Ok, let's play a game. You name an really nasty action carried out by a corporation. Then I'll name one carried out by a government. We'll repeat until someone runs out of really nasty things.
If you like, to tilt the game in your direction, I'll only use really nasty things done by nominally democratic governments.
1. Ok. The number is not zero. It's just less than other forms of energy. It is, in fact, lower than Solar energy. (In fact, solar energy is not very safe, because installation tends to be dangerous. People fall off roofs.)
2. But coal is the main alternative. Realistically, if we don't build nuclear, we will build coal.
3. No, I mean that knowledgable people don't really worry about waste disposal anymore. Encapsulate it in glass beads, store it an a saltmine. Or whatever. People who oppose nuclear power for other reasons use this as a scare tactic. In fact, the more sophisticated anti-nuclear folk have actually abandoned this tack and now concentrate on transportation to the disposal site as the big problem.
4. We can demonstrate that potential disposal sites have not be breached with water for millions of years.
5. Quite untrue. It is far cheaper than photovoltaic, for example. It is capital intensive, which makes it unpalatable. If you use unrealistically short plant lifetimes, as is the standard practice, then nuclear appears expensive. If you use realistic plant lifetimes, which appear to be several times the original planned lifetimes, nuclear is quite cheap.
6. ENIAC didn't tell us much about the reliability of computers, or the cost, or the size.
Nuclear power has the problem that it shares a word with "nuclear bomb." It also has the problem that widespread use would practically eliminate limits on use of power. The "environmental" movement views a chronic shortage of power as a good thing because it forces a lifestyle more in keeping with their agenda.
(An amusing demonstration of this was the cold-fusion flap a few years ago. In the early days after the announcement, several prominent environmentalists publically bemoaned the apparent availability of lots of cheap power, because they *wanted* limits to growth.
This is a very good summary of most of the specious arguments against nuclear power.
1. Chernobyl tells us as about as much about the safety of a modern nuclear plant as the ENIAC tells us about the capabilities of modern computers.
2. The results of Chernobyl were "catastophic" only because they were sudden. A large coal-fired plant kills a few hundred people per year, year after year, decade after decade. Nuclear plants kill zero people year after year, actually releasing less radiation than a coal plant. Three Mile Island was a "disaster", but actually saved thousands of lives compared to building equivalent capacity in coal-fired plants.
3. The problem of "what to do with the waste" is purely political. There are many solutions that put it out of harms way for thousands of years.
4. Nuclear power is not one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity. It has a high startup cost, which makes it politically unpalatable. Once in operation, it is one of the cheaper ways to generate electricity. And, of course, there is a practically unlimited supply of
fuel.
You speculate a lot about what rogue states might do, but we don't really need to speculate, do we? At least some rogue states (Iraq, N. Korea, etc.) do seem to be spending a healthy portion of their meager GDPs on building ICBMs. They might (or might not) also be building satchel bombs, I guess. Does that mean we should ignore the missiles?
Corporations try to predict where there technologies are going. They aren't very successful. Human beings cannot predict the economic, environmental, and societal effects of technologies.
Slow adoption? Compared to what? Java is already the defacto standard for enterprise applications. Most big companies now think of C++ in the same way they think of Cobol. I.e., not dead, but not something to start a new project with, either.
The standard reasons given for why I ought to vote really annoy me. The first, and silliest, is that "every vote counts." Nonsense. In fact, given a population as large as the US, the chances of my vote affecting the outcome of even a state race, much less a national one are, to many, many significant figures, zero. Whether I vote or not almost certainly doesn't make a difference in the outcome. You can make a plausible case that some presidential elections could have turned out different if a few thousand votes changed. I don't get to vote a thousand times.
Second, there is the obnoxious "if you don't vote you have no right to complain." Will somebody please explain the logic of that? I don't see any. In fact, the opposite seems true. If you accept the rules of a game and participate in it, but wind up losing, you have no right to complain: you lost fair and square. How, exactly, is it that refusing to play a game precludes me from saying that I think the game is stupid? Do I have to attend All-Star Wrestling events every couple years before I'm entitled to say that it's a stupid sport?
Third, there is "not voting is just apathy." This is nothing but a logical fallacy. Yes, apathy does imply not voting. Does this mean that not voting implies apathy? Would it make a difference if I marched down to the polling station, stood in line, and then didn't pull the lever?
A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader. A vote for Browne is a vote for Browne.
A vote for anyone is a vote wasted, if you are only concerned about the outcome of the election. If you vote because you think your vote will change the result, forget it. Stay home. There has never been a presidential election decided by one vote, or even a hundred votes. If the law of large numbers holds up, it very likely never will.
No matter who wins, you can be sure of one thing: if and how you personally voted or didn't vote will make no difference to the outcome.
I'm from South Dakota, too. Get out while there's still time! And please send me your resume; if your blood is warm I can find a job for you in the valley.
Cisco and Microsoft didn't pay any corporate tax because they compensated their employees extremely well. Not just their executives: both companies have stock-option programs that reach most of their employees. This is a very good thing. Other companies should be encouraged to do the same.
It's good for employees because they actually participate in the wealth they create; it doesn't all go to stockholders. It's good for stockholders and customers because the employees are strongly committed to the company and its success. It's even good for the IRS: the employees pay lots of taxes on those stock options.
For people making $50K and up in the US, medical care is provided by the company at minimal cost. I'm not making a case against universal health care, but for people making a good wage in the US, it just isn't an issue.
Housing, overall, is not too much different. There is far more variation within either country (e.g., Toronto vs. Winnipeg; San Jose vs. Cinncinatt) that there is between countries.
Cars are about the same. Fuel is a lot higher in Canada.
Food is about the same. Some stuff is cheaper; fresh produce is more expensive.
I would challenge you to find a state where the real tax rate is anywhere close to Ontario. Please count federal and provincial income tax, GST, etc.
Computers are cheaper in the US.
I don't know about internet connections.
Travel is definitely cheaper in the US. And the difference is likely to widen now that Cananda has only a single air carrier.
I've worked in both countries. Pay in Canada is not almost as good. It's not even close. Nominally, you may make almost the same number of dollars. But when you correct for the exchange rate and take taxes into account there is no comparison. A Canadian dollar is worth $0.67 cents US today. So multiply your Canadian wage by 2/3. Marginal income tax rates reach 50% and higher at fairly low salaries. Sales tax (GST) is much higher than US sales tax in most locales. (There's a reason that discount malls and gas stations in Buffalo and Detroit are flooded with Canadians every weekend.)
And by the way, if you are in the midst of applying for Canadian permanent residency, you have to get permission to leave Canada, just like the US. My experience is that there isn't much difference between the actual rules in the two countries. (Unless you are very rich: Canada has some rules that make permanent residency very easy and quick to get if you bring enough money along.) Canada is, however, a lot quicker about processing things.
There's something to be said for books that have been hand-written by monks. The heavy parchment, the massive weight of the tome, the calligraphy, the leather binding, the uniqueness of each volume. If you ask me, machine-printed books are a fad. The printing press will never replace calligraphers.
Where I work, there are lots of H1-B workers, and they're paid exactly the same as anyone else. The only inequity, if you can call it that, is that they can't switch jobs at the drop of a hat, so they aren't as apt to join the newest, hottest startups.
Where are you that no one you know personally knows Java!? Saturn?
Seriously, if you know C and C++, and if it takes more than a couple weeks to learn Java, then you are probably not the kind of person they're looking for. Java is an extremely simple language. Moreover, it has a large set of standard libraries to handle everything from networks to cryptography to user interfaces. If the project were done in C or C++, a huge amount more time would be spent writing infrastructure that Java already provides. (Either that or someone would spend a lot of time researching, choosing, and then arguing over some non-standard library that half the people couldn't stand.)
Sorry, you're wrong. You're conflating two very different things. There were many physical networks, including ARPANET, CSNET, NFSNET, and many other smaller ones. But the logical network has been called the internet since the early 1970's. The point of the term internet is that it's a network of networks. The various physical networks were tied together with common protocols (IP, etc.) to form the internet.
But he didn't take the initiative in creating the internet. In 1990, I had been using the internet for about 10 years. And I was hardly among the first. The internet had already been around for 10 years; the internet "culture" was already in the making. In fact, long-time internet users were already complaining that the internet was getting so big that it would soon collapse.
What Al Gore did was, to put it simply, take credit for something he didn't do. If this were the only time he did that, I suspect that it would have been forgotten by now. The problem is, he makes a habit of it, so it's turned into a joke.
There is another obvious non-infringing use: someone can develop a Linux driver and distribute under the GPL, but also distribute under other licenses. E.g., they could specifically permit use on Solaris. This isn't as far-fetched as you might think. There are a lot of Linux users and developers working for Sun, and they might well do that.
To me, this seems problematic. If I release virgin software under GPL v3, it works fine. But if I incorporate any GPL v2 software, what is the status? Don't the authors of the v2 software, who might disagree with GPL v3 changes, have any rights in the matter? What happens when software from three or four versions of the GPL are combined? This sounds like a mess.
I think revisions to the GPL ought to be resticted to clarifications (in spite of wording to the contrary in the GPL itself).
1. Yes, the proposal was withdrawn. I did say version 8. It will be back.
2. Decent? No. Awkward and primitive.
3. Sure, but I can recall discussions as recently as a couple years ago where the Perl glitterati argued vociferously that threading inside the language wasn't useful at all.
4. You've got be kidding. "Safe" is a collection of low-level primitives that I suppose, with massive effort, could be used to implement a secure system. It's hardly compares to Java's.
But, of course, all this just validates my original point. In the beginning OO wasn't useful. Now it's useful, but we can get by with a primitive system. By version 8, it will have all the bells and whistles. The same people will defend each version.
Ditto for threading. A few years ago, threading was something that that OS should do---adding it to the language wouldn't be useful. Then it was worth a tack-on. Now the next version will be based on threads.
Ditto for security. First, it's up to the OS: it has no business in the language. Next, it's worth an add-on hack. Finally (v8 or so) we'll have a full-blown system. The same people will defend each version to the death. Until it changes.
Look: I'm not putting down Perl. I just think this is amusing.
As I watch Perl evolve from version to version, one thing constantly amuses me. Questionable features (or missing features) that are defended strenuously in one version are fixed (or added) in the next. And the same people who argued passionately that the feature was already fine (or completely unnecessary) now passionately support the change.
I am completely convinced that by version 8 or so, Perl will make "$", "%", and "@" optional, will have a decent object-oriented system, will have useful threading, will have a secure sandbox ala Java, etc. etc. And the same people who currently claim that all this is not only unnecessary but outright harmful will embrace it.
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I doubt that you really value them at $0. If you really do, please give them to me. It will be no loss to you, and will make me happy.
Ok, let's play a game. You name an really nasty action carried out by a corporation. Then I'll name one carried out by a government. We'll repeat until someone runs out of really nasty things.
If you like, to tilt the game in your direction, I'll only use really nasty things done by nominally democratic governments.
1. Ok. The number is not zero. It's just less than other forms of energy. It is, in fact, lower than Solar energy. (In fact, solar energy is not very safe, because installation tends to be dangerous. People fall off roofs.)
2. But coal is the main alternative. Realistically, if we don't build nuclear, we will build coal.
3. No, I mean that knowledgable people don't really worry about waste disposal anymore. Encapsulate it in glass beads, store it an a saltmine. Or whatever. People who oppose nuclear power for other reasons use this as a scare tactic. In fact, the more sophisticated anti-nuclear folk have actually abandoned this tack and now concentrate on transportation to the disposal site as the big problem.
4. We can demonstrate that potential disposal sites have not be breached with water for millions of years.
5. Quite untrue. It is far cheaper than photovoltaic, for example. It is capital intensive, which makes it unpalatable. If you use unrealistically short plant lifetimes, as is the standard practice, then nuclear appears expensive. If you use realistic plant lifetimes, which appear to be several times the original planned lifetimes, nuclear is quite cheap.
6. ENIAC didn't tell us much about the reliability of computers, or the cost, or the size.
Nuclear power has the problem that it shares a word with "nuclear bomb." It also has the problem that widespread use would practically eliminate limits on use of power. The "environmental" movement views a chronic shortage of power as a good thing because it forces a lifestyle more in keeping with their agenda.
(An amusing demonstration of this was the cold-fusion flap a few years ago. In the early days after the announcement, several prominent environmentalists publically bemoaned the apparent availability of lots of cheap power, because they *wanted* limits to growth.
This is a very good summary of most of the specious arguments against nuclear power.
1. Chernobyl tells us as about as much about the safety of a modern nuclear plant as the ENIAC tells us about the capabilities of modern computers.
2. The results of Chernobyl were "catastophic" only because they were sudden. A large coal-fired plant kills a few hundred people per year, year after year, decade after decade. Nuclear plants kill zero people year after year, actually releasing less radiation than a coal plant. Three Mile Island was a "disaster", but actually saved thousands of lives compared to building equivalent capacity in coal-fired plants.
3. The problem of "what to do with the waste" is purely political. There are many solutions that put it out of harms way for thousands of years.
4. Nuclear power is not one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity. It has a high startup cost, which makes it politically unpalatable. Once in operation, it is one of the cheaper ways to generate electricity. And, of course, there is a practically unlimited supply of
fuel.
You speculate a lot about what rogue states might do, but we don't really need to speculate, do we? At least some rogue states (Iraq, N. Korea, etc.) do seem to be spending a healthy portion of their meager GDPs on building ICBMs. They might (or might not) also be building satchel bombs, I guess. Does that mean we should ignore the missiles?
Corporations try to predict where there technologies are going. They aren't very successful. Human beings cannot predict the economic, environmental, and societal effects of technologies.
Slow adoption? Compared to what? Java is already the defacto standard for enterprise applications. Most big companies now think of C++ in the same way they think of Cobol. I.e., not dead, but not something to start a new project with, either.
Java the platform, presumably.
The standard reasons given for why I ought to vote really annoy me. The first, and silliest, is that "every vote counts." Nonsense. In fact, given a population as large as the US, the chances of my vote affecting the outcome of even a state race, much less a national one are, to many, many significant figures, zero. Whether I vote or not almost certainly doesn't make a difference in the outcome. You can make a plausible case that some presidential elections could have turned out different if a few thousand votes changed. I don't get to vote a thousand times.
Second, there is the obnoxious "if you don't vote you have no right to complain." Will somebody please explain the logic of that? I don't see any. In fact, the opposite seems true. If you accept the rules of a game and participate in it, but wind up losing, you have no right to complain: you lost fair and square. How, exactly, is it that refusing to play a game precludes me from saying that I think the game is stupid? Do I have to attend All-Star Wrestling events every couple years before I'm entitled to say that it's a stupid sport?
Third, there is "not voting is just apathy." This is nothing but a logical fallacy. Yes, apathy does imply not voting. Does this mean that not voting implies apathy? Would it make a difference if I marched down to the polling station, stood in line, and then didn't pull the lever?
A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader. A vote for Browne is a vote for Browne.
A vote for anyone is a vote wasted, if you are only concerned about the outcome of the election. If you vote because you think your vote will change the result, forget it. Stay home. There has never been a presidential election decided by one vote, or even a hundred votes. If the law of large numbers holds up, it very likely never will.
No matter who wins, you can be sure of one thing: if and how you personally voted or didn't vote will make no difference to the outcome.
I'm from South Dakota, too. Get out while there's still time! And please send me your resume; if your blood is warm I can find a job for you in the valley.
Cisco and Microsoft didn't pay any corporate tax because they compensated their employees extremely well. Not just their executives: both companies have stock-option programs that reach most of their employees. This is a very good thing. Other companies should be encouraged to do the same.
It's good for employees because they actually participate in the wealth they create; it doesn't all go to stockholders. It's good for stockholders and customers because the employees are strongly committed to the company and its success. It's even good for the IRS: the employees pay lots of taxes on those stock options.
For people making $50K and up in the US, medical care is provided by the company at minimal cost. I'm not making a case against universal health care, but for people making a good wage in the US, it just isn't an issue.
Housing, overall, is not too much different. There is far more variation within either country (e.g., Toronto vs. Winnipeg; San Jose vs. Cinncinatt) that there is between countries.
Cars are about the same. Fuel is a lot higher in Canada.
Food is about the same. Some stuff is cheaper; fresh produce is more expensive.
I would challenge you to find a state where the real tax rate is anywhere close to Ontario. Please count federal and provincial income tax, GST, etc.
Computers are cheaper in the US.
I don't know about internet connections.
Travel is definitely cheaper in the US. And the difference is likely to widen now that Cananda has only a single air carrier.
I've worked in both countries. Pay in Canada is not almost as good. It's not even close. Nominally, you may make almost the same number of dollars. But when you correct for the exchange rate and take taxes into account there is no comparison. A Canadian dollar is worth $0.67 cents US today. So multiply your Canadian wage by 2/3. Marginal income tax rates reach 50% and higher at fairly low salaries. Sales tax (GST) is much higher than US sales tax in most locales. (There's a reason that discount malls and gas stations in Buffalo and Detroit are flooded with Canadians every weekend.)
And by the way, if you are in the midst of applying for Canadian permanent residency, you have to get permission to leave Canada, just like the US. My experience is that there isn't much difference between the actual rules in the two countries. (Unless you are very rich: Canada has some rules that make permanent residency very easy and quick to get if you bring enough money along.) Canada is, however, a lot quicker about processing things.
One strength is it scalability. The other is reliability. How fast is a P-III that has just crashed?
There's something to be said for books that have been hand-written by monks. The heavy parchment, the massive weight of the tome, the calligraphy, the leather binding, the uniqueness of each volume. If you ask me, machine-printed books are a fad. The printing press will never replace calligraphers.
If this is true, laws are being broken.
Where I work, there are lots of H1-B workers, and they're paid exactly the same as anyone else. The only inequity, if you can call it that, is that they can't switch jobs at the drop of a hat, so they aren't as apt to join the newest, hottest startups.
Where are you that no one you know personally knows Java!? Saturn?
Seriously, if you know C and C++, and if it takes more than a couple weeks to learn Java, then you are probably not the kind of person they're looking for. Java is an extremely simple language. Moreover, it has a large set of standard libraries to handle everything from networks to cryptography to user interfaces. If the project were done in C or C++, a huge amount more time would be spent writing infrastructure that Java already provides. (Either that or someone would spend a lot of time researching, choosing, and then arguing over some non-standard library that half the people couldn't stand.)
I sure remember calling it the internet.
Sorry, you're wrong. You're conflating two very different things. There were many physical networks, including ARPANET, CSNET, NFSNET, and many other smaller ones. But the logical network has been called the internet since the early 1970's. The point of the term internet is that it's a network of networks. The various physical networks were tied together with common protocols (IP, etc.) to form the internet.
But he didn't take the initiative in creating the internet. In 1990, I had been using the internet for about 10 years. And I was hardly among the first. The internet had already been around for 10 years; the internet "culture" was already in the making. In fact, long-time internet users were already complaining that the internet was getting so big that it would soon collapse.
What Al Gore did was, to put it simply, take credit for something he didn't do. If this were the only time he did that, I suspect that it would have been forgotten by now. The problem is, he makes a habit of it, so it's turned into a joke.
There is another obvious non-infringing use: someone can develop a Linux driver and distribute under the GPL, but also distribute under other licenses. E.g., they could specifically permit use on Solaris. This isn't as far-fetched as you might think. There are a lot of Linux users and developers working for Sun, and they might well do that.
To me, this seems problematic. If I release virgin software under GPL v3, it works fine. But if I incorporate any GPL v2 software, what is the status? Don't the authors of the v2 software, who might disagree with GPL v3 changes, have any rights in the matter? What happens when software from three or four versions of the GPL are combined? This sounds like a mess.
I think revisions to the GPL ought to be resticted to clarifications (in spite of wording to the contrary in the GPL itself).
1. Yes, the proposal was withdrawn. I did say version 8. It will be back.
2. Decent? No. Awkward and primitive.
3. Sure, but I can recall discussions as recently as a couple years ago where the Perl glitterati argued vociferously that threading inside the language wasn't useful at all.
4. You've got be kidding. "Safe" is a collection of low-level primitives that I suppose, with massive effort, could be used to implement a secure system. It's hardly compares to Java's.
But, of course, all this just validates my original point. In the beginning OO wasn't useful. Now it's useful, but we can get by with a primitive system. By version 8, it will have all the bells and whistles. The same people will defend each version.
Ditto for threading. A few years ago, threading was something that that OS should do---adding it to the language wouldn't be useful. Then it was worth a tack-on. Now the next version will be based on threads.
Ditto for security. First, it's up to the OS: it has no business in the language. Next, it's worth an add-on hack. Finally (v8 or so) we'll have a full-blown system. The same people will defend each version to the death. Until it changes.
Look: I'm not putting down Perl. I just think this is amusing.
As I watch Perl evolve from version to version, one thing constantly amuses me. Questionable features (or missing features) that are defended strenuously in one version are fixed (or added) in the next. And the same people who argued passionately that the feature was already fine (or completely unnecessary) now passionately support the change.
I am completely convinced that by version 8 or so, Perl will make "$", "%", and "@" optional, will have a decent object-oriented system, will have useful threading, will have a secure sandbox ala Java, etc. etc. And the same people who currently claim that all this is not only unnecessary but outright harmful will embrace it.