I finally got around to watching “An Inconvenient Truth” tonight, and I have to say, I’m all riled up.

There can be no doubt that climate change is real and is caused by human activity. That’s not what I’m all riled up about. I’m all riled up about what we can do about it and more worryingly, is it already too late?

One of the first things to really “shock” me in the film was the graph of the world’s population. I suppose I’d always “known” it, but I’d never really “known” it, if you follow me. Our population isn’t growing exponentially, it’s growing in some way that defies my knowledge of mathematics to explain it. It’s more like a straight line rising straight up than any sort of curve. In the 1950s there were only a little more than 2 billion people in the world - now we are over 6 billion. In another 30 years there will be close to 9 billion.

That is one hell of a lot of people.

What is perhaps more disturbing is the percentage of the population that is “industrialized.” Because that percentage is rising at an astronomical rate as well. And if you consider that the more “industrialized” a people are, the more energy they consume, well… you don’t need a degree in economic theory to understand basic supply & demand. With that many people, demand for energy will go up a lot. And there is no way our supply can keep up - even if there were vast, untouched resources on the same scale as the Middle East, it wouldn’t be enough to keep up.

Without change, we are going to consume more and more energy. As supply dwindles, and as demand increases, economic pressure will push us to consume every last bit of energy possible - and to hell with the consequences.

We will put the future of the human race - the future of our children - at risk, just for a few more years of energy, of the lifestyle we’ve gotten used to, that we’re “comfortable” with. And this risk is far more than the risk we used to be afraid of at the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

There are only 3 possibilities to deal with this problem:

1. Reduce the population (thus decreasing demand)
2. Relocate the population (I’m talking about space colonization)
3. Invent new technologies to make better use of the limited energy we posses

Let’s address them in turn.

Number 1 is going to happen if we don’t do something yesterday. If things continue as they have gone in the last 50 years, we will see mass starvation and massive death all across the globe. One way or another, there will be fewer people around. But it won’t be a pretty sight.

Number 2 is my personal choice. Space colonization brings with it the ability to harvest energy from the sun - or even terraform other planets and use resources there instead of bringing them from Earth. At least then, if we screw up the Earth so bad, we ourselves won’t totally die out.

Number 3 is starting to happen - although still too slow in many people’s opinions. And new technology can only take us so far - we can only squeeze so much out of a limited resource, no matter how efficient we make the technology. Without deep, radical, fundamental changes in our understanding of how to get energy, we will run out.

When you look at it like that, all 3 choices seem pretty dismal. But the great thing is that we don’t have to choose just one - we can take the best part of each solution and try to use them all at once, and maybe together we can do something about it.

But there’s a dark side to all this. To make a difference, we all really have to do it together. I mean everyone, everywhere, every nation, every city, everyone. We can’t do it piecemeal. It can’t just be one or two or even three countries - even if they are the biggest polluters or energy consumers. It has got to be everyone. Because our human nature demands it - if you have to restrict yourself, change your lifestyle, you’re going to resent your neighbor if he (or she, or they) don’t have to do the same - if they get to keep their lifestyle, if they don’t have to make sacrifices like you do. Our human nature demands that we all give equally, or else none of us will give. (This is, of course, a form of the “tragedy of the commons.”)

And we will all have to give. This sort of change isn’t going to be easy. I have a favorite little quote from one of my favorite movies, “The Lion King,” that goes something like this:

“Change is good…”

“…Yeah, but it’s not easy!”

Truer words were never said.

But we must change. It’s not going to be painless - let’s get that right out in the open right now. It’s going to hurt. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. That’s the way change is. And like most major paradigm-shifting changes, you can’t really see how things are going to be until you’re on the other side - and so will it be with this change. We don’t know what the future will bring, or even what it will be like. But we know we have to make the change. Because we do know what the future will be like if we don’t change.

It is not going to be easy. But it will be good.

Once we are on the other side, things will be better. We’ll have the technology, the policies, the systems in place and it’ll all be easy. Because once you’ve made the change, and it’s over with, well, it’s no longer change anymore - it’s just the way things are.

As the movie credits rolled, I was reminded of another quote that I really like - maybe you’ve even heard it before. I think that it is just as appropriate now as it was when it was first uttered:

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

John F. Kennedy
Address at American University
Washington, D.C., 1963

This story over on Slashdot about how the Washington Post’s online executive editor Jim Brady is arguing against anonymity sparked quite a lively little debate.

The problem isn’t really anonymity - it’s identity.

They don’t want to know who a particular person is, they just want to somehow stop that one person from coming back. They don’t care who you are, they just want to make sure that “you” don’t come back.

This is not a new problem.

Basically, what you need is a trusted, secure, centralized system that you identify yourself to. This centralized system then anonymizes your identity to allow you to participate in anonymous discussions. If you mis-behave (or if the owner of the discussion group just doesn’t like you), you can be banned - and the system takes care of the actual “banning.” The owner of the discussion group just says “ban anonymous user #xxx” and the system connects it back to “you.”

It’s sort of like encryption - where only the central server has the decryption key.

As an interesting aside, Arthur C. Clarke made an interesting use of this concept in his novel “The Songs of Distant Earth“, in the form of “ship’s council.” If you can, pick up that book and read it to see an example of this problem “solved” (in a manner of speaking).

Unfortunately, because of the centralized requirement of this form of anonymity, it will never really be possible on the Internet. After all, there is no “central” anonymizing server. And you can’t just make your own for various reasons - your government might seize it, you yourself might not be trustworthy, etc.

I sort of hope that one day we can solve this problem - because it is a problem. Just look up “sock puppets” sometime and see what I mean. But for now, I think we all just have to learn to deal with it - because it’s better to have broken anonymity than no anonymity at all.

So I’ve been using Mozy for a little over a month now, and so far I’m pretty pleased with it. It did take a while to do the initial backup, but that’s to be expected - I do have a lot of data to back up!

I liked the fact that I could schedule Mozy to run at “reduced speed” during the work day when I’m using my computer - that was, in fact, a deal-buster. I need all of my bandwidth when I work!!

That said, there was one minor annoyance with Mozy - although I didn’t realize it was Mozy at first.

I had noticed that when I selected several files in Windows Explorer, and went to right-click them, Explorer would freeze up for up to 30 seconds. At first I just thought it was because the files I was currently selecting were on a remote server, but later I noticed the same thing was happening with local files as well.

Well, I’m no stranger to troubleshooting strange things in Windows, so I broke out some tools - namely, Process Monitor and Process Explorer. With these two tools, I was able to see that… Explorer was taking a long time to process my request. Digging in a little bit deeper, I saw that it was a shell extension to Explorer that was consuming all the time. Tracking it down was a little tricky since I’d never done shell extensions, but eventually the trail lead to… Mozy.

OK, so Mozy is slowing things down. I could understand why - whenever I opened the configuration screen for Mozy, it always took forever to open. I don’t know why, but I can guess - it’s connecting to the on-line service and reading a whole bunch of stuff, both from the on-line service and from my computer (presumably refreshing the list of files to be backed up, which is quite extensive). Now, why it was doing this when I right-clicked I don’t know - after all, I don’t know how their shell extension is written - but at least I knew what was causing the problem. Now I just needed to figure out how to fix it.

A quick web search didn’t turn up much, but there were a few hints about other people having the same problem, and a solution that was mentioned, but wasn’t explained.

To save people the trouble of hunting for the answer, I’ll just come out and say it. I found the setting that needs to be turned off after digging around a bit - basically, you turn off the shell extension feature of Mozy. While this might be a turn-off for some, for me it’s not a big deal. I don’t need to restore files often enough that I’d need a shell extension for it.

You can find the option by right-clicking your Mozy icon and choosing “Configure.” Then, click on the “Options” tab and check “Don’t show restore menu in Windows Explorer.” For good measure, I also checked “Don’t show MozyHome Remote Backup virtual drive in My Computer.”

After making those two changes, the problem went away - my right-clicks on multiple files were as speedy as ever. And I don’t miss the functionality I turned off, so it’s all good for me!

Hopefully this will help other people who’ve experienced the same symptoms. And perhaps Mozy will figure out why it slows down so much and fix the problem - though I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that it might not be easy - or even possible, given the circumstances. But oh well.

If you’re interested in my earlier post on Mozy, click here.

New York drivers are much like their New Jersey neighbors, except without the strange phobia of left turns.

Actually that’s not entirely fair - as you get further away from New Jersey, New York drivers take on a style all their own.

And it’s a fast style.

Although they retain the irritating habit of slowing down for no reason, by and large you are more likely to find New York drivers doing 120% of the posted speed limit on the Interstate - if not more. They do also tend to fall into “lemming” mode and do whatever the person in front of them / around them is doing, regardless of why (which irritates me to no end), but all in all they aren’t bad drivers at all. Though I’ve never driven in New York City… but that’s really a whole different world and doesn’t count.

New York drivers are also less likely to cut you off than a driver from New Jersey, they are more likely to tailgate very, very close to you if you don’t get out of their way.

Still, as I said, not bad drivers at all (all things considered).

Next time: Connecticut!

This is a follow-up to my posts on Where have all the children gone and More on the “Missing Children”.

Bruce Schneier writes about how overprotective we’ve become of children. He quotes a story of a mother who lets her son take the New York City subway home on his own, trusting him to follow her instructions and be safe.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Now, I may not have grown up in New York City, but as a kid I used to wander for miles and miles on my own. I’m sure many people reading this can say the same thing - and we all turned out OK, right?

So why are we so scared to let children go out and actually be children?