Category Archives: Technology and Society

Fossil Fuels

Gaia loves them:

In the end, Japan’s work in this field is good news. This is still a very new technology, and it is likely to become significantly safer the more we learn and study it. More R&D needs to go into the technology supporting offshore drilling for methane hydrates before we can seriously consider doing this, but the potential is certainly there.

The energy revolution just keeps getting better.

But it makes Baby JeebusAlgore cry.

Thunderbird Spam Filter, WTF!?

OK, I’ve been living with this for too long, and I can’t find anything about it anywhere with web searches.

Thunderbird’s spam filter is absolutely stupid. Every effing day I have to dig through the junk folder to find legitimate email from people whom I’ve repeatedly (as in dozens of times) told it are not spammers, and from subjects (e.g., mailing lists, like arocket) that I’ve repeatedly told it is legitimate email I want to read. It absolutely refuses to learn. I can handle false negatives in spam reporting, but when it continually buries legitimate emails after I’ve implicitly whitelisted them, I can no longer tolerate this.

Am I the only one with this problem?

Green Cars’ Dirty Little Secret

They’re not very green. All they do is move the emissions to a different location.

The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.

It’s not about the economics. It’s about feelings, which are of course the highest value.

Really, Facebook?

I just got this email from them:

Steve Mims mentioned you in a comment.

Steve wrote: “The ACLU wholeheartedly supports Senator Paul’s efforts to make the Obama administration explain why it feels it has the right to kill Americans on American soil when they are not attacking America.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/06/Exclusive-ACLU-backs-Rand Simberg

Apparently the bot that makes these connections is confusing me with Rand Paul, to the point that it’s actually substituting my name for his.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve deleted the link to the Facebook discussion, per comments.

[Update a while later]

OK, here‘s a safer link to the original FB post.