No, that's not the ideal. Wikileaks has been successful because it takes some pains to verify that what it is publishing isn't fraudulent or forged, and thus has some independent credibility. Newspapers have entered a partnership with wikileaks for the provision of real material.
Information uploaded anonymously to the web would quickly vanish into the conspiracy-theory-sphere, and have no impact. Leakers also depend on wikileaks to be able to break news with impact, and make the risk they are taking worthwhile. So there's a confluence of influence between newspapers, leakers and wikileaks, but it does depend on wikileaks having an organisation and credibility. This is why wikileaks is feeling the heat and not the Guardian, NYT and Spiegel, because wikileaks is much less risk averse than the papers (but more risk averse than the leakers), and its credibility is more vulnerable.
Madness. Take a point-source of CO2 which could be relatively easily sequestered, and turn it into a liquid fuel which will doubtless be dispersed and burnt in thousands of impossible-to-sequester locations. That's no way to reduce emissions, it's a way of perpetuating the status quo. It perhaps may get more energy per unit of CO2, but won't help cut it.
Consumption isn't measured in watts or multiples thereof, it's measured in watt-hours, which is convertable into joules. Watts is a rate-of flow, which only gives a point-in-time indication of consumption. The relationship between the rate of flow that a power station can provide and the amount of energy it can supply depends on the 'load factor' that it can sustain (essentially a percentage of its capacity in watts). A base load coal power station can maintain a 70-80% load factor. A wind farm generally only 15-35% due to the intermittency of the wind. So a 4GW wind farm is comparable perhaps to a 1.5GW coal power station in terms of yearly output.
Taking your figures at face value and not adding in any other costs, then still that's a $3000, not $1000 per-person investment. Not that i'm arguing that's not worthwhile, but you have to compare like-with-like.
Providing wind energy alone to peoples houses has the problem that the wind doesn't care when you want to use your devices. So either storage, backup, or long-distance transmission with a significant capacity overbuild is needed for a theoretical wind-only supply chain. Each of these involves very significant costs which brings the ultimate cost higher than fossil fuels. *This* is why it 'hasn't been done'. The field can only be evened by making fossil fuels pay the external costs of their pollution to bring their costs *up* to the levels of renewable energy. There is no short term, and probably no long-term way of bringing renewable energy costs down to fossil fuel levels. Energy is inherently expensive, when everything is added up.
Well, wind is kinetic energy which is ultimately driven by heat inputs from solar energy. The heat in the atmosphere is increasing due to increased CO2, which leads to a danger of stronger winds, which is one of the big dangers of global warming.
To take a material amount of energy from the wind would require quite a massive number of wind turbines (look at them, even where they exist, the surface area of those blades is tiny, most wind just goes through). But for the sake of the thought experiment - taking kinetic energy from the wind essentially diverts some solar heat energy into a separate energy system 'loop' - that being our own civilisational electrical infrastructure. While it is in use it is out of the atmosphere so it is a slight mitigation of global warming.
However, of course, all energy eventually degrades into heat and will be released - absent a vent in space - back into the atmosphere, so the net effect is nil. However, it would have a regional weather effect since most of the heat would be released in our urban 'heat islands' where most energy is used. So I guess it ships global warming right to our doorsteps, without necessarily making it worse. Just what we deserve, actually.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me here, but isn't Nanosolar a CIGS (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide) film technology? My understanding was that due to the rarity of Indium, Gallium and Selenium, scaling up that technology would simply drive up the price of the metals until it was more expensive than good old 'cheap', plentiful silicon?
Obviously Nanosolar is confident of turning a profit, but it could be based on a supply contract price for only a certain amount of output.
Check out http://www.stirlingenergy.com/ . They are pursuing mass production of combined parabolic mirror/stirling engine units for large scale deployment, and appear to have signed contracts of impressive size with California utilities.
Pros of stirling engines: efficiency (as you said), old and well understood design, mass productibility, modularity.
Cons: moving parts, maintenance, complexity, lack of smoothing/storage options, fabricating parabolic mirrors is more difficult than other types.
I'm not sure that all these criticisms hold up other than from a peculiarly individualistic north american perspective. Many of the things that the author holds up as bad values are perfectly in line with what those of us from social democratic countries consider 'good values'.
Even from a strictly capitalistic perspective, the notion of a player deserving reward for time invested is not at all alien. Time is a form of capital and we do have the right to earn returns on that capital, no?
What isn't good is the effective 'inflation' caused by the... if you will 'bubble' created by hardcore gamers investing ridiculous amounts of the time-capital that they have to spend into acquiring goods. This leaves those who are time-capital poor (casual gamers) further and futher behind in the game. A familiar real-world situation. Interestingly Blizzard seem to be heading towards something which is analagous to an across-the-board minimum wage rise for casual gamers in the next patch, in the form of an easy-to-get high level armour set for all classes. Given that the motivation for this is the probability of having time-poor casual gamers dropping out of WoW society because they can't compete, this is spookily reminiscent of economic situations that we face in RL.
As for grouping together for greater rewards, this is real-life behaviour and IMHO, reinforces norms of social solidarity which are considered good form most places in the world. A player who can work well with 39 other people getting more reward and more 'honour' than one who stays on the outer and quests for his/her reward only? Well that's a good thing surely. It rewards sociable behaviour. The assumption that the game result should reflect the innate capability of the individual player rather than their willingness to contribute to a group endeavour is not universally held, by a long shot.
The assertion that Albert Einstein accomplished things alone is deeply wrong.
Finally i'm not sure why a virtual law against money-laundering through ebay is a bad thing either?
My swearing repertoire tends to involve ad-hoc variations around the themes of christ, and mules. "Illegitimate son of a mule", "Mule shit", "Christ on a stick", "Sweet smoking baby jesus" etc... These things are usually quite obscene and make my christian friends uncomfortable some of the time if I inadvertantly rant in their presence.
But at one time, after a particularly unfortunate and annoying accident, my brain - searching for an insult - decided that the absolute ultimate combination of my themes in the most brief and compact expression of extreme frustration possible would be to exclaim loudly "Oh.... Christ on a Mule".... which had the unexpected result of my xtian friends bursting out laughing, probably because they had expected something much worse and it was so innocent; and pointed out that Christ did indeed travel on a mule or similar to Bethlehem. Thus endeth the lesson: mixing metaphors can fuck up your shit.
Any reasonable person, given your hypothetical situation, could easily be expected to simply kill off a small percentage of the population were it to increase the overall welfare of the rest of the population,
Our respective definitions of "reasonable" differ, in a most spectacular fashion.
I certainly would not, and I can't think of anyone I know who would put any group to the knife just to improve general welfare. This kind of logic is only ever accepted when the question is put in terms of one life versus another. Would you kill 100 people to save 1000? Probably. Would you kill 100 people to save 100, if the latter 100 had a better chance of long term survival/better quality of life? Possibly. Would you kill 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off?
I wouldn't.
In a similar vein, many people have a sense of identity which extends beyond themselves, and would willingly accept the sacrifice of certain groups for the overall advantage of the species,
But would you be content to accept the situation where you are presented with a fait accompli; "you are the weakest link, goodbye", without the opportunity to live out your life? I have a hard time believing you would. If you were involved in an accident tomorrow that rendered you unable to work, would you kill yourself to avoid being a drain on the species' resources? I guess i'd have to break your spine to find out.
The point of Rawles' hypothetical is that we have the option of ordering our societies in various ways with different concepts of what constitutes "overall advantage" for the group, we are not in a simple "survival requires X" situation. Equality is a very compelling rival to Aggregate General Welfare, as small amounts of extra resources mean a lot more in relative terms to those who have few than those who already have much.
Finally, unless you believe that mankind has some common preordained goal that is being worked to, then civilisation *is* just a muddling trail of individuals trying to make their way forward in life. Why should they be conscripted to live and die with the efficiency of ants or worker bees for no perceptible purpose?
Okay, let's give you a quick lesson in ethics and morality.
First, imagine that you will be reincarnated as a random individual in a society. You have no way of knowing what skill sets and ability you will wake up with. Now, what kind of social organisation would you want to apply given that there is a distinct risk that you will be 'reborn' without your current level of ability to take care of yourself? Do you really want an undiluted survival market to apply? Is your ability to survive in such a situation the only measure of the worth of your next life? If you were doomed from the start by the nature of that society, but that nature could be changed so as you would not be doomed, would you not want it changed?
Consider then whether humans have intrinsic worth or are just a means to some ends. Are you the means to someone else's ends, or do you make your own decisions? Are your decisions to be treated seriously as intrinsic to your being, or brushed aside as aberrations in the mass march to a predetermined or naturally selected ends?
It is an ethical imperative that humans be treated as ends in themselves, otherwise a mechanistic world view results, and all nature of opressions follow from this. What this means is that if we have the means to help each other survive, then we are compelled to make use of them, and cope with the consequences. If a man is born crippled, we give crutches, if he is stupid we teach him patiently, if he is diseased we search for a cure. That we have now begun to grasp genetics offers a way to ameliorate the consequences of a lack of natural selection, but even in its absence we are compelled to defy natural selection; the alternative being the death of humanity as a collection of sentient beings. Sentience is inefficient, you know.
No, I think the question that is on everyone's lips is "how do we leverage this to get more eye-candy into KDE?".
I want rubberised windows bouncing around the desktop.
Existentialism is this: first one exists, and then one approaches the world as one who exists. It doesn't mean that the world doesn't exist, or that we live in one of our own making. It just means that the meaning, nature and attributes of the world are a different category to the stuff of the world itself.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not the ideal. Wikileaks has been successful because it takes some pains to verify that what it is publishing isn't fraudulent or forged, and thus has some independent credibility. Newspapers have entered a partnership with wikileaks for the provision of real material. Information uploaded anonymously to the web would quickly vanish into the conspiracy-theory-sphere, and have no impact. Leakers also depend on wikileaks to be able to break news with impact, and make the risk they are taking worthwhile. So there's a confluence of influence between newspapers, leakers and wikileaks, but it does depend on wikileaks having an organisation and credibility. This is why wikileaks is feeling the heat and not the Guardian, NYT and Spiegel, because wikileaks is much less risk averse than the papers (but more risk averse than the leakers), and its credibility is more vulnerable.
To turn it into a perpetual acceleration machine!
Madness. Take a point-source of CO2 which could be relatively easily sequestered, and turn it into a liquid fuel which will doubtless be dispersed and burnt in thousands of impossible-to-sequester locations. That's no way to reduce emissions, it's a way of perpetuating the status quo. It perhaps may get more energy per unit of CO2, but won't help cut it.
Consumption isn't measured in watts or multiples thereof, it's measured in watt-hours, which is convertable into joules. Watts is a rate-of flow, which only gives a point-in-time indication of consumption. The relationship between the rate of flow that a power station can provide and the amount of energy it can supply depends on the 'load factor' that it can sustain (essentially a percentage of its capacity in watts). A base load coal power station can maintain a 70-80% load factor. A wind farm generally only 15-35% due to the intermittency of the wind. So a 4GW wind farm is comparable perhaps to a 1.5GW coal power station in terms of yearly output. Taking your figures at face value and not adding in any other costs, then still that's a $3000, not $1000 per-person investment. Not that i'm arguing that's not worthwhile, but you have to compare like-with-like. Providing wind energy alone to peoples houses has the problem that the wind doesn't care when you want to use your devices. So either storage, backup, or long-distance transmission with a significant capacity overbuild is needed for a theoretical wind-only supply chain. Each of these involves very significant costs which brings the ultimate cost higher than fossil fuels. *This* is why it 'hasn't been done'. The field can only be evened by making fossil fuels pay the external costs of their pollution to bring their costs *up* to the levels of renewable energy. There is no short term, and probably no long-term way of bringing renewable energy costs down to fossil fuel levels. Energy is inherently expensive, when everything is added up.
Well, wind is kinetic energy which is ultimately driven by heat inputs from solar energy. The heat in the atmosphere is increasing due to increased CO2, which leads to a danger of stronger winds, which is one of the big dangers of global warming. To take a material amount of energy from the wind would require quite a massive number of wind turbines (look at them, even where they exist, the surface area of those blades is tiny, most wind just goes through). But for the sake of the thought experiment - taking kinetic energy from the wind essentially diverts some solar heat energy into a separate energy system 'loop' - that being our own civilisational electrical infrastructure. While it is in use it is out of the atmosphere so it is a slight mitigation of global warming. However, of course, all energy eventually degrades into heat and will be released - absent a vent in space - back into the atmosphere, so the net effect is nil. However, it would have a regional weather effect since most of the heat would be released in our urban 'heat islands' where most energy is used. So I guess it ships global warming right to our doorsteps, without necessarily making it worse. Just what we deserve, actually.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me here, but isn't Nanosolar a CIGS (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide) film technology? My understanding was that due to the rarity of Indium, Gallium and Selenium, scaling up that technology would simply drive up the price of the metals until it was more expensive than good old 'cheap', plentiful silicon? Obviously Nanosolar is confident of turning a profit, but it could be based on a supply contract price for only a certain amount of output.
Check out http://www.stirlingenergy.com/ . They are pursuing mass production of combined parabolic mirror/stirling engine units for large scale deployment, and appear to have signed contracts of impressive size with California utilities.
Pros of stirling engines: efficiency (as you said), old and well understood design, mass productibility, modularity.
Cons: moving parts, maintenance, complexity, lack of smoothing/storage options, fabricating parabolic mirrors is more difficult than other types.
They're actually a unique subspecies of beaked hominid birdmen. Explains the "eccent".
I'm not sure that all these criticisms hold up other than from a peculiarly individualistic north american perspective. Many of the things that the author holds up as bad values are perfectly in line with what those of us from social democratic countries consider 'good values'.
... if you will 'bubble' created by hardcore gamers investing ridiculous amounts of the time-capital that they have to spend into acquiring goods. This leaves those who are time-capital poor (casual gamers) further and futher behind in the game. A familiar real-world situation. Interestingly Blizzard seem to be heading towards something which is analagous to an across-the-board minimum wage rise for casual gamers in the next patch, in the form of an easy-to-get high level armour set for all classes. Given that the motivation for this is the probability of having time-poor casual gamers dropping out of WoW society because they can't compete, this is spookily reminiscent of economic situations that we face in RL.
Even from a strictly capitalistic perspective, the notion of a player deserving reward for time invested is not at all alien. Time is a form of capital and we do have the right to earn returns on that capital, no?
What isn't good is the effective 'inflation' caused by the
As for grouping together for greater rewards, this is real-life behaviour and IMHO, reinforces norms of social solidarity which are considered good form most places in the world. A player who can work well with 39 other people getting more reward and more 'honour' than one who stays on the outer and quests for his/her reward only? Well that's a good thing surely. It rewards sociable behaviour. The assumption that the game result should reflect the innate capability of the individual player rather than their willingness to contribute to a group endeavour is not universally held, by a long shot.
The assertion that Albert Einstein accomplished things alone is deeply wrong.
Finally i'm not sure why a virtual law against money-laundering through ebay is a bad thing either?
My swearing repertoire tends to involve ad-hoc variations around the themes of christ, and mules. "Illegitimate son of a mule", "Mule shit", "Christ on a stick", "Sweet smoking baby jesus" etc... These things are usually quite obscene and make my christian friends uncomfortable some of the time if I inadvertantly rant in their presence. But at one time, after a particularly unfortunate and annoying accident, my brain - searching for an insult - decided that the absolute ultimate combination of my themes in the most brief and compact expression of extreme frustration possible would be to exclaim loudly "Oh .... Christ on a Mule". ... which had the unexpected result of my xtian friends bursting out laughing, probably because they had expected something much worse and it was so innocent; and pointed out that Christ did indeed travel on a mule or similar to Bethlehem. Thus endeth the lesson: mixing metaphors can fuck up your shit.
lack of line breaks - my mistake.
Any reasonable person, given your hypothetical situation, could easily be expected to simply kill off a small percentage of the population were it to increase the overall welfare of the rest of the population, Our respective definitions of "reasonable" differ, in a most spectacular fashion. I certainly would not, and I can't think of anyone I know who would put any group to the knife just to improve general welfare. This kind of logic is only ever accepted when the question is put in terms of one life versus another. Would you kill 100 people to save 1000? Probably. Would you kill 100 people to save 100, if the latter 100 had a better chance of long term survival/better quality of life? Possibly. Would you kill 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off? I wouldn't. In a similar vein, many people have a sense of identity which extends beyond themselves, and would willingly accept the sacrifice of certain groups for the overall advantage of the species, But would you be content to accept the situation where you are presented with a fait accompli; "you are the weakest link, goodbye", without the opportunity to live out your life? I have a hard time believing you would. If you were involved in an accident tomorrow that rendered you unable to work, would you kill yourself to avoid being a drain on the species' resources? I guess i'd have to break your spine to find out. The point of Rawles' hypothetical is that we have the option of ordering our societies in various ways with different concepts of what constitutes "overall advantage" for the group, we are not in a simple "survival requires X" situation. Equality is a very compelling rival to Aggregate General Welfare, as small amounts of extra resources mean a lot more in relative terms to those who have few than those who already have much. Finally, unless you believe that mankind has some common preordained goal that is being worked to, then civilisation *is* just a muddling trail of individuals trying to make their way forward in life. Why should they be conscripted to live and die with the efficiency of ants or worker bees for no perceptible purpose?
Okay, let's give you a quick lesson in ethics and morality.
First, imagine that you will be reincarnated as a random individual in a society. You have no way of knowing what skill sets and ability you will wake up with. Now, what kind of social organisation would you want to apply given that there is a distinct risk that you will be 'reborn' without your current level of ability to take care of yourself? Do you really want an undiluted survival market to apply? Is your ability to survive in such a situation the only measure of the worth of your next life? If you were doomed from the start by the nature of that society, but that nature could be changed so as you would not be doomed, would you not want it changed?
Consider then whether humans have intrinsic worth or are just a means to some ends. Are you the means to someone else's ends, or do you make your own decisions? Are your decisions to be treated seriously as intrinsic to your being, or brushed aside as aberrations in the mass march to a predetermined or naturally selected ends?
It is an ethical imperative that humans be treated as ends in themselves, otherwise a mechanistic world view results, and all nature of opressions follow from this. What this means is that if we have the means to help each other survive, then we are compelled to make use of them, and cope with the consequences. If a man is born crippled, we give crutches, if he is stupid we teach him patiently, if he is diseased we search for a cure. That we have now begun to grasp genetics offers a way to ameliorate the consequences of a lack of natural selection, but even in its absence we are compelled to defy natural selection; the alternative being the death of humanity as a collection of sentient beings. Sentience is inefficient, you know.
No, I think the question that is on everyone's lips is "how do we leverage this to get more eye-candy into KDE?". I want rubberised windows bouncing around the desktop.
Existentialism is this: first one exists, and then one approaches the world as one who exists. It doesn't mean that the world doesn't exist, or that we live in one of our own making. It just means that the meaning, nature and attributes of the world are a different category to the stuff of the world itself.