We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.

OSS ESR has been involved in or founded:

Fetchmail, GPSd, CML2, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Jargon File, Terminfo/Termcap, VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS), Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack, GNU Toolkit SED, Hexdump, gif2png, Bogofilter, Countless Howtos at the LDP

With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.

The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir:

  - RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes.
  - ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes.

I've talked to him. It's amusing. And inspiring. And a little frustrating. At least as of a couple years ago he'd still interrupt you every single time you said "Linux" to stick a "GNU" in there.

Why do you refer to Stallman as a wacko? Why do you accuse him of being insane?

I would love to read the opinion of someone trained in human mental health care insofar as Stallman's mental health is concerned.

That's a long list, but most of them are toys, scripts or quick hacks. Even the ones that almost look significant at first glance -- i.e. bogofilter or sed -- not so much.

His version of bogofilter was 900 lines of code and his version of sed 1700. I'd guess that the total amount of code that he's written that gets packaged for a standard Linux distribution is maybe 5k LOC. That's being generous, honestly. And that's what I find disingenuous when he's busy talking about his prolific OSS background.

The comments about Stallman's sanity weren't meant to be taken literally. I assumed that was obvious.

"And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses." --ESR

"Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculates that there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent of the 198 million cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road today. Ideally, the energy charging those cars would come from carbon-free sources, which would reduce almost to zero the greenhouse gas emissions per mile. But a joint study by Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that even if a plug-in vehicle got all its electricity from coal-fired plants (the U.S. electricity grid is about 50 percent coal), it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car. Over the next thirty years, the study concluded, widespread adoption of V2G could eliminate 450 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of retiring a third of the current fleet." From Earth: The Sequel (p. 226)

This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night.

> it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car

2/3 isn't significantly different than 1 as far as I'm concerned. Especially when were talking about what goes into making the batteries.

Without clean grid electricity, electric cars are merely a feel-good way of outsourcing the problem.

I realize that. However, also realize that wind power is running at peak production during the night, which is when people would be charging their cars. Also realize the 2/3 number was for if 100% of the power was coming from coal, which it obviously wouldn't be.

How much power in the US is generated by wind?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States

However, it accounts for about a third of all new electricity production. You have to remember that a cap-and-trade bill is going to be what makes both V2G and renewable energy profitable, so if it becomes profitable to build V2G cars then it will also be profitable to increase wind capacity. I forgot that solar thermal is also an excellent candidate for creating electricity at night, since you can store excess hot water very efficiently during the day and then use a small amount of natural gas to make sure it's at the optimally efficient temperature to spin the turbines.

No. Here is the Wikipedia quote: "Wind power accounted for 35% of all new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Capacity is not production. Capacity-factor helps us understand how much production we can expect from a given capacity. Here are the capacity-factors of two recently-installed wind turbines:

http://www.hullwind.org

  Sept 25, 2008              Hull 1       Hull 2
                             660 KW       1.8 MW       

  Total Generation - kWhs  10,262,150    8,127,391 

  Days Commissioned          2464           877 
  Hours generating          39,050        14,050 
  Capacity Factor            26.3%         21.5%

1/3 is quite a lot in that respect.

Checking the study in question (first hit for 'study "Electric Power Research Institute" "Natural Resources Defense Council"'), it seems they did _not_ take into account the production and maintenance costs of each type of vehicle.

I'm skeptical of technologies that promise incremental conservation through massive consumption of other resources (battery material).

To quote E:TS again:

"Without any major breakthroughs, vehicles that are little different from today's could use one-third the energy per mile, says John DeCicco, Environmental Defense Fund's specialist in automotive strategies. That alone would radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If those cars ran on a biofuel made from renewable feedstocks with one-fourth the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of today's gasoline (Amyris's biogasoline, for instance, or Verenium's cellulosic ethanol), then the emissions per mile would be one-twelfth what they are today, a reduction of 92 percent. It was the feasibility of such options that, in September 2007, caused Vermont U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions to reject manufacturers' challenges and rule that they could meet California's new standards, requiring carbon dioxide emissions in new cars to be cut about 22 percent in the first phase (2009 through 2012) and 30 percent in the mid-term phase (2013 to 2016). Given the expected doubling by midcentury of vehicle miles traveled in the United States, however, California and the rest of the country will have to go much further--reducing automobile emissions about 80 percent." (p. 229)

The book lists a whole boatload of other ways to save massive amounts of energy with today's technology, many of which are listed in my notes of chapter 9: http://alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The sections on weather prediction, clean cement, carpeting, and fans are insanely cool.

...

"Another innovation came in the carpet pattern itself. The company's top-selling pattern, called Entropy, mimics the disorder of a forest floor with its strewn leaves, pebbles, and twigs. That randomness means that the pattern needn't match up from tile to tile, but can be laid out in any direction, eliminating the huge amounts of scrap normally generated at installation. It means few tiles are rejected at the factor: imperfections get lost in the wandering variations of color. It also means the carpet lasts a long time, because worn or stained tiles can be swapped out without replacing the rest." (p. 215)

Sounds like a good book.

But I'm sure he is useful to society. We're all unique snowflakes.

Sure. You can gauge a hacker's grip on reality based on what specific year they stopped taking him seriously. One does not get granularity that fine very often. Few people spend a day a week composing more and more whacky odes to junk science and more and more possessed rants against the cultural tapestries of entire continents. Even fewer people manage to slowly but consistently rack it up over the better part of a decade. Every field should get itself some Raymond or other, really.

Now excuse me while I go sip some latte, nibble some brie, and appease to some Islamofascists with my fellow Idiotarians.

http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm

http://www.sspi.gatech.edu

A book, "Silent Power", summarizing the work of the SSPW to date will be published here.

Chapter One "Climate Change - Nutritional Impacts" explains how the food we eat is slowly changing due to rising CO2

http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf

From that .pdf:

In one important study, Dr. Clenton Owensby and colleagues, studied ruminants grazing in a FACE range with a doubled CO2 level on Kansas’ grassy rangelands. Their studies into the impact of increasing carbon dioxide on those rangelands revealed a surprising effect. The grass these animals foraged from the FACE range had less nitrogen and correspondingly less protein. The protein content and digestibility, even by the four highly efficient stomachs of ruminants, was reduced at increased CO2 level.