Conservation is important, but it is not enough on its own. Our requirement for energy keeps increasing despite conservation. We need better, cleaner ways of making the energy we require.
And why does energy demands increase? Because people buy more and more inefficient energy vampires, me too. My stereo, dvd player, and TV constantly draw energy even when turned off. Therefore I plugged them all into a power strip with it's own power switch, I can then turn them all off at the same tyme. That is conservation, though it would be more conservative not having them admittedly. Another step of conservation people can do as I have is to replace most of their incandescent light bulbs with efficient compact florescent lights. The CFLs I replaced the incandescent lights with only use 1/4 of the power the incandescent bulbs did. And I only have lights on I need, when I leave one room and don't plan on returning I turn the lights off in that room.
As for cleaner energy, theres plenty that can be developed. In the US Rocky Mountains there's enough potential wind power to supply the lower 48 states with electricity. Other states also have good wind potential. Several years ago while they had rolling blackouts in California, there was a wind farm that sat idle in CA. Why? Because the power cabled needed to deliver the electricity to users wasn't there. Also California is a good state for solar power, as is AZ, MN, TX, and FL.
You don't understand the nuclear waste issue. It's far too complex to explain fully here. Needless to say, there are useful things that can be done with it that hysterical "environmentalists" have made politically impossible.
You're the one who doesn't understand, or refuses to accept it, there is no need for any new nuclear power plants. And the ones currently running can be closed. I'm glad environmentalists have done what they can to make nuclear power plants hard, they aren't needed!!!
well let's put it this way, while mining the moon for HE3 will be intractably expensive for decades and possibly a century or more, shooting a couple hundred tons of radioactive waste to a barren lifeless rock or the sun is much more feasible.
I don't know if mining the moon for HE3 would ever be economically feasible or not but I bet travel to the moon will be before the end of the century, unless a catastrophe occurs before then. At first only the rich may go but as with many other things the rich will pave the way for cheaper travel. But again why use nuclear power at all when non or low polluting alternative energy sources along with conservation provide all the energy needed?
so, every 35 years or so we gather the nuclear waste and send it off our planet, there we go no "environmental harm" from nuclear waste.
BS! Where is all the fuel to come from? Mining that's where and mining is very environmentally harmful. That's one area people don't think of when it comes to nuclear power though admittedly coal is dirty, especially Mountain Top removal. And what fuel will be used to send the waste into the sun, or anywhere else off planet? It might actually be more feasible to put nuclear waste in a hole drilled into a subduction zone but as this "New Scientist" article says injecting the waste into the mantle in the ocean or sea may be better. However as I see it there is no need for nuclear power plants what so ever.
challenger's crew capsule survived the catastrophic shock of a point blank detonation of several kilotons of liquid and solid fuel
I don't even want to think of the Challenger. When it launched a group of us students were out on a patio to watch the launch, campus was about 50 miles from the cape and though distant offered a good view of launches. To watch the launch 3 of us decided to be a few minutes late to our physics class. A minute after we saw it go up we knew something was wrong so after another minute we dashed into the student lounge to check the TV and they announced it had exploded. Eventually we made it to class where we announced what happened. The professor basically said so what, we could watch it later on the TV. Since it was a physics class he could have turned the accident into a physics lesson, but instead he showed indifference to the lives lost, saying "So what?". Sorry but it still bugs me.
Google does not get paid one, thin dime for delivering search results. They get paid for delivering advertisements to potential customers. Google's business model is not all that different from old school, over-the-air TV. Give the customer something they want (TV programming/search results), and while they're consuming that, give them the opportunity to buy something (TV commercials/AdWords, etc.). So, in terms of online ad placement, Google definitely qualifies as a monopoly.
First off just because Google sells ads doesn't make it a monopoly. Secondly though Google may be the market leader in online advertising, it doesn't own half of the ad market yet. There are plenty of other online advertisers such as Microsoft, heck there was recently some/. articles on how MS bought into Facebook and that MS sales ads on Facebook. Then there's Yahoo! and Overture as well. Because of Google's market share in searches, online businesses may need Google ads to sell more but there are others they can go to as well.
Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he attempted to re-negotiate the clone manufacturers' license agreements to raise Apple's royalty. Jobs proposed to raise the per-computer royalty by an amount that would render all the clones unable to compete on price. When the clone makers refused, Jobs in turn refused to license later versions of Apple hardware and operating system software to the clone vendors. The initial OS license was valid only for the 7.x series of the Mac OS; at the time these contracts were signed, Mac OS 8.0 was expected to be the next-generation Copland OS. Jobs exploited this loophole by declaring the imminent version of the Mac OS (which would otherwise have been numbered something like 7.7) to be 8.0, leaving the clone manufacturers without the ability to ship a current Mac OS version and effectively ending the cloning program.
This may be wrong but I don't see where it says Steve Jobs sued clone makers.
given the undeniable trend towards more-and-more web-based advertising, and given Google's dominance therein, the fact that they are well on their way to becoming a Microsoft-like monopoly is not only possible, it's very likely.
While I use Google more than any other search engine, I am not locked into using Google. Other SEs I use are About.com; Teoma, now Ask.com; and Mooter. It's real easy and quick to change SEs, however this isn't true for MS software. There's no way Google is a monopoly like MS. They may practice some of the same stuff, like looking over a small business under an NDA to possibly invest but come out with their own version of a product instead of investing but Google does not have any lock on either searches or ads.
And with their incredibly detailed databases on each and every one of us (from our gmail, our online office apps, our google search history, our google chats, etc)
All I use Google for is searching. I have no Gmail, no chats, and no apps. And even then I don't use Google's search exclusively, there are 4 SEs I regularly use.
they can make it virtually impossible for their customers (businesses) to switch to another advertiser, since the effectiveness of Google's ads will greatly exceed that of their competitors.
Ah but as TFA says Google's ads are loosing effectiveness. It's also easy for someone else to step in with advertising.
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
The first email service I had I got free more than 10 years ago, before Google even existed. My second one I got about 10 years ago and it was also free. Others were offering free email before Google. The email I mostly use is Yahoo!'s, I don't even have or use Gmail.
The NY Times is free where you live? We have to pay for it around here.
The cover price and subscriptions to "New York Times" only covers the cost of printing. The NYT makes it's profits from advertising. So yes it is an advertising company. This is how most newspapers, and magazines, work.
Google is offering apps and services to better profile individuals. If they develop the most accurate database of profiles they can achieve lockin to the same extent that Microsoft does. There will be a cost, a loss in revenue, by switching to some other targeted adverting firm.
When users either switch to another provider of apps and services, which MS is trying to get into, Google looses those profiles. Admittedly right now more and more are signing up for Google's apps, but when someone comes along offering something better people may switch. Unless they were foolish enough to let Google lock all of their documents away so they had to use Google. Personally I don't get what it is about all of these people taking and using online apps. Personal computers were started so people could have local control of apps and docs. And that isn't something I'm willing to give up. If I need to I can tunnel into my own server and synchronize docs on the road. Power? Modern laptops have plenty of power to run many apps, and hdds are hugh today.
Fuck, that's like saying slavery was a temporary social imbalance, but "the market works" so we should have waited until slavery was 'naturally' socially unacceptable, or nobody needed cotton & tobacco anymore.
I was in agreement with you until this. While I find slavery abhorrent, slavery in the US would have died without the Civil War within 20 or 30 years of the war. Economists studying the period concluded that slavery was more expensive than paying freemen a living wage and that those who relied on slaves would have had to free the slaves to keep their costs down or go out of business.
This is not to say everything was hunky dory, only that eventually economics would have ended slavery.
The way water is usually treated and dealt with by most urban societies is to not treat it like a mineral (aka gold or even steel), but to treat it as a flushing mechanism. In other words, the aquatic structures of most urban environments are designed to flush toxic wastes and other pollutants (primarily organic compounds of various varieties) into a place where it will eventually be dealt with.... that usually being the oceans of the world.
But that doesn't deal with it, all it does is pass it on to someone, or something, else to deal with. It may sound like something dirty that no one wants to put up with but prior to piping and the massive sewage created by it, people used to collect human waste and take it to farms to fertilize the crops. Unfortunately this allows pathogens to enter the food chain, but by composting it pathogens can be killed. I think this is one area where organics goes wrong. While organics encourages the use of manure from other animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs, it does not allow the use of humanure. Basically organics takes humans out of the loop and creates a deadend. Ask good gardeners and farmers what many plants like and they'll tell you nitrogen, guess what? Human urine has a lot of nitrogen. In some circles, such as with some Permaculturists, people recommend mixing urine with water, something like 1 to 10 parts, to water crops. Diluted like this there's little smell. Then with things like living machines sewage can be treated producing no odor while producing fertilizer. Living machines, patented, are being investigated by a number of universities and businesses. Oberlin College has created a living machine that is capable of treating all the waste water created by the Lewis Center at Oberlin. There's no reason a living machine can't be expanded. The end result being clean water and nutrient rich fertilizer. Ah, I see you bring up sewage later.
The technology also exists to have a magnitude order of improvement or better with the efficiency of water usage for agricultural purposes. Living in a desert area, I've seen some amazing low water consumption methods that can be applied to gardens and even commercial food production facilities.
Drip irrigation and soaker hoses are good, as is only watering in the morning. Watering then allows the soil to soak up some water where it can then reach plant roots before the sun and heat can evaporate the water. I use a soaker hose in my garden in the morning. This is what farmers in Israel have been doing, however they are now draining more and more water from the Jordan River. Water is the one thing Queen Rania has said Jordan will go to war over. However Jordan is also diverting water. Because so much of the river is being diverted the Dead Sea is drying up much as the Soviets caused the Aral Sea to die.
And otherwise the climate of Texas is pretty reasonable for human habitation, even though I would have to agree that western Texas in the summer is something you want to avoid unless you have some serious air conditioning available.
Ah but western Texas is great for wind farms. Just three wind farms in western Texas creates 116 megawatts of electricity.
I certainly can walk about 15 miles from my house where I'm typing this message, and enter not only what is designated as an official federal wilderness area, but also risk getting attacked by rattle snakes and cougars.
I was referring to your sarcastic rhetorical question regarding the storage of nuclear waste.
While it was sarcastic, and rhetorical, it was still a question to bring up a point as rhetoric is used for. If someone supports nuclear power then they should be willing to have nuclear waste stored in their backyard too. If not then they are nothing more than a hypocrite, unfortunately like many of the NAMBYs fighting against wind farms off shore in the northeast, Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras yet who call themselves environmentalists. Fact is is there is no need for new nuclear power plants, and those already running can be shutdown.
There are plenty of states with potential to generate alternative energy. The Rocky Mountains alone hold enough wind potential to power the 48 continuous states in the US. And in the Dakotas, North and South, along with Minnesota and Wisconsin and there is more good potential for wind. Texas also is good as is California. While CA had those rolling blackouts several years ago, there was a wind farm that sat idle in CA. Why? Because there wasn't the cabling needed to deliver the electricity. Then there's states with great solar potential, CA, AZ, NM, TX, and FL. Most if not all coastal states can also produce tidal power.
Nuclear fusion, of course, would be the best, but it's still a few years away.
No, conservation is the best. I once read a science study that concluded if every building in the US were to replace just one incandescent light with a compact florescent light, a number of power plants could be shutdown. That was just one bulb, imagine if almost all incandescent light bulbs were replaced how many power plants could be shutdown. In my apartment I have 6 light fixtures, in 5 I replaced the 10 bulbs with CFLs, the last fixture I've maybe turned on 10 tymes in more than 3 years of living here. Some have raised the objection that CFLs contain mercury, yes they do however burning coal also releases mercury in the air. I bet the amount of mercury CFLs contain plus the amount of mercury released by powering them is less than the amount of mercury released by burning the coal to power the incandescent light.
Obviously, you've never been high, and smashed someone's house down.
I've smoked marijuana but never ever got violent. Instead those I was with and I all got lethargic.
but, if you toss a bottle of white wine into the mix, being high and drunk gives you the imagination and energy
We were lethargic even when partying and drinking beer and Jack Daniels. Drinking without smoking then some would get active but not when smoking. And the violence is because of the alcohol. Marijuana does not make people violent. If you can provide any medical or scientific evidence to prove otherwise I want to see it.
Now, I'm a responsible Republican. Isn't it amazing that for all the rap Liberals get about being parties, the guys that really drank the most and imbibed the most are now all Republicans?
Yet it's Republicans that that push the War On Drugs, and keeping hemp illegal. Then President Nixon had a presidential commission to study whether hemp, marijuana, should be made legal and he said no matter what the commission concluded he would never allow marijuana to be legalized. Sure enough that's what the commission decided. Then Reagan gave the War of Drugs a big push with his office of the Drug Czar and Nancy's "Just say no" campaign. However the Republicans aren't all responsible, the Democrats don't do anything about stopping the war. That's the one good thing I can say about George Soros' Open Society Institute, they are working on making hemp legal again. He's pushing for the industrial uses of hemp and for medical marijuana.
I think you just proved his point with your utterly irrational reply.
If asking a question is utterly irrational I wonder what your definition of rational is. Also pointing out solar, wing, and tidal energy are better than coal and nuclear is rational unless you've switched meanings around.
I wonder who's the rational one, one who asks questions and uses facts or someone who uses no arguments or logic to back up a position.
Falcon
There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
Any given restaurant doesn't go through that much oil but a lot of used oil ends up in the waste stream. I worked in some fast food joins and the only thing I had ever heard used oil being used for was adding it to slop to feed pigs. Most of it ends up being dumped though, it's a waste. However it can be combined with raw oil to make biodiesel. That way there's no waste, well not nearly as much. It's not hard to make biodiesel either, basically mix lye and vegetable oil together letting them react for a while, then there will be a separation of liquids. A top film of glycerol, will separate from the biodiesel. And the glycerol doesn't have to be wasted either, it can be used to make body soap.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it?
However it's done, and for whatever reason, used oil still has to be picked up or collected. Even if it means it's put into the dumpster. It has to be disposed of somehow. One of the places I worked at had some steel barrels in back the oil would be dumped into. Weekly then, or whatever, a truck would come by to pick up the oil. For someone to use used vegetable oil to make biodiesel all that would be required is a tank truck to drive to the restaurants where the oil can be emptied or pumped into the tank. Go from the processing plant to restaurant 1 to restaurant 2 then to restaurant 3 before going back to the plant. If the oil were to end up in the waste stream then the restaurant has to pay for disposal, however a biodiesel maker can offer to pickup the used oil cheaper, for free, or pay them depending on the economics.
"Reefer Madness" was a bunch of lies made to induce fear in people. For instance it makes marijuana smokers as being driven to violence, however there is no scientific data to support this. Actually what science evidence there is show it has the opposite affect, it calms people so they only want to relax. That's why the Soviet Union made it illegal, they couldn't afford people who only wanted to hang out.
(it's now in the public domain-Yay!)
Another movie, also in the public domain, on hemp is the movie "Hemp For Victory" which the US government made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the WWII war effort. The current president Bush's dad, former president Bush Sr may have had his life saved by hemp. Bush Sr was in a plane that was shot down in the Pacific by the Japanese and he bailed out, the cords from the parachute he used may of had been made from hemp. Hemp was used for ropes as well as cords. Something surprised me when I looked at the Archives page, it has "Reefer Madness" as the fourth, last, movie listed. I've got the link bookmarked, bookmarked it several years ago at least, and never saw "Reefer Madness" listed before. Maybe because it's now in the public domain.
They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans,
I can see it now, Thomas Jefferson would of been rolling in his grave when the movie came out. TJ was a farmer who grew hemp on his farm, as many other of the USA's Founding Fathers did. Oh, I see you mention George Washington, yeap he grew it. TJ once wrote that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp, but as he knew such a law would deny farmers their rights he never proposed such a law.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Look at the utterly irrational fear of nuclear power they've created, when by any environmental standard it's tremendously better than fossil fuels.
Utterly irrational? So then you won't mind if your backyard is used to store nuclear waste then will you? As for what's better than coal fired power plants, solar, wind, and tidal are all better. And with research producing hydrogen from algae may prove feasible as well.
India and China are another issue, but both countries are quickly becoming industrialized as well, and going through many of the transition issues that affected North America and Europe in the 19th Century.... and surprisingly dealing with the issues in a much shorter period of time as well. Assuming that the prevailing attitude toward children hits these two countries, I would expect at least those two countries, who represent over 2 billion people, will also be eventually experiencing a population decline or even collapse of their own making. So where is this huge growth of population going to be coming from? Polynesia?
Yea, China's population growth is slowing down. I read in a study by 2050 it's expected there will be more seniors in China than there are young in China. Part of this is because of the one child policy however as in India people are having less children because their economic and educational situations are improving. In India because people have better opportunities for education and employment more men and women are holding off on getting married. As for where population growth is still going strong it's mostly in Africa and the Middle East. The economic possibilities aren't as good in these places, and in the Middle East women don't enjoy the same rights as men. Because of AIDS the African population growth rate is slowing down but even then the population is still expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2020.
most of Texas *IS* inhabitable, with generally plenty of fresh water (lately even too much of that) and plenty of empty space for cities to grow and expand
Now this is wrong. There is not enough fresh water in Texas. With the current population of Texas the Edwards Aquifer, which provides a lot of the water in Texas, is being pumped faster than the water can be replenished. The Oglala Aquifer, the largest in Texas running from Wyoming and South Dakota to Texas, is also seeing water levels dropping. And some of what's left is being poisoned.
Also aquifers all over the world are being drained faster than they can be refilled.
The problem is financial, not political. There are millions of people in Africa who are hungry
When the African country of Zimbabwe went from being a breadbasket, growing enough food to feed the populations and still leaving plenty for export, to a nation need aid to feed the country it was not financial in nature. President Robert Mugabe forced all of the commercial farmers, many of them white, off of the farms and gave the farms to his cronies and supporters. Because these people did not know how to farm Zimbabwe now depends on foreign aid to feed the population.
There are people in power who, literally, would rather let food rot in a warehouse while there people starve then feed their people.
That's the problem, why so many go hungry, because of politics. A good example of this I like to use is Zimbabwe in Africa. It used to be that the country was the breadbasket of Africa. Zimbabwian farmers grew enough food to feed the population and still had plenty of produce left to export. Food was the country's main foreign exchange earner. However once Robert Mugabe came to power as Zimbabwe's president he forced all of the white farmers off their farms and gave them to his cronies and supporters. None of these people knew how to farm so the farms went to waste. Now Zimbabwe is a basket case and has to have aid in feeding the population by importing food.
Ethanol is a horrid fuel, especially when made from corn
Corn is a horrible source for ethanol, I oppose corn for ethnaol. A better is sugarcane, but even better for making ethanol is Switchgrass. Ah, perhaps I should of finished your post before replying as I see you say sugar cane and switchgrass are better.
I don't know if Branson is concentrating on ethanol or biofuels in general. Unlike ethanol biodiesel can be made from more sources. When Rudolph Diesel designed his engine he designed it to run on vegetable oil, when he showed the engine during the World Expo in Paris he used peanut oil but he also demonstrated running it with hemp oil. And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it. Wllie Nelson started, invested in, a plant making biodiesel and formed Willie Nelson Biodiesel. In the 1930s Henry Ford designed and build a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate using a hemp, aka marijuana, based fuel.
Actually this was part of the reason hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Prior to the passage of the act scientific research showed hemp was an excellent industrial plant. Besides fuel hemp was good for making plastics and paper. MIT published a study showing an acre of hemp could produce more fiber for paper than an acre of forest. The use of hemp for fuel interfered with Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Using hemp for paper meant William Hearst's, a big California newspaper publisher who owned thousands of acres of forest, would see a loss in clear cutting forest for paper pulp. Then in the mid '30s Du Pont received a patent on making plastics from petroleum, so again hemp was seen as another threat. Andrew Mellon, a major funder of Du Pont, had his nephew-in-law Harry J Anslinger appointed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics where they were able to push to have hemp made illegal.
Would you rather live as an aborigine 500 years ago or in Sydney today?
I wouldn't want to live in Sydney today, or anytime in the future though I might of liked living as an aboriginal. As it is now Australia is turning into a dustbowl. Demand for water is way outstripping the water available, farms need water for the crops but as the cities get bigger and bigger they demand more and more water. And rainfall has dropped.
dedicate little portion of their economy but it will still be billions of dollars that most other first world nations can't afford: because we have other things in priority such as taking care of poverty and improving welfare.
Ah, China is dealing with poverty and improving general welfare of the Chinese. The economic booms in China is making a lot of Chinese's lives better. Unfortunately what hasn't happened yet is an opening of Chinese politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Conservation is important, but it is not enough on its own. Our requirement for energy keeps increasing despite conservation. We need better, cleaner ways of making the energy we require.
And why does energy demands increase? Because people buy more and more inefficient energy vampires, me too. My stereo, dvd player, and TV constantly draw energy even when turned off. Therefore I plugged them all into a power strip with it's own power switch, I can then turn them all off at the same tyme. That is conservation, though it would be more conservative not having them admittedly. Another step of conservation people can do as I have is to replace most of their incandescent light bulbs with efficient compact florescent lights. The CFLs I replaced the incandescent lights with only use 1/4 of the power the incandescent bulbs did. And I only have lights on I need, when I leave one room and don't plan on returning I turn the lights off in that room.
As for cleaner energy, theres plenty that can be developed. In the US Rocky Mountains there's enough potential wind power to supply the lower 48 states with electricity. Other states also have good wind potential. Several years ago while they had rolling blackouts in California, there was a wind farm that sat idle in CA. Why? Because the power cabled needed to deliver the electricity to users wasn't there. Also California is a good state for solar power, as is AZ, MN, TX, and FL.
You don't understand the nuclear waste issue. It's far too complex to explain fully here. Needless to say, there are useful things that can be done with it that hysterical "environmentalists" have made politically impossible.
You're the one who doesn't understand, or refuses to accept it, there is no need for any new nuclear power plants. And the ones currently running can be closed. I'm glad environmentalists have done what they can to make nuclear power plants hard, they aren't needed!!!
Falconwell let's put it this way, while mining the moon for HE3 will be intractably expensive for decades and possibly a century or more, shooting a couple hundred tons of radioactive waste to a barren lifeless rock or the sun is much more feasible.
I don't know if mining the moon for HE3 would ever be economically feasible or not but I bet travel to the moon will be before the end of the century, unless a catastrophe occurs before then. At first only the rich may go but as with many other things the rich will pave the way for cheaper travel. But again why use nuclear power at all when non or low polluting alternative energy sources along with conservation provide all the energy needed?
so, every 35 years or so we gather the nuclear waste and send it off our planet, there we go no "environmental harm" from nuclear waste.
BS! Where is all the fuel to come from? Mining that's where and mining is very environmentally harmful. That's one area people don't think of when it comes to nuclear power though admittedly coal is dirty, especially Mountain Top removal. And what fuel will be used to send the waste into the sun, or anywhere else off planet? It might actually be more feasible to put nuclear waste in a hole drilled into a subduction zone but as this "New Scientist" article says injecting the waste into the mantle in the ocean or sea may be better. However as I see it there is no need for nuclear power plants what so ever.
challenger's crew capsule survived the catastrophic shock of a point blank detonation of several kilotons of liquid and solid fuel
I don't even want to think of the Challenger. When it launched a group of us students were out on a patio to watch the launch, campus was about 50 miles from the cape and though distant offered a good view of launches. To watch the launch 3 of us decided to be a few minutes late to our physics class. A minute after we saw it go up we knew something was wrong so after another minute we dashed into the student lounge to check the TV and they announced it had exploded. Eventually we made it to class where we announced what happened. The professor basically said so what, we could watch it later on the TV. Since it was a physics class he could have turned the accident into a physics lesson, but instead he showed indifference to the lives lost, saying "So what?". Sorry but it still bugs me.
FalconGoogle does not get paid one, thin dime for delivering search results. They get paid for delivering advertisements to potential customers. Google's business model is not all that different from old school, over-the-air TV. Give the customer something they want (TV programming/search results), and while they're consuming that, give them the opportunity to buy something (TV commercials/AdWords, etc.). So, in terms of online ad placement, Google definitely qualifies as a monopoly.
First off just because Google sells ads doesn't make it a monopoly. Secondly though Google may be the market leader in online advertising, it doesn't own half of the ad market yet. There are plenty of other online advertisers such as Microsoft, heck there was recently some /. articles on how MS bought into Facebook and that MS sales ads on Facebook. Then there's Yahoo! and Overture as well. Because of Google's market share in searches, online businesses may need Google ads to sell more but there are others they can go to as well.
FalconYou mean the guy that sued his clone makers out of existence
Jobs ends the official program
Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he attempted to re-negotiate the clone manufacturers' license agreements to raise Apple's royalty. Jobs proposed to raise the per-computer royalty by an amount that would render all the clones unable to compete on price. When the clone makers refused, Jobs in turn refused to license later versions of Apple hardware and operating system software to the clone vendors. The initial OS license was valid only for the 7.x series of the Mac OS; at the time these contracts were signed, Mac OS 8.0 was expected to be the next-generation Copland OS. Jobs exploited this loophole by declaring the imminent version of the Mac OS (which would otherwise have been numbered something like 7.7) to be 8.0, leaving the clone manufacturers without the ability to ship a current Mac OS version and effectively ending the cloning program.
This may be wrong but I don't see where it says Steve Jobs sued clone makers.
FalconSure Google has a lot of ad revenue but its got competition by the "anti-Google" doubleclick.net
So, you haven't heard that Google acquired doubleclick?
I hate ads and most people (who know a thing about technology) use ad-block or have custom CSS to block ads
I haven't heard of custom CSS blocking ads, then again I use a Hosts file to block ads, along with any other website I want to block.
given the undeniable trend towards more-and-more web-based advertising, and given Google's dominance therein, the fact that they are well on their way to becoming a Microsoft-like monopoly is not only possible, it's very likely.
While I use Google more than any other search engine, I am not locked into using Google. Other SEs I use are About.com; Teoma, now Ask.com; and Mooter. It's real easy and quick to change SEs, however this isn't true for MS software. There's no way Google is a monopoly like MS. They may practice some of the same stuff, like looking over a small business under an NDA to possibly invest but come out with their own version of a product instead of investing but Google does not have any lock on either searches or ads.
And with their incredibly detailed databases on each and every one of us (from our gmail, our online office apps, our google search history, our google chats, etc)
All I use Google for is searching. I have no Gmail, no chats, and no apps. And even then I don't use Google's search exclusively, there are 4 SEs I regularly use.
they can make it virtually impossible for their customers (businesses) to switch to another advertiser, since the effectiveness of Google's ads will greatly exceed that of their competitors.
Ah but as TFA says Google's ads are loosing effectiveness. It's also easy for someone else to step in with advertising.
FalconGoogle on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
The first email service I had I got free more than 10 years ago, before Google even existed. My second one I got about 10 years ago and it was also free. Others were offering free email before Google. The email I mostly use is Yahoo!'s, I don't even have or use Gmail.
FalconThe NY Times is free where you live? We have to pay for it around here.
The cover price and subscriptions to "New York Times" only covers the cost of printing. The NYT makes it's profits from advertising. So yes it is an advertising company. This is how most newspapers, and magazines, work.
FalconGoogle is offering apps and services to better profile individuals. If they develop the most accurate database of profiles they can achieve lockin to the same extent that Microsoft does. There will be a cost, a loss in revenue, by switching to some other targeted adverting firm.
When users either switch to another provider of apps and services, which MS is trying to get into, Google looses those profiles. Admittedly right now more and more are signing up for Google's apps, but when someone comes along offering something better people may switch. Unless they were foolish enough to let Google lock all of their documents away so they had to use Google. Personally I don't get what it is about all of these people taking and using online apps. Personal computers were started so people could have local control of apps and docs. And that isn't something I'm willing to give up. If I need to I can tunnel into my own server and synchronize docs on the road. Power? Modern laptops have plenty of power to run many apps, and hdds are hugh today.
FalconFuck, that's like saying slavery was a temporary social imbalance, but "the market works" so we should have waited until slavery was 'naturally' socially unacceptable, or nobody needed cotton & tobacco anymore.
I was in agreement with you until this. While I find slavery abhorrent, slavery in the US would have died without the Civil War within 20 or 30 years of the war. Economists studying the period concluded that slavery was more expensive than paying freemen a living wage and that those who relied on slaves would have had to free the slaves to keep their costs down or go out of business.
This is not to say everything was hunky dory, only that eventually economics would have ended slavery.
FalconThe way water is usually treated and dealt with by most urban societies is to not treat it like a mineral (aka gold or even steel), but to treat it as a flushing mechanism. In other words, the aquatic structures of most urban environments are designed to flush toxic wastes and other pollutants (primarily organic compounds of various varieties) into a place where it will eventually be dealt with.... that usually being the oceans of the world.
But that doesn't deal with it, all it does is pass it on to someone, or something, else to deal with. It may sound like something dirty that no one wants to put up with but prior to piping and the massive sewage created by it, people used to collect human waste and take it to farms to fertilize the crops. Unfortunately this allows pathogens to enter the food chain, but by composting it pathogens can be killed. I think this is one area where organics goes wrong. While organics encourages the use of manure from other animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs, it does not allow the use of humanure. Basically organics takes humans out of the loop and creates a deadend. Ask good gardeners and farmers what many plants like and they'll tell you nitrogen, guess what? Human urine has a lot of nitrogen. In some circles, such as with some Permaculturists, people recommend mixing urine with water, something like 1 to 10 parts, to water crops. Diluted like this there's little smell. Then with things like living machines sewage can be treated producing no odor while producing fertilizer. Living machines, patented, are being investigated by a number of universities and businesses. Oberlin College has created a living machine that is capable of treating all the waste water created by the Lewis Center at Oberlin. There's no reason a living machine can't be expanded. The end result being clean water and nutrient rich fertilizer. Ah, I see you bring up sewage later.
The technology also exists to have a magnitude order of improvement or better with the efficiency of water usage for agricultural purposes. Living in a desert area, I've seen some amazing low water consumption methods that can be applied to gardens and even commercial food production facilities.
Drip irrigation and soaker hoses are good, as is only watering in the morning. Watering then allows the soil to soak up some water where it can then reach plant roots before the sun and heat can evaporate the water. I use a soaker hose in my garden in the morning. This is what farmers in Israel have been doing, however they are now draining more and more water from the Jordan River. Water is the one thing Queen Rania has said Jordan will go to war over. However Jordan is also diverting water. Because so much of the river is being diverted the Dead Sea is drying up much as the Soviets caused the Aral Sea to die.
And otherwise the climate of Texas is pretty reasonable for human habitation, even though I would have to agree that western Texas in the summer is something you want to avoid unless you have some serious air conditioning available.
Ah but western Texas is great for wind farms. Just three wind farms in western Texas creates 116 megawatts of electricity.
I certainly can walk about 15 miles from my house where I'm typing this message, and enter not only what is designated as an official federal wilderness area, but also risk getting attacked by rattle snakes and cougars.
In Florida where I used to live I
I was referring to your sarcastic rhetorical question regarding the storage of nuclear waste.
While it was sarcastic, and rhetorical, it was still a question to bring up a point as rhetoric is used for. If someone supports nuclear power then they should be willing to have nuclear waste stored in their backyard too. If not then they are nothing more than a hypocrite, unfortunately like many of the NAMBYs fighting against wind farms off shore in the northeast, Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras yet who call themselves environmentalists. Fact is is there is no need for new nuclear power plants, and those already running can be shutdown.
There are plenty of states with potential to generate alternative energy. The Rocky Mountains alone hold enough wind potential to power the 48 continuous states in the US. And in the Dakotas, North and South, along with Minnesota and Wisconsin and there is more good potential for wind. Texas also is good as is California. While CA had those rolling blackouts several years ago, there was a wind farm that sat idle in CA. Why? Because there wasn't the cabling needed to deliver the electricity. Then there's states with great solar potential, CA, AZ, NM, TX, and FL. Most if not all coastal states can also produce tidal power.
Nuclear fusion, of course, would be the best, but it's still a few years away.
No, conservation is the best. I once read a science study that concluded if every building in the US were to replace just one incandescent light with a compact florescent light, a number of power plants could be shutdown. That was just one bulb, imagine if almost all incandescent light bulbs were replaced how many power plants could be shutdown. In my apartment I have 6 light fixtures, in 5 I replaced the 10 bulbs with CFLs, the last fixture I've maybe turned on 10 tymes in more than 3 years of living here. Some have raised the objection that CFLs contain mercury, yes they do however burning coal also releases mercury in the air. I bet the amount of mercury CFLs contain plus the amount of mercury released by powering them is less than the amount of mercury released by burning the coal to power the incandescent light.
FalconObviously, you've never been high, and smashed someone's house down.
I've smoked marijuana but never ever got violent. Instead those I was with and I all got lethargic.
but, if you toss a bottle of white wine into the mix, being high and drunk gives you the imagination and energy
We were lethargic even when partying and drinking beer and Jack Daniels. Drinking without smoking then some would get active but not when smoking. And the violence is because of the alcohol. Marijuana does not make people violent. If you can provide any medical or scientific evidence to prove otherwise I want to see it.
Now, I'm a responsible Republican. Isn't it amazing that for all the rap Liberals get about being parties, the guys that really drank the most and imbibed the most are now all Republicans?
Yet it's Republicans that that push the War On Drugs, and keeping hemp illegal. Then President Nixon had a presidential commission to study whether hemp, marijuana, should be made legal and he said no matter what the commission concluded he would never allow marijuana to be legalized. Sure enough that's what the commission decided. Then Reagan gave the War of Drugs a big push with his office of the Drug Czar and Nancy's "Just say no" campaign. However the Republicans aren't all responsible, the Democrats don't do anything about stopping the war. That's the one good thing I can say about George Soros' Open Society Institute, they are working on making hemp legal again. He's pushing for the industrial uses of hemp and for medical marijuana.
FalconI think you just proved his point with your utterly irrational reply.
If asking a question is utterly irrational I wonder what your definition of rational is. Also pointing out solar, wing, and tidal energy are better than coal and nuclear is rational unless you've switched meanings around.
I wonder who's the rational one, one who asks questions and uses facts or someone who uses no arguments or logic to back up a position. Falcon
There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
Any given restaurant doesn't go through that much oil but a lot of used oil ends up in the waste stream. I worked in some fast food joins and the only thing I had ever heard used oil being used for was adding it to slop to feed pigs. Most of it ends up being dumped though, it's a waste. However it can be combined with raw oil to make biodiesel. That way there's no waste, well not nearly as much. It's not hard to make biodiesel either, basically mix lye and vegetable oil together letting them react for a while, then there will be a separation of liquids. A top film of glycerol, will separate from the biodiesel. And the glycerol doesn't have to be wasted either, it can be used to make body soap.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it?
However it's done, and for whatever reason, used oil still has to be picked up or collected. Even if it means it's put into the dumpster. It has to be disposed of somehow. One of the places I worked at had some steel barrels in back the oil would be dumped into. Weekly then, or whatever, a truck would come by to pick up the oil. For someone to use used vegetable oil to make biodiesel all that would be required is a tank truck to drive to the restaurants where the oil can be emptied or pumped into the tank. Go from the processing plant to restaurant 1 to restaurant 2 then to restaurant 3 before going back to the plant. If the oil were to end up in the waste stream then the restaurant has to pay for disposal, however a biodiesel maker can offer to pickup the used oil cheaper, for free, or pay them depending on the economics.
Falcon"Reefer Madness" was a bunch of lies made to induce fear in people. For instance it makes marijuana smokers as being driven to violence, however there is no scientific data to support this. Actually what science evidence there is show it has the opposite affect, it calms people so they only want to relax. That's why the Soviet Union made it illegal, they couldn't afford people who only wanted to hang out.
(it's now in the public domain-Yay!)
Another movie, also in the public domain, on hemp is the movie "Hemp For Victory" which the US government made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the WWII war effort. The current president Bush's dad, former president Bush Sr may have had his life saved by hemp. Bush Sr was in a plane that was shot down in the Pacific by the Japanese and he bailed out, the cords from the parachute he used may of had been made from hemp. Hemp was used for ropes as well as cords. Something surprised me when I looked at the Archives page, it has "Reefer Madness" as the fourth, last, movie listed. I've got the link bookmarked, bookmarked it several years ago at least, and never saw "Reefer Madness" listed before. Maybe because it's now in the public domain.
They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans,
I can see it now, Thomas Jefferson would of been rolling in his grave when the movie came out. TJ was a farmer who grew hemp on his farm, as many other of the USA's Founding Fathers did. Oh, I see you mention George Washington, yeap he grew it. TJ once wrote that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp, but as he knew such a law would deny farmers their rights he never proposed such a law.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Yeap, it is and would be good for that.
FalconLook at the utterly irrational fear of nuclear power they've created, when by any environmental standard it's tremendously better than fossil fuels.
Utterly irrational? So then you won't mind if your backyard is used to store nuclear waste then will you? As for what's better than coal fired power plants, solar, wind, and tidal are all better. And with research producing hydrogen from algae may prove feasible as well.
FalconIndia and China are another issue, but both countries are quickly becoming industrialized as well, and going through many of the transition issues that affected North America and Europe in the 19th Century.... and surprisingly dealing with the issues in a much shorter period of time as well. Assuming that the prevailing attitude toward children hits these two countries, I would expect at least those two countries, who represent over 2 billion people, will also be eventually experiencing a population decline or even collapse of their own making. So where is this huge growth of population going to be coming from? Polynesia?
Yea, China's population growth is slowing down. I read in a study by 2050 it's expected there will be more seniors in China than there are young in China. Part of this is because of the one child policy however as in India people are having less children because their economic and educational situations are improving. In India because people have better opportunities for education and employment more men and women are holding off on getting married. As for where population growth is still going strong it's mostly in Africa and the Middle East. The economic possibilities aren't as good in these places, and in the Middle East women don't enjoy the same rights as men. Because of AIDS the African population growth rate is slowing down but even then the population is still expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2020.
most of Texas *IS* inhabitable, with generally plenty of fresh water (lately even too much of that) and plenty of empty space for cities to grow and expand
Now this is wrong. There is not enough fresh water in Texas. With the current population of Texas the Edwards Aquifer, which provides a lot of the water in Texas, is being pumped faster than the water can be replenished. The Oglala Aquifer, the largest in Texas running from Wyoming and South Dakota to Texas, is also seeing water levels dropping. And some of what's left is being poisoned.
Also aquifers all over the world are being drained faster than they can be refilled.
The problem is financial, not political. There are millions of people in Africa who are hungry
When the African country of Zimbabwe went from being a breadbasket, growing enough food to feed the populations and still leaving plenty for export, to a nation need aid to feed the country it was not financial in nature. President Robert Mugabe forced all of the commercial farmers, many of them white, off of the farms and gave the farms to his cronies and supporters. Because these people did not know how to farm Zimbabwe now depends on foreign aid to feed the population.
There are people in power who, literally, would rather let food rot in a warehouse while there people starve then feed their people.
That's the problem, why so many go hungry, because of politics. A good example of this I like to use is Zimbabwe in Africa. It used to be that the country was the breadbasket of Africa. Zimbabwian farmers grew enough food to feed the population and still had plenty of produce left to export. Food was the country's main foreign exchange earner. However once Robert Mugabe came to power as Zimbabwe's president he forced all of the white farmers off their farms and gave them to his cronies and supporters. None of these people knew how to farm so the farms went to waste. Now Zimbabwe is a basket case and has to have aid in feeding the population by importing food.
FalconThe real value of the moon is space for humans to live on. We're out of space on Earth.
We have plenty of space in the oceans, floating or on the seafloor. Adding the real estate on the moon will add to it though.
FalconEthanol is a horrid fuel, especially when made from corn
Corn is a horrible source for ethanol, I oppose corn for ethnaol. A better is sugarcane, but even better for making ethanol is Switchgrass. Ah, perhaps I should of finished your post before replying as I see you say sugar cane and switchgrass are better.
I don't know if Branson is concentrating on ethanol or biofuels in general. Unlike ethanol biodiesel can be made from more sources. When Rudolph Diesel designed his engine he designed it to run on vegetable oil, when he showed the engine during the World Expo in Paris he used peanut oil but he also demonstrated running it with hemp oil. And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it. Wllie Nelson started, invested in, a plant making biodiesel and formed Willie Nelson Biodiesel. In the 1930s Henry Ford designed and build a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate using a hemp, aka marijuana, based fuel.
Actually this was part of the reason hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Prior to the passage of the act scientific research showed hemp was an excellent industrial plant. Besides fuel hemp was good for making plastics and paper. MIT published a study showing an acre of hemp could produce more fiber for paper than an acre of forest. The use of hemp for fuel interfered with Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Using hemp for paper meant William Hearst's, a big California newspaper publisher who owned thousands of acres of forest, would see a loss in clear cutting forest for paper pulp. Then in the mid '30s Du Pont received a patent on making plastics from petroleum, so again hemp was seen as another threat. Andrew Mellon, a major funder of Du Pont, had his nephew-in-law Harry J Anslinger appointed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics where they were able to push to have hemp made illegal.
FalconWhat does convection in the mantle have to do with the tides?
They both are liquids moving, one liquid metals and the other water.
FalconWould you rather live as an aborigine 500 years ago or in Sydney today?
I wouldn't want to live in Sydney today, or anytime in the future though I might of liked living as an aboriginal. As it is now Australia is turning into a dustbowl. Demand for water is way outstripping the water available, farms need water for the crops but as the cities get bigger and bigger they demand more and more water. And rainfall has dropped.
Falcondedicate little portion of their economy but it will still be billions of dollars that most other first world nations can't afford: because we have other things in priority such as taking care of poverty and improving welfare.
Ah, China is dealing with poverty and improving general welfare of the Chinese. The economic booms in China is making a lot of Chinese's lives better. Unfortunately what hasn't happened yet is an opening of Chinese politics.
Falcon