It is possible to make a number of the products currently made with oil-derived plastics with other things. Cellophane, bakelite, plastics derived from vegetable oils, coal. Alternatively metal, wood, or paper can be used for some products for which plastics are used now. All these need to be looked at in terms of cost-benefit analyses: there is no point in using wood if it takes a huge amount of energy to machine it to replace a plastic part. Design also plays a part, too, in that differences in design may mean less machining required, and so on.
Your basic premise is that in order to be sucessful you have to control the entire value chain.
No, it is that doing so may confer an advantage in some instances, and for Apple/Disney this could be the case, not that it is an absolute requirement. Given the competitiveness of the market even a small advantage could be significant. I'm suggesting this as a possiblity, but you'd want to do serious analysis to know if this truly is the case for Apple/Disney, and I don't have the figures for this. There do seem to be changes afoot, which might hint at something happening, though.
I don't believe Sony's plan will work.
Sony currently has a 70% market share in terms of consoles, and the media centre market is still open. I am not suggesting that Sony's plan will work, but it is already largely positioned end-to-end from content production to delivery, and this may be amplified by DRM in the future. The wildcard are the competing content delivery systems (Blu Ray and HD-DVD), of course
Disney and Apple should remain seperate and focus on what they are good at it (brand management and style).
And that might be a wise choice, but it would also depend on an detailed analysis of what is to be gained by various levels of integration. The complicating factor here is that Steve Jobs is a forceful personality and may have his own agenda in this regard.
Microsoft will not own content,
Microsoft has been getting interested in more vertical integration of its products as the PC market has become more saturated. It needs to do this to provide enough revenue growth to continue to interest investors. The most recent announcements have been with regards to VoIP technology, and more signficantly IPTV. It is also partnering more closely with Time Warner and seemed potentially interested in buying AOL. So Microsoft does not yet own content, and it doesn't seem necessarily likely that it will, but it positioning itself more closely to content providers in this arena. Perhaps the Apple-Disney link up will be no more than this in the end.
Hi tech hardware will be the means of delivering such content. By securing all points you have a vertical market. At the moment Microsoft is better positioned than Apple in terms of providing the last part of this in the home TV/film domain via Windows Media Centre Edition, but Apple potentially has the music and mobile video markets better under control via various iPods. Now if Apple was able to take something the size of a Mac Mini and adapt it to a media centre task then it might have something special. By controlling an important content provider it makes its job easier in terms of delivering content to such a machine (not by much - you wouldn't want to spite your nose too much by not selling to Windows folks too) by just enough to give itself some leverage (probably not a huge amount as you need to deliver content from all sorts of providers, but it might give an edge). You might argue that the switch to Intel is also timely here as it might have better availability of processors (since IBM is likely to be more interested in selling to Sony due to volume and Sony is going to be playing the same game as Apple/Disney with its own content and delivery system, the PS3).
"That is a tiny fraction of the armies Microsoft or Google can deploy to solve a problem."
Yes, the article says this, but it doesn't really say how many are working on Office at Microsoft. The information is probably out there, and I would expect it to be more than the size of Sun's team (I think Novell's team is fairly small from what I've seen hinted at). I'm not motiviated enough to find out the size of Microsoft's team. I suppose that to a certain extent chasing someone else's feature set is slightly easier than devising what the feature set should be, so that might make it easier to be more efficient in terms of man months per feature supplied versus bug produced, but it might be that OpenOffice development is more efficient. But then the important thing to the user is the end product, not how efficiently the programming resources were managed, except how it impacts on price. In any case there is a law of diminishing returns, and this is particulary the case with regards to software quality - 10% of the effort finds 90% of the bugs and vice versa (as a very approximate rule of thumb only). It would be interesting to see what the management:programming:quality split is for Office and OpenOffice.
The Windows registry appears quite "good" at gathering all sorts of junk.
Yes, it does seem to do this, and received wisdom seems to be that this is somehow responsible for the slow down. I haven't seen anything definitive from Microsoft on this, but then I haven't looked either.
Microsoft Word is a letter writing application. You can just about write a structured report, such as I use to do as a consultant in it, but it becomes pretty unwieldy when you try and number paragraphs, and do tables of contents, and other basic report writing stuff. If you try and insert boxes, diagrams and the like, Microsoft Word quickly becomes totally unusable, even to the point of crashing, bailing you out into macro source code, and other bizarre activities.
I found that Framemaker worked very well for writing reports. It was very stable, each section of a report could be very helpfully managed as a separate document wrapped up into a 'book' with very well done cross-chapter references, numbering, etc. We still have a copy somewhere and sometimes I consider using it again, but since people send me documents in Word format I'd need import and export filters, and ones that worked every time, plus a PDF export filter of some sort. But Framemaker was a document system done well. It still wouldn't be ideal for writing all those TPS reports and putting the covers on them.
Sometimes I feel what is needed for organisations where are report needs to be collaborative is an online system. Using an online document repository is one thing, but then you may as well edit the document online too, saving on uploads, downloads, people's inboxes filling up with Word files. If anyone knows of a good plug in for Plone for doing this in a word-like way (since users expect Word type functionality) I'd be very interested to know.
Some more complex reports do need integration with other tools, though, such as spreadsheet or database integration, but I am not sure an integrated office suite is necessarily required so much as a set of standardised connectors, and an intermediary database, and a way to handle these connections in a very intuitive way.
Sun hasn't every been successful at building a viable outside community for OpenOffice. And thus, it's not really an Open Source project, it's just Open Source license
I think some of this has historicaly been a trust problemn, and some has been their copyright assignment policy (which is also a trust problem).
Actually I suspect the barrier is more the sheer complexity of the project. Documentation on how software actually works and why things are designed the way they are is pretty much always insufficient, closed or open source. Also tools to make systems understandable are also still in their infancy. Whilst you can reverse engineer a code base into a series of UML diagrams (or whatever the latest paradigm is) the level of complexity is still such that it is hard to comprehend.
This means for any new person wishing to contribute there is a considerable run up period to become sufficiently conversant with the system before the developer can do be efficient. Someone relatively new might be able to spot the occasional buffer overrun bug, but then there are automated tools to do this already and it is the more subtle bugs that neither an automated tool nor a developer inexperienced with the software are the more important bugs to get fixed. Also some bugs are not fixable at this level since they are design flaws rather than bugs per se. Some are even consequences of design trade offs, hence even harder to address.
So I think the issue is complexity which means that what you really need to address the more subtle or wider issues are teams of developers with many months to get to grips with the code base, which limits full participation to larger organisations with sufficient financial backing.
I don't think this is a failing of OSS, just a recognition that large and complex projects are large and complex. I think it is impressive that so much large and complex projects have been delivered by community efforts. [I think there is a distinction between large projects from a large organisation which happen to be open source, and ones that have large community input]
I think the beauty of some of the early GNU tools and the UNIX design was the emphasis of relatively small tools that worked in concert via pipes and so on to produce a result. Here each individual tool is relatively small and so the barriers to comprehension and then contribution are much, much lower. Creating an office suite by coordinating the contributions of individual tools in theoretically possible, I suppose, but might be difficult.
"With software like Linux, you have a huge base of developers working to make the code better. And they have done a good job. But with Open Office, even though the code is technically 'open source', all the actual work is done by a relatively small team of engineers"
AFAIK there is at least a team in Sun and one in Novell working on this, and some other individuals contributing. With OSS there is at least the theoretical capability for others to get involved and with MS Office by its nature only Microsoft employees or those cleared by Microsoft can contribute.
Perhaps the original article would have been more informative if the number of MS Office developers and the number of OpenOffice active developers (or man-months of effort expended in the last year, perhaps) had been compared (a hard figure to find for OpenOffice I would imagine). In theory you could then rate the efficiency of OpenOffice and MS Office development by comparing the quality of the product and number of features via some metric against the effort expended.
Microsoft recommends rebooting periodically for best performance.
Windows is much, much better than it used to be. The old DOS/95/98 stack was horrible and the NT kernel based versions (2000, XP) are much improved. However on systems both at home and work using XP it seems that over time, as software is installed or removed, the system becomes slower. What causes this I don't know. A reinstall generally solves the problem. To save time I think it is good practice to install XP and the base set of programs you need and then ghost the install, thus saving time on reinstallation.
Apart from that for most desktop use to be honest I don't think there is much to choose in reliability between Windows and Linux. There are differences in behaviour and some things one does better than the other. Perhaps the most annoying issue with Linux is the GUI/OS interaction when some applications crash. These days most are well behaved and you can use various system guard tools running under X to kill the zombie applications, but sometimes you still need to get a console login and kill them by hand when things have gone wrong enough to lock X. This is not ideal for the average home user. But instances such as these are getting rarer. I suppose technically this is a fault of the application and X but people see the windowing system and base OS as one.
For large organisations I don't think that installing a 'FAT' OS, be it Linux, Windows, MAC OSX, etc is appropriate anyway. Server virtualisation or even applications served from a centralised server cluster make more sense, provided the responsiveness is sufficient. Add in a VPN and you have a potential system that can be used remotely too, but offering the same functionality, and supporting roving desktops and the like. Load balancing, Grid computing also come into the picture. It does depend on network loads and central servers being sufficient to provide a responsive desktop, and the overhead would not be appropriate for small organisations.
The bulbs tend to be good for about 2000 hours so at 10 hours a week you should be good for almos t 4 years. But if you assume a household with an average of 3 hours TV per day then it is likely to last 2 years at best.
It would make more sense for it to scan your RFID, link it to your customer loyalty cards, determine what you normally buy, and then attempt to predict (much like Amazon does) what you might like to buy in future. Knowing that you already wear Levis means that there probably isn't much point trying to sell you something you already have.
Occam's razor suggests that given two competing theories which explain the observations you have, choose the simpler one. It assumes that both of the solutions are already correct in that they explain the available observations. If further observations come along that go counter to the theory or model you have, then you reexamine things.
Last point volcanos release more greenhouse gases each year then all the nations of the world combined. Maybe we should ban or regulate valcanos?
Not only is this untrue the argument is ridiculous in that you cannot regulate anything but that which is under your control. If volcanoes were emitting an order of magnitude more greenhouse gas then your suggestion would have some merit, but less merit the closer human emissions are to those from volcanoes. Since the initial premise is incorrect it doesn't really matter anyway.
It is true that the climate has not been static, however the majority of the expansion in human population has been during a period of broadly the same climate from about 1800 to the present. Economies have been established and cities built based on this climate. If the outlier suggestions about climate change are true then the changes will be severe and changes in IT infratructure pale into insignificance alongside. Even the median predictions may mean some quite severe changes for people in some parts of the world in the next 50 to 100 years which may make habitation in some areas untenable.
What we do have is an opportunity to make changes more akin to your IT change example which can reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases released and also, if done correctly, improve the competitiveness of a nation. For example efficient office building construction to US standards for energy efficient building adds 2% to the capital cost, reduces energy usage by 30%, and seems to improve worker productivity. It pays for itself within 2 to 3 years after which businesses using such a building will have lower costs and be more competitve. This is from that well known leftist publication The Economist from around 18 months ago.
Last point volcanos release more greenhouse gases each year then all the nations of the world combined.
A common myth, and nothing more than a myth. It is untrue.
Anyone that reduces their consumption suffers with a competitive disadvantage.
No. The cost of many of these items is increasing. There may well be a significant advantage to reducing consumption of oil to alternatives that are cheaper or more stable price-wise in the future. Some OECD economies that are doing well now (at least in terms of headline growth, the figures for real terms GDP growth are different) are quite oil dependent, for example the USA which uses 50% more oil per unit GDP than the average. Others which seem weak now have shifted their domestic electricity production to other forms (e.g France - 60% nuclear). What will happen to these diverse economies in the future is uncertain but the best way to go forward is probably to move towards using alternative energy forms and then conserving stocks of what might be a valuable or scarce commodity in future. One of the coincidental advantages of some of these forms is that they also happen to release less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Those that race to burn it first get the benefit. Anyone that reduces their consumption suffers with a competitive disadvantage.
It is more true to say that any that allow their economic growth over the long term will be at a disadvantage. Thus swapping to new energy forms now in a way that imposes a huge burden on the economy would be bad, but then not changing at all and leaving the economy vulnerable to shortages in the future would also be a mistake. At the moment China is rapidly increasing its demand for oil and has huge economic growth, but it is also starting to look at investing in alternatives as the cost of oil will become a limiting factor.
Some of the most prudent technologies are not in new forms of generating electricity but forms of energy conservation. Office buildings can be built with around a 2% cost premium in such a way that they reduce energy input requirements by around 30% which pays for itself in a few years. Houses can be constructed in a similar way. Costs for heating in US homes this winter are set to rise by anything up to 50%. There are concerns that this may lead to a reduction in economic growth due to an adverse effect on consumer spending. If homes were 30% more energy efficient it would be less of a shock. In the UK meterologists are suggesting that it will have the most severe winter in 42 years. If homes were better insulated it would require less heating and leave more money to expand the economy.
First, can you prove that man made greenhouse gases are the sole reason behind global temp. increases, can you prove it isn't volcanos or decomposing plant matter?
Volcanic activity is likely to provide a cooling effect, so it is unlikely to be that.
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
The question you should ask is not what the correct temperature is (there isn't one) but how a change in climate will affect the world, or more specifically you. If it means that there will be a rise in sea level and you live in a coastal area it might affect to adversely. If you live in a frigid area and it turns it into a lush garden, good for you. What it will likely do, though, is require change in human activity to cope with the changing geography on the world which may impose additional costs on the economy above any possible additional advantage for some nations (and vice versa for others).
My concern wouldn't be so much with deliberate intentions to skew a poll as that involves a conspiracy that often leaves its own paper trail. My concern would more be with bugs in the voting software. Testing should ideally catch these bugs, but then many software systems, closed or open source, some subject to massive scrutiny, still have bugs.
Rosegarden on Linux has enough of the functionality required to assign parts to instruments. There are plenty of free midi players for Windows and Linux, but they give you less control over modification of instrument assignments and so on that might make the difference between an adequate rendition and one that is 'studio quality'.
If the current Linux kernel is outperforming Windows' kernel (the dominant desktop OS) then there is little incentive for people to swap (or be swapped, if you are an IBM, SGI, Red Hat, etc employee) from Linux kernel development to HURD development. At the point when a rival looks to be close then it is entirely possible that those companies will invest in a switch to HURD or something else. Mind you, the Linux kernel at 2.2 wasn't a great choice for interactive multimedia due to preemption issues, but that is much better.
A private sector company is required by law to provide best value for its shareholders rather than necessarily running a service in the best interests of countries around the world, so I'd say that an international body is what is needed rather than it being run by a private company as there is the potential for less conflicts of interest for that body. This is not to say that the members of the body aren't going to have their own agendas of course - thet will! An international body does not need to be part of the UN - many aren't and do a good job. The problem with an anyh international body is that it can quickly be consumed by its own politics or interference from member nations and grind to a halt. So basically there is no perfect solution to this problem, just a series of different imperfect solution, each with its merits and demerits. So I agree with a lot of what you say in your post.
While the UN is effective overall in a way, it is terrible at timely reponse to anything, especially if theres any disagreement. Look at the genocides that have gone on in the last 15 years and you'll notice the time between antrocities being reported & the UN actually doing something besides just talking is so long that usually either the genocide is done or well underway.
The UN has no military forces of its own (probably a good thing) which makes it reliant on others to provide this. Often resolutions are passed (or the votes for the resolutions are held - they can be vetoed by some of the larger nations as happened frequently during the cold war) but unless nations then step up to offer forces (other than Fiji which offers most often, but has few troops to actually offer) then nothing can happen.
Slashdot Mirror
It is possible to make a number of the products currently made with oil-derived plastics with other things. Cellophane, bakelite, plastics derived from vegetable oils, coal. Alternatively metal, wood, or paper can be used for some products for which plastics are used now. All these need to be looked at in terms of cost-benefit analyses: there is no point in using wood if it takes a huge amount of energy to machine it to replace a plastic part. Design also plays a part, too, in that differences in design may mean less machining required, and so on.
No, it is that doing so may confer an advantage in some instances, and for Apple/Disney this could be the case, not that it is an absolute requirement. Given the competitiveness of the market even a small advantage could be significant. I'm suggesting this as a possiblity, but you'd want to do serious analysis to know if this truly is the case for Apple/Disney, and I don't have the figures for this. There do seem to be changes afoot, which might hint at something happening, though.
I don't believe Sony's plan will work.
Sony currently has a 70% market share in terms of consoles, and the media centre market is still open. I am not suggesting that Sony's plan will work, but it is already largely positioned end-to-end from content production to delivery, and this may be amplified by DRM in the future. The wildcard are the competing content delivery systems (Blu Ray and HD-DVD), of course
Disney and Apple should remain seperate and focus on what they are good at it (brand management and style).And that might be a wise choice, but it would also depend on an detailed analysis of what is to be gained by various levels of integration. The complicating factor here is that Steve Jobs is a forceful personality and may have his own agenda in this regard.
Microsoft will not own content,Microsoft has been getting interested in more vertical integration of its products as the PC market has become more saturated. It needs to do this to provide enough revenue growth to continue to interest investors. The most recent announcements have been with regards to VoIP technology, and more signficantly IPTV. It is also partnering more closely with Time Warner and seemed potentially interested in buying AOL. So Microsoft does not yet own content, and it doesn't seem necessarily likely that it will, but it positioning itself more closely to content providers in this arena. Perhaps the Apple-Disney link up will be no more than this in the end.
Hi tech hardware will be the means of delivering such content. By securing all points you have a vertical market. At the moment Microsoft is better positioned than Apple in terms of providing the last part of this in the home TV/film domain via Windows Media Centre Edition, but Apple potentially has the music and mobile video markets better under control via various iPods. Now if Apple was able to take something the size of a Mac Mini and adapt it to a media centre task then it might have something special. By controlling an important content provider it makes its job easier in terms of delivering content to such a machine (not by much - you wouldn't want to spite your nose too much by not selling to Windows folks too) by just enough to give itself some leverage (probably not a huge amount as you need to deliver content from all sorts of providers, but it might give an edge). You might argue that the switch to Intel is also timely here as it might have better availability of processors (since IBM is likely to be more interested in selling to Sony due to volume and Sony is going to be playing the same game as Apple/Disney with its own content and delivery system, the PS3).
Yes, the article says this, but it doesn't really say how many are working on Office at Microsoft. The information is probably out there, and I would expect it to be more than the size of Sun's team (I think Novell's team is fairly small from what I've seen hinted at). I'm not motiviated enough to find out the size of Microsoft's team. I suppose that to a certain extent chasing someone else's feature set is slightly easier than devising what the feature set should be, so that might make it easier to be more efficient in terms of man months per feature supplied versus bug produced, but it might be that OpenOffice development is more efficient. But then the important thing to the user is the end product, not how efficiently the programming resources were managed, except how it impacts on price. In any case there is a law of diminishing returns, and this is particulary the case with regards to software quality - 10% of the effort finds 90% of the bugs and vice versa (as a very approximate rule of thumb only). It would be interesting to see what the management:programming:quality split is for Office and OpenOffice.
Yes, it does seem to do this, and received wisdom seems to be that this is somehow responsible for the slow down. I haven't seen anything definitive from Microsoft on this, but then I haven't looked either.
I found that Framemaker worked very well for writing reports. It was very stable, each section of a report could be very helpfully managed as a separate document wrapped up into a 'book' with very well done cross-chapter references, numbering, etc. We still have a copy somewhere and sometimes I consider using it again, but since people send me documents in Word format I'd need import and export filters, and ones that worked every time, plus a PDF export filter of some sort. But Framemaker was a document system done well. It still wouldn't be ideal for writing all those TPS reports and putting the covers on them.
Sometimes I feel what is needed for organisations where are report needs to be collaborative is an online system. Using an online document repository is one thing, but then you may as well edit the document online too, saving on uploads, downloads, people's inboxes filling up with Word files. If anyone knows of a good plug in for Plone for doing this in a word-like way (since users expect Word type functionality) I'd be very interested to know.
Some more complex reports do need integration with other tools, though, such as spreadsheet or database integration, but I am not sure an integrated office suite is necessarily required so much as a set of standardised connectors, and an intermediary database, and a way to handle these connections in a very intuitive way.
Sun hasn't every been successful at building a viable outside community for OpenOffice. And thus, it's not really an Open Source project, it's just Open Source license
I think some of this has historicaly been a trust problemn, and some has been their copyright assignment policy (which is also a trust problem).
Actually I suspect the barrier is more the sheer complexity of the project. Documentation on how software actually works and why things are designed the way they are is pretty much always insufficient, closed or open source. Also tools to make systems understandable are also still in their infancy. Whilst you can reverse engineer a code base into a series of UML diagrams (or whatever the latest paradigm is) the level of complexity is still such that it is hard to comprehend.
This means for any new person wishing to contribute there is a considerable run up period to become sufficiently conversant with the system before the developer can do be efficient. Someone relatively new might be able to spot the occasional buffer overrun bug, but then there are automated tools to do this already and it is the more subtle bugs that neither an automated tool nor a developer inexperienced with the software are the more important bugs to get fixed. Also some bugs are not fixable at this level since they are design flaws rather than bugs per se. Some are even consequences of design trade offs, hence even harder to address.
So I think the issue is complexity which means that what you really need to address the more subtle or wider issues are teams of developers with many months to get to grips with the code base, which limits full participation to larger organisations with sufficient financial backing.
I don't think this is a failing of OSS, just a recognition that large and complex projects are large and complex. I think it is impressive that so much large and complex projects have been delivered by community efforts. [I think there is a distinction between large projects from a large organisation which happen to be open source, and ones that have large community input]
I think the beauty of some of the early GNU tools and the UNIX design was the emphasis of relatively small tools that worked in concert via pipes and so on to produce a result. Here each individual tool is relatively small and so the barriers to comprehension and then contribution are much, much lower. Creating an office suite by coordinating the contributions of individual tools in theoretically possible, I suppose, but might be difficult.
So in other words it is fine for about 95% of office suite users?
AFAIK there is at least a team in Sun and one in Novell working on this, and some other individuals contributing. With OSS there is at least the theoretical capability for others to get involved and with MS Office by its nature only Microsoft employees or those cleared by Microsoft can contribute.
Perhaps the original article would have been more informative if the number of MS Office developers and the number of OpenOffice active developers (or man-months of effort expended in the last year, perhaps) had been compared (a hard figure to find for OpenOffice I would imagine). In theory you could then rate the efficiency of OpenOffice and MS Office development by comparing the quality of the product and number of features via some metric against the effort expended.
Windows is much, much better than it used to be. The old DOS/95/98 stack was horrible and the NT kernel based versions (2000, XP) are much improved. However on systems both at home and work using XP it seems that over time, as software is installed or removed, the system becomes slower. What causes this I don't know. A reinstall generally solves the problem. To save time I think it is good practice to install XP and the base set of programs you need and then ghost the install, thus saving time on reinstallation.
Apart from that for most desktop use to be honest I don't think there is much to choose in reliability between Windows and Linux. There are differences in behaviour and some things one does better than the other. Perhaps the most annoying issue with Linux is the GUI/OS interaction when some applications crash. These days most are well behaved and you can use various system guard tools running under X to kill the zombie applications, but sometimes you still need to get a console login and kill them by hand when things have gone wrong enough to lock X. This is not ideal for the average home user. But instances such as these are getting rarer. I suppose technically this is a fault of the application and X but people see the windowing system and base OS as one.
For large organisations I don't think that installing a 'FAT' OS, be it Linux, Windows, MAC OSX, etc is appropriate anyway. Server virtualisation or even applications served from a centralised server cluster make more sense, provided the responsiveness is sufficient. Add in a VPN and you have a potential system that can be used remotely too, but offering the same functionality, and supporting roving desktops and the like. Load balancing, Grid computing also come into the picture. It does depend on network loads and central servers being sufficient to provide a responsive desktop, and the overhead would not be appropriate for small organisations.
Some conferences require that you submit papers in formats other than LaTeX.
The bulbs tend to be good for about 2000 hours so at 10 hours a week you should be good for almos t 4 years. But if you assume a household with an average of 3 hours TV per day then it is likely to last 2 years at best.
(borrowed from George Carlin). Surely you want a cold water heater, not a hot water heater.
It would make more sense for it to scan your RFID, link it to your customer loyalty cards, determine what you normally buy, and then attempt to predict (much like Amazon does) what you might like to buy in future. Knowing that you already wear Levis means that there probably isn't much point trying to sell you something you already have.
Occam's razor suggests that given two competing theories which explain the observations you have, choose the simpler one. It assumes that both of the solutions are already correct in that they explain the available observations. If further observations come along that go counter to the theory or model you have, then you reexamine things.
Not only is this untrue the argument is ridiculous in that you cannot regulate anything but that which is under your control. If volcanoes were emitting an order of magnitude more greenhouse gas then your suggestion would have some merit, but less merit the closer human emissions are to those from volcanoes. Since the initial premise is incorrect it doesn't really matter anyway.
What we do have is an opportunity to make changes more akin to your IT change example which can reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases released and also, if done correctly, improve the competitiveness of a nation. For example efficient office building construction to US standards for energy efficient building adds 2% to the capital cost, reduces energy usage by 30%, and seems to improve worker productivity. It pays for itself within 2 to 3 years after which businesses using such a building will have lower costs and be more competitve. This is from that well known leftist publication The Economist from around 18 months ago.
Last point volcanos release more greenhouse gases each year then all the nations of the world combined.
A common myth, and nothing more than a myth. It is untrue.
No. The cost of many of these items is increasing. There may well be a significant advantage to reducing consumption of oil to alternatives that are cheaper or more stable price-wise in the future. Some OECD economies that are doing well now (at least in terms of headline growth, the figures for real terms GDP growth are different) are quite oil dependent, for example the USA which uses 50% more oil per unit GDP than the average. Others which seem weak now have shifted their domestic electricity production to other forms (e.g France - 60% nuclear). What will happen to these diverse economies in the future is uncertain but the best way to go forward is probably to move towards using alternative energy forms and then conserving stocks of what might be a valuable or scarce commodity in future. One of the coincidental advantages of some of these forms is that they also happen to release less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Those that race to burn it first get the benefit. Anyone that reduces their consumption suffers with a competitive disadvantage.
It is more true to say that any that allow their economic growth over the long term will be at a disadvantage. Thus swapping to new energy forms now in a way that imposes a huge burden on the economy would be bad, but then not changing at all and leaving the economy vulnerable to shortages in the future would also be a mistake. At the moment China is rapidly increasing its demand for oil and has huge economic growth, but it is also starting to look at investing in alternatives as the cost of oil will become a limiting factor.
Some of the most prudent technologies are not in new forms of generating electricity but forms of energy conservation. Office buildings can be built with around a 2% cost premium in such a way that they reduce energy input requirements by around 30% which pays for itself in a few years. Houses can be constructed in a similar way. Costs for heating in US homes this winter are set to rise by anything up to 50%. There are concerns that this may lead to a reduction in economic growth due to an adverse effect on consumer spending. If homes were 30% more energy efficient it would be less of a shock. In the UK meterologists are suggesting that it will have the most severe winter in 42 years. If homes were better insulated it would require less heating and leave more money to expand the economy.
Volcanic activity is likely to provide a cooling effect, so it is unlikely to be that.
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
The question you should ask is not what the correct temperature is (there isn't one) but how a change in climate will affect the world, or more specifically you. If it means that there will be a rise in sea level and you live in a coastal area it might affect to adversely. If you live in a frigid area and it turns it into a lush garden, good for you. What it will likely do, though, is require change in human activity to cope with the changing geography on the world which may impose additional costs on the economy above any possible additional advantage for some nations (and vice versa for others).
My concern wouldn't be so much with deliberate intentions to skew a poll as that involves a conspiracy that often leaves its own paper trail. My concern would more be with bugs in the voting software. Testing should ideally catch these bugs, but then many software systems, closed or open source, some subject to massive scrutiny, still have bugs.
Rosegarden on Linux has enough of the functionality required to assign parts to instruments. There are plenty of free midi players for Windows and Linux, but they give you less control over modification of instrument assignments and so on that might make the difference between an adequate rendition and one that is 'studio quality'.
If the current Linux kernel is outperforming Windows' kernel (the dominant desktop OS) then there is little incentive for people to swap (or be swapped, if you are an IBM, SGI, Red Hat, etc employee) from Linux kernel development to HURD development. At the point when a rival looks to be close then it is entirely possible that those companies will invest in a switch to HURD or something else. Mind you, the Linux kernel at 2.2 wasn't a great choice for interactive multimedia due to preemption issues, but that is much better.
A private sector company is required by law to provide best value for its shareholders rather than necessarily running a service in the best interests of countries around the world, so I'd say that an international body is what is needed rather than it being run by a private company as there is the potential for less conflicts of interest for that body. This is not to say that the members of the body aren't going to have their own agendas of course - thet will! An international body does not need to be part of the UN - many aren't and do a good job. The problem with an anyh international body is that it can quickly be consumed by its own politics or interference from member nations and grind to a halt. So basically there is no perfect solution to this problem, just a series of different imperfect solution, each with its merits and demerits. So I agree with a lot of what you say in your post.
The UN has no military forces of its own (probably a good thing) which makes it reliant on others to provide this. Often resolutions are passed (or the votes for the resolutions are held - they can be vetoed by some of the larger nations as happened frequently during the cold war) but unless nations then step up to offer forces (other than Fiji which offers most often, but has few troops to actually offer) then nothing can happen.
The USA uses 50% more oil per unit of GDP than the OECD average, AFAIK.