One of those comments was mine and I encourage others to do the same. The FCC may very well ignore the comments, but the more that there are the more it will show people how corrupt they are. Ignoring 50 comments is one thing, ignoring 650,000 comments is another thing entirely, especially when almost every single one of those comments is opposed to the policy they are proposing.

Make your voice heard, and even if not heard by the FCC, then let it be heard by your fellow citizens that the FCC won't listen to us anymore. Our government is corrupt but most people don't realize the extent to which it is corrupt. This is a good way to show them.

-AndrewBuck

I didn't claim that he was immune from being tracked down, I am well aware of the issues of IP level anonymity vs slashdot just choosing not to display a name which is what the AC parent did. I know the distinction because I run a Tor relay (not an exit node just a relay) and I use Tor myself.

My point was merely that he chose to remain anonymous (at least as well as he was easily able to) while criticising a tool used by others to actully do the same thing.

Whether Tor is used by "bad guys" is beside the point. A report came out today that the NSA's Xkeyscore program flags Tor users and counts them as 'extremists' merely for going to the Tor website, asking for a bridge ip, or searching for tails or reading a particular linux users forum. This puts me on their list of extremists and I am happy to be there. My Tor relay is called "Fuck the NSA" and I am not the only one running a relay called that. Anonymous communication is important and I am not afraid to use my real identity (have a look at my username) to say so.

Lastly, just to be clear, I am not saying that no one should post anonymously; I have defended the AC posting option on this site for exactly the reasons you list. I am merely pointing out the cowardice and hypocrisy of posting anonymously to criticise a tool to actually provide that very ability to people who need it; people whose lives depend on it. Remember that everyone who says Tor should be banned because the bad guys might use it is just choosing to kill one group of people instead of another. Tor saves lives every day in opressive regimes, so banning it does not just make the kiddie fiddlers get hurt, it would also hurt these innocent people. There are better ways to stop the bad guys than making anonymous communication impossible, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a facist. Period.

-AndrewBuck

Kind of ironic that you chose to post that comment anonymously, exactly the kind of thing TOR is designed to allow for.

-AndrewBuck

Although I largely agree with the sentiment you are expressing, there is a similar confusion here as well. I read through the article you linked and what they are talking about transporting is normal crude that has a high paraffin wax compnonent in it. This too, though, is different from the kerogen bearing rocks in the green river shale. There are a couple clues throughout the article that this is what they are talking about, but the most telling is this blurb from the last paragraph...

"For better or worse, Uinta Basin oil and gas production is increasing and expected to double by 2022 to the equivalent of 50 million barrels a year. Much of that growth is expected to come from tar sands and oil shale, which exists in abundance in the basin but has yet to be commercially developed."

Notice that they say that the tar sands there and the shale have yet to be produced commercially. Tar sands (depending on the depth and the oil content) generally can be produced commercially (it is an ugly mess but we can do it) since the job is merely to separate the thick, viscous oil from the sand. The kerogen in the green river shale (and many other shale formations) is a different beast entirely. For tar sand you heat the oil/sand mixture to soften up the oil and separate it out, but the conversion oil has already been done by heat from the earth. With kerogen, you need to heat the kerogen for a period of several years at something like 500 to 1000 degrees (usually done by pumping superheated steam into the ground). Then after this heating process is complete, you separate the oil in a manner similar to tar sands. This extra heating step at the beginning is why this will almost certainly never be used.

Hope this clears up the confusion about these various resources.

-AndrewBuck

The green river shale is a different kind of thing. The monterray and Bakken shale formations contain actual oil, the Green River formation contains kerogen -- a waxy substance that will turn into oil if you heat it to several hundred degrees for a period of years (yes years).

The best analogy I have heard to put this into perspective is that the Bakken is something like a rock that has been left soaking in a bucket of oil for a while and the oil has seeped into the pores of the rock. The green river shale is more like a brick that has had candle wax dripped on it. Both contain energy which can be extracted, but one yields oil directly whereas the other is merely a feedstock to make oil.

The last I had heard, no one has ever made a commercially successfull attempt to convert kerogen into oil. It can be done, just not anything like economically, and the environmental costs of doing so would be massive. Now of course the "free market" folks will say, "well the price will just rise until the kerogen is extractable", and they are right, the price will rise to something like 1000 dollars per barrel, and then we will have lots of that "cheap" green river shale oil available on the market, something like 3 trillion barrels worth.

-AndrewBuck

I get the point you were making, and to some degree you are correct. What you say is not entirely true though. Bond __investors__ make money as you suggest, but I think the article described this person as a bond __trader__, which is a very different thing. Traders often get a commision for the trade, whether the trade itself makes any money or not, even if they were the one who decided when to buy and sell, and what bonds to trade in. There are a lot of hedge funds that either lose money for their clients, or perform very poorly (many don't even beat the "index" funds which are basically "just buy one of everything"), yet these hedge funds themselves still do very well due to the fees they have hidden away in the fine print of the contracts you sign when you invest with them. This is actually a big part of why so many pension funds are in such bad shape. The underlying investments did alright, but the massive fees sucked out by the managers, traders, brokerage houses, and exchanges, eat up almost the entire profit on the trades leaving very little flowing back to the investor (in this case the pension fund). The funds list their "profits" in their prospectus which show how they make good trades and talk all about how much money you would make investing them, but when you actually dig through all the details, the fees are nearly as big as, or sometimes bigger than, the returns they quote up front. They sucker a lot of people this way, and even some (like pension fund managers) who should know better and either just don't catch the fees or don't care since it isn't their own money they are managing.

-AndrewBuck

Yeah, this is pretty laughable. I don't remember the exact figure but his battery factory (not built yet but planned) is estimated to be something like 25 to 50 percent of the current world output for these batteries; and it is expected that the battery factory will sell almost entirely, if not exclusively to his electric car operation. So this "genius" of a bond investor thinks to himself "gee, if there is such a big market for batteries he should just sell the batteries". Only problem with this line of thinking, if he quits making cars then the battery market dries up. With people like this running our economy it is little surpirse that we fell into an economic collapse, and are probably setting up the next one as we speak. Explain to me again why people like this deserve to be paid millions a year.

-AndrewBuck

You may not like it, but we live in a democracy, and the law is what the people say it is. We didn't know that this was in the law we passed, and now that we do, we are making our voice heard about it, the first step in the path to changing the law.

-AndrewBuck

(Full disclosure, I am one of the lead coordinators of the mapping effort discussed in the article and in my post below.)

Yes, the OpenStreetMap project is where the mapping is being done. The map linked in the article shows outbreak information overlaid on top of the OSM database of roads and buildings. It is this underlying map data that the croudsourcing is about.

If you go to this site you can create an OSM account and then start edititng the map immediately (think wikipedia, but for maps). You normally would edit by just going to the main OSM page and then editing the map there, the site I linked is the HOT task manager. We create areas on the task manager that need mapping done, the area is then broken up into a grid of small square tiles, and then people 'lock' a tile to work on, map all the roads and/or buildings in that tile, and finally mark the tile complete after the map has been updated. This tool was used to map all the roads and buildings in 3 large cities (Gueckedou, Macenta, and Kissidougou), where the outbreak originally started; all three of these towns were mapped completely, down to the last building, within 24 hours of HOT getting satellite imagery for them.

Right now the focus is to find and map all the small residential areas outside of these main cities, and to draw in the main connecting roads to each village. This helps the medical teams track the spread of the disease from village to village, as well as making it easier for them to travel around to do their own work. I really encourage slashdotters to help out on these kinds of projects. The mapping tools are easy to use (the in browser iD editor especially), but the technical knowledge of the slashdot crowd makes it easy for the average ./er to learn more advanced tools like JOSM and also to help with analysis and writing code to do cool stuff with the map data. You can really help out this (and a lot of other humanitarian efforts) by doing a bit of mapping anywhere in these areas, every little bit of extra data helps.

-AndrewBuck

OpenStreetMap is not really suited to what he is doing since we are making a 'base map' which is just the underlying features, roads, buildings, etc. The personal notes the OP is looking for can however be added to uMap which is a tool one of the OSM people developed to make maps overlay on top of the map. I am not sure what the public terms of service are though or how long it will be available. It was developed for coordinating information about humanitarian disasters but it would work for that as well. Link is below.

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/e...

-AndrewBuck

This is true to some degree. Obviously if they are mis-spending the money on themselves through corruption, etc, then we should do what we can to put an end to that. Having higher tax rates doesn't necessarily mean we have to just keep giving the money to the same people getting it now. Remember this is our country and "we the people" decide how it is spent.

That said, however, the reason there is so much money around DC is not because they are all sucking up tax dollars, it is almost 100% lobbying money and fat paychecks from the 'revolving door' of people leaving the government to take phony jobs in the private sector. I say phony jobs because they are not really being paid for whatever the their job title supposedly implies, but rather being paid back for the crony capitalism they practiced while in government (and by they I don't mean just the legislators, but the staffers, the lobbyists and the whole lot). Money in politics is what all of this stems from and just saying "well they are corrupt so we should cut taxes" is not a solution to the problem, it is just them winning at one of the many strategies they are using to screw you, me, and everyone else.

-AndrewBuck

They better be careful not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out. They want to live in some backwater island nation with no standing army to defend their billions of dollars... then let them. Just like with the double taxation I mentioned above they never seem to choose that option. They bitch and moan about how high our taxes are and then keep right on living in this country. The very same country that they say I am a traitor, and un-amaerican, if I say anything bad about and yet they like to make everyone think that they would leave here at the drop of a hat if we ask them to pony up a few bucks to keep the place running. They already shelter most of their money overseas anyway, so what would we really be losing if they took their gulfstreams and actually lived where their money lives. I guess we would be down a few gulf streams, but I don't see what else we would be losing.

-AndrewBuck

No it says you don't understand the tax code. I see you learned the phrase "double taxation" from econ 101 which is where I first heard about it but you seemed to have missed that they willingly pay that double taxation for the priveledge of limited liability. They have the option to avoid the double taxation, but they never seem to take it. Apparently that option is more than worth the double taxation since the free market chooses it over and over again.

The company makes a lot of money and pays the corporate tax rate on those profits, you have this correct. These taxes that they pay however are on their _profits_. Profits are money you earn _after_ you pay your employees, specifically the employee called the CEO who takes a salary of millions of dollars per year. This is the whole point of my argument, if the top income tax was 90% they would not pay the CEO millions, but instead would either reinvest that money back into the company (and not pay tax because business investment is tax deductable) or they would pay it out to the shareholders as dividends (who would then pay the 15% capital gains tax on it). This second option (paying dividends) is what they are supposed to be doing with that money instead of giving it to the CEO, the shareholders own the company, so why shouldn't they get that money. If the CEO really is such a brilliant leader of the company, he would be more than happy to take his pay as stock and let the increased dividends be his pay.

Once again another pro-corporate, pro 1% anaonymous coward trying to muddy the waters. Go back and tell your pay masters we aren't buying your bullshit anymore and they will have to feed you some new proapaganda to try out on the masses.

-AndrewBuck

You have a point and I am not really arguing that capital gains should be lower, it is already at 15%, significantly lower than even our already low 39% top income tax bracket. My point was simply that if they are going to argue that capital gains should be lower to encourage investment (which they do) then increasing the top income tax bracket should also be a part of that argument, which it is not. The reality is their policy is not based on any sound argument, their policy is simply lower their taxes and that is it.

-AndrewBuck

I agree with you that it is not really a political issue, nor should it be one. However the conservative wing of our country (and I mean to say conservative not republican since they are not one and the same) has gotten so far right that anything which might actually help anyone they just oppose out of gut instinct. I don't think they are anti-woman per se, it is just that they are anti "anything one of those evil liberals might be for". So if making upskirt pics illegal would be supported by a liberal, they will oppose it even if they would agree with it anyway. Remember this is supposedly the group of people concerned with family values and dressing modestly, but as soon as the liberals are on board they have to react.

In summary, liberals are against this not because they are liberals, but just because they are decent people who know what consent means. The conservatives then take a contrary stance based on a percieved political divide over the issue, thus making it a political issue. Fascinating stuff.

-AndrewBuck