Who ever said that when you're speaking English you have to apply the rules of pluralization for whatever language you're borrowing a loan word from? We do it sometimes, but not always. We also mix latin prefixes with greek root words sometimes (which gets George Orwell's panties in a twist, but I'm pretty sure I don't care). If the plural is commonly accepted as "sudoku" (is there precedent on this yet?) then we do it the Japanese way in this case. But there's no reason that just because the word comes from Japanese that we have to use Japanese rules in English speech. If Sudoku turns out to be more than a fad and we come to use the word a lot I'd guess it would become more integrated with English and follow more typical English rules (I don't know if there's a commonly established way to do it now). Just my own guess.
How accurately can you determine the age of a person that way? Especially around that age, when the body is changing rapidly and at different times for different people. Could you really develop a medical age test where the chance of false-positives is virtually nil but would actually catch anyone?
Actually that makes me think a bit. The regex is hard to understand, a manually-written parser would be much worse. I'm sure this will sound like blasphemy to some, but maybe what we need is a more verbose regex syntax.
I like current regex syntax for fairly simple expressions. But in complicated regexes it's hard to see the structure of the expression. So, at least something that ignored returns and whitespace and thus allowed the programmer to structure the expression hierarchically would be nice. And then verbose symbolic names for some of the constructs. They'd need to be clearly differentiated from literals -- maybe even require literals to be quoted. That would be awful for expressions that use lot of literals, but we could just use existing syntax for those.
Believe me: if I need to use a toilet I can withstand an evil eye.
FWIW, I've used Starbucks occasionally for restrooms, and once in St. Paul, MN, some friendly Starbucks employees let me look up a taxi dispatcher in their phone book. I don't drink coffee, but I'm very susceptible to impulse purchases of baked goods and drinks that aren't coffee. I could count the number of times I've entered a Starbucks with the intention of buying something on one hand, but I wind up incidentally buying muffins and stuff every now and then.
The reasons may be purely economic if you take a broad enough view of economics to render your final solution impossible. Olympic athletes have done just as much doping as professional ones. They don't get paid for their olympic performances, but they benefit economically in other ways (endorsements, and special career opportunities that come with celebrity status). Besides, sponsors and coaches may have money on the line in more direct ways, and could pressure amateurs. To eliminate all this, you'd have to *fully* eliminate the money incentive, which means that nobody is even interested.
But I don't think the reasons are purely economic anyway. People cheat all the time for little reason but just to win. Have you ever just dominated a little kid at checkers? The last thing they do before throwing the board at you is to try to cheat. People like winning. People that like winning even more than most are much more likely to train hard in sports for their whole lives. And people that have trained very hard are likely to become more determined to win, in order to validate that their effort was worth something. These people want to win a lot and they're surrounded by people that also want them to win.
I don't disagree with most of what you just said. I disagree with a couple things.
First, organic production doesn't mean "the old ways". There could be many advances, even high-tech ones, that increase sustainable carrying capacity and not just short-term capacity. And we'll need 'em, because traditional agriculture wasn't cutting it for much lower levels of population than we have now. That's why "Green Revolution" projects (which have nothing to do with environmentalism, but simply refer to the chlorophyll that give plants their dominant color) promoting (short-term) food security in developing nations by way of industrial agriculture were instituted. Those projects largely achieved their goals and smoothed out year-to-year crop yields in countries that had previously had unpredictable food supplies, paving the way for population growth.
Second, there's no issue of making current production sustainable in the long term, because current production is only good for the current population.
I pretty much agree that we have to either stop population growth. And that the consequence of that is that we have to stop exponential growth of all kinds; economic growth is foremost among these. One of the big problems is that the pressures of being poor in a competitive global capitalist economy drive high birth rates and rapid population growth. Or alternately we could, as my dad says, "Get off this rock!" Colonize space. Which is hard. Maybe even *too* hard. Although I actually am not sold on space colonization being the answer exactly; the fundamental issue of it is building artificial environments that can sustain human life. We already do that to a an increasing degree every generation on Earth, but we still rely on lots of natural processes. Anyway, we can't travel to any planets yet that could supply us with any of our physical needs other than rocks and land area. In getting off Earth we abandon the things it provides us (the things we have evolved to depend on, not just in our bodies but in our industry, too) and get rocks and land area, two things we still have lots of on Earth. We won't be ready to colonize space, in my opinion, until we're effectively immortal (with or without our bodies) and able to synthesize our immediate needs given nothing but energy, time, and basic elements. And we're working on those problems, sure. Exponential population growth just means we're working on them under the gun.
The concern is that runoff from agricultural chemicals, depletion of topsoil, and maybe some other environmental problems I can't recall right now, which are the results of our efficient (by some measures) food production techniques, will eventually cause our crop yields to decrease. Before you discount these concerns, consider we haven't been doing chemically-intensive, industrialized agriculture for very long (a few generations in most parts of the world), and we're already seeing some of these problems.
The idea behind sustainable agriculture is that we limit ourselves to techniques we're pretty sure we can keep up in the long term. The environment isn't just some abstract thing, it provides us with the raw materials we need to live and indeed to grow our food. If we feed ourselves now in ways that compromise our future ability to feed ourselves, we'll grow our population beyond what the earth can sustainably carry, and face an extremely painful decline or even crash. Maybe that ship has already sailed, and we'll have to innovate to create farming techniques that increase our very-long-term yields instead of just short-term ones. But the point is that environmental sustainability and human sustainability can't be separated. Not until the technological singularity (or other pie-in-the-sky event/technology that cuts human dependence on biological processes to almost nothing).
Yes, people everywhere have to find their own voice. That's vital, that they speak for their own wishes and not someone else's. But here's what they are up against: global businesses that overwhelm, through size, influence, and even actual physical force at times, any local institutions through which the people might channel their voice if it happens to run counter to their goals. If "other countries shouldn't intervene in their personal affairs," then those countries shouldn't intervene in their economic affairs either. They should bring up their economies with businesses that keep their profits at home instead of sending the lion's share back to western stockholders.
Is that a viable way for countries to modernize? Shit if I know. I'm not really an expert on economics of this sort or any other really. But I have enough of a mind to see through the dogma. Neoliberalism and globalism are very clearly not policies of non-intervention, and to conscript people into that world with no preparation and then expect them to effectively grasp the situation and fend for themselves is pretty naive.
Here is a fun anecdote I remember from a while back. In a major South American city a US company won a government contract to supply clean water to the city. People in poor areas of the city couldn't afford the water bills. So the people collected rainwater. This was deemed illegal by the government, as it competed with the US company's contract. Absurd? Sure. If I recall correctly, ultimately this caused such an outrage that the contractor was kicked out. The point is, for quite a while they overwhelmed the voice of the people and controlled the government. This is by no means the only time a contractor has bought laws from an economically dependent government. It's one of the few times the people have been able to fight back against them.
Who gives a fuck about what a baseball league calls itself?
Claiming that any new densely built-up collection of buildings will have no adverse environmental impact, no matter how ambitious the plans, is almost surely specious. There are the problems of exporting pollution, the same problems that make claims of zero-emission transport (whether by electric cars, public transit, or even bikes -- ask any cyclist, food ain't free) laughable. And there's also the problem that you can't build a dense collection of residences and businesses (necessary for walkable cities and efficient indoor climate control, which are key to lowering energy usage) and not essentially wipe out wildlife within that city. When I read about plans to incorporate wildlife into cities I almost always cringe. Real wild ecosystems require large, basically unenclosed areas for predators to roam -- natural concentrations of predators and many other animals simply won't coexist with built-up cities, suburbs, or even farms. The best way for humans to protect wild ecosystems (and not just a few specific species) is not to build enclosed wildlife preserves in cities, but to contain cities and leave space around them instead of sprawling.
Anyway, whatever I think the flaws are (and I certainly don't have all the answers -- the people planning this definitely have more knowledge of the local situation than I do and probably have real professionals in the pertinent fields on hand and not just interested laymen like myself), kudos to these folk for actually doing something. From the bit that I've looked at so far I think it could be promising.
It probably should. Corporations from the west that come in and effectively control governments weakened by neoliberal reforms (or even get their way directly with private militarized security forces) aren't "people in those countries", though.
We can't extend labor protections to the whole world overnight. But I think if people had an effective voice and governments with their interests in mind they wouldn't have to accept the type of practices we read about, where workers falling into debt to their employers are forced to bring their kids into the work force.
It's not poo-pooing. If a cell takes more energy to create than the total expected output in life, then the first batch of cells can't supply the energy to create the second batch. Some analyses claim this true of small residential wind turbines, for example; it's also historically been true of solar cells. If that was the case with these cells they'd be basically useless. They'd be an energy sink, not an energy source.
For example. If the company wasn't selling anything, but just building panels for itself, say it takes 12J to build a panel that yields 10J over its entire life. For the first batch they burn 12J worth of coal for energy. For the second they use the first batch's energy plus 2J more worth of coal. And every subsequent batch requires 2J-worth more of coal to be burned. And this is a company that's producing nothing. If they're selling each time also to a consumer that will get 10J out of it, they'll need to build two panels per batch, requiring 24J of energy. Since they're only getting 10J from the ones they keep around, they'll need to burn 14J-worth of coal per year -- more than the 10J the consumer would have used if not for the cell. Better would be the company just burning coal to make its cells and then selling them -- only 12J of yearly coal burned. Better still would be the consumer just burning 10J-worth of coal.
That's not moving forward. If the company can sell the product for enough money to cover its expenses then it can survive doing this, even though this means the consumer is probably making a cost-ineffective decision when buying it (unless energy is a lot cheaper for the company than for the consumer, which, in different areas, is certainly possible). If the government subsidizes a company operating as an energy sink it may become a cost-effective option for consumers, and consumers with good financial sense and lots of space will buy tons of them, making it a gigantic energy sink, with much more coal burned than before.
Given that these cells are cheap, maybe they've found a way to make them an energy source instead of a sink. In that case, all that stuff you said works.
It isn't just people in their private lives; it's also corporations. You know, the ones that own the government? They like the freedom of the Internet and the ability to communicate securely and freely, because it helps them make money. They've already moved their taxable income to other countries. They can take their servers elsewhere easily if they want. It probably wouldn't take them too long to move the jobs, too, if they had to.
It's not just like they could let big business have exceptions or poke through with VPNs. Countless small businesses fuel the high-tech economy, too, and start up from practically nothing. Think they don't have any clout? What about the investors and banks that profit off of their growth? Some of them are pretty big, and would certainly have mouthpieces in Congress.
A guess: it's not changing the pay that requires a change in the code. It's keeping track of how much pay each employee is then owed at the end of the political fight.
You see, they're not just going to unexpectedly cut their employees' pay. They're just going to take a short, interest-free loan from them without their consent. How merciful of them.
It's no wonder governments so often get the worst pick of employees. Why would people with choices stay when they could at any time used as political pawns like this?
The systems that could disable your car on the road already exist. Sheesh. I'm pretty sure even the most basic cars today have engine-control computers and have for a while. If people want to drive over a certain speed they have to "chip" their cars; the computer also can control some other engine operation parameters too, though I don't know which. Then there was that Slashdot story from a while back about the guy that ran experiments on fuel economy based on computer outputs from his Jeep's engine computer.
The stuff MS is building doesn't need to touch the important stuff. When a car's radio or heater breaks it doesn't lock your steering, and MS's new devices won't either. So even the stability isn't all that important. Like GP, I don't really want a nav system operated by Microsoft in my car, and because they are known to sell out their customers. For me it's not so much the government or even DRM enforcers, but advertisers. My first sense of personal disillusionment with Microsoft was ads in WMP when I tried to play CDs. I thought that had no place in an operating system or a CD-playing app. I don't want a screen whose software I don't control in my car because it seems inevitable to me that it will become an ad screen.
Well, I don't really want a screen in my car period. Too much opportunity for distraction (that said, Microsoft's work on voice-activation, and having a vast library of MP3s loaded and available through voice command, is much safer than fumbling through a pile of CDs on the freeway). I don't really drive much anyway, so my middle-aged screenless car may last me a long time.
Unfortunately Scotchgard has been "reformulated" to make is "safer" PFOS never breaks down, good for electronics, bad for people and the environment. the new Formula (Perfluorobutane sulfonate PFBS ) is designed to break down after a month, so you'd have to keep reapplying.
s/Unfortunately/Fortunately
Really, now. Long view. Which would you rather be stuck with: scrubbing your skillet, or accumulation of inert toxins in animal tissue?
Some people having crappy speakers doesn't mean that everyone's sound should be fucked up. What you want to do to the audio stream on your laptop makes sense if that's what makes it sound best; applying that on Google's side is ludicrous.
And I've never understood why so many businesses that want and need competent programmers make them dress like tools and fit into a corporate culture that that's actually harmful to good engineering practice. But they do.
Fortunately I haven't worked for such companies; I know a few people that have, in various industries. I don't know why they take the jobs, just to be unhappy there, but they do.
Apple might not change their minds because of one incident; rarely has any single protest changed anything. A disruptive protest like this one, if carried on long enough, could directly make a difference; or a series of different protests related in theme. The FSF would need to have a lot of popular support to carry it out, and I don't think they have that at this point. So it's pretty unlikely they could get direct results from a big company with an army of brainwashed customers like Apple.
The indirect effects of protest, however, can be significant. Maybe the monolithic Apple corporate structure won't listen, but if they got a press mention that could get a lot of people individually to investigate the problems inherent in DRM-laden media. Most people don't understand DRM, and I think if they did they would be more likely to avoid it. Which would be to their benefit, and to everyone's, as they'd add anti-DRM pressure to the market.
I don't remember the tactical details of the protest; I think the fundamental nature of DRM is the big issue here, and going beyond that would sacrifice clarity, but that's just my opinion. More fundamentally than tactics or specific issues, however, are facts about how messages are heard and understood. Corporations can easily disseminate their messages because they have a lot of money. That doesn't make their messages "right", that doesn't make them beneficial to those that hear them. People in opposition, with much less money, may have to resort to disruption to make their voices heard.
The people are sort of stuck here. Before most businesses we dealt with every day were large corporations, there could be a fairly equal exchange of ideas between customers and proprietors. A concerned community could make itself heard to businesses that affected it. Apple is a large corporation. They'll spend a lot of advertising money to talk at you in a way that sort of feels personal ("Hey, here's a company that understands me!"), but is limited in substantial message to, "Buy our shit, K?" They even go beyond what most companies do and hire a bunch of people to sit in stores and do face-to-face tech support, which means they're listening to customers, though in a somewhat limited way.
The only people that have DIRECT CONTROL over Apple's business practices are high up in the company. They talk a lot, but it's hard to make them listen. If you can tie up all the "genius bars" for a day, that might actually make someone notice. It would be pretty hard to do, but if you did, it might at least be acknowledged by someone with DIRECT CONTROL. It might also get noticed by the mainstream media, who would make some ham-fisted attempt to understand what the fuck it is that the FSF was talking about, and might even report on it, leading reasonable folk to wonder, "What was that clueless reporter blathering about," and look up the real info themselves.
Furthermore, as far as the analogy goes, every waiter at those white-only restaurants didn't have DIRECT CONTROL over anything. They probably were upset they weren't going to make any tip money. And I bet plenty of the would-be customers DID NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EQUALITY, or maybe were even hostile to the cause. The magnitude of what the FSF is concerned with is not as great as the magnitude of what the civil-rights movement did. But some problems really do deserve more press. The recent Microsoft and Yahoo DRM expiration issues point out what a fundamental problem DRM is; a lot of people that use DRM-laden media every day don't understand that their very use of those files is at the whim of a corporation, and that they have no good reason to believe that those files will remain playable perpetually, or that they'll be able to find convenient portable devices to play those files perpetually.
As far as I'm concerned if the FSF can book a significant amount of "genius bar" time, more power to 'em. If they can make a big corporation listen to them even for a little while, that's a step. Almost any message coming from a position of principle, reason, and understanding (an anti-DRM stance is certainly one) is more important than a day's worth of "productivity" for Apple and its customers.
In the case of these machines there aren't really similar Apple machines to compare it to. There's a big hole in Apple's lineup. The Apple-obsessed might call it, "A Mini, but big enough that it doesn't have to use laptop components, and maybe is upgradeable"; or, "An iMac but, again, upgradeable, and that isn't tied to a monitor for no good reason"; or, "A highly down-spec'd Mac Pro geared towards home use". These are all stupid descriptions. It's called a cheap standard tower, and Apple doesn't make one. I think that's one reason for the popularity of "Hackintoshes", and the reason companies think they can make money going into this market. I think they'd have a much harder time competing directly against Apple.
Ha. What a silly thing for the government to say. I know someone (living in DC) that's done a significant amount of contracting work for which he needed a security clearance from the Federal Government. He said that after all the procedures he went through to get the clearance he's become accustomed and desensitized to having machine guns pointed at his face. From the stories I've heard from him, if you're going to a location where you could potentially see something sensitive, that's the way you're treated until you're identified. My experience working at Argonne National Lab (near Chicago) was somewhat similar though not as strict (there were armed guards but they didn't point machine guns at my face while they searched my car; there's a 9.5-mile running trail around the perimeter and all the potential back entrances had at least significant barbed-wire fences, but probably also alarm systems). I don't think the Google van would get very far going accidentally down the wrong roads.
As for stuff that can be seen from the public streets... I'm not sure what exactly terrorists could hope to find that they couldn't find in other books of photos, with better quality.
Sometimes the votes and wishes of people really don't mean squat. It's not that they don't mean squat to "them" (the mayor and the courts), it's that they don't mean squat, period. When they don't mean squat, it's probably best that someone tell the people, just generally because information flow is good. To go along with your "slave license" idea (hey, that new coat looks great on Godwin's Law!) the people of California could vote on a ballot initiative instating slavery, and it would get shot down just as surely as the mayor's slave licenses.
Actually, more than in slavery itself, you could find plenty of parallels to this sort of thing in the history of 20th century American racial discrimination and the civil rights movement. A lot of leaders and courts made decisions that had nothing to do with majority wishes. Now we basically all agree that segregation was wrong; the leaders led.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but I disagree with your last paragraph. It all gets thrown away eventually, by you or whoever is responsible after you die (the odds that any given possession, even a large one, is going to become a collectors' item is small enough to be insignificant). Whether it goes to a tech recycling company that presumably can reclaim some materials, whether it goes to a landfill where the materials are wasted and any toxic chemicals are presumably competently contained, or whether it's dumped in the woods where the nasty stuff (in the case of old circuit boards, lead is the thing that comes to mind for me, though I'm no expert) just seeps into the soil, if it one day was built it will be thrown away some other day.
So the questions with regards to how "green" a computer is are how it was made and of what, how cleanly and efficiently it operates, and how it's disposed of. If energy savings of this computer over an existing computer are greater than the manufacture and disposal costs of *this* computer (as the old computer has already been built and will be thrown away, and although this is also true of the new one, buying a new computer creates demand that will cause more of that type to be built), buying this computer as opposed to keeping an old one (or buying used) is "greener".
This equation is complicated because the costs are largely in toxic pollution and dumping and the savings are in energy; there's no obvious conversion rate (energy generation, depending on source, probably has pollution both on-site and at mining/drilling sites, probably affects ecosystems in ways other than just pollution/toxicity, and probably draws down a non-renewable resource), and in fact it varies situationally (a scenario with abundant clean energy but already-dangerous levels of environmental toxicity would favor different choices than a scenario with less pollution and no clean energy source). It's further complicated in this case by this computer's dependence on external services. Presumably it will cause additional energy use at some data center compared to some other computer, and then you have to factor in the energy situation in that data center's location and the costs of additional Internet traffic.
If you want to never throw anything away, never buy anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Who ever said that when you're speaking English you have to apply the rules of pluralization for whatever language you're borrowing a loan word from? We do it sometimes, but not always. We also mix latin prefixes with greek root words sometimes (which gets George Orwell's panties in a twist, but I'm pretty sure I don't care). If the plural is commonly accepted as "sudoku" (is there precedent on this yet?) then we do it the Japanese way in this case. But there's no reason that just because the word comes from Japanese that we have to use Japanese rules in English speech. If Sudoku turns out to be more than a fad and we come to use the word a lot I'd guess it would become more integrated with English and follow more typical English rules (I don't know if there's a commonly established way to do it now). Just my own guess.
How accurately can you determine the age of a person that way? Especially around that age, when the body is changing rapidly and at different times for different people. Could you really develop a medical age test where the chance of false-positives is virtually nil but would actually catch anyone?
Actually that makes me think a bit. The regex is hard to understand, a manually-written parser would be much worse. I'm sure this will sound like blasphemy to some, but maybe what we need is a more verbose regex syntax.
I like current regex syntax for fairly simple expressions. But in complicated regexes it's hard to see the structure of the expression. So, at least something that ignored returns and whitespace and thus allowed the programmer to structure the expression hierarchically would be nice. And then verbose symbolic names for some of the constructs. They'd need to be clearly differentiated from literals -- maybe even require literals to be quoted. That would be awful for expressions that use lot of literals, but we could just use existing syntax for those.
Believe me: if I need to use a toilet I can withstand an evil eye.
FWIW, I've used Starbucks occasionally for restrooms, and once in St. Paul, MN, some friendly Starbucks employees let me look up a taxi dispatcher in their phone book. I don't drink coffee, but I'm very susceptible to impulse purchases of baked goods and drinks that aren't coffee. I could count the number of times I've entered a Starbucks with the intention of buying something on one hand, but I wind up incidentally buying muffins and stuff every now and then.
Ha, you're lucky I showed the restraint to use checkers as my example and not kickboxing!
The reasons may be purely economic if you take a broad enough view of economics to render your final solution impossible. Olympic athletes have done just as much doping as professional ones. They don't get paid for their olympic performances, but they benefit economically in other ways (endorsements, and special career opportunities that come with celebrity status). Besides, sponsors and coaches may have money on the line in more direct ways, and could pressure amateurs. To eliminate all this, you'd have to *fully* eliminate the money incentive, which means that nobody is even interested.
But I don't think the reasons are purely economic anyway. People cheat all the time for little reason but just to win. Have you ever just dominated a little kid at checkers? The last thing they do before throwing the board at you is to try to cheat. People like winning. People that like winning even more than most are much more likely to train hard in sports for their whole lives. And people that have trained very hard are likely to become more determined to win, in order to validate that their effort was worth something. These people want to win a lot and they're surrounded by people that also want them to win.
I don't disagree with most of what you just said. I disagree with a couple things.
First, organic production doesn't mean "the old ways". There could be many advances, even high-tech ones, that increase sustainable carrying capacity and not just short-term capacity. And we'll need 'em, because traditional agriculture wasn't cutting it for much lower levels of population than we have now. That's why "Green Revolution" projects (which have nothing to do with environmentalism, but simply refer to the chlorophyll that give plants their dominant color) promoting (short-term) food security in developing nations by way of industrial agriculture were instituted. Those projects largely achieved their goals and smoothed out year-to-year crop yields in countries that had previously had unpredictable food supplies, paving the way for population growth.
Second, there's no issue of making current production sustainable in the long term, because current production is only good for the current population.
I pretty much agree that we have to either stop population growth. And that the consequence of that is that we have to stop exponential growth of all kinds; economic growth is foremost among these. One of the big problems is that the pressures of being poor in a competitive global capitalist economy drive high birth rates and rapid population growth. Or alternately we could, as my dad says, "Get off this rock!" Colonize space. Which is hard. Maybe even *too* hard. Although I actually am not sold on space colonization being the answer exactly; the fundamental issue of it is building artificial environments that can sustain human life. We already do that to a an increasing degree every generation on Earth, but we still rely on lots of natural processes. Anyway, we can't travel to any planets yet that could supply us with any of our physical needs other than rocks and land area. In getting off Earth we abandon the things it provides us (the things we have evolved to depend on, not just in our bodies but in our industry, too) and get rocks and land area, two things we still have lots of on Earth. We won't be ready to colonize space, in my opinion, until we're effectively immortal (with or without our bodies) and able to synthesize our immediate needs given nothing but energy, time, and basic elements. And we're working on those problems, sure. Exponential population growth just means we're working on them under the gun.
So... how about a no-children pact?
The concern is that runoff from agricultural chemicals, depletion of topsoil, and maybe some other environmental problems I can't recall right now, which are the results of our efficient (by some measures) food production techniques, will eventually cause our crop yields to decrease. Before you discount these concerns, consider we haven't been doing chemically-intensive, industrialized agriculture for very long (a few generations in most parts of the world), and we're already seeing some of these problems.
The idea behind sustainable agriculture is that we limit ourselves to techniques we're pretty sure we can keep up in the long term. The environment isn't just some abstract thing, it provides us with the raw materials we need to live and indeed to grow our food. If we feed ourselves now in ways that compromise our future ability to feed ourselves, we'll grow our population beyond what the earth can sustainably carry, and face an extremely painful decline or even crash. Maybe that ship has already sailed, and we'll have to innovate to create farming techniques that increase our very-long-term yields instead of just short-term ones. But the point is that environmental sustainability and human sustainability can't be separated. Not until the technological singularity (or other pie-in-the-sky event/technology that cuts human dependence on biological processes to almost nothing).
Yes, people everywhere have to find their own voice. That's vital, that they speak for their own wishes and not someone else's. But here's what they are up against: global businesses that overwhelm, through size, influence, and even actual physical force at times, any local institutions through which the people might channel their voice if it happens to run counter to their goals. If "other countries shouldn't intervene in their personal affairs," then those countries shouldn't intervene in their economic affairs either. They should bring up their economies with businesses that keep their profits at home instead of sending the lion's share back to western stockholders.
Is that a viable way for countries to modernize? Shit if I know. I'm not really an expert on economics of this sort or any other really. But I have enough of a mind to see through the dogma. Neoliberalism and globalism are very clearly not policies of non-intervention, and to conscript people into that world with no preparation and then expect them to effectively grasp the situation and fend for themselves is pretty naive.
Here is a fun anecdote I remember from a while back. In a major South American city a US company won a government contract to supply clean water to the city. People in poor areas of the city couldn't afford the water bills. So the people collected rainwater. This was deemed illegal by the government, as it competed with the US company's contract. Absurd? Sure. If I recall correctly, ultimately this caused such an outrage that the contractor was kicked out. The point is, for quite a while they overwhelmed the voice of the people and controlled the government. This is by no means the only time a contractor has bought laws from an economically dependent government. It's one of the few times the people have been able to fight back against them.
Who gives a fuck about what a baseball league calls itself?
Claiming that any new densely built-up collection of buildings will have no adverse environmental impact, no matter how ambitious the plans, is almost surely specious. There are the problems of exporting pollution, the same problems that make claims of zero-emission transport (whether by electric cars, public transit, or even bikes -- ask any cyclist, food ain't free) laughable. And there's also the problem that you can't build a dense collection of residences and businesses (necessary for walkable cities and efficient indoor climate control, which are key to lowering energy usage) and not essentially wipe out wildlife within that city. When I read about plans to incorporate wildlife into cities I almost always cringe. Real wild ecosystems require large, basically unenclosed areas for predators to roam -- natural concentrations of predators and many other animals simply won't coexist with built-up cities, suburbs, or even farms. The best way for humans to protect wild ecosystems (and not just a few specific species) is not to build enclosed wildlife preserves in cities, but to contain cities and leave space around them instead of sprawling.
Anyway, whatever I think the flaws are (and I certainly don't have all the answers -- the people planning this definitely have more knowledge of the local situation than I do and probably have real professionals in the pertinent fields on hand and not just interested laymen like myself), kudos to these folk for actually doing something. From the bit that I've looked at so far I think it could be promising.
It probably should. Corporations from the west that come in and effectively control governments weakened by neoliberal reforms (or even get their way directly with private militarized security forces) aren't "people in those countries", though.
We can't extend labor protections to the whole world overnight. But I think if people had an effective voice and governments with their interests in mind they wouldn't have to accept the type of practices we read about, where workers falling into debt to their employers are forced to bring their kids into the work force.
It's not poo-pooing. If a cell takes more energy to create than the total expected output in life, then the first batch of cells can't supply the energy to create the second batch. Some analyses claim this true of small residential wind turbines, for example; it's also historically been true of solar cells. If that was the case with these cells they'd be basically useless. They'd be an energy sink, not an energy source.
For example. If the company wasn't selling anything, but just building panels for itself, say it takes 12J to build a panel that yields 10J over its entire life. For the first batch they burn 12J worth of coal for energy. For the second they use the first batch's energy plus 2J more worth of coal. And every subsequent batch requires 2J-worth more of coal to be burned. And this is a company that's producing nothing. If they're selling each time also to a consumer that will get 10J out of it, they'll need to build two panels per batch, requiring 24J of energy. Since they're only getting 10J from the ones they keep around, they'll need to burn 14J-worth of coal per year -- more than the 10J the consumer would have used if not for the cell. Better would be the company just burning coal to make its cells and then selling them -- only 12J of yearly coal burned. Better still would be the consumer just burning 10J-worth of coal.
That's not moving forward. If the company can sell the product for enough money to cover its expenses then it can survive doing this, even though this means the consumer is probably making a cost-ineffective decision when buying it (unless energy is a lot cheaper for the company than for the consumer, which, in different areas, is certainly possible). If the government subsidizes a company operating as an energy sink it may become a cost-effective option for consumers, and consumers with good financial sense and lots of space will buy tons of them, making it a gigantic energy sink, with much more coal burned than before.
Given that these cells are cheap, maybe they've found a way to make them an energy source instead of a sink. In that case, all that stuff you said works.
It isn't just people in their private lives; it's also corporations. You know, the ones that own the government? They like the freedom of the Internet and the ability to communicate securely and freely, because it helps them make money. They've already moved their taxable income to other countries. They can take their servers elsewhere easily if they want. It probably wouldn't take them too long to move the jobs, too, if they had to.
It's not just like they could let big business have exceptions or poke through with VPNs. Countless small businesses fuel the high-tech economy, too, and start up from practically nothing. Think they don't have any clout? What about the investors and banks that profit off of their growth? Some of them are pretty big, and would certainly have mouthpieces in Congress.
A guess: it's not changing the pay that requires a change in the code. It's keeping track of how much pay each employee is then owed at the end of the political fight.
You see, they're not just going to unexpectedly cut their employees' pay. They're just going to take a short, interest-free loan from them without their consent. How merciful of them.
It's no wonder governments so often get the worst pick of employees. Why would people with choices stay when they could at any time used as political pawns like this?
The systems that could disable your car on the road already exist. Sheesh. I'm pretty sure even the most basic cars today have engine-control computers and have for a while. If people want to drive over a certain speed they have to "chip" their cars; the computer also can control some other engine operation parameters too, though I don't know which. Then there was that Slashdot story from a while back about the guy that ran experiments on fuel economy based on computer outputs from his Jeep's engine computer.
The stuff MS is building doesn't need to touch the important stuff. When a car's radio or heater breaks it doesn't lock your steering, and MS's new devices won't either. So even the stability isn't all that important. Like GP, I don't really want a nav system operated by Microsoft in my car, and because they are known to sell out their customers. For me it's not so much the government or even DRM enforcers, but advertisers. My first sense of personal disillusionment with Microsoft was ads in WMP when I tried to play CDs. I thought that had no place in an operating system or a CD-playing app. I don't want a screen whose software I don't control in my car because it seems inevitable to me that it will become an ad screen.
Well, I don't really want a screen in my car period. Too much opportunity for distraction (that said, Microsoft's work on voice-activation, and having a vast library of MP3s loaded and available through voice command, is much safer than fumbling through a pile of CDs on the freeway). I don't really drive much anyway, so my middle-aged screenless car may last me a long time.
s/Unfortunately/Fortunately
Really, now. Long view. Which would you rather be stuck with: scrubbing your skillet, or accumulation of inert toxins in animal tissue?
Some people having crappy speakers doesn't mean that everyone's sound should be fucked up. What you want to do to the audio stream on your laptop makes sense if that's what makes it sound best; applying that on Google's side is ludicrous.
And I've never understood why so many businesses that want and need competent programmers make them dress like tools and fit into a corporate culture that that's actually harmful to good engineering practice. But they do.
Fortunately I haven't worked for such companies; I know a few people that have, in various industries. I don't know why they take the jobs, just to be unhappy there, but they do.
Apple might not change their minds because of one incident; rarely has any single protest changed anything. A disruptive protest like this one, if carried on long enough, could directly make a difference; or a series of different protests related in theme. The FSF would need to have a lot of popular support to carry it out, and I don't think they have that at this point. So it's pretty unlikely they could get direct results from a big company with an army of brainwashed customers like Apple.
The indirect effects of protest, however, can be significant. Maybe the monolithic Apple corporate structure won't listen, but if they got a press mention that could get a lot of people individually to investigate the problems inherent in DRM-laden media. Most people don't understand DRM, and I think if they did they would be more likely to avoid it. Which would be to their benefit, and to everyone's, as they'd add anti-DRM pressure to the market.
I don't remember the tactical details of the protest; I think the fundamental nature of DRM is the big issue here, and going beyond that would sacrifice clarity, but that's just my opinion. More fundamentally than tactics or specific issues, however, are facts about how messages are heard and understood. Corporations can easily disseminate their messages because they have a lot of money. That doesn't make their messages "right", that doesn't make them beneficial to those that hear them. People in opposition, with much less money, may have to resort to disruption to make their voices heard.
The people are sort of stuck here. Before most businesses we dealt with every day were large corporations, there could be a fairly equal exchange of ideas between customers and proprietors. A concerned community could make itself heard to businesses that affected it. Apple is a large corporation. They'll spend a lot of advertising money to talk at you in a way that sort of feels personal ("Hey, here's a company that understands me!"), but is limited in substantial message to, "Buy our shit, K?" They even go beyond what most companies do and hire a bunch of people to sit in stores and do face-to-face tech support, which means they're listening to customers, though in a somewhat limited way.
The only people that have DIRECT CONTROL over Apple's business practices are high up in the company. They talk a lot, but it's hard to make them listen. If you can tie up all the "genius bars" for a day, that might actually make someone notice. It would be pretty hard to do, but if you did, it might at least be acknowledged by someone with DIRECT CONTROL. It might also get noticed by the mainstream media, who would make some ham-fisted attempt to understand what the fuck it is that the FSF was talking about, and might even report on it, leading reasonable folk to wonder, "What was that clueless reporter blathering about," and look up the real info themselves.
Furthermore, as far as the analogy goes, every waiter at those white-only restaurants didn't have DIRECT CONTROL over anything. They probably were upset they weren't going to make any tip money. And I bet plenty of the would-be customers DID NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EQUALITY, or maybe were even hostile to the cause. The magnitude of what the FSF is concerned with is not as great as the magnitude of what the civil-rights movement did. But some problems really do deserve more press. The recent Microsoft and Yahoo DRM expiration issues point out what a fundamental problem DRM is; a lot of people that use DRM-laden media every day don't understand that their very use of those files is at the whim of a corporation, and that they have no good reason to believe that those files will remain playable perpetually, or that they'll be able to find convenient portable devices to play those files perpetually.
As far as I'm concerned if the FSF can book a significant amount of "genius bar" time, more power to 'em. If they can make a big corporation listen to them even for a little while, that's a step. Almost any message coming from a position of principle, reason, and understanding (an anti-DRM stance is certainly one) is more important than a day's worth of "productivity" for Apple and its customers.
In the case of these machines there aren't really similar Apple machines to compare it to. There's a big hole in Apple's lineup. The Apple-obsessed might call it, "A Mini, but big enough that it doesn't have to use laptop components, and maybe is upgradeable"; or, "An iMac but, again, upgradeable, and that isn't tied to a monitor for no good reason"; or, "A highly down-spec'd Mac Pro geared towards home use". These are all stupid descriptions. It's called a cheap standard tower, and Apple doesn't make one. I think that's one reason for the popularity of "Hackintoshes", and the reason companies think they can make money going into this market. I think they'd have a much harder time competing directly against Apple.
Ha. What a silly thing for the government to say. I know someone (living in DC) that's done a significant amount of contracting work for which he needed a security clearance from the Federal Government. He said that after all the procedures he went through to get the clearance he's become accustomed and desensitized to having machine guns pointed at his face. From the stories I've heard from him, if you're going to a location where you could potentially see something sensitive, that's the way you're treated until you're identified. My experience working at Argonne National Lab (near Chicago) was somewhat similar though not as strict (there were armed guards but they didn't point machine guns at my face while they searched my car; there's a 9.5-mile running trail around the perimeter and all the potential back entrances had at least significant barbed-wire fences, but probably also alarm systems). I don't think the Google van would get very far going accidentally down the wrong roads.
As for stuff that can be seen from the public streets... I'm not sure what exactly terrorists could hope to find that they couldn't find in other books of photos, with better quality.
I realize this isn't quite the same as measuring specific airborne toxins, but Pittsburgh has some of the worst particulate pollution of any US city. http://www.citymayors.com/environment/polluted_uscities.html
Sometimes the votes and wishes of people really don't mean squat. It's not that they don't mean squat to "them" (the mayor and the courts), it's that they don't mean squat, period. When they don't mean squat, it's probably best that someone tell the people, just generally because information flow is good. To go along with your "slave license" idea (hey, that new coat looks great on Godwin's Law!) the people of California could vote on a ballot initiative instating slavery, and it would get shot down just as surely as the mayor's slave licenses.
Actually, more than in slavery itself, you could find plenty of parallels to this sort of thing in the history of 20th century American racial discrimination and the civil rights movement. A lot of leaders and courts made decisions that had nothing to do with majority wishes. Now we basically all agree that segregation was wrong; the leaders led.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but I disagree with your last paragraph. It all gets thrown away eventually, by you or whoever is responsible after you die (the odds that any given possession, even a large one, is going to become a collectors' item is small enough to be insignificant). Whether it goes to a tech recycling company that presumably can reclaim some materials, whether it goes to a landfill where the materials are wasted and any toxic chemicals are presumably competently contained, or whether it's dumped in the woods where the nasty stuff (in the case of old circuit boards, lead is the thing that comes to mind for me, though I'm no expert) just seeps into the soil, if it one day was built it will be thrown away some other day.
So the questions with regards to how "green" a computer is are how it was made and of what, how cleanly and efficiently it operates, and how it's disposed of. If energy savings of this computer over an existing computer are greater than the manufacture and disposal costs of *this* computer (as the old computer has already been built and will be thrown away, and although this is also true of the new one, buying a new computer creates demand that will cause more of that type to be built), buying this computer as opposed to keeping an old one (or buying used) is "greener".
This equation is complicated because the costs are largely in toxic pollution and dumping and the savings are in energy; there's no obvious conversion rate (energy generation, depending on source, probably has pollution both on-site and at mining/drilling sites, probably affects ecosystems in ways other than just pollution/toxicity, and probably draws down a non-renewable resource), and in fact it varies situationally (a scenario with abundant clean energy but already-dangerous levels of environmental toxicity would favor different choices than a scenario with less pollution and no clean energy source). It's further complicated in this case by this computer's dependence on external services. Presumably it will cause additional energy use at some data center compared to some other computer, and then you have to factor in the energy situation in that data center's location and the costs of additional Internet traffic.
If you want to never throw anything away, never buy anything.