I'm not suggesting for a moment that all subsidies should be removed overnight; the dislocation caused would be incredibly severe.
Instead, you'd gradually remove subsidies over 10 or 20 years, and target subsidies at paying people to leave farming (because that would be the net result - fewer, bigger, more efficient farms) rather than encouraging them to continue.
As it happens, rural malapportionment and its effects on agricultural protectionism are a subject that I, as part of a farm-owning family in a basically non-subsidising country (Australia) know a little bit about. You do have a good point about the historical basis for this, but there are a bunch of reasons why it persists today and disproportionate political power is one of the most important.
Japan has an even worse rural malapportionment than the US; see this PDF file for an explanation. Basically, the LDP 's power base is Japanese farmers.
Europe is a different matter, but the power bases of various politicians are still an important factor in the failure to wind back agricultural subsidies. France is the agricultural powerhouse of the EU, and consequently gets a huge whack of subsidy cash. Guess what Jacques Chirac's job was before he was President? Minister for Agriculture, and the continuation of subsidies was his crowning achievement in that job. Until he goes, any chance of even tinkering reforms is pretty minimal.
What I don't understand is why the poor struggling family farmer down on his luck story keeps on getting swallowed by urban voters.
This self-serving rubbish gets thrown up by rural voters, and the mostly conservative politicians who rely on their disproportionate electoral influence, all the friggin' time. Your contention that those sheep living New York, LA, and Chicago are more susceptible to charismatic bullshit-spinners than the good citizens of Bum's Rush, Alabama simply isn't supported by any evidence.
In my experience, the only thing that electoral bias in favour of rural voters does is to artificially inflate farmers property values by turning them into into welfare recipients (in all but name), while indulging their worst tendancies to blame people who aren't WASPs for the world's problems and tell everybody else what they can and can't do in their own bedrooms.
The subsidy for American farmers works out to about $20,000 per rural job - yep, those salt of the earth folks you love so much have a huge proportion of their income paid by those city pagans. That's what the electoral college, and 2 senators per state regardless of population, does.
What Kerry says about Bush is incredibly mild compared to what the rank-and-file in the Democratic Party really think of the guy - and I'd imagine the same applies from the other angle. The bad things that they say about each other are phrased in terms of political theatre, but they stem from sincere and deeply held beliefs. In the case of Bush, they think (amongst other things) he's an idiot who led the country into an unnecessary war that has resulted in the deaths of over 1000 Americans, God knows how many thousand Iraqis, cost over 200 billion dollars, has been the best recruiting tool Osama bin Laden could have dreamed of, and will end up leaving Iraq in a worse state than it was under Saddam, murderous thug he may have been.
Now, I understand that if you're a Republican, you probably disagree with the above, and I'm not really interested in getting into a debate over the merits of this viewpoint. The point is that most Democrats believe it. And if you think that way, wouldn't you get a little annoyed with the man responsible?
The President, whatever the constitution says, has the power of the bully pulpit to forcefully put issues on the national agenda. If a popular president started advocating for serious electoral reform, the issue would instantly get taken up in Congress and in the media.
On issues that have penetrated the mainstream there is already a huge volume of material out there. This is an important issue in the longer term, but it's off the radar screen of the mainstream, so it's a good one to ask here.
Finally, I doubt there's any Americans on Slashdot who haven't made up their minds who to vote for (For those of you who haven't, what rock have you been living under?). Therefore, I think it's worth asking questions about non election-deciding issues to get an insight into where the mainstream of both parties are on them.
Just because people are accessing with IE doesn't mean that they're not Linux users. It could be that they use both at home, or that they're reading Slashdot from school or work.
I know I sometimes use IE to read Slashdot from work.
Here's a new technology by a British inventor which, while not quite being a flying car, looks like it has the potential to be a considerable improvement over the helicopter in some applications. It's called the FanWing, and it basically involves replacing the wing with something that looks like a paddlewheel.
He claims VTOL performance (hasn't actually demonstrated VTOL yet, though), much better power efficiency than a helicopter, easier flight charactistics than a conventional aircraft let alone a helicopter, and importantly much lower noise than a helicopter. The models fly, but he hasn't flown a full-size prototype yet.
Look, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but it sure does fly and it does look like a genuinely new idea.
What you seem to be missing is this thing isn't a fuel cell vehicle. It's just a slightly modified BMW V12 (the same one they put in the 7-Series) tuned to run on hydrogen. It's just conventional internal combustion engine on different fuel. Any idiot can do that.
Hydrogen combustion is only an environmental win if you don't emit carbon in the process of producing the hydrogen - unlike fuel cells, which are a win regardless because a fuel cell is far more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
The Last Starfighter was kind of pioneering in its use of CGI, but it was by no means the first film to use CGI special effects. Tron, made two years before The Last Starfighter, used a lot of CGI (watching it today, you sit there screaming "use some Gouroud shading, you lazy bums" at the screen in some parts). For that matter, the trench run briefing in A New Hope, way back in 1977, was CGI.
This timeline on the Wikipedia has a lot more detail, though it's a little breathless in its reporting of press releases...
Slightly offtopic, but if any Slashdotters ever visit Munich, you can see a replica of Konrad Zuse's Z3, and a Z4, at the Deutches Museum, probably the greatest technology museum in the world.
They have so much geeky stuff there you could spend three or four days there and still not appreciate it all. There's captions to most things in English, so you don't have to speak German to get a lot out of the place.
They have this in a number of countries with post Stone-age cellular networks (that means most western nations except you, USA), but it's not at all cheap. In Australia, you get about 500 megabytes download a month for about 70 USD. Over that limit, though it's 2.80 USD per megabyte!
I don't think you'd be downloading warez and pr0n at that price...:)
If I were able to vote in the US elections there are several criteria I'd be looking at:
What do they plan to do? What kind of good ideas do they have?
Does their performance in their past career give some indication that they'll be able to achieve their plans?
Because of the many checks and balances in government, a President will need to compromise their agenda. Do I support the candidate's broad principles?
Do I trust this candidate to act wisely when the shit hits the fan?
Now, while the Wikipedia article can give some indication on most of these points, if you want to have a detailed look at their actual plans you'd be better off reading the policy positions on their websites.
I've seen applications that test command-line apps for buffer overflows. They work, and have been used to detect potentially exploitable bugs. The general principle can be used to test other types of apps, though obviously you have to adapt the program for each type of program input.
A more general prevention method is to use an environment that doesn't allow buffer overflows; as Java proponents never tire of pointing out, Java guards against this type of attack. There are C libraries which do similar things, IIRC; StackGuard was one such method, though it seems to haved faded into obscurity.
As to your suggestion of a static source code check for unsafe programming practices, there are programs that do that too. GCC itself includes a number of warnings that pop up if you use inherently unsafe C library functions, like gets() (which is buffer overflow in a can...).
The mechanical parts, such as the bearings, of a wind turbine are subject to wear just like any other mechanical device, The structure will eventually succumb to fatigue also. I suspect that the structure, which probably takes the most energy to construct, would last considerably longer than 20 years.
As to the lifetime of other types of powerplant, I'm no expert, but I do know that mechanical devices wear out eventually, and nuclear devices require a lot of maintenance because of for safety reasons you need to detect and repair potential faults before they happen.
That all sounds fine and dandy, but the technology to use hydrogen for this purpose still seems to be at least a decade, and probably more, away. Over that timescale, it seems to me that there are a number of other technologies which might make significant advances. If these occur, the impetus for hydrogen energy storage might just disappear, for static applications at least.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but this study by wind power advocates suggests an energy payback time of three to six months, a small fraction of a windmill's lifetime. Even assuming they're out by an order of magnitude, a turbine should last at least 20 years and so the energy produced is way larger than the energy used to produce the turbine.
Sure, and fusion power, solar power satellites, or artificial photosynthesis could make the whole discussion moot in a couple of decades. Right now, no.
I buy green power here in Australia. The base cost of electricity here is about 10 cents (US) per kilowatt hour, and you pay about a 2 US cent premium for green power. I very much doubt that energy is 90% cheaper in the US than it is here.
Oh, and for the millionth time, would the proponents of wind power factor in the cost of energy storage into their ridiculous claims that it's possible to affordably replace fossil fuel and nuclear generators with wind right now?
Essentially, the US is living beyond its means. Its deficit is unsustainable in the long term, as is the value of the US dollar. If China or Japan decides to pull the pin, your economy goes down the toilet for years to come.
Sooner or later, they will probably, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did, start to seperate their private enthusiasms from Google. Gates and Jobs both own private stakes in a number of companies and organisations, Jobs most famously with Pixar and Gates with an images company which I can't recall the name of just now.
This is the same government whose IT Minister was named the "World's greatest Luddite" by The Register. . Aside from the well-known stupid internet ensorship laws, this government has just signed an FTA with the USA which requires us to enforce software patents, among other things.
For this and a million other reasons (not the least of which is this government's terrible morals) I suspect most Australian Slashdotters will be voting for someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, you'd gradually remove subsidies over 10 or 20 years, and target subsidies at paying people to leave farming (because that would be the net result - fewer, bigger, more efficient farms) rather than encouraging them to continue.
Japan has an even worse rural malapportionment than the US; see this PDF file for an explanation. Basically, the LDP 's power base is Japanese farmers.
Europe is a different matter, but the power bases of various politicians are still an important factor in the failure to wind back agricultural subsidies. France is the agricultural powerhouse of the EU, and consequently gets a huge whack of subsidy cash. Guess what Jacques Chirac's job was before he was President? Minister for Agriculture, and the continuation of subsidies was his crowning achievement in that job. Until he goes, any chance of even tinkering reforms is pretty minimal.
What I don't understand is why the poor struggling family farmer down on his luck story keeps on getting swallowed by urban voters.
In my experience, the only thing that electoral bias in favour of rural voters does is to artificially inflate farmers property values by turning them into into welfare recipients (in all but name), while indulging their worst tendancies to blame people who aren't WASPs for the world's problems and tell everybody else what they can and can't do in their own bedrooms.
The subsidy for American farmers works out to about $20,000 per rural job - yep, those salt of the earth folks you love so much have a huge proportion of their income paid by those city pagans. That's what the electoral college, and 2 senators per state regardless of population, does.
What Kerry says about Bush is incredibly mild compared to what the rank-and-file in the Democratic Party really think of the guy - and I'd imagine the same applies from the other angle. The bad things that they say about each other are phrased in terms of political theatre, but they stem from sincere and deeply held beliefs. In the case of Bush, they think (amongst other things) he's an idiot who led the country into an unnecessary war that has resulted in the deaths of over 1000 Americans, God knows how many thousand Iraqis, cost over 200 billion dollars, has been the best recruiting tool Osama bin Laden could have dreamed of, and will end up leaving Iraq in a worse state than it was under Saddam, murderous thug he may have been.
Now, I understand that if you're a Republican, you probably disagree with the above, and I'm not really interested in getting into a debate over the merits of this viewpoint. The point is that most Democrats believe it. And if you think that way, wouldn't you get a little annoyed with the man responsible?
I was going to use the combine harvester analogy myself, but I thought I'd only confuse Slashdotters without the benefit of a rural background...
I know I sometimes use IE to read Slashdot from work.
He claims VTOL performance (hasn't actually demonstrated VTOL yet, though), much better power efficiency than a helicopter, easier flight charactistics than a conventional aircraft let alone a helicopter, and importantly much lower noise than a helicopter. The models fly, but he hasn't flown a full-size prototype yet.
Look, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but it sure does fly and it does look like a genuinely new idea.
Hydrogen combustion is only an environmental win if you don't emit carbon in the process of producing the hydrogen - unlike fuel cells, which are a win regardless because a fuel cell is far more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
This functionality would be extremely nice to have. Does anybody know if there actually any plans to make this merge happen?
The Last Starfighter was kind of pioneering in its use of CGI, but it was by no means the first film to use CGI special effects. Tron, made two years before The Last Starfighter, used a lot of CGI (watching it today, you sit there screaming "use some Gouroud shading, you lazy bums" at the screen in some parts). For that matter, the trench run briefing in A New Hope, way back in 1977, was CGI. This timeline on the Wikipedia has a lot more detail, though it's a little breathless in its reporting of press releases...
They have so much geeky stuff there you could spend three or four days there and still not appreciate it all. There's captions to most things in English, so you don't have to speak German to get a lot out of the place.
I don't think you'd be downloading warez and pr0n at that price... :)
Now, while the Wikipedia article can give some indication on most of these points, if you want to have a detailed look at their actual plans you'd be better off reading the policy positions on their websites.
A more general prevention method is to use an environment that doesn't allow buffer overflows; as Java proponents never tire of pointing out, Java guards against this type of attack. There are C libraries which do similar things, IIRC; StackGuard was one such method, though it seems to haved faded into obscurity.
As to your suggestion of a static source code check for unsafe programming practices, there are programs that do that too. GCC itself includes a number of warnings that pop up if you use inherently unsafe C library functions, like gets() (which is buffer overflow in a can...).
As to the lifetime of other types of powerplant, I'm no expert, but I do know that mechanical devices wear out eventually, and nuclear devices require a lot of maintenance because of for safety reasons you need to detect and repair potential faults before they happen.
That all sounds fine and dandy, but the technology to use hydrogen for this purpose still seems to be at least a decade, and probably more, away. Over that timescale, it seems to me that there are a number of other technologies which might make significant advances. If these occur, the impetus for hydrogen energy storage might just disappear, for static applications at least.
As the article itself points out, such prices have not historically been sustained, but I'm not so sure this time around...
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but this study by wind power advocates suggests an energy payback time of three to six months, a small fraction of a windmill's lifetime. Even assuming they're out by an order of magnitude, a turbine should last at least 20 years and so the energy produced is way larger than the energy used to produce the turbine.
This claim has been made a lot for solar power (where it's been shown to be wrong) as well as for wind. Would you care to cite a source, please?
Sure, and fusion power, solar power satellites, or artificial photosynthesis could make the whole discussion moot in a couple of decades. Right now, no.
Oh, and for the millionth time, would the proponents of wind power factor in the cost of energy storage into their ridiculous claims that it's possible to affordably replace fossil fuel and nuclear generators with wind right now?
Essentially, the US is living beyond its means. Its deficit is unsustainable in the long term, as is the value of the US dollar. If China or Japan decides to pull the pin, your economy goes down the toilet for years to come.
Sooner or later, they will probably, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did, start to seperate their private enthusiasms from Google. Gates and Jobs both own private stakes in a number of companies and organisations, Jobs most famously with Pixar and Gates with an images company which I can't recall the name of just now.
For this and a million other reasons (not the least of which is this government's terrible morals) I suspect most Australian Slashdotters will be voting for someone else.