There are dozens of "great" ways to solve the spam problem, this may or (more like) may not be one of them. But the real problem is finding a migration path away from the current system to any new "fixed" system.
During the transition period, users will either have to accept e-mail from the old SMTP system, or refuse it. If they accept it, why would anyone move to the new system when they are still going to get spam via SMTP? If they refuse it, why will anyone move to the new system when it means they anyone still using SMTP (which at the start, will be virtually everyone) will be unable to e-mail them?
If we could say, "OK, from Jan 1st 2005, SMTP is gonna be switched off and everyone will use the new system", there wouldn't be a problem, but obviously we can't do that.
Or we could somehow stop spam from SMTP getting to accounts on the new system. But then, if we could do that, we could presumably use exactly the same technique to fix SMTP.
No, no, no. You misunderstand completely. When we blow things up, it's war. When our allies blow things up, it's war. It's only terrorism if someone we don't like blows something up.
You do realise that a US billion (a thousand million) is alot smaller than a European billion (a million million), right?
No it isn't. 1 billion = 10^12 has been depracated in the UK for decades now. The government uses 1 billion = 10^9, as do scientists, engineers etc. Same for the rest of the EU, if indeed they ever used the old definition. I realise that some languages may talk about a quantity which is 10^12, but when an EU person says "billion" they mean the English definition (by which I mean the American definition, as that is what the English use).
I don't know when the change happened, but I'm a 24 year old Brit. When my parents were in school they were taught 1 billion = 10^12, when I was in school I was taught 1 billion = 10^9.
This confusion seems to come from US based dictionaries. Both my UK dictionaries list 10^9 as the definition of billion, and 10^12 as an "old" usage of the word.
Is the Linux desktop really the right metaphor for a palmtop device?
Probably not, but is that relevant. Do you think people run X on their Palmtop because they think it makes it a better PDA? I rather expect it's because more because Linux has a vast range of other software that they want to run.
I run Linux on my Psion 5MX - means that I can hack on my personal coding projects on long journeys without having to lug a huge laptop around. I couldn't do that with the Psion's native OS as it just doesn't have the tools.
Eventually we will have the best of both worlds - a decent PDA interface running on top of X. But first you have to get the basics working.
Presumably the people getting this free software are exactly the people who might be looking at free software as a cheap alternative to MS.
Giving them free stuff therefore loses MS very little in sales, but ensures they are all gaining experience and expertise in MS not Linux etc. So when they do have the money to spend on software, they will do so with Microsoft.
Most of the properties of aerogel can be found in other substances. Aerogel isn't special because any one of it's properties is unique, but because it has several useful properties in one substance/
If it means I don't have to hear that godawful intro music again, this is a good thing. Makes me cringe every time.
On a more serious note, the whole Star Trek genre has been stale for a long time. I watched a fair bit of Enterprise, almost out of habit, but I wasn't really "wowed" by any of it. Star Trek seems to run off a formula, to such an extent that you can almost map Enterprise episodes onto past stories from the other series. (And even within those, there was never huge variety.)
On the other hand, Farscape really drew me in. I was looking forward to the next episode to find out what happened, rather than watching just because "it was on".
I'm also rediscovering Babylon 5. I didn't really appreciate it at the time as I missed half (or more) of the episodes, but now I'm rewatching it all in sequence, I've come to the conclusion it's the best sci-fi series of all time. In Star Trek, nothing really surprising happens - you know that in each episode the crew will face some insurmountable challenge, overcome it by suddenly discovering they can supe-up some component of the ship, and at the end of the episode things will be just the same as they were at the start. B5 on the other hand (and to a lesser extent, Farscape) has real suspense and drama. Sure, you know they'll win out at the end, but you have no idea what is gonna happen on the way.
And I'm glad to hear, there are rumours abound of another B5 project in the works. Surprised that/. hasn't covered this, actually.
Mod me -1 troll if you want, but this is really what I think.
The brits are not using it to get raids on dissenters' houses or cars
No, instead we have the Terrorism Act 2000 being used to harrass and detain anti-war protestors.
I like the cameras anyway. I know if I'm ever attacked, I can go get tapes of it.
Except most criminals aren't that dumb. The evidence suggests that CCTV cams just drive crime out of areas with CCTV. Think a mugger is gonna attack you in front of a camera? Think a mugger is gonna say "Boy, all these CCTV cameras in the town centre, I'd better give up my life of crime."
I guess the answer is to make sure there are no areas without CCTV...
I'm typing this looking at my HP A1097C monitor. I believe it's 10 or more years old. It's 19", Sync On Green, fixed frequency running 1280x1024 @ 72Hz.
It came from an old HP X-Terminal, and I rescued it from being thrown out at a former place of work.
It has a few problems. It's Sync On Green, which means it won't work with most graphics cards. Luckily, Matrox video cards for some unknown reason are able to output a SoG signal.
It doesn't support DPMS.
Although it works fine under X windows, I've yet to discover how to get the Linux console to output the appropriate screenmode. Anyone who provides me with a recipe for converting X modelines to the equivelent options for the Linux framebuffer will be rewarded with eternal gratitude and brotherhood, and a pint of finest English ale should you ever visit Bristol.
Finally, it's VERY VERY heavy.
Apart from that, works a treat. Picture is still perfect and it's outlasted two other monitors which died at less than half it's age.
Why is the modded insightful? It's one of those Slashdot platitudes that gets trotted out on stories like this, without any reasoning or explanation.
If you have evidence that the computer modelling techniques used are unreliable, state that. Or alternatively, put the honus on the other side and say "I don't believe that this type of computer modelling is valid. Does anyone have any evidence that it works?"
But don't just say "We can't predict the weather, therefore we can't predict X". That's just the dumbest argument ever.
First of all, we can predict the weather with a pretty good degree of accuracy. Being a weather obsessed Brit, I watch at least one weather forecast every day, and it is quite unsusual for the short term (less than 24 hour) forecast to be wrong.
Secondly, how can just assume that our ability to predict the when it is going to rain has any impact on our ability to predict what species will become extinct.
Note, I'm not arguing that your conclusion is wrong. For all I know, this prediction of species lost could well be complete nonsense. I am arguing that it has little to do with our accuracy at weather forecasting. (And if it does, you have failed to argue it, so you don't deserver +3 insightful.)
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Well, what we SHOULD do is use renewable energy sources to produce electricity to produce the hydrogen. In fact, hydrogen will probably play a key role in wind power in the future - produce H when the wind blows, use the H to produce electricity when it doesn't.
The problem is, for as long as the worlds most powerful country is lead by man made by the oil industry, this seems pretty unlikely...
But how do you "reset" your internal clock? Your body uses sunlight as a cue. This is precisely why working night shifts messes people up. Your body sees the light doing one thing, and your daily routine is trying to do another.
And it's also why some people have trouble adjusting to the winter months - our current time system doesn't sync to well with the sun. I know that I personally get up far earlier in the summer months when it's light.
I don't know about anywhere else, but here in the UK the energy market is distorted massively in favour of nuclear power. The nuclear industry is getting huge government subsidies. The government has agreed to pay for the cleanup of pretty much every privately owned site in the country.
And yet still, nuclear power providers are struggling against bankrupcy and only escaping because the government is keeps throwing huge amounts of taxpayer money at them, almost certainly in breach of EU competition rules.
And yet, wind power is on a big up turn. The only thing that is slowing it down is the difficulty getting planning permission due the the nimbys.
And this is really still first round of large scale wind power. It's going to get much more efficient over the next decade or so as our expertise increases.
Sure, nuclear power doens't have the problems with CO2 emmisions of fossil fuels. But it only takes once suicide bomber to get into a nuclear site and we'll have a pretty huge disaster on our hands. A bunch of volunteers from Greenpeace got into the same nuclear power station in the UK twice in the space of a few months, and got onto the reactor dome the second time, despite the fact security had supposedly been stepped up, and did the same at another reactor in France just a few days ago.
Would you bet your life that Al-qaeda can't do the same?
Student party solves 16th Hilbert Problem? Jeez, when I was a student, we did drugs and group sex at parties, not math! Being a student just isn't what it used to be.
We DO follow a set of predetermined rules, they are just far more complex.
Unless you believe there is something inherently "magical" about human beings (i.e., we have a soul) then we are simply following the laws of physics which determine how the matter and energy in our bodies will behave.
Does that mean we could simulate human society? Maybe. The effects of the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, random radioactive decay etc. mean that you can't do it perfectly, but how well you can do it depends on how fast the errors scale up to a human level. But still. it seems likely to me you could (in theory at least) predict the behaviour of society as a whole, if not the actions of an individual human being. The problem is, using this method (physical simulation of a complete society) you would need a computer far larger than the planet.
Still, it's entirely possible that there is a far simpler model than would predict the behaviour of people in large groups accurately, we just haven't found it yet. People really aren't as unique as they like to think - although individuals can be difficult to predict, large numbers of people follow easily studyable distributions.
We are getting there, slowly. Economics is essentially the science of modelling a particular aspect of human behaviour. It's not perfect, but it does work to some extent.
Then we have the problem with identity theft. My mother-in-law is a registrar, and she is powerless to stop somebody asking for a copy of ANYBODY'S birth certificate.
I often wondered about this. Why doesn't the gov simply require these copies are stamped with "COPY - Not valid as identification!".
Obviously, this is not very secure, but it costs nothing and would surely stop at least some fraud, as the fraudsters would suddenly have to get a copy and then fake the documents, rather than just using what the government has given them to defraud the government.
As bad as the Apartheid regime in South Africa was, it never nerve gassed one particular ethnic group and Western lefties still held protests, boycotted products, called for sanctions. Yet when the Ba'ath (it means "Socialist Arab Rebirth") party gassed the Kurds, not a whisper of dissent from said Westerners.
There was plenty of dissent. Not from the US or UK government, noteably. But then, it would be pretty awkward to say "Hey! That poisonous gas we sold you... we never thought you were going to use it to kill people. I mean obviously, we'd never have sold it to you if we thought you were gonna do that. It's more, sort of, decorative gas. If you want any more stuff like that from us, you really have to be more careful with it."
Besides which, when the US claims to be the land of "freedom and democracy", and uses military force to export that "freedom and democracy" I think we have an obligation to point out the fairly obvious example of them trouncing peoples freedom in a very unfree and undemocratic way.
in particular, explicitly recognising various fair uses in the sense that US copyright law does
I don't know about backups, but I'm pretty sure it does explicitly recognise "fair use".
All the photocopiers in my (UK) university libraries have a poster above them which says "Make sure you stay within the law!" and gives details on how much you can legally photocopy from various different types of source.
In fact, I've heard it mentioned explicitly in the UK media recently, with regards to the "Burrell affair" which involved Paul Burrell publishing extracts from letters whose copyright was held by Princess Dianna and other royals. He was able to publish these extracts due to fair use, otherwise the royal family could have prevented the book being published (and/or sued for royalties) for copyright infringement.
If we could increase the speed of wireless networking by a few orders of magnitude, and invent wireless power, we could build entire computers this way. Imagine being able to upgrade your computer by buying a new CPU and just sticking it in your house "somewhere".:)
Or even better, just swipe the spare cycles from the luser next door who forgot to check the "don't let my neighbours use my stuff" box.
Applying two different standards based on "need" to what affects everyone globally is wrong.
Why? I can see no reason why this is true. If country A wants to produce CO2 to feed it's starving people, and country B wants to produce CO2 to make luxory goods, it seems fairly obvious that need should be taken into account, and that it would in fact be morally wrong to ignore this need.
Besides which, a system of allowing pollution emmisions to scale with economic growth is still linking pollution to need, just in the wrong direction - countries with the least need are allowed to pollute most, and the most needy countries are allowed to pollute least!
So who gets to decide who has enough stuff?
Is that really an intractable problem? Countries where people are dieing of starvation and easily preventable diseases, where people very poor. are countries which don't have enough. Countries where starvation is very rare, where healthcare is very good and people are relatively rich, are countries which have enough.
If you really want to boil it down to number we could use GDP per capita. I would expect that the countries with the lowest GDP pc are the same countries where people are dieing because they are extremely poor, whereas the countries with very high GDP per capita are the countries where a slowdown in growth would affect peoples actual quality of life very little.
Suggesting that some people have too much and others have too little is essentially communism. I don't mean that as an insult to you, but communism doesn't work and is not the economic system that we employ in most of the world.
That's OK, I'm not insulted. The people of Bangledesh have too little. The people of America, by comparison, have enough. If that makes me a Communist, so be it.
BTW, I don't know about the rest of the world where you say it failed, but Communism seems to be working very well for us here in Britain. We have had a system for many years whereby we decide who has enough and who doesn't, and we transfer some wealth from those who have enough to those who don't. By doing this, the average quality of life in our country goes up, as the people we give to gain massively (e.g. they don't starve to death) and the people we take from only lose a little (because they can still afford a decent standard of life).
This is a great solution if you want to maintain the status quo. The problem is, sone of us want to move towards a world where there is less of a huge discrepancy between the quality of life of people in rich and poor countries.
Under that argument, it seems logical that those who are most able to pay pay most. To people in the developing world, being able to pollute might well be the difference between life and death. To people in developed world, being able to pollute makes very little difference to our quality of life. I live in a rich country, and I'd be more than happy for our economy to grow a bit slower because we had to make larger cuts in pollution, if that meant some people in the developing world could lift themselves out of abject poverty.
Creating a system where countries can pollute according to how much "stuff" they produce is overlooking the fact that some people are dieing because they don't have enough stuff, whereas some people already have more than enough.
Slashdot Mirror
There are dozens of "great" ways to solve the spam problem, this may or (more like) may not be one of them. But the real problem is finding a migration path away from the current system to any new "fixed" system.
During the transition period, users will either have to accept e-mail from the old SMTP system, or refuse it. If they accept it, why would anyone move to the new system when they are still going to get spam via SMTP? If they refuse it, why will anyone move to the new system when it means they anyone still using SMTP (which at the start, will be virtually everyone) will be unable to e-mail them?
If we could say, "OK, from Jan 1st 2005, SMTP is gonna be switched off and everyone will use the new system", there wouldn't be a problem, but obviously we can't do that.
Or we could somehow stop spam from SMTP getting to accounts on the new system. But then, if we could do that, we could presumably use exactly the same technique to fix SMTP.
No, no, no. You misunderstand completely. When we blow things up, it's war. When our allies blow things up, it's war. It's only terrorism if someone we don't like blows something up.
You do realise that a US billion (a thousand million) is alot smaller than a European billion (a million million), right?
No it isn't. 1 billion = 10^12 has been depracated in the UK for decades now. The government uses 1 billion = 10^9, as do scientists, engineers etc. Same for the rest of the EU, if indeed they ever used the old definition. I realise that some languages may talk about a quantity which is 10^12, but when an EU person says "billion" they mean the English definition (by which I mean the American definition, as that is what the English use).
I don't know when the change happened, but I'm a 24 year old Brit. When my parents were in school they were taught 1 billion = 10^12, when I was in school I was taught 1 billion = 10^9.
This confusion seems to come from US based dictionaries. Both my UK dictionaries list 10^9 as the definition of billion, and 10^12 as an "old" usage of the word.
Is the Linux desktop really the right metaphor for a palmtop device?
Probably not, but is that relevant. Do you think people run X on their Palmtop because they think it makes it a better PDA? I rather expect it's because more because Linux has a vast range of other software that they want to run.
I run Linux on my Psion 5MX - means that I can hack on my personal coding projects on long journeys without having to lug a huge laptop around. I couldn't do that with the Psion's native OS as it just doesn't have the tools.
Eventually we will have the best of both worlds - a decent PDA interface running on top of X. But first you have to get the basics working.
Presumably the people getting this free software are exactly the people who might be looking at free software as a cheap alternative to MS.
Giving them free stuff therefore loses MS very little in sales, but ensures they are all gaining experience and expertise in MS not Linux etc. So when they do have the money to spend on software, they will do so with Microsoft.
Most of the properties of aerogel can be found in other substances. Aerogel isn't special because any one of it's properties is unique, but because it has several useful properties in one substance/
If it means I don't have to hear that godawful intro music again, this is a good thing. Makes me cringe every time.
/. hasn't covered this, actually.
On a more serious note, the whole Star Trek genre has been stale for a long time. I watched a fair bit of Enterprise, almost out of habit, but I wasn't really "wowed" by any of it. Star Trek seems to run off a formula, to such an extent that you can almost map Enterprise episodes onto past stories from the other series. (And even within those, there was never huge variety.)
On the other hand, Farscape really drew me in. I was looking forward to the next episode to find out what happened, rather than watching just because "it was on".
I'm also rediscovering Babylon 5. I didn't really appreciate it at the time as I missed half (or more) of the episodes, but now I'm rewatching it all in sequence, I've come to the conclusion it's the best sci-fi series of all time. In Star Trek, nothing really surprising happens - you know that in each episode the crew will face some insurmountable challenge, overcome it by suddenly discovering they can supe-up some component of the ship, and at the end of the episode things will be just the same as they were at the start. B5 on the other hand (and to a lesser extent, Farscape) has real suspense and drama. Sure, you know they'll win out at the end, but you have no idea what is gonna happen on the way.
And I'm glad to hear, there are rumours abound of another B5 project in the works. Surprised that
Mod me -1 troll if you want, but this is really what I think.
The brits are not using it to get raids on dissenters' houses or cars
No, instead we have the Terrorism Act 2000 being used to harrass and detain anti-war protestors.
I like the cameras anyway. I know if I'm ever attacked, I can go get tapes of it.
Except most criminals aren't that dumb. The evidence suggests that CCTV cams just drive crime out of areas with CCTV. Think a mugger is gonna attack you in front of a camera? Think a mugger is gonna say "Boy, all these CCTV cameras in the town centre, I'd better give up my life of crime."
I guess the answer is to make sure there are no areas without CCTV...
This doesn't quite work, because the timing need to be quite specific.
However, this story prompted me to search on the web, and I found someone who had done plenty of experimenting and found the right timing etc.
Still doesn't quite work, unfortunately. Something odd with the screen updates.
E.g., if I type
abcde
Then move the curser to it's between the c and d, and then hit backspace I see
abdde
Instead of
abde
Still, definite improvement over no framebuffer at all.
Ta anyway for the attempted help.
I'm typing this looking at my HP A1097C monitor. I believe it's 10 or more years old. It's 19", Sync On Green, fixed frequency running 1280x1024 @ 72Hz.
It came from an old HP X-Terminal, and I rescued it from being thrown out at a former place of work.
It has a few problems. It's Sync On Green, which means it won't work with most graphics cards. Luckily, Matrox video cards for some unknown reason are able to output a SoG signal.
It doesn't support DPMS.
Although it works fine under X windows, I've yet to discover how to get the Linux console to output the appropriate screenmode. Anyone who provides me with a recipe for converting X modelines to the equivelent options for the Linux framebuffer will be rewarded with eternal gratitude and brotherhood, and a pint of finest English ale should you ever visit Bristol.
Finally, it's VERY VERY heavy.
Apart from that, works a treat. Picture is still perfect and it's outlasted two other monitors which died at less than half it's age.
Why is the modded insightful? It's one of those Slashdot platitudes that gets trotted out on stories like this, without any reasoning or explanation.
If you have evidence that the computer modelling techniques used are unreliable, state that. Or alternatively, put the honus on the other side and say "I don't believe that this type of computer modelling is valid. Does anyone have any evidence that it works?"
But don't just say "We can't predict the weather, therefore we can't predict X". That's just the dumbest argument ever.
First of all, we can predict the weather with a pretty good degree of accuracy. Being a weather obsessed Brit, I watch at least one weather forecast every day, and it is quite unsusual for the short term (less than 24 hour) forecast to be wrong.
Secondly, how can just assume that our ability to predict the when it is going to rain has any impact on our ability to predict what species will become extinct.
Note, I'm not arguing that your conclusion is wrong. For all I know, this prediction of species lost could well be complete nonsense. I am arguing that it has little to do with our accuracy at weather forecasting. (And if it does, you have failed to argue it, so you don't deserver +3 insightful.)
Considering that sales in the UK over Christmas were poor all round it's hardly surprising. Why should we expect consoles to buck the trend?
Well, what we SHOULD do is use renewable energy sources to produce electricity to produce the hydrogen. In fact, hydrogen will probably play a key role in wind power in the future - produce H when the wind blows, use the H to produce electricity when it doesn't.
The problem is, for as long as the worlds most powerful country is lead by man made by the oil industry, this seems pretty unlikely...
But how do you "reset" your internal clock? Your body uses sunlight as a cue. This is precisely why working night shifts messes people up. Your body sees the light doing one thing, and your daily routine is trying to do another.
And it's also why some people have trouble adjusting to the winter months - our current time system doesn't sync to well with the sun. I know that I personally get up far earlier in the summer months when it's light.
I don't know about anywhere else, but here in the UK the energy market is distorted massively in favour of nuclear power. The nuclear industry is getting huge government subsidies. The government has agreed to pay for the cleanup of pretty much every privately owned site in the country.
And yet still, nuclear power providers are struggling against bankrupcy and only escaping because the government is keeps throwing huge amounts of taxpayer money at them, almost certainly in breach of EU competition rules.
And yet, wind power is on a big up turn. The only thing that is slowing it down is the difficulty getting planning permission due the the nimbys.
And this is really still first round of large scale wind power. It's going to get much more efficient over the next decade or so as our expertise increases.
Sure, nuclear power doens't have the problems with CO2 emmisions of fossil fuels. But it only takes once suicide bomber to get into a nuclear site and we'll have a pretty huge disaster on our hands. A bunch of volunteers from Greenpeace got into the same nuclear power station in the UK twice in the space of a few months, and got onto the reactor dome the second time, despite the fact security had supposedly been stepped up, and did the same at another reactor in France just a few days ago.
Would you bet your life that Al-qaeda can't do the same?
Student party solves 16th Hilbert Problem? Jeez, when I was a student, we did drugs and group sex at parties, not math! Being a student just isn't what it used to be.
We DO follow a set of predetermined rules, they are just far more complex.
Unless you believe there is something inherently "magical" about human beings (i.e., we have a soul) then we are simply following the laws of physics which determine how the matter and energy in our bodies will behave.
Does that mean we could simulate human society? Maybe. The effects of the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, random radioactive decay etc. mean that you can't do it perfectly, but how well you can do it depends on how fast the errors scale up to a human level. But still. it seems likely to me you could (in theory at least) predict the behaviour of society as a whole, if not the actions of an individual human being. The problem is, using this method (physical simulation of a complete society) you would need a computer far larger than the planet.
Still, it's entirely possible that there is a far simpler model than would predict the behaviour of people in large groups accurately, we just haven't found it yet. People really aren't as unique as they like to think - although individuals can be difficult to predict, large numbers of people follow easily studyable distributions.
We are getting there, slowly. Economics is essentially the science of modelling a particular aspect of human behaviour. It's not perfect, but it does work to some extent.
Then we have the problem with identity theft. My mother-in-law is a registrar, and she is powerless to stop somebody asking for a copy of ANYBODY'S birth certificate.
I often wondered about this. Why doesn't the gov simply require these copies are stamped with "COPY - Not valid as identification!".
Obviously, this is not very secure, but it costs nothing and would surely stop at least some fraud, as the fraudsters would suddenly have to get a copy and then fake the documents, rather than just using what the government has given them to defraud the government.
As bad as the Apartheid regime in South Africa was, it never nerve gassed one particular ethnic group and Western lefties still held protests, boycotted products, called for sanctions. Yet when the Ba'ath (it means "Socialist Arab Rebirth") party gassed the Kurds, not a whisper of dissent from said Westerners.
There was plenty of dissent. Not from the US or UK government, noteably. But then, it would be pretty awkward to say "Hey! That poisonous gas we sold you... we never thought you were going to use it to kill people. I mean obviously, we'd never have sold it to you if we thought you were gonna do that. It's more, sort of, decorative gas. If you want any more stuff like that from us, you really have to be more careful with it."
Besides which, when the US claims to be the land of "freedom and democracy", and uses military force to export that "freedom and democracy" I think we have an obligation to point out the fairly obvious example of them trouncing peoples freedom in a very unfree and undemocratic way.
in particular, explicitly recognising various fair uses in the sense that US copyright law does
I don't know about backups, but I'm pretty sure it does explicitly recognise "fair use".
All the photocopiers in my (UK) university libraries have a poster above them which says "Make sure you stay within the law!" and gives details on how much you can legally photocopy from various different types of source.
In fact, I've heard it mentioned explicitly in the UK media recently, with regards to the "Burrell affair" which involved Paul Burrell publishing extracts from letters whose copyright was held by Princess Dianna and other royals. He was able to publish these extracts due to fair use, otherwise the royal family could have prevented the book being published (and/or sued for royalties) for copyright infringement.
Fantastic for those of us who always lose things.
:)
If we could increase the speed of wireless networking by a few orders of magnitude, and invent wireless power, we could build entire computers this way. Imagine being able to upgrade your computer by buying a new CPU and just sticking it in your house "somewhere".
Or even better, just swipe the spare cycles from the luser next door who forgot to check the "don't let my neighbours use my stuff" box.
In Soviet Russia we make ourselves space sick.
As an avid unicyclist, I'd definitely buy one. But only if I it lets me turn off the gyros to give me manual control.
SHould have some kind of foot rest so I can still pedal grab onto park benches as well.
Applying two different standards based on "need" to what affects everyone globally is wrong.
Why? I can see no reason why this is true. If country A wants to produce CO2 to feed it's starving people, and country B wants to produce CO2 to make luxory goods, it seems fairly obvious that need should be taken into account, and that it would in fact be morally wrong to ignore this need.
Besides which, a system of allowing pollution emmisions to scale with economic growth is still linking pollution to need, just in the wrong direction - countries with the least need are allowed to pollute most, and the most needy countries are allowed to pollute least!
So who gets to decide who has enough stuff?
Is that really an intractable problem? Countries where people are dieing of starvation and easily preventable diseases, where people very poor. are countries which don't have enough. Countries where starvation is very rare, where healthcare is very good and people are relatively rich, are countries which have enough.
If you really want to boil it down to number we could use GDP per capita. I would expect that the countries with the lowest GDP pc are the same countries where people are dieing because they are extremely poor, whereas the countries with very high GDP per capita are the countries where a slowdown in growth would affect peoples actual quality of life very little.
Suggesting that some people have too much and others have too little is essentially communism. I don't mean that as an insult to you, but communism doesn't work and is not the economic system that we employ in most of the world.
That's OK, I'm not insulted. The people of Bangledesh have too little. The people of America, by comparison, have enough. If that makes me a Communist, so be it.
BTW, I don't know about the rest of the world where you say it failed, but Communism seems to be working very well for us here in Britain. We have had a system for many years whereby we decide who has enough and who doesn't, and we transfer some wealth from those who have enough to those who don't. By doing this, the average quality of life in our country goes up, as the people we give to gain massively (e.g. they don't starve to death) and the people we take from only lose a little (because they can still afford a decent standard of life).
This is a great solution if you want to maintain the status quo. The problem is, sone of us want to move towards a world where there is less of a huge discrepancy between the quality of life of people in rich and poor countries.
Under that argument, it seems logical that those who are most able to pay pay most. To people in the developing world, being able to pollute might well be the difference between life and death. To people in developed world, being able to pollute makes very little difference to our quality of life. I live in a rich country, and I'd be more than happy for our economy to grow a bit slower because we had to make larger cuts in pollution, if that meant some people in the developing world could lift themselves out of abject poverty.
Creating a system where countries can pollute according to how much "stuff" they produce is overlooking the fact that some people are dieing because they don't have enough stuff, whereas some people already have more than enough.