No - you want heroic stature in your leaders, and you think that's what other people want as well. Some of us couldn't give a damn, so long as the leaders are good. Last election my largest information source was a nonpartisan party-vs-issues matrix, and "heroic stature" was not considered an "issue".
Don't project your prejudices onto "people" in general without evidence to back up those assertions.
Like throwing up unrelated argument after unrelated argument as each one proves to be nonsense? If you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't have to keep throwing out random pieces of the bill - you'd just state the problematic one and that would be that.
You didn't. You couldn't.
Hence, you've proved[1] quite clearly that you don't understand the bill - and that you don't give a damn about your ignorance - so there's no further point in arguing with you. Your self-imposed delusions are stronger than my patience for fixing them.
The simple fact is that bill C-74, which is identical to this one, has already been examined by privacy advocates and found to not allow warrantless wiretaps. Whatever your personal grudge against governments, they're simply not being as evil as you're claiming, in this particular instance. Get over it.
[1] You asserted the meaning of "authorized" in a passage on "authorized persons" meant that wiretaps could be conducted without warrants. However, the bill provides a clear and easy-to-find definition of "authorized", which specifies that wiretaps can only be done with warrants. Ergo, your assertion directly contradicted the text of the bill, showing that you failed to understand it. (Or were lying, but I prefer not to assume that unless given no choice.)
The reason I quoted the definition of the "authorized person" is because all sections of the bill use that definition!
You mean this definition, right at the top?
"2. (1) The following definitions apply in this Act. "authorized"
autorisée
"authorized" in relation to a person, means having authority, under the Criminal Code or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, to intercept communications."
i.e., "authorized" means "authorized under existing laws" means has a warrant.
demanding that we take a (mangled by you) word of some website (or unrelated bill C-74)
a) The website in question was linked to in the submission. RTFA. b) I have "mangled" nothing, and show all my sources. RTFA. c) The website chosen by the submitter notes that bill C-74 is not merely "related" but identical.
If you're going to rant and be abusive, at least try to be right.
The fact that the government chose not to activate some provisions at the time, which the Home Office wants to acivate now (with modifications), has little bearing on the affair.
Your original claim was that crypto is "effectively outlawed" in the UK. That claim was wrong, for the simple reason that part 3 of this Act is not the law! (At least insofar as law enforcement officers' options are concerned.)
Police in the UK have no way to compel you to turn over your encryption key. Whether this changes in the future as a result of part 3 being brought into force is cause for speculation and even concern, but the simple fact remains that something which might happen is not the same as something that has happened.
Moreover, you're extra-wrong, due to the fact that "crypto is outlawed" is a far cry from "can be compelled to turn over encryption keys". The most obvious difference is that if crypto is truly outlawed, the government can observe everyone's communications, all the time. By contrast, if you're forced to turn over an encryption key, you know the government is observing those communication channels, making it only useful as a post-hoc means of collecting evidence. Very different.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing for the government to be able to do, of course, but it does mean that hyperbole of your sort is not helpful for understanding the matter.
Hence the Slashdot submission mentioning the "no warrant" part.
The part of the bill you quoted rather clearly refers to who can make these requests, not how or when they can make them. Moreover, the section you have quoted from is:
"Obligations Concerning Subscriber Information"
i.e., the "IP address from name" queries that I was talking about, and NOT any kind of wiretap.
Why are you so insistent on mischaracterizing what this bill is about? There are valid privacy concerns regarding the "IP address from name" provision without you pretending the bill is something it's not. Indeed, your kind of nonsense just makes people who are concerned about the bill look foolish, and undercuts their efforts.
wholesale, warrantless monitoring of all electronic communications -- which is what this bill actually permits
You have clearly not read either the bill or the links regarding the bill in the submission. From the FAQ from those links:
* Will these proposals mean that my online communications can be monitored at will by the police, without judicial authorization?
No.
* Will it be easier for the police to get search warrants under these proposals?
The proposals would not change the test for obtaining search warrants under Criminal Code.
This would be an excellent opportunity for you to RTFA and STFU until you know what you're talking about. (Unless spreading disinformation is your goal, of course.)
Actually the RIPA act passed already, but it was not renewed in 2005, following which the Home Office demanded that RIPA Part 3 be reinstated with modifications. This is the current debate you are referring to.
Perhaps a better question to ask is why the mod's didn't immediately flag the original post as flamebait?
Not only flag it as flamebait, but flag it as incredibly misleading.
Almost everyone here has assumed the law allows warrantless wiretapping, which is not the case. All it does is (a) require ISPs to have a setup that allows for wiretaps with warrants to take place, and (b) provide (without warrant) a mapping between IP address and customer name.
This is made quite clear in the FAQ in one of the article's links:
* Will these proposals mean that my online communications can be monitored at will by the police, without judicial authorization?
These regulations already exist in Britain and France.
Crypto is illegal in Britain and France?
Really?
Then I'm sure you'll be able to provide cites and references, 'cuz I can't find anything as extreme as what you're claiming. The most recent complaints I've found regarding the UK have been that the government is planning to allow police to compel suspects to decrypt data or divulge encryption keys.
That's (a) not "already existing" (as of today, the government's website regarding the legislation indicates that it has not yet become law), and (b) rather questionably the outlawing of crypto.
Dying in a subway bombing would suck, but how many people have really gone that way?
About 500 in the last three years (200 in Madrid, 200 in Mumbai, 40 in Moscow, and about 40 in London), so it's less far-fetched than you might think. Can you come up with 500 people whose lives have been ruined by false accusations, much less the additional 3,700 injured by those attacks?
It's a valid concern which needs to be addressed.
That being said, the odds of dying in a subway bombing are also vastly less than the odds of dying in all manner of more mundane ways, particularly car accidents (literally hundreds of times less). So it's a valid concern that needs to be addressed in a balanced way, as the grandparent poster said.
"Balanced", of course, will mean different things to different people, so - this being Canada - the end result will be a reasonable compromise.
No, you care if YOU or a loved one dies in a terrorist bombing
How do you claim to know what HE cares about better than he does? Is that not FAR more presumptive than him simply claiming to care whether you die?
Moreover, caring about the wellbeing of fellow people is so much an intrinsic part of human nature that its lack is termed a mental disorder, so I suspect that "I don't want people to care about each other" was not the message you intended to send.
A much more reasonable statement would have been "allow me the freedom to choose my own balance between security and liberty". Unfortunately, some aspects of that tradeoff are done at the government level, meaning that the extent to which individuals can make that tradeoff themselves is self-referentially itself a part of that tradeoff.
the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A. Otherwise the slippery slope scheme merely serves as a device of sophistry.
You haven't provided a shred of independent justification for the claim that "requiring ISPs to provide the name of the owner of an IP address will inevitably lead to a police state akin to Nazi Germany", meaning that - according to the above definition, your argument is particularly confusing, fallacious, illogical and/or insincere.
It would require telecom service providers to offer much greater surveillance capacity to law enforcement agencies, and would allow police to obtain subscriber name and address information from service providers upon request, without a warrant.
i.e., what they can do without a warrant is tell that you are the owner of an internet connection, but not what you have been sending down it. From the FAQ regarding the earlier version of this bill:
Currently, TSPs are permitted to disclose data on their subscribers to law enforcement agencies without a warrant or court order, but they are not required to do so. These proposals would require them to provide limited "subscriber data" to LEAs upon request.
Bill C-74 also requires TSPs to have the technical capability for interception built in to their networks, so that police are not prevented from exercising their lawful interception powers because of operational barriers.
i.e., the ISP needs to be set up such that a warrant can be executed, and needs to provide basic data on a specified individual (name/address/IP address) without a warrant. Most of the concerns raised here are directly addressed by that FAQ:
* Will these proposals mean that my online communications can be monitored at will by the police, without judicial authorization?
No.
* Do the proposals require that ISPs retain all data about their subscribers for a certain period of time?
No.
* Will it be easier for the police to get search warrants under these proposals?
The proposals would not change the test for obtaining search warrants under Criminal Code.
* Will it be easier for the police to intercept private communications under these proposals?
Yes. One of the main purposes of the lawful access proposals is to make it easier for police to intercept communications when they have judicial authorization to do so.
i.e., the "wiretapping" part is simply if police have a warrant then the ISP must have the ability to allow that warrant to be carried out. This bill does NOT authorize warrantless wiretapping!
Which, of course, is pretty much the opposite of what the story summary implies. One wonders why the author - or editors - felt it necessary to mislead us about a fairly straight-forward privacy story.
I've avoided buying games because of unreasonable programs bundled with them before (for example, Silent Storm Sentinels being lumbered with Starforce copy protection), so it's good to know I should avoid this game, too.
I wonder if they're floating this as a test balloon, or if they actually think this is a reasonable thing to do. Or whether they figure most people just won't care. I wonder how much of an impact it actually makes when people avoid games which do this kind of thing.
> Point taken, but unless those other energy sources are abundant, cheap, and accessible, > it's quite likely they'll use the energy from the oil itself.
As long as it's economic, yes, so you're right that it'll likely to continue to be the case for a while yet. I'm just pointing out that the process isn't required to work that way, so these are still viable options in the case of declining oil supplies.
> For some processes you really need oil or natural gas. For example to process canola to make > biodiesel fuel you need to spend some oil. It's hard to power that tractor on solar or nuclear > energy. To make the fertilizer to grow that canola, the primary ingredient is natural gas.
There really aren't all that many things which require petroleum-per-se, though; using it is only the way it's currently done, not the way it must be done.
I'm not sure which part of oil-to-biodiesel you're saying takes oil, but vehicles can and have been run on vegetable oil out of a deep fryer. Based on my understanding of the process, you're likely talking about hydrogenation, which is just adding hydrogen from any source -- solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is a non-fossil option for that.
Similarly, fertilizer is made with natural gas only because that's currently the cheapest source of hydrogen; solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is, again, a non-fossil option for that process (although work in modern organic farming practices suggests our current heavy fertilizer inputs may not even be necessary; the Amish, for example, get surprisingly high yields despite low chemical inputs).
Finally, of course, the tractors involved are usually diesel anyway, and so can run pretty easily on biodiesel.
Obviously, it's not going to be a fun time when petroleum supplies start running short -- no argument there. I'm just pointing out that there are alternative options for generating liquid transportation fuels that need not rely heavily on petroleum.
First, many people on slashdot will favor the "but, dude, we have technology!" argument. Many will not understand the difference between a fossil fuels energy source and their laptop.
Yeah, I was surprised by the slashdot geeks' comments as well. Seeing that programming computers is very technical, detailed, and mathematical, I was expecting the/. crowd of nerds to understand and embrace Peak Oil. Instead, it's their unwavering belief in "technological improvements" that will put this "so-called peak oil theory" to the trash bin.
I was absolutely flabbergasted by that thread over at/., you would think that they'd be able to come to grips with this faster than the normal public.
Yeah, 'cuz you're soooo open-minded and against spouting off, Mr. Comment #3.
Perhaps, if your argument didn't convince us, the problem isn't that we were unable to "come to grips with it". Maybe the problem is that your argument isn't all that convincing to someone who isn't already a believer, and that it's a whole lot harder to convince normal people than to preach to the choir.
But with paragons of rationality and open-mindedness like you guys, ready with such well-thought-out and informative responses to doubts and misgivings, I guess it's just plain ignorant (not to mention unscientific) of us to question you. Bad skeptic, no biscuit!
> Having more oil than Saudi Arabia is meaningless if you have to use 70% of it just refining the next lot.
Flawed logic, since not all energy is oil.
If we need to spend X Joules of energy to obtain X Joules of oil, then that can still be a winning proposition if the energy we spend is something we have an abundance of, such as solar or coal. Most EROEI-based complaints fail to take into account this difference, and are largely worthless as a result.
And Japanese Communists, who brought the idea of kamikaze-style suicide attacks to the Middle East?
And Polish Nihilists, who introduced suicide bombing to the modern world with the assassination of Czar Alexander II?
The notion of suicide bombings, much less suicide attacks in general, is by no means an idea unique to Muslims, and to argue otherwise is to simply display your utter ignorance.
Average vehicle lifespan in the US is 13 years, at which point a car will have been driven 145,000 miles (link).
Based on that and replacing the batteries every 100,000 miles, you'd be spending $13,000 once in 13 years, or $1,000 a year. Compare that to 145,000 miles of gas at 22mpg at $3/gallon -- $20,000, or $1,500 per year -- and you'll find that anyone moaning that "battery changes are ridiculously expensive!!" just hasn't done the math.
Mechanical Engineering Power did a study that came up with much the same results as the white paper already linked -- see here. (gas engine for comparison -- about half the well-to-wheel efficiency.)
In general, your back-of-the-envelope numbers are mostly wrong. Generating plants often exceed 50% efficiency), transmission loss is about 7%, switching chargers lose in the range of 5-20%, and overall drivetrain loss is around 55% for an electric motor, for a total of about 22% (as above).
That huge drivetrain loss is known as the "tank-to-wheel" efficiency, and it's what really kills the gas car -- those have about 14% efficiency for that process, giving them 11-12% overall efficiency (also known as "well-to-wheel" efficiency). So in general a gas-powered car takes about twice the energy to run that an all-electric car does, with hybrids somewhere in the middle. Google "well-to-wheel" and you'll find a great deal more on this.
Manufacturing costs play some role in overall energy requirements, but it's pretty minor. A typical car in the US fleet will see about 160,000 miles; at 22mph (average), that's about $22,000 of gas (at $3/gallon), which totally dwarfs the energy costs involved in constructing the car in the first place. Careful about total-lifespan costs, though -- there was a deeply bogus study that came out a few months ago that used nonsensical assumptions (e.g., "cars last for 100,000 miles, trucks for 250,000" even though the figure as measured for the US fleet is 150,000 vs. 170,000), so there's some false claims floating about.
> That 250 mile range estimate is probably at significantly lower speeds.
"The LiIon tzero will drive 250 miles in left lane traffic, in LA that means 75-80 mph. Alan Cocconi (AC Propulsion founder and chief engineer) drove it to San Diego and back without charging. On any type of standardized drive cycle it will go over 300 miles." link
> If I remember right, electric motor efficiency and power typically increase with load, > but fall off with speed
"Efficiency: 90% average, 80% at peak power" torque chart
> 1000 pounds of batteries...are equivalent to about 1.5 gallons of gas (6.3 pounds/gal). > Divide that by an efficiency of around 30% and you've got a 32:1 energy density ratio > in favor of gasoline.
Internal combustion vehicles are about 15% tank-to-wheel energy-efficient. link An all-electric vehicle is about 44% tank-to-wheels energy-efficient. link The car's web site puts its efficiency at 2.2km/MJ, vs. 0.6km/MJ for the gas cars (see here).
So an electric vehicle needs to carry about 30% the energy of a gas vehicle.
Another way to look at this is to compare to the Lotus Elise, which consensus is saying is the closest regular car on the market. The Elise gets 25mpg, and so would need 10 gallons -- 63 pounds -- to travel 250 miles, giving us a ratio of 16-to-1 in required weight.
The fuel tanks on this Peterbilt model range from 40 to 150 gallons, with an apparent midpoint of 83 gallons, giving us 525 pounds of gas or 8320 pounds of batteries. The suspensions seem to cluster around 40,000 pounds, suggesting that batteries would need to replace about 20% of the max weight capacity of a truck in order to get the same mileage as a tank of gas (although that's not taking into account weight savings in the engine and similar components).
That's a lot -- it's probably 25-30% of the freight capacity of the truck. Batteries are dense, though, so it'll take up little of the truck's volume, potentially making the result feasible for cargo that is more limited by volume than by weight. Still, I think it offers a good argument that long-haul trucking is likely to stay a liquid-fuelled activity for the forseeable future.
If you'd read TFA, you'd notice that it's warmer than 100 years ago. And 200 years ago. And 300. And 400.
And probably 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000, and a wide variety of other times. From TFA:
"recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia. ... the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years ... the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years ... there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years."
> it's clear that a stable climate is an illusion caused by man's > relatively short lifespan. This fact is as clear as the fact > that global warming is happening.
But is it happening faster than it typically does?
In many parts of the US, it's common to see temperature changes of 100 degrees over the course of a year. And it's not really a problem - plants are adapted to that cycle, animals migrate/burrow/grow or shed winter coats, people know to wear the right clothes and use the right technology, the change is gradual enough to largely avoid thermal shock to infrastructure, and so on.
If you saw a temperature change of 100 degrees over the course of an hour, though, it would be a disaster. If it happened in summer, for example, vast swathes of vegetation would freeze and die and whole populations of animals would be unprepared and freeze to death, both of which would lead to ripple effects up the food chain, including us (crop failure). Thousands of people would die as they were caught unprepared without proper clothing and heating. The immense heat differentials in the area would whip up enormous storms.
Analogous problems could happen from unusually-fast changes in global temperature -- for example, disruptions of whole ecosystems as plants and animals are unable to adjust fast enough, substantial increases in dangerous weather as energy is rapidly added to the system, flooding displacing hundreds of millions of people over the course of a few years, and so on.
Most of these problems are made worse the more rapid the change is; there's a reason flash floods are more dangerous than seepage. Add to this some of the nonlinear effects that oceanographers I know are worried about (e.g., the Gulf Stream shutting down -- which we know has happened in the past -- and drastically changing the climate of the Atlantic region), and you get the potential for immense human suffering.
Will it kill off the human species? Probably not. But using that to suggest it's "okay" is as nonsensical as saying it's "okay" to have all your limbs blown off, so long as you survive.
> trying to keep achieve stability in a chaotic system that we don't > really understand and can barely model is probably pointless.
In your opinion, perhaps. Throwing up our hands and crying "ohh, it's all too complicated" is not the approach that has led the advance of civilization and knowledge. We control chaotic systems pretty successfully every day - the turbulence around jet engines, for example - so there's reason to believe we could usefully influence other chaotic systems.
If nothing else, the simple fact that we're already influencing this chaotic system and pushing it into a state which is worse for us makes the question somewhat moot. We're already influencing the system, so we have no choice about whether to influence it, only about how. Unless you're arguing that blindly whacking away at an incompletely-understood system is just as good as employing what knowledge we do have as best as possible.
But that would be a strange claim for you to be making, given the continued success of jet engines and our continued incomplete understanding of turbulent fluids. If that's your claim, the evidence isn't on your side.
> Precisely! I was just thinking before I read your post, "They say it's > been this hot before we even had any of the technology that's making it > hotter. Why is it a problem?"
Well, it's not a problem for the planet. By the same token, the planet has withstood multiple impacts by miles-wide asteroids that caused mass extinctions and killed 90% of all higher life forms on its surface.
Neither is a problem for the planet; both would be pretty dang unpleasant for us humans living on it, though.
Slashdot Mirror
No - you want heroic stature in your leaders, and you think that's what other people want as well. Some of us couldn't give a damn, so long as the leaders are good. Last election my largest information source was a nonpartisan party-vs-issues matrix, and "heroic stature" was not considered an "issue".
Don't project your prejudices onto "people" in general without evidence to back up those assertions.
Like throwing up unrelated argument after unrelated argument as each one proves to be nonsense? If you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't have to keep throwing out random pieces of the bill - you'd just state the problematic one and that would be that.
You didn't. You couldn't.
Hence, you've proved[1] quite clearly that you don't understand the bill - and that you don't give a damn about your ignorance - so there's no further point in arguing with you. Your self-imposed delusions are stronger than my patience for fixing them.
The simple fact is that bill C-74, which is identical to this one, has already been examined by privacy advocates and found to not allow warrantless wiretaps. Whatever your personal grudge against governments, they're simply not being as evil as you're claiming, in this particular instance. Get over it.
[1] You asserted the meaning of "authorized" in a passage on "authorized persons" meant that wiretaps could be conducted without warrants. However, the bill provides a clear and easy-to-find definition of "authorized", which specifies that wiretaps can only be done with warrants. Ergo, your assertion directly contradicted the text of the bill, showing that you failed to understand it. (Or were lying, but I prefer not to assume that unless given no choice.)
You mean this definition, right at the top?
"2. (1) The following definitions apply in this Act.
"authorized"
autorisée
"authorized" in relation to a person, means having authority, under the Criminal Code or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, to intercept communications."
i.e., "authorized" means "authorized under existing laws" means has a warrant.
a) The website in question was linked to in the submission. RTFA.
b) I have "mangled" nothing, and show all my sources. RTFA.
c) The website chosen by the submitter notes that bill C-74 is not merely "related" but identical.
If you're going to rant and be abusive, at least try to be right.
Your original claim was that crypto is "effectively outlawed" in the UK. That claim was wrong, for the simple reason that part 3 of this Act is not the law! (At least insofar as law enforcement officers' options are concerned.)
Police in the UK have no way to compel you to turn over your encryption key. Whether this changes in the future as a result of part 3 being brought into force is cause for speculation and even concern, but the simple fact remains that something which might happen is not the same as something that has happened.
Moreover, you're extra-wrong, due to the fact that "crypto is outlawed" is a far cry from "can be compelled to turn over encryption keys". The most obvious difference is that if crypto is truly outlawed, the government can observe everyone's communications, all the time. By contrast, if you're forced to turn over an encryption key, you know the government is observing those communication channels, making it only useful as a post-hoc means of collecting evidence. Very different.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing for the government to be able to do, of course, but it does mean that hyperbole of your sort is not helpful for understanding the matter.
Go read the damn links before whining. From TFA:
"Bill C-416 appears to be identical to Bill C-74"
The part of the bill you quoted rather clearly refers to who can make these requests, not how or when they can make them. Moreover, the section you have quoted from is:
"Obligations Concerning Subscriber Information"
i.e., the "IP address from name" queries that I was talking about, and NOT any kind of wiretap.
Why are you so insistent on mischaracterizing what this bill is about? There are valid privacy concerns regarding the "IP address from name" provision without you pretending the bill is something it's not. Indeed, your kind of nonsense just makes people who are concerned about the bill look foolish, and undercuts their efforts.
You have clearly not read either the bill or the links regarding the bill in the submission. From the FAQ from those links:
This would be an excellent opportunity for you to RTFA and STFU until you know what you're talking about. (Unless spreading disinformation is your goal, of course.)
You are mistaken:
Part 3 of RIPA has never been brought into force.
Evidence suggests that perhaps you should inform yourself better about these issues.
Not only flag it as flamebait, but flag it as incredibly misleading.
Almost everyone here has assumed the law allows warrantless wiretapping, which is not the case. All it does is (a) require ISPs to have a setup that allows for wiretaps with warrants to take place, and (b) provide (without warrant) a mapping between IP address and customer name.
This is made quite clear in the FAQ in one of the article's links:
Crypto is illegal in Britain and France?
Really?
Then I'm sure you'll be able to provide cites and references, 'cuz I can't find anything as extreme as what you're claiming. The most recent complaints I've found regarding the UK have been that the government is planning to allow police to compel suspects to decrypt data or divulge encryption keys.
That's (a) not "already existing" (as of today, the government's website regarding the legislation indicates that it has not yet become law), and (b) rather questionably the outlawing of crypto.
About 500 in the last three years (200 in Madrid, 200 in Mumbai, 40 in Moscow, and about 40 in London), so it's less far-fetched than you might think. Can you come up with 500 people whose lives have been ruined by false accusations, much less the additional 3,700 injured by those attacks?
It's a valid concern which needs to be addressed.
That being said, the odds of dying in a subway bombing are also vastly less than the odds of dying in all manner of more mundane ways, particularly car accidents (literally hundreds of times less). So it's a valid concern that needs to be addressed in a balanced way, as the grandparent poster said.
"Balanced", of course, will mean different things to different people, so - this being Canada - the end result will be a reasonable compromise.
How do you claim to know what HE cares about better than he does? Is that not FAR more presumptive than him simply claiming to care whether you die?
Moreover, caring about the wellbeing of fellow people is so much an intrinsic part of human nature that its lack is termed a mental disorder, so I suspect that "I don't want people to care about each other" was not the message you intended to send.
A much more reasonable statement would have been "allow me the freedom to choose my own balance between security and liberty". Unfortunately, some aspects of that tradeoff are done at the government level, meaning that the extent to which individuals can make that tradeoff themselves is self-referentially itself a part of that tradeoff.
Classic Slippery Slope fallacy:
You haven't provided a shred of independent justification for the claim that "requiring ISPs to provide the name of the owner of an IP address will inevitably lead to a police state akin to Nazi Germany", meaning that - according to the above definition, your argument is particularly confusing, fallacious, illogical and/or insincere.
Which is not helpful.
They're not even trying to, at least based on the links provided in the story summary.
From here, we read:
i.e., what they can do without a warrant is tell that you are the owner of an internet connection, but not what you have been sending down it. From the FAQ regarding the earlier version of this bill:
i.e., the ISP needs to be set up such that a warrant can be executed, and needs to provide basic data on a specified individual (name/address/IP address) without a warrant. Most of the concerns raised here are directly addressed by that FAQ:
i.e., the "wiretapping" part is simply if police have a warrant then the ISP must have the ability to allow that warrant to be carried out. This bill does NOT authorize warrantless wiretapping!
Which, of course, is pretty much the opposite of what the story summary implies. One wonders why the author - or editors - felt it necessary to mislead us about a fairly straight-forward privacy story.
Good to know.
I've avoided buying games because of unreasonable programs bundled with them before (for example, Silent Storm Sentinels being lumbered with Starforce copy protection), so it's good to know I should avoid this game, too.
I wonder if they're floating this as a test balloon, or if they actually think this is a reasonable thing to do. Or whether they figure most people just won't care. I wonder how much of an impact it actually makes when people avoid games which do this kind of thing.
> Point taken, but unless those other energy sources are abundant, cheap, and accessible,
> it's quite likely they'll use the energy from the oil itself.
As long as it's economic, yes, so you're right that it'll likely to continue to be the case for a while yet. I'm just pointing out that the process isn't required to work that way, so these are still viable options in the case of declining oil supplies.
> For some processes you really need oil or natural gas. For example to process canola to make
> biodiesel fuel you need to spend some oil. It's hard to power that tractor on solar or nuclear
> energy. To make the fertilizer to grow that canola, the primary ingredient is natural gas.
There really aren't all that many things which require petroleum-per-se, though; using it is only the way it's currently done, not the way it must be done.
I'm not sure which part of oil-to-biodiesel you're saying takes oil, but vehicles can and have been run on vegetable oil out of a deep fryer. Based on my understanding of the process, you're likely talking about hydrogenation, which is just adding hydrogen from any source -- solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is a non-fossil option for that.
Similarly, fertilizer is made with natural gas only because that's currently the cheapest source of hydrogen; solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is, again, a non-fossil option for that process (although work in modern organic farming practices suggests our current heavy fertilizer inputs may not even be necessary; the Amish, for example, get surprisingly high yields despite low chemical inputs).
Finally, of course, the tractors involved are usually diesel anyway, and so can run pretty easily on biodiesel.
Obviously, it's not going to be a fun time when petroleum supplies start running short -- no argument there. I'm just pointing out that there are alternative options for generating liquid transportation fuels that need not rely heavily on petroleum.
Okay, will do. From the site:
Yeah, 'cuz you're soooo open-minded and against spouting off, Mr. Comment #3.
Perhaps, if your argument didn't convince us, the problem isn't that we were unable to "come to grips with it". Maybe the problem is that your argument isn't all that convincing to someone who isn't already a believer, and that it's a whole lot harder to convince normal people than to preach to the choir.
But with paragons of rationality and open-mindedness like you guys, ready with such well-thought-out and informative responses to doubts and misgivings, I guess it's just plain ignorant (not to mention unscientific) of us to question you. Bad skeptic, no biscuit!
> Having more oil than Saudi Arabia is meaningless if you have to use 70% of it just refining the next lot.
Flawed logic, since not all energy is oil.
If we need to spend X Joules of energy to obtain X Joules of oil, then that can still be a winning proposition if the energy we spend is something we have an abundance of, such as solar or coal. Most EROEI-based complaints fail to take into account this difference, and are largely worthless as a result.
> Every homicide bomber in the western world is a Moslem. Sorry, you lose.
Even the non-religious Tamil Tigers, who invented the suicide vest and as of 2000 were "unequivocally the most effective and brutal terrorist organization ever to utilize suicide terrorism"?
And Japanese Communists, who brought the idea of kamikaze-style suicide attacks to the Middle East?
And Polish Nihilists, who introduced suicide bombing to the modern world with the assassination of Czar Alexander II?
The notion of suicide bombings, much less suicide attacks in general, is by no means an idea unique to Muslims, and to argue otherwise is to simply display your utter ignorance.
Average vehicle lifespan in the US is 13 years, at which point a car will have been driven 145,000 miles (link).
Based on that and replacing the batteries every 100,000 miles, you'd be spending $13,000 once in 13 years, or $1,000 a year. Compare that to 145,000 miles of gas at 22mpg at $3/gallon -- $20,000, or $1,500 per year -- and you'll find that anyone moaning that "battery changes are ridiculously expensive!!" just hasn't done the math.
Mechanical Engineering Power did a study that came up with much the same results as the white paper already linked -- see here. (gas engine for comparison -- about half the well-to-wheel efficiency.)
In general, your back-of-the-envelope numbers are mostly wrong. Generating plants often exceed 50% efficiency), transmission loss is about 7%, switching chargers lose in the range of 5-20%, and overall drivetrain loss is around 55% for an electric motor, for a total of about 22% (as above).
That huge drivetrain loss is known as the "tank-to-wheel" efficiency, and it's what really kills the gas car -- those have about 14% efficiency for that process, giving them 11-12% overall efficiency (also known as "well-to-wheel" efficiency). So in general a gas-powered car takes about twice the energy to run that an all-electric car does, with hybrids somewhere in the middle. Google "well-to-wheel" and you'll find a great deal more on this.
Manufacturing costs play some role in overall energy requirements, but it's pretty minor. A typical car in the US fleet will see about 160,000 miles; at 22mph (average), that's about $22,000 of gas (at $3/gallon), which totally dwarfs the energy costs involved in constructing the car in the first place. Careful about total-lifespan costs, though -- there was a deeply bogus study that came out a few months ago that used nonsensical assumptions (e.g., "cars last for 100,000 miles, trucks for 250,000" even though the figure as measured for the US fleet is 150,000 vs. 170,000), so there's some false claims floating about.
> That 250 mile range estimate is probably at significantly lower speeds.
"The LiIon tzero will drive 250 miles in left lane traffic, in LA that means 75-80 mph.
Alan Cocconi (AC Propulsion founder and chief engineer) drove it to San Diego and back
without charging. On any type of standardized drive cycle it will go over 300 miles." link
> If I remember right, electric motor efficiency and power typically increase with load,
> but fall off with speed
"Efficiency: 90% average, 80% at peak power" torque chart
> 1000 pounds of batteries...are equivalent to about 1.5 gallons of gas (6.3 pounds/gal).
> Divide that by an efficiency of around 30% and you've got a 32:1 energy density ratio
> in favor of gasoline.
Internal combustion vehicles are about 15% tank-to-wheel energy-efficient. link
An all-electric vehicle is about 44% tank-to-wheels energy-efficient. link
The car's web site puts its efficiency at 2.2km/MJ, vs. 0.6km/MJ for the gas cars (see here).
So an electric vehicle needs to carry about 30% the energy of a gas vehicle.
Another way to look at this is to compare to the Lotus Elise, which consensus is saying is the closest regular car on the market. The Elise gets 25mpg, and so would need 10 gallons -- 63 pounds -- to travel 250 miles, giving us a ratio of 16-to-1 in required weight.
The fuel tanks on this Peterbilt model range from 40 to 150 gallons, with an apparent midpoint of 83 gallons, giving us 525 pounds of gas or 8320 pounds of batteries. The suspensions seem to cluster around 40,000 pounds, suggesting that batteries would need to replace about 20% of the max weight capacity of a truck in order to get the same mileage as a tank of gas (although that's not taking into account weight savings in the engine and similar components).
That's a lot -- it's probably 25-30% of the freight capacity of the truck. Batteries are dense, though, so it'll take up little of the truck's volume, potentially making the result feasible for cargo that is more limited by volume than by weight. Still, I think it offers a good argument that long-haul trucking is likely to stay a liquid-fuelled activity for the forseeable future.
If you'd read TFA, you'd notice that it's warmer than 100 years ago. And 200 years ago. And 300. And 400.
And probably 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000, and a wide variety of other times. From TFA:
"recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.
...
the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years
...
the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years
...
there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years."
> relatively short lifespan. This fact is as clear as the fact
> that global warming is happening.
But is it happening faster than it typically does?
In many parts of the US, it's common to see temperature changes of 100 degrees over the course of a year. And it's not really a problem - plants are adapted to that cycle, animals migrate/burrow/grow or shed winter coats, people know to wear the right clothes and use the right technology, the change is gradual enough to largely avoid thermal shock to infrastructure, and so on.
If you saw a temperature change of 100 degrees over the course of an hour, though, it would be a disaster. If it happened in summer, for example, vast swathes of vegetation would freeze and die and whole populations of animals would be unprepared and freeze to death, both of which would lead to ripple effects up the food chain, including us (crop failure). Thousands of people would die as they were caught unprepared without proper clothing and heating. The immense heat differentials in the area would whip up enormous storms.
Analogous problems could happen from unusually-fast changes in global temperature -- for example, disruptions of whole ecosystems as plants and animals are unable to adjust fast enough, substantial increases in dangerous weather as energy is rapidly added to the system, flooding displacing hundreds of millions of people over the course of a few years, and so on.
Most of these problems are made worse the more rapid the change is; there's a reason flash floods are more dangerous than seepage. Add to this some of the nonlinear effects that oceanographers I know are worried about (e.g., the Gulf Stream shutting down -- which we know has happened in the past -- and drastically changing the climate of the Atlantic region), and you get the potential for immense human suffering.
Will it kill off the human species? Probably not. But using that to suggest it's "okay" is as nonsensical as saying it's "okay" to have all your limbs blown off, so long as you survive.
> trying to keep achieve stability in a chaotic system that we don't
> really understand and can barely model is probably pointless.
In your opinion, perhaps. Throwing up our hands and crying "ohh, it's all too complicated" is not the approach that has led the advance of civilization and knowledge. We control chaotic systems pretty successfully every day - the turbulence around jet engines, for example - so there's reason to believe we could usefully influence other chaotic systems.
If nothing else, the simple fact that we're already influencing this chaotic system and pushing it into a state which is worse for us makes the question somewhat moot. We're already influencing the system, so we have no choice about whether to influence it, only about how. Unless you're arguing that blindly whacking away at an incompletely-understood system is just as good as employing what knowledge we do have as best as possible.
But that would be a strange claim for you to be making, given the continued success of jet engines and our continued incomplete understanding of turbulent fluids. If that's your claim, the evidence isn't on your side.
> Precisely! I was just thinking before I read your post, "They say it's
> been this hot before we even had any of the technology that's making it
> hotter. Why is it a problem?"
Well, it's not a problem for the planet. By the same token, the planet has withstood multiple impacts by miles-wide asteroids that caused mass extinctions and killed 90% of all higher life forms on its surface.
Neither is a problem for the planet; both would be pretty dang unpleasant for us humans living on it, though.