The problem with nuclear power is that there is still no safe long-term waste storage (something the article avoids talking about). Furthermore, our current nuclear reactors only utilize a small fraction of the power contained in uranium.
The solution is breeder reactors. Unfortunately, that's something the right wing is opposed to because the consider it a proliferation risk.
The obstacle to safe nuclear power isn't the left, it's the right.
Just become something is explicitly legal in a jurisdiction doesn't mean a party can't contract out of that right.
Who are you responding to? I didn't write that.
In any case, that is why there are rights you cannot waive in a contract.
As a result, you do not see courts calling adhesion contracts illegal unless there is a real question of unconcionability or the parties make up a bilateral monopoly.
You like responding to your own points, don't you? I didn't say that those contracts are "illegal", I said that courts will take the disparity into account when disputes arise.
Actually, what most Libertarians realize is that you cannot govern based on emotions, and that everything has a value.
It's ironic, then, that the libertarian program itself is so much based on emotions; many of the policies advocated by libertarians make little sense from a rational or economic point of view, but libertarians promote them because they give them a sense of freedom.
Well, hey, if everything is fine and dandy and if they can just keep making money hand over fist with their existing products, they don't need to buy Novell.
There is nothing per se invalid about contracts of adhesion (ie, you only have one source for a certain thing).
No, that's not what a contract of adhesion is. In fact, for most contracts of adhesion (insurance, etc.) there are many sources for the same product or service. What it really refers to is that there is such a difference in bargaining power between the two parties of a contract that one can basically just dictate long, complex, and inequitable terms.
Contracts of adhesion are not per se invalid, but courts will take the circumstances of the contract into account should a dispute arise.
Note that, in addition, EULAs often contain unenforceable terms (like restrictions on reverse engineering in jurisdictions where reverse engineering is explicitly permitted by law irrespective of contractual terms).
Oracle was a one-time deal--a combination of excellent timing for bringing out an RDBMS, good business skills, and a lot of luck. I don't think Ellison has it in him to repeat the success. And if he did, he wouldn't be futzing around buying FOSS operating systems, he'd come up with a new idea and found a new company.
Nokia is very new at this and it will take the organization several years until they get the hang of it; that's the same whenever a new platform is introduced into an organization and has nothing to do with Linux. Look at Motorola's iTunes phone to see how even adding a single new capability to a phone is non-trivial. Thousands of highly reliable embedded Linux devices show that embedded Linux itself is very much up to the task.
As for the 770, the hardware is nice, kind of like a big Palm; it's the UI that needs several more iterations--but that's OK if they stick with it.
For the time being, the Palm Tungsten X is probably the most mature device in this space--if you want something that "just works" get it. But don't be smug about it: the Palm T|X software platform is beyond obsolete, and Palm is in deep trouble since they still haven't figured out what to replace it with.
Given the prices that Audi charges for their cars and their repairs, and given how poorly their cars do on reliability measures, replacing an engine or two should covered by the warranty even if people choose to fill up with battery acid. (Disgruntled ex-owner.)
Your alternative is to migrate more and more applications to (ActiveX-free) web-based interfaces. You can then use whatever clients you like. Many business applications do well with web interfaces; their web interfaces are often actually more consistent than their desktop interfaces. You can then run whatever clients you like.
No matter what you do, whether people can print on local printers and access local drives is largely a networking and management issue. Yes, Citrix makes it work in one way, but there are many other ways in which that can be set up that don't involve Citrix at all. If you want to prepare for a move to any other system, fixing that might be the first step. Some possible solutions are to set up a VPN, to get separate user level bridging for those services, or to set something up with ssh.
Kiko doesn't seem to have anything over the other AJAX calendars coming out. Looks to me like they were aiming too low. I'm not even sure who would buy them at this point, given that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! all already have their own systems ready.
Ugh got wireless. Ugh got email. Is Ugh too stupid to put the two together? Maybe if Ugh is a patent examiner at the USPTO. For everybody else, this is obvious.
Yes, most companies that are serious about enforcing their patents search for prior art. Of course, when they find some, they don't just throw up their hands and give up, they start thinking about how they can get the patent even though someone else invented pretty much the same thing before.
It could get invalidated very easily. It's much harder to invalidate a patent because of a piece of prior art if you actually cite that prior art in your patent (because the patent office is presumed to have actually looked at that prior art and determined that it's not relevant).
the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study
Scientific theories are developed by conducting careful experiments that isolate different variables and effects; when experiments are not possible, you look for observations that can substitute for those experiments. The browser wars have a mess of variables, interactions, and effects, and they are pretty much the worst kind of observation you can find.
What doesn't it do well in handling albums? [...] What's wrong with compilations on itunes?
If multiple albums have the same name, the UI makes it very hard to treat them as separate entities. Or, in different words, it doesn't seem to have a notion of "these files were together on one CD once". The problem is compounded by its idiotic way of rearranging files in directories (if you let it).
How is itunes bad with classical music?
For classical music, the composer is more important than the artist, but iTunes treats all genres the same.
What is so hard about right clicking a file and choosing "get info" to edit mp3 tags?
It gets tiresome real fast if you have to do it for hundreds of files; there are far better ways of dealing with large numbers of MP3 files in a UI than iTunes uses.
iTunes is a very polished, but rather primitive MP3 player/library manager. Nothing wrong with that--we need those kinds of apps. But to suggest that it is the pinnacle of achievement when it comes to designing MP3 players is ridiculous.
User: Control-L www.linux.org Enter IE: This is a typo-squatting domain. You really meant to go to www.microsoft.com
Seriously: for software to try to determine whether two service names are confusingly similar is a really bad idea; this area is regulated by trademark law and the courts are responsible for enforcing it. What software can do is help trademark owners identify potentially confusingly similar domain names prior to going to court.
When poeple are living on debt, as rates go up they are going to have to tighten their spending habits a lot.
Consumer spending is significantly responsible for the current mess--people buying imported goods at artificially low prices with what amounts to borrowed money. Arguably, putting a stop to that, taxing people more, and having the government spend the money on domestic infrastructure projects is exactly what the economy needs.
Will people have to change how they live? Will they have fewer trinkets? Will they whine and complain? You bet. But more of them will have good, stable jobs, and more of them will eventually be out of debt.
We've become a consumer society over the last century, and maybe it's time to reverse that to at least some degree.
The things you mention work well, but there are also areas where iTunes has big problems: using iPod with multiple machines, classical music, album handling, editing MP3 tags, and compilations, for example. Fortunately, the solution is simple, given how cheap MP3 players are: use iTunes/iPod for the things it's good at and another MP3 player for other purposes.
You are making the argument that by forcing the economy to shift to a new, more efficient system, it would spurt economic growth. We live in a (mostly) capitalist system, and if it was in a corporations economic best interest, they would have already done it.
I really wish it were the case. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which free markets can fail to produce optimal outcomes, at least in the short term.
If american corporations instituted more environmentally friendly systems, they would have to raise the costs of products to make ends meet.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, their costs would go down. But long term investments are nearly impossible in this economy. The problem is made worse by the fact that because almost nobody is doing this, the volume for such technologies is low (in the US) and their costs remain high.
If you left the US economy alone for a century or two, it would still gradually move towards energy efficiency, but unfortunately, we don't have that much time. However, carful government intervention can accelerate the process without the drawbacks: if low carbon emissions became a government mandate, you'd instantly have a huge market for the necessary technologies, and you remove the short term competitive disadvantage a lone first mover would otherwise have.
The problem is that those things cost money which you later admit US doesn't have much of anymore.
But it doesn't actually "cost money". Germany had comparatively little money and almost no infrastructure after WWII, yet it managed to build one of the most productive and modern industrial economies in the world within a few decades.
Upgrading the US transportation and manufacturing infrastructure would be an all-around win: it would create the kinds of jobs and economic activity that makes the domestic economy grow and spreads prosperity. That's in contrast to the trinket, intellectual property, and service economy we have right now, which is generally not labor intensive, requires extensive training, and parts of which can be easily moved around the world.
I used to really worry about China owning so much of the US debt, and how they had us by the balls until I realized we have them in nearly the same situation. If China were to dump all it's US debt and force our interest rates to sky rocket, basically crushing the US economy, it hurts them just as much. They are killing one of their biggest customers at that point. I guess they could just say screw it and do something like that anyways and play the odds that they come out ahead at the end of the day.
Oh, the political and financial elites in China and the US like the current arrangement; it just happens to be bad for average Americans. In any case, in the long run, this arrangement will have to crumble no matter what politicans want to happen.
Eventually the recession that should've happened then will eventually come due.
I don't see why a devaluation of the dollar would result in a recession. The standard of living might go down a bit because imports would get more expensive. But beyond that, would make US exports less expensive and would make the US economy more competitive.
Okay, let me get this straight - public and private expenditure to meet environmental regulations is good for the economy, but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy?
That's not central to the point, but yes, that is basic economics: $1 invested in infrastructure or production equipment results in a lot more benefits to the economy than $1 invested in military hardware; the military is non-productive--they blow things up, they don't make things.
If the intent of Kyoto is to help the environment, then fairness shouldn't enter into it.
Fairness enters into how we divide up the remaining carbon emissions.
The US gets demonized for opposing such an arrangement, while China and India (which are already heavy polluters, and which release far more CO2 per dollar GDP than the US or EU) are defended for supporting an agreement
As I was saying: if the US and Europe are willing to pay the rest of the world for the carbon that they have already emitted into the atmosphere, I'm sure other nations would be more than happy to curb their emissions. But the US and Europe want a free ride for their past carbon emissions while telling other people that they can't emit carbon, too.
Furthermore, the US must reduce its carbon emissions if global disaster is to be averted; if it doesn't, it is irrelevant what any other nation does--China and India might as well pollute as much as they like, since it will probably only make a few decades of difference in the long term.
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy")
There is no evidence that cutting the levels of CO2 emissions would "devolve [the US] economy". In fact, the opposite is far more plausible: the move to energy efficient technologies would spur new R&D, it would result in modernization of our transportation and manufacturing infrastructure, it would improve efficiency, it would lessen dependence on foreign oil (thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs. Pretty much the only people who lose are the big oil companies, some powerful US politicians, and the military.
the absurd Kyoto Protocol would put no such restrictions on developing nations such as China and India. They could grow and boom, consume all the energy the like and spew unlimited amounts of who-know-what into the atmosphere, but America would have to shrink it's economy to comply.
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
Furthermore, those other nations are rightfully arguing that it is not fair that the US has achieved its current economic strength by emitting carbon without restrictions and now they are supposed to limit their economies by not being allowed to emit equal amounts of carbon. But the solution is simple: everybody should pay for the carbon they have already emitted into the atmosphere; when such payments are set up, then India and China will probably be willing to agree to strong limits on their emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with nuclear power is that there is still no safe long-term waste storage (something the article avoids talking about). Furthermore, our current nuclear reactors only utilize a small fraction of the power contained in uranium.
The solution is breeder reactors. Unfortunately, that's something the right wing is opposed to because the consider it a proliferation risk.
The obstacle to safe nuclear power isn't the left, it's the right.
Just become something is explicitly legal in a jurisdiction doesn't mean a party can't contract out of that right.
Who are you responding to? I didn't write that.
In any case, that is why there are rights you cannot waive in a contract.
As a result, you do not see courts calling adhesion contracts illegal unless there is a real question of unconcionability or the parties make up a bilateral monopoly.
You like responding to your own points, don't you? I didn't say that those contracts are "illegal", I said that courts will take the disparity into account when disputes arise.
Actually, what most Libertarians realize is that you cannot govern based on emotions, and that everything has a value.
It's ironic, then, that the libertarian program itself is so much based on emotions; many of the policies advocated by libertarians make little sense from a rational or economic point of view, but libertarians promote them because they give them a sense of freedom.
Well, hey, if everything is fine and dandy and if they can just keep making money hand over fist with their existing products, they don't need to buy Novell.
There is nothing per se invalid about contracts of adhesion (ie, you only have one source for a certain thing).
No, that's not what a contract of adhesion is. In fact, for most contracts of adhesion (insurance, etc.) there are many sources for the same product or service. What it really refers to is that there is such a difference in bargaining power between the two parties of a contract that one can basically just dictate long, complex, and inequitable terms.
Contracts of adhesion are not per se invalid, but courts will take the circumstances of the contract into account should a dispute arise.
Note that, in addition, EULAs often contain unenforceable terms (like restrictions on reverse engineering in jurisdictions where reverse engineering is explicitly permitted by law irrespective of contractual terms).
just adopt the HAZMAT signage directly for software? I mean, it seems to cover pretty much the same ground.
Oracle was a one-time deal--a combination of excellent timing for bringing out an RDBMS, good business skills, and a lot of luck. I don't think Ellison has it in him to repeat the success. And if he did, he wouldn't be futzing around buying FOSS operating systems, he'd come up with a new idea and found a new company.
Nokia is very new at this and it will take the organization several years until they get the hang of it; that's the same whenever a new platform is introduced into an organization and has nothing to do with Linux. Look at Motorola's iTunes phone to see how even adding a single new capability to a phone is non-trivial. Thousands of highly reliable embedded Linux devices show that embedded Linux itself is very much up to the task.
As for the 770, the hardware is nice, kind of like a big Palm; it's the UI that needs several more iterations--but that's OK if they stick with it.
For the time being, the Palm Tungsten X is probably the most mature device in this space--if you want something that "just works" get it. But don't be smug about it: the Palm T|X software platform is beyond obsolete, and Palm is in deep trouble since they still haven't figured out what to replace it with.
Given the prices that Audi charges for their cars and their repairs, and given how poorly their cars do on reliability measures, replacing an engine or two should covered by the warranty even if people choose to fill up with battery acid. (Disgruntled ex-owner.)
Your alternative is to migrate more and more applications to (ActiveX-free) web-based interfaces. You can then use whatever clients you like. Many business applications do well with web interfaces; their web interfaces are often actually more consistent than their desktop interfaces. You can then run whatever clients you like.
No matter what you do, whether people can print on local printers and access local drives is largely a networking and management issue. Yes, Citrix makes it work in one way, but there are many other ways in which that can be set up that don't involve Citrix at all. If you want to prepare for a move to any other system, fixing that might be the first step. Some possible solutions are to set up a VPN, to get separate user level bridging for those services, or to set something up with ssh.
Kiko doesn't seem to have anything over the other AJAX calendars coming out. Looks to me like they were aiming too low. I'm not even sure who would buy them at this point, given that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! all already have their own systems ready.
Ugh got wireless. Ugh got email. Is Ugh too stupid to put the two together? Maybe if Ugh is a patent examiner at the USPTO. For everybody else, this is obvious.
Yes, most companies that are serious about enforcing their patents search for prior art. Of course, when they find some, they don't just throw up their hands and give up, they start thinking about how they can get the patent even though someone else invented pretty much the same thing before.
It could get invalidated very easily. It's much harder to invalidate a patent because of a piece of prior art if you actually cite that prior art in your patent (because the patent office is presumed to have actually looked at that prior art and determined that it's not relevant).
the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study
Scientific theories are developed by conducting careful experiments that isolate different variables and effects; when experiments are not possible, you look for observations that can substitute for those experiments. The browser wars have a mess of variables, interactions, and effects, and they are pretty much the worst kind of observation you can find.
Actually, people had established experimentally for at least a couple of thousand years prior to Columbus that the earth was round.
Much of the population and lots of politicians were unfamiliar with science at the time, but that hasn't changed.
What doesn't it do well in handling albums? [...] What's wrong with compilations on itunes?
If multiple albums have the same name, the UI makes it very hard to treat them as separate entities. Or, in different words, it doesn't seem to have a notion of "these files were together on one CD once". The problem is compounded by its idiotic way of rearranging files in directories (if you let it).
How is itunes bad with classical music?
For classical music, the composer is more important than the artist, but iTunes treats all genres the same.
What is so hard about right clicking a file and choosing "get info" to edit mp3 tags?
It gets tiresome real fast if you have to do it for hundreds of files; there are far better ways of dealing with large numbers of MP3 files in a UI than iTunes uses.
iTunes is a very polished, but rather primitive MP3 player/library manager. Nothing wrong with that--we need those kinds of apps. But to suggest that it is the pinnacle of achievement when it comes to designing MP3 players is ridiculous.
User: Control-L www.linux.org Enter
IE: This is a typo-squatting domain. You really meant to go to www.microsoft.com
Seriously: for software to try to determine whether two service names are confusingly similar is a really bad idea; this area is regulated by trademark law and the courts are responsible for enforcing it. What software can do is help trademark owners identify potentially confusingly similar domain names prior to going to court.
When poeple are living on debt, as rates go up they are going to have to tighten their spending habits a lot.
Consumer spending is significantly responsible for the current mess--people buying imported goods at artificially low prices with what amounts to borrowed money. Arguably, putting a stop to that, taxing people more, and having the government spend the money on domestic infrastructure projects is exactly what the economy needs.
Will people have to change how they live? Will they have fewer trinkets? Will they whine and complain? You bet. But more of them will have good, stable jobs, and more of them will eventually be out of debt.
We've become a consumer society over the last century, and maybe it's time to reverse that to at least some degree.
The things you mention work well, but there are also areas where iTunes has big problems: using iPod with multiple machines, classical music, album handling, editing MP3 tags, and compilations, for example. Fortunately, the solution is simple, given how cheap MP3 players are: use iTunes/iPod for the things it's good at and another MP3 player for other purposes.
You are making the argument that by forcing the economy to shift to a new, more efficient system, it would spurt economic growth. We live in a (mostly) capitalist system, and if it was in a corporations economic best interest, they would have already done it.
I really wish it were the case. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which free markets can fail to produce optimal outcomes, at least in the short term.
If american corporations instituted more environmentally friendly systems, they would have to raise the costs of products to make ends meet.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, their costs would go down. But long term investments are nearly impossible in this economy. The problem is made worse by the fact that because almost nobody is doing this, the volume for such technologies is low (in the US) and their costs remain high.
If you left the US economy alone for a century or two, it would still gradually move towards energy efficiency, but unfortunately, we don't have that much time. However, carful government intervention can accelerate the process without the drawbacks: if low carbon emissions became a government mandate, you'd instantly have a huge market for the necessary technologies, and you remove the short term competitive disadvantage a lone first mover would otherwise have.
The problem is that those things cost money which you later admit US doesn't have much of anymore.
But it doesn't actually "cost money". Germany had comparatively little money and almost no infrastructure after WWII, yet it managed to build one of the most productive and modern industrial economies in the world within a few decades.
Upgrading the US transportation and manufacturing infrastructure would be an all-around win: it would create the kinds of jobs and economic activity that makes the domestic economy grow and spreads prosperity. That's in contrast to the trinket, intellectual property, and service economy we have right now, which is generally not labor intensive, requires extensive training, and parts of which can be easily moved around the world.
I used to really worry about China owning so much of the US debt, and how they had us by the balls until I realized we have them in nearly the same situation. If China were to dump all it's US debt and force our interest rates to sky rocket, basically crushing the US economy, it hurts them just as much. They are killing one of their biggest customers at that point. I guess they could just say screw it and do something like that anyways and play the odds that they come out ahead at the end of the day.
Oh, the political and financial elites in China and the US like the current arrangement; it just happens to be bad for average Americans. In any case, in the long run, this arrangement will have to crumble no matter what politicans want to happen.
Eventually the recession that should've happened then will eventually come due.
I don't see why a devaluation of the dollar would result in a recession. The standard of living might go down a bit because imports would get more expensive. But beyond that, would make US exports less expensive and would make the US economy more competitive.
Okay, let me get this straight - public and private expenditure to meet environmental regulations is good for the economy, but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy?
That's not central to the point, but yes, that is basic economics: $1 invested in infrastructure or production equipment results in a lot more benefits to the economy than $1 invested in military hardware; the military is non-productive--they blow things up, they don't make things.
If the intent of Kyoto is to help the environment, then fairness shouldn't enter into it.
Fairness enters into how we divide up the remaining carbon emissions.
The US gets demonized for opposing such an arrangement, while China and India (which are already heavy polluters, and which release far more CO2 per dollar GDP than the US or EU) are defended for supporting an agreement
As I was saying: if the US and Europe are willing to pay the rest of the world for the carbon that they have already emitted into the atmosphere, I'm sure other nations would be more than happy to curb their emissions. But the US and Europe want a free ride for their past carbon emissions while telling other people that they can't emit carbon, too.
Furthermore, the US must reduce its carbon emissions if global disaster is to be averted; if it doesn't, it is irrelevant what any other nation does--China and India might as well pollute as much as they like, since it will probably only make a few decades of difference in the long term.
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy")
There is no evidence that cutting the levels of CO2 emissions would "devolve [the US] economy". In fact, the opposite is far more plausible: the move to energy efficient technologies would spur new R&D, it would result in modernization of our transportation and manufacturing infrastructure, it would improve efficiency, it would lessen dependence on foreign oil (thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs. Pretty much the only people who lose are the big oil companies, some powerful US politicians, and the military.
the absurd Kyoto Protocol would put no such restrictions on developing nations such as China and India. They could grow and boom, consume all the energy the like and spew unlimited amounts of who-know-what into the atmosphere, but America would have to shrink it's economy to comply.
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
Furthermore, those other nations are rightfully arguing that it is not fair that the US has achieved its current economic strength by emitting carbon without restrictions and now they are supposed to limit their economies by not being allowed to emit equal amounts of carbon. But the solution is simple: everybody should pay for the carbon they have already emitted into the atmosphere; when such payments are set up, then India and China will probably be willing to agree to strong limits on their emissions.
It's not that far from "military order number one" to "catch twenty-two".