I love KDE, I have done from the start, but there is no getting away from the fact that the way the switch to KDE 4 has been handled is a completely disaster (I've been using KDE 4.1 for a few months now). I can sort of see why the team directing KDE have done this but I'm sure it could have been handled a lot better than it has been.
Hind sight is a perfect science but before I radically changed KDE I would have made damn sure that the most popular software that relies on KDE was going to have a version ready about the same time KDE was released. Not having a KDE 4 version of Amarok for example is terrible.
Over all I think KDE will end up stronger for this change. The bits that are working are really nice I'm just worried that it will take 5 years to get to the point where full advantage can be taken of the effort that has been put in. In the end I think KDE will be the dominant desktop but Gnome must be seriously gaining support at the moment.
True enough but as a percentage of income the amount someone would pay is probably broadly similar across all earners. I would actually suspect that higher earners would probably be willing to pay a smaller percentage. It doesn't really get away from the fact though that most people would only pay a very small sum / % of income in order to protect someone elses child. I'm not advocating that we shouldn't pay some money to help protect vulnerable members of society I just don't want the most extreme 10% setting the amount.
I hear what you are saying regarding Part P. It's an absolute farce. I had to rewire our house so I went off and got myself Part P qualified. While I'm glad that I took a course and got the qualification (because I now feel competent to work on my house) I couldn't help feeling that the whole Part P thing was little more than a protection racket. It really feels like the certification bodies simply lent on the government to protect their business sector. Lets face it they must be making a killing out of Part P because Joe Public just heard "your can't work on your own electrics any more". I think the certification bodies have probably leant on councils as well to make it harder to do non-self-cert work or self-cert work with out the backing of certification body. My council (Gloucester) are fairly good but it took numerous phone calls and I had to present my certificates of qualification to them in order to sign off my work. I have a friend who was on the same course as me whose council won't even consider anything other than a fully signed sparky doing work.
I don't want to feed the trolls but... lets flip what you say on it's head and ask the question "how much would the ISP pay to say someone elses child from abuse?". Would they pay £1000 a year? Perhaps £10000. While they would certainly pay any amount to save their own child I suspect you would be shocked to find out what they would pay to save the child of A.N. Other.
Voting in a new leader is hardly a revolution when compared to the revolutions of history. In Americas case it looks like there has been quite a shift with this new president - perhaps a revolution-lite. It's not like you're writing a new constitution or moving to a fairer form of democracy though. That would be a real revolution and, I feel, would only come about with great loss of life.
Well the frist sensible decision which involves children in a decade. As other posters have pointed out it is not the (direct) responsibility of businesses to pick up the tab for crime fighting irrespective of how vile that crime is. This is just another one of those quasi-governmental bodies the UK is so fond of throwing it's weight around.
Personally, I'd like to see more crime fighting measures costed out like this. Perhaps if the public got to see how much these stupid wars on X, Y and Z cost they would grow up a bit and realize that there will always be bad people in the world and, with finite resources, you are only ever going to limit their number.
It is a sad state of affairs but if you adopts the view that everything you say and do may be monitored by the government without redress then your view is probably not far from what is happening.
The problem with this monitoring is that it's almost impossible to stop or control because by it's very nature it's kept very secret.
I imagine in the future we will end up with a revolution and lots of people will die, that's typically what happens when the ruler is doing something the majority of the populace doesn't agree with. Before you shout that the majority of the population are sheeple and just "think of the children / terrorists" I think the real problem is that they aren't well informed and very time poor and if they knew what was going on and they would disagree strongly.
Our house is fairly large by UK standards but by no means completely out of the ordinary. We have just fitted a 36kW gas boiler. To provide the same heating from a heat pump would about 12kW of electricity since heat pumps can achieve about 3:1 efficiency (note that acutally efficiency is usually more like 2:1 but we'll go with best case.
A modern UK supply is 240V on a 100A fuse which means it will provide up to 24kW of power so you could run a heat pump off it. Don't forget though the supply is also providing power to everything else in the house which could easily use up the other 12 kW especially if the cooker is electric.
I'm not very familiar with domestic wiring in the US but I'm guessing you typically have a main fuse of about 150 to 200A so that you can get the same power from the lower voltage. As you can see if the fuse is 150A it's going to be getting close the mark when it comes to supplying the heat pump and the house.
Interesting, I know that when we were looking at getting ground source heating for our current house the first thing everyone asked up was "do you have a three phase electricity supply?". Fortunately we do but I that is seriously rare in this country and I can't believe it's all the common in the US either. Just connecting everyone to three phase would be a huge job in itself (similar in scope to giving everyone fibre internet connections).
This technology is fairly well know in the UK and it's getting more popular everyday. The main problem with it is the cost of drilling (apparently it's about double the normal price at the moment because of the Olympic games - everyone that has a drill is down there laying foundations in Londons rubbish soil) as most people don't have enough garden to lay shallow pipe work. Longer term though if a lot of people switched to this technology we would need to upgrade the electricity grid.
While I agree that the picture you paint is truly terrifying I think it is important that one point is reiterated: the fact that the government now routinely threaten groups of people with legislation. The problem with this, as far as I can see it, is that we now have a whole raft of pseudo laws (nuLaws maybe) which we have no redress against. Worse still, very few (if any) of these nuLaws are debated in anyway that could be considered open and there is no standardized way to have them reviewed once they are in place. If the government ever want to increase the scope of these nuLaws they just have to put pressure on the nuLaw enforcers who have a vested interest in doing exactly what the government tell them as their existence depends on it. If the people cry foul the government can simply point the finger and say it wasn't us.
If all of that wasn't bad enough I believe the sort of people that gravitate to this type of organization tend to be conservative and more pro-censorship. It's like the age old joke that you don't want anyone serving as a police officer that wants to be a police officer.
While competition is generally a good thing I think the fight between Gnome and KDE has seriously hampered the adoption of Linux on the desktop (even if there hadn't been a fight I don't think we would see widespread Linux use on the Desktop but it would be greater than it is). The problem was that they were both good, for different reasons, and both had a good developer base the end result of which was a battle neither side could really win and we all lost from.
While I would hate to see Gnome consigned to the dustbin I think it's about time they gave up and admitted that KDE has won (flame away). I admit that KDE isn't perfect, far from it, but KDE4+ is streets ahead of Gnome now and the big hurdle to widespread use by companies has now vanished.
Except that approach has been shown not to work. Have a look at the way the US government tried to force the mining industry, which left tailings all the place, to clean the up. The end result was that every single one went bankrupt and the problem wasn't fixed except by the Government which had to raise taxes to fix it.
Forget thermite (unless it's for fun) a couple of hours at 200 deg C should do the trick. Not sure I'd want to use the oven for cooking afterwards though. I wonder if whacking the drive in a microwave for a couple of minutes would do the trick?
Why not think bigger, lets get world wide agreement on power consumption levels for a whole host of devices or at least standardized marking such as efficiency. The great thing is that it wouldn't actually take many countries signing up to the agreement to force manufacturers to make changes.
To get good economies of scale manufacturers need to produce huge numbers of identical items. If twenty percent of their market demanded more efficient devices (through legislation) they would, I am sure, change and sell that more efficient device everywhere.
The only caveat I will put on this is if the more efficient device is significantly more expensive to produce in which case they may well either not supply that 20% of the market or make two versions. I suspect though that some huge energy saving could be made with very minor changes that haven't happened simply because there has been no incentive to change.
And as for global warming, it's debatable that something needs to be done about that.
I'm as sceptical about global warming as the next guy but I think there is probably enough evidence now to say that we have caused (or in the near future will cause) a problem that we have to act.
Evidence shows that changes in temperature of a few degrees are very bad for life on earth. In fact the greatest extinction event in earths history appears to have been caused primarily but a rise in temperature of between 3 and 5 degrees. We have already raised the temperature about 1 degree.
I find it a little saddening that nearly everyone complains about this type of legislation while at the same time demanding that something be done about global warming.
The fundamental problem we have is that we aren't currently being billed the true cost of (most of) the power we are using. The energy companies have been getting away with polluting the environment on a massive scale for at no cost to them.
We can tackle that problem in two ways: 1) force power companies to pay to clean up their pollution. 2) Increases taxes so that Government can clean up the pollution. Either way it means that things are going to get a lot more expensive. Government isn't about to raise taxes to clean up the atmosphere and they certainly aren't going to try to make energy companies fix the problem so the only really option is to bring in strict guidelines on how much power devices can consume and hope the problem goes away.
I hope they realize that no amount of thick doors and walls or even burying the whole thing underground is going to stop 99.99999% of the attacks on this place, assuming of course that they actually intend to connect it to the Internet. While this is pretty cool I can't really see the point in it. The facility won't be easy to fit cooling, power and connectivity too and because it's underground there is a significant and on going risk of flooding. I would have thought a purpose built above ground facility with soild 5m razor wire topped walls and lots of hungry dogs would have been better.
struggle to see what the problem is here really. It sounds rather like Google are buying dedicated (virtual) pipes to move data around. Millions of companies already do this and no one complains. Flame away, I get that foot in mouth feeling.
No additional jobs aren't a bad thing but we probably have close on full employment now unless we start taking pretty draconian measures to force people to work (e.g. in the 19th century if you didn't work you went cold and hungry). That means that either would would need more people or we would have to take people from one job and put them on making diesel. This would increase demand for labour and drive up prices.
The problem is not the lack of energy, it's how widely dispersed that energy is and how much effort it takes to collect it. More than enough energy is coming from the sun and hitting this planet we just can't economically collect it.
I fear you are actually missing the point. The point is not that coffee grounds can or can't make oil it's how much effort it requires to do it for what gain we get out the other end. For a start I doubt very much if the figures for the amount of diesel produced are realistic. This person is trying to sell this idea so he's going to have given the best case scenario where every used coffee ground is processed into diesel which simply isn't going to be the case in reality. For arguments sake though lets say he is correct and in a year his process can produce about enough one days worth of fuel for the US.
I wonder though how much effort went into collecting and processing all that coffee. Obviously we will mechanize as much of it as is reasonable but it's still going to require machines and people to operate them. Even if we use the best case of having the delivery drivers collect the used coffee we are still talking about some additional staff.
I'd bet that if you looked at the number of people required per million gallons of diesel produced this system would come out very poorly against just pumping it out the ground and that is the crux of the problem.
The difference is really in the scale of the transportation and the concentration of the fuel source. The fuels that we currently consume such as oil and coal have very large deposits in comparativly small areas. Used coffee grounds on the other hand are widely spread across the whole world making collection harder. I'm sure if oil was spread thinly everywhere rather than being localized in wells it wouldn't be any where near as economical (from an energy point of view).
There is one mitigating factor with used coffee grounds however, a truck had to deliver the coffee in the first place so presumably it could take the used coffee back. Since you have to return the truck anyway you are only paying for the additional weight which shouldn't be great compared to actually moving the truck. Of course this has got to be weighed up against the fact that even if all the coffee grounds were collected the amount of fuel produced is tiny in relation to what is used.
While it's certainly an interesting idea I can't see it being right (but I've only read the first page, the site seems to have collapsed). My problem with it is simple that the impactor idea seems to fit all the data so well I think it's unlikley to be wrong.
I wonder though if this could perhaps be tested. The huge explosion theory could well have left old rocks away from the explosion site untouched. The impactor would have melted the whole planet. If we find even one rock old than the impact date we have our answer.
Trouble is that our childrens children will still be feeling the pain of the current economic choices assuming the whole system doesn't go into total meltdown before then. Also, the 700B$ wasn't in cash it was split across a lot of packages that had a total worth of700B$ on paper.
You could also argue that saving the entire economy is something that must be done so splashing that much cash on it is justified. As much as I would like to see a cheap way of getting into space it is not something we _must_ do right now so it doesn't justify that sort of expenditure.
The space elevator is like fusion power only 100 years in the future. The difference between the space elevator and fusion power though is that we have actually achieved fusion just not useful fusion we have never done anything even close to making a space elevator (although I believe we have played out lines from the space shuttle).
Personally I think if a space elevator is physically possible it's so far away into the future as to be fairly meaningless to us. The technological hurdles we need to get over before we can even think about trying are huge. In fact I imagine we would need to overcome other hudles in politics and economics before we could even make an attempt. For example the first elevator would have to be a world project - how would we get that many nations working together for a long time and not pulling out? How would we finance it? I don't think our current economic principals allow us to work on projects of this magnitude.
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I love KDE, I have done from the start, but there is no getting away from the fact that the way the switch to KDE 4 has been handled is a completely disaster (I've been using KDE 4.1 for a few months now). I can sort of see why the team directing KDE have done this but I'm sure it could have been handled a lot better than it has been.
Hind sight is a perfect science but before I radically changed KDE I would have made damn sure that the most popular software that relies on KDE was going to have a version ready about the same time KDE was released. Not having a KDE 4 version of Amarok for example is terrible.
Over all I think KDE will end up stronger for this change. The bits that are working are really nice I'm just worried that it will take 5 years to get to the point where full advantage can be taken of the effort that has been put in. In the end I think KDE will be the dominant desktop but Gnome must be seriously gaining support at the moment.
True enough but as a percentage of income the amount someone would pay is probably broadly similar across all earners. I would actually suspect that higher earners would probably be willing to pay a smaller percentage. It doesn't really get away from the fact though that most people would only pay a very small sum / % of income in order to protect someone elses child. I'm not advocating that we shouldn't pay some money to help protect vulnerable members of society I just don't want the most extreme 10% setting the amount.
I hear what you are saying regarding Part P. It's an absolute farce. I had to rewire our house so I went off and got myself Part P qualified. While I'm glad that I took a course and got the qualification (because I now feel competent to work on my house) I couldn't help feeling that the whole Part P thing was little more than a protection racket. It really feels like the certification bodies simply lent on the government to protect their business sector. Lets face it they must be making a killing out of Part P because Joe Public just heard "your can't work on your own electrics any more". I think the certification bodies have probably leant on councils as well to make it harder to do non-self-cert work or self-cert work with out the backing of certification body. My council (Gloucester) are fairly good but it took numerous phone calls and I had to present my certificates of qualification to them in order to sign off my work. I have a friend who was on the same course as me whose council won't even consider anything other than a fully signed sparky doing work.
I don't want to feed the trolls but... lets flip what you say on it's head and ask the question "how much would the ISP pay to say someone elses child from abuse?". Would they pay £1000 a year? Perhaps £10000. While they would certainly pay any amount to save their own child I suspect you would be shocked to find out what they would pay to save the child of A.N. Other.
Voting in a new leader is hardly a revolution when compared to the revolutions of history. In Americas case it looks like there has been quite a shift with this new president - perhaps a revolution-lite. It's not like you're writing a new constitution or moving to a fairer form of democracy though. That would be a real revolution and, I feel, would only come about with great loss of life.
Well the frist sensible decision which involves children in a decade. As other posters have pointed out it is not the (direct) responsibility of businesses to pick up the tab for crime fighting irrespective of how vile that crime is. This is just another one of those quasi-governmental bodies the UK is so fond of throwing it's weight around.
Personally, I'd like to see more crime fighting measures costed out like this. Perhaps if the public got to see how much these stupid wars on X, Y and Z cost they would grow up a bit and realize that there will always be bad people in the world and, with finite resources, you are only ever going to limit their number.
It is a sad state of affairs but if you adopts the view that everything you say and do may be monitored by the government without redress then your view is probably not far from what is happening.
The problem with this monitoring is that it's almost impossible to stop or control because by it's very nature it's kept very secret.
I imagine in the future we will end up with a revolution and lots of people will die, that's typically what happens when the ruler is doing something the majority of the populace doesn't agree with. Before you shout that the majority of the population are sheeple and just "think of the children / terrorists" I think the real problem is that they aren't well informed and very time poor and if they knew what was going on and they would disagree strongly.
Our house is fairly large by UK standards but by no means completely out of the ordinary. We have just fitted a 36kW gas boiler. To provide the same heating from a heat pump would about 12kW of electricity since heat pumps can achieve about 3:1 efficiency (note that acutally efficiency is usually more like 2:1 but we'll go with best case.
A modern UK supply is 240V on a 100A fuse which means it will provide up to 24kW of power so you could run a heat pump off it. Don't forget though the supply is also providing power to everything else in the house which could easily use up the other 12 kW especially if the cooker is electric.
I'm not very familiar with domestic wiring in the US but I'm guessing you typically have a main fuse of about 150 to 200A so that you can get the same power from the lower voltage. As you can see if the fuse is 150A it's going to be getting close the mark when it comes to supplying the heat pump and the house.
Interesting, I know that when we were looking at getting ground source heating for our current house the first thing everyone asked up was "do you have a three phase electricity supply?". Fortunately we do but I that is seriously rare in this country and I can't believe it's all the common in the US either. Just connecting everyone to three phase would be a huge job in itself (similar in scope to giving everyone fibre internet connections).
This technology is fairly well know in the UK and it's getting more popular everyday. The main problem with it is the cost of drilling (apparently it's about double the normal price at the moment because of the Olympic games - everyone that has a drill is down there laying foundations in Londons rubbish soil) as most people don't have enough garden to lay shallow pipe work. Longer term though if a lot of people switched to this technology we would need to upgrade the electricity grid.
While I agree that the picture you paint is truly terrifying I think it is important that one point is reiterated: the fact that the government now routinely threaten groups of people with legislation. The problem with this, as far as I can see it, is that we now have a whole raft of pseudo laws (nuLaws maybe) which we have no redress against. Worse still, very few (if any) of these nuLaws are debated in anyway that could be considered open and there is no standardized way to have them reviewed once they are in place. If the government ever want to increase the scope of these nuLaws they just have to put pressure on the nuLaw enforcers who have a vested interest in doing exactly what the government tell them as their existence depends on it. If the people cry foul the government can simply point the finger and say it wasn't us.
If all of that wasn't bad enough I believe the sort of people that gravitate to this type of organization tend to be conservative and more pro-censorship. It's like the age old joke that you don't want anyone serving as a police officer that wants to be a police officer.
I want off this rock!
While competition is generally a good thing I think the fight between Gnome and KDE has seriously hampered the adoption of Linux on the desktop (even if there hadn't been a fight I don't think we would see widespread Linux use on the Desktop but it would be greater than it is). The problem was that they were both good, for different reasons, and both had a good developer base the end result of which was a battle neither side could really win and we all lost from.
While I would hate to see Gnome consigned to the dustbin I think it's about time they gave up and admitted that KDE has won (flame away). I admit that KDE isn't perfect, far from it, but KDE4+ is streets ahead of Gnome now and the big hurdle to widespread use by companies has now vanished.
Except that approach has been shown not to work. Have a look at the way the US government tried to force the mining industry, which left tailings all the place, to clean the up. The end result was that every single one went bankrupt and the problem wasn't fixed except by the Government which had to raise taxes to fix it.
Forget thermite (unless it's for fun) a couple of hours at 200 deg C should do the trick. Not sure I'd want to use the oven for cooking afterwards though. I wonder if whacking the drive in a microwave for a couple of minutes would do the trick?
Why not think bigger, lets get world wide agreement on power consumption levels for a whole host of devices or at least standardized marking such as efficiency. The great thing is that it wouldn't actually take many countries signing up to the agreement to force manufacturers to make changes.
To get good economies of scale manufacturers need to produce huge numbers of identical items. If twenty percent of their market demanded more efficient devices (through legislation) they would, I am sure, change and sell that more efficient device everywhere.
The only caveat I will put on this is if the more efficient device is significantly more expensive to produce in which case they may well either not supply that 20% of the market or make two versions. I suspect though that some huge energy saving could be made with very minor changes that haven't happened simply because there has been no incentive to change.
And as for global warming, it's debatable that something needs to be done about that.
I'm as sceptical about global warming as the next guy but I think there is probably enough evidence now to say that we have caused (or in the near future will cause) a problem that we have to act.
Evidence shows that changes in temperature of a few degrees are very bad for life on earth. In fact the greatest extinction event in earths history appears to have been caused primarily but a rise in temperature of between 3 and 5 degrees. We have already raised the temperature about 1 degree.
I find it a little saddening that nearly everyone complains about this type of legislation while at the same time demanding that something be done about global warming.
The fundamental problem we have is that we aren't currently being billed the true cost of (most of) the power we are using. The energy companies have been getting away with polluting the environment on a massive scale for at no cost to them.
We can tackle that problem in two ways: 1) force power companies to pay to clean up their pollution. 2) Increases taxes so that Government can clean up the pollution. Either way it means that things are going to get a lot more expensive. Government isn't about to raise taxes to clean up the atmosphere and they certainly aren't going to try to make energy companies fix the problem so the only really option is to bring in strict guidelines on how much power devices can consume and hope the problem goes away.
I hope they realize that no amount of thick doors and walls or even burying the whole thing underground is going to stop 99.99999% of the attacks on this place, assuming of course that they actually intend to connect it to the Internet. While this is pretty cool I can't really see the point in it. The facility won't be easy to fit cooling, power and connectivity too and because it's underground there is a significant and on going risk of flooding. I would have thought a purpose built above ground facility with soild 5m razor wire topped walls and lots of hungry dogs would have been better.
struggle to see what the problem is here really. It sounds rather like Google are buying dedicated (virtual) pipes to move data around. Millions of companies already do this and no one complains. Flame away, I get that foot in mouth feeling.
No additional jobs aren't a bad thing but we probably have close on full employment now unless we start taking pretty draconian measures to force people to work (e.g. in the 19th century if you didn't work you went cold and hungry). That means that either would would need more people or we would have to take people from one job and put them on making diesel. This would increase demand for labour and drive up prices.
The problem is not the lack of energy, it's how widely dispersed that energy is and how much effort it takes to collect it. More than enough energy is coming from the sun and hitting this planet we just can't economically collect it.
I fear you are actually missing the point. The point is not that coffee grounds can or can't make oil it's how much effort it requires to do it for what gain we get out the other end. For a start I doubt very much if the figures for the amount of diesel produced are realistic. This person is trying to sell this idea so he's going to have given the best case scenario where every used coffee ground is processed into diesel which simply isn't going to be the case in reality. For arguments sake though lets say he is correct and in a year his process can produce about enough one days worth of fuel for the US.
I wonder though how much effort went into collecting and processing all that coffee. Obviously we will mechanize as much of it as is reasonable but it's still going to require machines and people to operate them. Even if we use the best case of having the delivery drivers collect the used coffee we are still talking about some additional staff.
I'd bet that if you looked at the number of people required per million gallons of diesel produced this system would come out very poorly against just pumping it out the ground and that is the crux of the problem.
The difference is really in the scale of the transportation and the concentration of the fuel source. The fuels that we currently consume such as oil and coal have very large deposits in comparativly small areas. Used coffee grounds on the other hand are widely spread across the whole world making collection harder. I'm sure if oil was spread thinly everywhere rather than being localized in wells it wouldn't be any where near as economical (from an energy point of view).
There is one mitigating factor with used coffee grounds however, a truck had to deliver the coffee in the first place so presumably it could take the used coffee back. Since you have to return the truck anyway you are only paying for the additional weight which shouldn't be great compared to actually moving the truck. Of course this has got to be weighed up against the fact that even if all the coffee grounds were collected the amount of fuel produced is tiny in relation to what is used.
While it's certainly an interesting idea I can't see it being right (but I've only read the first page, the site seems to have collapsed). My problem with it is simple that the impactor idea seems to fit all the data so well I think it's unlikley to be wrong.
I wonder though if this could perhaps be tested. The huge explosion theory could well have left old rocks away from the explosion site untouched. The impactor would have melted the whole planet. If we find even one rock old than the impact date we have our answer.
Trouble is that our childrens children will still be feeling the pain of the current economic choices assuming the whole system doesn't go into total meltdown before then. Also, the 700B$ wasn't in cash it was split across a lot of packages that had a total worth of700B$ on paper.
You could also argue that saving the entire economy is something that must be done so splashing that much cash on it is justified. As much as I would like to see a cheap way of getting into space it is not something we _must_ do right now so it doesn't justify that sort of expenditure.
The space elevator is like fusion power only 100 years in the future. The difference between the space elevator and fusion power though is that we have actually achieved fusion just not useful fusion we have never done anything even close to making a space elevator (although I believe we have played out lines from the space shuttle).
Personally I think if a space elevator is physically possible it's so far away into the future as to be fairly meaningless to us. The technological hurdles we need to get over before we can even think about trying are huge. In fact I imagine we would need to overcome other hudles in politics and economics before we could even make an attempt. For example the first elevator would have to be a world project - how would we get that many nations working together for a long time and not pulling out? How would we finance it? I don't think our current economic principals allow us to work on projects of this magnitude.