If Homer’s Odyssey had been Twittered.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Remembering Three-Mile Island
I have some thoughts today, over at PJM.
How Did It Go?
Here’s a graph of Anti-HumanityEarth Hour’s effects in California.
It doesn’t really surprise me. Even if a lot of people dimmed lights, the amount of electricity used for lights in CA isn’t that huge a percentage of the total demand. For instance, one of the biggest drivers, particularly in the Bay Area, 24/7/365, is server farms, and no Virginia, even in the land of fruits and nuts, they’re not going to shut them down for a stupid political propaganda stunt.
[Update a few minutes later]
Just To Be Safe
There are only two days left before the Conficker worm does whatever it’s going to do. Go check out your Windows system.
The Naturalistic Fallacy
John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:
The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.
Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.
Just An Hour And A Half Until
…time to celebrate human achievement. Get those lights on at 8:30!
So Close
…and yet so far.
I’ve been slowly bringing my Fedora Core 9 box up to full utility, and had a major breakthrough today, in that I finally got flash/shockwave running in Firefox. The problem now? No sound.
When I go System/Preference/Hardware/Volume Control, I get the message: “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.”
I’ve checked, and Gstreamer and Gstreamer-plugins-good are installed. I tried G*-plugins-bad and ugly, but they weren’t to be found in the repository (is this a 64-bit problem?). Anyway, anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is there some command line to detect the sound card (it’s built into the board)?
I Want One
Behold, the hotelicopter.
Heresy
Did Natasha Richardson die of Canadacare?
But it’s so much more “efficient.”
A Breakthrough
One of my consulting clients is very Windows centric, and I thought it was going to be a problem when my Windows desktop died a few weeks ago. Though, actually, I could never access either their Sharepoint or Exchange servers even when it was up, because there was some software on it that was incompatible with Juniper, so the only way I could get in was with my Vista laptop. Well, just for the hell of it, I tried to access both sites today using Firefox in Fedora, and it seems to be fully functional, so it gets along better with my client’s server than my Windows 2000 machine did.
This is interesting on two levels: first, that the security system didn’t complain, and second, that Linux Firefox seems to play well with Microsoft sites. It’s come a long way, baby.