where child_id = '3')
WTF? It's one thing flying by the seat of your pants and not using foreign keys... it's quite another having to triple your work to do very simple operations that are fairly routine in a moderately normalized database.
And how about transactions? Did they not assure us that they weren't needed? Maybe for most small projects, but even a small shopping cart is vulnerable to data corruption without it: you have to delete the cart, insert the order, send an email to the user, update inventory and advise the owner. They all have to succeed, or you're screwed having to manually clean up. You can play around the order of operations to make things less critical, but you can't have a situation where you can feel confident that nothing awful could happen.
Take the kludge they proposed for getting around their lack of nested SELECTs- when creating reports for a project, that adds a lot of time to development.
I realize those three features are in the "new and improved" MySQL, and that I was constrained to an old -but stable- version (3.23). But I'll be upgrading to PostgreSQL instead- if I'm going to have to do go through the bother of an upgrade, I might as well go with a db that is more standards compliant, and where the people developing it seem to understand my actual needs a tad better.
The shopping cart is not a "big development" by most standards, but it is already constrained by MySQL's poor feature set. If you don't know what database normalization is, google it, learn and apply it. Now try to do anything useful with MySQL. I've seen other developers hit a brick wall after just 10 tables, because of missing issues that are standard on other RDBMSs or MySQL's "gotchas." Stored procedures aren't even something I'm necessarily interested in. It's the rest of the stuff I needed, and I resented being told they weren't important features, or that I could kludge my way around deficiencies through writing more code.
I remember a few years ago, a total nOOb, trying to figure out what's what in the database world. I had read about how we don't really need all those complex features that slow down databases, and believed it.
Then I worked for a company that required Oracle for its database, because nothing else on the market could possibly handle what they needed done. And they put me to work on some of their stored procedures. ouch.
I learned what I needed about database normalization, and I realized just how much of a toy MySQL was.
That they added essential features is great, but that they still think they're unnecessary shows they have NO CLUE what challenges you get in big developments. And if they flip-flopped on the features, will they change the license?
The most promising db right now for people like me is obviously PostgreSQL. No license hassles is just gravy.
yeah, a few kilowatts... for a single house. take a few hundred in any area, and you'll have manageable fluctuations.
Now, since I've visited homes where most of the energy came from solar cells (natural gas cooking/hot water; wood heating), I know it's not such a crazy idea. The moment you are more than a couple miles away from the grid, it can be cheaper to go solar than to pay for the wires to your home. With a few batteries, you can handle nighttime load as well.
The grid is getting old and fragile, but distributed generation should be able to help. By adding new generation capacity in smaller increments, and getting a mix that better correlates with peak load. Solar can help with that, and while 60% sounds a tad high, 10% should be relatively easy to accomplish. Like for your MSSQL example, a grid is far more robust if it has different power sources.
That peak load is damned expensive, and some power companies are willing to help out with the costs of demand management or adding power generators if that can be used to help meet peak load. Solar is no panacea, but it's not useless either.
Slashdot has covered a number of stories that demonstrated the impact of good communications infrastructure in the "third world". Finding out what the real market rates are for your cash crop (instead of blindly trusting middlemen), getting your land title (instead of going through corrupt notaries), diagnosing diseases in your farm animals, communicating with relatives that are far away, education... the list goes on.
It's not up to this guy that came up with a cool idea to decide between giving people clean water or cheap TV/computers. If we are to treat third-world people as equals, we'll have to trust them to decide whether they want to spend money on this tool or on something else that's more important to them. To decide for them is rather paternalistic, no?
One last point - your pen1s enlArgement emails... we need help runnning this network, cause we're obviously overwhelmed. By inviting more people in, hopefully we'll find talented people- perhaps another Srinivasa Ramanujan?
Let's assume these people can handle most of their problems if we're not fucking with them, and that they may actually help us solve some of our problems.
You'll notice the opposite is true here in the "developed" world. Nine months after every major blackout, ice/snow storm, there's a mini baby-boom. People don't get nookie when they're watching Survivor and sitcom reruns (If having sex during Survivor is what turns your crank, I don't want to know).
TV programmes have also had a huge cultural impact- showing financially independent women in their 30's? Downright radical.
The guy who came up with this is a geek, and he's thinking about bringing technology to the masses. There's nothing wrong with that- people ought to contribute to our common advancement with what knowledge they know and are passionate about.
OK, I call BS.
/.'ers would stop it with the over-the-top FUD, and get a bit better informed on the topic.
Efficiency doesn't need to go up to make solar cost-effective. The most efficient PV modules are insanely expensive to build; give me 10% efficiency for a dirt cheap thin-film that I can put on my roof and I'll be happy. The sector is growing some 30% a year, and each doubling in production brings prices down. Modules are now around $4/watt, and the Japanese, with their solar roof program, have taken a leadership position and created a huge market. With that comes more incentive to find break-throughs in thin-film technology.
We likely won't have massive farms of the stuff any time soon. Building-integrated photo voltaics (BIPV if you want to google for more info) is one of the more promising avenues. Solar energy and consumption is distributed, as should be its conversion to electricity.
In a distributed generation system, local variations even out on a larger scale so you won't get massive drops as clouds pass over. Even in overcast days you can get 70% of the energy of a bright day, so the energy produced is not going to suddenly drop anywhere. In places where energy use is highly correlated to air conditionning, this is a very useful addition to the power mix.
Solar is a fascinating field, if much smaller than wind. I wish
We are already paying for police investigations through our taxes. We do have to pay somewhere- but do we have to pay to sustain numerous bureaucracies? If people don't mind, maybe we should tax dental care to promote dental hygiene, and condoms for sex education? Or, in the same vein, taxing internet access to fund internet surveillance?
To create another special tax just creates more inefficiency in an already complex system, not to mention that consumption taxes are the most regressive of all. We have a tax system that needs fixing, not more regressive, byzantine jerry-rigging.
The police/RCMP/CSIS are already conducting surveillance, and paying for it with their respective budgets. Is this a thinly veiled way of increasing their wiretapping budget and legitimating this practice, and the need for corporate communication? What does this entail for new communications technology -- will all companies be required to create easy backdoors for snooping?
Finally, the very assumption that we'll have to pay is offensive. If we had to pay, it should be done through taxes. But do we need to, and how much should we spend on this priority? I'd like that decision to be made where it ought to be- in the budget debate in our elected parliament. Such a decision ought to be made knowing full well what stupid things our intel services have seen fit to investigate over the years, and whether we ought to trust them to actually recognize a threat without undue harm to civil liberties and privacy. E.g. see Whose national security?
The "How to buy" page definitely needs the FAQ.
In comparison, the many OSS licenses don't seem so bad/complex after all, and at least the price is right.
Exactly my conclusion.
In fact, I would suggest a variation on your scenario: instead of doing this on a highway, doing it in a busy downtown. This can't possibly be guarded against...
Maybe if we point out enough of these, enough people will understand- the only way to deal with this problem is at the source. Hopefully we can also educate them so they know that invading Iraq only makes it worse- hey, I can dream, right?
OK, so I got critical and super-critical confused, and super-critical is not even an option on most modern plants. Good, I guess.
But suppose I (well, not me) dropped a dirty bomb next door to a nuclear power plant. Even if all that happens is the plant goes offline, that's a fairly big blow, no? Not to mention the exodus that will inevitably follow (even if the plant doesn't go Chernobyl, you still have to deal with a dirty bomb).
Just a few more strikes against your energy infrastructure and you're in serious difficulties... the Alaskan pipeline is impossible to defend, and the Strategic Petroleum reserve is only useful if you can get oil out of it and then refined. There are a lot of weak points- and for the record, I think terrorists will go after oil before nuclear assets.
Never mind my ignorance on nuclear issues- that was only one nightmare scenario amongst many. My point is that the US is extremely vulnerable, and there's no way to defend against every attack.
Energy is not your only critical infrastructure, think through some of the rest and learn about their key weaknesses... if the US is going to avoid losing, it has to approach the problem from a better angle.
We though a remote-controlled plane sending chemical weapons over the White House would be a sensible choice. Cause mass panic, kill a few high officials... and disorganize things like you wouldn't believe.
OK, so close but no cigar. But a few of us saw *something* coming, knowing an attack was certainly in the works. (Why? Well, some of us that pay attention to the rest of the world and what they're saying.)
Anyhow, since then that same friend and I have been thinking of what type of attacks might be next. A replay of the same type of attack is unlikely, and now we've exposed some of our worst fears. And I've been afraid to even communicate my ideas of how that could work...
One idea involves making a nuclear plant go critical. How long before a plant goes critical without human intervention? Is it possible to infiltrate high-security areas or disable all humans inside a plant?
Knowing that some of our fears gives them ideas (cf. the original message in this thread), I wonder if I should elaborate or even mention some of the scarier scenarios I could cook up. The US is so incredibly opened it scares even me- and I'm neither faint of heart, nor even living in the US.
Anyhow, there are no good defences against all the attacks. Perhaps I should elaborate, just to drive the point home.
Hmm... maybe then we'll be forced to look for coping strategies that delve into cultural issues, dealing with the root causes of the conflict, and policing actions that could take down such a network as Al-Qaeda.
However, now that they know the US is completely and utterly paranoid about this scenario, they might want to make us believe that it's a possibility.
I doubt it's true they're even preparing to use them, and even if it was we should just calm the fuck down. The terrorist want us to behave irrationally, and so far they're winning.
Or when they dropped people in Serbia and Montenegro from their Adsense program because of sanctions that didn't exist.
Sure, their engineers might be educated and extremely brilliant. But who the heck hired their incompetent lawyers? They're not just botching the IPO, they've been botching a lot of things for a long time now.
The terrorists aren't really interested in casualties. They go after symbols to get you to respond with irrational actions - which so far, they are succeeding at.
If 9/11 had been intended to kill massive amounts of people, they would have waited mid-day, and/or prevented people from leaving the building.
I'm sure if you asked most people in the US what the terrorists wanted, they would claim the destruction of our civilization. In that kind of environment, it's not surprising people would hold absurd ideas about the intentions of terrorists.
With such counter-factual beliefs, you folks unfortunately do not stand a chance.