Even in Canada global warming is a mixed blessing. Yes summers will get longer, winters shorter.

And that means that the edge of the permafrost moves north. The areas where the permafrost melts is close to impassible.

Lot of the northern mines depend on bringing equipment in over winter roads. It's not practical to make all weather roads for a single mine site. (There are still significant communities that have no all season road access.)

In addition while climate change makes northern lands warmer, the northern limit to agriculture in Canada is not limited by climate so much as it is by soil and drainage. The edge of agriculture is the edge of the Canadian sheild. Above that line is rock, and bog and lakes.

Now admitedly places that now only grow rye could grow wheat. Places that are currently pasture could grow crops.

The other issue is rainfall. GW is almost certainly going to change rainfall patterns. About half of Alberta's farm land is in the Palliser triangle which has long cycle periods of adequate rain and drought. In a good year we get 16-20 inches of precip. In a bad year 6. The current best guess of the climate modelers is that we will get more precipitation, but not as much as the increase in evaporation from the warmer temperatures.

This will mean that bunch grass ecozones move into the sod grass areas, sod grass moves into parkland. In the mountains it will get too dry for spruce, so the line demarking spruce/pine moves up and north. Depending on fire management policies pondersosa pine may replace lodgepole pine in forest land management.

Or pine may be locally extinct. We aren't getting cold enough winters to kill enough of hte pine beatle larva. Northern BC is a mess. Some cases where pine beatle has attacked and successfully reproduced using spruce. This could take out most of the southern half of the boreal forest.

Most of the GW deniers deny because:

A. "It's not my fault, so I don't have to do anything or change my way of life"

"Why" matters in the long run. Understanding the mechanisms that control climate is important in the long run, both for more accurate prediciton, and for geo-engineering a solution.

As an example: A garden hose spewing SO2 into the high stratosphere could generate enough clouds to drop the temperature. This was in effect what the erruption of Mt. Pinatubu did. Everyone points to that erruption and says "see! We can control this." It was also a drought year for major regions. Thinking: The SO2 produced high cloud. The surface temp dropped, the stratosphere temp rose, the lapse rate dropped, decreasing the height of rain clouds. Less rain gets over mountain barriers. Result: Drought.

In the short run, it's changing. Adapt, or die.

A hundred foot rise in ocean levels is going to call for some pretty massive resettlements.

I think there is merit in WYSIWYG editors for 'story boards' It's quick to layout. You can try various looks, even create sample navigation for interaction.

But any significant website is almost certain to use some form of template system.

I ended up doing a first stab at my personal web page using the composer in Mozilla. Once I got the LOOK I wanted, I redid the first few pages in HTML by hand. And then with MUCH cleaner and simpler HTML, I went to Template Toolkit to control page generation. And then I installed the Markdown module for TT and essentially eliminated 95% of my html. (I still have to use some divs for positioning.)

Spent a lot of time with a single CSS file so that the page behaves reasonably with any non-pathological browser/screen combo.

The end result is a site with about 80 pages, statically served, but regenerated as needed. http://sherwoods-forests.com/ if you want to look.

Even logging in manually to turn on the wifi has the problem of:
* Various people have to know to log in.
* Remember to turn it off.

How about wiring a plug into coat room light circuit. Plug with wifi hub into that plug. When the coat room light is on, you have wifi. When people are gone, the wife is turned off with the lights.

I'll admit being puzzled by this. The wires on the pole outside my house are 6 strands of aluminum around a steel core. I don't think I have ever seen copper distribution lines.

At one point as a kid, I looked into salvaging a mile of power line that went to an abandoned mine. It too was Al over steel. We talked to various scrap dealers. They weren't interested unless we separated the aluminum from the steel. We tried that with a 20 foot chunk and decided to cut firewood instead.

Standard behavioral psych: It's not the harshness of the penalty, it's te probability of being caught. Draconian punishments have seldom been effective, as long as people had a good chance of getting away with it.

14 years in Australia, and no right to come home? Used to be a British punishment for poaching rabbits. Hanging for stealing a loaf of bread. People still stole bread.

DUA? loss of license. By itself it doesn't work. Checkstops? Works.

10 years for marijuana possession? That's been effective, hasn't it?

Part of this is is due to 'reuse' and is a consequence of abstraction.

I've done remodeling. Electrical is always interesting. Electricians have no real organized system of working. You can't predict where a wire will run. Open up a wall, and spend a few hours going back and forth. (Does the line go to the light, then the switch, or is the switch 'beyond' the light. Can I splice in to *THIS* box and get power all the time, or will in be dead at one setting of the 3 way switches at either end.

If I reuse a 2x4 do I care if there are wiring holes I don't use? No. Do I care if there are nails clipped off and hammered flat. Not usually. If I move the sink, do I take apart the wall to remove the old sewer line? No.

Houses are not designed to be maintained. Nor are cities. (Try upgrading a city sewer system.)

In the Bad Old Days microsoft figured that for each legit copy of MS Word there were 3 pirated copies. That destroyed sales to the point that there is little effective competition to Word.

One of the murky areas is that copyright holders can withhold their product. If a book is out of print, you are SOL. At one point if a publisher refused to sell you a copy of a book you could take over the copyright, subject to the same terms with the author.

Copyright gives a monopoly on the sale of a something. Monopolies generally are subject to abuse and need to be regulated.

An earlier post commented on cheering the GPL rights holders, and panning the RIAA.

I object to the music/movie industry's mode of action. Getting these enormous awards for infringement is out of line. Non-commercial infringement should be both simpler to enforce, and should have reasonably small penalties -- e.g. 3 times cover price.

I also object to people getting inordinate awards for small efforts. A book in many ways is a bargain. A print run of 10,000 can pay for the publication, transport, etc at $40. But textbooks are often 5 times that. Why? Becuase they have you by the short and curlies. A huge part of the cost of a book deals with the issues of dealing with dead trees -- paper, printing, binding, transport. So an ebook/digital download/ should be MUCH cheaper than the same material as a DVD with case, book with dustjacket. That it isn't is greed. And yes, I resent it.

Can small penalties be effective? Consider trespass. This is a civil offence and in Alberta common tresspass is subject to a maximum award of $250. Yet "no trespass" signs are pretty well respected.

Regarding pre-copyright material.

My sister is a storyteller, with a niche for aboriginal stories. In the coastal indian cultures it is traditional to ask for permission to tell some one else's story. E.g. a story has an owner. True some stories are 'public domain' but some aren't. Or the way of telling it is unique.

Leo sats are only above your local horizon for about 7-9 minutes. It takes ~10 LEO sats to provide continuous coverage over about a 200 mile wide path. And it takes dozens of paths to cover the world. Putting the up from 100 miles to 200 miles however cuts the number by roughly 4. (Each satellite is visible twice as long from about twice as far away.)

However there are possibly alternative orbits to Geosync. Even if you were half the distance, it would take 1/4 the power -- or rather 4 times as many bits for the same power.

If we take the numbers at face value:

Viasat has 140 Gb/s throughput. Typical over subscribing is about a factor of 20. So if we choose 5 mbit/s as our package, then the satellite can handle 28,000 simultaneous channels and with over subscription can handle 560,000 subscribers. The sat itself cost 400 million to put in place. Not quite a thousand bucks per subscriber. I would be quite happy to get 5 Mb/s 1/20 of the time.

BUT

140 Gb/s = 14 GB/s (allow 2 bits per byte for overhead)
= 840 GB/min
= 50,400 GB/hour
= 36288000 GB/month

But you get smacked if you use more than 7.5 GB/ month.

So, on the base package you can support 4,383,400 subscribers.

I smell pig.

Aptly named variables are a good start. I had a grad student who came to me trying to debug fortran code (physics student). I took one look at it, and said: R1? S2? Before I will even look at this, go back and rename all your variables except loop counters to meaningfull names.

"But I know what they are."

"You may know, but I don't. And you are asking ME for help."

The clarity he found in renameing solved his problem.

If good code is worth documenting then try one or more of these:

1. Write the overview documentation BEFORE writing the code. This helps clarify the coding process. So documentation is about what you did, it's about what you are going to do.

2. Have another person review it. Does it make sense? Does the overview match the actual code?

For especially clever high production workers, you may have a documentor assigned full time to them. You hire a secretary to keep the boss out of trouble. Hire a documentor to keep up with the coder.

May be worth having a documentor for a team.

It's worth checking out. When the CuNim is piled 35,000 feet thick, we lose connectivity. But the average drizzle isn't too bad.

It's not an improvement. Under the Anik F2 I can reliably get 20 MB/hour = 480 MB/Day = 15 GB/month. Under new system I can use up my daily cap in half an hour, and my monthly cap in 10 hours, if I didn't have the daily cap in place.