The Failure Industry Somewhere in the nineties the company Volmac (now Capgemini) carried out a project for the InformatiseringsBank (now the IB Group). This studyloan administration automation project failed and that produced a lot of negative publicity. The huge reputational damage for Volmac was reportedly a major factor in the acquisition of the company by the French Capgemini. And the sad thing was that it was later determined that Volmac had done good work. The failure was the fault of the client. "Helas, du beurre d'peanut" sounded from Paris (Ed: Dutch saying translated literally into French for comic effect,means as much as "too bad!").
Fast forward a decade. ICT projects with the government as client fail almost standard. I do not have to pick this up from the press because I'm in the thick of it. A megaproject fails spectacularly. Damage: nearly 300 million euros plus misery at six million Dutch who receive improper payments. Newspaper articles. Parliamentary debates. The damage to the ICT company behind this modern debacle: negligible.
Basically this means the ICT supplier today has an economic interest in failure. If a project of 8 million is inflated to an estimated 80 million budget then you're better off with a failure than to implement according to plan. A successful project can never compete against ten failing projects, especially when image damage is so very 1995. But wait, a mega-project failure will cause reputational damage to the client and he does not do business with you anymore. Well, from my own experience, I can conclude that this also is no longer true. Worse, while we were busy transforming the fail into a success, there arose a lot of pressure from the client's IT department to once again give the large-therefore-good ICT company a new chance.
[here I have to stop translating due to time pressure. I really should translate this later on. The rest is straight from Google Translate]
Now you should always be reticent about things with which you yourself are involved, but short after
there was an ICT-drama, now with another large ICT company in the lead. And although this ICT debacle caused a lot of ugly publicity, there was proving remarkably mild judgment of the client: "The ICT company had nothing to reproach of the failed project. No, the failure to lay ourselves as client ". Two-zero for failure because this industry business is still whistling around. The argument: "big", "Reliable", "continuity"...
Well were after two mega projects fail ofcourse the heads of the internal IT management are cut off. Yet? Haha just the opposite, of course! With large ICT projects are large budgets from The Hague. When projects get out of hand then just walk supplementary budget. Where commercial companies as office furnisher Samas and Van Lanschot Bank nearly destroyed have gone to the costs of failed ICTprojecten, means a major ICT project in government precisely additional revenue and a fail project much additional revenue. Who that additional money gets is like a hero in the industry.
Failing ICT are heroes precisely because they fail. But fortunately there are still users who have an interest in a working system. Well, that is nuanced. Often at the large government projects to replace rickety and therefore very labor-intensive legacy systems. Replacement by a system that does so than large impact on employment. And if the user organization still a working system would then use another trick. That means that all ICT based tools the i
Last year a well known IT architect wrote an article titled "The Failure bonus" where he describes how the system for government IT contracts is set up in such a way that failure is rewarded richly, but performing better than specs will lead to unemployment at a rapid pace. It's not that big IT consultants are incompetent, it is that they are very competent at following the money.
That said: big projects are inherently impossible to complete and everyone in IT knows it. Government knows it too, big projects should be cut down to manageable size or abandoned. Putting out contracts on a "cash on delivery" basis would probably make that a much more viable option for small firms.
I'm currently working on an IT project on one of the worse govt departments in my country. They have a reputation for horrible performance, both in their normal operations and in the IT department as well. They were officially reprimanded by the government accounting office a few years back for failure to control their own organisation. The project is a frigging mess, it's the worst project I've ever seen in a professional setting, even compared to municipal IT which is mainly "amateur time".
The main problem is that this organisation thinks IT is not its core business. So they have no competent people to determine what needs to be done and especially to determine resources. They don't even have an IT department, only an infrastructure support department. And that is the whole problem. I could spend hours discussing the hilarious and horrendous "project" I'm in, but mainly it's a matter of management totally and completely dropping the ball on this.
I agree - this could be iffy with respect to consumer laws. However, freelancers are businesses and are unprotected by those laws, so I'm pretty sure small businesses are going to get shafted pretty hard on this one. The big problem is that freelancers often have to work from a laptop without acccess to a network, so the whole "cloud thingy" is not an option if your income depends on being online. But having the license tied to a single computer won't work for them either.
All in all - it *is* time to take another look at LibreOffice *shudder*
Personally I find it fascinating that Kolmogorov complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity), which expresses the complexity of an object, has a near 1:1 relationship with entropy on a black hole. Also, you cannot compress any object further than its Kolmogorov complexity without losing information. Interesting to apply this to a black hole, where everything is physically compressed to the limit. Does this mean that everything is information, in some way?
There is an interesting take on this in the comic books of Planetary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_(comics)) where they have aliens that run their spaceship on an information engine.
It's intended to gauge the sentiments of the masses, to warn the local rulers before the uprising starts. I'm pretty sure they have a pretty good market in the Middle East right now. It doesn't do anything about lone killers or terrorists.
This reeks of "schleppnetzfahndung", a term used to describe the use of similar data by the West German police to combat terrorism in the 70's. It did catch a couple of terrorists. It also got tens of thousands of citizens banned from working in all kinds of jobs, because they had the wrong friends, read the wrong papers or were members of the wrong trade union. For a lot of people, that seemed to be the main reason to use that method. It certainly had a very chilling impact on dissidents.
By the way, why many people still have a mind set that Computer Science is all about programming?
Because of the stupid name "computer science". Over here we call it "information science" (informatica) and then it suddenly relates much better to Shannon's Information theory, things like the Holographic Universe hypothesis, and then we're all of a sudden discussing the nature of the universe as seen from the perspective of information: are we all just a 2D representation in discrete bits on a 3D or 4D manifold?
If you name your science "computer science" you get what you ask for: a lot of stuff placing the computer in a central position. If you name your science "information science", suddenly you place the computer in the right perspective: it is merely a tool to manipulate information faster than before.
I graduated with a very good teacher who hardly used a computer for his work at all. He's a well known geometric algorithm guy. He solves math issues that need a computer as tool. Not computer issues that deal with math.
So true. I see it daily with colleagues. The problem is that studying (done right) gives you a studying mindset: it teaches you to study, even if you don't have to. Not many people have that by nature and if you don't have it, you will fall behind compared to others.
You're the living proof that going to the university doesn't mean you're smart. You think you're smart because you have an IQ of 110. That barely makes you eligible for studying, to be honest. Many of my friends are a lot smarter than that and I've seen dropouts with a higher IQ. Your IQ doesn't mean shit if you don't use those brains.
As for the teachers... My old professor is also running two companies. He's the guy who built GameMaker but he did loads of other stuff as well. He was one of the youngest full professors to get a prestigious science prize. I worked for the university after I graduated. One of the people I worked with was involved with setting up the standard for XML (he was one of the national reps on the committee). He is a consultant now, and also teaches. I know a couple of other examples of people who move in and out of teaching. There are also those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.
You're in no position to disparage them: you have achieved nothing much, you have no reputation, your "certified" IQ doesn't mean anything. I suggest you listen to your teachers, learn what they have to say, and then improve on that if you can.
I think the inventory planning system for a large manufacturer I worked for, does the same. However, it may never have been published. I'm also pretty sure they never thought to patent it, since this is too stupid to patent and those guys had brains.
The average survival rate of people who stop being active after retirement is 6 years (in The Netherlands, YMMV). People who stay active, stay alive MUCH longer.
There is a big difference between someone moving up stairs, walking around in the building, having to use his or her brains actively and moving to and from work by bicycle, and someone sitting behind the TV all day.
So kudos to your mom, she sounds like a very smart lady.
I'm a member of a trade union myself, and I know what they are for. However, musicians aren't employees, they're self-employed or they are employers. That gives them a very different position versus the members of a trade union. The best they could do would be to form a guild, with a very limited goal. Sort of like the actors guild - except that is more of a union than a musicians union could ever be, since actors do not usually become employers.
So, to restate the question: given the different interests between musicians, how would a trade union solve anything? Collective bargaining only works when you have collective interests, and I doubt that this holds for musicians in the same way it does for employees.
- It is highly doubtful the four guys would have attacked him, had they seen the gun, as they were unarmed and there were about 15 to 20 other passengers in the same coach; - He was charged with reckless endangerment for missing one of his five bullets. Fortunately no other passengers got hurt because he ran out of bullets. He hit 4 out of 5; - 'Later in the tape, Goetz said, "If I had more bullets, I would have shot 'em all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets."'
As an argument for having more bullets, this is about the worst argument possible.
On the construction sites I've been to (when they were building my house, and other houses) they use a centimeter with millimeter scale subdivision. Which is one reason why all the lengths on building plans and blueprints are in millimeters (this is NL but it is the same as in Australia).
Yep. Sounds like this was a student who got his first taste of the real world. I'm not at all sorry for him. A few more experiences like that and he'll probably adjust his attitude to the realities of life outside his dorm.
One question: is it stupid to unite against a common enemy, if the enemy is real? Because you seem to imply that whatever the reality of AGW, as long as we have to do something together with "them darn fur'ners" it's bad.
So: if the temperatures do *not* plunge back, what new excuse will you make then? And suppose you do turn around then, how much worse will the measures have to be, thanks to people like you? Right now, the measures are actually not bad. They will kill off a few companies that are inefficient and need to dump waste everywhere in order to compete. They will drive the best companies to improve even more and out-compete the others. Capitalism at its best. But if we wait long enough, the measures that will be unavoidable then will kill much more than that.
You are making assumptions. Yes, fossil fuels are necessary right now. But we can improve the wastage levels a lot. Cars do not have to guzzle gallons of fuel to transport people if you have better public transportation and enforce green standards on cars. The Japanese car factories proved that it was possible to build much better cars than were the norm (and Chrysler, GM and Ford nearly or actually died on that one). The same goes for many areas of the way we live. The US especially seems to glorify in insane airconditioning, huge wastage of food and resources, very bad insulation on housing, and on and on.
Even without draconic measures in place, many standard building practices in the US would be utterly unacceptable in most EU countries. That could improve tomorrow, leading to a better quality of buildings and reduced CO2 consumption.
The whole dichotomy between "reducing CO2" and "better living conditions" is fake. You can have both, in a lot of cases. We should save the fossil fuels for those cases where we cannot and not spend it willy-nilly.
On one hand, we have a scientist who points out some issues with current theory on a higher level, which is that it may not be possible to prove anything so you can theorize until you're blue in the face, but we have no way to compare predictions with reality.
With AGW, the discussion was started around 1980 (I have a few books in my cupboard from that time), criticism was levelled and theories reworked to account for them, to get them in line with the experimental and available evidence. There is a lot of evidence that you can test your theories against, and bit by bit predictions are getting more accurate. There is no-one saying they cannot be made even more accurate by more testing and more refining using the standard scientific methods.
Did you leave your brains at work when you left on friday? If you could just, for a second or two, try to get it in your skull that potentially species-destroying events are not safely ignored and do not go away by wishful thinking, then *maybe* you could accept that there are a lot of people concerned about it. Maybe a tad more than the 100 lunatics you seem to think make up the entire society of "people who think it's a bad thing".
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies? That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain? That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
The whole problem is *not* that most people think we need to give away boatloads of money to appease our conscience. That is just your personal straw man. You can keep setting it up and burning it down again, but no one in their right mind will accept your verbal hysteria as an argument. Most people just want to hold on to the standards of living we have. And not see it getting much worse, and see what their children potentially have to live through. If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late. And then, draconian measures will have to be implemented.
The geo-engineering measures are opposed by a lot of people because outside of a very small group of techno-fetishists, it does not *solve* the underlying issues (at best it just mitigates them - but even that is questionable), has side-effects that are unknown and potentially as lethal as the current issues we have. Since we have a very well-understood way of dealing with the CO2 issues, which is to stop spewing CO2 in the air, there is no reason to go to unproven options. Reducing CO2 output has no known harmful side-effects, except that old and established industries that cannot change their operations, will go the way of the dinosaurs. Boohoo. That's not a communist plot, that's a consequence of the bed those industries made and now have to lie in.
"Version 1.0 was released in 2006 for Windows XP SP2/SP3, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. For Windows Server 2008, it is included as an optional feature.
Version 2.0 is integrated with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is released for Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1.[29]"
Slashdot Mirror
It's in Dutch, so I guess that explains it.
It's by Rene Veldwijk, one of the most respected database designers in The Netherlands.
http://www.ockham.nl/ocp/downloads/faalindustrie/columns-1/veldwijk-faalindustrie.pdf
My translation (reworked from Google Translate):
Column - René Veldwijk
Database Magazine - Issue 6 - October 2010
The Failure Industry
Somewhere in the nineties the company Volmac (now Capgemini) carried out a project for the InformatiseringsBank (now the IB Group).
This studyloan administration automation project failed and that produced a lot of negative publicity. The huge reputational damage for Volmac was reportedly a major factor in the acquisition of the company by the French Capgemini. And the sad thing was that it was later determined that Volmac had done good work. The failure was the fault of the client. "Helas, du beurre d'peanut" sounded from Paris (Ed: Dutch saying translated literally into French for comic effect,means as much as "too bad!").
Fast forward a decade. ICT projects with the government as client fail almost standard. I do not have to pick this up from the press because I'm in the thick of it. A megaproject fails spectacularly. Damage: nearly 300 million euros plus misery at six million Dutch who receive improper payments. Newspaper articles. Parliamentary debates. The damage to the ICT company behind this modern debacle: negligible.
Basically this means the ICT supplier today has an economic interest in failure. If a project of 8 million is inflated to an estimated 80 million budget then you're better off with a failure than to implement according to plan. A successful project can never compete against ten failing projects, especially when image damage is so very 1995.
But wait, a mega-project failure will cause reputational damage to the client and he does not do business with you anymore. Well, from my own experience, I can conclude that this also is no longer true. Worse, while we were busy transforming the fail into a success, there arose a lot of pressure from the client's IT department to once again give the large-therefore-good ICT company a new chance.
[here I have to stop translating due to time pressure. I really should translate this later on. The rest is straight from Google Translate]
Now you should always be reticent about things with which you yourself are involved, but short after ...
there was an ICT-drama, now with another large ICT company in the lead. And although this ICT debacle caused a lot of
ugly publicity, there was proving remarkably mild judgment of the client: "The ICT company had nothing to reproach
of the failed project. No, the failure to lay ourselves as client ". Two-zero for failure because this industry business is still whistling around.
The argument: "big", "Reliable", "continuity"
Well were after two mega projects fail ofcourse the heads of the internal IT management are cut off. Yet? Haha just
the opposite, of course! With large ICT projects are large budgets from The Hague. When projects get out of hand
then just walk supplementary budget. Where commercial companies as office furnisher Samas and Van Lanschot Bank
nearly destroyed have gone to the costs of failed ICTprojecten, means a major ICT project in government precisely
additional revenue and a fail project much additional revenue. Who that additional money gets is like a hero in the industry.
Failing ICT are heroes precisely because they fail. But fortunately there are still users who have an interest in a working system.
Well, that is nuanced. Often at the large government projects to replace rickety and therefore very labor-intensive legacy systems.
Replacement by a system that does so than large impact on employment. And if the user organization still a working system would then use another trick. That means that all ICT based tools the i
Last year a well known IT architect wrote an article titled "The Failure bonus" where he describes how the system for government IT contracts is set up in such a way that failure is rewarded richly, but performing better than specs will lead to unemployment at a rapid pace. It's not that big IT consultants are incompetent, it is that they are very competent at following the money.
That said: big projects are inherently impossible to complete and everyone in IT knows it. Government knows it too, big projects should be cut down to manageable size or abandoned. Putting out contracts on a "cash on delivery" basis would probably make that a much more viable option for small firms.
I'm currently working on an IT project on one of the worse govt departments in my country. They have a reputation for horrible performance, both in their normal operations and in the IT department as well. They were officially reprimanded by the government accounting office a few years back for failure to control their own organisation. The project is a frigging mess, it's the worst project I've ever seen in a professional setting, even compared to municipal IT which is mainly "amateur time".
The main problem is that this organisation thinks IT is not its core business. So they have no competent people to determine what needs to be done and especially to determine resources. They don't even have an IT department, only an infrastructure support department. And that is the whole problem. I could spend hours discussing the hilarious and horrendous "project" I'm in, but mainly it's a matter of management totally and completely dropping the ball on this.
I'll never look at that word the same way again :)
I agree - this could be iffy with respect to consumer laws. However, freelancers are businesses and are unprotected by those laws, so I'm pretty sure small businesses are going to get shafted pretty hard on this one. The big problem is that freelancers often have to work from a laptop without acccess to a network, so the whole "cloud thingy" is not an option if your income depends on being online. But having the license tied to a single computer won't work for them either.
All in all - it *is* time to take another look at LibreOffice *shudder*
Well, if you want, we can start right here :)
Personally I find it fascinating that Kolmogorov complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity), which expresses the complexity of an object, has a near 1:1 relationship with entropy on a black hole. Also, you cannot compress any object further than its Kolmogorov complexity without losing information. Interesting to apply this to a black hole, where everything is physically compressed to the limit. Does this mean that everything is information, in some way?
There is an interesting take on this in the comic books of Planetary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_(comics)) where they have aliens that run their spaceship on an information engine.
It's not intended for people like Chris D.
It's intended to gauge the sentiments of the masses, to warn the local rulers before the uprising starts. I'm pretty sure they have a pretty good market in the Middle East right now. It doesn't do anything about lone killers or terrorists.
This reeks of "schleppnetzfahndung", a term used to describe the use of similar data by the West German police to combat terrorism in the 70's. It did catch a couple of terrorists. It also got tens of thousands of citizens banned from working in all kinds of jobs, because they had the wrong friends, read the wrong papers or were members of the wrong trade union. For a lot of people, that seemed to be the main reason to use that method. It certainly had a very chilling impact on dissidents.
By the way, why many people still have a mind set that Computer Science is all about programming?
Because of the stupid name "computer science". Over here we call it "information science" (informatica) and then it suddenly relates much better to Shannon's Information theory, things like the Holographic Universe hypothesis, and then we're all of a sudden discussing the nature of the universe as seen from the perspective of information: are we all just a 2D representation in discrete bits on a 3D or 4D manifold?
If you name your science "computer science" you get what you ask for: a lot of stuff placing the computer in a central position. If you name your science "information science", suddenly you place the computer in the right perspective: it is merely a tool to manipulate information faster than before.
I graduated with a very good teacher who hardly used a computer for his work at all. He's a well known geometric algorithm guy. He solves math issues that need a computer as tool. Not computer issues that deal with math.
So true. I see it daily with colleagues. The problem is that studying (done right) gives you a studying mindset: it teaches you to study, even if you don't have to. Not many people have that by nature and if you don't have it, you will fall behind compared to others.
You're the living proof that going to the university doesn't mean you're smart. You think you're smart because you have an IQ of 110. That barely makes you eligible for studying, to be honest. Many of my friends are a lot smarter than that and I've seen dropouts with a higher IQ. Your IQ doesn't mean shit if you don't use those brains.
As for the teachers... My old professor is also running two companies. He's the guy who built GameMaker but he did loads of other stuff as well. He was one of the youngest full professors to get a prestigious science prize. I worked for the university after I graduated. One of the people I worked with was involved with setting up the standard for XML (he was one of the national reps on the committee). He is a consultant now, and also teaches. I know a couple of other examples of people who move in and out of teaching. There are also those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.
You're in no position to disparage them: you have achieved nothing much, you have no reputation, your "certified" IQ doesn't mean anything. I suggest you listen to your teachers, learn what they have to say, and then improve on that if you can.
I think the inventory planning system for a large manufacturer I worked for, does the same. However, it may never have been published. I'm also pretty sure they never thought to patent it, since this is too stupid to patent and those guys had brains.
The average survival rate of people who stop being active after retirement is 6 years (in The Netherlands, YMMV). People who stay active, stay alive MUCH longer.
There is a big difference between someone moving up stairs, walking around in the building, having to use his or her brains actively and moving to and from work by bicycle, and someone sitting behind the TV all day.
So kudos to your mom, she sounds like a very smart lady.
I'm a member of a trade union myself, and I know what they are for. However, musicians aren't employees, they're self-employed or they are employers. That gives them a very different position versus the members of a trade union. The best they could do would be to form a guild, with a very limited goal. Sort of like the actors guild - except that is more of a union than a musicians union could ever be, since actors do not usually become employers.
So, to restate the question: given the different interests between musicians, how would a trade union solve anything? Collective bargaining only works when you have collective interests, and I doubt that this holds for musicians in the same way it does for employees.
So the trade union would magically have everyone pay for music? I fail to see the relationship between union and solution.
From your link:
- It is highly doubtful the four guys would have attacked him, had they seen the gun, as they were unarmed and there were about 15 to 20 other passengers in the same coach;
- He was charged with reckless endangerment for missing one of his five bullets. Fortunately no other passengers got hurt because he ran out of bullets. He hit 4 out of 5;
- 'Later in the tape, Goetz said, "If I had more bullets, I would have shot 'em all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets."'
As an argument for having more bullets, this is about the worst argument possible.
On the construction sites I've been to (when they were building my house, and other houses) they use a centimeter with millimeter scale subdivision. Which is one reason why all the lengths on building plans and blueprints are in millimeters (this is NL but it is the same as in Australia).
Yup. Sounds like facebook had a working stress test and this guy failed it spectacularly :)
Yep. Sounds like this was a student who got his first taste of the real world. I'm not at all sorry for him. A few more experiences like that and he'll probably adjust his attitude to the realities of life outside his dorm.
Not only that, but it was sexist in another way too, assuming the VP would be male instead of female. In my multinational company, the VP is a she.
One question: is it stupid to unite against a common enemy, if the enemy is real? Because you seem to imply that whatever the reality of AGW, as long as we have to do something together with "them darn fur'ners" it's bad.
So: if the temperatures do *not* plunge back, what new excuse will you make then? And suppose you do turn around then, how much worse will the measures have to be, thanks to people like you? Right now, the measures are actually not bad. They will kill off a few companies that are inefficient and need to dump waste everywhere in order to compete. They will drive the best companies to improve even more and out-compete the others. Capitalism at its best. But if we wait long enough, the measures that will be unavoidable then will kill much more than that.
I like my morning madness undiluted :)
You are making assumptions. Yes, fossil fuels are necessary right now. But we can improve the wastage levels a lot. Cars do not have to guzzle gallons of fuel to transport people if you have better public transportation and enforce green standards on cars. The Japanese car factories proved that it was possible to build much better cars than were the norm (and Chrysler, GM and Ford nearly or actually died on that one). The same goes for many areas of the way we live. The US especially seems to glorify in insane airconditioning, huge wastage of food and resources, very bad insulation on housing, and on and on.
Even without draconic measures in place, many standard building practices in the US would be utterly unacceptable in most EU countries. That could improve tomorrow, leading to a better quality of buildings and reduced CO2 consumption.
The whole dichotomy between "reducing CO2" and "better living conditions" is fake. You can have both, in a lot of cases. We should save the fossil fuels for those cases where we cannot and not spend it willy-nilly.
It's not the same thing by a wide margin.
On one hand, we have a scientist who points out some issues with current theory on a higher level, which is that it may not be possible to prove anything so you can theorize until you're blue in the face, but we have no way to compare predictions with reality.
With AGW, the discussion was started around 1980 (I have a few books in my cupboard from that time), criticism was levelled and theories reworked to account for them, to get them in line with the experimental and available evidence. There is a lot of evidence that you can test your theories against, and bit by bit predictions are getting more accurate. There is no-one saying they cannot be made even more accurate by more testing and more refining using the standard scientific methods.
Did you leave your brains at work when you left on friday? If you could just, for a second or two, try to get it in your skull that potentially species-destroying events are not safely ignored and do not go away by wishful thinking, then *maybe* you could accept that there are a lot of people concerned about it. Maybe a tad more than the 100 lunatics you seem to think make up the entire society of "people who think it's a bad thing".
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies? That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain? That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
The whole problem is *not* that most people think we need to give away boatloads of money to appease our conscience. That is just your personal straw man. You can keep setting it up and burning it down again, but no one in their right mind will accept your verbal hysteria as an argument. Most people just want to hold on to the standards of living we have. And not see it getting much worse, and see what their children potentially have to live through. If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late. And then, draconian measures will have to be implemented.
The geo-engineering measures are opposed by a lot of people because outside of a very small group of techno-fetishists, it does not *solve* the underlying issues (at best it just mitigates them - but even that is questionable), has side-effects that are unknown and potentially as lethal as the current issues we have. Since we have a very well-understood way of dealing with the CO2 issues, which is to stop spewing CO2 in the air, there is no reason to go to unproven options. Reducing CO2 output has no known harmful side-effects, except that old and established industries that cannot change their operations, will go the way of the dinosaurs. Boohoo. That's not a communist plot, that's a consequence of the bed those industries made and now have to lie in.
From the wikipedia (hard to find, I know :P):
"Version 1.0 was released in 2006 for Windows XP SP2/SP3, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. For Windows Server 2008, it is included as an optional feature.
Version 2.0 is integrated with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is released for Windows XP with Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1.[29]"
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell for more info.