The right to communicate is a more general version of "free speech and free press", and needs to be an absolute right. Man cannot exist above subsistence except as a society, and a society cannot operate if you cannot communicate. By "cannot exist", I mean even the most determined backwoods survivalist uses tools and knowledge they got from someone else, and at a minimum has to be able to communicate "get off my land". Since we cannot tell in advance what kinds of communication are needed, or what technical means we use to carry it out, it needs to be an absolute right. Any attempt to interfere with communication (hello SOPA) must be looked at with extreme suspicion.
I pay the IRS for my Second Life net earnings just like any other small business. The key thing to understand is that it becomes real money at the point Linden Lab/Second Life cashes me out to PayPal. Anything before that is just internal data on their servers. I also get to deduct all my legitimate expenses, like internet connection, depreciation on my PC.
As far as labor laws, the question is are Coffee and Power service providers (the people doing the work) an employee of anyone under government rules? If they are, then minimum wage and other rules apply. But your hair salon person isn't your employee, they are providing a service for a fee. If they come do it at your house, generally they would still not be an employee. There are technical rules about when you do become one, and thus covered by all the labor laws.
The great idea in Second Life isn't the avatars or 3D graphics, it's a "frictionless microcurrency". Frictionless in that transactions between users have no fees, and microcurrency in that the smallest unit is 0.004 US$. The great failure of Linden Lab (owners of Second Life) is not realizing that frictionless money has huge potential outside their little virtual world.
Meanwhile, what does Rosedale come up with? A new kind of currency with 15% overhead, even more than credit cards and PayPal charges. All I can say is WTF?
What advantage does Coffee and Power have over the "Gigs" section of Craigslist, aside from prettier website? Does anyone know?
I tried to do that last month, because I had sold my big screen TV, there being nothing but crap on basic cable any more. Instead Comcast made me a 6 month deal to pay less for internet, and still keep TV service, even though I have no way to watch it. My bill is $20 a month less, so I really don't care how they split it, but it's interesting how hard they tried to keep me on TV service. I wonder if they get paid by advertisers according to audience as measured by subscriptions? Then it doesn't actually matter if I don't watch.
Gravitational confinement fusion - the only kind known to work so far. It's somewhat lacking in shielding though. Even from 149.6 million km away, it will still kill you several ways if you don't have the equivalent of 10 meters of water or 4 meters of rock to protect you.
Copies of music files are no longer a scarce commodity. In the days of vinyl, you needed raw materials and a pressing plant to make copies. These days it's utterly trivial. Live performances, on the other hand, are scarce. The performer only has so many nights, and the venues only have so many seats. You can make lots of money touring. 20,000 seats at $50 each adds up to a lot of money. They could probably milk things like watching recording sessions or touring with the band for special fans for extra revenue.
I seem to remember Jesus copying the loaves and fishes and distributing them, putting hardworking bakers and fishermen out of work. But the story is told as an example that sharing is good.
If you add up the downloads for the two versions at http://www.crydev.net/faq.php there have been 1.06 million legal downloads of the free software development kit that lets you mod the Crysis 2 game, create new levels, or even entire games from scratch, and then sell them. So while it may have been the most pirated, at the same time it may be the most free and legal downloads too. I don't have numbers for other game engine SDKs, so I can't say for sure if it's the most downloaded, but a million is sure a lot of them.
The answer is to defund corporations and big government. If you get houses built the way Habitat for Humanity does it (crowdsourced construction), and don't have to take out a bank loan, just pay them back for materials, then bye bye banks. If you get your food from a community run farm, where a professional farmer or two manages it, and everyone helps at peak times your cost of food goes way down. If food and housing are covered, your need for a paid job goes down, and therefore so does your tax bill. Interest and taxes are overhead on your life. So intelligently reduce overhead.
All the discussion here about home solar is beside the point, because home scale projects are still twice the cost they need to be competitive in most places. Utility scale projects in the USA southwest are competitive NOW, so that is where the action is. Check out the 1 Gigawatt Blythe Solar plant in Riverside County, CA:
Wholesale or buying for a utility scale power plant would be even lower, but you can see that average prices have fallen in half the last three years. That means the high cost producers are just out of luck and need to adapt or die.
That would not happen, but it would be possible to delist supporters of SOPA from search engines, and refuse them hosting, network connections, etc. If they are trying to destroy your business, there is no rule that says you have to do business with them.
Vote for the guy who has taken the least in bribes, I mean "campaign contributions", from corporations. It's easy enough to find out how much from third party sites like http://www.opensecrets.org/
Heck, they could have bought the real bag, used it in the movie, and auctioned it off afterwards as a famous movie prop and probably gotten more for it than they paid. This is assuming the item was not destroyed while making the film. I have not seen it and have no plans to.
They have failed to create scarcity. Any book of any popularity is already available as a free download by one method or another, and without crappy DRM, so it's a better product. They should take a page (pun intended) from the music industry. Live performances are scarce, and fans are willing to pay for them. Have authors go on tour and host private parties where you can chat and have a drink with them. Fans will pay for this. Author face time is scarce. Maybe go to a subscription model. You pay Amazon one price to access everything they have on the Kindle. They in turn pay the authors and publishers according to readership, which is their incentive to put out good stuff and not crap. It's worked for cable TV.
If Bitcoin has failed as a currency, then why is the list of sites accepting Bitcoin 50% larger now than in July? To me that indicates it's use is growing rapidly.
During winter, mining heats your house via graphics card waste heat. So even at below cost of electricity for the coins you mine, it is worthwhile. You are getting some value out of electricity you would have spent anyway on home heating. During summer, however, this logic gets reversed. You not only pay for the electricity to run the graphics card, but also for extra air conditioning to keep your house at a tolerable temperature.
Dog years are a made up thing. How long a planet takes to orbit the Sun, however, is how a year is defined. So just choose an appropriate planet. If the site operator is smart enough to specify Earth years don't sign up there. They are obviously hacker types who will steal all your personal info.
They are working on an open source set of machines to bootstrap modern civilization for anyone who wants it. The founder lives in a cordwood hut, so I don't think there is much in the way of overhead. I've contributed to the wiki, and am starting a local Do-it-yourself association/hackerspace ( http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Community_DIY_Gadsden ) to bootstrap the tool set in my area (between Atlanta & Birmingham). I like that people can participate, not just write a check and forget about it till next year, and empowering post-scarcity economics in the physical world is a worthy goal.
According to Alexa.com, the popularity of Megaupload seems to have increased about 15-20% in the last couple of weeks. Not only can we name the Streisand Effect, in this case we can measure it.
By the way, Streisand uses Sony/Columbia for her music. It would have been ironic if she was signed with Universal.
The next step would be to make the first rocket stage fly back. Once it is empty, it will not weigh much, so adding some wings, landing gear, and small jet engines to it will not be that difficult.
Beyond that, using electric propulsion once in space, getting to Near Earth Asteroids, and hauling some of it back to Earth orbit can give 20-50 times mass return. If you can learn to extract Oxygen from the raw rock (which actually is not hard), you can use that as more fuel for the electric thruster, making it self-sustaining in fuel, eventually hauling back hundreds of times it's initial mass. Then you start learning to process that mass into other useful products. This gets you entirely around the cost to launch things from the ground by whatever ratio your mining and extraction system can do. For example, if your fleet of ore carriers and extraction plant can produce ten times it's mass of useful materials, that can substitute for launching all that mass from the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
The right to communicate is a more general version of "free speech and free press", and needs to be an absolute right. Man cannot exist above subsistence except as a society, and a society cannot operate if you cannot communicate. By "cannot exist", I mean even the most determined backwoods survivalist uses tools and knowledge they got from someone else, and at a minimum has to be able to communicate "get off my land". Since we cannot tell in advance what kinds of communication are needed, or what technical means we use to carry it out, it needs to be an absolute right. Any attempt to interfere with communication (hello SOPA) must be looked at with extreme suspicion.
An average of 50,000 people at any given moment (it varies by time of day). About half a million regular users. That's probably more than Slashdot.
I pay the IRS for my Second Life net earnings just like any other small business. The key thing to understand is that it becomes real money at the point Linden Lab/Second Life cashes me out to PayPal. Anything before that is just internal data on their servers. I also get to deduct all my legitimate expenses, like internet connection, depreciation on my PC.
As far as labor laws, the question is are Coffee and Power service providers (the people doing the work) an employee of anyone under government rules? If they are, then minimum wage and other rules apply. But your hair salon person isn't your employee, they are providing a service for a fee. If they come do it at your house, generally they would still not be an employee. There are technical rules about when you do become one, and thus covered by all the labor laws.
The great idea in Second Life isn't the avatars or 3D graphics, it's a "frictionless microcurrency". Frictionless in that transactions between users have no fees, and microcurrency in that the smallest unit is 0.004 US$. The great failure of Linden Lab (owners of Second Life) is not realizing that frictionless money has huge potential outside their little virtual world.
Meanwhile, what does Rosedale come up with? A new kind of currency with 15% overhead, even more than credit cards and PayPal charges. All I can say is WTF?
What advantage does Coffee and Power have over the "Gigs" section of Craigslist, aside from prettier website? Does anyone know?
I tried to do that last month, because I had sold my big screen TV, there being nothing but crap on basic cable any more. Instead Comcast made me a 6 month deal to pay less for internet, and still keep TV service, even though I have no way to watch it. My bill is $20 a month less, so I really don't care how they split it, but it's interesting how hard they tried to keep me on TV service. I wonder if they get paid by advertisers according to audience as measured by subscriptions? Then it doesn't actually matter if I don't watch.
Gravitational confinement fusion - the only kind known to work so far. It's somewhat lacking in shielding though. Even from 149.6 million km away, it will still kill you several ways if you don't have the equivalent of 10 meters of water or 4 meters of rock to protect you.
Copies of music files are no longer a scarce commodity. In the days of vinyl, you needed raw materials and a pressing plant to make copies. These days it's utterly trivial. Live performances, on the other hand, are scarce. The performer only has so many nights, and the venues only have so many seats. You can make lots of money touring. 20,000 seats at $50 each adds up to a lot of money. They could probably milk things like watching recording sessions or touring with the band for special fans for extra revenue.
I seem to remember Jesus copying the loaves and fishes and distributing them, putting hardworking bakers and fishermen out of work. But the story is told as an example that sharing is good.
If you add up the downloads for the two versions at http://www.crydev.net/faq.php there have been 1.06 million legal downloads of the free software development kit that lets you mod the Crysis 2 game, create new levels, or even entire games from scratch, and then sell them. So while it may have been the most pirated, at the same time it may be the most free and legal downloads too. I don't have numbers for other game engine SDKs, so I can't say for sure if it's the most downloaded, but a million is sure a lot of them.
The answer is to defund corporations and big government. If you get houses built the way Habitat for Humanity does it (crowdsourced construction), and don't have to take out a bank loan, just pay them back for materials, then bye bye banks. If you get your food from a community run farm, where a professional farmer or two manages it, and everyone helps at peak times your cost of food goes way down. If food and housing are covered, your need for a paid job goes down, and therefore so does your tax bill. Interest and taxes are overhead on your life. So intelligently reduce overhead.
All the discussion here about home solar is beside the point, because home scale projects are still twice the cost they need to be competitive in most places. Utility scale projects in the USA southwest are competitive NOW, so that is where the action is. Check out the 1 Gigawatt Blythe Solar plant in Riverside County, CA:
http://solartrustofamerica.com/projects-references/blythe-solar-power-project/index.html
Americans spend $430 billion on new cars alone each year, so billions for an electrification project is not a big number in context.
Here is some current data on retail panel prices: http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
Wholesale or buying for a utility scale power plant would be even lower, but you can see that average prices have fallen in half the last three years. That means the high cost producers are just out of luck and need to adapt or die.
That would not happen, but it would be possible to delist supporters of SOPA from search engines, and refuse them hosting, network connections, etc. If they are trying to destroy your business, there is no rule that says you have to do business with them.
Vote for the guy who has taken the least in bribes, I mean "campaign contributions", from corporations. It's easy enough to find out how much from third party sites like http://www.opensecrets.org/
Heck, they could have bought the real bag, used it in the movie, and auctioned it off afterwards as a famous movie prop and probably gotten more for it than they paid. This is assuming the item was not destroyed while making the film. I have not seen it and have no plans to.
They have failed to create scarcity. Any book of any popularity is already available as a free download by one method or another, and without crappy DRM, so it's a better product. They should take a page (pun intended) from the music industry. Live performances are scarce, and fans are willing to pay for them. Have authors go on tour and host private parties where you can chat and have a drink with them. Fans will pay for this. Author face time is scarce. Maybe go to a subscription model. You pay Amazon one price to access everything they have on the Kindle. They in turn pay the authors and publishers according to readership, which is their incentive to put out good stuff and not crap. It's worked for cable TV.
If Bitcoin has failed as a currency, then why is the list of sites accepting Bitcoin 50% larger now than in July? To me that indicates it's use is growing rapidly.
During winter, mining heats your house via graphics card waste heat. So even at below cost of electricity for the coins you mine, it is worthwhile. You are getting some value out of electricity you would have spent anyway on home heating. During summer, however, this logic gets reversed. You not only pay for the electricity to run the graphics card, but also for extra air conditioning to keep your house at a tolerable temperature.
Actual electrical workers probably care about cheap knockoff parts that could electrocute them or their customers, or catch fire.
Dog years are a made up thing. How long a planet takes to orbit the Sun, however, is how a year is defined. So just choose an appropriate planet. If the site operator is smart enough to specify Earth years don't sign up there. They are obviously hacker types who will steal all your personal info.
http://opensourceecology.org/
They are working on an open source set of machines to bootstrap modern civilization for anyone who wants it. The founder lives in a cordwood hut, so I don't think there is much in the way of overhead. I've contributed to the wiki, and am starting a local Do-it-yourself association/hackerspace ( http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Community_DIY_Gadsden ) to bootstrap the tool set in my area (between Atlanta & Birmingham). I like that people can participate, not just write a check and forget about it till next year, and empowering post-scarcity economics in the physical world is a worthy goal.
According to Alexa.com, the popularity of Megaupload seems to have increased about 15-20% in the last couple of weeks. Not only can we name the Streisand Effect, in this case we can measure it.
By the way, Streisand uses Sony/Columbia for her music. It would have been ironic if she was signed with Universal.
So, basically, these black men are indentured servants to Universal?
The next step would be to make the first rocket stage fly back. Once it is empty, it will not weigh much, so adding some wings, landing gear, and small jet engines to it will not be that difficult.
Beyond that, using electric propulsion once in space, getting to Near Earth Asteroids, and hauling some of it back to Earth orbit can give 20-50 times mass return. If you can learn to extract Oxygen from the raw rock (which actually is not hard), you can use that as more fuel for the electric thruster, making it self-sustaining in fuel, eventually hauling back hundreds of times it's initial mass. Then you start learning to process that mass into other useful products. This gets you entirely around the cost to launch things from the ground by whatever ratio your mining and extraction system can do. For example, if your fleet of ore carriers and extraction plant can produce ten times it's mass of useful materials, that can substitute for launching all that mass from the ground.