I side with Palin most of the time and find the anti-Palin diatribe in the majority of the comments depressing. The mob on Slashdot is just like mobs everywhere. Now, while I don't side with Palin on this issue, because I have a small fondness for anarchy, she has a very legitimate position. When two people talk, they talk with a level of trust. Wikileaks shattered a lot of the mutual trust. People seem to think that everything government does should be out in the open. What foolishness. There is no perfect form of government. Assuming that having everything out in the open would work better is a long long shot. You just change one system of corruption for another.

It's not a matter of intimidation or fear of losing. Memorizing sequences requires memorization skills and the desire to use them, nothing more. If I choose not to memorize, for whatever reason, playing against one who does becomes unsatisfying. If I out-think their canned routine, what satisfaction do I get? If I slip and their canned routine runs over me, what have I learned? The other player wasn't really responding to my moves. I would learn as much from studying a book. Why am I playing this person if they are going to act like a machine? They are not personally engaged in what we are doing. It's like going for a walk on a fine sunny day and meeting people who are plugged into their music systems. We are in two different worlds; they don't hear the birds I hear nor can they adequately respond to a greeting.

There is a lot good advice posted. Much depends on the operations that will take place in the room. Most control rooms have daily cycles consisting of the day shift with maintenance working on things and interacting with the operators, a swing shift where things quiet down, and a graveyard shift that consists of long hours of quiet and talk among the operators to pass the time. When a process upset or emergency occurs the operators must respond quickly, but with a well-run process upsets don't happen very often.

I have spent too much of my life in control rooms, paper industry and power plant. Control rooms existed before computers, consisting of expanses panels of controllers and switches. Since there were so many controls, at least half of them could only be reached by standing. The operators were trim and in good shape. They frequently spent their time sitting down because there was nothing to do, then immediately came to their feet when action was required. Humans function much better standing up. They think better and it is best for them physically, the two go hand in hand. Many control displays work by touch. Proper display design is an elite craft. Arrange the displays so that normal operator input occurs standing and dealing with the display at eye level. People will object that keyboard input is required and keyboards have to be horizontal. I don't know your processes, but the vast majority of keyboard interactions involve display selection, alarm interaction, and numerical entry (setpoints, etc.). Sometimes tags get typed, it isn't frequent or common and almost always results from bad display design. Anyway, numerical entry can easily be handled by a vertical keypad. It certainly doesn't need to be horizontal. Display selection should primarily be handled through the displays, using proper design. Alarm interaction needs its own small keypad beneath the numerical one. In the future, voice recognition will be used with the displays, but right now it would be a gimmick.

By the way, my company provides simulations for operator training. Contact me if you are interested. Start-ups, shutdowns, upsets, alarms, tags, etc. All the usual suspects.

You wrote a nice response, thank you. I am an American, and you are right in that I could do more to get rid of copyright. I shall try to remember to do so.

History does not show that the human race needs intellectual property such as patents and copyright. I say this in spite of having a small software company with its key asset being a software package. However it would be a long discussion with us starting so far apart.

Thank you for responding,

John

If a person buys into the current scheme of intellectual property and finds a niche there, then they find themselves defending their niche and the scheme. The human race got along quite well for a very long time without the idea. The scheme works well for the lawyers and corporations and the individuals who rely on it. It doesn't work well for the normal person who has to act in an unnatural way because of it. The fact that a person pays for an education and feels committed to the scheme does not make it right. Repeating the behavior of others is a natural human instinct; lawyers saying you can't sing this song because it belongs to someone else is a great foolishness and harmful to society.

"right to copy" is a weird legal hack, of relatively recent vintage, that may or may not prove beneficial in the long run. People copy things all the time. They see somebody do something clever and they start doing it themselves. Others see them and copy their behavior. Does the first person who did it get any credit? Only a little, at best. A person creates a new dance step at a party and it spreads like crazy. The spread clearly involves copyright violations. How is it any different than singing a new song that others start to sing? Do people have a right to copy the behavior of others? "right" is not the correct term for it. Sparrows do it, dogs do it, people do it. It's part of what we are. When it comes to copying sheet music, are you saying that the expert, who can look at the music and instantly memorize it, is free and clear while the novice, who has not yet attained that level of skill and makes a physical copy, is a criminal? Current law says that Girl Scouts can't sing Happy Birthday without legal permission. What incredible nonsense. The current theory of what can be owned and the concept of intellectual property work to the advantage of corporations far more than they do for individuals.

It is the same as with money, bad information drives out good.

The issue isn't nice and neat.

Carbon
When it comes to carbon everything depends on its origin and its destination. Carbon only exists in the earth, in the biosphere, and in the atmosphere. That's it. It transfers easily between the biosphere and the atmosphere, not so with the earth. The environmental problem results from digging up lots of carbon and having it end up in the atmosphere. When making paper, carbon becomes an issue when it is dug out of the ground and burned to make electricity to make the paper. That's the only carbon that counts. This use of carbon can be mitigated by printing telephone books and burying them in the ground. This takes carbon out of the atmosphere/biosphere for a long time, not geologically long, but long.

Water
Water stays water. Production of paper can result in water pollution, but not water loss. There are two types of water pollution, chemical and heat (hot water can be environmentally bad). Paper mills result in less water pollution than people think and keeping the water clean is a matter of legislation, not one of paper production.

Chemicals
Making paper uses chemicals. Most chemicals are recycled. When you see a pulp mill where logs go in and pulp and paper comes out, the big majority of the equipment and processes are dedicated to recycling the chemicals. Making paper isn't hard, its separating the fibers which takes all the work. Chemicals are expensive and the paper industry does its best not to lose any.

Heat
Definitely a waste byproduct. Nature likes to produce heat and anything we do has that result. The human body generates plenty of heat while sound asleep. That said, a pulp mill (people use bad terminology, paper mills aren't an issue) does its best to get as much work from the heat as possible. More and more mills have installed electrical turbines and some come close to generating all their own power. The electricity produced comes at a low cost. The mills already are using the steam, heating it up and cooling it down to make electricity is quite efficient.

Other issues such as old-growth are in pretty much the same boat.

There are problems with everything, once you decide to not live by chasing the migrating herds. I read all the nonsense about electronic books. What can you do? People want to make money and think selling everyone on the next best thing is the way to go. The human being is quite adaptable and can live with all sorts of stupid ideas. Is there too much waste paper in the world? Yes. Does anyone really think the human race is healthier for the invention of television?

Currently environmentalism is the hot secular religion. In another day and age building paper mills had the same cachet.

The important thing to remember is that results matter. Palin did two things as governor that impressed me, one of which applies here. The legislature passed some a depriving same-sex partners from certain benefits. The Alaskan supreme court had ordered the opposite. Palin vetoed the bill.

Would she have vetoed it if their Supreme Court were not involved? No. What is important is that she could have sided with her party which knew what it was doing when it passed the law. In American history, a governor siding with his party is quite common. Politically it is better to have the courts rule against you. She didn't. She didn't like it, but she did what she had to do. This respect for law and responsibility is not something we see in politicians. In Washington people worry about a law or portions of a law being unconstitutional and then go ahead and decide to let the Supreme Court figure it out. Who do you want in positions of power? Personally I would be content with a tentacle-headed Martian as president as long as it was a good executive and did the job. Instead people go with the equivalent of used-car salesmen, then moan and groan when they don't do what they said they would do. People are afraid of Palin because they suspect she will do what she says she will do and they don't like some of her ideas. So they vote for people who are lying through their teeth. Obama makes all sorts of promises on the campaign trail and then in office says things are more complicated than he realized. What an absolute joke. He knew that before-hand and wouldn't say it. Yet the people voted for him.

There are things about Palin I don't like, but I think she would be far more professional than the current group of politicians. Politicians and professionalism separated long ago.

You do understand that the human race uses profit (aka material wealth) as a desirable trait when it comes to sexual selection? People criticize profit-seekers and say they would take smog over clean air if it worked out to their advantage. One doesn't overcome all those years of evolution, based on selection, with just a wave of the hand. In theory, free will can overcome it, but that is something out of favor currently so appeals to it don't work.

Oddly I don't see an alternative to Palin.

The people running for office in this country are generally lawyers and have a negotiating mindset. They view the world from a particular strategic perspective. There are some who don't fit this mold, Bloomberg in New York or Arnold in California, but they are rare.

Palin is very smart, just different from what people expect and she gets criticized for not fitting the conventional view of someone running for president/vice president. People criticize her for her performance in the interview. If we took an unnamed person, put them in that interview, and they performed as she appeared to perform, then the unnamed person would be considered an idiot. Companies wouldn't consider the person suitable for much more than emptying the garbage and you would have to watch them on that.

If you took another person, said they worked themselves up the hard way, became governor of Alaska, and did a good job there, then the response would be diametrically different.

I consider the latter information to be important, and the interview to be part of a world foreign to her. Do I want her to do well in such interviews? I don't know. I want her to do well in office, playing the games with the media -- some people would say that is part of the job. I don't know that it is. The media is fickle beast and has the attention span of a gnat. It also turns on those who won't play its games. She's different; she was a good governor from what I read of her actions in that role; and she is not part of the inside crowd which I consider to be a very great asset.

If you look at the world today, politicians the world over are converging on a particular style. She doesn't fit that style and I consider that a very valuable trait and something that America needs. If I read that she did a poor job as governor I would feel differently, but she didn't. If you have a kid who doesn't do well in school, it isn't always because she has serious problems. If you find she does other things very well and she has drive, then you have to say that she is special and will have to be judged by other standards.

People talk as if voting to avoid Palin makes some sort of sense, that it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that she should never be allowed near the White House. There are closed minds and minds that are sealed shut forever. People criticize the section of the electorate that votes as a reflex, without consideration. What is the difference between those and those who make decisions with minds frozen shut? Palin's strengths don't fit the McDonald's menu of strengths that people use to evaluate politicians. If her good points aren't on the menu, she must be a loser. Then people complain about the same old politicians.

This is nonsense. The idea that everything obvious must have been previously done is a complete rejection of the meaning of the word "obvious". Using this legal-speak nothing has been obvious since the beginning of the world. Nothing is obvious today that isn't in the history books. You can use that thinking for what should be patentable, but it is the type of behavior that makes people despise lawyers. It always forces everything to the most primitive denominator. Does this make decision making easier? Certainly. Is it also so far outside of acceptable human norm that one has to become specialized in an arcane pursuit to understand it? Yes. This is the same approach to thinking that results in finding a woman not suitable for marriage because she is not a virgin. Some people think that way, they also tend to have other problems.

Instead, most people have developed a better approach regarding women and marriage. Economically, it suits the lawyers to not do so regarding patents. How would they benefit? Anything they can do to pull the law away from reasonableness is to their economic advantage.