The distinction is not important. The use of this vehicle WILL create pollution. Because in reality we dont have any 'energy free' ways of filling the tank.
The issue is not "energy free" ways of filling the tank. It is "pollution free" ways of producing energy. Which we do have, and are getting more of and more market penetration of the one's we have.
This is simply shifting the pollution problem, not solving it.
While I disagree that this is entirely true (it both shifts and reduces the problem), shifting the problem is an important part of solving it, as it is shifting it to the arena where it is more practical to address without disruption. If vehicles are "fueled" using centrally-generated electricity to locally produce the "fuel", you don't have to either destroy personal transport or build a new fueling and distribution infrastructure and force people to replace their cars to implement improvements in the pollution performance of transportation, you just have to improve the pollution performance of your mix of large-scale electricity generation, which can practically be done incrementally and with no disruption to the end-user.
No. The use of this vehicle DOES produce pollution. In the energy consumed to fill the compressed air tank. Which will probably be from electricity, and probably that electricity will be created from coal.
No, the use of the vehicle does not. The filling of the tank may or may not, depending on the energy source used to fill the tank. The distinction is important.
The thing is there isn't just a lot of compressed air lying around. Thanks to thermodynamics, it costs more to compress the air than what we get out of it when we uncompress it. And it's probably oil or coal burning plants that compress the air. So this isn't solving anything.
Uh, yeah, it is.
Burning fossil fuels in a power plant is generally more efficient and cleaner than burning them in a small, light mobile engine. So it reduces pollution that way.
While compressed air isn't the only such storage medium that turns the vehicle-power problem into a large-scale generation problem, batteries and fuel cells are far from clean to produce. Compressed air canisters aren't nearly as dirty. And, its a lot easier to build a distributed compressed-air generating infrastructure powered by large-scale power plants than it is for hydrogen.
Its not solving everything, but if it performs as advertised, it certainly is a useful part of the solution.
So.. it costs like 5-10$ to fill a single scuba tank. Where do they get their $1.50 figure from? There is no mention of how that figure is arrived at at all.
Possibly, energy costs are cheaper in India than in the West; certainly, the raw materials consumed to produce the energy is not, but the human labor in maintaining the power plants and infrastructure probably is considerably cheaper.
And "Zero-pollution"?
Its exhausted is simply the compressed air, but expanded. It produces no engine pollution. I suppose it might produce some amount of "pollution" from wear on the tire and various mechanical components, but that's generally not considered when discussing automotive pollution in the first place.
Its an alpha release. I suspect the licensing, particularly the restriction on where you may use the software, reflect that. Imagine the damage to the product brand if some company included it on the kind of devices it uses as examples of prohibited devices (like ATMs or medical devices or set-top boxes), and it (as an alpha produce is wont to do) failed spectacularly in an unforseen manner.
The license isn't made, I suspect, with individual hackers modding their own internet appliance, set-top boxes, etc., in mind. Sure, it technically prohibits it, but Adobe isn't going to know if you do it, isn't going to care if you do it, and isn't likely to do anything more than mention that its a license violation and not their fault when it screws up if somehow you manage to even get their attention with the fact you've done it.
The real problem with nuclear energy is not the reactors (the middle bit)), but the mining (the first bit) of the uranium and the disposal (the end bit) of the waste.
"The real problem" suggests there is only one "real" probly. While both mining and disposal are certainly real problems, it is also true that a real problem with (commercial viability of) nuclear energy is the reactors themselves, and particularly their safety. The reason no reactors have been built in the US since the 1970s is the potential liability risk in the case of accidents (not because major accidents are extremely likely, but because the potential damages from one are vast), which is why companies that would like to build reactors and reap the enormous profits possible selling the output from them are lobbying for broad shields from liability in order to build new reactors without substantial risk.
If the EULA enforces things that a reasonable person wouldn't expect to find in a contract of this type, the unreasonable elements of the EULA may be found unenforceable by the courts.
Whether the right to sell data relating to your Internet use to third parties something a reasonable person would expect is debatable. Someone could challenge those portions of the EULA covering click info, on the basis that they are not to be reasonably expected in an end user license covering a contract for Internet access.
Since most of the time there is a separate "privacy policy" containing such provisions, and you have to separately acknowledge the privacy policy, and since it would be very hard to make the case that a reasonable person would not expect to find agreements as to what information would be protected as private and what information would be shared in a "privacy policy", I don't expect that that's going to be effective against most agreements.
At Microsoft some VPs don't even have any reports. In fact a lot of the time it's not clear to anyone what they're for, what they do and what their accountabilities are.
That doesn't seem really all that unusual in many large corporations; VP, as a title, seems to be handed out rather ridiculously broadly.
It's been argued that one of the main reasons that Google trades at such a high P/E ratio is because they've restricted the number of shares circulating... Like, if they split the stock to match the shares outstanding of other companies, there'd be so many shares circulating that the price would drop, not only just because there'd be more shares as a result of the splits, but because there would actually enough to fill the demand.
That doesn't make sense at all unless you assume there are a huge percentage of Google stockholders (and would-be stockholders) that are vanity investors that simply want to own one share of Google stock.
If Google did a 30:1 split to match Microsoft's outstanding shares, there is no reason to expect that the share price would change at all, since 30 of the new shares would have exactly the same claim on Google's assets and future earnings as one of the new shares.
Now, if Google issued more publicly circulating stock, that might have the effect you describe, but that's very different from a split.
I agree that translating old code (or reimplementing it from the idea, not necessarily translating the code itself) is a good way to learn, but it helps to have a good book on the target language to get the idioms of the new language.
There is only one reason that a third party would want to get involved with this bullshit -- kickbacks from the MPAA and other media conglomerates.
No, I think you overlooked "lobbying Congress to 'protect copyright' by requiring the feature, which they will be ahead of their competitors in deploying, and likely patent essential elements, too."
Though there's likely media conglomerate help in that, too, as the media conglomerates have their own interests in lobbying for such legislation. But I think its more about getting a government-protected market advantage than content industry kickbacks.
So copies go out with my ID attached? No, thanks. I'll buy brand X. Or Y. But not Thompson.
A company that developes something like this does not hope to sell them to consumers based on the feature being attractive, they hope to lobby government to mandate the feature as an alternative to other legislation to address piracy, and then (because they were ahead and shaped the requirement), capitalize on a marketplace where they have a government-granted headstart on the rest of their competitors.
This works especially well if they've patented essential parts of the implementation, so that its a practical necessity for other players to license from them to meet the mandate.
Thompson doesn't care about copyright infringement, at least not of video files. It cares about creating structural barriers to its competitors.
Now, Google may bring all the world's information together, but that's only because it happens to help sell advertisements.
The voting power in Google stock is very narrowly held, and deliberately so because the founders wanted to go public without giving effective control of the company to outside investors.
With a company thats direction is narrowly controlled by a small group, you can't assume that everything is about financial profit as much as you can with a widely held company.
One might just as well argue that Google sells ads, because that's the only way to bring in the money to bring the world's information together.
Of course, the reality probably combines both: Google's leadership is probably interested both in profit and bringing information together, and has found a way to have the two reinforce each other.
Isn't this a bit like saying Serial Killer 5 - Rest of World 6 Billion? Surely the point is that there is may be infringing code.
Er, no. Its saying that there are 326 lines of code that, on an extremely untenable interpretation of the law, might be infringed by IBM but, if that extremely untenable interpretation is controlling, then there 700,000 lines of code of IBM's that SCO has infringed. Neither of those results is good for SCO.
Those are interesting facts, but I'm curious: Have you informed the Yellowstone Caldera? And, if so, what, if anything, was its response?
I'm sure you think that makes some kind of sense, even as sarcasm.
The sarcastic point being, of course, that you're doing, in essence, the same thing as the poster to whom you object: Making assessments based upon incomplete and uncertain data, from unreliable sources.
Er, no, I'm not. On two levels: first, that's not what I'm doing, but even more importantly, that's no what I was objecting to either.
Worse, you assume not only that the data you cite in your reply is perfectly trustworthy (since you make no disclaimers to the contrary, nor even bother to provide sources to such, to allow others to ascertain such)
Er, no, I assume no such thing. You might assume that because of the absence of disclaimers, but that's not a particularly rational assumption.
but also, that it is complete (again, for the same reason)
No, actually, saying the "X known instances of Y" is quite clear that there may be as-yet-undetected instances and that, therefore, the information is not complete. Your earlier assumption that you falsely ascribed to me was merely unwarranted, this one is directly contrary to what I stated.
yet, you provide no proof that either is the case, beyond your stating this as bald fact.
I don't know why I should provide proof of either of those claims that I did not make but which you unwarrantedly assumed (in the one case directly contrary to what I said) and falsely ascribed to me.
Then, you apply mathematical analysis to that, and post it as a refutation, with a conclusion...
No, I post it as a challenge ("I don't think..." is hardly a conclusion) and invitation to support the claim it responds to.
I'd rephrase your post for you, but, I'm too tired, and you should've known better in the first place.
That's okay. I don't need your help with my post, and I think you may have been too tired for even the more limited response you attempted. At least, if I were you, that's the excuse I'd stick with.
Not to rain all over your parade of doom, but I doubt the erruption is going to kill us all...
If I thought it was going to kill us all, I probably wouldn't have talked about our descendants. It's really hard to tell how bad it might be, though. The biggest supervolcano eruption known appears to have been a massive global catastrophe; the three previous Yellowstone eruptions have been from somewhat smaller (but still a major regional catastrophe with global effects) to much smaller (which would still be probably by far the most devastating natural disaster in US history). But my point wasn't that it would kill us all, but rather that until we've actually observed in some detail the lead up to an actual eruption, its quite possible we won't have a good idea what the signs of an eruption are (or, at least, what the signs are that say an eruption is imminent on a time scale on which some response is warranted.)
That won't help anyone around at the time of the first observed eruption, but it may be helpful if enough data is recorded and preserved to help with the next eruption of a supervolcano. But supervolcano eruptions worldwide don't happen often (ISTR seeing an estimate of one somewhere in the world every 50,000 or so year), so its not going to be anyone alive for the first one that benefits directly from that information (unless a really improbable coincidence occurs), but their, likely very distant, descendants.
It doesn't sound like Mr. Balmer's been paying that close attention to the FOSS phenomenon.
Its hardly as if Ballmer, and Microsoft more generally, don't spread all kinds of FUD about FOSS in general and particular FOSS products in particular.
Its not that Ballmer doesn't understand FOSS, its that FOSS is a threat to Microsoft. Likewise with Google. Google products compete with Microsoft products, any image Google achieves as a leader in the tech field as an investment weakens Microsoft's ability to attract capital, and Google's image as an attractive place to work makes it more expensive for Microsoft to attact talent.
Spreading FUD about Google's viability is a way of fighting all three of those threats simultaneous, creating an impression of insecurity that, if people buy it, makes relying on Google products, investing in Google, or seeking employment at Google less attractive.
Throwing more resources at a problem isn't always the best way to solve it.
Sure. But that's not Ballmer's point (or if it is, he's made it badly). Where is the one problem Google is supposedly "throwing more resources at"? Ballmer sure doesn't seem to point to anything like that.
Rather, he seems to be complaining that Google is hiring lots of programmers without a specific problem to direct them at. Which is a very different, though also superficially plausible, accusation.
OTOH, in a competitive environment, when your competitors are complaining that you are draining their talent pool and driving up their costs, I'm not entirely convinced that that, alone isn't useful, the question is whether its worth the cost to you.
You're assuming that the politicians actually want a well thought out and workable solution.
No, actually, I don't. And I can't see anything in my post that indicates that.
The political advocates I'm talking about are mostly not politicians, but lobbyists who are proposing to politicians the specific forms of action that ought to be taken to show that they're "doing something".
No, it's kind of like saying that it erupts at a 600,000 year cycle, and that it's 40,000 years late this time.
I've yet to hear an adequate explanation for how a 600,000 year cycle is inferred from the known eruptions at 2.2 mya, 1.3 mya, and 640 kya.
You've got one 900,000 year interval, and one 660,000 year interval. Now, you could say its an average of 780,000 years, or you could say its getting shorter each time and, judging from the ratio, it should have erupted about 160,000 years ago, or a lot of other hasty, invalid, but at least consistent generalizations. But how you get "every 600,000 years", I don't know.
Geology shows it pukes on a fairly regular basis, and based on the past schedule, it's overdue.
There are three clear past eruptions, AFAIK, which is hard to infer a regular basis from.
The first two were about 900,000 years apart. The second and most recent were about 660,000 years apart. The most recent was about 640,000 years ago.
It's not all that clearly regular, and if you assume there is a regular pattern underlying the eruptions with some variation around an average period (hard to infer from the known dates!), I don't see much cause to call it overdue. Anyone know where that idea comes from?
There was a BBC horizon program about this several years ago. Apparently it is hundreds of years overdue for its regular eruption.
The three known eruptions of Yellowstone Caldera are at 2.2 mya, 1.3 mya, and 640 kya. Given the two periods of 900 ky and 660 ky between those, that's an average of 780 ky between eruptions, with a standard deviation of about 170 ky. So, I don't think you can really say its "overdue" for anything.
If this happens during the winter, they might need to scrape off some ash, pile it by the side of the field, or take and put it in a big pile someplace
We're not talking about a thin layer of ash, but something that is feet thick near (and when the outer limits are the whole western US, "near" can be pretty far) the eruption site.
You can't compare the clearing of a massive wreck of twisted metal and concrete full of remains to clearing a field.
You also can't you compare the clearing of volcanic debris from the entire Western United States to clearing a field.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is not "energy free" ways of filling the tank. It is "pollution free" ways of producing energy. Which we do have, and are getting more of and more market penetration of the one's we have.
While I disagree that this is entirely true (it both shifts and reduces the problem), shifting the problem is an important part of solving it, as it is shifting it to the arena where it is more practical to address without disruption. If vehicles are "fueled" using centrally-generated electricity to locally produce the "fuel", you don't have to either destroy personal transport or build a new fueling and distribution infrastructure and force people to replace their cars to implement improvements in the pollution performance of transportation, you just have to improve the pollution performance of your mix of large-scale electricity generation, which can practically be done incrementally and with no disruption to the end-user.
No, the use of the vehicle does not. The filling of the tank may or may not, depending on the energy source used to fill the tank. The distinction is important.
Uh, yeah, it is.
Burning fossil fuels in a power plant is generally more efficient and cleaner than burning them in a small, light mobile engine. So it reduces pollution that way.
While compressed air isn't the only such storage medium that turns the vehicle-power problem into a large-scale generation problem, batteries and fuel cells are far from clean to produce. Compressed air canisters aren't nearly as dirty. And, its a lot easier to build a distributed compressed-air generating infrastructure powered by large-scale power plants than it is for hydrogen.
Its not solving everything, but if it performs as advertised, it certainly is a useful part of the solution.
Possibly, energy costs are cheaper in India than in the West; certainly, the raw materials consumed to produce the energy is not, but the human labor in maintaining the power plants and infrastructure probably is considerably cheaper.
Its exhausted is simply the compressed air, but expanded. It produces no engine pollution. I suppose it might produce some amount of "pollution" from wear on the tire and various mechanical components, but that's generally not considered when discussing automotive pollution in the first place.
Its an alpha release. I suspect the licensing, particularly the restriction on where you may use the software, reflect that. Imagine the damage to the product brand if some company included it on the kind of devices it uses as examples of prohibited devices (like ATMs or medical devices or set-top boxes), and it (as an alpha produce is wont to do) failed spectacularly in an unforseen manner.
The license isn't made, I suspect, with individual hackers modding their own internet appliance, set-top boxes, etc., in mind. Sure, it technically prohibits it, but Adobe isn't going to know if you do it, isn't going to care if you do it, and isn't likely to do anything more than mention that its a license violation and not their fault when it screws up if somehow you manage to even get their attention with the fact you've done it.
Everything old is new... LSI Patents the Doubly-Linked List
"The real problem" suggests there is only one "real" probly. While both mining and disposal are certainly real problems, it is also true that a real problem with (commercial viability of) nuclear energy is the reactors themselves, and particularly their safety. The reason no reactors have been built in the US since the 1970s is the potential liability risk in the case of accidents (not because major accidents are extremely likely, but because the potential damages from one are vast), which is why companies that would like to build reactors and reap the enormous profits possible selling the output from them are lobbying for broad shields from liability in order to build new reactors without substantial risk.
Since most of the time there is a separate "privacy policy" containing such provisions, and you have to separately acknowledge the privacy policy, and since it would be very hard to make the case that a reasonable person would not expect to find agreements as to what information would be protected as private and what information would be shared in a "privacy policy", I don't expect that that's going to be effective against most agreements.
Or, more directly, each Google employee is, on average, generating over 1.5 times the revenue generated by the average Microsoft employee.
That doesn't seem really all that unusual in many large corporations; VP, as a title, seems to be handed out rather ridiculously broadly.
That doesn't make sense at all unless you assume there are a huge percentage of Google stockholders (and would-be stockholders) that are vanity investors that simply want to own one share of Google stock.
If Google did a 30:1 split to match Microsoft's outstanding shares, there is no reason to expect that the share price would change at all, since 30 of the new shares would have exactly the same claim on Google's assets and future earnings as one of the new shares.
Now, if Google issued more publicly circulating stock, that might have the effect you describe, but that's very different from a split.
I agree that translating old code (or reimplementing it from the idea, not necessarily translating the code itself) is a good way to learn, but it helps to have a good book on the target language to get the idioms of the new language.
No, I think you overlooked "lobbying Congress to 'protect copyright' by requiring the feature, which they will be ahead of their competitors in deploying, and likely patent essential elements, too."
Though there's likely media conglomerate help in that, too, as the media conglomerates have their own interests in lobbying for such legislation. But I think its more about getting a government-protected market advantage than content industry kickbacks.
A company that developes something like this does not hope to sell them to consumers based on the feature being attractive, they hope to lobby government to mandate the feature as an alternative to other legislation to address piracy, and then (because they were ahead and shaped the requirement), capitalize on a marketplace where they have a government-granted headstart on the rest of their competitors.
This works especially well if they've patented essential parts of the implementation, so that its a practical necessity for other players to license from them to meet the mandate.
Thompson doesn't care about copyright infringement, at least not of video files. It cares about creating structural barriers to its competitors.
The voting power in Google stock is very narrowly held, and deliberately so because the founders wanted to go public without giving effective control of the company to outside investors.
With a company thats direction is narrowly controlled by a small group, you can't assume that everything is about financial profit as much as you can with a widely held company.
One might just as well argue that Google sells ads, because that's the only way to bring in the money to bring the world's information together.
Of course, the reality probably combines both: Google's leadership is probably interested both in profit and bringing information together, and has found a way to have the two reinforce each other.
Er, no. Its saying that there are 326 lines of code that, on an extremely untenable interpretation of the law, might be infringed by IBM but, if that extremely untenable interpretation is controlling, then there 700,000 lines of code of IBM's that SCO has infringed. Neither of those results is good for SCO.
I'm sure you think that makes some kind of sense, even as sarcasm.
Er, no, I'm not. On two levels: first, that's not what I'm doing, but even more importantly, that's no what I was objecting to either.
Er, no, I assume no such thing. You might assume that because of the absence of disclaimers, but that's not a particularly rational assumption.
No, actually, saying the "X known instances of Y" is quite clear that there may be as-yet-undetected instances and that, therefore, the information is not complete. Your earlier assumption that you falsely ascribed to me was merely unwarranted, this one is directly contrary to what I stated.
I don't know why I should provide proof of either of those claims that I did not make but which you unwarrantedly assumed (in the one case directly contrary to what I said) and falsely ascribed to me.
No, I post it as a challenge ("I don't think..." is hardly a conclusion) and invitation to support the claim it responds to.
That's okay. I don't need your help with my post, and I think you may have been too tired for even the more limited response you attempted. At least, if I were you, that's the excuse I'd stick with.
If I thought it was going to kill us all, I probably wouldn't have talked about our descendants. It's really hard to tell how bad it might be, though. The biggest supervolcano eruption known appears to have been a massive global catastrophe; the three previous Yellowstone eruptions have been from somewhat smaller (but still a major regional catastrophe with global effects) to much smaller (which would still be probably by far the most devastating natural disaster in US history). But my point wasn't that it would kill us all, but rather that until we've actually observed in some detail the lead up to an actual eruption, its quite possible we won't have a good idea what the signs of an eruption are (or, at least, what the signs are that say an eruption is imminent on a time scale on which some response is warranted.)
That won't help anyone around at the time of the first observed eruption, but it may be helpful if enough data is recorded and preserved to help with the next eruption of a supervolcano. But supervolcano eruptions worldwide don't happen often (ISTR seeing an estimate of one somewhere in the world every 50,000 or so year), so its not going to be anyone alive for the first one that benefits directly from that information (unless a really improbable coincidence occurs), but their, likely very distant, descendants.
Its hardly as if Ballmer, and Microsoft more generally, don't spread all kinds of FUD about FOSS in general and particular FOSS products in particular.
Its not that Ballmer doesn't understand FOSS, its that FOSS is a threat to Microsoft. Likewise with Google. Google products compete with Microsoft products, any image Google achieves as a leader in the tech field as an investment weakens Microsoft's ability to attract capital, and Google's image as an attractive place to work makes it more expensive for Microsoft to attact talent.
Spreading FUD about Google's viability is a way of fighting all three of those threats simultaneous, creating an impression of insecurity that, if people buy it, makes relying on Google products, investing in Google, or seeking employment at Google less attractive.
Sure. But that's not Ballmer's point (or if it is, he's made it badly). Where is the one problem Google is supposedly "throwing more resources at"? Ballmer sure doesn't seem to point to anything like that.
Rather, he seems to be complaining that Google is hiring lots of programmers without a specific problem to direct them at. Which is a very different, though also superficially plausible, accusation.
OTOH, in a competitive environment, when your competitors are complaining that you are draining their talent pool and driving up their costs, I'm not entirely convinced that that, alone isn't useful, the question is whether its worth the cost to you.
There are three clear past eruptions, AFAIK, which is hard to infer a regular basis from.
The first two were about 900,000 years apart. The second and most recent were about 660,000 years apart. The most recent was about 640,000 years ago.
It's not all that clearly regular, and if you assume there is a regular pattern underlying the eruptions with some variation around an average period (hard to infer from the known dates!), I don't see much cause to call it overdue. Anyone know where that idea comes from?
The three known eruptions of Yellowstone Caldera are at 2.2 mya, 1.3 mya, and 640 kya. Given the two periods of 900 ky and 660 ky between those, that's an average of 780 ky between eruptions, with a standard deviation of about 170 ky. So, I don't think you can really say its "overdue" for anything.