steve_g

Rene Descartes walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "Give me a Bud light." The bartender asks, "Do you want a glass?" Descartes says, "I think not.." and promptly disappears.

But the folks who would bear the costs of improving efficiency don't appear to value the resulting reduction in pollution more than the cost. If they did, they would pay for the efficiency.

The pro-pollution argument is this - pollution is an unwanted environmental result of an otherwise desirable activity. Reducing pollution may mean curtailing the desirable activity (undesirable) or changing how the activity is performed to reduce the unwanted consequence. The second approach usually makes the activity more expensive and thus less desirable.

No one would argue that reducing pollution at a lower cost is a problem; that would benefit everyone. The problem is that pollution reduction is almost always a trade-off To understand the trade-offs you must understand the consequences and costs. The element that makes the whole situation intractable is that different people value the costs and benefits differently.

Sorry, this is a tough one.

If both ends of the communication are on the Microsoft stack, setting up SOAP webservices is straightforward. The tools basically take care of everything. In our case, we have a customer who exposed an ASP.NET webservice that we consume (data flows in both directions). Our production apps use VB.NET to hit the webservice, but I was able to easily write a python client for testing (by handrolling the SOAP messages).

My intuition is that SOAP starts becoming unpleasant if you have lots of parties involved and/or multiple platforms. We haven't hit that wall.