Besides the geopolitical fantasy required in your fairy tale solution is the requirement to have unlimited availability of non existent superconducting transmission lines.

Big copper cables have electrical resistance which results in line losses. In the winter in much of the world peak power usage happens after sunset, which often is the calmest time of day too. That means power woulf have to be transmitted across the continent, or even from another continent. The line losses would be tremendous...most of the power would be lost to heat and RF emissions.

It is far more efficient to have highly distributed generation AND storage than to have an intercontinental power grid of supersized transmission lines. Skyscraper sized batteries ate stupid too, but to make solar and wind work you probably would need every household to have a refrigerator sized battery permanently plugged into the grid, and for all users connections to the grid to be bidirectional.

Who decides what is indisputable? A crew of experts hand picked by google executives? A computer algorithm that does big data analysis of mob rule?

Once a thing becomes indisputable and thus factual, what happens when it is disputed in the future? When is dispute just crackpots and when is it valid? I remember 16mm films in school talking about how smog, particulates and so forth could block sunlight and bring about cooling that could trigger an ice age. Today clinate change is about heat trapping gasses heating up the planet. The idea we are heading into an ice age is laughable.

Nutritional facts are notoriously fluid and disputable things. All fatty foods used to be fattening and bad for the heart. Then it was discovered some fats...unsaturated vegetable fats...were good, and margerine consisting of hydrogenated vegetable fats were widely thought to be better than butter for the heart. But hydrogenation transforms such fats into trans fatty acids, which are virtually toxic to the heart. Also some saturated fats like coconut oil are supposedly healthy now, and eating moderate amounts of beef and other meats with saturated fat are better for the heart than a very low gat diet.

Facts are not simple clear cut things because nothing is absolutely indisputable. And often determining what is fact is tainted by political and commercial conflicts of interest.

Quite frankly i do not think Google is capable of being a trustworthy arbiter of what is an indisputable fact, no more than Microsoft, or Apple, or the Republican party, or the Democrats, or the UN or any institution.

Can we even say that it us a fact the sky is blue? We cant even agree on the colour of a woman's dress ;-)

I think it is a mistake to try to rank degree of "factualness" for these reasons...it reinforces conventional wisdom when sometimes it should be challenged. More important to me is to link information better to original sources. I would prefer Google work to trace statements/content to their origins and the relationships of content creators, then let searchers judge for themselves. For example, in researching climate change solutions, how much of it is funded by nuclear energy industry? It is a valid question to consider, since agressively shutting down fossil fuel power generation can be hijacked by such interests to further their own interests. This doesnt mean facts publushed by the nuclear industry are not valid, it just provides context so you can make informed decisions.

Ranking should remain based on how highly cited tge results are, with the "chain of citations" easily accessible, because the most highly cited information probably deserves the most scrutiny.

Mostly wrong. Emissions from burning biomatter are less than coal, and particulate emissions from power plants are very stingently regulated.

Particulates, called "fly ash", are removed electrostatically and collected along with the bottom ash--particles that are too heavy to go up the stack. This ash can be pelletised and used as a high quality fertiliser.

Processing food waste is a big challenge, from straw, husks, peels and such to animal waste (you can feed a lot of food products to livestock but you still have manure to handle). Such waste is not immediately useful...it must be composted or cooked or otherwise processed otherwise it does more harm than good.

I do not support subsidised production of " fuel crops" like switchgrass and surplus corn, but food waste in the developed world is almost tragic. Developing biomass energy technology is vital to recover this wasted energy source. Making it into automobile fuel is a bad way to do it, but burning it to make electricity or heat homes or capturing the methane (much more serious source of greenhouse effect) from landfills or stockyards or barns to use, well, solar be damned. This is recovering wasted energy anyways.

It should be said that though studies like this are scientifically valid, they are commissioned with a political agenda in mind. First we had peak oil, we were going to run out so we had to get off oil, which was a valid observation at the time. Then technology made more oil recoverable and now we have reserves that could stretch out centuries. But wait, if we burned all that oil it would release all this carbon and make our climate like it was when the dinosaurs were alive--also a theory with scientific merit. But then we use technology again to try to solve the issue and it gets shot down as well. Biofuels are inefficient and compromise food production. Nuclear is dangerous and makes toxic pollution. Wind is unreliable, destroys habitats and kills birds. Solar is similar in that it destroys habitat and is unreliable--we need to store and transmit power at night time. Hydro ruins rivers and floods lands and so on.

There is a pattern here. Scientific studies funded with the purpose of starting at a pre determined conclusion and working back to a credible theory to back it. Just like science funded by big oil or ither industries, governmental entities do this too. In cases like this it is done to justify ideological policies or the creation of bureaucracies.

Case and point...Kyoto and related accords spearheaded by the UN, which is dominated by developing and undeveloped nations and representatives that lean heavily socialist. The whole world needs to address climate change, but developing nations get a free pass and the rest enforce emissions caps through elabourate trade and credit schemes adminustered by a large bureaucracy. The real problem of climate change continues apace, but the agendas of developing nations to get a competitive advantage in industry and socialists have a means of wealth transfer/equalisation as well as guaranteed jobs running the cap and trade market...a handy nest-feathering scheme for them too (nothing is more treacherous than a wealthy socialist ;-)

It sure would be nice if we all did what is sensible and simple while we thought of all these wild future schemes...biofuel is a great concept when viewed in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mindset. Using up thousands of acres to grow switchgrass for the sole purpose of making ethanol to put in cars is asinine, but so is building a solar array in the desert the size of Phoenix compared to making pig poop into electricity, which would have otherwise polluted waterways and released much more damaging methane into the atmosphere. Bonus is that the byproduct of creating electricity with pig poop is a quality, much more eco friendly fertiliser to *increase* food production.

But then that doesn't create scarcity which can be used to hold power over a population, nor does it advance the socialist cause of wealth redistribution. Also the concept is too simple there must be a catch...to get big government/corporate buy in a solution must be complex, intrusive, widespread and expensive.

You are wrong. It is illegal to fix most proprietary software yourself. The EULA for most closed softwats, including all Microsoft's propritary software, prohibits all reverse engineering by end users. You could issue a binary patch if you wanted perhaps, but creating that patch would violate license agreements and be illegal under copyright law.

These long standing flaws in free software are not there because of the development model, they were eventually found because of it--people eventually looked hard enough for them. Closed software in widespread use may...no DOES... contain flaws of this magnitude. It is just that the POTENTIAL number of eyes is limited in closed software, and most if not all of those eyes belong to people who have a disincentive to reveal bugs.

I agree there, especially if you are coming from the purgatory of VB6 or .NET line-of-business apps, and there are good frameworks out there.

The original poster does want to know about traditional client-server, and there is a Python business application framework that is a closer fit: Tryton

It is not web centric and has a GTK based client, although there is integration with Flask for web based applications (the Nereid module) and a big push on for a full fledged web client alternative to the GTK client (plans are to give it a "material design" look and leverage all the best tools and practices etc).

It has a very extensive API so if the provided front ends do not suit your needs you can make a front end tailored specifically to your needs and leverage Tryton for the model, business rules, workflows and such. The database of choice is PostgreSQL, though you can implement SQLite or MySQL I think. ERPNEXT I think is limited (or was when I last looked) to MySQL and seemed to lack in documentation and testing, but it might be simpler if you can live with web front ends.

Hope this helps...

WINE is NOT emulation. The name was not chosen just because it is a clever reverse acronym. Emulation implies that there is translation going on at the binary instruction level. An emulator system like MESS takes binary executables from a completely different system, such as an old 8 bit Z80 or 6502 based home computer, and interprets them one instruction at a time by translating on the fly into native instructions and hardware calls.

WINE does none of that. With WINE the windows executable runs directly without any interpretation and translation, like any other binary executable does in Linux. Wine merely provides an environment of libraries and hooks and helper programs to the .exe file to handle all the numerous windows specific function calls. Merely is not really accurate i suppose, since wine re implements a large part of the windows os to do its job. But is DOES NOT EMULATE. You could not make an ARM build of WINE and use it to run a typical .exe, since it is x86 binary and the system would be ARM and WINE executes the .exe natively.

As such, WINE is more accurately described as a windows compatible operating system environment, more like DR DOS as an MS DOS Alternative rather than MESS emulating an old Spectrum.

How this pertains to AMDs drivers i am not certain. WINE i think would have nothing to do with the windows drivers...am i correct in assuming wine provides equivalents to GDI and directx and other graphics library calls to make an .exe run and those WINE libraries use linux drivers to interact with hardware? I've not tried to install windows drivers of any kind into WINE, just used it to run a few windows apps on occasion. If i need to do anything involving significant windows work i use KVM or virtualbox (all my computers run a Linux os, usually Debian, and my need for windows is small enough that i only need windows occasionally, but since it is to support industrial automation Using software that won't work using WINE and should be used under quarantine, virtualisation works very well)

So whether you use wine or not, good linux support is probably important in a video driver. I am not a big gamer so i don't bother with catalyst, but the open amd driver is very reliable for me, plays video very well and for what 3d I have done it has been alright, as good as or better than intel anyways.

That is why i selected amd for my current machine...i avoid the closed drivers and when i looked at the open driver situation nvidia was quite a bit behind intel and amd for reliability and performance and vendor support. Perhaps if i was looking for peak 3d performance i would have picked differently, but closed drivers have ALWAYS caused me more trouble than open, on any OS platform, and i go with reliability over performance when i can.

My Jeep has a QNX based touchscreen that is very responsive and fast and reliable, plus it had physical knobs, switches and buttons for climate control and radio as a backup. The backup radio controls are on the steering wheel. I can change the station or audio track, adjust the volume and answer or make handsfree calls and use cruise control without taking hands off the steering wheel. Climate control knobs are logical and nicely sized so they can be operated without taking eyes off the road.

The Ford Explorer i rented had miserable controls. Slow confusing touchscreen and the "physical" climate control buttons were capacitive touch points. Ford should be sued for that. I rented that Ford in the winter -20 weather and had to take my gloves off to turn up the heat. Very annoying!

Two reasons i got a Jeep instead of the Ford. The above was one. And second, for my model year the jeep grand cherokee and the jeep patriot had better reliability records than the similarly equipped ford escape and explorer. The in laws bought a ford around the same time and have spent considerably more on repairs and maintenance than i have on my jeep. As a chrysler brand there is a perception of unreliability but specific models are average to very good so they can be a good used choice if you research.

That said, ford has worked hard to improve its reliability, and ditching mytouch sounds promising so i may consider them again some time.

Pot does not affect reflexes the way alcohol does, though I do believe it affects perception enough to be dangerous to drive at elevated concentrations in the body. Even someone who is totally baked NEVER stumbles around and slurs speech the way a drunk person does, but such a person certainly doesn't exhibit good enough judgement to operate a vehicle.

I followed a stoned driver to her home one evening way back when..i was invited over. That experience convinced me driving stoned is a very bad idea. This person took a "creative" route home, changed lanes randomly, drove 65km/h on a 100km/h freeway, tapped the brakes to the tune on the radio at one point, used the turn signals randomly...there was most definitely an impact on driving skills. Plus she invited *me* over, which in itself probably said something about her impaired judgement ;-). If I were to replay those events i would have given her a ride home and worried about getting her car later...

Just because you are not physically impaired by a drug does not mean you are not impaired, and just because you are not speeding does not mean you are not a danger. A stoned driver has no judgement skills and in one way is like a drunk person; his or her recollections of events while impaired are skewed. Other drugs may even make your reaction times better but severely impair judgement. Drivers on cocaine, heroin or meth have caused mayhem because of their erratic mental state.

The most dangerous form of impaired driving, in fact, is not physical impairment and does not involve any chemical impairment at all...that would be texting while driving. When a driver texts in a moving vehicle that person still has full physical abilities and quick reactions, however judgement is severely compromised due to the distraction. Talking without hands free is almost as bad. Distracted drivers behave very much like an amplified version of a stoned driver.

Driving stoned is illegal for a good reason and should remain that way...just because other impairment is worse doesn't mean it is ok. By all means, if you want to kick back and have a toke go ahead, not judging anyone for that, but a person should take some responsibility when driving out of consideration to others. Put away the mobile, get some rest, don't be drunk, don't be stoned, don't be high. If you can't do all of those, make alternative transportation plans.

The sarcasm on this site is usually a bit more obvious. Needless to say...or maybe not...Debian is the most forked linux distribution on the planet. Its the prison b!tch of distros ;-)

...to use a natural gas home filling station to power a fuel cell car. It might make more sense to just use the gas to power a more conventional combustion engine. CNG engines are simpler and have been around forever.

Using natural gas to power a fuel cell in a vehicle would require an onboard reformer. The process is rather complex to implement at such a small size, involves some temperature extremes and produces carbon dioxide in the end anyways. Though i suppose if done right it would be quite a bit more efficient than a regular combustion engine.

...on the crucial finer points that make being paid to drive someone around so much different that it merits such massive legal protection and draconian regulation.

It certainly is not the burden of inspection. At least where i am at, taxis are given the EXACT SAME inspection as out of province used vehicles registered by regular drivers. As for maintenance, when i was still scrimping and saving to pay off student loan and get a house i drove used cars and went to the junk yard to get parts, and there were ALWAYS taxi drivers there getting tires off wrecks for their cabs. They were less picky than me...if they were not flat and not worn to the belts they'd take them.

I understand there may be liability issues in driving taxi as well, however that doesn't merit the nature of regulations in place--so many rules are in place to limit competition and have nothing to do with safety or fraud protection. People can and have set up online services to do deliveries, operate guided tours and so forth that require professional drivers without the challenges and hassle. Even driving schoolbus isnt given so much scrutiny! Think of the children!

I dont fault drivers, it is the fault of taxi companies and plate brokers. Tight regulation makes plates so scarce relative to demand that they can cost more to buy or lease than the vehicle.

The whole anti-uber thing honestly confounds me. I understand the need for regulation in terms of safety and liability but i really fail to see why governments ate so obstructionist. They are supposed to HELP the public, and the public is helped by efforts to improve transportation.

I suppose it has to do with history of taxi operation. Perhaps back at the early 1900's before regulation a few shady operators ruined it for the honest ones. Perhaps even organised crime established itself in the industry leading to closer scrutiny by government for our protection. My theory is that criminal element never completely left. They may have established a presence on boards/commissions to ensure that if they had to follow rules to operate honestly and safely that the rules would also ensure their enterprises were lucrative and free from competition.

I have no solid evidence of this happening, and I believe whatever mob presence there was is long gone, but there certainly is a legacy there in present regulations and powerful lobbies suggesting such influence in the past.

The lobby must be bery powerful still. A couple of right leaning pro business councillors in my city are usually quite outspoken in defending policies to cut red tape, limit taxation and regulation and so forth to help especially entrepreneurs and small businesses, but they roll over and defer to the taxi commissioner at the mere mention of uber or more taxi plates and back amendments to blunt efforts to ease restrictions or outright vote against adding plates or permitting uber and others to operate.

It makes me wonder what goes on that makes the taxi lobby so influential that even some opinionated politicians clam up at mere mention of taxis or uber.

I do find it annoying to deal with binary formats for some non executable files like configs and small logs. That said the argument you make about fragility of binary is false and has little merit.

There is no "mostly ACID"--a database is or isn't, and the human-readability of a file has no bearing on how corruptable it is. Things like underlying file system and implementation have more to do with it.

PostgreSQL for example is a very robust, multi-concurrent ACID compliant data store, so much so that it is often used as the back end for logging in large important systems. Failed transactions roll back cleanly and single byte errors most certainly do NOT render all data theteafter inaccessible! Despite that you have binary formatted data, even if it is all VARCHAR fields.

It is all in the design and implementation. Binary formats and protocols generally have field and record delimiters, as well as error detection and correcting features like checksums. If a byte is corrupt you lose one record at most and usually just a single field. Delimited text is just a very primitive binary format in that sense, and without checksum or error correction at that. I've never seen a truly robust data store built atop a text format!

On more than one occasion I have seen log files in text format become corrupt, and in most cases the missing or unreadable lines of text were exactly at the point i was interested in seeing. It is quite possible for a text log to go haywire and stay that way until a process is killed and restarted. Text does not help here. Similarly a binary database store can be useless if poorly implemented, such as not using transaction statements in SQL or using myISAM storage for your mySQL database.

My criticism of systemd in this particular instance is not because using binary formats is more fragile than text...indeed i dont know enough to say either way. It is really just a minor annoyance to me due to the fact it creates a need to use an unfamiliar, less generalised tool to view and analyse the data than cat and grep and so on.

In any case for a REAL hgh volume critical system i would push all my data via syslog to a robust storage system underpinned by a database like PostgreSQL or other ACID compliant system. There are some times when a system crashes on boot at a point before such facilities are online, however bootups happen very occasionally on servers and if i have to view a binary log out of a failed system i will just deal with the annoyance and use the provided log viewing on a functioning system or rescue boot environment.

Yes it seems to ignore the unix ideal, but Linux, mac OS and other contemporary platforms and applications with unix roots abandoned the unix way a long time ago as tech moved on and pragmatism set in. It gets tedious to manage text files; they do not scale. I guess the decision was made to use binary for compactness and to forego the need to rotate logs and use general text processing tools to do log analysis, which i am comfortable using but could be thought of as cumbersome.

I am still getting used to systemd. I am a bit disoriented and find the scope of what they are trying to tackle rather wide to put under management of a single project, but hey, the Linux kernel is huge monolithic and has thousands of tightly coupled binary modules, and it works well enough. And, in my experience once i figure out the systemd way of doing it i find it a big improvement over the old crufty init way. Making your own init scripts, even using LSB template, and using things like monit or other more kludgy ways to monitor and restart processes is not a status quo i miss anymore.

I hope the petty bickering in debian community over what boils down to politics over technical merits does not stifle innovation. Debian is not known as an innovation leader but it has done and will have to continue to embrace change and progress when it meets stability standards.

This here is a hint of why systemd gets all this hate. Sysadmins who embrace old school methods and cling to an ideology that, whatever merits it may have, has in practice been abandoned at many levels.

This here post suggests that you arent worthy of being a sysadmin if you cannot manually edit and manage inittab and dozens of files in init.d and links for your run levels and so on. Sorry some people have to spend their time doing real work and would rather just use their systems not manage some brittle low level mechanism.

Ignored here is that traditional init SUCKS. It only works for most people because most people do not mess with the canned scripts in the package. It is ridiculous that a misplaced semicolon or ampersand in one of any number of files could cause an entire system start to fail for example. And instead of doing something better all too many sysops would blame the user, as if this sort of thing should always be beyond "normal" people.

The other reason for the hate also seems to be the person behind the product. I see hate comments made solely because Pottering founded the project. Because of his personality and the track record of some of his work on initial release he could cure all cancer and some people would let a tumour kill them because Pottering invented the cure. This is stupid. Who is behind a project is only one of many considerations and not the most important one especially if the case of Free software.

I am not qualified enoygh to pass judgement on systemd yet, but i do know that the status quo is unsustainable. SysV style init scrips are brittle and from a developer/distributor perspective so burdonsome to maintain that it is nearly intolerable, especially considering where traditional sysop positions are being supplanted by "devops". THAT is why users/hackers/old school sysops are having systemd "forced" on them. Package maintainers have embraced the first true, full refactoring of the init system ever done in Linux OSes because nobody who has to develop, maintain or distribute a software package has ever said wow, writing init scrips is so much fun!

If systemd is somehow seriously undermining the ability to provide stability or security then it warrants serious discussion. That subject is orthogonal to who wrote the code and how it adheres to the unix way. The unix way can be exploited and be unstable too if poorly implemented, but the point is moot as linux systems have been departing from the pure linux way at various points since the beginning.

I like the unix way, and should a systemd alternative come out that both follows that better AND actually addresses init shortcomings better than systemd i would adopt that. So far it is not the case. Upstart was not the answer for me, status quo is not the answer. OpenRC is lipstick on the init pig right now--a step in the right direction but not mature enough to handle parallel execution and appears more burdonsome to support for software maintainers who still need to manage that legacy init pig in the meantime.

So systemd is the least of all evils in some peoples views. Part of the problem is yhat nobody stepped forward with a stable, elegant next gen init system until systemd was entrenched. They fell short technically or have been promising but had issues working with developer communities. So it is time to sh!t or get off the pot and implement a better systemd alternative if the problems are that serious and more than philosophical.