I have used their service in the past but I never bought their program. I did some debugging and definitions work with a security company as a lark and have free access to their software. Anyhow, it took a minute to find a code online which I entered (use the ID too) and it offered me a free key after that. It was pretty painless. I will give their monitoring service a try on this laptop and see how it works out. I often do not use real-time AV anyhow.

I do not think anyone is suggesting it as the sole source. What is with people and the assumption that it is an all-or-nothing game? What is the issue with mitigating additional, greater, problems with partial solutions either combined or awaiting further technical developments to make improvements? What is with hoping for a change in the future instead of taking action now to reduce the speed of the coming environmental problems?

There is nobody, at least nobody with the power to do anything, who is advocating a single power distributor. Not one single person... They may be concentrating on one area as a potential solution or as a solution for lessening the immediacy or total effect of environmental catastrophe. That does not mean that they are advocating neglecting other solutions or even recommending that their solution is the only, best, and final solution. Trust me, when all the world's problems are solved you will still be able to find something to complain about. In the meantime, quit complaining and get out of the way so that we can work on mitigating the looming disaster you are hell bent on decrying. Got it? Good... Now get out of the way and stop clouding the conversation with your intellectually dishonest tripe. Some of us are trying to learn and others are trying to solve.

And your qualifications are...?

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/...

They are not right now. They are still protesting. People like them seem to believe that technology stands still.

Tidal power has some issues with portability. Much of the United States is not close to the coast and power is lost as over the distances it would need to be transported. (Inverse square law and all that.) Anyhow, this does not detract (in my humble opinion) from your idea. Those same states have a fairly constant wind option and solar options.

Also, one needn't look for a perfect solution that suits everywhere but, rather, a blend of solutions that reduce carbon fuel dependence. Unfortunately some folks seemingly see this as an all-or-nothing scenario and think that if one solution is not effective then no solutions are effective. They also seem to think that if it does not work everywhere and would only reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels that it is not enough and therefor must be skipped as a partial reduction is not a good enough place to start. The various comments, here on this site, that reply how the solutions offered will not fix everything are a good example of this mentality. No, nobody said it would fix everything, it was just a suggestion as to where we might start to alleviate some of the problems.

Finally, it is my understanding that a number of environmental groups are not happy with tidal power as it could, theoretically, disrupt currents, change the wetland ecosystems, and kill fish. I am not sure that any of those are true and I suspect that the folks who complain about this are not going to be satisfied no matter what is done and, if we did solve the issues - all of them that they had, they would simply find another reason to complain. This, of course, does not mean that all of their complaints are unreasonable.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I may be missing something. I am not an expert and freely admit this. I could also be wrong. Tech from 50 years ago obviously should be improved on before it is put into use, so there may be other compelling reasons to not start with LSTRs ASAP, though I am unaware of any major issues preventing us from doing so. China is betting quite heavily on thorium reactors and seem to be having no issue with them at this time - though none are complete that I am aware of. It seems unlikely that they would be in the production-scale building phase had they not already demonstrated the effectiveness at a smaller scale. Again, I could be mistaken and could be reading something into this that simply is not there. Or, alternatively, you simply are unaware of them and I respect your willingness to include the verbiage, "...I'm aware of..."

Just because you agree with them does not stop them from being regulatory hurdles. The phrase, "regulatory hurdles," carries no inherent bias unless you add one to it. There are regulatory hurdles for automobile manufacturing and they are a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles that must be overcome in order to serve food to the public and this is a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles to creating a nuclear power plant and this is a good thing.

There may be TOO MANY or TOO STRINGENT regulatory hurdles, a subject up for debate, but there are regulatory hurdles (that must be overcome) for most anything in today's world and that, really, is a good thing. Giving your bias to a phrase is not constructive or honest. Your inability to understand words and their meanings does not make your definition the default. You should be ashamed of yourself but I suspect you (and maybe a minority of nitwits) will attempt to argue this. You are free to do so. There are no regulatory hurdles you must overcome in order to delude yourself further.

I am not an expert but I have been forcing myself to read and learn more about LSTRs (Liquid Salt Thorium Reactors) which are really quite harmless and have very low radioactivity (read a very long half-life). Of course people do not really understand radiation, I have a passing layman's knowledge though much higher than the 'average' person would have but I defer to experts and learn a lot, so they think that this can not be done with a reasonable safety risk. The reality is that older systems are much more hazardous but we could, seemingly, make them pretty damned safe now with a couple of different choices.

Given my little knowledge and my observations it seems that LSTRs are the way to go. Thorium was being used in the 50s but they dropped the ball when they decided to go with Uranium instead and little research has been done since then but they had it working way back then as I understand. Educating people and showing that that the risks, even with the old systems, are actually fewer than they are with the other options. Coupled with the fact that nuclear reactors are not going to be releasing a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere there is little justification for not using them other than fear based on ignorance. As for the ignorance, it is not always a bad thing - people just do not know and can not be expected to educate themselves well enough to make sound judgments. Judgments should be made by the NRC and we should rely on them as they are the experts. Obviously they should be subject to criticism and the likes and should take into consideration alternative views...

Anyhow, it's not a simple subject and I do not see much hope for it changing in the near future. One of the great things is that you can go outside, scoop up a single shovelful of dirt, and probably have some thorium in it. Maybe if people realize this they will be more open to the LSTR (or a variation of it) and will be less afraid of it. Maybe they need to be financially motivated as there does not seem to be anyone with environmental motivations actively seeking to change this. "Bring in your shovel of dirt and we will assay it and get back to you. Maybe you can get paid to fuel your local reactor!" No, that would not work. People would try to outlaw dirt. They will think that is what a dirty bomb is and they will claim terrorists are throwing clods of dirt at victims. Think of the children, playing in the dirt...

It's the non-engineers.

They have this misconception that people used to dealing with the intricate semantics of programming languages are going to be unaware of the intricate semantics of English. Therefore, if they ask a question once, and do not get an answer they like, they will repeatedly ask the same question in different guises, hoping to obtain the answer they wanted to hear.

This really comes down to who is more patient than whom.

I usually attempt to buffer my answers in order to soften the blow, but you can ask the same question as many ways as you want, and the answer will likely not change, so long as it is fundamentally the same question. And I usually have the patience of Job. However, there was one incident where I was up against a deadline, and was being asked to "just cobble together something that works, and we'll (read: you'll) fix it (read: in a binary compatible way) later. Which was an impossibility (I was working on some very complex database code written in C++ which did subschema definitional enforcement on an upper level database schema, and the semantics had to be correct for the data stored in the binary backing store to be usable going forward, when we did the next update). The code had to be *right*, as opposed to *right now*, and the time difference was important.

We had a UI person who was in a management position, and they brought her over to argue their case that immediate was better than correct (correct would fit under the deadline, but only if everyone left me alone to finish the code). The UI person was constantly revising the UI in each release, and each release was practically a full rewrite. And she did not understand why I could not write my code the same way she wrote hers. Finally having had enough, I explained "It's OK if your code is crap; you are going to rewrite it in the next release anyway. My code has to work now, and it has to continue to work going forward, and therefore it needs to be correct. I understand that you are feeling the approaching deadline. So am I. However, while your code can be crap, mine can't be because I have to maintain it going forward. Now if you will get the hell out of my office, I will be able to finish the code by the deadline."

Needless to say, there were some ruffled feathers. The director of engineering sided with me. I completed the (correct, rather than expedient) code by the deadline, and the product didn't turn into unmaintainable crap vis-a-vis the update process going forward.

What's the moral to this story?

Well, with specific regard to DICE:

(1) Repeatedly asking the same question in different ways is not going to get them a different answer, if the first answer was correct. Any other answer than that answer would be incorrect, for the question asked.

With specific regard to the current topic:

(2) Engineers who actually reliably, repeatedly, and consistently deliver what they are asked to deliver, within the timeframe that was agreed upon, can, and often do, wield more authority than the managers nominally set above them in the food chain, so it's not like going into management is going to give you any more real authority than you already have by way of your relationship with the team, and their trust of your judgement.

A management path can be a good idea if:

(A) You want more perks (stock options, etc.), although in a good company, if you are a great engineer, you will get those anyway

(B) You are tired of doing engineering for a living (which probably means you didn't qualify as "great engineer" under option 'A' anyway)

(C) You feel you would be more useful and/or happier in such a position (but if your happiness is based on power, don't expect it will necessarily follow)

(D) You are an OK (but not great) engineer at a company which engages in age discrimination, and you are happy to continue working for such a company going forward, and it's your only way to do so (at which point, I pretty much need to question your personal ethics)

Other than that... DICE: Asked and Answered. Please go on to the next survey question.

WTF? Have you BEEN to any Google-owned pages and, you know, actually looked at the things they contain? They may not contain links to OTHER tracking or unsavory shit sites but they certainly have tracking scripts and tracking cookies. They are not better simply because they are Google. In fact they are probably worse because they are, you know, Google and those same scripts and tracking cookies are on a very large number of other sites which enables them to do those same things you are complaining about as if they are not done by Google. Hell, they are engineered by Google!

Go get Opera and then get Disconnect and NoScript Suite Lite. Grab Ghostery too. You can run all three together just fine. Then poke away at Google. Notice all the blurbs? Pick a random Google page - almost any page will do, from what I have noticed, except the Search page and GMail pages. Hell, if you want a very GOOD example of the sad state of affairs - grab Ghostery and click on the fucking PRIVACY page at Google. Seriously... Google tracking... On their privacy policy page. AdBlock happily announces that it is blocking all sorts of stuff when I do a search at Google. Who knows what else it is blocking - it may be blocking scripts that are now not recognized as being blocked by the other apps.

So, no... Google is just as awful with the tracking scripts (on their PRIVACY POLICY PAGE no less), obnoxious ads (at least they are not blinking and moving ads so I give them credit for that), and other unsavory shit (such as tracking cookies and, I imagine, web beacons). What would have made you think that they were somehow not guilty of these behaviors? They are riddled with these things. I guess you could have said, "Not as riddled." You could have then tried to argue it. You did not say that though so I am using your own verbiage as my source of information and, well, I fail to see how you came to the conclusions you have reached.

I miss Mosaic's gopher search functionality. There is little left to the gopher space. I have checked. Bastards...You are all bastards for killing the gopher.

I think there should be a competition in standards with the resulting best standard being used. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Competition to establish a standard is a good thing assuming the judgment body is unbiased and the end result is the best standard at the time. Standards should compete on their own merit with good proposals being enacted. Why would standardization be based on which one gives a "feel-good" result instead of being based on their merits? Am I missing something here or are you just thinking that standards should be based on the proposals from your favorite companies instead of being based on their merits?

Seriously, please do answer. I tend to get reasonably sane responses from you and this seems unlike your characteristic statements. I suspect that I am missing something and that the something probably isn't, "It is M$ so default evil. Duh!" You are usually more rational about things. So who are you and what did you do with the real 140Mandak, hmm?

Umm... But... Err.. Erf... Seriously? How, exactly, do you think Google got popular in the first place? I am not sure you thought your clever rebuttal through very well.

Heh... Who knew? The Scottish national animal is the Wandering Violent Drunk - See also: Scottish kiss.

Actually, it is the Unicorn. Really. I did not know that. I should think that would be the national imaginary animal but, well, see Scottish Kiss.

There were not a lot of ads on the internet in the early 90s. Really, there was a time...