Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
Yeah, but I'm not sure it's really like that. AFAICT it's almost more like if you were littering and the trash blew over into your neighbor's yard, and then you complained to the neighborhood association that your neighbor wasn't taking good enough care of their yard, because it was covered in trash.
If IBM is dominant, it seems like it's at least partially because they're the one left standing after Microsoft leveraged their monopoly to drag the whole market in a different direction.
It's not a replacement for batteries, it's a replacement for cables. Right now, even battery-powered devices need cables once the charge in the battery is used up. I'd love wireless power, to be able to ditch the rat's nest of cables I have everywhere going to every appliance and device. Unfortunately, I would guess that wireless power technologies would generally be (a) inefficient; (b) unreliable; (c) dangerous; or (d) some combination of the above.
Well his motivation for saying it doesn't negate what he says.
No, it doesn't, but it gives a rational person reason to doubt what he says.
In my recent experience, the VAST majority of recent grads don't have knowledge or work ethic commensurate with their level of experience.
Even assuming that's true, which I don't particularly doubt, that still doesn't tell the whole story. There's still the question of how those recent graduates from India. I'd expect that generally, people with experience will do a better job than someone with no experience, regardless of country of origin.
Then there's also the question of what happens once you invest all the time, money, and effort into training and giving that worker experience. How does that investment pay off when hiring a local employee vs. outsourcing to another country? I don't really know the answer to that, but it's worth considering.
CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.
It (The DRM Movement) is an attempt to circumvent fair use by controlling your computer, such that it cannot play music which you have the right to play under fair use unless you pay for it again.... and again, and again, and again...
Sorry, but that's just not how copyright law works. Neither copyright law nor fair use really cover the *playing* of a song or the *listening* to it. It only covers the act of copying. If you buy a CD with copyrighted material, you can play it even without fair use, but without a license or fair use, you wouldn't be legally allowed to copy the CD.
However, under current copyright law (AFAIK), buying a CD does not grant you any particular right to the copyrighted works of that CD. It does not give you a lifetime right to own a copy, and to make a copy in the event that your copy gets lost. Fair use only allows you to make backups of the copy that you own.
So it seems to me that "fair use" would permit you to make a copy of your CD and keep it as a backup, but if you lose the CD and it's backup, it doesn't specifically give you the right to make a copy from the original that someone else owns.
Of course, if we were writing copyright law now, it would make more sense to handle things the way you're suggesting, and it's the sort of legal distinction that would only be made explicit if there were an actual lawsuit. And I doubt there will be a lawsuit for private copying that doesn't include further distribution, so I doubt it will come up.
Well it depends. If you're talking in a discussion about what's legal, you might want to understand the law as it is. If you want the law to change, then it helps to understand what the law is. If you want to protect yourself from legal action, then it helps to know what the law is.
I agree, incidentally, that the law is out-of-sync with reality. Copyright law was created centuries ago to deal with book publishers who were shipping physical books, and it worked ok when applied to the recording industry shipping actual records. Now that these industries aren't necessarily shipping anything, the law doesn't really work out in sensible ways. Still, I think it's good that we all try to understand the history of copyright and understand how the law currently works, so that we (as a society) can talk about changing the law.
Sorry, but it doesn't really (technically) work that way. When you buy the CD, you haven't bought any rights to anything. You've just bought the CD. According to copyright, you have no right to copy that CD. Fair use says that you can copy that CD, so long as it's copied in certain ways for for certain purposes.
Where this has gotten confusing is that when you "buy" a song online, what you've really bought it a license to copy that song under additional circumstances not normally granted under fair use. Of course, that license probably has terms in it that say the online store can revoke the license and deny you access to that song at any time for any reason.
For this reason, I think someone should really sue these companies for false advertising or deceptive practices (IANAL, so I don't know what you would technically sue them for). Companies using DRM shouldn't be allowed to advertise that they're "selling" music, and they shouldn't be permitted to use the word "buy". Instead of "buy", they should be forced to use words like "rent" or "license". And the terms of the license should be in simple language and displayed prominently, not just when you first install or run the software.
I'm ok with that. I just don't think a good education (not vocational training, but real education) is ever a waste, even on a janitor. Also, I think that one of our economic aims should be to enable everyone to make a livable wage, i.e. enough to have a modest but decent place to live and to be able to afford nutritious food for themselves and their families. We might not succeed, and even if everyone made a livable wage they still might not spend the money well, but I still think that should be the aim: dignity for all.
We'd have to re-vamp our teacher training along the lines of what's talked about in the paper to try to increase the number of people who could do it
Well I think you've also described a little paradox. In order to improve education, we need educators who are more educated. In order to have better educated educators, we need improved education. So where do we start?
What's wrong with smart people working in the service industries?
That's somewhat of a rhetorical question, but it really isn't a great thing that we have a defacto class system based on keeping some people ignorant and poor while others enjoy luxury. We assume that working in a restaurant should be a job of lesser human beings who aren't deserving of respect, and we've ensured that those jobs don't pay a livable wage.
We complain about foreigners stealing our jobs, and we complain that poor people are so filled with vice that they don't pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Meanwhile, we make sure our economy is filled with jobs that can't provide what we consider an acceptable quality of life, and we close off routes for upward mobility wherever we can.
And if smart people did work at McDonalds, their intelligence and education still wouldn't be a complete waste. They'd still probably be better citizens, run the restaurant better, and maybe get my order right every once in a while. And who knows, maybe one of them would someday revolutionize the food service industry with innovative new ideas.
If that's indicative of how math is taught nowadays, we're all hosed.
Meh, I would sooner guess that it's indicative of how retarded philosophy is in modern academia. It's just not taken seriously, and in the cases that it is, it's an exercise in being an obtuse pompous ass. From some of the philosophy professors I've met and listened to, I would guess that you may as well have been talking to a high school art teacher.
(no offense to any philosophy professors out there, but if you're a good one, then I hope you know what I'm referring to)
That is just one example of how horribly, horribly stupid the HS math curriculum is in the US.
I don't know, but to me that sounds more like evidence that the classes in elementary school and middle school are stupid. You should understand basic logic and even basic geometry before you get to high school. If a high school student isn't able to comprehend the idea of a geometry proof, then the education system has already failed him (or her).
Well if you're not asking for teachers needing to be professional published mathematicians, what was that paragraph about?
I think he's asking for teachers to know about and care about the subjects they teach. I think you do need to understand and care about a topic in order to teach it well, so he's at least on the right track there.
You may be right that expecting that much from teachers seems unrealistic. However, if expecting our teachers to teach well is an unreasonably high expectation, then it might just be a sign of how screwed our education system is.
you dont really understand the history of copyright. its the IP clause of the constitution that provides for copyright, so, we as a nation have had it for, well a while.
Yeah, you did notice the part where I said, "not to give a complete history of the copyright"? I was talking about the origin of the idea of "copyright", which started before the US Constitution. Still, that was only a few hundred years ago, and we had lots of great artistic works before that.
However, if you want to talk about the Constitutional clause, which is potentially relevant to the conversation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
So there are lots of interesting things about this clause, one being this *only* gives Congress the power to grant copyrights "for limited times" and only for the sake of promoting "progress of science and useful arts." Congress does not constitutionally have the power to grant unlimited copyrights, nor do they have the power to do it for any reason other than "promoting useful arts". Insofar as copyrights are not promoting the arts, they are unconstitutional.
Another noteworthy aspect of the clause is that it appears in the portion of the constitution where the people are granting powers to the government, and not in the portion where the people are reserving rights for themselves. That is fairly important evidence in that it shows the founders did not view the copyright as anything like an inalienable right of individuals. The copyright is merely a tool that Congress may employ for the purpose of promoting the arts, but it's also a tool that Congress can choose not to employ (in fact, is not empowered to employ) whenever it's not serving that purpose.
$400 trillion dollars more is unlikely? What makes you say that?
Anyway, I say we give that to them. Think of how much it will benefit the economy! In this time of economic downturn, since we have given up on any kind of manufacturing, we should be giving as much money as possible to the companies that are still afloat. How could that fail to work?
The US copyright system, which is being forced down the throats of more and more nations, was a CONTRACT, nothing more. In return for a LIMITED monopoly in the form of government imposed copyrights We, The People got in return a richer and more diverse Public Domain for all of us.
Somehow this is what seems to get lost in a lot of copyright discussions. Not to give a complete history of the copyright, but there was a time when we had no copyright, and people wrote books, painted, composed music, and performed it because they wanted to, and often they found ways to get paid for their expertise and talent. One common way was to do work that someone else wanted them to do on commission, whether they wanted to do it or not. Though many artists wished to have control over their own work, it was just silly to expect as much. Another artist would copy your painting, or another author might rewrite your story, and that's how culture developed.
And basically all that was fine until the the printing press arrived, and book publishers started making a fortune from printing books, neglecting to pay the authors. People recognized this as unfair and discouraging to those who might want to write a book, so they invented the idea of the copyright. The idea wasn't to ensure profitability for publishers by forcing readers to pay for the right to read a book, nor was it meant to allow authors to control the destiny of their work, but it was solely a way to help authors get a share of the huge profits publishers were already making.
Flash forward to the present, and now copyrights are being manipulated in such a way as to have almost the opposite effect that was intended. Copyrights are being used to guarantee profits for the publishers, while the artists are being denied their fair share of the profits. If anything, the Internet should allow us to go back to pre-copyright days, since distribution doesn't really require a "publisher" in the same way.
Now I'm not saying we actually should drop copyrights, but only that convention has twisted the purpose of the copyright and given bad expectations about what copyrights will accomplish. Now we think that people own, buy, and sell ideas. Further, that if you own an idea, you should retain ownership and complete control forever. That's just an unsustainable situation.
you still do not seem to have grasped the idea of how large the earth is
Yeah, I get your argument. The Earth is so big and we're so small that we can't possibly have a significant effect on the environment. Except when we can, in which case a tiny little fraction of a percent change can wreak massive damage. Good grasp of logic, there.
Look, you're being silly with all your "look at me, I'm so smart because I'm university educated and an engineer!" Like that's even impressive. You think being a university graduate and engineer is rare, or puts you in some kind of special class that requires people listen to you? Look where you're discussing this-- this place is teeming with engineers.
You haven't done research in this. You're not an expert in climatology. I bet you're not even a real scientists, but I'm supposed to listen to your vague assertions about scale, when you can't even tell me how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference?
Why don't you just admit it: you don't know, because this is not your field of expertise. All of your blustering is just you insisting that making a tiny change in something huge can't make any significant difference, in spite of the fact that real climatologists know that sometimes it can. You're saying a fraction of percent can't make a difference, but a 0.5% change in global temperature can have drastic effects, and we're all worried about a 0.005% shift in the chemical balance of our atmosphere.
I'm not a disbeliever in global warming, and if I had to guess, I'd say that we could pull a lot of energy out of the jet stream without worrying about it. On the other hand, if we're going to try to solve our energy problems by pulling it all out of our atmosphere, I'd hope that some real climatologists (not a random armchair-quarterback engineer) have tried to figure out whether that's going to cause any problems.
Yeah, where I grew up, "suburbs" were lots and lots of sold square miles of "developments" with winding roads that didn't necessarily connect, occasionally interrupted by highways and strip malls. No sidewalks at all. Sometimes there were shoulders, but usually not. Sometimes you could get places by cutting through people's back yards, but often people had fences anyway.
So like I said, I had a couple friends "in the neighborhood", by which I mean within my particular development, less than a mile away from me, where I could get to by riding my bike on only residential streets. Most people I knew and went to school with were at least 2 miles away (or so), which is still bike-riding distance, but it required riding in the middle of the street on a major road for at least part of the trip. There was not a park or public playground "in my neighborhood, so kids had to get a parent to drive them to one of those. Getting to the public pool required crossing at least a couple major roads. By the time we were teenagers, we could handle getting to a couple of the places that were within a couple miles, but even then we were "being bad"-- our parents would yell at us for riding our bikes on dangerous roads and cutting through people's yards.
The suburbs are no good for living, unless you assume that pretty much every person has their own car.
How this isn't considered "ethnically cleansing" cities is beyond me. It seems as if the only people who would be affected negatively would be minority groups.
This is a good point and a valid concern, but it depends a bit on the areas they're getting rid of. There may be large areas that are essentially empty anyway, and maybe lots of those buildings are in bad shape (and maybe should even be condemned). I'm not too familiar with the cities in question, but the scenario doesn't seem completely impossible.
Also, for anyone who is displaced, they could choose to offer some other kinds of options for relocation, which wouldn't necessarily drive people out of the city. Maybe they could offer some alternative low-incoming housing for people who can't afford to simply move?
Anyway, it generally sounds like a good idea to me. For economic, environmental, and even social/cultural/health reasons, I think that our country would be well served by aiming to increase population density in specific areas (i.e. move people in cities into more compact cities, move people in suburbs into cities, even moving farming closer to cities, and leave more of the country open to nature).
In larger population densities, you can more easily (economically) provide better services to more people. Assuming things are done right, Infrastructure becomes cheaper to build and maintain. Having people live in cities is generally much more energy efficient per-person. Ignoring air pollution issues, people who live in cities are often thinner and healthier.
There are trade-offs, yes, but I think the suburbs sort of need to die. People don't realize that they're a relatively recent invention (suburbs arguably didn't exist until about half a century ago), and I think it's a social experiment which has failed.
That was great as long as my friends lived a few blocks away in the same development, or something. But at least some of my friends live 5-10 miles away, where I'd kind of have to ride my bike on the highway. The 'burbs are often just poorly designed for any mode of transport except car.
I hadn't read anything about Opera Unite until today, but I'm wondering if it's something like how Apple's "Back to my Mac" service works. I believe "Back to my Mac" establishes some kind of tunnel via HTTPS to Apple's MobileMe servers, which then allows each computer to advertise services (AFP, VNC) through Bonjour. I can't claim to know the technical details of how that service works either.
Slashdot Mirror
Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
Yeah, but I'm not sure it's really like that. AFAICT it's almost more like if you were littering and the trash blew over into your neighbor's yard, and then you complained to the neighborhood association that your neighbor wasn't taking good enough care of their yard, because it was covered in trash.
If IBM is dominant, it seems like it's at least partially because they're the one left standing after Microsoft leveraged their monopoly to drag the whole market in a different direction.
It's not a replacement for batteries, it's a replacement for cables. Right now, even battery-powered devices need cables once the charge in the battery is used up. I'd love wireless power, to be able to ditch the rat's nest of cables I have everywhere going to every appliance and device. Unfortunately, I would guess that wireless power technologies would generally be (a) inefficient; (b) unreliable; (c) dangerous; or (d) some combination of the above.
Well his motivation for saying it doesn't negate what he says.
No, it doesn't, but it gives a rational person reason to doubt what he says.
In my recent experience, the VAST majority of recent grads don't have knowledge or work ethic commensurate with their level of experience.
Even assuming that's true, which I don't particularly doubt, that still doesn't tell the whole story. There's still the question of how those recent graduates from India. I'd expect that generally, people with experience will do a better job than someone with no experience, regardless of country of origin.
Then there's also the question of what happens once you invest all the time, money, and effort into training and giving that worker experience. How does that investment pay off when hiring a local employee vs. outsourcing to another country? I don't really know the answer to that, but it's worth considering.
CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.
I'd much rather we were $114 in debt.
It (The DRM Movement) is an attempt to circumvent fair use by controlling your computer, such that it cannot play music which you have the right to play under fair use unless you pay for it again. ... and again, and again, and again ...
Sorry, but that's just not how copyright law works. Neither copyright law nor fair use really cover the *playing* of a song or the *listening* to it. It only covers the act of copying. If you buy a CD with copyrighted material, you can play it even without fair use, but without a license or fair use, you wouldn't be legally allowed to copy the CD.
However, under current copyright law (AFAIK), buying a CD does not grant you any particular right to the copyrighted works of that CD. It does not give you a lifetime right to own a copy, and to make a copy in the event that your copy gets lost. Fair use only allows you to make backups of the copy that you own.
So it seems to me that "fair use" would permit you to make a copy of your CD and keep it as a backup, but if you lose the CD and it's backup, it doesn't specifically give you the right to make a copy from the original that someone else owns.
Of course, if we were writing copyright law now, it would make more sense to handle things the way you're suggesting, and it's the sort of legal distinction that would only be made explicit if there were an actual lawsuit. And I doubt there will be a lawsuit for private copying that doesn't include further distribution, so I doubt it will come up.
Well it depends. If you're talking in a discussion about what's legal, you might want to understand the law as it is. If you want the law to change, then it helps to understand what the law is. If you want to protect yourself from legal action, then it helps to know what the law is.
I agree, incidentally, that the law is out-of-sync with reality. Copyright law was created centuries ago to deal with book publishers who were shipping physical books, and it worked ok when applied to the recording industry shipping actual records. Now that these industries aren't necessarily shipping anything, the law doesn't really work out in sensible ways. Still, I think it's good that we all try to understand the history of copyright and understand how the law currently works, so that we (as a society) can talk about changing the law.
Sorry, but it doesn't really (technically) work that way. When you buy the CD, you haven't bought any rights to anything. You've just bought the CD. According to copyright, you have no right to copy that CD. Fair use says that you can copy that CD, so long as it's copied in certain ways for for certain purposes.
Where this has gotten confusing is that when you "buy" a song online, what you've really bought it a license to copy that song under additional circumstances not normally granted under fair use. Of course, that license probably has terms in it that say the online store can revoke the license and deny you access to that song at any time for any reason.
For this reason, I think someone should really sue these companies for false advertising or deceptive practices (IANAL, so I don't know what you would technically sue them for). Companies using DRM shouldn't be allowed to advertise that they're "selling" music, and they shouldn't be permitted to use the word "buy". Instead of "buy", they should be forced to use words like "rent" or "license". And the terms of the license should be in simple language and displayed prominently, not just when you first install or run the software.
I'm ok with that. I just don't think a good education (not vocational training, but real education) is ever a waste, even on a janitor. Also, I think that one of our economic aims should be to enable everyone to make a livable wage, i.e. enough to have a modest but decent place to live and to be able to afford nutritious food for themselves and their families. We might not succeed, and even if everyone made a livable wage they still might not spend the money well, but I still think that should be the aim: dignity for all.
We'd have to re-vamp our teacher training along the lines of what's talked about in the paper to try to increase the number of people who could do it
Well I think you've also described a little paradox. In order to improve education, we need educators who are more educated. In order to have better educated educators, we need improved education. So where do we start?
I dont' recall sculptors ever being pissed at concrete workers or ironworkers.
Yeah, but it's also worth recognizing that your average concrete worker might not be the best person to teach a sculpture class.
What's wrong with smart people working in the service industries?
That's somewhat of a rhetorical question, but it really isn't a great thing that we have a defacto class system based on keeping some people ignorant and poor while others enjoy luxury. We assume that working in a restaurant should be a job of lesser human beings who aren't deserving of respect, and we've ensured that those jobs don't pay a livable wage.
We complain about foreigners stealing our jobs, and we complain that poor people are so filled with vice that they don't pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Meanwhile, we make sure our economy is filled with jobs that can't provide what we consider an acceptable quality of life, and we close off routes for upward mobility wherever we can.
And if smart people did work at McDonalds, their intelligence and education still wouldn't be a complete waste. They'd still probably be better citizens, run the restaurant better, and maybe get my order right every once in a while. And who knows, maybe one of them would someday revolutionize the food service industry with innovative new ideas.
If that's indicative of how math is taught nowadays, we're all hosed.
Meh, I would sooner guess that it's indicative of how retarded philosophy is in modern academia. It's just not taken seriously, and in the cases that it is, it's an exercise in being an obtuse pompous ass. From some of the philosophy professors I've met and listened to, I would guess that you may as well have been talking to a high school art teacher.
(no offense to any philosophy professors out there, but if you're a good one, then I hope you know what I'm referring to)
That is just one example of how horribly, horribly stupid the HS math curriculum is in the US.
I don't know, but to me that sounds more like evidence that the classes in elementary school and middle school are stupid. You should understand basic logic and even basic geometry before you get to high school. If a high school student isn't able to comprehend the idea of a geometry proof, then the education system has already failed him (or her).
Well if you're not asking for teachers needing to be professional published mathematicians, what was that paragraph about?
I think he's asking for teachers to know about and care about the subjects they teach. I think you do need to understand and care about a topic in order to teach it well, so he's at least on the right track there.
You may be right that expecting that much from teachers seems unrealistic. However, if expecting our teachers to teach well is an unreasonably high expectation, then it might just be a sign of how screwed our education system is.
you dont really understand the history of copyright. its the IP clause of the constitution that provides for copyright, so, we as a nation have had it for, well a while.
Yeah, you did notice the part where I said, "not to give a complete history of the copyright"? I was talking about the origin of the idea of "copyright", which started before the US Constitution. Still, that was only a few hundred years ago, and we had lots of great artistic works before that.
However, if you want to talk about the Constitutional clause, which is potentially relevant to the conversation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
So there are lots of interesting things about this clause, one being this *only* gives Congress the power to grant copyrights "for limited times" and only for the sake of promoting "progress of science and useful arts." Congress does not constitutionally have the power to grant unlimited copyrights, nor do they have the power to do it for any reason other than "promoting useful arts". Insofar as copyrights are not promoting the arts, they are unconstitutional.
Another noteworthy aspect of the clause is that it appears in the portion of the constitution where the people are granting powers to the government, and not in the portion where the people are reserving rights for themselves. That is fairly important evidence in that it shows the founders did not view the copyright as anything like an inalienable right of individuals. The copyright is merely a tool that Congress may employ for the purpose of promoting the arts, but it's also a tool that Congress can choose not to employ (in fact, is not empowered to employ) whenever it's not serving that purpose.
But it's not now, yet it still has the majority of the market because of bundling and legacy apps.
$400 trillion dollars more is unlikely? What makes you say that?
Anyway, I say we give that to them. Think of how much it will benefit the economy! In this time of economic downturn, since we have given up on any kind of manufacturing, we should be giving as much money as possible to the companies that are still afloat. How could that fail to work?
...what?
The US copyright system, which is being forced down the throats of more and more nations, was a CONTRACT, nothing more. In return for a LIMITED monopoly in the form of government imposed copyrights We, The People got in return a richer and more diverse Public Domain for all of us.
Somehow this is what seems to get lost in a lot of copyright discussions. Not to give a complete history of the copyright, but there was a time when we had no copyright, and people wrote books, painted, composed music, and performed it because they wanted to, and often they found ways to get paid for their expertise and talent. One common way was to do work that someone else wanted them to do on commission, whether they wanted to do it or not. Though many artists wished to have control over their own work, it was just silly to expect as much. Another artist would copy your painting, or another author might rewrite your story, and that's how culture developed.
And basically all that was fine until the the printing press arrived, and book publishers started making a fortune from printing books, neglecting to pay the authors. People recognized this as unfair and discouraging to those who might want to write a book, so they invented the idea of the copyright. The idea wasn't to ensure profitability for publishers by forcing readers to pay for the right to read a book, nor was it meant to allow authors to control the destiny of their work, but it was solely a way to help authors get a share of the huge profits publishers were already making.
Flash forward to the present, and now copyrights are being manipulated in such a way as to have almost the opposite effect that was intended. Copyrights are being used to guarantee profits for the publishers, while the artists are being denied their fair share of the profits. If anything, the Internet should allow us to go back to pre-copyright days, since distribution doesn't really require a "publisher" in the same way.
Now I'm not saying we actually should drop copyrights, but only that convention has twisted the purpose of the copyright and given bad expectations about what copyrights will accomplish. Now we think that people own, buy, and sell ideas. Further, that if you own an idea, you should retain ownership and complete control forever. That's just an unsustainable situation.
you still do not seem to have grasped the idea of how large the earth is
Yeah, I get your argument. The Earth is so big and we're so small that we can't possibly have a significant effect on the environment. Except when we can, in which case a tiny little fraction of a percent change can wreak massive damage. Good grasp of logic, there.
Look, you're being silly with all your "look at me, I'm so smart because I'm university educated and an engineer!" Like that's even impressive. You think being a university graduate and engineer is rare, or puts you in some kind of special class that requires people listen to you? Look where you're discussing this-- this place is teeming with engineers.
You haven't done research in this. You're not an expert in climatology. I bet you're not even a real scientists, but I'm supposed to listen to your vague assertions about scale, when you can't even tell me how much wind energy can we pull out of the jet stream before it makes a difference?
Why don't you just admit it: you don't know, because this is not your field of expertise. All of your blustering is just you insisting that making a tiny change in something huge can't make any significant difference, in spite of the fact that real climatologists know that sometimes it can. You're saying a fraction of percent can't make a difference, but a 0.5% change in global temperature can have drastic effects, and we're all worried about a 0.005% shift in the chemical balance of our atmosphere.
I'm not a disbeliever in global warming, and if I had to guess, I'd say that we could pull a lot of energy out of the jet stream without worrying about it. On the other hand, if we're going to try to solve our energy problems by pulling it all out of our atmosphere, I'd hope that some real climatologists (not a random armchair-quarterback engineer) have tried to figure out whether that's going to cause any problems.
Yeah, where I grew up, "suburbs" were lots and lots of sold square miles of "developments" with winding roads that didn't necessarily connect, occasionally interrupted by highways and strip malls. No sidewalks at all. Sometimes there were shoulders, but usually not. Sometimes you could get places by cutting through people's back yards, but often people had fences anyway.
So like I said, I had a couple friends "in the neighborhood", by which I mean within my particular development, less than a mile away from me, where I could get to by riding my bike on only residential streets. Most people I knew and went to school with were at least 2 miles away (or so), which is still bike-riding distance, but it required riding in the middle of the street on a major road for at least part of the trip. There was not a park or public playground "in my neighborhood, so kids had to get a parent to drive them to one of those. Getting to the public pool required crossing at least a couple major roads. By the time we were teenagers, we could handle getting to a couple of the places that were within a couple miles, but even then we were "being bad"-- our parents would yell at us for riding our bikes on dangerous roads and cutting through people's yards.
The suburbs are no good for living, unless you assume that pretty much every person has their own car.
Yeah, it's 45.7 per 100,000 people (i.e. 0.0457%).
How this isn't considered "ethnically cleansing" cities is beyond me. It seems as if the only people who would be affected negatively would be minority groups.
This is a good point and a valid concern, but it depends a bit on the areas they're getting rid of. There may be large areas that are essentially empty anyway, and maybe lots of those buildings are in bad shape (and maybe should even be condemned). I'm not too familiar with the cities in question, but the scenario doesn't seem completely impossible.
Also, for anyone who is displaced, they could choose to offer some other kinds of options for relocation, which wouldn't necessarily drive people out of the city. Maybe they could offer some alternative low-incoming housing for people who can't afford to simply move?
Anyway, it generally sounds like a good idea to me. For economic, environmental, and even social/cultural/health reasons, I think that our country would be well served by aiming to increase population density in specific areas (i.e. move people in cities into more compact cities, move people in suburbs into cities, even moving farming closer to cities, and leave more of the country open to nature).
In larger population densities, you can more easily (economically) provide better services to more people. Assuming things are done right, Infrastructure becomes cheaper to build and maintain. Having people live in cities is generally much more energy efficient per-person. Ignoring air pollution issues, people who live in cities are often thinner and healthier.
There are trade-offs, yes, but I think the suburbs sort of need to die. People don't realize that they're a relatively recent invention (suburbs arguably didn't exist until about half a century ago), and I think it's a social experiment which has failed.
That was great as long as my friends lived a few blocks away in the same development, or something. But at least some of my friends live 5-10 miles away, where I'd kind of have to ride my bike on the highway. The 'burbs are often just poorly designed for any mode of transport except car.
I hadn't read anything about Opera Unite until today, but I'm wondering if it's something like how Apple's "Back to my Mac" service works. I believe "Back to my Mac" establishes some kind of tunnel via HTTPS to Apple's MobileMe servers, which then allows each computer to advertise services (AFP, VNC) through Bonjour. I can't claim to know the technical details of how that service works either.