The People Mover, which I believe is what's at WVU, is different from PRT. PRT has offline loading and unloading, which is why it has the potential to scale further than buses or light rail.
If you consider the number of these small cars that can travel on the track, and the distance at which they can travel, the track can have very high capacity. This would be true for light rail as well, except that light rail trains can't follow very close to each other. It's not even a safety issue -- though there are more of those issues than with small cars. It's because of loading and unloading people. The train has to stop at every station, so the train is not moving continuously.
In rush hour here in Chicago, the trains slow down significantly because of this, and trains tend to clump together because the train in the front (with more people) takes longer at the station. It's quite annoying, and it takes me about 50 minutes to go 7 miles.
PRT doesn't have that scaling issue, because the car only stops at the destination, not at all intermediate destinations. Also, one car stopping does not effect other cars -- the stations are offline, which means the car merges on and off the main track.
That means that PRT has the potential to scale in a way that light rail can never, ever scale. The only good way to scale up light rail and subways once you've saturated the line (which is easy at rush hour) is to make the trains longer, which is very expensive because you have to make all the stations longer too.
Also, I cringe every time I see a huge bus with three people on it, or these 20 ton trains with a couple people on them. It feels very absurd.
This is an important issue. For the Free Software movement, this does not that troubling -- if you value Linux (or, GNU/Linux) for the freedom it provides, then Microsoft is incidental. Microsoft's efforts are unlikely to substantially effect the quality of GNU/Linux -- they might manage to retard growth, but they cannot take anything away from us that we already have.
For the Open Source movement, this could be deadly. The philosophical underpinning of Open Source is that it leads to a technically superior piece of software. If Microsoft were to create a technically superior product, then Open Source would really be something of a failure. And while you can make the (valid) argument that having the source available gives you more power over the product, and thus the product is intrinsically more powerful (well, empowering) -- MS can counter with its Shared Source, which provides no freedom, but does address this criticism from Open Source.
Slashdot has generally sided with OSS in philosophy and terminology. Not surprising -- OSS is the weaker argument, the easier path to follow, and avoids offending anyone.
The two parties are often close to each other and very far from popular opinion. For instance, I believe support for single-payer health care is around 60%. That's without any positive press or any politician backing it. And yet neither party even talks about it. To me, that stands as a direct afront to democracy -- quite obviously, neither party is being representative of the People.
Health care isn't the only issue like this -- the environment is another, off the top of my head.
Reactionary libertarian arguments aren't very helpful. Anyway, I don't know why you are telling this to me -- I'm obviously not in support of a national ID (if you read through my entire post). But a card is not poisonous gas, and you make yourself look unreasonable by saying that.
Really, I'm not arguing with you, because I pretty much agree with you. But I would suggest you tone down your rhetoric, because it isn't helpful to the cause. There are valid issues that the national ID card is supposed to address. A blind rant against it doesn't respect that. If you don't think the national ID card really helps any of those problems -- identifying criminals, avoiding fraud, etc -- then argue those points specifically. If you think the compromise isn't a good one, then weigh the benefits and problems in your argument.
A lot of libertarian-minded people come off very negatively in these sorts of arguments, because all they ever do is talk things down. If you want to make a good argument, you should make one that either recognizes the problem and proposes a better solution, or argues that the problem does not in fact exist.
The real problem with a national ID isn't the ID. Every state has IDs -- drivers license and otherwise -- and it's currently reasonable to expect nearly everyone will have some form of ID. Foreigners will always have a passport.
Unifying the ID isn't really a big deal in and of itself. There's no danger to civil rights that people could more easily verify the validity of identification. The particular set of information they choose to standardize on is likely to be innocuous.
The danger of a national ID is in the way it is used. In particular, in the use of a magstrip or other machine-readable common format. Most states seem to have something like this -- Illinois has some sort of 2D bar code, for instance -- but because there's no standard you cannot reasonably expect to scan every person's card at some given point. So I've never seen anyplace where they actually use a machine to read the card.
If you have a national ID, then this would no longer be the case. It makes it very possible -- and likely inevitable -- that IDs will regularly be scanned in all sorts of locations. Courthouses, airports (whether or not you are flying), privately secured locations (office buildings, etc.)... and the next thing you know there's random road blocks (to catch drunk drivers, drug smugglers, terrorists, or whatever other justification they choose) and they'll scan your ID.
If these systems were one-way, even this wouldn't be too terribly bad. That is, if such scans only checked to see if there was an outstanding warrant or other legal restriction placed on you. However, this is unlikely to be the way these cards would be used by the government, and certainly not the way they'd be used by private security. It is all too easy to record every time you pass such a checkpoint, and in that way coming up with an extensive profile of every person's movement and associations.
Of course, much of this already exists with credit cards. And who knows... maybe they'll join them together.
You want the filesystem to be the packaging system. That's certainly possible, but a good packaging system will mostly solve all the same problems, for whatever filesystem layout you want or are stuck with.
Anyway, Linux distros don't seem to be made up of "Apps" in the way Windows is. It's made up of... well, I don't know what to call them except packages. I have way more packages on my system than applications, and not every package is clearly part of an application. It's not as easy as putting everything in its own directory.
Still, the unfortunate part of a packaging system is that they do poorly with 3rd party applications. For tarballs, the most organization you have is from the filesystem. If they could solve that -- I guess, come up with a standard (lowest-common-denominator) package system that 95%+ of software was distributed in -- then the filesystem really won't matter too much.
Good software design is
all about preparing for the unexpected!
I couldn't disagree with you more. Putting generality into the code that you don't forsee a need for is very bad design, IMHO. Generality is messy, and generality in one piece often makes it difficult to make another part general.
For the most part, your code should be designed to do what it is supposed to do, and no more. Of course, you will have an idea of what it might be needed in the future -- and it will sometimes be a good idea to design the code with that in mind. But usually it is not, because you will often be wrong. And if you don't even have an idea of what need your code will fulfill -- i.e., you are truly planning for the unexpected -- then you would be a fool to mess up your code in planning for it.
One-off code is perfectly fine. Of course you want to reuse code as much as possible, but it is not possible to reuse all your code. If someone wants to do something new, then you'll have to write new code. Hopefully you will do it without using cut and paste -- a horrible way to do code reuse -- but you will have to write some new code. Maybe you'll make a new subclass (my favorite), or add a new option, or refactor, or a combination of the above. And, sometimes, it really will be more expedient to copy and paste.
You may want to check out Python though. Imagine Perl without nearly as much support or maturity, but with beautiful syntax and good OO, and it's improving real quick.
Why would you say Python isn't mature? Some of the libraries are still in the process of maturing -- XML libraries and such, mostly because their domain isn't generally understood yet anyway. But the basic language seems extremely mature to me, and recent improvements (which have actually been quite radical) don't effect normal programs written in Python -- they only occasionally effect programs that are more advanced/introspective, and allow new uses and optimizations.
This is nothing compared to what's being proposed for Perl 6. Python has been changing very incrementally (and we still have more than enough punctuation left... though I don't think anyone has proposed using any of it). In many ways it seems like it's moving to where Ruby is, but in a very different way -- Python has been practical for a long time, and is getting more and more pure as time goes on. Ruby started very pure, and is now getting to be more practical. I don't think pure and practical are in conflict, but you can only work on so much at a time, and the two languages have paced themselves differently.
As far as support, yes, the Python community is smaller. On the internet I don't think this makes a difference -- both communities are large enough that you can't be a part of them in their entirety. There are more Perl modules than Python, but for the most part there's a sufficient number of Python modules. Though in the real world -- where geography matters -- Perl is significantly better supported. You can find a Perl hacker and hire him or her fairly easily in comparison to a Python hacker.
FAST rendering engine. Much better than IE (especially in recent builds!) This is VERY significant for modem users who have to sit and wait for IE to figure out what is in a table before rendering it, while moz's engine pops it up as it comes down. Slashdot renders here in under a second.
It has a fast rendering engine, yet it still manages to feel slow. Really the same criticism applies to IE as well. NS4, for all its many, many sins, feels way faster than Mozilla or IE, because it gives really immediate UI feedback.
Overall, responsiveness has gotten worse and worse in software, even as other speeds have gotten better. And it's the less-than-a-second pauses that really annoy me (and a lot of other people too) -- I can't really tell that they are there, but they make the whole experience feel worse.
While the electric motors are efficient, the rest of the system isn't -- distribution and storage. They are inefficient enough that it is a serious problem.
And yes, it certainly is bad for the environment to use electric heat. Right now, natural gas is far, far more efficient for generating heat in the home -- actually, it always will be, and as long as there are petroleum-using, pollution-creating electricity creation, it won't be a good idea to move heat to electric. A lot of the same issues exist with cars.
Most electric power is generated by converting heat to mechanical power, and then converting mechanical power to electricity. Then you change the electricity into chemical energy (in the battery), and convert it back out again. Then you convert it to mechanical energy. Normal cars convert fuel to heat, and heat to mechanical energy. Despite the inefficiency of that particular process, since there's so few conversions going on it can still be more efficient.
Point is, an electric car or or similar device dissociates the power generation from the power usage. You are free to improve one side of it without affecting the other.
It seems like a bit of a premature optimization, though... we don't (practically/realistically) know what will really work. I'd be very interested to see what relative energy use and pollution is for different kinds of transportation.
At one point -- admittedly, quite a while ago -- I had heard of studies that electric cars cause more pollution than normal cars. A large part of that might be in the form of heavy metals, due to the large battery packs. I've heard bad things about "light" rail as well, as moving 40 ton trains around (my, what passes for light these days) -- even on rails -- is not very efficient considering the average occupancy.
You also have to consider the pollution due to production. I've heard people say that those with old cars should buy new cars that pollute less. I'm very suspicious of that -- the waste of getting rid of that old car and the pollution to produce the new car may be much more than any pollution created in the use of the old car. I don't really know one way or another -- I haven't seen many studies of overall pollution (though I have seen a book that talks about the pollution due to production of various goods).
I suppose the ideas of free market environmentalism -- where try to expose the true environmental impact of items through price (through taxes) -- would make this clearer, as the price would reflect a balance of resources, labor, and environmental impact. It still wouldn't allow us to judge potential benefits that much, but at least we could understand the present situation.
Obviously, they're hoping to make it up on market share (not like the dot-coms, I hope!) and maintenance.
Actually, they might be underpricing them because of regulations. Car manufacturers (by law) have to sell a certain number of efficient cars for every inefficient car they sell -- so very efficient cars are sometimes sold cheaper to allow the company to sell more (high-margin) inefficient cars.
2) A large Gas-Turbine plant (Running what is basicly a Jet engine) can be more efficant that a Otto engine in a car. For one thing it does not have to go anywhere, and probably gets better maintinace.
Last time electric cars came up here, I looked up energy efficiency statistics, and found that 2/3 of electricity is lost in transmition. That's one hell of a big drain on the over-all efficiency of the system -- one that sucks up the efficiency of that large Gas-Turbine plant pretty well, I imagine. I wish I still had the link for that, but it was hard to find the first time and it's too late for me to get into that again.
There's all sorts of ways we could meet current electric demand in a cleaner way, but we aren't. Having electric cars wouldn't change that -- there's just as much an incentive to make clean electric now as there would be with electric cars. And apparently that incentive isn't great enough for us to do it now.
Electric cars do open up the potential for using clean power. But with the tremendous efficiency problems electric cars have... clean power is not limitless any more than dirty power is.
Right now we could all convert our heating systems to electric -- without needing any technological breakthroughs! But that wouldn't be any better for the environment -- quite the contrary, it would be much worse for the environment. Electric cars seem like the same thing.
If you did, then the price of diesel would go way up. When you refine oil you get a certain amount of diesel and a certain amoung of gas. The demand has to be proportionate, or the system gets messed up.
This exact thing happened in the 70s, when diesel cars got (moderately) popular, and diesel prices went up past gas.
Why would methane be that much better than gasoline anyway?
All the organic sources are horribly inefficient (like ethanol) or they have a small capacity -- peat, for instance. Is there some great source for methane I don't know about? Why aren't they using it for power plants, then?
And the non-organic sources are all mostly equivalent -- one day natural gas is cheaper, demand goes up and it's more expensive, and so on.
Electric vehicles haven't needed any sabotaging to fail. They've failed all on their own, over and over.
Part of this is that there's two big industries involved: the oil industry and the car manufacturers. Car manufacturers aren't going to let the oil companies keep them from doing what they have to to keep their market -- part of which is deflecting criticism about pollution and energy use.
Of course, the car companies don't really seem to want to improve energy use or pollution anyway -- SUVs being a primary example -- but at least they are doing enough to distract attention, and preparing a little for a potential future where they might have to do more for conservation.
But then they still have to figure out how to deal with traffic.
Please, write in with your own thoughts and concerns on the settlement: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov -- this settlement is supposed to be in support of the American People, not business interests. Microsoft was found guilty of harming American consumers, don't let the government forget that it's consumers that need redress, not businesses. I don't really know how the process works, but simply writing in a very short, well-reasoned comment is probably quite beneficial if you don't want to write something longer. Here's what I wrote:
------------
To: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Subject: Micosoft Settlement
The manner in which APIs would be revealed are limiting to Microsoft's
main competitor: Free and Open Source Software ("Free" defined as
"without restriction" not "free of cost").
This software is created largely by individuals in informal and
generally noncommercial cooperation. This is a very significant
movement, and provides great potential benefits for American consumers.
I think that makes such Free and Open Source Software *the* essential
beneficiary of the ruling against Microsoft. This case was not a
question of whether businesses were harmed by the monopoly, but rather
consumers. It is essential that this pro-consumer movement be helped by
the settlement. Instead they speficially discriminated against by the
settlement.
Under provisions to release the API of Microsoft products, Microsoft is
given discretion as to who they will release information: namely,
"viable businesses", with Microsoft being able to interpret that as they
wish.
I am personally involved in many projects that have the potential to
benefit consumers, but are not businesses of any sort, rather a
conglomeration of individual developers. I would expect that these
groups will be excluded under this settlement.
Instead of this model, APIs should be made fully public. Individuals,
in some manner, should be able to ask questions of Microsoft regarding
these APIs, and have them answered publically. If it seems too
difficult to allow any individual to ask such a question, an electronic
petition process could be used instead, as long as a group of
individuals can have the same weight as a commercial organization.
It is essential that the API information be made public. If it is
hindered by any sort of NDA it will be *absolutely useless* to Free/Open
Source software projects. We have formed a legal and social structure
where we do not have the ability to keep pieces of our code private.
This process must be respected by the settlement, as it forms the most
serious competition for Microsoft, and is of large benefit to consumers.
It is also essential that non-commercial groups of individuals be able
to access API documentation, and have questions resolved by Microsoft.
In general, it is dangerous to allow Microsoft to have discretion on any
aspect of this manner, as they can use that to further punish their most
stringent competitors as they have done so many times in the past.
It is also dangerous to allow them discretion on security issues. While
it is acceptable that they be allowed a short, private period to resolve
security issues before making them public, all aspects of their systems
must be made public. It is all too easy to add security aspects to
nearly any portion of a system. It is even potentially a good thing
that they add security at many parts of their system. However, they
should not need to be private about their security measures to ensure
the effectiveness of that security. The Free/Open Source communities
have created large amounts of software that is secure while being open.
Microsoft should do the same. This process is completely possible, and
has been demonstrated over and over for as long as computer security has
existed.
I pretty much lost respect for the BBC during the Kosovo bombing. They were pulling the line and slinging the bull just as hard as the US sellouts. I suppose it makes sense -- the UK has been following US foreign policy pretty strictly, no reason its media shouldn't go along for the ride as well.
It's hard to really judge the integrity of sources, though -- unless you are getting information from a real diversity of sources, it's not easy to tell when important facts or stories have been left out (the most common problem in media). At least there's the internet -- the facts might not all be correct, but they are usually plentiful.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
An excellent point to bring up.
Considering these offensive possibilities is the only way I've found to make any sense of missile defense: why some people are trying so hard to make it, why others are so opposed to it.
In its proposed use, it's obviously stupid: it does a very poor job of defending against a very unlikely attack. Maybe its supporters are just trying to make more money for weapons producers -- actually, I'm sure they are -- but maybe there's more to it.
But then why do all these other countries get so bothered about it? If it's doomed to fail -- there seems to be concensus on that from all nonpartial observers -- then why not just let the US fail at it?
So here's where this theory comes in: missile defense provides a reason to do research and implementation of military systems in space, with high accuracy lasers and all that. It doesn't have to work, because it will never be tested in a realistic way, and the staged tests will just be faked (like all the tests so far).
Once you have high-precision and powerful lasers in space, you have a hell of a lot of power. Spy satellites already have impressive accuracy. It's entirely possible to create an offensive weapon that could kill anyone that's out in the open (given a certain amount of intelligence -- supposing biometrics don't get too good, so they could identify us from space).
Of course this would scare the hell out of all the other countries -- enemies and allies alike. It's no secret that the US is a fickle lover. One day you're our best friend -- Noriega, for example -- the next you're in jail. Or just dead.
At work we've standardized on Slackware (because it's easy to adapt to your needs and it doesn't try to second-guess you), and I only have to run the installer once whenever a new release comes out..
With Debian, you don't even have to run the installer when the new release comes out: do apt-get dist-upgrade and it upgrades it for you. This had been the only way to install woody for a long time: you install potato (the previous version), do a dist-upgrade, and you have woody.
Well, Evolution isn't really competition for Outlook anymore than Outlook is competition for Evolution -- they both run on different platforms with no overlap. In a somewhat ironic way, this means Exchange is now more universal and inclusive.
So this is kind of a win for Linux the desktop and a loss for Linux the server.
Slashdot Mirror
If you consider the number of these small cars that can travel on the track, and the distance at which they can travel, the track can have very high capacity. This would be true for light rail as well, except that light rail trains can't follow very close to each other. It's not even a safety issue -- though there are more of those issues than with small cars. It's because of loading and unloading people. The train has to stop at every station, so the train is not moving continuously.
In rush hour here in Chicago, the trains slow down significantly because of this, and trains tend to clump together because the train in the front (with more people) takes longer at the station. It's quite annoying, and it takes me about 50 minutes to go 7 miles.
PRT doesn't have that scaling issue, because the car only stops at the destination, not at all intermediate destinations. Also, one car stopping does not effect other cars -- the stations are offline, which means the car merges on and off the main track.
That means that PRT has the potential to scale in a way that light rail can never, ever scale. The only good way to scale up light rail and subways once you've saturated the line (which is easy at rush hour) is to make the trains longer, which is very expensive because you have to make all the stations longer too.
Also, I cringe every time I see a huge bus with three people on it, or these 20 ton trains with a couple people on them. It feels very absurd.
For the Open Source movement, this could be deadly. The philosophical underpinning of Open Source is that it leads to a technically superior piece of software. If Microsoft were to create a technically superior product, then Open Source would really be something of a failure. And while you can make the (valid) argument that having the source available gives you more power over the product, and thus the product is intrinsically more powerful (well, empowering) -- MS can counter with its Shared Source, which provides no freedom, but does address this criticism from Open Source.
Slashdot has generally sided with OSS in philosophy and terminology. Not surprising -- OSS is the weaker argument, the easier path to follow, and avoids offending anyone.
Health care isn't the only issue like this -- the environment is another, off the top of my head.
Really, I'm not arguing with you, because I pretty much agree with you. But I would suggest you tone down your rhetoric, because it isn't helpful to the cause. There are valid issues that the national ID card is supposed to address. A blind rant against it doesn't respect that. If you don't think the national ID card really helps any of those problems -- identifying criminals, avoiding fraud, etc -- then argue those points specifically. If you think the compromise isn't a good one, then weigh the benefits and problems in your argument.
A lot of libertarian-minded people come off very negatively in these sorts of arguments, because all they ever do is talk things down. If you want to make a good argument, you should make one that either recognizes the problem and proposes a better solution, or argues that the problem does not in fact exist.
Unifying the ID isn't really a big deal in and of itself. There's no danger to civil rights that people could more easily verify the validity of identification. The particular set of information they choose to standardize on is likely to be innocuous.
The danger of a national ID is in the way it is used. In particular, in the use of a magstrip or other machine-readable common format. Most states seem to have something like this -- Illinois has some sort of 2D bar code, for instance -- but because there's no standard you cannot reasonably expect to scan every person's card at some given point. So I've never seen anyplace where they actually use a machine to read the card.
If you have a national ID, then this would no longer be the case. It makes it very possible -- and likely inevitable -- that IDs will regularly be scanned in all sorts of locations. Courthouses, airports (whether or not you are flying), privately secured locations (office buildings, etc.)... and the next thing you know there's random road blocks (to catch drunk drivers, drug smugglers, terrorists, or whatever other justification they choose) and they'll scan your ID.
If these systems were one-way, even this wouldn't be too terribly bad. That is, if such scans only checked to see if there was an outstanding warrant or other legal restriction placed on you. However, this is unlikely to be the way these cards would be used by the government, and certainly not the way they'd be used by private security. It is all too easy to record every time you pass such a checkpoint, and in that way coming up with an extensive profile of every person's movement and associations.
Of course, much of this already exists with credit cards. And who knows... maybe they'll join them together.
Anyway, Linux distros don't seem to be made up of "Apps" in the way Windows is. It's made up of... well, I don't know what to call them except packages. I have way more packages on my system than applications, and not every package is clearly part of an application. It's not as easy as putting everything in its own directory.
Still, the unfortunate part of a packaging system is that they do poorly with 3rd party applications. For tarballs, the most organization you have is from the filesystem. If they could solve that -- I guess, come up with a standard (lowest-common-denominator) package system that 95%+ of software was distributed in -- then the filesystem really won't matter too much.
For the most part, your code should be designed to do what it is supposed to do, and no more. Of course, you will have an idea of what it might be needed in the future -- and it will sometimes be a good idea to design the code with that in mind. But usually it is not, because you will often be wrong. And if you don't even have an idea of what need your code will fulfill -- i.e., you are truly planning for the unexpected -- then you would be a fool to mess up your code in planning for it.
One-off code is perfectly fine. Of course you want to reuse code as much as possible, but it is not possible to reuse all your code. If someone wants to do something new, then you'll have to write new code. Hopefully you will do it without using cut and paste -- a horrible way to do code reuse -- but you will have to write some new code. Maybe you'll make a new subclass (my favorite), or add a new option, or refactor, or a combination of the above. And, sometimes, it really will be more expedient to copy and paste.
This is nothing compared to what's being proposed for Perl 6. Python has been changing very incrementally (and we still have more than enough punctuation left... though I don't think anyone has proposed using any of it). In many ways it seems like it's moving to where Ruby is, but in a very different way -- Python has been practical for a long time, and is getting more and more pure as time goes on. Ruby started very pure, and is now getting to be more practical. I don't think pure and practical are in conflict, but you can only work on so much at a time, and the two languages have paced themselves differently.
As far as support, yes, the Python community is smaller. On the internet I don't think this makes a difference -- both communities are large enough that you can't be a part of them in their entirety. There are more Perl modules than Python, but for the most part there's a sufficient number of Python modules. Though in the real world -- where geography matters -- Perl is significantly better supported. You can find a Perl hacker and hire him or her fairly easily in comparison to a Python hacker.
Overall, responsiveness has gotten worse and worse in software, even as other speeds have gotten better. And it's the less-than-a-second pauses that really annoy me (and a lot of other people too) -- I can't really tell that they are there, but they make the whole experience feel worse.
And yes, it certainly is bad for the environment to use electric heat. Right now, natural gas is far, far more efficient for generating heat in the home -- actually, it always will be, and as long as there are petroleum-using, pollution-creating electricity creation, it won't be a good idea to move heat to electric. A lot of the same issues exist with cars.
Most electric power is generated by converting heat to mechanical power, and then converting mechanical power to electricity. Then you change the electricity into chemical energy (in the battery), and convert it back out again. Then you convert it to mechanical energy. Normal cars convert fuel to heat, and heat to mechanical energy. Despite the inefficiency of that particular process, since there's so few conversions going on it can still be more efficient.
But isn't all the water at the bottom of the ocean around 4 degrees Celcius? (The temperature at which water is most dense)... How would there be ice?
At one point -- admittedly, quite a while ago -- I had heard of studies that electric cars cause more pollution than normal cars. A large part of that might be in the form of heavy metals, due to the large battery packs. I've heard bad things about "light" rail as well, as moving 40 ton trains around (my, what passes for light these days) -- even on rails -- is not very efficient considering the average occupancy.
You also have to consider the pollution due to production. I've heard people say that those with old cars should buy new cars that pollute less. I'm very suspicious of that -- the waste of getting rid of that old car and the pollution to produce the new car may be much more than any pollution created in the use of the old car. I don't really know one way or another -- I haven't seen many studies of overall pollution (though I have seen a book that talks about the pollution due to production of various goods).
I suppose the ideas of free market environmentalism -- where try to expose the true environmental impact of items through price (through taxes) -- would make this clearer, as the price would reflect a balance of resources, labor, and environmental impact. It still wouldn't allow us to judge potential benefits that much, but at least we could understand the present situation.
Electric cars do open up the potential for using clean power. But with the tremendous efficiency problems electric cars have... clean power is not limitless any more than dirty power is.
Right now we could all convert our heating systems to electric -- without needing any technological breakthroughs! But that wouldn't be any better for the environment -- quite the contrary, it would be much worse for the environment. Electric cars seem like the same thing.
This exact thing happened in the 70s, when diesel cars got (moderately) popular, and diesel prices went up past gas.
All the organic sources are horribly inefficient (like ethanol) or they have a small capacity -- peat, for instance. Is there some great source for methane I don't know about? Why aren't they using it for power plants, then?
And the non-organic sources are all mostly equivalent -- one day natural gas is cheaper, demand goes up and it's more expensive, and so on.
At least for all the hydrocarbons.
Part of this is that there's two big industries involved: the oil industry and the car manufacturers. Car manufacturers aren't going to let the oil companies keep them from doing what they have to to keep their market -- part of which is deflecting criticism about pollution and energy use.
Of course, the car companies don't really seem to want to improve energy use or pollution anyway -- SUVs being a primary example -- but at least they are doing enough to distract attention, and preparing a little for a potential future where they might have to do more for conservation.
But then they still have to figure out how to deal with traffic.
------------
To: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Subject: Micosoft Settlement
The manner in which APIs would be revealed are limiting to Microsoft's main competitor: Free and Open Source Software ("Free" defined as "without restriction" not "free of cost").
This software is created largely by individuals in informal and generally noncommercial cooperation. This is a very significant movement, and provides great potential benefits for American consumers. I think that makes such Free and Open Source Software *the* essential beneficiary of the ruling against Microsoft. This case was not a question of whether businesses were harmed by the monopoly, but rather consumers. It is essential that this pro-consumer movement be helped by the settlement. Instead they speficially discriminated against by the settlement.
Under provisions to release the API of Microsoft products, Microsoft is given discretion as to who they will release information: namely, "viable businesses", with Microsoft being able to interpret that as they wish.
I am personally involved in many projects that have the potential to benefit consumers, but are not businesses of any sort, rather a conglomeration of individual developers. I would expect that these groups will be excluded under this settlement.
Instead of this model, APIs should be made fully public. Individuals, in some manner, should be able to ask questions of Microsoft regarding these APIs, and have them answered publically. If it seems too difficult to allow any individual to ask such a question, an electronic petition process could be used instead, as long as a group of individuals can have the same weight as a commercial organization.
It is essential that the API information be made public. If it is hindered by any sort of NDA it will be *absolutely useless* to Free/Open Source software projects. We have formed a legal and social structure where we do not have the ability to keep pieces of our code private. This process must be respected by the settlement, as it forms the most serious competition for Microsoft, and is of large benefit to consumers.
It is also essential that non-commercial groups of individuals be able to access API documentation, and have questions resolved by Microsoft. In general, it is dangerous to allow Microsoft to have discretion on any aspect of this manner, as they can use that to further punish their most stringent competitors as they have done so many times in the past.
It is also dangerous to allow them discretion on security issues. While it is acceptable that they be allowed a short, private period to resolve security issues before making them public, all aspects of their systems must be made public. It is all too easy to add security aspects to nearly any portion of a system. It is even potentially a good thing that they add security at many parts of their system. However, they should not need to be private about their security measures to ensure the effectiveness of that security. The Free/Open Source communities have created large amounts of software that is secure while being open. Microsoft should do the same. This process is completely possible, and has been demonstrated over and over for as long as computer security has existed.
In my own experience, I've had terrible experiences with refurbished monitors, and decent experience with other products.
It's hard to really judge the integrity of sources, though -- unless you are getting information from a real diversity of sources, it's not easy to tell when important facts or stories have been left out (the most common problem in media). At least there's the internet -- the facts might not all be correct, but they are usually plentiful.
Considering these offensive possibilities is the only way I've found to make any sense of missile defense: why some people are trying so hard to make it, why others are so opposed to it.
In its proposed use, it's obviously stupid: it does a very poor job of defending against a very unlikely attack. Maybe its supporters are just trying to make more money for weapons producers -- actually, I'm sure they are -- but maybe there's more to it.
But then why do all these other countries get so bothered about it? If it's doomed to fail -- there seems to be concensus on that from all nonpartial observers -- then why not just let the US fail at it?
So here's where this theory comes in: missile defense provides a reason to do research and implementation of military systems in space, with high accuracy lasers and all that. It doesn't have to work, because it will never be tested in a realistic way, and the staged tests will just be faked (like all the tests so far).
Once you have high-precision and powerful lasers in space, you have a hell of a lot of power. Spy satellites already have impressive accuracy. It's entirely possible to create an offensive weapon that could kill anyone that's out in the open (given a certain amount of intelligence -- supposing biometrics don't get too good, so they could identify us from space).
Of course this would scare the hell out of all the other countries -- enemies and allies alike. It's no secret that the US is a fickle lover. One day you're our best friend -- Noriega, for example -- the next you're in jail. Or just dead.
So this is kind of a win for Linux the desktop and a loss for Linux the server.