I also hate to be the one to point this out, but given a free choice much (not all) of the world population starts consuming meat once given the economic means to do so.

In a world that seems to be lurching towards greater individual autonomy and personal choice, your solution does not strike me as likely to get off the ground. At the end, you'll either have to adopt more and more coercive action to meet your goal or accept that there are billions of independent agents with different preferences.

This.

It's an interesting conundrum. We can at least try to pass laws to prevent our governments from spying us, but even if we succeed we can't very well pass a law forbidding others' governments from doing what they will.

Ultimately, I don't see a solution that's plausible here.

1) I would love nothing else for petro-power to become economically unsustainable with respect to renewables. Currently, that's not the case even with massive green-power subsidies. Here in CA, power prices are pushed ever higher as they push the mandates higher.

2) Functional regulation also requires a principled opposition that is willing to focus on actual deliverables rather than scoring points.

3) There is no way that global warming is going to be solved by regulations on the extractive industry, so this is a non-goal in this domain. If we want to try for a comprehensive solution to AGW, it needs to be done across industries and across countries. Global problems cannot be solved locally.

Now proper regulation would raise costs significantly and put pressure on finding REAL solutions sooner which is why environmentalists want to use them to prohibit dirty industry growth

This is exactly the problem, you are effectively deciding on the solution rather than the goal. If it's possible to pump crude out of Alaska without spilling it on the tundra, then you should be in favor of it. To the extent that safety requires raising the cost, that's an acceptable tradeoff, but it absolutely is not the goal unless you are just being obstructionist instead of productive.

Nuclear power is a great example. A still functioning regulatory system makes nuclear power more costly than solar PV. This is still the case with the large government subsidies involved in that industry already.

I worked in nuclear for a while. Most of the cost increase goes to lobbyists and lawyers to fight the other guys' lobbyists and lawyers. Which is all that the nimbyciles have every really accomplished -- making the industry grease the same palms that they are doing with at least as much dough.

[ Kind of ironic actually -- the fight against the parasitic plutocrats only spawns more plutocrats. Perhaps that's a sign about why it's unproductive not to engage with problems directly and find solutions. ]

I keep hearing other nations do a better job deciding such things; like Canada for example.

You mean that country that's pissed off we are stalling our decision on the giant pipeline to transport their oil from the tar sands?!

Truth be told, I've heard they don't care what the answer is since if we say no they'll build the pipeline to the Pacific themselves, but they wanted the stability of shipping it to us. Such a shame really to keep them in limbo, since they can't go elsewhere until we've officially said no too. But yeah, that oil isn't going to the stay in the ground in any event.

We are not anti-fracking or anti-drilling. My goodness, we live in Texas. Keep it in the pipes, and if you have a leak or spill, report it and be respectful to your neighbors. If you are going to put this stuff in close proximity to homes, be respectful and careful.

Yeah, pretty much this.

We all know that extraction companies do idiotic and careless things and don't give a fuck about safety -- either of their workers or of the environment around them.

We also know that a lot of environmentalists advocate the complete cessation of fracking and drilling even though that makes no practical sense (for now).

And so we've lost the middle ground of wanting a strong extractive industry with strong environmental safeguards and a culture of safety grown up around it. It would be a strategic error for companies to adopt such a policy in a situation where environmentalists are going to oppose them politically and legally anyway no matter what they do. And it would be a strategic error for environmentalists to advocate for responsible extraction given that the companies are going to weasel out of it anyway.

I know where we want to go, I think it's certainly technologically and economically feasible to extract oil and gas without damaging the environment. But the way we pursue it is fundamentally broken on all sides.

[ And none of this is intended to be negative. I consider myself an environmentalist and a technologist FWIW. ]

Dude with 30lbs of marijuana in an uncovered truck bed.

I hate the War on Drugs as much as the next /.er, but seriously, if you have that much weed you can probably afford a hard-top or a van or something.

Maybe not, depending on the license.

In fact, protecting the integrity of the software by using a digital signature is expressly the use case that GPLv3 is trying to forbid.

Well we killed off all the damned wolves so now we have to control the herbivore population or they will boom/bust and starve to death -- a fate much worse than being shot.

Anyway, it's an enjoyable activity and actually rather zen given that you often spend hours perched away with nothing but your thoughts ...

You don't have to cull it down, you just need to organize it into logically distinct groups and assign them priorities. Hoarding isn't the problem, the problem is assigning too high a priority to the hoarded pr0n as compared to the really important stuff.

• Group #0:

Contents: Documents, source control repositories, user preferences, email archives
Maximum Size: 10GB
Protection: 3-way Mirror + Snapshots + Offsite
Total Space Required (way upper bound): 150GB
Total Cost: $3 a month for Crashplan

• Group #1:

Contents: Personal photos, music collection, other people's #0 backups, /home
Maximum Size: 1TB
Protection: 2-way Mirror + Offsite
Total Space Required: 2TB
Total cost $3 a month for Crashplan

• Group #2

Contents: Everything else, media, pr0n,
Maximum Size: âz
Protection: Diskpool, maybe integrity if you like zfs/btrfs

(1) Password managers. One strong password, infinite storage. Maybe one for work and one for home.

(2) DropBox. One file, infinite number of distributed copies. Also available to sync on your mobile device of choice :-)

(3) Discipline. Every password is in the vault, no exceptions. Every change is updated and synced to DB.

Problem Solved.

Again, that sentence is unparseable by people in the real world.

Maybe tech workers have spent too much time in the tech world and forgot that terms like "SIP" and "POTS" are not really part of the language. Moreover, the mental model of understanding used to conceptualize the various bits of the phone system and how they interact is itself part of a specialized skill set. You can't get very far when you are, quite literally, thinking about it wrong.

And it's not just the idiots (although they certainly qualify), I've met tons of research academics, medical professionals, authors, historians whose make fundamental errors in how information systems work and are organized. They ask questions that I just have to answer with, "the fact that you ask this question means you have the wrong picture in your head already".

As an example, I once had a surgeon explain to me that his computer was not likely to be hacked because he always put it to sleep when he wasn't using it. I asked him what about the times it was awake, and he said that "well it can't be hacked because I'm using it at the time and only one person can be on the computer at once". Suffice it to say, I had to go down a few levels to explain things.

Or think of it this way -- he knows as much about computers and information systems as you know about orthopaedic surgery and the organization of the connective tissue in the body. :-)

If you're doing wifi-only, get yourself a static IP, run asterisk, use any old cellphone with SIP support and wifi and skip AT&T, as they are fuckers of the highest degree. Their prices are beyond fucking ridiculous. They want $50/mo for a land line. I got SIP for about ten bucks a month. My Xperia Play is now our cordless phone, and it's also a neato clock. My server is a $20 pogoplug, but in fairness I bought two of them so I could do HA.

You forgot to account for the time of a competent admin that can set up asterisk and is around to troubleshoot it.

$50/mo for a landline is stupid, but make a fair comparison -- you can't rate a system that requires a /.er to design and set up against one that a person with an IQ of room temperature can use.

For many (but certainly not all) applications, especially when it comes to UI, what matters is 95% worst performance, not peak throughput. From the Anandtech review, that's where this drive really shines.

Different tradeoffs have to be made for different workloads -- it can't be boiled down to a single (or even a set of) number(s). Some applications are far more tolerant of worst-case performance than others.

You are right to be sarcastic but you are dead wrong in conflating volatility risk with counterparty risk. The two are actually completely orthogonal -- you can have very little risk of volatility but high counterparty risk, or high/low (and high/high low/low for that matter).

The key is to distinguish from the risk inherent in the fulfillment of the contract and the risk that the contract will not be carried out.