There are thousands of articles on the web about the toxicity of DDT to all life -- and yes, it is more harmful to some species than others.
And in particular, There aren't any large-scale studies showing a clear negative effect on human health. Despite many attempts. Even the claims of damage to birds have mostly been debunked.
I didn't say anything about Dursban. I'm mostly unfamiliar with Dursban. But I'd like to point out that we don't need to "introduce" vast quantities of toxins into our environment; our environment is already full of natural "toxins" whether we choose to introduce new ones or not. Introducing new chemicals that - like everything that exists - are toxic to some at some dosage level, often reduces our overall health risk and removing old chemicals often increases health risk. For instance, outlawing DDT just meant that most people who would have used DDT used some other chemical as a substitute, and I don't believe anybody bothered to determine that DDT was MORE toxic than the likely replacements before banning it. It's also pretty clear that the short-term effect of banning DDT was to drastically increase human deaths due to malaria.
Once it was thoroughly proven that DDT was extremely harmful to all forms of life, the chemical companies promptly focused on selling DDT outside the US.
DDT was never "thoroughly proven" harmful to humans, much less to "all forms of life". There was some evidence to suggest it may have been harmful to a few varieties of bird, but that's about it. The few studies used to suggest possible harm to humans have generally been debunked.
What planet are you living on? School funding in California was much higher than the rest of the country when its schools were performing much better than the rest of the country. Since then we've had prop 13, and school funding in the rest of the country has caught up.
Inflation-adjusted per-student funding in California is significantly higher now than it was before Prop 13 was passed. We've increased the amount spent on schooling. Why should we be particularly bothered that we haven't increased it as much as other states have? Especially given there's little relationship between a state's rank in school funding and its relative student performance? (One way to measure that: some of the highest-spending states have the lowest SAT scores, and some of the lowest spending states have the highest SAT scores)
California is home of Nixon, Reagan, Wilson, the Cato Institute, etc., etc., etc.
The Cato Institute is in Washington DC. You probably have it confused with the Hoover Institute (which is at Stanford).
The one source that I want someone to dig up for me is this: a pre-shortage, pre-"deregulation" article suggesting that the California "deregulation" legislation was the wrong kind of deregulation. Then I'll know who to follow for the right kind of local political coverage for the rest of my life.
If you can find that, I'll kiss you on the mouth. (You can kiss my girlfriend if you'd prefer.)
The libertarian Cato Institute has been publishing articles along those lines as far back as you care to go. You can find them gloating a bit about it here.
I still have a ways to go, myself, but I can tell you it works.
http://flwd.com/5bx/main/index.html
People who pick 5BX might find this of use: I wrote a palm app to help keep track of all the 5BX level information so you don't have to keep big, complicated paper charts around. You can find the program at PalmGear. It's still under development, so please send feedback if you find any bugs or have feature requests.
Palm pilot...$70
Palm pilot watch w/ almost no features...$300
Actually, the Fossil watch has almost exactly the same feature set as the $70 Palm Pilot (a Palm Zire). The screen is the same number of pixels, the pixels are just smaller. The memory is the same, there's IR beaming and character recognition. It's even got buttons; they simply don't happen to ship mapped to the usual functions.
I think it's even easier than you say. This UN thingy looks like it's saying the world only uses 133,127 hectares for crops total, and the US (not even North America, just the USA) has 176,950 hectares of unused arable land.
Don't most of the problems you list actually get easier to solve as population density goes up?
Food doesn't. Six billion people eat a lot. We can make wonderful efficient use of urban space, pack everyone into the cities until we're all as cozy as the folks in Tokyo--yep, we'd all fit. But growing enough food for all those people given just one continent would be...challenging.
I said "most" of the problems, thinking food might be an exception. But heck, I'll bite on this one too: Couldn't you just pick a fairly large continent and, using modern farming techniques, farm ten times as much land as before on that continent? Pick Asia or Africa as your continent and cut down forests and drain swamps until you've got enough acreage in a suitable climate, and bring the productivity up to western standards with modern technology. It doesn't seem to me like much of a challenge compared to convincing all those people to move. Sure, it'd be a political challenge, but that's another issue.
There would, of course, be a problem of diminishing returns, because the very best farmland is probably already being farmed. The land that isn't being farmed is going to be significantly less productive without a hefty investment in irrigation, fertilizer, terracing, logging, you name it. But it's not like there's a lack of potentially farmable but currently unfarmed land in the world. If you were willing to do whatever it takes, one continent probably would suffice. So, I'm not sure I see the problem. Maybe it would help if we ran some numbers rather than speaking in generalities like "a lot."
Not that I'm advocating we should depopulate all but one continent and super-develop the remaining one, mind you...
At the moment the estimated world population is 6351506980 Is there any way that you think that a single continent could support 6.3bil people? Food, Water, Waste disposal, electricity, transportation networks...
Don't most of the problems you list actually get easier to solve as population density goes up? The expensive and difficult part of building a network to handle needs such as electricity, water, transportation and even waste disposal is getting your network to cover the people way out in the boonies where you have to lay a lot of road, wire or pipe to support relatively few customers. That's why the US government had a taxpayer-supported Rural Electrification Agency but never needed a Metropolitan one.
But Sosa just rolled over and paid out $3500. These people are a problem because they help a bad system to stay bad. It makes it terribly difficult for me to have sympathy for someone who has such a lack of conviction, such a failed sense of justice. They don't care. Should we?
Yeah, Sosa's initial impulse was to send the money in. His reasoning process on that was probably something like this:
(1) There's a time limit on this offer.
(2) I don't have the time and energy to deal with lawyers and do the research to handle this right now.
(3) The worst-case scenario if I pay is I'm out $3500, which I can't afford.
(4) The worst-case scenario if don't pay is that I'm out 100 grand or more plus a lot of time.
Initial result=>PAY.
But after he had the time to reflect more on the matter, Sosa decided to fight back. So far, he's participated in a class-action suit (and lost, meaning he's on the hook for at least another $10k) and has given public interviews resulting in the article just featured.
So, yeah, I think he's doing the right thing. He cares, and we should too.
And another thing, who on earth are the Objectivist Center and Reason Foundation?
In addition to publishing Reason magazine, the Reason Foundation supports a lot of public policy studies through the Reason Public Policy Institute, which is basically a libertarian-leaning think-tank. It's not surprising they'd have a postltion on this issue; they have a position on every transportation-related issue one could imagine, and Poole is probably more politically savvy than most of the other signatories.
I also didn't see any comments from President Bush. As I understand it, he is supportive of the TIA. Will he sign a bill that is going to kill one of his pet projects? Again, let's hope so.
Does Bush veto anything? I haven't been keeping track recently, but I had the impression based on his first year or two that Bush automatically signs almost anything Congress puts in front of him.
So either you shut off the computer somehow and therefore have no control over the plane or you avoid the no fly zones.
And this isn't like opening up your computer's case and switching some wires around. First you have to find out what wires you need to disconnect, which I imagine won't be easy, then you'd have to figure out how to get to them, etc.
No problem. There will be a panel in the cockpit. Remove that panel and you will find two wires leading to the "tamperproof" soft-wall decision box, a red one and a blue one. A bad guy would know which wire to cut because he did his research beforehand, but you're a good guy, so you will have to agonize over the matter. "Do I cut the red wire, or the blue wire?" Beads of sweat break out on your forehead as you position the wire clippers over the blue wire, change your mind at the last instant and clip the red wire. This turns out be the right decision, so you will be able to steer the plane to avoid disaster just in the nick of time. Hurray!
...or have I been watching too many action movies?
Are you serious? How old are you? Or, more specifically, have you ever had to answer an essay question on a history or English class in school?
Try writing a few coherent paragraphs within 30 minutes, and see how much your hand hurts with printing.
Personally, I find cursive to be slower and harder than printing. It requires more mental effort and care to form cursive letters, enough so that the mental effort of writing can be a distraction from the mental effort of thinking of what to write next. Whereas printed text just flows out easily for me.
Some people find cursive easier than cursive, some find it harder. Cursive may have fewer pen-lifts, but it requires keeping careful control of the pen for longer periods of uninterrupted time without a break. Drawing a long intricate sequence of continuous curves can be harder than drawing a collection of short, discrete strokes.
So to answer your question: I'm 35, and I have totally forgotten how to write in cursive. I printed in all my essays in college. Maybe I had a touch of dysgraphia, but I found cursive to be more trouble than it was worth. Cursive generally takes me twice as long to write and is half as legible as printing. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.
Have any of you programmers actually used Dvorak or Maltron keyboards.
I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK about six months ago, and switched back to QWERTY last week. DVORAK wasn't any faster or easier to use, and it made all the vim commands and standard operating system shortcuts I knew awkward to type. zxcv for undo/cut/copy/paste, hjkl movement...that sort of stuff is hardwired for me. Or back I go, or as they say in dvorak: "xajt C ir":-)
The problem is that Microsoft's bundling of patches (and unavailability of source code and exploit examples) means that companies running servers with complex configurations often can't just install a service pack, something breaks. If they had source code and/or exploit examples they could probably pull out just the code to the patch they need, or code up a stateful firewall filter to watch for the exploit.
Full disclosure here first - I work for the company that makes Everguard.
When you subscribe to Everguard, we look inside the microsoft patches to see what files they touch. If one of our data suppliers (say, SecurityFocus) provides exploit examples, we'll make that information available too. So when our system tells you there's a named vulnerability that applies to some of your machines, you can click on a "why is this a vulnerability?" link to find out which versions of which DLLs or EXE files on your particular system are considered vulnerable and you can click on the vulnerability name or number to get more information about the nature of that vulnerability -including in some cases links to exploit examples.
So, it's possible that you could look at the detailed information, figure out a way to block the exploit, and mark that vulnerability in Everguard as "resolved through reconfiguration" with a log comment explaining what you did. Rather than telling the system to go ahead and apply the patches at 1:00 am, rebooting the machines as necessary.
In the short term, I expect that the most recent attack will provide a huge sales boost to pre-packaged "security solutions" like firewalls, virus protection, etc.
Also, companies with hundreds or thousands of machines to administer will probably start buying large-scale third-party automated patch deployment systems. A system like Everguard or Patchlink or Bigfix will let you know where there are unpatched vulnerabilities on your network, help you patch them, and check that they've been patched.
Most of these systems are cross-platform and at least one uses a linux-based server.
a dvorak keyboard...... which *is* significantly faster, trust me, if you have the time to learn it...
I'm using Dvorak right now. It took a week to learn, a month to be comfortable with and another month - including many hours of use of a typing-tutor program - before I approached my QWERTY speed. And now that I've been using Dvorak for several months both at home and at work, I'm about ready to switch back.
Why? First off, I never saw any speed improvement at all. It subjectively feels a little better when I force myself to touch-type, but I'm still slower than I was before I made the switch. Secondly, there are occasions when I need to use a QWERTY keyboard. For instance, there are PDA keyboards that only come with that layout. Or internet kiosks when I travel. Thirdly, over the years I've learned many functional shortcuts based on the QWERTY layout that don't transfer well to Dvorak. Command-V to paste. Navigation using vi/vim keys. That sort of thing.
So it was an interesting experiment, but I'm not convinced that Dvorak is worth the effort and I expect I will switch back to QWERTY in the near future.
Yes. My point in this is that these figures seem to point out that in the US, where deadly arms are legal, the use of deadly force in crimes is more common; thus resulting in the higher number ( more than 5 times higher ) of murders in the US, whereas in the UK, where gun laws are stricter, the number of deaths by crime are significantly lower.
One trouble with your premise is that the UK murder rate was a lot lower than in the US/before/ the UK came up with their stricter regulatory regime and the gap has been narrowing ever since they passed those laws.
Another trouble with your premise is that the murder rate with "hands and feet" as the weapon is also several times higher in the US than the UK. Surely you won't claim that's because Americans have more hands and feet per capita?:-)
Did you have a look at the murder and rape rates from the police statistics?
The rate in the US is 10x that of the UK's.
Er, no. The murder rate was 5.7x, the rape rate was 3x, as of 1996. source.
And note that England came off much, much worse in the victim survey than it did in the police statistics. The UK rates of robbery, assault, burglary and theft were all about twice the US rate(*) in 1995 -- a big change from a decade or two ago when the UK seemed like such a civilised place.
(*to be more precise, they were 1.4x, 2.3x, 1.7x, and 2.2x respectively)
Note that the murder rate is still higher in the US (but declining! Give it another decade...) but muggings and rapes and assaults are much more common than murder so the changes in those categories is what made the difference.
There are some great charts in the overview page that show how much difference a decade or two can make in this sort of argument.
Slashdot Mirror
And in particular, There aren't any large-scale studies showing a clear negative effect on human health. Despite many attempts. Even the claims of damage to birds have mostly been debunked. I didn't say anything about Dursban. I'm mostly unfamiliar with Dursban. But I'd like to point out that we don't need to "introduce" vast quantities of toxins into our environment; our environment is already full of natural "toxins" whether we choose to introduce new ones or not. Introducing new chemicals that - like everything that exists - are toxic to some at some dosage level, often reduces our overall health risk and removing old chemicals often increases health risk. For instance, outlawing DDT just meant that most people who would have used DDT used some other chemical as a substitute, and I don't believe anybody bothered to determine that DDT was MORE toxic than the likely replacements before banning it. It's also pretty clear that the short-term effect of banning DDT was to drastically increase human deaths due to malaria.
Junkscience.com's DDT FAQ
DDT was never "thoroughly proven" harmful to humans, much less to "all forms of life". There was some evidence to suggest it may have been harmful to a few varieties of bird, but that's about it. The few studies used to suggest possible harm to humans have generally been debunked.
Here's a brief free encyclopedia article on the subject.
I'll take a rain check on that kiss. :-)
http://flwd.com/5bx/main/index.html
People who pick 5BX might find this of use: I wrote a palm app to help keep track of all the 5BX level information so you don't have to keep big, complicated paper charts around. You can find the program at PalmGear. It's still under development, so please send feedback if you find any bugs or have feature requests.
-Glen Raphael
raphael@pobox.com
Palm pilot watch w/ almost no features...$300
Actually, the Fossil watch has almost exactly the same feature set as the $70 Palm Pilot (a Palm Zire). The screen is the same number of pixels, the pixels are just smaller. The memory is the same, there's IR beaming and character recognition. It's even got buttons; they simply don't happen to ship mapped to the usual functions.
I stand corrected.
There would, of course, be a problem of diminishing returns, because the very best farmland is probably already being farmed. The land that isn't being farmed is going to be significantly less productive without a hefty investment in irrigation, fertilizer, terracing, logging, you name it. But it's not like there's a lack of potentially farmable but currently unfarmed land in the world. If you were willing to do whatever it takes, one continent probably would suffice. So, I'm not sure I see the problem. Maybe it would help if we ran some numbers rather than speaking in generalities like "a lot."
Not that I'm advocating we should depopulate all but one continent and super-develop the remaining one, mind you...
Don't most of the problems you list actually get easier to solve as population density goes up? The expensive and difficult part of building a network to handle needs such as electricity, water, transportation and even waste disposal is getting your network to cover the people way out in the boonies where you have to lay a lot of road, wire or pipe to support relatively few customers. That's why the US government had a taxpayer-supported Rural Electrification Agency but never needed a Metropolitan one.
Here's a book recommendation for you: The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Yeah, Sosa's initial impulse was to send the money in. His reasoning process on that was probably something like this:
(1) There's a time limit on this offer.
(2) I don't have the time and energy to deal with lawyers and do the research to handle this right now.
(3) The worst-case scenario if I pay is I'm out $3500, which I can't afford.
(4) The worst-case scenario if don't pay is that I'm out 100 grand or more plus a lot of time.
Initial result=>PAY.
But after he had the time to reflect more on the matter, Sosa decided to fight back. So far, he's participated in a class-action suit (and lost, meaning he's on the hook for at least another $10k) and has given public interviews resulting in the article just featured.
So, yeah, I think he's doing the right thing. He cares, and we should too.
In addition to publishing Reason magazine, the Reason Foundation supports a lot of public policy studies through the Reason Public Policy Institute, which is basically a libertarian-leaning think-tank. It's not surprising they'd have a postltion on this issue; they have a position on every transportation-related issue one could imagine, and Poole is probably more politically savvy than most of the other signatories.
Here's the RPPI's take on general transportation, and surface transportation.
Does Bush veto anything? I haven't been keeping track recently, but I had the impression based on his first year or two that Bush automatically signs almost anything Congress puts in front of him.
Page 1 says "Mircrosoft" will launch the thing, and "thereâ(TM)s some changes"
According to page 2, 2.5G is now "fully supported a offers GSM suspend/resume" while meanwhile, "on the multimedia site of things..."
Page 5 tells us there are "a few welcome extraâ(TM)s" and "we clocked between 10 till 12 hours on the battery..."
Quick, somebody make this guy a Slashdot editor!
Some people find cursive easier than cursive, some find it harder. Cursive may have fewer pen-lifts, but it requires keeping careful control of the pen for longer periods of uninterrupted time without a break. Drawing a long intricate sequence of continuous curves can be harder than drawing a collection of short, discrete strokes.
So to answer your question: I'm 35, and I have totally forgotten how to write in cursive. I printed in all my essays in college. Maybe I had a touch of dysgraphia, but I found cursive to be more trouble than it was worth. Cursive generally takes me twice as long to write and is half as legible as printing. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.
...were expressed well in a Reason Magazine interview some years ago.
When you subscribe to Everguard, we look inside the microsoft patches to see what files they touch. If one of our data suppliers (say, SecurityFocus) provides exploit examples, we'll make that information available too. So when our system tells you there's a named vulnerability that applies to some of your machines, you can click on a "why is this a vulnerability?" link to find out which versions of which DLLs or EXE files on your particular system are considered vulnerable and you can click on the vulnerability name or number to get more information about the nature of that vulnerability -including in some cases links to exploit examples.
So, it's possible that you could look at the detailed information, figure out a way to block the exploit, and mark that vulnerability in Everguard as "resolved through reconfiguration" with a log comment explaining what you did. Rather than telling the system to go ahead and apply the patches at 1:00 am, rebooting the machines as necessary.
Also, companies with hundreds or thousands of machines to administer will probably start buying large-scale third-party automated patch deployment systems. A system like Everguard or Patchlink or Bigfix will let you know where there are unpatched vulnerabilities on your network, help you patch them, and check that they've been patched.
Most of these systems are cross-platform and at least one uses a linux-based server.
I'm about 40 wpm on QWERTY, a bit less than that on Dvorak.
I'm using Dvorak right now. It took a week to learn, a month to be comfortable with and another month - including many hours of use of a typing-tutor program - before I approached my QWERTY speed. And now that I've been using Dvorak for several months both at home and at work, I'm about ready to switch back.
Why? First off, I never saw any speed improvement at all. It subjectively feels a little better when I force myself to touch-type, but I'm still slower than I was before I made the switch. Secondly, there are occasions when I need to use a QWERTY keyboard. For instance, there are PDA keyboards that only come with that layout. Or internet kiosks when I travel. Thirdly, over the years I've learned many functional shortcuts based on the QWERTY layout that don't transfer well to Dvorak. Command-V to paste. Navigation using vi/vim keys. That sort of thing.
So it was an interesting experiment, but I'm not convinced that Dvorak is worth the effort and I expect I will switch back to QWERTY in the near future.
One trouble with your premise is that the UK murder rate was a lot lower than in the US /before/ the UK came up with their stricter regulatory regime and the gap has been narrowing ever since they passed those laws.
Another trouble with your premise is that the murder rate with "hands and feet" as the weapon is also several times higher in the US than the UK. Surely you won't claim that's because Americans have more hands and feet per capita? :-)
Which denies the original posters assertion of a "much, much higher violent crime rate". So we're all agreed on this point now?
but you're more likely to be killed or raped in the process in the US.
And more likely to be beaten up, mugged, or have you car stolen in the UK, yes.
The rate in the US is 10x that of the UK's.
Er, no. The murder rate was 5.7x, the rape rate was 3x, as of 1996. source.
And note that England came off much, much worse in the victim survey than it did in the police statistics. The UK rates of robbery, assault, burglary and theft were all about twice the US rate(*) in 1995 -- a big change from a decade or two ago when the UK seemed like such a civilised place.
(*to be more precise, they were 1.4x, 2.3x, 1.7x, and 2.2x respectively)
There are some great charts in the overview page that show how much difference a decade or two can make in this sort of argument.