I think the point is that a large-enough number of candidates plus a random selection equals statistical trust - the larger the base, the less likely it is that there isn't at least one uncompromised notary in your random sample. A CA will always have the single-point-of-failure problem. While infiltrating Thawte certainly isn't something your average chinese hacker kid can do, it is certainly within the abilities of the NSA, or the KGB. The "web of trust" approach and the "we pick someone at random from a large crowd" approach both make it prohibitively expensive to compromise the sources of trust.
If you pick 5 sources at random, even from a crowd where 50% have been compromised, you still have a 1-(0.5^5) ~= 97% chance of having at least one uncompromised trust source. That's a pretty good record against an enemy who could compromise half of what could be millions of candidates.
Having been in the field for years, I agree that most of us are less happy than Joe Average. But correlation does not causation make. Are we unhappy because we're IT Security people, or are we IT security people because we're unhappy? Or is a third variable causing both?
My guess is on the third. As an IT security guy, you need a certain mindset, one that doesn't exactly lead to happiness. "Ignorance is bliss", remember? If you're a critical person, one that looks for flaws, one that goes around constantly wondering "what could go wrong?", for whom "good enough" isn't - that and other things like it are good pre-conditions for IT security people, and bad pre-conditions if you're looking for happiness.
Financial calculations are fairly simple math, and there are libraries or modules available for all major languages. I fail to see what the "special" advantage of Cobol is, aside from the legacy.
And to the anonymous coward: As someone who studied math, I find "a = b+10" easier to read than "ADD 10 TO B GIVING A" or whatever the correct Cobol syntax is (sorry, it's been 10 years or so).
I'm seriously trying not to troll, I'm hoping to get an answer. Every language has its strengths, I just don't know what Cobol's strength is, despite having learnt it and written programs in it.
How much more do we, Americans, have to take before we take action?
Making television illegal would certainly get any politician kicked out of any office. Insisting on a sound, scientific basis any analysis for decisions instead of catering to religious idiots, lobbyists or special-interest groups would also do the job.
Oh, you meant in like corruption and lies? Nah, the number of politicians who ever lost their careers over that is vanishingly small. And that's not an american problem alone.
Seriously, what are the advantages of Cobol? I learnt the damn language and I can't think of one thing that's better in Cobol compared to pretty much every other programming language I know. Ok, excluding BASIC.
Can someone please have mercy and put it down for good? On the list of programming languages that really, really deserve to die, Cobol is way up top, even above visual basic.
Know what, the guy is right. Not the anonymous submitter (who complains about anonymity - the irony), but the canadian privacy guy.
Why? Because he's hit the nail right on the head. If I'm wrongfully accused of X, or even just appear as a witness in such a case, you will get a hit and a court document when you put "Tom + X" into Google. Sure, if you read the document, you'll find out what really happened - if! We here on/. should know very, very well that "RTFA" isn't an empty phrase.
Especially employers usually wish to know a lot more than they really need to know. My sexual perversions and my hobbies shouldn't interest my employer. But if they show up on a Google search, he probably can't help but be influenced by them, since in the end those people are humans, too. So if my hobby is eating raw insects and that's something (s)he finds incredibly disgusting, (s)he can't help project that disgust, that's just human nature.
Same with court cases, especially historic. Yeah, maybe Joe was jailed for drug dealing. Maybe that was 1982 and it was a first and minor offense. And he's learnt his lesson and came out in 1984 the perfect citizen. And maybe, just maybe, the HR chief's daughter died of cocaine two years ago. Joe won't get the job, despite there being no rational reason.
Apparently, your strength is all in the willpower, because the brains part would've told you that it's highly likely that if it wasn't that bad, the most likely reason was that you didn't do it right. That includes the proper context. There's a massive difference between playing around in the garage with friends, and being subject to the same treatment in Gitmo every day with no end in sight by guys who are most decidedly not your friends.
The last part is more important. Child porn means nothing to the guardians of freedom, as the CIA, NSA, etc. see themselves. I wouldn't even put it beyond them to earn money for their black operations from sources like that, after all they're quite active in the drug business as well.
They'd not use it in a public court case, much rather let the defendant go free and maintain the illusion that there is no backdoor. In fact, their goal would have to be that whether or not there is a backdoor, we (the public) can't say for certain. That serves both purposes - if there is, we don't know and rely on PGP more than we should, and if there isn't, we don't know for sure and trust PGP less than we could.
That is the classic weasel American answer. You can't eradicate homelessness, so don't do anything.
First, I'm not american. Second, the point wasn't to do nothing, the point was to not try the impossible - you have to stop somewhere because of limited ressources, and that "somewhere" will be well before the problem is "solved".
Homelessness CAN of course be eradicated. For instance, shoot all homeless people.
Agreed. I should have explicitly mentioned that I was speaking within the context of what society and laws allow us to do.
That is wrong on so many level. You act like if the only problem you have with the homeless is that they prevent you to use the bank. If you could use the bank, then there is ZERO reason for you to do anything for homeless people. THIS is the mindset that must change.
Agreed. There's a lot more about homeless people that bothers me than just them using a bench I'd rather use. The smell, for example, is horrible. For that reason alone, I'm quite happy that a reasonable part of my taxes is spent getting them off the street (and into a shower, preferably). I'm not happy at all with even a cent being spent on making living on the street any more comfortable. Be that benches or meals delivered. In fact, whoever delivers those meals to the homeless right in the city center is a crazy person. They should drop flyers there showing the way to the meal place, which is a little remote (within walking distance, but not right on fucking main street!).
Please, if you can solve the homeless problem for a reasonable amount of money, I'm all ears. However, we part ways when you say "if we can't get them off the streets, we should at least make living there as comfortable as possible". No, no, no. We do not want to give them any incentives to stay homeless, on the contrary. It should be as hard as possible, and they should want to get away from that as much as possible. If they need help to do so - as I said, as long as it's for a reasonable price, I'm all for it.
You know, our difference is funny. You say that I think "we can't solve it, so we should do nothing". Which, btw., I don't. I think that you think "we can't solve it, so we should invite it", well, a bit exaggerated.
Well, in fact we might be reaching the point of inconciliable differences. I see governmental subsidies as black and white, because I consider taxation as theft.
On a personal level, I agree. On the level of society, it's just one arbitrarily selected compromise to pay for public services. Another option would be that you have to pay each and every time you use a public service - including roads, courts, police and firefighters. In some countries you already do pay sometimes (e.g. toll roads), but that pay is very rarely enough to cover the real costs.
There are also many public services that are less visible. Laws, for example. The rule of law is one of the basic foundations of our society. And now we enter the territory of positive externalities - the fact that we have laws and that they are enforced gives you and me a benefit, even if we never have to make actual use of a court or police. It allows us to base decisions on trust where we have no personal relationship, because we know that if push comes to shove, we can enforce the contract.
There might be other ways to pay for the base details of society, but so far nobody has come up with one that has a majority of people convinced.
You've pointed out very correctly that regulation is one of the few ways in which the government can take care of environmental issues. But it is far from the most effective one. I'm of the opinion that this should be looked as a property rights issue.
But it's not. The environment as a whole is not property and defining it as such won't change that fact. Global warming is one evidence that a deal with the neighbours isn't enough. People thousands of miles away can be affected, and at least so far we have no efficient way to make global contracts with the rest of humanity.
I do totally agree that government spending is often wasteful and certainly not the most efficient way of handling money. However, on a country scale, we have yet to find a better one that works - for good or bad, governments work. Maybe they work badly, but they work. All alternatives have yet to prove that they share that feature.
On the side of the factory or plant, taxes based on the amount of pollution would solve the incentive problem. In most countries, such taxes already exist or are being worked on. I personally would make it a closed system in which the taxes that the polluters pay become the subsidies for the development of cleaner alternatives. But that's a personal preference of creating small, independent systems instead of giant assemblies.
Finally, I have learnt recently that bureaucracy is not a government problem, it's a human problem. I used to think it can't be that hard, but once you are in a position where you allocate considerable ressources to people, you find out that in order to do justice to everyone, things become quite complicated very quickly. Every detail has a reason - not always a good one. Large companies also develop bureaucracies. It's not a visible because it isn't as public, but it's there.
However, I believe it is short-sighted. Is homelessness the problem? That assumes that it can be solved. I claim that it can not, like unemployment. You can reduce it, but not eliminate it. Economists know well that there is a certain level of unemployment that you will always have, because of people moving, changing jobs or careers, companies going bancrupt, or people simply having a job that nobody in the area needs. Even in a perfect economy, you'll have some unemployed people. They will likely find new jobs soon, but by then other people will be unemployed. I think the rate of "structural unemployment" is estimated to be between 0.5% and 1%.
Back to topic: I think the same holds true for homelessness. There will always be someone without a home. He might be drunk, ill, crazy or simply lazy. For whatever reason, in a city of one or more million people, you will have some homeless ones. For various reasons, they also tend to accumulate in certain areas of the city. Usually the same ones where public spaces are (that might be one reason, though there's also a third variable linking the two).
Anyways, "helping" is, like all things, subject to diminishing returns on investment. If you have 1000 homeless in your city today, maybe sum X will get half of them off the street. But it won't cost X again to get the other off the street. More likely, it'll cost X again to get half of the remaining half off the street, and so on, until you run out of money and still have homeless left. Maybe just 50. Massive improvement.
Now, ignoring kind feelings and all, explain to me, taxpayer Joe Average, who already paid a whole lot to get those 950 homeless a shelter, why the remaining 50 still prevent me from using that bank, which I also paid for?
There's always a line somewhere. The differences between various ethics is just where it's drawn and what reasons are given.
The $5 mio. was not the initial price-tag. It was the accumulated cost, mostly of maintainance, over a period of four years. So it's not development costs, but maintainance, cleaning (the self-clean broke down), etc.
I don't understandy why, either - care to elaborate? What is wrong with society when it tries to make sure public stuff is used for the intended purpose?
Ah, OK, so what you're pushing for is really government subsidies.:-)
Actually, no. I'm pointing out that - like most of the real world - they aren't a black/white, good/bad issue. There are many places where government subsidies are useful, and just as many where they are harmful.
And correct again, the energy market is heavily regulated. Rightfully so, I would say, because regulation is one of the few ways in which the current system can take care of externalities. That, going back to the start of the discussion, is the whole point: The environment is an externality. Pure economic thinking does not get you to the point of doing anything to preserve it.
Yes, modern coal plants are fairly efficient. Modern wind turbines as well, the subsidies were necessary to get the technology advanced enough. For all I know, modern wind turbines are profitable without subsidies.
In the developing world? The US and China alone are responsible for 2/5ths of the world's CO2 emissions. it's around 22% for the US alone! So, don't neglect the importance of the green economy growth in the US which is where it'll do the most good.
Correct. There's still the other 3/5th (i.e. the majority), however. One of their important aspects is that they're growing, and fast. That's why they're called "developing". Reduced emissions (CO2 and others) in the US is great, but world-wide it won't make a difference if the rest of the world continues polluting.
I do disagree - and heavily - on the second part. The US isn't very influencial when it comes to green technology. In fact, almost all of it was researched and developed outside the US. While the US puts up a good number of wind turbines, for example, the majority of them comes from Germany, which thanks to government subsidies has been a world leader in wind energy for 10 years or so. It's been only after many years of government "interference" that the technology became competitive. Meanwhile, the "free market" still makes coal plants a highly profitable investment.
to a new scheme in which monsters drop health orbs on the ground that refill your health when you touch them.
What exactly is new about that? I've played a hundred or so games that used that system, many of them 10 or 20 years old (you know, back when action games didn't have an inventory).
There's nothing new in Diabolo, not in 3, not in 2, not in the first one. It's an excellent and fun implementation of very old game concepts, but I've yet to see anything in it that wasn't done before.
So please, I know this is/., but try to get the facts right every now and then. They changed the system to a different one. Nothing new about it.
For each electric car in the street it's one less CO2 emitting one. So the growth of the 'green' market is directly and inversely proportional to the CO2 emissions worldwide.
Re-read my last answer. You completely ignore that at the same time your one electric car is put on the street, ten or twenty gasoline-powered cars are also put on the street elsewhere (predominently in the developing world). So if you move from the one example car to the whole picture, CO2 emissions are anything but falling.
Estimates on those numbers, as well as the numbers of coal plants being opened in China, India, etc. are easily available in the news or Google.
Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I'm tired of hearing that.
A single idea very rarely is valuable. However, a connected string of ideas can have a value of many millions. With that I mean not just the original "let's do X" thought, but the string of how to do it at all, how to do it well, how to do it in a commercially viable way, etc. - it's ideas that count, for most of the actual implementation you can hire people.
The value of people like Miyamoto is that they don't just have isolated ideas, but can string them together to create something of value. But his value is still in the ideas he has. Don't confuse "initial flash of thought" with "idea", that's not the same thing.
On average, the public knows nothing. Everyone of us has his fields of knowledge, but almost all of us have more fields that we know nothing (or very little) about than we have fields of knowledge. So on average, we know nothing, because in any random sample there will almost certainly be more people with zero (or very little) knowledge of any specific field than there are people who happen to know something about it.
That's true of science, but also of everything else that's not trivial daily-life stuff.
And that's the built-in problem of democracy. For science, the problem doubles because it's easier to convince people with rhetorics and fancy pictures than with numbers and facts.
Oh, so you know WHEN it will be too late to reverse climate change? Share it with us please.
I don't and I didn't claim I do. But even by the most optimistic figures, "green" energy generation grows much slower than CO2 emission does. Given that, I don't need any dates, simple extrapolation tells you that unless green energy grows much faster, its growth alone won't be enough, and CO2 reduction is required in addition.
And unless it wasn't clear as it should be to anyone informed about the topic, of course there is no money directly in destroying the environment, at least I'm not aware of anyone paying for that. The money is in doing things that destroy the environment. e.g. running a coal power plant is a pretty profitable thing to do - so much that lots and lots of new ones are being built every year.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that a large-enough number of candidates plus a random selection equals statistical trust - the larger the base, the less likely it is that there isn't at least one uncompromised notary in your random sample.
A CA will always have the single-point-of-failure problem. While infiltrating Thawte certainly isn't something your average chinese hacker kid can do, it is certainly within the abilities of the NSA, or the KGB. The "web of trust" approach and the "we pick someone at random from a large crowd" approach both make it prohibitively expensive to compromise the sources of trust.
If you pick 5 sources at random, even from a crowd where 50% have been compromised, you still have a 1-(0.5^5) ~= 97% chance of having at least one uncompromised trust source. That's a pretty good record against an enemy who could compromise half of what could be millions of candidates.
Having been in the field for years, I agree that most of us are less happy than Joe Average. But correlation does not causation make. Are we unhappy because we're IT Security people, or are we IT security people because we're unhappy? Or is a third variable causing both?
My guess is on the third. As an IT security guy, you need a certain mindset, one that doesn't exactly lead to happiness. "Ignorance is bliss", remember? If you're a critical person, one that looks for flaws, one that goes around constantly wondering "what could go wrong?", for whom "good enough" isn't - that and other things like it are good pre-conditions for IT security people, and bad pre-conditions if you're looking for happiness.
Thanks for the answer. I think I'm starting to get it, but I lack experience in the precise environment to judge it fully.
Financial calculations are fairly simple math, and there are libraries or modules available for all major languages. I fail to see what the "special" advantage of Cobol is, aside from the legacy.
And to the anonymous coward: As someone who studied math, I find "a = b+10" easier to read than "ADD 10 TO B GIVING A" or whatever the correct Cobol syntax is (sorry, it's been 10 years or so).
I'm seriously trying not to troll, I'm hoping to get an answer. Every language has its strengths, I just don't know what Cobol's strength is, despite having learnt it and written programs in it.
How much more do we, Americans, have to take before we take action?
Making television illegal would certainly get any politician kicked out of any office. Insisting on a sound, scientific basis any analysis for decisions instead of catering to religious idiots, lobbyists or special-interest groups would also do the job.
Oh, you meant in like corruption and lies? Nah, the number of politicians who ever lost their careers over that is vanishingly small. And that's not an american problem alone.
Actually, I don't like Java, either. :)
Seriously, what are the advantages of Cobol? I learnt the damn language and I can't think of one thing that's better in Cobol compared to pretty much every other programming language I know. Ok, excluding BASIC.
Cobol is not dead
Can someone please have mercy and put it down for good? On the list of programming languages that really, really deserve to die, Cobol is way up top, even above visual basic.
Know what, the guy is right. Not the anonymous submitter (who complains about anonymity - the irony), but the canadian privacy guy.
Why? Because he's hit the nail right on the head. If I'm wrongfully accused of X, or even just appear as a witness in such a case, you will get a hit and a court document when you put "Tom + X" into Google. Sure, if you read the document, you'll find out what really happened - if! We here on /. should know very, very well that "RTFA" isn't an empty phrase.
Especially employers usually wish to know a lot more than they really need to know. My sexual perversions and my hobbies shouldn't interest my employer. But if they show up on a Google search, he probably can't help but be influenced by them, since in the end those people are humans, too. So if my hobby is eating raw insects and that's something (s)he finds incredibly disgusting, (s)he can't help project that disgust, that's just human nature.
Same with court cases, especially historic. Yeah, maybe Joe was jailed for drug dealing. Maybe that was 1982 and it was a first and minor offense. And he's learnt his lesson and came out in 1984 the perfect citizen. And maybe, just maybe, the HR chief's daughter died of cocaine two years ago. Joe won't get the job, despite there being no rational reason.
Apparently, your strength is all in the willpower, because the brains part would've told you that it's highly likely that if it wasn't that bad, the most likely reason was that you didn't do it right. That includes the proper context. There's a massive difference between playing around in the garage with friends, and being subject to the same treatment in Gitmo every day with no end in sight by guys who are most decidedly not your friends.
The last part is more important. Child porn means nothing to the guardians of freedom, as the CIA, NSA, etc. see themselves. I wouldn't even put it beyond them to earn money for their black operations from sources like that, after all they're quite active in the drug business as well.
They'd not use it in a public court case, much rather let the defendant go free and maintain the illusion that there is no backdoor. In fact, their goal would have to be that whether or not there is a backdoor, we (the public) can't say for certain. That serves both purposes - if there is, we don't know and rely on PGP more than we should, and if there isn't, we don't know for sure and trust PGP less than we could.
Because everyone can join, whereas a "closed beta" means that only selected testers can join.
He was austrian. You know, we are very precise and stuff over here.
That is the classic weasel American answer. You can't eradicate homelessness, so don't do anything.
First, I'm not american. Second, the point wasn't to do nothing, the point was to not try the impossible - you have to stop somewhere because of limited ressources, and that "somewhere" will be well before the problem is "solved".
Homelessness CAN of course be eradicated. For instance, shoot all homeless people.
Agreed. I should have explicitly mentioned that I was speaking within the context of what society and laws allow us to do.
That is wrong on so many level. You act like if the only problem you have with the homeless is that they prevent you to use the bank. If you could use the bank, then there is ZERO reason for you to do anything for homeless people. THIS is the mindset that must change.
Agreed. There's a lot more about homeless people that bothers me than just them using a bench I'd rather use. The smell, for example, is horrible. For that reason alone, I'm quite happy that a reasonable part of my taxes is spent getting them off the street (and into a shower, preferably). I'm not happy at all with even a cent being spent on making living on the street any more comfortable. Be that benches or meals delivered. In fact, whoever delivers those meals to the homeless right in the city center is a crazy person. They should drop flyers there showing the way to the meal place, which is a little remote (within walking distance, but not right on fucking main street!).
Please, if you can solve the homeless problem for a reasonable amount of money, I'm all ears. However, we part ways when you say "if we can't get them off the streets, we should at least make living there as comfortable as possible". No, no, no. We do not want to give them any incentives to stay homeless, on the contrary. It should be as hard as possible, and they should want to get away from that as much as possible. If they need help to do so - as I said, as long as it's for a reasonable price, I'm all for it.
You know, our difference is funny.
You say that I think "we can't solve it, so we should do nothing". Which, btw., I don't.
I think that you think "we can't solve it, so we should invite it", well, a bit exaggerated.
Well, in fact we might be reaching the point of inconciliable differences. I see governmental subsidies as black and white, because I consider taxation as theft.
On a personal level, I agree. On the level of society, it's just one arbitrarily selected compromise to pay for public services. Another option would be that you have to pay each and every time you use a public service - including roads, courts, police and firefighters. In some countries you already do pay sometimes (e.g. toll roads), but that pay is very rarely enough to cover the real costs.
There are also many public services that are less visible. Laws, for example. The rule of law is one of the basic foundations of our society. And now we enter the territory of positive externalities - the fact that we have laws and that they are enforced gives you and me a benefit, even if we never have to make actual use of a court or police. It allows us to base decisions on trust where we have no personal relationship, because we know that if push comes to shove, we can enforce the contract.
There might be other ways to pay for the base details of society, but so far nobody has come up with one that has a majority of people convinced.
You've pointed out very correctly that regulation is one of the few ways in which the government can take care of environmental issues. But it is far from the most effective one. I'm of the opinion that this should be looked as a property rights issue.
But it's not. The environment as a whole is not property and defining it as such won't change that fact. Global warming is one evidence that a deal with the neighbours isn't enough. People thousands of miles away can be affected, and at least so far we have no efficient way to make global contracts with the rest of humanity.
I do totally agree that government spending is often wasteful and certainly not the most efficient way of handling money. However, on a country scale, we have yet to find a better one that works - for good or bad, governments work. Maybe they work badly, but they work. All alternatives have yet to prove that they share that feature.
On the side of the factory or plant, taxes based on the amount of pollution would solve the incentive problem. In most countries, such taxes already exist or are being worked on. I personally would make it a closed system in which the taxes that the polluters pay become the subsidies for the development of cleaner alternatives. But that's a personal preference of creating small, independent systems instead of giant assemblies.
Finally, I have learnt recently that bureaucracy is not a government problem, it's a human problem. I used to think it can't be that hard, but once you are in a position where you allocate considerable ressources to people, you find out that in order to do justice to everyone, things become quite complicated very quickly. Every detail has a reason - not always a good one. Large companies also develop bureaucracies. It's not a visible because it isn't as public, but it's there.
Okay, that's an acceptable answer.
However, I believe it is short-sighted. Is homelessness the problem? That assumes that it can be solved. I claim that it can not, like unemployment. You can reduce it, but not eliminate it. Economists know well that there is a certain level of unemployment that you will always have, because of people moving, changing jobs or careers, companies going bancrupt, or people simply having a job that nobody in the area needs. Even in a perfect economy, you'll have some unemployed people. They will likely find new jobs soon, but by then other people will be unemployed. I think the rate of "structural unemployment" is estimated to be between 0.5% and 1%.
Back to topic: I think the same holds true for homelessness. There will always be someone without a home. He might be drunk, ill, crazy or simply lazy. For whatever reason, in a city of one or more million people, you will have some homeless ones. For various reasons, they also tend to accumulate in certain areas of the city. Usually the same ones where public spaces are (that might be one reason, though there's also a third variable linking the two).
Anyways, "helping" is, like all things, subject to diminishing returns on investment. If you have 1000 homeless in your city today, maybe sum X will get half of them off the street. But it won't cost X again to get the other off the street. More likely, it'll cost X again to get half of the remaining half off the street, and so on, until you run out of money and still have homeless left. Maybe just 50. Massive improvement.
Now, ignoring kind feelings and all, explain to me, taxpayer Joe Average, who already paid a whole lot to get those 950 homeless a shelter, why the remaining 50 still prevent me from using that bank, which I also paid for?
There's always a line somewhere. The differences between various ethics is just where it's drawn and what reasons are given.
Please RTFA. Among other details:
a) The self-cleaning broke down somewhere during the 4 years
b) It already has a time-limit (15 minutes) after which it simply opens the door
Like so many others, you didn't RTFA, it seems.
The $5 mio. was not the initial price-tag. It was the accumulated cost, mostly of maintainance, over a period of four years. So it's not development costs, but maintainance, cleaning (the self-clean broke down), etc.
I don't understandy why, either - care to elaborate? What is wrong with society when it tries to make sure public stuff is used for the intended purpose?
Ah, OK, so what you're pushing for is really government subsidies. :-)
Actually, no. I'm pointing out that - like most of the real world - they aren't a black/white, good/bad issue. There are many places where government subsidies are useful, and just as many where they are harmful.
And correct again, the energy market is heavily regulated. Rightfully so, I would say, because regulation is one of the few ways in which the current system can take care of externalities. That, going back to the start of the discussion, is the whole point: The environment is an externality. Pure economic thinking does not get you to the point of doing anything to preserve it.
Yes, modern coal plants are fairly efficient. Modern wind turbines as well, the subsidies were necessary to get the technology advanced enough. For all I know, modern wind turbines are profitable without subsidies.
In the developing world? The US and China alone are responsible for 2/5ths of the world's CO2 emissions. it's around 22% for the US alone! So, don't neglect the importance of the green economy growth in the US which is where it'll do the most good.
Correct. There's still the other 3/5th (i.e. the majority), however. One of their important aspects is that they're growing, and fast. That's why they're called "developing". Reduced emissions (CO2 and others) in the US is great, but world-wide it won't make a difference if the rest of the world continues polluting.
I do disagree - and heavily - on the second part. The US isn't very influencial when it comes to green technology. In fact, almost all of it was researched and developed outside the US. While the US puts up a good number of wind turbines, for example, the majority of them comes from Germany, which thanks to government subsidies has been a world leader in wind energy for 10 years or so. It's been only after many years of government "interference" that the technology became competitive. Meanwhile, the "free market" still makes coal plants a highly profitable investment.
to a new scheme in which monsters drop health orbs on the ground that refill your health when you touch them.
What exactly is new about that? I've played a hundred or so games that used that system, many of them 10 or 20 years old (you know, back when action games didn't have an inventory).
There's nothing new in Diabolo, not in 3, not in 2, not in the first one. It's an excellent and fun implementation of very old game concepts, but I've yet to see anything in it that wasn't done before.
So please, I know this is /., but try to get the facts right every now and then. They changed the system to a different one. Nothing new about it.
For each electric car in the street it's one less CO2 emitting one. So the growth of the 'green' market is directly and inversely proportional to the CO2 emissions worldwide.
Re-read my last answer. You completely ignore that at the same time your one electric car is put on the street, ten or twenty gasoline-powered cars are also put on the street elsewhere (predominently in the developing world). So if you move from the one example car to the whole picture, CO2 emissions are anything but falling.
Estimates on those numbers, as well as the numbers of coal plants being opened in China, India, etc. are easily available in the news or Google.
Well, one thing that business has taught me is how little value ideas really have.
I'm tired of hearing that.
A single idea very rarely is valuable. However, a connected string of ideas can have a value of many millions. With that I mean not just the original "let's do X" thought, but the string of how to do it at all, how to do it well, how to do it in a commercially viable way, etc. - it's ideas that count, for most of the actual implementation you can hire people.
The value of people like Miyamoto is that they don't just have isolated ideas, but can string them together to create something of value. But his value is still in the ideas he has. Don't confuse "initial flash of thought" with "idea", that's not the same thing.
On average, the public knows nothing. Everyone of us has his fields of knowledge, but almost all of us have more fields that we know nothing (or very little) about than we have fields of knowledge. So on average, we know nothing, because in any random sample there will almost certainly be more people with zero (or very little) knowledge of any specific field than there are people who happen to know something about it.
That's true of science, but also of everything else that's not trivial daily-life stuff.
And that's the built-in problem of democracy. For science, the problem doubles because it's easier to convince people with rhetorics and fancy pictures than with numbers and facts.
Oh, so you know WHEN it will be too late to reverse climate change? Share it with us please.
I don't and I didn't claim I do. But even by the most optimistic figures, "green" energy generation grows much slower than CO2 emission does. Given that, I don't need any dates, simple extrapolation tells you that unless green energy grows much faster, its growth alone won't be enough, and CO2 reduction is required in addition.
And unless it wasn't clear as it should be to anyone informed about the topic, of course there is no money directly in destroying the environment, at least I'm not aware of anyone paying for that. The money is in doing things that destroy the environment. e.g. running a coal power plant is a pretty profitable thing to do - so much that lots and lots of new ones are being built every year.