Free market economics don't work where the service providers are depending on human stupidity and/or desperation to operate. For a free market to correct itself, consumers need to be educated about the product or service they're buying, and they need to be discerning when two or more choices are presented. Neither is exactly true when dealing with online dating schemes.
Additionally, it's too damn easy to spread false information via astroturfing when people are depending on word of mouth to determine which service to use. In the case you describe (Match vs. Yahoo), what's stopping Match.com from sending out people to random message boards saying "I found a girl at Match"? The whole reason this kind of slimy advertising works is because this particular market doesn't have any kind of objective source of product information.
You said that if Yahoo had a 98% success rating and Match had a 75% one, the market would favour Yahoo. Well, who's going to determine those figures? And if those figures can be gotten reliably, who's going to make sure the end user has access to them? And even when those two conditions are satisfied, you're still dealing with a group of end users who may not care - desperation and sex together are a wonderful way to supress common sense. Does the fact they're clueless and unhappy mean that they should be scammed?
If only because it hasn't been remade. I'm replaying it at the moment, and it still holds up as a solid strategy game.
It's also just about the only game I played back in the day that doesn't have a modern equivalent - LSN isn't nearly as good, and the only other game I can think of that came close was Fallout (which is also a gooc classic in it's own right). In fact if it weren't for the lack of more recent choices, I probably wouldn't be playing X-com; I don't do the whole "classic" game scene normally.
I was under the impression that birds were thought to have split off earlier than that. The way I'd been taught it, dinosaurs and birds became distinct groups in the Jurassic, and birds survived the extinction due to factors such as warm blooded metabolism and their relatively small size.
But OTOH, it's been a long time since I was learning this, so new evidence might have emerged since then, or my memory could be wrong.
I'd tend to assume that any impact that size would be extremely unlikely to genreate the right conditions for the formation of life. We're talking about the kind of kinetic energy here that can boil oceans on impact, which would tend to foul up any chances of life emerging.
The conditions we currently think led to abiogenesis (the pre-evolutionary formation of life) weren't cataclysmic, they were merely improbably chemical reactions that might have arisen on the primordial earth - just a matter of something with a low probability having a few hundred million years to occur by chance in, in an environment with no pre-existing competeing lifeforms and plenty of potential habitat.
Now mind you, any major change in the ecology will open up new niches for creatures to evolve into, so in that sense an impact "creates new life", but that is exactly what the article is talking about. The mass die off precipitated by such an impact let the dinosaurs get started. The cretaceous die off got rid of the dinosaurs in turn, and let mammals take the top spot.
It's a gray area. Uploading isn't legal, but the courts won't let the CRIA go to town on the downloaders.
The thing to remember is that corporations don't have quite as much power in Canada as they do in the US. And this particular bit of propaganda is the result of said corporations trying to go the other route - they can't pursue massive lawsuits (thank god), so they're trying to "educate" children about copyright, which is somewhat like letting Molson educate kids about safe drinking habits...
Anyway, I say let them spread their propaganda. All it goes to show is that record company execs are completely ignorant about their audiences - this crap looks like it was cobbled together by some marketing blockhead at the behest of his boss. Trying to tell kids that X law should be respected by giving the comic books, or TV shows, or whatever is a sure way to get said law viewed as lame.
I'd say the difference is that Captain Propaganda here has a chest that looks suspiciously cheeky, and there is that streaching around the logo... plus other well known superheros don't have circular logos, they have animals, or shield shapes or whatever.
The proportions, angles, shapes and general appearance are all disturbingly similar to goatse. Wanna bet that the artist hated his job and wanted to hide something obscene in there for the hell of it?
McDonalds countered by releasing wave after wave of giant mechanical clowns, armed with death rays and arterial clog cannons. A McDonalds spokescreature said that this was intended to counter the growing popularity of Burger King's overlords.
The Hamburgler was unavailable for comment.
Re:Let's Ditch The Game Console...
on
In Defense of Games
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Doesn't work that way.
Kids will do whatever they find to be fun. Try and force them to do something else, and while they will do it, they'll quit just as soon as they aren't forced to anymore.
My GF got forced into playing the Cello as a kid. She's good at it - not amazing, but definately skilled. However, she has exactly zero interest in it now that she's an adult - being forced to play essentially took all the fun outta it for her.
For my part, I remember being stuck with all the great classics in literature in school. I would never read those now - Shakespear, Dostoyevski, Dickens and the like are all things I read as a student and promptly gave up when I graduated high school. For all I know I might have enjoyed them had I either discovered them outside school as a kid, or later in life as an adult.
She's still into classical music, and I still read, but neither of us wants anything to do with what we got stuck with as kids. OTOH, I was reading hard science fiction (starting with Larry Niven, who is definatly not light reading) as early as my teens, and I haven't yet lost interest - because those were the books I read of my own volition, and they were never forced on me.
You want to make kids give up games and start reading? Good luck. The minute they aren't being pressured anymore they'll go right back to their games - because games are fun and books are what the adults are making them waste their time on. Trying to make them to be something other than children does them no good later in life.
Educate them, teach them right from wrong, get them started on science and literature, but DO NOT try and make their fun into something you percieve to be useful. There is plenty of room in life for wasting time, especially when you're young.
Subpoena? You mean like the ones used by the NSA monitoring? Where is that due process thingy again? We seem to have forgotten it somewhere...
Besides which, even if people don't prey on children or plan terrorist acts, what's to stop the **AA from using the greater data retention in the next batch of lawsuits? After all, they can get subpoenas too.
Pedos and terrorists are convienient excuses. The number of actual, real, internet predators and terrorists is very very small. Most violent or sexual crime is in no way related to the net - and most terrorists could easly commit crimes using low tech means (like, oh say, boxcutters, maybe?).
And most child molesters aren't random scary strangers - they're people the victim knows and trusts. The best way to limit the number of molested children would be to force people to get a license before having children, and force people in positions of trust with children (teachers, preists, etc) to undergo rigorous psychological testing. What's that you say? That would violate their constitutional rights? Well tough titty - it's for the children, so that makes it OK.
The reason that laws governing the internet get passed, and laws limiting parenthood don't even get proposed, is that the former are politically easy to sell, and the latter would rightly be seen as oppressive and illegal. It's just more examples of politicians crying "oh won't somebody think of the children" as a way to get elected - because politicians are inherently dishonest and lazy.
Then what you are argueing for in a sort of international mob rule. If a "criminal" pornographer in the US could be charged under Iranian law, then there would be no borders, no concept of sovereignty, no codefied local justice. Everyone would be a criminal to someone's legal system.
If you seriously think that this is a good thing, then you are beyond reasoning with. No thinking person could seriously argue for letting foreign countries dictate laws outside their borders.
And I would ask you what you think your own fate would be. Have you broken any Chinese laws lately? How about Iranian, or North Korean? What about religious law in some nations? Are you sure? Because if the world worked the way you describe it should, you'd be liable for those infractions, legal thought they might be where you live.
Others have already made most of the points I would have. You honestly don't seem to get the point.
The people working at the pirate bay have NEVER set foot on US soil. They're operating purely within their own country, using Swedish servers, and facilitating the trade of copyright materials from many different countries (not just the US). At no point in their P2P activity have they stolen anything specifically American - they have rather traded data that would have been illegal under US law. Swedish law doesn't recognize this as theft, and never has. If they were American pornographers, they would be immune to Iranian prosecution - because porn is legal in the states, and there is sweet fuck all Iran could do about it.
As long as they host in Sweden and respect the local laws, they cannot (legally) be charged with anything, other than the possibility of being tried "in Absentia" in a US court. This isn't about how you think the law should operate - this is about how it does operate. And wishing for it to be different is wishing for national sovereignty to be eliminated - which would hurt you and your countrymen far more than you seem to realize. You're either too thickheaded to see that, or you're a **AA shill.
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism. Even if there was once some noble intent of protecting people by finding monsters hidden among them, it won't just be used for that. Any time you have a major source of power in polical hands, you can bet on it being abused eventually - and what greater power over a domestic population is there than widespread spying without judicial oversight?
Thw difference with the Singapore case was that the person actually was in Singapore. Hence the distinction drawn for "local laws".
The pirate bay people are in Sweden, and are following Swedish law. If they were operating in the US, that would be different.
To continue with the previous analogy, if an American opened up a porn site overseas in a repressive nation, he's be charged (under local law). If he opened up that site in the US, and people went there from repressive countries, he could not be charged (though his customers would be another story). TPB is like the latter example, not the former. The Singapore case was like the former. Apples and oranges.
"I'm getting really tired of this "Not in my country" defense. It doesn't hold water."
So you'd prefer another country to have hold over what is and is not legal in your own?
What if the shoe was on the other foot? What if the law being violated was, for example, Iranian, and the website was American? I'm sure there are thousands of porn sites hosted in California that are just as blatantly illigal in repressive countries as TPB is in America. Would you be so quick to say "It doesn't matter what country they're in, it's still illegal in the prosecuting country, so that makes cracking down on them OK" ?
And no, it doesn't matter that the prosecuting country in question is "unfreindly" - in case you missed the memo, what matters legally are local laws and possibly extradition treaties. Plus, many Swedes would undoubtably view American law as repressive on IP issues, just as many Americans would view Iranian law as oppressive on free speach issues.
The "not in my country" defense is otherwise known as national sovereignty. Don't like it? Tough. You either abide by it, or accept the idea that another nation can enforce it's laws upon you remotely. If you wish legal sovereignty for your own nation, you must allow others the same right. To grant them any less makes you little more than a hypocritic shill.
Though I would say that the important distinction with the Oregon plant you linked is that they use biofuel, rather than the fact they also use fuel cells. You mention that in your post, but keep in mind that it makes all the difference. Since their fuel source is carbon neutral, it doesn't matter what means they use to convert it to electricity.
The difference between fuel cells and turbines, as other posters have informed me, is effeciency. The difference between biofuel and fossil fuels is their impact on the carbon cycle (plus the problems associated with dwindling fuel supplies). It's the fuel, not the power plant, that determines whether the plant contributes to the greenhouse effect.
However I should have mentioned that in my list of hydrogen sources - that was a serious oversight on my part. Pity/. doesn't let me edit...
Whoever told you there were no homeless people in Canada?
Poverty is not the sole resposibility of the government, even in socialist democracies. Any jobs are likely to be from the private sector (especially very low level "wage slave" jobs), and most of the companies responsible for hiring will not take an applicant with no home address or phone number. Heck, most of them won't even think about taking an applicant who doesn't have access to a shower. There are exceptions of course, but as a general rule if you're truely poor it's harder to get a job than if you're only somewhat poor.
How then do you fix the problems of the homeless? You can keep them from starving, from freezing to death, and from being denied medical care, but you cannot magically give them a job or the means to get one themselves. Even gov't subsidised housing and the like is not guaranteed to work in all cases. And this doesn't even begin to factor in problems like mental illness.
It's not impossible for them to help themselves, or for the gov't to help them get a fresh start; but even when the resources are devouted to doing so, people are going to slip through the cracks. There are definate bootstrapping issues in any such system.
What most people would say is that impovershed Canadians are better off than impovershed Americans. That doesn't mean that they're magically elevated above the status of poverty, but there are more social "safety nets" in place, and more basic resources (like health insurance) made available to people who couldn't afford them on their own. The fact that they're better off than they could be, or than they would be in another country, doesn't mean they don't have problems.
From TFA, it seems the issue was more that the US doesn't guarantee sufficient protection of passanger data. Given that this data includes things like CC numbers and identifying information, I could see the concern.
Which raises the question as to what specifically the EU courts find lacking in US data security. Perhaps there are too few checks and balances with regard to who gets access to passenger data?
Oh, I dunno. I could see censorship done via IP law, even if not directly.
What if, for example, P2P programs caught on in China as a way to circumvent government censorship? Banning those programs as "subversive" (or words to that effect) would have political repercussions. Banning them in the name of IP law however would work fine - there would be less uproar, and as a bonus, the law would have the support of any media company operating in China. Plus, the government could claim they were complying with western law.
"Censorship? What censorship? We're merely protecting copyright materials. How is that different from what companies in America do?" -- Doesn't that seem a little convienient?
Not saying it will happen, but it's not that far fetched. And the only reason I see for it not happening is the fact that china really doesn't feel the need to justify it's actions internationally, or at least they haven't felt the need yet.
Well, since as you correctly say the radioactivity is "zero sum", why bury the still-potent stuff at all?
The unspent fuel in the waste can be reproccessed; this is simple enough to do. European and Japanese plants are already doing this. The really nasty stuff that's still undergoing energetic fission could probably be used to generate power in different types of reactor - after all if it's still "hot" enough to be dangerous, then we oughta be able to do more with it than just burial.
The stuff you're left over with, the low level radioactives and contaminated equipment and such, THAT gets buried. You either dilute it, vitrify it, or just bury it deep under the water table in a subduction zone. It'll last a long time (after all, this is the stuff with the lowest radiation, ergo the longest halflife), but it can be gotten rid of.
And it's not like fuel is the greatest expense in a reactor, so even if we double or triple the cost of fuel by using reproccessing/sorting techniques to get the waste down to something manageable, it'll still be cheaper than the rest of the operating expenses of the power plant.
But I also like your idea about buying it under centres of gov't:-)
Not sure I agree in this context. We're talking about using fuel cells in a power plant remember - the person I was responding to was reffering to using fuel cells to generate commercial power, which almost certainly means a plant running on natural gas.
Lets say your power plant uses propane gas. It can either burn the gas to run an electric turbine, or it can run the gas through fuel cells to produce electricity. Any scrubber system you can use with the first option will also work with the second, so unless you get signifigantly more effeciency with fuel cells, there is no difference in emmissions.
Now, with regard to using power plants to make hydrogen for use in cars, I agree, it's better than using straight hydrocarbon fuel. However, the amount of power required for electrolysis is very very high, so your best options are things like nuclear power, which means you have to convince people that nuclear power is better than the alternatives.
Just to clarify about fusion, there are a number of solutions to the neutron problem that have been proposed, and presumably more will emerge before the reactor tech is ready for widespread use.
For starters, there's using a lithium blanket in the reactor shielding. This approach uses neutron flux to breed tritium fuel from lithium; this in turn means that your secondary fuel source also serves as reactor shielding. It's a partial solution, but it will reduce the problem of reactor irradiation.
There's also the possibility of using materials in the reactor that don't produce as many dangerous isotopes when irradiated. Fission is dangerous in no small part because we can't control what decay products are going to be produced. With fusion, the only radioactives left over are going to be reactor componants - and we can determine in advance what sort of material those are made of, to limit the number of really nasty byproducts they produce. At the very least we should be able to avoid things like strontium-90.
Finally, after a century or so of fusion power, what would stop us from changing fuels? There are aneutronic fusion reactions (He3-D, or H-H-H-H for instance), and while they are much harder to create, we might be able to use them with a more mature fusion technology. Insisting that reactor irradiation will be a problem because the only easy reaction to use is D-T is like someone at the dawn of the industrial age insisting that steam power will always lead to deforestation from burning wood fuel - both work from the assumption that the technology will only advance up to a certain point and go no further.
Also, finally, saying fusion isn't a panacea is somewhat silly. From where we are standing, it is exactly that - it's a solution to several of our most serious environmental and energy problems. All our energy needs could be met with a combination of fusion power and some means of renewable mobile fuel (biofule or hydrogen most likely). The fact that it isn't perfect, and won't be cheap, doesn't make it any less attractive.
Hydrogen doesn't occur naturally in pure form - it's always combined with something else, like a hydrocarbon chain, or water. To run a fuel cell you either have to:
1) Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine. You're still using natural gas, or possibly some other fossil fuel.
2) Use water electrolysis to get hydrogen. This requires loads of electricity. This in turn means that your hydrogen "fuel" is actually a power storage medium like a battery. You cannot run a power plant this way.
Got a link to the nebraska plant? I'd bet good money they're using option #1, and if they are, then they haven't weaned themselves of fossil fuels.
Option #2 is the only way to use truely "green" fuel cells, but it also requires a source of clean electricity - such as fusion - or else you're just moving the source of pollution from a tailpipe to a power plant.
Every time I see the idea brought up that X technology is either right around the corner, or will never happen, I take a step back and remember just how bad we humans are at seeing the future.
Remember when 2000 was going to be the year we had flying cars, moon bases and nuclear power in our homes? And how would someone making those same wild predictions have reacted to the idea of home computers? We vastly overestimated what we could do in one area, and underestimated the other. Whether this was predestined due to feasability, or whether it was a question of where we spent our research dollars, is a something I've always wondered...
Anyway, the way I've always looked at it, a new technology has several stages it must pass before we can make any assumptions about it. Each stage we get past (or get stuck at) gives us a better picture of what the future holds:
1. Does the proposed idea work within the laws of physics as we currently understand them? This is the level that perpetual motion will forever be stuck at (pardon the pun). This is also where any dreams of FTL travel and generated gravity go - they shall remain fictional unless physics opens up the possibility in in future. We can make no predictions here, other than sometimes saying "that will never work".
2. Does the technological advance require other advances first? Anything that requires fusion power, or any sort of "unobtainium" type materials, or advanced biotech, goes here. This is where the space elevator is currently stuck (another pun... ), since we can't yet produce the materials we need. Generally, anything in this category is possible, but may or may not transpire in the future - there's no way to predict either way.
3. Do we have the engineering know-how to make this work? This is often just a matter of time. Fusion power, reusable lauch vehicals and ion engines go here. I'd call this the "beta", since it's generally the stage where we are building prototypes and getting there in small steps, often with setbacks. It takes time and testing to advance out of this stage, just like in a software beta.
4. What are the practical, political, ethical, and other issues with this technology? See the hydrogen economy as an example of practical problems (ie, where do we get the energy we'd need) and human cloning as an example of an ethical problem (do we really want to do this with a human being?) Both are naturally political issues as well.
How well predictions work depends on where we are. We cannot predict the first category (except when something truely is impossible), we can rarely predict the second, we can sometimes project trends accurately enough in the third, and for the fourth one the question is often if we will, not when we can. Given where the space elevator is at the moment - a workable idea hinged on large quantities of unobtainium - I'd say we can neither predict when nor if it will happen.
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Free market economics don't work where the service providers are depending on human stupidity and/or desperation to operate. For a free market to correct itself, consumers need to be educated about the product or service they're buying, and they need to be discerning when two or more choices are presented. Neither is exactly true when dealing with online dating schemes.
Additionally, it's too damn easy to spread false information via astroturfing when people are depending on word of mouth to determine which service to use. In the case you describe (Match vs. Yahoo), what's stopping Match.com from sending out people to random message boards saying "I found a girl at Match"? The whole reason this kind of slimy advertising works is because this particular market doesn't have any kind of objective source of product information.
You said that if Yahoo had a 98% success rating and Match had a 75% one, the market would favour Yahoo. Well, who's going to determine those figures? And if those figures can be gotten reliably, who's going to make sure the end user has access to them? And even when those two conditions are satisfied, you're still dealing with a group of end users who may not care - desperation and sex together are a wonderful way to supress common sense. Does the fact they're clueless and unhappy mean that they should be scammed?
If only because it hasn't been remade. I'm replaying it at the moment, and it still holds up as a solid strategy game.
It's also just about the only game I played back in the day that doesn't have a modern equivalent - LSN isn't nearly as good, and the only other game I can think of that came close was Fallout (which is also a gooc classic in it's own right). In fact if it weren't for the lack of more recent choices, I probably wouldn't be playing X-com; I don't do the whole "classic" game scene normally.
I was under the impression that birds were thought to have split off earlier than that. The way I'd been taught it, dinosaurs and birds became distinct groups in the Jurassic, and birds survived the extinction due to factors such as warm blooded metabolism and their relatively small size.
But OTOH, it's been a long time since I was learning this, so new evidence might have emerged since then, or my memory could be wrong.
You reminded me of a sig I saw once, which went something like this:
"I never said Thou Shalt Not Think."
I'd tend to assume that any impact that size would be extremely unlikely to genreate the right conditions for the formation of life. We're talking about the kind of kinetic energy here that can boil oceans on impact, which would tend to foul up any chances of life emerging.
The conditions we currently think led to abiogenesis (the pre-evolutionary formation of life) weren't cataclysmic, they were merely improbably chemical reactions that might have arisen on the primordial earth - just a matter of something with a low probability having a few hundred million years to occur by chance in, in an environment with no pre-existing competeing lifeforms and plenty of potential habitat.
Now mind you, any major change in the ecology will open up new niches for creatures to evolve into, so in that sense an impact "creates new life", but that is exactly what the article is talking about. The mass die off precipitated by such an impact let the dinosaurs get started. The cretaceous die off got rid of the dinosaurs in turn, and let mammals take the top spot.
It's a gray area. Uploading isn't legal, but the courts won't let the CRIA go to town on the downloaders.
The thing to remember is that corporations don't have quite as much power in Canada as they do in the US. And this particular bit of propaganda is the result of said corporations trying to go the other route - they can't pursue massive lawsuits (thank god), so they're trying to "educate" children about copyright, which is somewhat like letting Molson educate kids about safe drinking habits...
Anyway, I say let them spread their propaganda. All it goes to show is that record company execs are completely ignorant about their audiences - this crap looks like it was cobbled together by some marketing blockhead at the behest of his boss. Trying to tell kids that X law should be respected by giving the comic books, or TV shows, or whatever is a sure way to get said law viewed as lame.
I'd say the difference is that Captain Propaganda here has a chest that looks suspiciously cheeky, and there is that streaching around the logo... plus other well known superheros don't have circular logos, they have animals, or shield shapes or whatever.
The proportions, angles, shapes and general appearance are all disturbingly similar to goatse. Wanna bet that the artist hated his job and wanted to hide something obscene in there for the hell of it?
McDonalds countered by releasing wave after wave of giant mechanical clowns, armed with death rays and arterial clog cannons. A McDonalds spokescreature said that this was intended to counter the growing popularity of Burger King's overlords.
The Hamburgler was unavailable for comment.
Doesn't work that way.
Kids will do whatever they find to be fun. Try and force them to do something else, and while they will do it, they'll quit just as soon as they aren't forced to anymore.
My GF got forced into playing the Cello as a kid. She's good at it - not amazing, but definately skilled. However, she has exactly zero interest in it now that she's an adult - being forced to play essentially took all the fun outta it for her.
For my part, I remember being stuck with all the great classics in literature in school. I would never read those now - Shakespear, Dostoyevski, Dickens and the like are all things I read as a student and promptly gave up when I graduated high school. For all I know I might have enjoyed them had I either discovered them outside school as a kid, or later in life as an adult.
She's still into classical music, and I still read, but neither of us wants anything to do with what we got stuck with as kids. OTOH, I was reading hard science fiction (starting with Larry Niven, who is definatly not light reading) as early as my teens, and I haven't yet lost interest - because those were the books I read of my own volition, and they were never forced on me.
You want to make kids give up games and start reading? Good luck. The minute they aren't being pressured anymore they'll go right back to their games - because games are fun and books are what the adults are making them waste their time on. Trying to make them to be something other than children does them no good later in life.
Educate them, teach them right from wrong, get them started on science and literature, but DO NOT try and make their fun into something you percieve to be useful. There is plenty of room in life for wasting time, especially when you're young.
Subpoena? You mean like the ones used by the NSA monitoring? Where is that due process thingy again? We seem to have forgotten it somewhere...
Besides which, even if people don't prey on children or plan terrorist acts, what's to stop the **AA from using the greater data retention in the next batch of lawsuits? After all, they can get subpoenas too.
Pedos and terrorists are convienient excuses. The number of actual, real, internet predators and terrorists is very very small. Most violent or sexual crime is in no way related to the net - and most terrorists could easly commit crimes using low tech means (like, oh say, boxcutters, maybe?).
And most child molesters aren't random scary strangers - they're people the victim knows and trusts. The best way to limit the number of molested children would be to force people to get a license before having children, and force people in positions of trust with children (teachers, preists, etc) to undergo rigorous psychological testing. What's that you say? That would violate their constitutional rights? Well tough titty - it's for the children, so that makes it OK.
The reason that laws governing the internet get passed, and laws limiting parenthood don't even get proposed, is that the former are politically easy to sell, and the latter would rightly be seen as oppressive and illegal. It's just more examples of politicians crying "oh won't somebody think of the children" as a way to get elected - because politicians are inherently dishonest and lazy.
Then what you are argueing for in a sort of international mob rule. If a "criminal" pornographer in the US could be charged under Iranian law, then there would be no borders, no concept of sovereignty, no codefied local justice. Everyone would be a criminal to someone's legal system.
If you seriously think that this is a good thing, then you are beyond reasoning with. No thinking person could seriously argue for letting foreign countries dictate laws outside their borders.
And I would ask you what you think your own fate would be. Have you broken any Chinese laws lately? How about Iranian, or North Korean? What about religious law in some nations? Are you sure? Because if the world worked the way you describe it should, you'd be liable for those infractions, legal thought they might be where you live.
Others have already made most of the points I would have. You honestly don't seem to get the point.
The people working at the pirate bay have NEVER set foot on US soil. They're operating purely within their own country, using Swedish servers, and facilitating the trade of copyright materials from many different countries (not just the US). At no point in their P2P activity have they stolen anything specifically American - they have rather traded data that would have been illegal under US law. Swedish law doesn't recognize this as theft, and never has. If they were American pornographers, they would be immune to Iranian prosecution - because porn is legal in the states, and there is sweet fuck all Iran could do about it.
As long as they host in Sweden and respect the local laws, they cannot (legally) be charged with anything, other than the possibility of being tried "in Absentia" in a US court. This isn't about how you think the law should operate - this is about how it does operate. And wishing for it to be different is wishing for national sovereignty to be eliminated - which would hurt you and your countrymen far more than you seem to realize. You're either too thickheaded to see that, or you're a **AA shill.
Whoever said this was about "terrorists"?
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism. Even if there was once some noble intent of protecting people by finding monsters hidden among them, it won't just be used for that. Any time you have a major source of power in polical hands, you can bet on it being abused eventually - and what greater power over a domestic population is there than widespread spying without judicial oversight?
Thw difference with the Singapore case was that the person actually was in Singapore. Hence the distinction drawn for "local laws".
The pirate bay people are in Sweden, and are following Swedish law. If they were operating in the US, that would be different.
To continue with the previous analogy, if an American opened up a porn site overseas in a repressive nation, he's be charged (under local law). If he opened up that site in the US, and people went there from repressive countries, he could not be charged (though his customers would be another story). TPB is like the latter example, not the former. The Singapore case was like the former. Apples and oranges.
"I'm getting really tired of this "Not in my country" defense. It doesn't hold water."
So you'd prefer another country to have hold over what is and is not legal in your own?
What if the shoe was on the other foot? What if the law being violated was, for example, Iranian, and the website was American? I'm sure there are thousands of porn sites hosted in California that are just as blatantly illigal in repressive countries as TPB is in America. Would you be so quick to say "It doesn't matter what country they're in, it's still illegal in the prosecuting country, so that makes cracking down on them OK" ?
And no, it doesn't matter that the prosecuting country in question is "unfreindly" - in case you missed the memo, what matters legally are local laws and possibly extradition treaties. Plus, many Swedes would undoubtably view American law as repressive on IP issues, just as many Americans would view Iranian law as oppressive on free speach issues.
The "not in my country" defense is otherwise known as national sovereignty. Don't like it? Tough. You either abide by it, or accept the idea that another nation can enforce it's laws upon you remotely. If you wish legal sovereignty for your own nation, you must allow others the same right. To grant them any less makes you little more than a hypocritic shill.
Thanks for the link :-)
/. doesn't let me edit...
Though I would say that the important distinction with the Oregon plant you linked is that they use biofuel, rather than the fact they also use fuel cells. You mention that in your post, but keep in mind that it makes all the difference. Since their fuel source is carbon neutral, it doesn't matter what means they use to convert it to electricity.
The difference between fuel cells and turbines, as other posters have informed me, is effeciency. The difference between biofuel and fossil fuels is their impact on the carbon cycle (plus the problems associated with dwindling fuel supplies). It's the fuel, not the power plant, that determines whether the plant contributes to the greenhouse effect.
However I should have mentioned that in my list of hydrogen sources - that was a serious oversight on my part. Pity
Whoever told you there were no homeless people in Canada?
Poverty is not the sole resposibility of the government, even in socialist democracies. Any jobs are likely to be from the private sector (especially very low level "wage slave" jobs), and most of the companies responsible for hiring will not take an applicant with no home address or phone number. Heck, most of them won't even think about taking an applicant who doesn't have access to a shower. There are exceptions of course, but as a general rule if you're truely poor it's harder to get a job than if you're only somewhat poor.
How then do you fix the problems of the homeless? You can keep them from starving, from freezing to death, and from being denied medical care, but you cannot magically give them a job or the means to get one themselves. Even gov't subsidised housing and the like is not guaranteed to work in all cases. And this doesn't even begin to factor in problems like mental illness.
It's not impossible for them to help themselves, or for the gov't to help them get a fresh start; but even when the resources are devouted to doing so, people are going to slip through the cracks. There are definate bootstrapping issues in any such system.
What most people would say is that impovershed Canadians are better off than impovershed Americans. That doesn't mean that they're magically elevated above the status of poverty, but there are more social "safety nets" in place, and more basic resources (like health insurance) made available to people who couldn't afford them on their own. The fact that they're better off than they could be, or than they would be in another country, doesn't mean they don't have problems.
From TFA, it seems the issue was more that the US doesn't guarantee sufficient protection of passanger data. Given that this data includes things like CC numbers and identifying information, I could see the concern.
Which raises the question as to what specifically the EU courts find lacking in US data security. Perhaps there are too few checks and balances with regard to who gets access to passenger data?
Oh, I dunno. I could see censorship done via IP law, even if not directly.
What if, for example, P2P programs caught on in China as a way to circumvent government censorship? Banning those programs as "subversive" (or words to that effect) would have political repercussions. Banning them in the name of IP law however would work fine - there would be less uproar, and as a bonus, the law would have the support of any media company operating in China. Plus, the government could claim they were complying with western law.
"Censorship? What censorship? We're merely protecting copyright materials. How is that different from what companies in America do?" -- Doesn't that seem a little convienient?
Not saying it will happen, but it's not that far fetched. And the only reason I see for it not happening is the fact that china really doesn't feel the need to justify it's actions internationally, or at least they haven't felt the need yet.
Bah, heathen. Keep insulting my tree gods, and I won't send you any mid-winter feast cards this year :-P
Well, since as you correctly say the radioactivity is "zero sum", why bury the still-potent stuff at all?
:-)
The unspent fuel in the waste can be reproccessed; this is simple enough to do. European and Japanese plants are already doing this. The really nasty stuff that's still undergoing energetic fission could probably be used to generate power in different types of reactor - after all if it's still "hot" enough to be dangerous, then we oughta be able to do more with it than just burial.
The stuff you're left over with, the low level radioactives and contaminated equipment and such, THAT gets buried. You either dilute it, vitrify it, or just bury it deep under the water table in a subduction zone. It'll last a long time (after all, this is the stuff with the lowest radiation, ergo the longest halflife), but it can be gotten rid of.
And it's not like fuel is the greatest expense in a reactor, so even if we double or triple the cost of fuel by using reproccessing/sorting techniques to get the waste down to something manageable, it'll still be cheaper than the rest of the operating expenses of the power plant.
But I also like your idea about buying it under centres of gov't
Not sure I agree in this context. We're talking about using fuel cells in a power plant remember - the person I was responding to was reffering to using fuel cells to generate commercial power, which almost certainly means a plant running on natural gas.
Lets say your power plant uses propane gas. It can either burn the gas to run an electric turbine, or it can run the gas through fuel cells to produce electricity. Any scrubber system you can use with the first option will also work with the second, so unless you get signifigantly more effeciency with fuel cells, there is no difference in emmissions.
Now, with regard to using power plants to make hydrogen for use in cars, I agree, it's better than using straight hydrocarbon fuel. However, the amount of power required for electrolysis is very very high, so your best options are things like nuclear power, which means you have to convince people that nuclear power is better than the alternatives.
Just to clarify about fusion, there are a number of solutions to the neutron problem that have been proposed, and presumably more will emerge before the reactor tech is ready for widespread use.
For starters, there's using a lithium blanket in the reactor shielding. This approach uses neutron flux to breed tritium fuel from lithium; this in turn means that your secondary fuel source also serves as reactor shielding. It's a partial solution, but it will reduce the problem of reactor irradiation.
There's also the possibility of using materials in the reactor that don't produce as many dangerous isotopes when irradiated. Fission is dangerous in no small part because we can't control what decay products are going to be produced. With fusion, the only radioactives left over are going to be reactor componants - and we can determine in advance what sort of material those are made of, to limit the number of really nasty byproducts they produce. At the very least we should be able to avoid things like strontium-90.
Finally, after a century or so of fusion power, what would stop us from changing fuels? There are aneutronic fusion reactions (He3-D, or H-H-H-H for instance), and while they are much harder to create, we might be able to use them with a more mature fusion technology. Insisting that reactor irradiation will be a problem because the only easy reaction to use is D-T is like someone at the dawn of the industrial age insisting that steam power will always lead to deforestation from burning wood fuel - both work from the assumption that the technology will only advance up to a certain point and go no further.
Also, finally, saying fusion isn't a panacea is somewhat silly. From where we are standing, it is exactly that - it's a solution to several of our most serious environmental and energy problems. All our energy needs could be met with a combination of fusion power and some means of renewable mobile fuel (biofule or hydrogen most likely). The fact that it isn't perfect, and won't be cheap, doesn't make it any less attractive.
Where are you getting the fuel then?
Hydrogen doesn't occur naturally in pure form - it's always combined with something else, like a hydrocarbon chain, or water. To run a fuel cell you either have to:
1) Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine. You're still using natural gas, or possibly some other fossil fuel.
2) Use water electrolysis to get hydrogen. This requires loads of electricity. This in turn means that your hydrogen "fuel" is actually a power storage medium like a battery. You cannot run a power plant this way.
Got a link to the nebraska plant? I'd bet good money they're using option #1, and if they are, then they haven't weaned themselves of fossil fuels.
Option #2 is the only way to use truely "green" fuel cells, but it also requires a source of clean electricity - such as fusion - or else you're just moving the source of pollution from a tailpipe to a power plant.
Every time I see the idea brought up that X technology is either right around the corner, or will never happen, I take a step back and remember just how bad we humans are at seeing the future.
Remember when 2000 was going to be the year we had flying cars, moon bases and nuclear power in our homes? And how would someone making those same wild predictions have reacted to the idea of home computers? We vastly overestimated what we could do in one area, and underestimated the other. Whether this was predestined due to feasability, or whether it was a question of where we spent our research dollars, is a something I've always wondered...
Anyway, the way I've always looked at it, a new technology has several stages it must pass before we can make any assumptions about it. Each stage we get past (or get stuck at) gives us a better picture of what the future holds:
1. Does the proposed idea work within the laws of physics as we currently understand them? This is the level that perpetual motion will forever be stuck at (pardon the pun). This is also where any dreams of FTL travel and generated gravity go - they shall remain fictional unless physics opens up the possibility in in future. We can make no predictions here, other than sometimes saying "that will never work".
2. Does the technological advance require other advances first? Anything that requires fusion power, or any sort of "unobtainium" type materials, or advanced biotech, goes here. This is where the space elevator is currently stuck (another pun... ), since we can't yet produce the materials we need. Generally, anything in this category is possible, but may or may not transpire in the future - there's no way to predict either way.
3. Do we have the engineering know-how to make this work? This is often just a matter of time. Fusion power, reusable lauch vehicals and ion engines go here. I'd call this the "beta", since it's generally the stage where we are building prototypes and getting there in small steps, often with setbacks. It takes time and testing to advance out of this stage, just like in a software beta.
4. What are the practical, political, ethical, and other issues with this technology? See the hydrogen economy as an example of practical problems (ie, where do we get the energy we'd need) and human cloning as an example of an ethical problem (do we really want to do this with a human being?) Both are naturally political issues as well.
How well predictions work depends on where we are. We cannot predict the first category (except when something truely is impossible), we can rarely predict the second, we can sometimes project trends accurately enough in the third, and for the fourth one the question is often if we will, not when we can. Given where the space elevator is at the moment - a workable idea hinged on large quantities of unobtainium - I'd say we can neither predict when nor if it will happen.