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Comment Re: Let's not kid ourselves (Score 1) 492

You don't put wind turbines in cities either because the buildings break up the wind

There are quite a few buildings in my city with wind turbines on their roofs. We also have the more sculpture-like turbines on some of our raised mass transit platforms.

But that wasn't my point. My point was that cities are already killing birds with their tall buildings on the plains, in the valleys, on the mountains, etc, but not in the oceans. It's a distinctly different environment with different bird species with different behaviors.

Comment Re: Let's not kid ourselves (Score 1) 492

The danger to birds is overblown (no pun intended). There are plenty of offshore projects in the UK, though. It does cost a bit more, although there is more wind off the coast.

I agree. Tall glass buildings are a much bigger threat to birds than wind turbines, so the impact of wind turbines shouldn't have concerned people who are fine with the death toll from buildings. Putting the turbines in the ocean seems like a different situation though; We don't build cities in ocean. But maybe the ocean will come into our cities if we don't build enough wind tubines and solar panels.

Comment Re: Let's not kid ourselves (Score 1) 492

In the UK that's not really the case as onshore wind is pretty much dead due to changes in planning rules.

I wonder how those rules will be impacted by the bladeless wind generators being developed, or wind harnessing faux trees that can be installed in cities.

I'm not familiar with the pushback against wind power in the UK, but in the US there are complaints about the noise, aesthetic, and danger to birds. The newer wind generators seem to solve those problems so the opposition may relent.

Comment Re: Let's not kid ourselves (Score 5, Informative) 492

Did you know that coal power is subsidized?

Do people want to live closer to solar, wind or coal power plants? Maybe renewable energy reduces transmission costs because production can be located closer to customers.

Finally, on your point about backup energy sources. Tesla installed a multi-megawatt battery in Australia that more than pays for itself by leveling out energy production from coal, among other things: https://electrek.co/2018/01/23...

So I'm going to guess that backup capacity is not going to bring wind power up to 3x its current price in order to make it comparable to coal. It might in fact make it even cheaper as demonstrated in Australia.

Coal power is dead. It's a market failure, a health failure and climate failure.

Comment Re: Attempting to twist the conversation (Score 1) 109

Collective ownership is socialist. If you search for socialism online, the first five results or so refer to social ownership of production as socialism. If the customers of an ISP also work for the ISP, then that's a socialist enterprise. Worker owned businesses are also socialist. If big G Government owns and operates a business, it's socialist only if the government is beholden to the will of the people. The United States Post Office isa great example of a government run socialist enterprise.

Socialism and Communism are not the same thing, but Communism was an attempt to implement socialism at a grand scale. I think it failed on a key point though: the will of the people was silenced.

Comment Portland did it already (Score 1) 109

We had a community run mesh network called Personal Telco. It's mostly gone now because gigabit internet service is cheap and reliable from the major ISPs, whereas Personal Telco was basically free but slow and unreliable. We also have two non-profit ISPs providing mesh networks, one called StepHouse using legitimate commercial grade hardware to do it. I think they will succeed where most have failed because they're a legitimate business charging for access rather than relying on the good will of people.

Comment But do those users trust Facebook (Score 1) 80

Most of my friends are on Facebook, but I'm the only one who's willing to verify my identity or send payments through Facebook. Actually, I really don't trust the payment system.

So, I think the conversion rate is going to be much lower than the Libra investors expect it to be.

Ripple (XRP) on the other hand has banks as the transaction verifiers, and major investors. People will trust Ripple way more than LibraCoin.

Comment Re: Ice cream melts because it's baseball season (Score 1) 47

Would it be difficult to find another remote job? Like I said, they're becoming more commonplace. Also, if you already worked remotely, a remote job is easier to get because they're already experienced in working remotely.

And no, you need a solid fast connection to work remotely. You need to be able to video conference, regularly download updates to packages and dev software that can be up to a gig for each download period. Then there's remotely debugging issues on a cloud hosted instance.

  I've tried working remotely on a slow connection and it was a miserable experience that took ten times as long to do most things.

Comment Re:Ice cream melts because it's baseball season (Score 1) 47

Improvements to Internet service attract people who care about good Internet service, who tend to be more affluent, and thus tend to have lower unemployment rates, statistically speaking, which tends to result in more improvements to Internet service. But nothing in there in any way implies any possibility of better Internet service actually making people more employable or creating jobs; rather it implies the creation of segregated enclaves of wealth and jobs in areas with better service amidst a sea of impoverished communities with poor service.

I agree with you that for the most part, the causal link is the opposite of what the headline mentioned. But I think you've also uncovered why a broadband company should invest in more rural communities. Remote jobs for affluent, skilled workers are becoming more commonplace, and a portion of those workers want to live in rural areas, but couldn't before because of the commute times. Now the only thing stopping them from moving into these rural communities is the broadband speeds. If ISPs invest in these communities, they'll attract affluent workers who will bring money into the communities, creating service jobs.

Comment Open Source OS isn't invulnerable (Score 1) 119

Just add a complicated new feature or major patch with an "accidental" buffer overflow bug. It probably won't get noticed for a long time if it's added by an employee or friend of the repo maintainer, and if it is noticed then they claim it was an accident. Then they do it again using a different contributor.

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