And an interesting point is that the global warming makes *more* snow likely as is dumping on he US right now, so the "Cold right now outside my house so can't be global warming, heh heh!" stupid is even more stupid...
I know that I should not feed the trolls, but why do you put up two mildly offensively obtuse straw men in your last two paras? The alternative names were to try to get past the petty carping of the "skeptics" though all remain valid just like there are multiple different words meaning 'pig-headed' or 'stupid' for example, and NO ONE in mainstream science is predicting *weather* or exact temperatures in "the following decades" and you well know it.
Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope: how do we know aliens won't force the GOP to run some kind of idiot for president to make that happen?
So, what you are talking about will either not be possible (to impose on you) because you can just stop taking the 'money off for utility control' dollar, or you can't because a politician will have legislated something stupid to force you to take it, in which case your gripe is with them.
We are running an open payroll (to other staff, not public, though we did consider that).
We are small and a start-up and not paying anything astonishing to anyone, but it sure takes away some furtiveness and toxicity that we can just have the discussions out in the open. Some do stuff for us for free for the open source goodness, some we pay "London Living Wage" to which is a bit above minimum wage, and some we pay a little more than that. Only myself and my co-director are full time and we get paid less than a Tube driver basic wage I think! B^>
"... a few whiny articles about how big energy companies and short sighted governments are interfering with the peoples' right to push tiny bits of energy onto the grid and make the people around them pay for the infrastructure to do so... "
On this: I am pushing out more energy (well, exergy even) than I consume over a year just from my house, and continue to pay the standing charge on both electricity and gas which should broadly cover those infrastructure costs (it's ~25% of my electricity bill, ~50% of my gas bill).
Way to go on petulant generalisations which only need a single counter-example to refute... The whining here is all yours, I suggest.
Pretty much all my edits have stuck so far as I can tell, or at least not been reverted per se, other than one which was briefly (somewhat aggressively) queried then reinstated.
I make a mixture of micro (eg typo), and more substantive corrections/additions.
HVDC transmission losses are of the order of a couple of % per 1000km IIRC. So, yes, we have a solution to the transport problem called "interconnectors" which I've no reason to believe is overly ambitious.
I had one of the earliest live commercial IP connections in the UK in the early '90s (and had a letter from the NSF allowing such traffic across the backbone!) and from the moment we went live we had attack/probe traffic at least in every minute since then when I've looked. (And I've had something like 10,000 SPAM delivery attempts per day for many years now too.)
(In those days the malicious traffic was from South America, FWIW!)
No it shouldn't happen, and if it causes you real annoyance and/or harm then you should consider the usual non-technical remedies eg as against someone repeatedly fly-tipping on your property, or robo-calling you, etc. In the UK there might be scope for action for "unauthorised use" of your computer systems and network.
I think that thoughtless, anti-social, resource-wasting activities should be discouraged rather than shrugged off as inevitable.
1) Is this shiny new Interweb thing better than text flooded over UUCP for actually understanding things and for thoughtful conversations? Discuss.
2) If you could by fiat could change one thing technically or legally worldwide to make the online world a more civil place, what might it be? Might Google's 'hate speech' 'spellchecker' delaying or censoring Twitter/FB/etc posts mentioning Hi**er or similar help?
I use an RPI as my primary Internet facing server and for other tasks, and matches the performance of a rackful of old Sun equipment. And runs from off-grid solar power, ie orders of magnitude less than those Sun servers:
Been there, done that (because of a sysamdin who thought that doing diagrams with pretty pictures was MUCH more important than doing backups for any of my team for many weeks, on one occasion) and you know what?
You're right!
Rgds
Damon
PS. Not that I advocate it as normal workflow for the sake of everyone's blood pressure for a start!
I think that the whole blowing out of the water of the "Safe Harbour" for processing EU personal data is some of that "fire" arising from an apparent complete disregard for data privacy in the US.
Using personal data in the EU for a purpose other than originally stated/agreed would be illegal (unless possibly if the EULA explicitly said "we can do what we like with your personal data" though I suspect that such carte blanche would be ineffective in law: I refuse to agree to such contracts anyway).
So, if non-EU orgs continue to treat their users' privacy with contempt there were be costs to them and their peers, locally in the courts or internationally in lost business for example. Maybe not hot enough a "fire" to get the message across quickly, but there regardless.
Exactly: GP is attempting to fix the wrong problem...
Regulate, manage, tax, but don't prohibit except possibly a tiny number. Two of the four most harmful drugs are alcohol and nicotine so we should be able to regulate most of the rest at least as well...
For example, for the (virtual) card numbers we issued (I was CTO of a virtual card company) we selected the card numbers using a cryptographically secure RNG within our BIN range(s). We went out of our way to make the numbers of newly-issued cards unguessable/unpredictable, and it was a significant element of our security.
Our own Inland Revenue "lost in the post" a CD with 12 million or so UK residents' details including payment info some time ago, and it is accepted that the info should never even have been collated for this purpose.
I have removed my details from the public version of the voter rolls here to reduce marketing crap, etc.
Routinely selling voter details to random orgs seems generally a bad idea if voters cannot opt out.
That is not a given; there is a view that paying people to do something inefficiently is worse than motivating them to find a better use of their time.
1) There are fees to use ports and canals; those may or may not cover all the costs but they can. A completely free ride for the shipper seems unlikely.
2) Companies do get 'free money' to build all sorts of factories, regularly.
3) Other infrastructure also gets 'free money' such as road building which is notoriously not charged back to users for the wear they put on it.
4) This discussion is partly about energy/carbon/pollution for which the money element is separate. Yes, I'd like externalities to be included in prices to end-users via the shipping costs to steer users in the right direction, but the sheer efficiency of sea transport is still there, regardless.
Ah, my numbers come from course materials that may not be public, but I believe that I have had them corroborated, eg when pricing up our own manufacturing costs.
Would be happy to be shown to be wrong, but the point is for us that in making plastics locally in the UK vs China I think that transport (which will at least partly reflect energy for example) is more or less a rounding error.
Someone, somewhere, cannot see the letters 'bro' used as a contraction for a type of pastry without concluding that this is actually a conspiracy of programmers in the male-dominated world of technology to intimidate females...
Did you actually read TFBR?
No one anywhere claimed offence or conspiracy, simply that it could possibly be construed that way so why not finesse the issue entirely.
Then we have a whole bunch of (somewhat self-absorbed and nasty-sounding, possibly just fine once the spittle stops hitting the keyboard) people here saying how stupid it is to argue over a file suffix, which is exactly what they are doing and the original subjects of this shouting match were not.
So maybe, by the same token, so-called SJWs often aren't doing what it claimed of them either, I don't know*, but I hear the sounds of knees being jerked...
Rgds
Damon
*I may even be one since I'm trying to get a social enterprise off the ground, and I try to both maintain a fairly robust sense of humour and avoid causing needless offence to people around me who have different bugbears and backgrounds. I fail on both counts from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
And an interesting point is that the global warming makes *more* snow likely as is dumping on he US right now, so the "Cold right now outside my house so can't be global warming, heh heh!" stupid is even more stupid...
Rgds
Damon
I know that I should not feed the trolls, but why do you put up two mildly offensively obtuse straw men in your last two paras? The alternative names were to try to get past the petty carping of the "skeptics" though all remain valid just like there are multiple different words meaning 'pig-headed' or 'stupid' for example, and NO ONE in mainstream science is predicting *weather* or exact temperatures in "the following decades" and you well know it.
Damon
Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope: how do we know aliens won't force the GOP to run some kind of idiot for president to make that happen?
So, what you are talking about will either not be possible (to impose on you) because you can just stop taking the 'money off for utility control' dollar, or you can't because a politician will have legislated something stupid to force you to take it, in which case your gripe is with them.
Rgds
Damon
No it won't. They will lose user acceptance and the ability to trim load if they do that.
Rgds
Damon
We are running an open payroll (to other staff, not public, though we did consider that).
We are small and a start-up and not paying anything astonishing to anyone, but it sure takes away some furtiveness and toxicity that we can just have the discussions out in the open. Some do stuff for us for free for the open source goodness, some we pay "London Living Wage" to which is a bit above minimum wage, and some we pay a little more than that. Only myself and my co-director are full time and we get paid less than a Tube driver basic wage I think! B^>
Rgds
Damon
"... a few whiny articles about how big energy companies and short sighted governments are interfering with the peoples' right to push tiny bits of energy onto the grid and make the people around them pay for the infrastructure to do so ... "
On this: I am pushing out more energy (well, exergy even) than I consume over a year just from my house, and continue to pay the standing charge on both electricity and gas which should broadly cover those infrastructure costs (it's ~25% of my electricity bill, ~50% of my gas bill).
Way to go on petulant generalisations which only need a single counter-example to refute... The whining here is all yours, I suggest.
Rgds
Damon
Pretty much all my edits have stuck so far as I can tell, or at least not been reverted per se, other than one which was briefly (somewhat aggressively) queried then reinstated.
I make a mixture of micro (eg typo), and more substantive corrections/additions.
I have no axe to grind: maybe that helps?
Rgds
Damon
HVDC interconnectors disagree with "too far away, across the Mediterranean".
Rgds
Damon
HVDC transmission losses are of the order of a couple of % per 1000km IIRC. So, yes, we have a solution to the transport problem called "interconnectors" which I've no reason to believe is overly ambitious.
If you want ambitious, try:
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...
Rgds
Daomn
EFTA membership is important here I suspect:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
I had one of the earliest live commercial IP connections in the UK in the early '90s (and had a letter from the NSF allowing such traffic across the backbone!) and from the moment we went live we had attack/probe traffic at least in every minute since then when I've looked. (And I've had something like 10,000 SPAM delivery attempts per day for many years now too.)
(In those days the malicious traffic was from South America, FWIW!)
No it shouldn't happen, and if it causes you real annoyance and/or harm then you should consider the usual non-technical remedies eg as against someone repeatedly fly-tipping on your property, or robo-calling you, etc. In the UK there might be scope for action for "unauthorised use" of your computer systems and network.
I think that thoughtless, anti-social, resource-wasting activities should be discouraged rather than shrugged off as inevitable.
Rgds
Damon
1) Is this shiny new Interweb thing better than text flooded over UUCP for actually understanding things and for thoughtful conversations? Discuss.
2) If you could by fiat could change one thing technically or legally worldwide to make the online world a more civil place, what might it be? Might Google's 'hate speech' 'spellchecker' delaying or censoring Twitter/FB/etc posts mentioning Hi**er or similar help?
Rgds
Damon
I use an RPI as my primary Internet facing server and for other tasks, and matches the performance of a rackful of old Sun equipment. And runs from off-grid solar power, ie orders of magnitude less than those Sun servers:
http://www.earth.org.uk/off-gr...
Oh, and I can shove it in a small cupboard, rather than taking a whole room.
And I run it fanless with entirely solid-state media, so it's quiet.
So, smaller, quieter and vastly more energy efficient and cheaper and people are WHINING?
Gah
Damon
Been there, done that (because of a sysamdin who thought that doing diagrams with pretty pictures was MUCH more important than doing backups for any of my team for many weeks, on one occasion) and you know what?
You're right!
Rgds
Damon
PS. Not that I advocate it as normal workflow for the sake of everyone's blood pressure for a start!
Ahem... what about the EU?
By number of people, size of economy, and by actually making some progress on decoupling the economy from carbon emissions?
Rgds
Damon
I disagree.
I think that the whole blowing out of the water of the "Safe Harbour" for processing EU personal data is some of that "fire" arising from an apparent complete disregard for data privacy in the US.
Using personal data in the EU for a purpose other than originally stated/agreed would be illegal (unless possibly if the EULA explicitly said "we can do what we like with your personal data" though I suspect that such carte blanche would be ineffective in law: I refuse to agree to such contracts anyway).
So, if non-EU orgs continue to treat their users' privacy with contempt there were be costs to them and their peers, locally in the courts or internationally in lost business for example. Maybe not hot enough a "fire" to get the message across quickly, but there regardless.
Rgds
Damon
Exactly: GP is attempting to fix the wrong problem...
Regulate, manage, tax, but don't prohibit except possibly a tiny number. Two of the four most harmful drugs are alcohol and nicotine so we should be able to regulate most of the rest at least as well...
Rgds
Damon
No.
For example, for the (virtual) card numbers we issued (I was CTO of a virtual card company) we selected the card numbers using a cryptographically secure RNG within our BIN range(s). We went out of our way to make the numbers of newly-issued cards unguessable/unpredictable, and it was a significant element of our security.
Rgds
Damon
Indeed.
Our own Inland Revenue "lost in the post" a CD with 12 million or so UK residents' details including payment info some time ago, and it is accepted that the info should never even have been collated for this purpose.
I have removed my details from the public version of the voter rolls here to reduce marketing crap, etc.
Routinely selling voter details to random orgs seems generally a bad idea if voters cannot opt out.
Rgds
Damon
Why add plain nastiness to all your other foaming wrongness in other posts on this story?
Professional troll?
That is not a given; there is a view that paying people to do something inefficiently is worse than motivating them to find a better use of their time.
Rgds
Damon
1) There are fees to use ports and canals; those may or may not cover all the costs but they can. A completely free ride for the shipper seems unlikely.
2) Companies do get 'free money' to build all sorts of factories, regularly.
3) Other infrastructure also gets 'free money' such as road building which is notoriously not charged back to users for the wear they put on it.
4) This discussion is partly about energy/carbon/pollution for which the money element is separate. Yes, I'd like externalities to be included in prices to end-users via the shipping costs to steer users in the right direction, but the sheer efficiency of sea transport is still there, regardless.
Rgds
Damon
Ah, my numbers come from course materials that may not be public, but I believe that I have had them corroborated, eg when pricing up our own manufacturing costs.
Would be happy to be shown to be wrong, but the point is for us that in making plastics locally in the UK vs China I think that transport (which will at least partly reflect energy for example) is more or less a rounding error.
Rgds
Damon
But quite possibly no less cost, time, energy or carbon.
It can take more energy/cost/etc to ship something inefficiently within your local state/county/etc than to get it shipped efficiently from China.
Rgds
Damon
Someone, somewhere, cannot see the letters 'bro' used as a contraction for a type of pastry without concluding that this is actually a conspiracy of programmers in the male-dominated world of technology to intimidate females ...
Did you actually read TFBR?
No one anywhere claimed offence or conspiracy, simply that it could possibly be construed that way so why not finesse the issue entirely.
Then we have a whole bunch of (somewhat self-absorbed and nasty-sounding, possibly just fine once the spittle stops hitting the keyboard) people here saying how stupid it is to argue over a file suffix, which is exactly what they are doing and the original subjects of this shouting match were not.
So maybe, by the same token, so-called SJWs often aren't doing what it claimed of them either, I don't know*, but I hear the sounds of knees being jerked...
Rgds
Damon
*I may even be one since I'm trying to get a social enterprise off the ground, and I try to both maintain a fairly robust sense of humour and avoid causing needless offence to people around me who have different bugbears and backgrounds. I fail on both counts from time to time.