Where's the proof she was conducting state business with an unauthorized account? If she was breaking the law, by all means, indict her. Just because *you* say she was breaking the law doesn't mean that, absent any proof whatsoever, she actually was. There's no actual evidence she broke the law.
I tremble at the thought of the injustice which would be prevalent in a society if it were run by people who think like you. You claim to wish for justice while simultaneously contradicting yourself, by demanding that an injustice be done (i.e. indict Sarah Palin without any evidence just because you don't like her).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way it worked out is this. . . the judge sentenced him to prison. The USBOP has different prisons available to them. The judge cannot determine *which* prison he gets sent to - that's at the discretion of the USBOP. The judge recommended that the prison he be sent to be one of the 'halfway houses' which the USBOP runs, but the BOP decided to send him to a more traditional prison. Basically, a judge can determine if a felon goes to prison or not, but cannot choose the prison.
Maybe they're afraid someone is going to hack into their slashdot account. After all, if there's a significant body of commentors stating that it's just fine that this guy hacked her account because they happen to disagree with Sarah Palin politically, then why wouldn't they hack anybody's account that they happen to disagree with? There seems to be a certain lack of respect for privacy, civility, respect for others, and the rule of law here on slashdot.
Please, protecting people and businesses from having others illegally gain access to their private accounts is not some obscure, ridiculous 300 year old law. It's completely reasonable for it to be a felony to illegally access other people's accounts. It's also completely reasonable to send someone who broke the law by hacking into someone else's account to jail for doing so. You do the crime, you do the time.
We're not talking about one of those legal technicality laws that make criminals out of almost everyone. We're talking about purposely using technical features to gain access to an account which you have not been authorized to access by either the person who 'owns' the account, or by a court through a search warrant. (Yes, I realize that there are issues of the federal government itself doing warrantless wiretapping of the Internet, but that's another issue; yes, it's hypocritical, but at the same time, just because the government is violating our rights, doesn't mean it should be ok for everyone to violate our rights - you don't solve problems by creating additional problems).
First, I acknowledge that there are inequalities in our justice system, that some people who have done more serious crimes, sometimes face lesser penalty. Also, not all those convicted are guilty.
But, just because the email account belongs to a politician *you don't like*, doesn't make it legal for someone to hack their email accounts. Do computer accounts deserve legal protection from people breaking into them? I think the answer is yes, and I believe most people would agree you have a reasonable expectation of legal protection for your private or business (if you own a business) computer accounts.
Just because not everyone who hacks into accounts is caught, doesn't mean that those who *are caught* and convicted by a jury should not face the punishment for their crimes. Now, perhaps it was a mistake for whoever sentenced this fellow to ignore the judges recommendation. However, if the judge only *recommends* a sentence, but is not tasked with actual sentencing, then it is ultimately not his decision. His decision is guidance, not binding.
When you hack into other people's accounts, you're committing a felony. There's nothing unjust about sending a felon to prison.
Is it reasonable to expect that every SysAdmin is an expert in programming to the degree necessary to thoroughly evaluate whether *working code* contains subtle bugs that can be exploited by a cracker? Don't get me wrong, I don't think the argument that proprietary software has an inherent security advantage is valid, but what I'm saying is that SysAdmin is a different job, with different skillsets, than is software development. Sure, there's a lot of overlap, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that every SysAdmin has to be a programming expert and validate security.
On the other hand. . . every company larger than some threshold size, probably should have security-trained programmers on staff whose job it is to security-audit the source code of programs which are being considered for implementation at the company, who can make a report that can guide the IT decision makers. In the case of open-source programs, the company might even consider having those programmers fix the bugs (if it's determined from their report that it makes business sense to fix found bugs instead of using an alternative solution), and submit those fixes to the program's 'official' maintainers.
That, however, still leaves small businesses, most of whom will not be able to afford to have a staff programmer to security audit their code. However, Open Source means they reap the benefits of the larger businesses' investments in auditing the code and fixing problems (which, the larger businesses might not find particularly fair, but otoh, those businesses too are reaping big benefits from their investments in the Open Source code - including better security and control over their own operations).
"people who make free apps should not have to pay"
Just because the app is free, doesn't mean that Apple has no costs associated with hosting the app on the download server, verifying the app doesn't have viruses/etc, and bandwidth to allow customers to download the app.
Now, I'm no Apple fanboy - I own an Android phone, because I don't like the level of control that Apple exercises over their products after sale, but I also recognize that having a small annual fee for hosting the app is not unreasonable. On the other hand, what is unreasonable is that you can't host the app yourself, or with some other service.
Wikipedia is "free" but they just raised something like $10 Million to fund their operations this year. If you are offering a 'free' app that other people find useful, you should have no problem getting $99 in donations to pay the annual hosting fee. That is an absolutely paltry sum, in the big picture. But, you should also have other hosting options, which Apple does not allow.
Man, welcome to the club. I've been perusing slashdot since, I dunno, 1997. I've actually come to expect a lot of slashdot headlines and summaries to be one or more of the following: just plain wrong, unnecessarily inflammatory, or very, very confusing.
Basically, slashdot are not journalists. They are link aggregators and a discussion forum. As a 'central' discussion forum with a pretty decent threaded comment system, it's much nicer to discuss news here than at most other news sites (which have next-to-useless discussion systems, mostly), but I definitely do NOT come to slashdot for the quality of the editing and article summaries.
So if an "armchair quarterback" isn't really a quarterback, does that mean your armchair layman is *really* a scientist, just pretending to be a layman from the comfort of his armchair?
"I would have more faith in this experiment if . . . testing of the "receiving tubes" was done by a person other than the one who ran the experiments. .."
Wait, so the only way for science to be valid is if the person doing the experiment is NOT the person doing the experiment? Bu. . . wha?!?
Did you mean the analysis of the data/results? Or, having multiple experimenters each doing an isolated *part* of the experiment, blind to what the other person was doing?
D-link has a Wireless N 300 router, listed on their site for $65 (so you could probably find it a little cheaper than that at other resellers). The DIR-615, which claims to be IPv6 ready. As someone else mentioned, the Apple Airport routers also support IPv6.
It is a bit disappointing that there's only a few models with built-in IPv6 support, but at least they're starting to make them. As more ISP's role out IPv6, the OEMs will start putting out more devices that support it. I think the problem right now is that there's virtually no demand for IPv6 support from customers, because no ISPs are offering IPv6 connectivity (that too will be changing, probably, soon - I think Comcast and a small number of other ISPs are starting too look into IPv6).
It kind of makes me wonder, though, just how much Apple is losing because you can't get an iPhone from other carriers. I'm sure it was a good deal for Apple in the beginning, but I really think at this point in the game, AT&T Exclusivity means that Apple has about reached the maximum market share they can with just one carrier. If Verizon, Sprint, T-Mo, Cricket, etc. could sell iPhones to their customers, Apple would probably be selling 3X as many phones.
Hmmmm, it appears that somehow my post above got mangled and part of it is missing. The first paragraph was supposed to say something along the lines of. . .
So, you're comparing a 800-1200 Watt Microwave oven with devices which transmit 1 watt or less? Also, generally speaking, the signals from omindirectional trasmitters (which most WiFi devices are, and I believe this applies to Smart Meters also) obey the inverse-sqaure law. . .
I don't really know, but I would guess they might be able to do some sort of light-analysis. Scientists can tell us the chemical composition of distant stars and nebulae simply be examining the light coming from or passing through (respectively) them, so perhaps they can do something similar with the water in the lake?
I'm not sure building gas plants will remain 'easy'. San Bruno has, no doubt, made Californians a bit wary about the risks of natural gas. It's true though, building nuclear power plants tends to have more red-tape than most other types. Expense though, is a relative thing. Nuclear power plants provide a LOT of power with very high uptimes, generally speaking. So, the price per kWh can generally be cheaper than gas in the end, and competitive with coal.
Also, a nuclear plant serving California wouldn't necessarily have to be built in California. Probably easier to build it in AZ or NV and pipe in the power.
So, you're comparing a 800-1200 Watt Microwave oven with devices which transmit inverse-square law, which basically says that the energy at distance r is proportional to 1/r^2. Since any squared value grows very fast, and since the squared value is at the bottom of the fraction, this means that energy exposure drops off extremely quickly with distance.
At 10 meters, the energy is going to be about 1/100 what it is at 1 meter. At 100 meters distance, the energy will be about 1/10000 what it is at 1 meter.
So, in reality, no, a lot of these devices - tens of thousands of them, even, spread over an area the size of a county, is not going to add up to a dangerous level of exposure.
At night, do thousands of fireflies glowing intermittently light up a given section of the street like a single street-light?
"the utility can replace fast-response generators like natural gas with slower response generators like coal, because they don't need as much fast response generation capacity to deal with their now smaller peaks. Of course, coal has a bigger carbon footprint than gas."
Or nuclear (which I believe is also slow-response), which has a smaller carbon footprint than gas.
Part of racism is how people referred to each other. The lack of any basic respect, the 'looking down upon as fundamentally, intrinsically lesser or beneath you'. You start cleaning up the books, and you whitewash what the author was trying to convey about the culture. Mark Twain chose to use those racial slurs, because he was communicating something. It's worth thinking about what he was communicating.
Electric battery-powered cars kind of suck right now. The better solutions (at least for awhile) are probably to either A) Synthesize gas/diesel from coal, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, or start buying Compressed Natural Gas cars, and fuel the cars with CNG (the U.S., at least, has a lot of both coal and natural gas).
If you're worried about carbon emissions, there's also the idea of synthesizing gas/diesel fuel using electricity, water, and CO2. There's a company, which I haven't been able to determine if they're legit yet, called Doty Energy. If the tech is legitimate (and it, at least, doesn't seem to violate any basic laws of physics, so far as I can tell, so that's a good start in the plausibility department).
They claim to have a process to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuel from electricity, water, and CO2. If that's true, we could use nuclear, wind, or solar to produce fuel.
Right now, I favor the Fischer-Tropsch process idea, because CNG requires new cars, and new fueling stations, whereas F-T fuels are the same gas or diesel we already use, so we have distribution infrastructure and cars/trucks/boats that can already use it. Longer term, switching to CNG or electro-synthesized fuels seems like a pretty good idea.
But, I do agree with your basic position - right now, our money being dumped into the Middle East can't be all the helpful. However, it's quite possible that even without oil money, Saudi Arabia wouldn't be much different than it is (except poorer). I mean, look at Rwanda or several other nations where lots of violance and bloodshed, genocides, etc have happened, where despotic, corrupt regimes hold onto power. All it takes to terrorize a population is an army of zealots and a lot of cheap machetes.
Part of the problem here is that the repair centers/techs don't apparently *already have* the parts they needed for repairs. This has become common in recent times, and it just guarantees that huge amounts of time are wasted shipping one part at a time, they call it "just-in-time" but it's really "never-in-time". Imagine what that 3-week cycle would have been if their had been local parts available? What took 3 weeks might have taken 2 or 3 days.
But, companies don't want to keep an inventory of spare parts on hand for repairs, because it's 'too expensive', so they end up wasting a lot of time shipping one or two parts at a time.
Back in November, a blogger named Rod Adams, who runs the Atomic Insights blog, ran a story about how the Chinese acquired Nuclear Reactor technology which U.S. taxpayers had pay Billions of dollars on R&D to create, for the Westinghouse AP1000 series of nuclear reactors. China convinced Westinghouse to sell them the design info by promising the purchase of a small number of reactors, and after that, the Chinese will make their own. Even export it to other countries and compete with Westinghouse over the design.
If a company decides to make such a bargain, in the *general* case, I figure that's their business. But, when they take tech that U.S. taxpayers subsidized the R&D, I think that's crossing a line. Basically, we pay the bills, and China gets the profits. That's insane. Of course, a big driver of that dynamic is how screwed up U.S. policy and private investment regarding nuclear technology has become - basically, it's become about impossible to get nuclear plants built in the U.S., the industry died here, so our nuclear engineering and manufacturing companies have struck whatever bargains they have to with places like China which *will* build reactors.
The last hope I have with regards to U.S. nuclear innovation is with fast-breeder reactor technology (such as the GE-Hitachi PRISM). I *really* hope we can keep that for a little while and make some money off *that* U.S. taxpayer expenditure (the PRISM is the result of a U.S. DOE project called the Integral Fast Reactor), in the coming decades.
I wouldn't expect it to be reasonable for a country to hold on to 'exclusive' rights to any technology forever, but it would be nice to at least realize a reasonable level of benefit/profit from our taxpayer expenditures on technology before it becomes "public domain".
It's an interesting observation that they run half empty. Why is that? Are the routes poorly planned, so that there are simply not enough people wanting to travel to the other destinations along the lines? Do Chinese people simply not travel much because it is not part of their culture, but over time ridership may increase as people get more comfortable with travel and interested in visiting other cities in China? Are the fares too expensive for most Chinese to afford to be able to ride? Do the people just not trust the technology and are afraid of accidents?
I'm no Apple fanboy - I don't even own any Apple gear, because I find them too controlling of equipment after sale. If I buy it, I figure it's mine, but Apple doesn't, so I don't buy Apple.
That said, there's a very good technical reason Apple uses the plug they do - it's not *just* data and charge. I believe it also does analog stereo out (although you can do that with USB also - HTC phones do stereo out over micro-USB), and can even be used for video out (which I believe USB cannot - well, you could probably do a digital video stream, but not analog output), and maybe some other things.
Point is, Apple decided that instead of putting 3 or 4 different connectors on their phone, they'd consolidate all the pins into a single small connector. Not an unreasonable technical decision. If they would just allow everyone else to use the connector too, perhaps it would make for a better 'standard' than USB.
I don't think the Dems 'invented' this idea. I won't even give Rush Limbaugh credit, as I think the idea probably goes back to almost the beginning of party politics in the U.S., but I will point out that Rush Limbaugh advocated an idea he dubbed 'Operation Chaos' during the 2008 primaries, which encouraged Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in the democratic party primaries. So, as the saying goes, remove the log from your own eye before trying to remove the mote from your brother's.
I generally vote Republican, but consider myself independent, and I see that neither party has 'clean hands' when it comes to politics.
Regarding cross-overs, my take is that it should only be allowed during years in which there is a primary for both parties, and you should only be able to vote in one party's primary or the other, but not both. When one party is not having a primary, it leaves too many people with nothing better to do than to mess up the other party's primary. When both parties have a primary, if someone decides to vote in one at the 'expense' of not being able to vote in the other, that at least means that, for the most part, the real party voters will be voting in their own primary because they won't want to lose the opportunity to influence the race they are most interested in. At that point, anyone crossing over is probably genuinely more interested in their own party's primary.
And, oh yeah, all primaries in all states should be done on a single day. This nonsense of spreading out the primaries over the course of like 6 months, is ridiculous - it leads to situations like 2008 where Operation Chaos could happen because the Republican primaries were, effectively, over - McCain had already won enough states to seal the deal, so all the other primaries were just irrelevant. If you have all the primaries in one day, folks won't cross over, because they won't have the ability to know whether their candidate will 'lose' anyhow.
In another slashdot discussion about a year ago, someone linked to a company called Doty Energy. They claim to have a process which can efficiently take electricity, and generate gasoline and diesel from water and waste CO2 (I think the idea is sort-of like reverse-combustion - when hydrocarbon fuels burn cleanly, the products of combustion are energy, water, CO and CO2, so theoretically, it should be possible to 'reverse' the reaction with input energy, water, and CO2 and produce synthetic gas/diesel).
I don't know if the company is legitimate or not, but if they are, then it seems to me they have the best answer for carbon-neutral transportation. The Internal Combustion Engine is just a very effective device for the purposes we put it to, and gas/diesel are incredibly convenient energy storage mechanisms for transportation. Doty *claims* they can produce fuel at a price competitive to oil at $45/bbl, which isn't terribly expensive - oil is currently hovering around $90/bbl. Perhaps Korea needs to get in touch with them, or vice-versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the proof she was conducting state business with an unauthorized account? If she was breaking the law, by all means, indict her. Just because *you* say she was breaking the law doesn't mean that, absent any proof whatsoever, she actually was. There's no actual evidence she broke the law.
I tremble at the thought of the injustice which would be prevalent in a society if it were run by people who think like you. You claim to wish for justice while simultaneously contradicting yourself, by demanding that an injustice be done (i.e. indict Sarah Palin without any evidence just because you don't like her).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way it worked out is this. . . the judge sentenced him to prison. The USBOP has different prisons available to them. The judge cannot determine *which* prison he gets sent to - that's at the discretion of the USBOP. The judge recommended that the prison he be sent to be one of the 'halfway houses' which the USBOP runs, but the BOP decided to send him to a more traditional prison. Basically, a judge can determine if a felon goes to prison or not, but cannot choose the prison.
Do I have the gist of the situation correct?
Maybe they're afraid someone is going to hack into their slashdot account. After all, if there's a significant body of commentors stating that it's just fine that this guy hacked her account because they happen to disagree with Sarah Palin politically, then why wouldn't they hack anybody's account that they happen to disagree with? There seems to be a certain lack of respect for privacy, civility, respect for others, and the rule of law here on slashdot.
It's somewhat unsettling.
Please, protecting people and businesses from having others illegally gain access to their private accounts is not some obscure, ridiculous 300 year old law. It's completely reasonable for it to be a felony to illegally access other people's accounts. It's also completely reasonable to send someone who broke the law by hacking into someone else's account to jail for doing so. You do the crime, you do the time.
We're not talking about one of those legal technicality laws that make criminals out of almost everyone. We're talking about purposely using technical features to gain access to an account which you have not been authorized to access by either the person who 'owns' the account, or by a court through a search warrant. (Yes, I realize that there are issues of the federal government itself doing warrantless wiretapping of the Internet, but that's another issue; yes, it's hypocritical, but at the same time, just because the government is violating our rights, doesn't mean it should be ok for everyone to violate our rights - you don't solve problems by creating additional problems).
First, I acknowledge that there are inequalities in our justice system, that some people who have done more serious crimes, sometimes face lesser penalty. Also, not all those convicted are guilty.
But, just because the email account belongs to a politician *you don't like*, doesn't make it legal for someone to hack their email accounts. Do computer accounts deserve legal protection from people breaking into them? I think the answer is yes, and I believe most people would agree you have a reasonable expectation of legal protection for your private or business (if you own a business) computer accounts.
Just because not everyone who hacks into accounts is caught, doesn't mean that those who *are caught* and convicted by a jury should not face the punishment for their crimes. Now, perhaps it was a mistake for whoever sentenced this fellow to ignore the judges recommendation. However, if the judge only *recommends* a sentence, but is not tasked with actual sentencing, then it is ultimately not his decision. His decision is guidance, not binding.
When you hack into other people's accounts, you're committing a felony. There's nothing unjust about sending a felon to prison.
Is it reasonable to expect that every SysAdmin is an expert in programming to the degree necessary to thoroughly evaluate whether *working code* contains subtle bugs that can be exploited by a cracker? Don't get me wrong, I don't think the argument that proprietary software has an inherent security advantage is valid, but what I'm saying is that SysAdmin is a different job, with different skillsets, than is software development. Sure, there's a lot of overlap, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that every SysAdmin has to be a programming expert and validate security.
On the other hand. . . every company larger than some threshold size, probably should have security-trained programmers on staff whose job it is to security-audit the source code of programs which are being considered for implementation at the company, who can make a report that can guide the IT decision makers. In the case of open-source programs, the company might even consider having those programmers fix the bugs (if it's determined from their report that it makes business sense to fix found bugs instead of using an alternative solution), and submit those fixes to the program's 'official' maintainers.
That, however, still leaves small businesses, most of whom will not be able to afford to have a staff programmer to security audit their code. However, Open Source means they reap the benefits of the larger businesses' investments in auditing the code and fixing problems (which, the larger businesses might not find particularly fair, but otoh, those businesses too are reaping big benefits from their investments in the Open Source code - including better security and control over their own operations).
"people who make free apps should not have to pay"
Just because the app is free, doesn't mean that Apple has no costs associated with hosting the app on the download server, verifying the app doesn't have viruses/etc, and bandwidth to allow customers to download the app.
Now, I'm no Apple fanboy - I own an Android phone, because I don't like the level of control that Apple exercises over their products after sale, but I also recognize that having a small annual fee for hosting the app is not unreasonable. On the other hand, what is unreasonable is that you can't host the app yourself, or with some other service.
Wikipedia is "free" but they just raised something like $10 Million to fund their operations this year. If you are offering a 'free' app that other people find useful, you should have no problem getting $99 in donations to pay the annual hosting fee. That is an absolutely paltry sum, in the big picture. But, you should also have other hosting options, which Apple does not allow.
Man, welcome to the club. I've been perusing slashdot since, I dunno, 1997. I've actually come to expect a lot of slashdot headlines and summaries to be one or more of the following: just plain wrong, unnecessarily inflammatory, or very, very confusing.
Basically, slashdot are not journalists. They are link aggregators and a discussion forum. As a 'central' discussion forum with a pretty decent threaded comment system, it's much nicer to discuss news here than at most other news sites (which have next-to-useless discussion systems, mostly), but I definitely do NOT come to slashdot for the quality of the editing and article summaries.
So if an "armchair quarterback" isn't really a quarterback, does that mean your armchair layman is *really* a scientist, just pretending to be a layman from the comfort of his armchair?
"Well, I'm no layman, but even I can tell. . ."
"I would have more faith in this experiment if . . . testing of the "receiving tubes" was done by a person other than the one who ran the experiments. . ."
Wait, so the only way for science to be valid is if the person doing the experiment is NOT the person doing the experiment? Bu. . . wha?!?
Did you mean the analysis of the data/results? Or, having multiple experimenters each doing an isolated *part* of the experiment, blind to what the other person was doing?
D-link has a Wireless N 300 router, listed on their site for $65 (so you could probably find it a little cheaper than that at other resellers). The DIR-615, which claims to be IPv6 ready. As someone else mentioned, the Apple Airport routers also support IPv6.
It is a bit disappointing that there's only a few models with built-in IPv6 support, but at least they're starting to make them. As more ISP's role out IPv6, the OEMs will start putting out more devices that support it. I think the problem right now is that there's virtually no demand for IPv6 support from customers, because no ISPs are offering IPv6 connectivity (that too will be changing, probably, soon - I think Comcast and a small number of other ISPs are starting too look into IPv6).
It kind of makes me wonder, though, just how much Apple is losing because you can't get an iPhone from other carriers. I'm sure it was a good deal for Apple in the beginning, but I really think at this point in the game, AT&T Exclusivity means that Apple has about reached the maximum market share they can with just one carrier. If Verizon, Sprint, T-Mo, Cricket, etc. could sell iPhones to their customers, Apple would probably be selling 3X as many phones.
Hmmmm, it appears that somehow my post above got mangled and part of it is missing. The first paragraph was supposed to say something along the lines of. . .
So, you're comparing a 800-1200 Watt Microwave oven with devices which transmit 1 watt or less? Also, generally speaking, the signals from omindirectional trasmitters (which most WiFi devices are, and I believe this applies to Smart Meters also) obey the inverse-sqaure law. . .
I don't really know, but I would guess they might be able to do some sort of light-analysis. Scientists can tell us the chemical composition of distant stars and nebulae simply be examining the light coming from or passing through (respectively) them, so perhaps they can do something similar with the water in the lake?
I'm not sure building gas plants will remain 'easy'. San Bruno has, no doubt, made Californians a bit wary about the risks of natural gas. It's true though, building nuclear power plants tends to have more red-tape than most other types. Expense though, is a relative thing. Nuclear power plants provide a LOT of power with very high uptimes, generally speaking. So, the price per kWh can generally be cheaper than gas in the end, and competitive with coal.
Also, a nuclear plant serving California wouldn't necessarily have to be built in California. Probably easier to build it in AZ or NV and pipe in the power.
So, you're comparing a 800-1200 Watt Microwave oven with devices which transmit inverse-square law, which basically says that the energy at distance r is proportional to 1/r^2. Since any squared value grows very fast, and since the squared value is at the bottom of the fraction, this means that energy exposure drops off extremely quickly with distance.
At 10 meters, the energy is going to be about 1/100 what it is at 1 meter. At 100 meters distance, the energy will be about 1/10000 what it is at 1 meter.
So, in reality, no, a lot of these devices - tens of thousands of them, even, spread over an area the size of a county, is not going to add up to a dangerous level of exposure.
At night, do thousands of fireflies glowing intermittently light up a given section of the street like a single street-light?
"the utility can replace fast-response generators like natural gas with slower response generators like coal, because they don't need as much fast response generation capacity to deal with their now smaller peaks. Of course, coal has a bigger carbon footprint than gas."
Or nuclear (which I believe is also slow-response), which has a smaller carbon footprint than gas.
Part of racism is how people referred to each other. The lack of any basic respect, the 'looking down upon as fundamentally, intrinsically lesser or beneath you'. You start cleaning up the books, and you whitewash what the author was trying to convey about the culture. Mark Twain chose to use those racial slurs, because he was communicating something. It's worth thinking about what he was communicating.
Electric battery-powered cars kind of suck right now. The better solutions (at least for awhile) are probably to either A) Synthesize gas/diesel from coal, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, or start buying Compressed Natural Gas cars, and fuel the cars with CNG (the U.S., at least, has a lot of both coal and natural gas).
If you're worried about carbon emissions, there's also the idea of synthesizing gas/diesel fuel using electricity, water, and CO2. There's a company, which I haven't been able to determine if they're legit yet, called Doty Energy. If the tech is legitimate (and it, at least, doesn't seem to violate any basic laws of physics, so far as I can tell, so that's a good start in the plausibility department).
They claim to have a process to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuel from electricity, water, and CO2. If that's true, we could use nuclear, wind, or solar to produce fuel.
Right now, I favor the Fischer-Tropsch process idea, because CNG requires new cars, and new fueling stations, whereas F-T fuels are the same gas or diesel we already use, so we have distribution infrastructure and cars/trucks/boats that can already use it. Longer term, switching to CNG or electro-synthesized fuels seems like a pretty good idea.
But, I do agree with your basic position - right now, our money being dumped into the Middle East can't be all the helpful. However, it's quite possible that even without oil money, Saudi Arabia wouldn't be much different than it is (except poorer). I mean, look at Rwanda or several other nations where lots of violance and bloodshed, genocides, etc have happened, where despotic, corrupt regimes hold onto power. All it takes to terrorize a population is an army of zealots and a lot of cheap machetes.
Part of the problem here is that the repair centers/techs don't apparently *already have* the parts they needed for repairs. This has become common in recent times, and it just guarantees that huge amounts of time are wasted shipping one part at a time, they call it "just-in-time" but it's really "never-in-time". Imagine what that 3-week cycle would have been if their had been local parts available? What took 3 weeks might have taken 2 or 3 days.
But, companies don't want to keep an inventory of spare parts on hand for repairs, because it's 'too expensive', so they end up wasting a lot of time shipping one or two parts at a time.
Back in November, a blogger named Rod Adams, who runs the Atomic Insights blog, ran a story about how the Chinese acquired Nuclear Reactor technology which U.S. taxpayers had pay Billions of dollars on R&D to create, for the Westinghouse AP1000 series of nuclear reactors. China convinced Westinghouse to sell them the design info by promising the purchase of a small number of reactors, and after that, the Chinese will make their own. Even export it to other countries and compete with Westinghouse over the design.
If a company decides to make such a bargain, in the *general* case, I figure that's their business. But, when they take tech that U.S. taxpayers subsidized the R&D, I think that's crossing a line. Basically, we pay the bills, and China gets the profits. That's insane. Of course, a big driver of that dynamic is how screwed up U.S. policy and private investment regarding nuclear technology has become - basically, it's become about impossible to get nuclear plants built in the U.S., the industry died here, so our nuclear engineering and manufacturing companies have struck whatever bargains they have to with places like China which *will* build reactors.
The last hope I have with regards to U.S. nuclear innovation is with fast-breeder reactor technology (such as the GE-Hitachi PRISM). I *really* hope we can keep that for a little while and make some money off *that* U.S. taxpayer expenditure (the PRISM is the result of a U.S. DOE project called the Integral Fast Reactor), in the coming decades.
I wouldn't expect it to be reasonable for a country to hold on to 'exclusive' rights to any technology forever, but it would be nice to at least realize a reasonable level of benefit/profit from our taxpayer expenditures on technology before it becomes "public domain".
It's an interesting observation that they run half empty. Why is that? Are the routes poorly planned, so that there are simply not enough people wanting to travel to the other destinations along the lines? Do Chinese people simply not travel much because it is not part of their culture, but over time ridership may increase as people get more comfortable with travel and interested in visiting other cities in China? Are the fares too expensive for most Chinese to afford to be able to ride? Do the people just not trust the technology and are afraid of accidents?
I'm no Apple fanboy - I don't even own any Apple gear, because I find them too controlling of equipment after sale. If I buy it, I figure it's mine, but Apple doesn't, so I don't buy Apple.
That said, there's a very good technical reason Apple uses the plug they do - it's not *just* data and charge. I believe it also does analog stereo out (although you can do that with USB also - HTC phones do stereo out over micro-USB), and can even be used for video out (which I believe USB cannot - well, you could probably do a digital video stream, but not analog output), and maybe some other things.
Point is, Apple decided that instead of putting 3 or 4 different connectors on their phone, they'd consolidate all the pins into a single small connector. Not an unreasonable technical decision. If they would just allow everyone else to use the connector too, perhaps it would make for a better 'standard' than USB.
I don't think the Dems 'invented' this idea. I won't even give Rush Limbaugh credit, as I think the idea probably goes back to almost the beginning of party politics in the U.S., but I will point out that Rush Limbaugh advocated an idea he dubbed 'Operation Chaos' during the 2008 primaries, which encouraged Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in the democratic party primaries. So, as the saying goes, remove the log from your own eye before trying to remove the mote from your brother's.
I generally vote Republican, but consider myself independent, and I see that neither party has 'clean hands' when it comes to politics.
Regarding cross-overs, my take is that it should only be allowed during years in which there is a primary for both parties, and you should only be able to vote in one party's primary or the other, but not both. When one party is not having a primary, it leaves too many people with nothing better to do than to mess up the other party's primary. When both parties have a primary, if someone decides to vote in one at the 'expense' of not being able to vote in the other, that at least means that, for the most part, the real party voters will be voting in their own primary because they won't want to lose the opportunity to influence the race they are most interested in. At that point, anyone crossing over is probably genuinely more interested in their own party's primary.
And, oh yeah, all primaries in all states should be done on a single day. This nonsense of spreading out the primaries over the course of like 6 months, is ridiculous - it leads to situations like 2008 where Operation Chaos could happen because the Republican primaries were, effectively, over - McCain had already won enough states to seal the deal, so all the other primaries were just irrelevant. If you have all the primaries in one day, folks won't cross over, because they won't have the ability to know whether their candidate will 'lose' anyhow.
In another slashdot discussion about a year ago, someone linked to a company called Doty Energy. They claim to have a process which can efficiently take electricity, and generate gasoline and diesel from water and waste CO2 (I think the idea is sort-of like reverse-combustion - when hydrocarbon fuels burn cleanly, the products of combustion are energy, water, CO and CO2, so theoretically, it should be possible to 'reverse' the reaction with input energy, water, and CO2 and produce synthetic gas/diesel).
I don't know if the company is legitimate or not, but if they are, then it seems to me they have the best answer for carbon-neutral transportation. The Internal Combustion Engine is just a very effective device for the purposes we put it to, and gas/diesel are incredibly convenient energy storage mechanisms for transportation. Doty *claims* they can produce fuel at a price competitive to oil at $45/bbl, which isn't terribly expensive - oil is currently hovering around $90/bbl. Perhaps Korea needs to get in touch with them, or vice-versa.