That's exactly the system we have here in Norway and Scandinavia. The power is even traded on the Nordpool power exchange.
We've seen nothing else but prices going up and up, on a yearly averaged basis that is.
See my other posts for more detailed explanation.
On the positive side, we do have access to MORE power than ever before, since we can import from abroad. But it ain't cheaper.
Funny fact: Just days ago, our "industry minister" was congratulating himself and NSG (Norske Skog), one of our biggest, failing industries here in Norway, for securing a 12-year contract for fixed power-bill with Statskraft (government-owned power company in Norway). The president of Norske Skog made a quite shocking statement, that with the current power-pricing in Norway, Norske Skog would simply not be able to operate in Norway for much longer without such a contract.
Several other huge corporations in Norway are also in need for a similar agreement, something, it seems, they are only able to get through the government, or with the help of government officials.
Makes you wonder what infrastructure they'll think of deregulating next..
No, deregulation has worked wonders for electricity. Here in Norway, the power company sells all the renewable-powered electricity to foreign countries in the summer, leaving the water-magasines emptied for the winter. Thus the power companies profit double, once for selling at higher price to foreign countries in the summer, and twice for jacking up the prices in the winter, leading to shortages and crises. Now we're having like 2-3 times the energy bill compared to 10 years ago, 3-4 times that in the winter. Not bad profits there at all..
The great thing about this is that we're left totally vulnerable to expensive foreign import of electricity in the winter, and we're importing dirty nuclear and coal energy, although Norway has loads of cheap renewable energy reservoirs with our water powered powerplants. It doesn't matter what any individual company does either, because either you're on the Nordpool power-exchange, or you're not delivering any power in Norway. So it's really impossible to create any viable alternative in the market due to the market structure being centered around Nordpool speculations.
How can profit be a bad thing? It makes no sense to regulate anything. An1 want some tea with that koolaid?
Irony mode off..
If they can throw Clinton out of office for having sex with a secretary, when Bush can start wars on false grounds, and most presidents are known for similar "extravagance", then this is just more of the same shit.
It's not that we condone Mr. Assange's or Clinton's behaviour. But it is not criminal, just a leverage for someone behind the scenes to manipulate media and everyone into getting what they want.
What we need to do is reward and support those who expose such abuse of power, even if it is just "political".
Once a formal charge is filed, you can bet these women's sorry ass a counter-suit for untruthful allegations and collaboration is to follow.
But by the time all this has blown over, Assange's life will already have been ruined by the powerful people behind the invisible strings. These sex-allegations are perfect, dubious and speculative, but enough to mow down Assange and his credibility, together with the denial of all business with every major corporation on the planet. The right to possess money (banking) has already been taken away from him, without any evidence of criminal activity or judgements against him.
Who will step up and assist him now? It will be professional and personal suicide.. You will also get registered and surveilled for the rest of your life.
Unless we expose it all that is.
You haven't had sex yet I see..
What happened with just getting up and leave the bed? What was she doing in the same bed as Mr. Assange anyways?
The reports says no violence or threats were involved. So it doesn't seem any due effort were put in order to stop the activity.
In any civilized and mature country, that would mean consensual sex.
So he should return in order to be interrogated? How can he "prove his innocence"? What defense lawyer in their right mind would recommend him to return and incriminate himself? Getting him to talk in Sweden, a totally foreign country for Assange, they can come up with any and all charges at their own leisure.
It is the Swedish prosecutor who must now file formal charges, something they have not done yet. Only "allegations", which mysteriously to all, finds its way on the Interpol (very very suspicious).
"Allegations" are not charges. How can Assange defend himself against unspecified crimes?
This combined with PayPal, VISA, Mastercard, Swiss banks and Bank Of America preventing their customers to transfer money to Wikileaks, smells like something very very rotten.
Exactly what Wikileaks is created to expose!
Btw, did you know promiscuity may be genetically triggered? We should not be so quick to condemn. Look at the bigger picture.
I'm using Ruby for a personal project of mine going on for about a year now, semi-fulltime. I'd like to add that I've been programming since I was 8 years old, and have a grasp of most common procedural languages except LISP and functional languages.
If you don't like Ruby because it's too powerful for you, fine. However for my needs, Ruby has really made my system of several processes faster to create, more dynamically flexible than I first envisioned, easier to extend and refactor. In fact, my experience has been so positive, that I have almost nothing negative to say about Ruby and ActiveRecord. This is because whatever hurdles I met, I overcame them, and often enhanced my system further by learning to do things better from the higher-level and down.
What you list as weaknesses of Ruby, as a quite experienced programmer, I see as benefits:
1) "Monkey patching": I have a few files where I extend basic objects like String, Object, etc., for use with serializing and mathematical extensions I required. No I don't "monkey patch" unless required, but native float is just too horrible, so I had to modify BigDecimal to make the core functions easier to use. I also combined Msgpack (faster serialize, but doesn't support all Ruby types) and Marshal (native serializing in Ruby), to be able to serialize everything over the faster Msgpack implementation as strings of Marshal. It is faster and more compact than just using Marshal. ActiveRecord was extended because I needed lightning fast mass "insert-or-updates" to DB, for which I used temporary db tables. A very simplistic one-liner is all that is required to update any of my tables with arrays of objects. Neato.
Now, the files and lines where I extended library and core functionality is not too great, and it allowed me to stich together already accessible functionality to improve performance, and making things more readable and accessible at the same time.
For very little effort, "monkey patching" enabled me to extend my very programming environment and libraries, something which in many languages are not possible.
Of course, when abused or misunderstood, this can be negative, just like a pistol is harmful in the hands of a child. When upgrading, of course, I'll need to review and test the code to see if something's changed. But these are very small drawbacks for me, and I have minimized and compartmentalized the code.
2) Duck typing: After using Ruby, I'm on the other side of the fence. I now see absolutely no reason to declare types anywhere. What I did instead is to create standard-code to dynamically check incoming arguments of all functions. That way, I can have a sort of one-sided contract behaviour, checking for *whatever* I want in the beginning of the function using instance_eval(), and save myself all the troubles of static types altogether, while enhancing my system at the same time.
I realize the standard Ruby libraries are missing such functionality, and also the efficient error-handling routines I created, but once you have such functions in place (what you need), I see no reason for static types. In fact, getting rid of types allows for more flexible arguments and handling, better fail-checks and faster development altogether. If something is wrong, often my argument- or paranoia-checking code is picking it up instantly. Neato.
3) ActiveRecord: Yes, it's ORM, but only if you want to. You can use db-depdendent, direct sql if you like, or get faster queries using arrays of arrays instead of the more general ActiveRecord objects. What ActiveRecord has done for me, is save me from endless work with SQLs, only to change them again and again. I've also extended the functionality of ActiveRecord, to deliver fast insert-update operations. If I were stuck with creating dozens of SQLs, I would probably have missed that opportunity to optimize. Because ActiveRecord freed me, but didn't bar me, from the low-levels, I was able to optimize more from the higher-level down.
Another thing ActiveRecord has done, is make my db schema totally normalized and efficient. Its model and naming convention has forced me to really think what is it exactly that I need, what are the relationships. In how many projects do you even have a normalized logical and physical model? Here I got it almost for free, just using the programming language constructs and trying to adhere to the standard. If you're having trouble with ActiveRecord, my bet is that you need to spend some time improving the normalization of your models.
I understand using ActiveRecord on an already-defined schema can mean trouble though. Its best fit is for new projects. I also don't use the migrations command-line tools, but just keep all models and dbobjects in my own separate files, and update the db when necessary. I'm not using Rails.
ORMs can be bad, but in my experience ActiveRecord does a good job of it, and doesn't force you anything you don't want. You should of course find out why things are slow when they are slow, and in my experience it IS possible to rectify all such cases. Don't shoot it down just because you're lazy.. See it as a RAD tool instead, which you should build on top of.. You can quickly get a working prototype, and then start optimizing. Isn't that the most agile approach anyways?
4) Ruby Gems: I dislike the native compiling and the hardware-dependent binary blobs, and the occational need to override the system-string. But once you've got it working, it's very neat. You can install / uninstall from commandline, and get impressive amounts of libraries and functionality. If you're spending too much time making general libraries, you're doing something wrong, because most can be had with the Ruby gems.
I haven't tried CPAN too much. Perl I can modify, but I absolutely hate the language syntaxes (yes, plural).
Ruby is for me elegant, simple and powerful. But it can become dangerous in the wrong hands.
There's no doubt in my mind that Ruby has made things possible for me in one year, which would probably take a good team several years to accomplish. You just have to see the possibilities and work smart.. You won't get top-notch low-level performance, but you might be able to squeeze out even better performance from working from the higher-level down.
How Ruby is in teams, is another matter..
However with some smart coding and some standards, such as my suggestions above, it should be possible to surpass productivity of most other languages, such as Perl and Java, because of Ruby's many advantages:
http://learnruby.com/about-ruby.html
So I see alot of neat possibilties in Ruby. Just wished there were better standard libraries for such important core functionality such as argument-checking, paranoia-checking (or program by contract) and errorhandling (standardized pretty-printing of errors with local variables, helpful context information from which function, line of the check that failed, line number, etc.)
However, even though some things were missing, Ruby did enable me to extend it for myself. Which is a good thing in my book.
I'm very fond of the scientific method and principles myself. I also agree about funding and special interest groups. They generate alot of biased crap generally, I guess it's human nature, at least it's nothing new. However, when done right, nothing beats scientific results hands down. There is alot of superstition, which can even be harmful, and many "non-intuitive" answers to be gotten from science.
However, I've had experiences which have taught me that 1000 scientists can be wrong, and that basing my life on scientific consensus means the lowest common denominator. So not always what I'd like to do.
I'm also the creative and investigative type of people. I guess, at some point, we need to just make our own decisions, and basing everything in my life on scientific papers, would just make it impossible for me to be who I am. Many great experiences that I've had, I would be without, and if that were so, I would much rather not live. They were that important to me.
I'd rather not go into details, because it's personal, and very few people on
I know I am not an expert in this. I was just offering my opinion, and I don't see any refutations yet.
News for you:
Peer reviewed papers != Reality
Are you a biologist all the time? Chemist all the time?
If you can't communicate with other people in "emotional terms", ie. plain language, then you're a nerd, out of touch with fellow human beings.
I said I'm not an expert on farming, and if you'd like me to do your homework, I'm sorry, you're probably more qualified for that than me. But only if you're willing.
What kind of harm do you believe they will suffer?
What is it exactly that you fear so much?
Children watch porn. At least everyone I ever talked with honestly said they did. They did so in the 60s, 70, 80s, 90s, 00s.., and probably before that too.
It's just that they don't understand it, so get tired of it after 5 minutes. Until they become teens of course...
Why is this a problem again?
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
