Here's a thought. Distribute the spent fuel rods to households for "micro-reactors". One spent fuel rod could provide enough heat to power a household-sized nuclear reactor for decades if we could efficiently tap its thermal output.
That is a great idea. It would also solve the problems of overpopulation (by reducing it) and global warming (by increasing the mutation rate, allowing for a faster adaption of the ecosystem).
the UN bans this because one ofthe steps to do it is weapons grade plutonium.
The UN bans nothing like that. The IAEO might have something to say about it, but breeder programs and reprocessing facilities have been projected and partially implemented in a lot of states. Most of them have been abandoned again for political and technical reason, not any supposed "UN" ban.
Of course, the US might become nervous if Iran and North Korea start working on these issues (in fact, they are, and they are).
4: WHY exactly is global warming bad? Wont it give more landmass (eg, melts permafrost siberia) and lessen the "nice tropical -120F on antartica?
Global warming does not mean it gets warmer everywhere. Europe will likely get colder winters, and antarctica might also get colder (because wind systems stabilize, leading to less air exchange).
From a long term perspective, moderate global warming is not necessarily bad. Earth will likely find a new balance, and the ecosystem will adapt. Total biodiversity and bioproductivity may drop, or, quite possibly, increase. Some humans (or their evolutionary successors) will certainly survive.
Of course the long term is a couple of million years. In between, the change, and the probably unprecended speed of the change, puts an enormous additional stress on an eco (both -logic and -nomic) system that has adapted to colder, stable temperatures. Some may profit, some may lose, but on average we will all lose significantly. Nice beachfrotn property on the Kola penisula will not be of much use to a Florida retiree whose condo is washed away by a hurricane.
Of course, there is also a non-zero chance at a runaway greenhouse effect...
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Under the Geneva conventions, due process for war criminals amounts to senior present officer "No uniform...check, hiding in civilian population....check, not acting in accordance with laws of war ie firing on civilians etc...check; Ok you're guilty. CAP!...~dead war criminal~"
In your wet dreams, maybe. Moreover, obviously that did not happen. You don't forfeit your rights because somebody did not kill you.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
First, he decided to take up arms against the country, then he lost his citizenship.
Did I miss an "allegedly" or did you forgot to put it in? As long as there has been no fair, public trial, there is no proof of the claim. And as long as there is no proof, he is innocent as far as the law is concerned.
That is one of the things that gets my gall about the US so-called anti-terror operations. Imprisoning people without fair trials, for indefinite periods of time, and under inhumane conditions. If Gunatanamo were in Vietnam, John Rambo would be a hero for killing the guards and freeing the inmates.
In fact, I think any of the inmates would be legally and morally justified in attacking and killing any of the guards in any way in an attempt to flee. I'm close to thinking the same applies to outsiders, the only thing that keeps me from this more radical position is that the legal process is still ongoing. This does not apply to the inmates, because they receive no information about the process, they are not allowed to see lawyers, or to communicate in any meaningful way with the outside.
Their rights are clearly being violated in a major way - I think the whole chain of command, up to Bush, should rot in jail for this outrage.
As for allowing sloppy HTML, that's a problem if you think the primary purpose of a browser is to enforce HTML standards rather than display web pages.
Well, a browser should display web pages. However, a string of broken HTML is not a web page, but rather some random data send out by a web server in response to a request. The problem with displaying broken pages is that it waters down the standard and erects artifical barriers to entry in the market. You cannot just implement the spec, but you have to copy all the quirks of your competitors. Fine if you have a near-monopoly, but not good in general.
Would you accept 6mm nuts for 8mm screws? After all, the primary purpose of the shop is to sell you stuff, not to enforce the standard...
Did anybody actually read the press release? Including the submitter? This was not someone trying to overturn the One Click so-called patent *spit* and failing, but rather a separate garden-variety patent extortion company trying to claim that their previous and even more trivial, obvious, and overbroad patent trumps Amazon's trivial, obvious, and overbroad patent.
On "lesser of two evils" argument, this was a win...
3) 1% (The OpenBSD songs, + RMS Free Software Song)
Oh man, I feel really sorry for you if this is what you've been having to listen to on your iPod...
Actually, the OpenBSD songs are surprisingly professional and quite ok. OK, RMS is on there more for nostalgia and laughs...
And no iPod - when I'm at my Powerbook I don't need it, and when I'm not at my Powerbook, I typically need the concentration to avoid hitting skiers, snowboarders, trees, or ordinary traffic.
want me to FTP you some pirated music sometime, man?
ITunes says: 1844 songs, 5.7 days, 9.15 GB. In other words, I'll manage somehow.
1) 0% (to lazy to figure things out under Linux/Solaris)
2) 0% (iTunes store only just opened in Germany)
3) 1% (The OpenBSD songs, + RMS Free Software Song)
4) 95% (most of it classic and Jazz)
5) 4% (note that this is legal in Germany, and AFAIK, Canada)
Here in America, I'm pretty sure there has been a much higher incidence of abortions since abortion was made legal nation wide.
I tried to look up some US statistics online, and data is ambiguous. One problem is, of course, that it is hard to get even approximate numbers for illegal abortions. Estimates for pre-Roe/Wade times vary from 250,000 per year (which would mean significant increase after it became legal) to 1.2 Million (which means that Roe/Wade did not change things significantly). Today it seems to be at about 900,000, or so so taking population growth into account, the frequency of abortions has decreased quite significantly since the end-70th.
As a Christian, I believe that homosexuality is sinful. I also believe that unborn children are living humans, and killing them because they are inconvenient is wrong.[...]
Killing babies, though... man. That's a moral issue, not a religious one. Even the most vocal proponent of "choice," which is just a euphamism for "death," Mrs. Roe is now wishing that she hadn't had an abortion. Not only is it mindless killing, it is also a psychological burden to most would-have-been mothers.
I can accept that many people feel uncomfortable about abortion. It's not an easy topic, and it touches very fundamental philosphical questions, as well as very basic mammalian instincts.
However, at least in Europe it can be observed that more liberal abortion laws (often, but not always coupled with better sex education) lead to lower rates of abortion than stricter laws. Thus, I wonder if opponents of the right to an abortion are more more interested in "saving the babies", or in "punishing the sinners"?
And remind me again, why is the RIAA evil? Is it because they are protecting their intellectual property?
They are evil for a number of reasons. For me, number one is that they try to protect their so-called intellectual property not by going after the people who violate it, but by going after people who build generic tools that can be used for many puroposes (including copyright violation). DeCSS is a useful thing if you want to watch DVD's under Linux. FreeNet is useful for distributing any kind of information.
Actually, suing people who violate copyrights is quite ok with me. The RIAA and MPAA have, for a long time, not done so because they fear the bad publicity, and, probably, because it is harder to go after the small fry. It's a little bit like a super power attacking another state instead of going the slow and hard work of really going after terrorists and the circumstances that create them -- and of course we would never tolerate something like that!
The second reason why the RIAA is evil is because they are pushing for an extension of "intellecual property rights" far beyond what is good and reasonable for society to tolerate.
6 digits! Did Microsft buy a few licences or something? I doubt the EV1 deal can bring 6 digits, and there isn't really anything else they can count as SCOSource revenue.
I think they are still milking the EV1 deal - this is the quarter in which (some of) this revenue should finally be on the book. It has consistently been toutet as a 6-figure deal.
And notice that they have not said that they have a 6 figure income this quarter, just that they are going to report it.
All in all, it again looks like they have no new income from SCOSource this year.
NP-Complete problems are by definition problems that can't be solved in polynomial time(at least not by a Turing machine?). However, most problems that are considered NP-Complete are not mathematically proven to be so. Some are though, and the thing with NP-Complete problems is that you can always translate one NP-Complete problem to another NP-Complete problem.
Sorry, but you got things mixed up.
NP problems are problems that can be solved by a Nondeterministic Turing machine in Polynomial time. NP-Complete problems are the class of "hardest" problems in NP. All the usual suspects (Traveling Salesman, 3-SAT, SAT,...) are proven
to be in NPC.
We know that we can solve NPC problems in exponential time (as we can simulate a non-deterministic Turing maschine on deterministic hardware with exponential overhead). What we do not know is if there is any smarter way. That is the P=?=NP question.
This is the critical element here, otherwise the good science will get muddled into the google soup along with the gibberish that some religious or political fanatics or degree for hire bozos pass off as science.
Although one still needs to take anyone elses work critically, at least one can be reasonably assured that something in an establilshed journal is less likely to be hogwash, or at least it will have the equations internally self consistant and biblio's are for real.
We are, in fact, paying for a mixture of things, and the ingedients have changed significantly over time. What we don't pay for is the reviewing - all referees I know work for free. I would be a lot richer if I got adequate money for writing reviews.
Originally, publishing a journal had significant and necessary costs. Paper copies of submissions and reviews had to be mailed back and forth, the finished paper had to be typeset and proofread, then it had to be printed and distributed. Editors had real work to do, too.
Nowadays, papers get send back and forth via email, the authors provide ready-for-printing electronic manuscripts, and even distribution is done via the web for some of the more progressive journals. I've organized a couple of workshops without any budget at all - the only unavoidable hard cost in publishing proceedings is the making of paper copies (which is negligible and absorbed by whatever institution one of the editors works at). All the rest is voluntary labour (and the much same holds true for journals).
Costs should have gone down a lot, but instead prices have steadily risen. That is why scientists and libraries are looking for other ways of doing stuff.
Still, the "author pays for publication" model is deeply flawed as well. At the moment I decide when a paper is ready and where I submit it. No applying for funds, no burocracy that tells me to wait half a year because of a budget freeze or "better" value for money in another journal.
As long as you are affiliated with a reasonably funded institute in an industrialized country, this is only a PITA. But what about scientists from poorer nations? This would exclude them from the scientific marketplace, or might lead to an even bigger brain drain than currently.
Brad is fully competent to handle this case on his own. Not only has he been longer around the net than I have been (which puts him in the bang-path-era), he also is the current chairman of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and has weathered more censorship/civil liberties suits than most other people or organizations.
I do think his reply is a little bit to serious - maybe an mp3 with really sinister laughing would have been more appriate, or s simple and polite "Fuck off".
Which is exactly why GPL is less free than BSD type licences. Freedom is, among other things, the absence of artificial constraints. The GPL has an artificial constraint (derivitive works must also be free), making it by definition less free than licences which lack those artificial constraints. Freedom includes the freedom to be a dick, the freedom to profit from one's work, and the freedom not to share.
Freedom is not a particularly well-defined concept. Notice that with your simple definition, maximal individual freedom does not lead to maximal individual liberty. Where is my freedom to own slaves? Where is my freedom to kill people with different opinions? Why all these artificial constraints?
The point of the GPL is to maximise overal freedom of all users. In order to do so, it does indeed impose some constraints on how the code can be used. But similar things are done by any society currently in existance. We have laws exactly to protect individual liberty. Libertopia aside, I probably don't want to live in a total anachy.
....
Socialism isn't necessarily a bad thing, just be honest and admit what you are doing -- taking property rights away from the individual and giving them to society as a whole.
Where does the GPL take away individual property rights? Unless you wrote the code in question, you have none in it. In exchange for allowing you to use my code, I require that you share alike. A totally free transaction, nothing taken except in the sense that I take a Coke from the supermarket (after paying for it).
Wow, I've never gotten this many replies from a/. thread.
Just a few comments:
You only demonstrate the dangers of bad science education, coupled
with an unreasonable belief in numbers.
I'll be the first to admit that most of my scientific education
sucks. I'm not sure what you mean by an unreasonable belief in
numbers. I know my output numbers are only as good as my input
numbers, but that's why I asked for people to confirm my input
numbers, which several people did.
I think most actually deconfirmed them. By unreasonable belief in
numbers I mean that somebody gave you some cool numbers which
seem to have an interesting implication on the anthropogen
CO2 discussion. Now, instead of running a few quick checks to see that
the numbers must be wrong (e.g. in order to produce 10 tons
of CO2 per year, a human would have to ingest 2.7 tons of Carbon per
year, or 7.4 kg per day - that's a lot of dry spaghetti), you repeat
them...totally ignoring the fact that those numbers are irrelevant
anyways. Numbers are only valuable if you understand the process
they describe - it's the old apples and oranges problem. Your original
comparison is like saying "no, the garden hose will never make the
pool overflow - see how much more water the circulation pump moves".
30 million tons for what? That sounds like a reasonable number for
daily worldwide production and a particular definition of industrial
processes.
My original source was inaccurate, but RayBender corrected me here
and provided some better sources. Essentially, we produce 6-7 billion
tons of CO2 a year by doing other things than breathing.
No, he (and the other poster in the thread) claimed that fossil fuel
amounts to 6-7 billion tons of Carbon emission. CO2 is one atom
of Carbon (atomic weight 12) and two of Oxygen (atomic weight 16), for
a total molecular weight of 44. Hence the 6-7 billion tons of carbon
correspond to 22-26 billion tons of CO2, compared to my estimate of 28
billion tons.
Using again the corrected numbers, we arrive at 6 billion tons
(6x10^9) for CO2 produced by human breathing. So you underestimated
CO2 production from fossil sources by a factor of 1000 and
overestimated breathing CO2 production by a factor of 10.
Someone else (probably RayBender again, he's pretty smart) pointed out
that I messed up the weight of the CO2 by a factor of 10, so humans do
produce about 7 x 10^9 tons of CO2 in a year, about the same as is
produced by industrial processes. You seem to be overestimating the
amount of CO2 produced by fossil sources, although I would be
interested to see your sources.
No, RayBender and I are in fairly good agreement (+/- 20%, which is
quite ok for this kind of back-of-the-envelope estimate). I based my
numbers on the amount of fosil fues actually produced each year.
Yes, I see it, but you don't. Those numbers don't matter at all
because the CO2 produced by breathing is part of a CO2 cycle. That is,
all Carbon in our breath comes from food (in the end, from plants),
who extracted it from the air while growing. As long as we don't start
eating synthetic food, our net CO2 production from breathing is
exactly zero.
Now this is one of the more interesting points in this part of the
thread so far. As world population grows with advances in industry,
there are advances in agriculture and more plants grown to feed
everyone, which offsets the increased CO2 from more humans
exhaling. Of course, there are some practical problems with this:
Most people don't confine their diet to plants. Domesticated food
animals are going to be bred in greater numbers as well, which also
produce CO2 in breathing. Of course, these animals have to eat too,
and so more plants have to be grown to feed them.
I don't know if you are aware of that, but Carbon (
Human carbon dioxide emissions raise the overall temperature.
Someone else said this better than I can a few months ago, but I can't
find it, so I'll do my best to replicate it. (Remember, this is an
estimation at best, but it should illustrate the point I am trying to
make).
Nothing wrong with estimates, but you should always
cross-check if the result actually makes sense. You only demonstrate
the dangers of bad science education, coupled with an unreasonable
belief in numbers.
The best I could find on Google is that CO2 emissions from industrial
processes account for about 30 million tons. This sounds reasonable to
me, anyone have a better figure?
30 million tons for what? That sounds like a reasonable number for
daily worldwide production and a particular definition of
industrial processes.
To get a better estimate for carbon dioxide priduction from fossil sources, I checked
the worldwide production numbers for coal and crude oil. World
production for coal is about 5 billion tons, about 80% of which is
anthracite (hard coal). The rest is lower-grade coal. Anthracite
typically is 90%+ Carbon, the lower grades on average about
50-60%. That gives us a little bit more that 4 billion tons of Carbon
from coal. With Carbon's atomic weigh of 12 and Oxygen at 16, that
gives us 15 billion tons of CO2 from burning coal alone.
Crude oil production is approximately 30 billion barrels per year, or
another 4 billion tons. Crude oil is a mixture of various
Carbohydrates, but usually has about 2 Hydrogen Atoms per Carbon Atom
(+ various other substances in negligible quantity). So let's call it
another 3.5 billion tons of carbon, corresponding to 13 billion tons
of CO2. So CO2 production from fossil fuel use is about 28 billion
tons per year, or 1000 times your number.
Cross-check: There are about 200 million cars in the US alone. If each
of those burns 10kg (about 3-4 gallons) of fuel per month, that's
nearly 20 million tons of Carbon (70 million tons of CO2) right
there.
Now on to the dangerous humans.
Humans exhale CO2 as part of the normal breathing process. Let's
assume for the sake of this simplified example that an average human
breathes 20 times a minute. If I remember correctly, average
exhalation volume of air is 2.5 liters or so, of which 20% or so is
CO2 (If any of my figures are inaccurate, please correct
them).
You are wildly inaccurate here. Roughly 80% of air is nitrogen, and
essentially inert. 20% is Oxygen. Of that Oxygen, about another 20% is
converted into CO2. You are off by a factor of 5 in the rest:
Therefore, there is about half a liter of CO2 in one
exhalation, which would be about a gram (this is a roundoff to make my
next calculations easier). This results in 20 grams of CO2 produced by
one adult human in a minute. There are 60*24*365.25, or 525960 minutes
in a year, which means one human exhales 10,519,200 grams, or 10,519.2
kilograms, of CO2 in a year.
Only about 4% of the exhaled air is CO2, or 100 ml per breath. Now,
one Mol (44g) of CO2 occupies about 22 l, so 100 ml weights 0.2 grams,
giving us (using your numbers) 4 g of CO2 per minute or 2103 840 kg of
CO2 per person per year. Using the corrected number, we arrive at
2103840 grams or about 2 tons of CO2. Now 2 tons of CO2 corresponds to
550 kg of Carbon per person. That carbon has to come from our food, so
your numbers presume that everybody consumes about 1.5 kg of Carbon
per day and converts it with 100% efficency. Those numbers are much to
high - humans consume about one pound of dry matter per day (most of
which is eventually Carbon). So either the breating frequency or the
breathing volume are to high - I suspect both. Let's continue with a
more reasonable (still high) one ton of CO2 per person per year.
Assuming a world population of six billion humans (don't point out
that I'm discounting other species, I know and I
I have a Powerbook G4/1GHz, the last generation Titanium Powerbook, which still has the rather lousy old memory interface. In my experience, and for my kind of work (which is mostly C compiling, LaTeX, and theorem proving, somewhat similar to compiling in CPU usage, but more hungry w.r.t. memory), a G4 is about as fast as a P3, MHz for MHz. That is, a 1GHz G4 should be roughly at the same level as a 1.5GHz P4.
With the better memory bus in the new machines, I guess that the 1.25/1.33 GHz ALBooks should come close to a 2GHz P4.
In other words, they are plenty fast enough for at least medium sized projects (and if you use a reasonably smart development environment, e.g. make, you rarely compile a lot of stuff in one go anyways.
For me, I'm very happy with my machine. It's not the pure performance, but rather the whole package. It is actually a pleasure to just sit there and type away on the keyboard. And I'm using it mostly under X11/Fink, so it is not attribuatable to the OS (although MacOS-X is farly good), it is purely due to the nice materials and reasonably ergonomic design.
What we need, then, are smart speed limit signs! Using a combination of the devices being discussed here, and some kind of a digital display sign, the speed limit could be instantly adjusted to the current traffic, and posted on the display.
Those are actually used in Germany on high-traffic sections of the Autobahn, e.g. the A8 going into Munich from the Alps, or the A1 in the vicinity of Cologne. Those sections are monitored (via bridge cameras, as far as I know), and electronic signs restrict speed to adequate limits. They are also used to set lower speed limits if road conditions are bad (due to e.g. snow, ice, or for). Of course in theory drivers are required to reduce speed on their own in this circumstances, but in practice the signs work a lot better.
Don't like SUV's? Don't drive one! And butt out of other's business, Live your own life, and do not control others.
Where have I tried to control others? You might want to reread the thread.
That said, I don't like SUVs, I think they are dangerous for other drivers, I think they cause an inadequate amount of cost to the community (e.g. by causing more pollution, using more resources, and damaging the roads more than smaller cars). I think our tax system should reflect that so that people who do want to (or need to) buy an SUV do bear the full cost of owning one, instead of getting a subsidy. Nowhere do I want to forbid them, though.
Unfortunately, we are not living on an infinite planet where our actions only affect ourselves. As we use to say: Your right to move your fist stops at my nose.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the US might become nervous if Iran and North Korea start working on these issues (in fact, they are, and they are).
From a long term perspective, moderate global warming is not necessarily bad. Earth will likely find a new balance, and the ecosystem will adapt. Total biodiversity and bioproductivity may drop, or, quite possibly, increase. Some humans (or their evolutionary successors) will certainly survive.
Of course the long term is a couple of million years. In between, the change, and the probably unprecended speed of the change, puts an enormous additional stress on an eco (both -logic and -nomic) system that has adapted to colder, stable temperatures. Some may profit, some may lose, but on average we will all lose significantly. Nice beachfrotn property on the Kola penisula will not be of much use to a Florida retiree whose condo is washed away by a hurricane.
Of course, there is also a non-zero chance at a runaway greenhouse effect...
That is one of the things that gets my gall about the US so-called anti-terror operations. Imprisoning people without fair trials, for indefinite periods of time, and under inhumane conditions. If Gunatanamo were in Vietnam, John Rambo would be a hero for killing the guards and freeing the inmates.
In fact, I think any of the inmates would be legally and morally justified in attacking and killing any of the guards in any way in an attempt to flee. I'm close to thinking the same applies to outsiders, the only thing that keeps me from this more radical position is that the legal process is still ongoing. This does not apply to the inmates, because they receive no information about the process, they are not allowed to see lawyers, or to communicate in any meaningful way with the outside.
Their rights are clearly being violated in a major way - I think the whole chain of command, up to Bush, should rot in jail for this outrage.
Would you accept 6mm nuts for 8mm screws? After all, the primary purpose of the shop is to sell you stuff, not to enforce the standard...
On "lesser of two evils" argument, this was a win...
And no iPod - when I'm at my Powerbook I don't need it, and when I'm not at my Powerbook, I typically need the concentration to avoid hitting skiers, snowboarders, trees, or ordinary traffic.
ITunes says: 1844 songs, 5.7 days, 9.15 GB. In other words, I'll manage somehow.1) 0% (to lazy to figure things out under Linux/Solaris)
2) 0% (iTunes store only just opened in Germany)
3) 1% (The OpenBSD songs, + RMS Free Software Song)
4) 95% (most of it classic and Jazz)
5) 4% (note that this is legal in Germany, and AFAIK, Canada)
However, at least in Europe it can be observed that more liberal abortion laws (often, but not always coupled with better sex education) lead to lower rates of abortion than stricter laws. Thus, I wonder if opponents of the right to an abortion are more more interested in "saving the babies", or in "punishing the sinners"?
No, it's a porn movie sponsored by the American Association of Physical Therapists.
They are evil for a number of reasons. For me, number one is that they try to protect their so-called intellectual property not by going after the people who violate it, but by going after people who build generic tools that can be used for many puroposes (including copyright violation). DeCSS is a useful thing if you want to watch DVD's under Linux. FreeNet is useful for distributing any kind of information.
Actually, suing people who violate copyrights is quite ok with me. The RIAA and MPAA have, for a long time, not done so because they fear the bad publicity, and, probably, because it is harder to go after the small fry. It's a little bit like a super power attacking another state instead of going the slow and hard work of really going after terrorists and the circumstances that create them -- and of course we would never tolerate something like that!
The second reason why the RIAA is evil is because they are pushing for an extension of "intellecual property rights" far beyond what is good and reasonable for society to tolerate.
And notice that they have not said that they have a 6 figure income this quarter, just that they are going to report it.
All in all, it again looks like they have no new income from SCOSource this year.
NP problems are problems that can be solved by a Nondeterministic Turing machine in Polynomial time. NP-Complete problems are the class of "hardest" problems in NP. All the usual suspects (Traveling Salesman, 3-SAT, SAT, ...) are proven
to be in NPC.
We know that we can solve NPC problems in exponential time (as we can simulate a non-deterministic Turing maschine on deterministic hardware with exponential overhead). What we do not know is if there is any smarter way. That is the P=?=NP question.
We are, in fact, paying for a mixture of things, and the ingedients have changed significantly over time. What we don't pay for is the reviewing - all referees I know work for free. I would be a lot richer if I got adequate money for writing reviews.
Originally, publishing a journal had significant and necessary costs. Paper copies of submissions and reviews had to be mailed back and forth, the finished paper had to be typeset and proofread, then it had to be printed and distributed. Editors had real work to do, too.
Nowadays, papers get send back and forth via email, the authors provide ready-for-printing electronic manuscripts, and even distribution is done via the web for some of the more progressive journals. I've organized a couple of workshops without any budget at all - the only unavoidable hard cost in publishing proceedings is the making of paper copies (which is negligible and absorbed by whatever institution one of the editors works at). All the rest is voluntary labour (and the much same holds true for journals).
Costs should have gone down a lot, but instead prices have steadily risen. That is why scientists and libraries are looking for other ways of doing stuff.
Still, the "author pays for publication" model is deeply flawed as well. At the moment I decide when a paper is ready and where I submit it. No applying for funds, no burocracy that tells me to wait half a year because of a budget freeze or "better" value for money in another journal.
As long as you are affiliated with a reasonably funded institute in an industrialized country, this is only a PITA. But what about scientists from poorer nations? This would exclude them from the scientific marketplace, or might lead to an even bigger brain drain than currently.
I do think his reply is a little bit to serious - maybe an mp3 with really sinister laughing would have been more appriate, or s simple and polite "Fuck off".
The point of the GPL is to maximise overal freedom of all users. In order to do so, it does indeed impose some constraints on how the code can be used. But similar things are done by any society currently in existance. We have laws exactly to protect individual liberty. Libertopia aside, I probably don't want to live in a total anachy.
....
Where does the GPL take away individual property rights? Unless you wrote the code in question, you have none in it. In exchange for allowing you to use my code, I require that you share alike. A totally free transaction, nothing taken except in the sense that I take a Coke from the supermarket (after paying for it).I think most actually deconfirmed them. By unreasonable belief in numbers I mean that somebody gave you some cool numbers which seem to have an interesting implication on the anthropogen CO2 discussion. Now, instead of running a few quick checks to see that the numbers must be wrong (e.g. in order to produce 10 tons of CO2 per year, a human would have to ingest 2.7 tons of Carbon per year, or 7.4 kg per day - that's a lot of dry spaghetti), you repeat them...totally ignoring the fact that those numbers are irrelevant anyways. Numbers are only valuable if you understand the process they describe - it's the old apples and oranges problem. Your original comparison is like saying "no, the garden hose will never make the pool overflow - see how much more water the circulation pump moves".
No, he (and the other poster in the thread) claimed that fossil fuel amounts to 6-7 billion tons of Carbon emission. CO2 is one atom of Carbon (atomic weight 12) and two of Oxygen (atomic weight 16), for a total molecular weight of 44. Hence the 6-7 billion tons of carbon correspond to 22-26 billion tons of CO2, compared to my estimate of 28 billion tons.
No, RayBender and I are in fairly good agreement (+/- 20%, which is quite ok for this kind of back-of-the-envelope estimate). I based my numbers on the amount of fosil fues actually produced each year.
I don't know if you are aware of that, but Carbon (
Nothing wrong with estimates, but you should always cross-check if the result actually makes sense. You only demonstrate the dangers of bad science education, coupled with an unreasonable belief in numbers.
30 million tons for what? That sounds like a reasonable number for daily worldwide production and a particular definition of industrial processes. To get a better estimate for carbon dioxide priduction from fossil sources, I checked the worldwide production numbers for coal and crude oil. World production for coal is about 5 billion tons, about 80% of which is anthracite (hard coal). The rest is lower-grade coal. Anthracite typically is 90%+ Carbon, the lower grades on average about 50-60%. That gives us a little bit more that 4 billion tons of Carbon from coal. With Carbon's atomic weigh of 12 and Oxygen at 16, that gives us 15 billion tons of CO2 from burning coal alone.
Crude oil production is approximately 30 billion barrels per year, or another 4 billion tons. Crude oil is a mixture of various Carbohydrates, but usually has about 2 Hydrogen Atoms per Carbon Atom (+ various other substances in negligible quantity). So let's call it another 3.5 billion tons of carbon, corresponding to 13 billion tons of CO2. So CO2 production from fossil fuel use is about 28 billion tons per year, or 1000 times your number.
Cross-check: There are about 200 million cars in the US alone. If each of those burns 10kg (about 3-4 gallons) of fuel per month, that's nearly 20 million tons of Carbon (70 million tons of CO2) right there.
Now on to the dangerous humans.
You are wildly inaccurate here. Roughly 80% of air is nitrogen, and essentially inert. 20% is Oxygen. Of that Oxygen, about another 20% is converted into CO2. You are off by a factor of 5 in the rest:
Only about 4% of the exhaled air is CO2, or 100 ml per breath. Now, one Mol (44g) of CO2 occupies about 22 l, so 100 ml weights 0.2 grams, giving us (using your numbers) 4 g of CO2 per minute or 2103 840 kg of CO2 per person per year. Using the corrected number, we arrive at 2103840 grams or about 2 tons of CO2. Now 2 tons of CO2 corresponds to 550 kg of Carbon per person. That carbon has to come from our food, so your numbers presume that everybody consumes about 1.5 kg of Carbon per day and converts it with 100% efficency. Those numbers are much to high - humans consume about one pound of dry matter per day (most of which is eventually Carbon). So either the breating frequency or the breathing volume are to high - I suspect both. Let's continue with a more reasonable (still high) one ton of CO2 per person per year.
With the better memory bus in the new machines, I guess that the 1.25/1.33 GHz ALBooks should come close to a 2GHz P4. In other words, they are plenty fast enough for at least medium sized projects (and if you use a reasonably smart development environment, e.g. make, you rarely compile a lot of stuff in one go anyways.
For me, I'm very happy with my machine. It's not the pure performance, but rather the whole package. It is actually a pleasure to just sit there and type away on the keyboard. And I'm using it mostly under X11/Fink, so it is not attribuatable to the OS (although MacOS-X is farly good), it is purely due to the nice materials and reasonably ergonomic design.
Those are actually used in Germany on high-traffic sections of the Autobahn, e.g. the A8 going into Munich from the Alps, or the A1 in the vicinity of Cologne. Those sections are monitored (via bridge cameras, as far as I know), and electronic signs restrict speed to adequate limits. They are also used to set lower speed limits if road conditions are bad (due to e.g. snow, ice, or for). Of course in theory drivers are required to reduce speed on their own in this circumstances, but in practice the signs work a lot better.
That said, I don't like SUVs, I think they are dangerous for other drivers, I think they cause an inadequate amount of cost to the community (e.g. by causing more pollution, using more resources, and damaging the roads more than smaller cars). I think our tax system should reflect that so that people who do want to (or need to) buy an SUV do bear the full cost of owning one, instead of getting a subsidy. Nowhere do I want to forbid them, though.
Unfortunately, we are not living on an infinite planet where our actions only affect ourselves. As we use to say: Your right to move your fist stops at my nose.