Articles tagged: links
Thursday, 15 July, 2010. Tagged with: government, links, software, travel
Why governing Americans is so hard
Howard Gleckman in the Christian Science Monitor:
The conventional wisdom is that Americans are fed up with their government. But our demands on policymakers are so inconsistent and irrational that we make governing nearly impossible. We hate big deficits, but oppose the actual tax increases or spending cuts that we need to dam the flood of the red ink. We are furious that government passed an $800 billion stimulus last year, but feel lawmakers are not doing enough to get the economy going. We want government to “do something” about the gulf oil spill but reject government interference in private business.
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We are, collectively, four. We want what we want, and we want it now. And we want somebody else to pay for it.
Why your plane is always full
James Fallows:
… I got up before 5:30am today to get an 8:15am flight out of Dulles, only to find an email from the airline saying that the flight had been delayed to 10:45. The inbound flight – from Dubai! – is late, and there are no spare planes to go on to San Francisco. OK – gladder to know now than before leaving the house for the airport, though ideally it would have great to know last night. Nothing to be done. But it was a serendipitous intro to the very next item in the email inbox: a report on how substantially airline capacity continues to be cut. There just are fewer flights anywhere, and more of them are full, than in yesteryear.
Microsoft opens source code to Russian secret service
Tom Espiner, ZDNet UK:
Microsoft has signed a deal to open its Windows 7 source code up to the Russian intelligence services.
Russian publication Vedomosti reported on Wednesday that Microsoft had also given the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) access to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server source code, with hopes of improving Microsoft sales to the Russian state.
The agreement will allow state bodies to study the source code and develop cryptography for the Microsoft products through the Science-Technical Centre ‘Atlas’, a government body controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Press, according to Vedomosti.
(via Bruce Schneier)
Sunday, 07 February, 2010. Tagged with: links, travel
I blogged about smartphone-augmented travel over on the Crazy Like That blog. Check it out.
Sunday, 06 December, 2009. Tagged with: education, environment, links, money, unintendedconsequences
NYT piece on plasma centers in Texas and the economic attraction of plasma donation, particularly to Mexican factory workers.
Interesting figure: The average $30 donation payment results in $300 worth of product. Also, a Michigan blood center is seeing some whole-blood volunteer donors shifting to being paid for plasma elsewhere.
With some college texts running over $200, and tuition costs increasing, there’s a bit of curiosity about the future of textbooks and how they might live on ebook readers like the Kindle or Nook. The Atlantic Wire collects some links. (Disclosure: My daytime employer, WebAssign, does business with universities and college textbook publishers)
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looks into whether what we cook with and store our food in impacts our health.
Sunday, 27 September, 2009. Tagged with: environment, links
Three New York Times articles suggest a very pragmatic direction to improve energy efficiency, reduce need for new power plants - or, allow for less efficient plants to be retired - and thereby reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted.
Solar Power, Without All Those Panels
…companies are now offering alternatives to these fixed installations, in the less conspicuous form of shingles, tiles and other building materials that have photovoltaic cells sealed within them.
”The new materials are part of the building itself, not an addition, and they are taking photovoltaics to the next level — an aesthetic one,” said Alfonso Velosa III, a research director at Gartner and co-author of a coming report on the market for the new field, called building-integrated photovoltaics.
By giving a home or building the capacity to satisfy some of its own power requirements, the grid itself gets a bit of an infrastructural buffer. Think fewer brownouts during high demand, or the ability to keep the fridge running if a transformer down the street blows up.
Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize
The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money — and more in government contracts — to the first company that figures out how to do it.
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The L Prize has garnered significant attention in the lighting industry because 60-watt incandescent lamps represent 50 percent of all the lighting in the United States, with 425 million sold each year. The Energy Department says that if all those lamps were LED equivalents, enough power would be saved to light 17.4 million American households and cut carbon emissions by 5.6 million metric tons annually.
The article talks about Phillips’ entry for the L Prize, but I’d keep my eye on Morrisville-based Cree.
It’s Easy Being Green
Paul Krugman:
It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.
How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.
I’d settle for staying even.
Thursday, 22 January, 2009. Tagged with: links, technological failure
So, peanut butter’s been in the news, lately:
