The gas [NF3], widely used in the manufacture of flat screen TVs, is estimated to be 17,000 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
Ironically, NF3 is not covered by the Kyoto protocol as it was only produced in tiny amounts when the treaty was signed in 1997.
Levels of this gas in the atmosphere have not been measured, but scientists say it is a concern and are calling for it to be included in any future emissions cutting agreement.
If its not TVs its cow farts. Tomorrow it will be my bar of Irish Spring. Just to be clear: I get it. Pollution = bad. I'm not down with pollution. I am as green as is practical and will be greener still once green tech gets up to speed. Looking at this from a "guy who studies and tries to help solve problems" angle, seriously, thisAs much as it might be needed, no purge of any hierarchy's long-since-useful staff is likely (aside from normal attrition of boomers with sufficient retirement savings). Those who resist the most (based on the angry finger-waving I get when I bring it up) are those that don't have their minds in the right place, a'la Bill G. In the end it isn't an argument about how successful any given individual or mission was, its about the kind of shift that is taking place all around that overwhelms individual will. I mean, no matter how much you might like the sound, there is a reason why REO Speedwagon is playing at the local country club and not Wolf Trap. Calls for reform aren't about malice or disrespect, they're about business. When you make it personal, that's when you end up causing the most damage.]]>Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it. Whatever the corporate-social-responsibility gurus say, business is a force for good in itself: its most useful contribution to society is making profits and products. Philanthropy no more canonises the good businessman than it exculpates the bad. In spite of his flaws, Mr Gates is one of the good kind. Some great industrialists, like Henry Ford, stick around even as the world moves on and their powers fail. Mr Gates, pragmatic to the end, is leaving at the top.
]]> mid-careerists are fleeing the service, that theoretically leaves O-5s and up who “don’t get it” and kids who get it but see what kind of reaction “it” gets from seniors to carry us through the next 10-15 years. When today’s seniors retire we’ll be into roughly the 3rd decade of the info age with a military led by people who have done their best to misuse and abuse information technology, and a force that drastically under-performs with the tools it has because they have never had any top-cover. Well, “never” might be too strong a word because clearly there are mavericks in this age just as there has been in others (H/T Bob):Unfortunately, high-speed communications and bold initiative do not always go hand in hand. With such an abundance of information available simultaneously at all levels, micromanagement can creep unnoticed into the chain of command and pull it apart. For example, if a general is able to follow an ongoing firefight through email and IM, and he is inclined to believe he knows what's best for the units in contact, then he very well might start directing those small units from afar, consequently eliminating the need for his colonels, captains, and sergeants to do any thinking of their own.
For practitioners, “publish” has always been something of a dirty word. “Who has time to research and write; I’ve got a day job!” And that would be true today if publishing still meant months of library time, weeks spent finding an outlet, still more weeks editing, and in the end an audience realistically measured in the dozens. Publishing also has the stink of “academic” on it, which in some quarters is as welcome as Bud distributor at an AA meeting. Today of course anyone can publish (ahem) and while your initial audience might still only measure in the dozens** your ideas spread virally and that nominal audience just might include people of substance who move in rarified circles that you would never have contact with under normal circumstances . Reaching honchos is a nice bennie, but really this is about making meaningful, functional connections as rapidly as possible (social networking for grunts). As was pointed out recently, and as I have experienced first hand, no one has a lock on good ideas and no one wants to pull an Edison and rack up thousands of failures before finally achieving success (especially if people are shooting at you). I suspect however that the real driver behind our inability to rapidly adapt in this area has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with psychology. Somewhere around the late 80s it was not enough that you ran your platoon or company or battalion; someone at the next level was always sticking their nose into what was ostensibly your business. “Center mass” in a performance evaluation was essentially a career ender. Your PC-quotient mattered more come promotion time than your demonstrated skills and abilities. There was a time when you would be allowed to salvage a nominal s***-bird, but no longer. 20 years in such a system, plus the immediacy that technology brings, has predictably produced seniors who not only cannot let people do their jobs, they’re doing it for them in real-time. If I had a solution beyond going Marshall on the senior ranks and elevating O3s and O4s to O6 and O7 and kick starting the revolution in military information affairs, well, I would have a much busier speaking schedule. ** You can’t see it in the picture, but Shane’s shirt reads: “More people have read this shirt than your blog.” ]]>Adm. Stavridis pointed out that publishing no longer has to be done on paper. “Get out there in the blogs. I’ll see you in the blogosphere,” he stated. He also emphasized that writing doesn’t have to be long articles. Anyone can start by writing a short response in a blog. “Start small and think big.”
It’s likely because Germans, like the French and Italians, ran out of patience with domestic terror groups years ago.
A recent line from another journalist (I forget whom at the moment) also applies: 'few people have seen a dead American soldier.' More broadly, few know one, period. 9/11 directly impacted few and the post-attack security measures are no different. I doubt it will change much if we are attacked again. ]]>