This isn't about tragedy of the commons, though. They're not banning coal. They're banning light bulbs.
Here's a quick reality check: when power companies see lower usage, they reduce production, starting with their most expensive power source; coal is the cheapest power source. Translation: no feasible reduction in power consumption will ever result in a significant decrease in coal-based power, nor in a significant decrease in CO2 emissions.
There is only one way to force a reduction in emissions, and that is to tax dirty power production itself to make it less economically viable. Anything else is pure showmanship and will have precisely as much impact as pissing into the wind.
Here's the problem with what you're saying. The numbers don't work.
Businesses have already gone to the cheapest possible lighting (long-tube fluorescent fixtures) because they draw a lot less power. Therefore, the only place you'll usually see any significant number of incandescent bulbs is in the home.
Residential power is only 21% of U.S. consumption, and lighting is only 12% of that. This means that if you could completely eliminate incandescent bulbs, and even if the new bulbs used zero power, you would still not cut our nation's power consumption by even a paltry 3%. Based on typical power consumption increases, in about a year and a half, we'd be right back where we were before the ban. It's a trivial drop in the bucket.
If you want to get rid of CO2 emissions, ban or tax the damn CO2 emissions. For those of us who already get the vast majority of power from non-polluting sources, this incandescent ban is just a giant middle finger. It's actually harmful to the environment because the added disposal costs far exceed the savings in terms of emissions. It simply cannot be justified by any rational environmental policy.
The government ban on CFCs, with the exception of refrigerants (which were tapered off over a couple of decades), had essentially no direct impact on consumers. The same is not true for light bulbs.
The coal power plant powering that heater that happens to give off a little bit of light you keep using for the wrong purpose, releases more mercury than any CFL ever will.
What about the other 56% of electrical power that wasn't produced from coal? Or, for that matter, the other 84% if you live in parts of California.
No one ever got sick and died or went through a windshield and broke his or her neck because of an incandescent bulb. There's a pretty big difference between laws that mandate safety and laws that are merely passed for the convenience of energy companies so that they don't have to upgrade their transmission and generation infrastructure.
Agreed. Science fiction and fantasy both are subgenres of the same genre, which is alternative reality fiction. Alternative history fiction is also a subgenre of that genre, and there are probably others.
What makes alternative reality fiction interesting is that, by telling a story in a different reality, you avoid alienating the readers when you touch on sensitive topics. In an alternate universe, you can subtly poke at the edges of our universe, pointing out the flaws in our society in a way that makes people think but doesn't make them burn your book the way a biting editorial criticism or tell-all book would.
Ultimately, the science isn't important. You can almost always tell nearly identical stories using either futuristic technology or magic. Either way, you're still using the same basic trope. Thus, the only two differences are:
In science fiction, you must explain the magic.
Because you must explain the magic, violations of natural laws must generally be limited in degree.
As a result, science fiction is harder to write, and tends to result in more believable stories. Whether this matters or not depends solely on the extent to which that disbelief interferes with people's ability to enjoy the story, relate to the characters, or grasp the underlying message.
I'm down there watching the launch. If I stay until the landing, can I haul it back myself?
How many illegal immigrants do I need to pick up in the Home Depot parking lot to adequately load it into the trunk of a 1957 Beetle?
Does it come with a fuel tank, or is that extra? I don't want one of those current generation fuel tanks where the foam falls off every time you fly the thing, either. Where can I get the older model from before the formulation change?
I know this is a sophisticated piece of machinery. Is there a way I could test drive the engine before I take it home? I'd hate to bring home a dud engine that I can't use to launch missiles at the infid^W^W^W^W start a campfire.
Is that imperial tons, short tons, or metric tons? How much for next-day shipping to Hawaii?
How about ground shipping to Uzbekistan?
I know this engine is powerful enough to peel the paint off my house, but is it true that it will give you a permanent orange afro?
I will send you a check for ten million dollars (twice the shipping!) if you ship it immediately. I would only ask that you send along with it a check for two million US$ dollars refund.
OK, but suppose your dad isn't a writer, he's a carpenter. And suppose he builds himself a fabulous house, with his own hands. Every nail he hammers himself. This is an awesome house. And then he dies. By your logic, should your mom, you, and the rest of his offspring be allowed to live in a house that they had nothing to do with?
That analogy is absurd. With copyright, we're talking about the design of the book being protected, not the physical object.
A better analogy would be that you (and the rest of his offspring) should no longer be allowed to charge other people for the right to build houses based on the plans that he drew up. Those designs were created by standing on the shoulders of all those who designed houses before it. Thus, they should be protected for a very limited period of time, and in no case more than twenty years after the creator's death (and only then if the creator did so on death's door).
No one is arguing that you should not be able to have the physical fruits of your parents' labor, merely that you should not be allowed to continue to profit almost indefinitely off of their ideas.
Well, yes and no. I've usually found that the reason that vote counts are low in certain elections is that the independent/undecided voters mostly stayed home. The hardline party voters mostly turn out every time.
Thus, elections with low vote counts in the U.S. tend to be basically party-line votes. The higher the voter turnout, the greater the percentage of voters who actually cared enough to study the issues.
Close. Email was killed by spam and lack of mandatory end-to-end encryption and authentication. BCC was killed because a secure system (where secure is defined as spam-free) and anonymity are antithetical.
Since it's post-AIDS, great white leader now sticks to a monogamous relationship. Instead of a grand Federation uniting the galaxy fighting evil empires, it's now the big Peacekeeper gov't that's the bad guy, while the plucky entrepreneurial startup who are the good guys. And now all these alien factions are struggling to seize control of Critchton's technology (wormholes), while the crew, at various times, scheme to backstab each other when it's to their advantage and struggle to take control of the ship (startup).
That would have been a lot more readable if you had used the contraction for "it is" instead of the possessive form of "it". Leaving out the apostrophe when it should be there makes it just as hard to read as putting it in when it shouldn't. When in doubt, leave it (the entire contraction) out. It is far, far better to type "it is" when you mean "it's" than to type "its" when you mean "it's".
Now, back on point, I don't think Star Trek was propagandist at all. It merely reflected the cultural ideals of the time. A series in which the human culture seems too alien to the viewers will never make money.
More to the point, the purpose of good science fiction (and Star Trek spanned the gamut from bad to good, depending on the episode) is to show something about the real world and make you think about real-world issues, while doing so in a setting that is different enough for people to still accept the criticism. Therefore, all good science fiction, by definition, must incorporate aspects of the current culture of the time. Without that, it's just space opera.
Oh, they don't have to stop it forever. They just have to delay it long enough to fully recoup their R&D costs. After that, when somebody cracks their DRM, they'll just release the PS4, and then nobody will want the PS3, so nobody will want to develop software for it. Problem solved.
At least for DVDs, there is no part of a disk that a burner can't write to. You just have to have a burner designed for authoring and somewhat more expensive authoring media that doesn't pre-burn the CSS area. When it comes to DVDs, they're about three or four grand apiece, last I checked, but they are readily available.
Alternatively, I suspect you can find hacked firmware for DVD+R burners to do it since that part of the media is actually burnable on DVD+R. If it doesn't exist by now, I'd be surprised.
And you can actually buy DVD-R media without the lead-in pre-burned, or at least somebody can. The DVD Forum approved that about four years ago for use in special kiosks that burn movies on demand. Again, you'd need custom firmware and the modified (non-pre-burned) DVD-R media, but if you're a company in China manufacturing fake DVDs, I doubt that you'd have hard time finding somebody to supply such things.
This is, of course, assuming that you felt the need to use burners at all. In reality, you don't need to be able to burn a copy of the disc if you're doing mass piracy. All you need is a replication house that doesn't look too closely (for a fee). The stampers start with a bit-for-bit image of the data to be burned. AFAIK, in principle, there's no reason this couldn't come from a commercial DVD.
For Blu-Ray discs, I have no idea. I haven't had any reason to author one yet.
The moral of the story is this: If you are a male (especially a single white male over 30) in the 21st century, do not go anywhere near children. Don't look at them, don't talk to them, don't get within 50 feet of them (especially if you own a camera, even if you leave the camera at home).
So true. I was driving through my neighborhood a few weeks ago, and I slowed down leading up to a stop sign as a precaution because of a bunch of kids playing in the street. One of the little bastards shouted "child molester" at me. Such absurd behavior encourages drivers to roll right through the stop sign at 25 MPH and point the noses of their cars directly at the little brats.
Our culture has raised our kids to be so utterly terrified of what amounts to fictional boogeymen that we've forgotten how to actually live our lives. Kids are terrified of strangers because every stranger is just a rapist waiting to pull you into a car, drive off with you, rape you, murder you, and dump the body in a ditch somewhere. This despite the fact that the little bastard's parents are statistically several orders of magnitude more likely to molest him than any single person who drives by. Thankfully, my parents had the good sense to teach me better than that (in spite of the attempt at indoctrination by our local schools). Unfortunately, most parents don't have that much sense because they were indoctrinated themselves as kids. If the trend continues, we're going to be a nation of absolute scaredy-cats who are afraid of our own shadows in just a couple more generations.
The scariest thing about it is realizing that in just a few years, that idiot kid will be able to vote.
Because according to Wikipedia, the PS3 is (or at least was at one time) sold at a loss, so they depend on getting their cut of game sales just to break even.
Seriously, is extending the use of hardware worse for Sony?
You bet. The "copyright" controls inside these devices are not really for copyright protection purposes. You can always make a bit-for-bit-perfect copy of optical media if you have the right hardware, and the real pirates have the right hardware. Therefore, by definition, any DRM scheme not involving handing out a one-time-use account key to the first owner of a game is, by definition, completely ineffectual as a copyright protection scheme.
No, the principal purpose of those keys is to prevent third parties from developing for their platform without paying them royalties. To that end, if game developers believed Sony had no way of re-securing their platform, and if this belief led them to release titles without paying Sony, then Sony would stand to lose a lot of money.
Well, it's a wash, based on the last stats I read. (I forget where I read the article.) With SSDs, you have no moving parts, which makes them much, much more reliable in portable devices (laptops, iPods, and so on). However, you have many more solder joints to crack, so you have a much greater chance of a thermally-induced failure than you would with a hard drive.
The real advantage of SSDs as far as data recovery goes is that you don't need a clean room to work on them. The majority of failures in electronics are caused by broken solder joints on the board, which can be repaired by anyone who owns proper reflow soldering tools.
The one place where SSDs are at a disadvantage is that a board failure on a hard drive can be repaired by swapping the boards in many cases, whereas a board failure on a SSD requires actually diagnosing the board, and in the worst case, unsoldering the flash parts and soldering them to a new board. Even still, the whole "anybody with reflow tools" rule makes that not nearly as bad as it sounds.
In which case I posit you're an illiterate, because it is right there in the very first sentence of the summary.
It wasn't in the summary when I posted my comment (half a day before you posted your reply). These sorts of problems tend to get fixed by the editors after people complain. Then a new crop of people comes in later, and they say, "Huh?" because the problem has already been fixed. And then people have to explain to those people that the editors changed the summary. It happens every time.
This is why we really ought to have the ability to post in a separate area to complain about problems with the summary itself. Alternatively, the summary could have a change log at the bottom (e.g. an italicized, bulleted list of corrections). Or both.
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This isn't about tragedy of the commons, though. They're not banning coal. They're banning light bulbs.
Here's a quick reality check: when power companies see lower usage, they reduce production, starting with their most expensive power source; coal is the cheapest power source. Translation: no feasible reduction in power consumption will ever result in a significant decrease in coal-based power, nor in a significant decrease in CO2 emissions.
There is only one way to force a reduction in emissions, and that is to tax dirty power production itself to make it less economically viable. Anything else is pure showmanship and will have precisely as much impact as pissing into the wind.
Here's the problem with what you're saying. The numbers don't work.
Businesses have already gone to the cheapest possible lighting (long-tube fluorescent fixtures) because they draw a lot less power. Therefore, the only place you'll usually see any significant number of incandescent bulbs is in the home.
Residential power is only 21% of U.S. consumption, and lighting is only 12% of that. This means that if you could completely eliminate incandescent bulbs, and even if the new bulbs used zero power, you would still not cut our nation's power consumption by even a paltry 3%. Based on typical power consumption increases, in about a year and a half, we'd be right back where we were before the ban. It's a trivial drop in the bucket.
If you want to get rid of CO2 emissions, ban or tax the damn CO2 emissions. For those of us who already get the vast majority of power from non-polluting sources, this incandescent ban is just a giant middle finger. It's actually harmful to the environment because the added disposal costs far exceed the savings in terms of emissions. It simply cannot be justified by any rational environmental policy.
That and because they usually squeal like a banshee when you drive them with a PWM circuit....
The government ban on CFCs, with the exception of refrigerants (which were tapered off over a couple of decades), had essentially no direct impact on consumers. The same is not true for light bulbs.
What about the other 56% of electrical power that wasn't produced from coal? Or, for that matter, the other 84% if you live in parts of California.
No one ever got sick and died or went through a windshield and broke his or her neck because of an incandescent bulb. There's a pretty big difference between laws that mandate safety and laws that are merely passed for the convenience of energy companies so that they don't have to upgrade their transmission and generation infrastructure.
Agreed. Science fiction and fantasy both are subgenres of the same genre, which is alternative reality fiction. Alternative history fiction is also a subgenre of that genre, and there are probably others.
What makes alternative reality fiction interesting is that, by telling a story in a different reality, you avoid alienating the readers when you touch on sensitive topics. In an alternate universe, you can subtly poke at the edges of our universe, pointing out the flaws in our society in a way that makes people think but doesn't make them burn your book the way a biting editorial criticism or tell-all book would.
Ultimately, the science isn't important. You can almost always tell nearly identical stories using either futuristic technology or magic. Either way, you're still using the same basic trope. Thus, the only two differences are:
As a result, science fiction is harder to write, and tends to result in more believable stories. Whether this matters or not depends solely on the extent to which that disbelief interferes with people's ability to enjoy the story, relate to the characters, or grasp the underlying message.
I can see the "Questions" box now.
'Nuff said.
Yeah, but this is one of those eBay scams where they charge you nothing for the product and then nail you with a million dollar shipping charge.
That analogy is absurd. With copyright, we're talking about the design of the book being protected, not the physical object.
A better analogy would be that you (and the rest of his offspring) should no longer be allowed to charge other people for the right to build houses based on the plans that he drew up. Those designs were created by standing on the shoulders of all those who designed houses before it. Thus, they should be protected for a very limited period of time, and in no case more than twenty years after the creator's death (and only then if the creator did so on death's door).
No one is arguing that you should not be able to have the physical fruits of your parents' labor, merely that you should not be allowed to continue to profit almost indefinitely off of their ideas.
Well, yes and no. I've usually found that the reason that vote counts are low in certain elections is that the independent/undecided voters mostly stayed home. The hardline party voters mostly turn out every time.
Thus, elections with low vote counts in the U.S. tend to be basically party-line votes. The higher the voter turnout, the greater the percentage of voters who actually cared enough to study the issues.
Now I know you're lying. You're posting on here. You have no girlfriend.
Close. Email was killed by spam and lack of mandatory end-to-end encryption and authentication. BCC was killed because a secure system (where secure is defined as spam-free) and anonymity are antithetical.
That would have been a lot more readable if you had used the contraction for "it is" instead of the possessive form of "it". Leaving out the apostrophe when it should be there makes it just as hard to read as putting it in when it shouldn't. When in doubt, leave it (the entire contraction) out. It is far, far better to type "it is" when you mean "it's" than to type "its" when you mean "it's".
Now, back on point, I don't think Star Trek was propagandist at all. It merely reflected the cultural ideals of the time. A series in which the human culture seems too alien to the viewers will never make money.
More to the point, the purpose of good science fiction (and Star Trek spanned the gamut from bad to good, depending on the episode) is to show something about the real world and make you think about real-world issues, while doing so in a setting that is different enough for people to still accept the criticism. Therefore, all good science fiction, by definition, must incorporate aspects of the current culture of the time. Without that, it's just space opera.
Oh, they don't have to stop it forever. They just have to delay it long enough to fully recoup their R&D costs. After that, when somebody cracks their DRM, they'll just release the PS4, and then nobody will want the PS3, so nobody will want to develop software for it. Problem solved.
At least for DVDs, there is no part of a disk that a burner can't write to. You just have to have a burner designed for authoring and somewhat more expensive authoring media that doesn't pre-burn the CSS area. When it comes to DVDs, they're about three or four grand apiece, last I checked, but they are readily available.
Alternatively, I suspect you can find hacked firmware for DVD+R burners to do it since that part of the media is actually burnable on DVD+R. If it doesn't exist by now, I'd be surprised.
And you can actually buy DVD-R media without the lead-in pre-burned, or at least somebody can. The DVD Forum approved that about four years ago for use in special kiosks that burn movies on demand. Again, you'd need custom firmware and the modified (non-pre-burned) DVD-R media, but if you're a company in China manufacturing fake DVDs, I doubt that you'd have hard time finding somebody to supply such things.
This is, of course, assuming that you felt the need to use burners at all. In reality, you don't need to be able to burn a copy of the disc if you're doing mass piracy. All you need is a replication house that doesn't look too closely (for a fee). The stampers start with a bit-for-bit image of the data to be burned. AFAIK, in principle, there's no reason this couldn't come from a commercial DVD.
For Blu-Ray discs, I have no idea. I haven't had any reason to author one yet.
So true. I was driving through my neighborhood a few weeks ago, and I slowed down leading up to a stop sign as a precaution because of a bunch of kids playing in the street. One of the little bastards shouted "child molester" at me. Such absurd behavior encourages drivers to roll right through the stop sign at 25 MPH and point the noses of their cars directly at the little brats.
Our culture has raised our kids to be so utterly terrified of what amounts to fictional boogeymen that we've forgotten how to actually live our lives. Kids are terrified of strangers because every stranger is just a rapist waiting to pull you into a car, drive off with you, rape you, murder you, and dump the body in a ditch somewhere. This despite the fact that the little bastard's parents are statistically several orders of magnitude more likely to molest him than any single person who drives by. Thankfully, my parents had the good sense to teach me better than that (in spite of the attempt at indoctrination by our local schools). Unfortunately, most parents don't have that much sense because they were indoctrinated themselves as kids. If the trend continues, we're going to be a nation of absolute scaredy-cats who are afraid of our own shadows in just a couple more generations.
The scariest thing about it is realizing that in just a few years, that idiot kid will be able to vote.
Guess we'd better arrest Dave Chappelle, too. Or is saying you're going to urinate on someone not considered sexual by the courts?
It probably means they haven't burned through their VC funding yet. Give it time.
Because according to Wikipedia, the PS3 is (or at least was at one time) sold at a loss, so they depend on getting their cut of game sales just to break even.
You bet. The "copyright" controls inside these devices are not really for copyright protection purposes. You can always make a bit-for-bit-perfect copy of optical media if you have the right hardware, and the real pirates have the right hardware. Therefore, by definition, any DRM scheme not involving handing out a one-time-use account key to the first owner of a game is, by definition, completely ineffectual as a copyright protection scheme.
No, the principal purpose of those keys is to prevent third parties from developing for their platform without paying them royalties. To that end, if game developers believed Sony had no way of re-securing their platform, and if this belief led them to release titles without paying Sony, then Sony would stand to lose a lot of money.
Well, it's a wash, based on the last stats I read. (I forget where I read the article.) With SSDs, you have no moving parts, which makes them much, much more reliable in portable devices (laptops, iPods, and so on). However, you have many more solder joints to crack, so you have a much greater chance of a thermally-induced failure than you would with a hard drive.
The real advantage of SSDs as far as data recovery goes is that you don't need a clean room to work on them. The majority of failures in electronics are caused by broken solder joints on the board, which can be repaired by anyone who owns proper reflow soldering tools.
The one place where SSDs are at a disadvantage is that a board failure on a hard drive can be repaired by swapping the boards in many cases, whereas a board failure on a SSD requires actually diagnosing the board, and in the worst case, unsoldering the flash parts and soldering them to a new board. Even still, the whole "anybody with reflow tools" rule makes that not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Booger pickers.
It wasn't in the summary when I posted my comment (half a day before you posted your reply). These sorts of problems tend to get fixed by the editors after people complain. Then a new crop of people comes in later, and they say, "Huh?" because the problem has already been fixed. And then people have to explain to those people that the editors changed the summary. It happens every time.
This is why we really ought to have the ability to post in a separate area to complain about problems with the summary itself. Alternatively, the summary could have a change log at the bottom (e.g. an italicized, bulleted list of corrections). Or both.
I wonder how much of this is due to vendors deliberately not bumping the version numbers when they put in a security patch?