Does this mean that I will be paid for my garbage, rather than me paying to have it removed?
Distributed fuel sources are usually not economical to buy because the cost of collecting the small, disperse pockets of fuel usually increase the price past that of traditional fuels like coal, which are centrally located in large quantities. So, at the very least, you'll still be paying for collection.
Landfill fees will likely decrease, but probably not overwhelmingly, until/unless there are a significant number of such plants in one small geographic area. If this landfill lowers it's dumping fees significantly, trash trucks from miles around will take everything there in order to save a few hundred bucks per load. So, they either need to keep the prices close enough to other landfills that it isn't worth driving out of your way to dump there, or they could keep prices low, and be restricted only by daily quotas on how much can be dumped at a time... The latter case is the scenario in the Puenta Hills, CA landfill, where they siphon off the methane to power turbines rather than more exotic methods like plasma arcs.
Companies are caught. Purchaser is hurt due to fines.
That would only be true if companies were complete monopolies and purchasers were FORCED to buy their products at a specific time... Neither is true.
If Samsung and LG raise prices, their competitors will benefit, getting more sales, AND consumers will see that prices are a bit high, and opt not to buy a new device with an LCD screen.
I've believed for a while now that "winrot" and general perceived operating system instability are most often caused by hard drives in the beginning stages of failure.
I'm quite sure you're wrong.
Even an unresponsive hard drive should not cause Windows to crash (not since 9x went away, at least). And hard drives simply don't go through their death throes for long... If you have a failing HDD, you'll know it for sure within about a month of regular use.
I think it's an underrated cause of random crashes, and boot errors such as "missing c:\windows\system32\hal.dll, etc"
The latter can certainly be caused by a bad HDD, but it's a very rare error to get, and even then, it's much more often caused by a failed windows update, a worm/virus infection, or some application behaving badly and corrupting files or RAM.
Windows is terribly unstable for no good reason. Like everything else in life which you can't guess and can't control, people develop all sorts of superstitions about things which cause it, and ways they can control it... But like all superstitions, they're nonsense, and out of your control. The hardware has very, very little to do with Windows instability. Those who have stopped running Windows entirely can attest that even cheap junk hardware runs 99.9% stable, and the rare hardware error is not subtle enough to be missed for long.
The illegality of prostitution does a significant amount to suppress both supply, and demand. Hence, larger numbers of prostitutes will be servicing a larger number of customers/johns.
does making it illegal make prostitution more or less susceptible to criminal influence?
Even if per-capita criminal activity goes down, the sheer increase in the number of prostitutes is very likely to more than counter-act that effect.
IMHO, a supply of easy money is unhealthy for anybody, and professions where such success is very short-term, quickly leads to large numbers of poor people, desperate to maintain their expensive habits (and I don't *just* mean drugs).
The primary "harm" is that Libertarian theory states that a monopoly can't exist under a system with no regulation. ie. That all monopolies are the direct result of government intervention, either directly establishing them (like the telcos, public utilities, etc.) or erecting barriers in the form of relevant legislation (like product safety laws, labor laws, whatever...) that prevents small competitors from starting up without large amounts of cash. My whole point is that the theory is wrong, and natural economic forces almost always trend toward monopolies, which will continue to gain more and more power.
In the more general sense, just search for "monopolistic behavior" or "anti-competitive tactics" and you'll surely find no end to the listing of harm large competitors have tried doing to unfairly eliminate their smaller counterparts, which is only stopped by have a strong government that forbids such behaviors in the name of the public interest.
If they raise prices then they lose their advantage of economies of scale.
No, they don't.
If they can make widgets for $5 in large quantities, but it costs $20 in small quantities, then they can charge $19 and still make tremendous profit, without making it possible for any other company to get a foothold.
And that's not the only circumstance by a long shot... Just the quickest way to explain how a free market, by nature, heavily discourages competition, and all manner of other relatively minor public-service burdens.
As far as I can see what you are talking about has already happened except for the part about Walmart and other mega retailers jacking up their prices. After all they have to compete against other mega retailers (Target etc).
Wal-Mart could collude with, merge with, and/or outright buy-out (eg.) Target, if not for government regulation preventing monopolization of industries.
In fact, just search for "anti-competitive behavior". I'm sure you'll find a list of almost everything companies have tried, but have been shot down by the government.
I'd say most people don't know how to use SSH very well...
Stop typing passwords for every system: ssh-keygen, ssh-auth and ssh-add.
Transferring files both with scp/sftp and ssh user@host "cat file" > file, and the like.
Changing encryption algo for significantly improved speed, eg. -c arcfour
Enabling/disabling compression for internet/intranet. -C
An $HOME/.ssh/config file to map names to IP addresses, specify the default user names for each host, toggle compression per host, enable/disable port forwarding, keepalive, etc.: host webserver
ForwardX11 no
ForwardAgent yes
Compression yes
hostname slashdot.org
port 2100
user cmdrtaco
And parenthesis and backticks seem to be going out of fashion in short order... Too bad, since they're quite time-saving: mkdir `date +%Y`
The rev command has got to be one of the most useless Unix commands I've ever come across.
It's actually VERY useful.
Many programs output data that has a variable length, or variable number of fields/separators. In such cases it is often much easier to select the correct data as either a number of bytes, white-space or other separator, from the end-of-line, rather than the start.
Such things can be done with, eg. awk, but with much more complexity, and multiple-steps.
I didn't run benchmarks, but the difference wasn't noticeable. OTOH, setting acoustic management to the maximum did have a noticeable effect, though not enough to be a problem, or convince me to disable it and get the actuator noise back.
And then several new guys arrive on the scene, and they undercut the monopoly with lower prices, thereby restoring competition.
"Economies of scale" says otherwise. The larger the company, the lower their costs per-item, and in most cases that is a HUGE price difference.
I'm sure there are many, many other examples out there where a monopoly's back was broken by new innovative or cost-cutting competitors.
A few, but there are many, many more where a monopoly used its money and influence to embrace said new technologies, while keeping prices rather high.
Note that all the electric-car startups are having next to zero effect on the market, while Toyota, Ford, GM, etc. are slowly jumping onto that bandwagon. You can't out-compete a heavily entrenched competitor.
Water adsorption is so high from 100 GHz up to light that it doesn't matter.
Water absorbs light? Odd that.
I'm sure the reason for the lack of regulation is simply because such frequencies are so extremely directional that there's next to no possibility of even neighboring transceivers causing interference.
The record for a speed landing is still held by Beagle 2 which currently stands at a Mach 352 High Performance Landing.
"It is not known for certain whether the lander reached the Martian surface; [...] It may have missed Mars altogether, skipped off the atmosphere and entered an orbit around the sun, or burned up during its descent."
It's a big assumption that Beagle 2 reached the surface, and one not based on any evidence.
Too bad for those of us who think the government is getting dangerously big.
No, actually it's incredibly lucky for you... Getting everything you want would have turned horribly ugly in short order.
Libertarianism is the antithesis of all economic theory, developed over the past 300+ years of human history. It is based in ignorance of all well-known economic forces.
Libertarians say that with competition, companies will all do the right thing, but after a few batches of Melamine show up in your food, you'll start having to rethink that lovely theory. The most pathetic thing in the world was watching Ron Paul hand-wave away Fox News' decision to refuse him airtime, and claim that even less regulation and complete self-rule would have made them decide differently...
Of course the other fundamental belief of Libertarianism is that, without regulations, companies will spring up, left and right, and out-compete the big existing corporations. The problem is, things like economies of scale are such a HUGE force in business, that a small startup can't possibly manage to get prices anywhere near as low as a big company... There's no government regulations requiring small shops to go bankrupt when Wal-Mart moves in next door, it's simple economics that a large company can be cheaper. And when you get rid of all regulations, they're going to start buying out all competitors in short order, and quickly become international monopolies, stronger than any government, able to fix prices, single-handedly driving countries or the world into recession, and each interested only in finding a way to make more money, with no regulations at all to stop them.
The Republicans have been taking us down the road of deregulation for the past two decades, and look where we are now... Rolling power outages in California (eg. Enron), Sub-prime mortgages, Largest bank failures in history, lending grinding to a halt, a global recession looming, etc.
But that won't stop the mass delusion of Libertarianism... No. It can all be chalked up to having not gone FAR enough. If banks were given even MORE freedom, then surely they wouldn't have screwed up as badly as they did with the relatively little freedom they did have, right? Be careful what you ask for.
Depends on how you define other formats. H.261/Mpeg-1? Thoroughly trounced by Theora at all bitrates. Mpeg-2? Again, trounced by Theora. VP6, theora kills it at "web" bitrates.
Theora is an individual codec. It's can't be directly compared to a format. Your statement is nonsense, and it's clear you've simply fallen victim to Xiph.org dogma.
The new encoder looks like it will make Theora competitive with MPEG 4 part 10.
I've been following the progress as well. The new encoder looks like it will (FINALLY) make Theora competitive with MPEG-4 ASP codecs, like Divx and Xvid. It has no prayer against H.264 as of yet... Which is sad, since H.264 has been out for several years now, while Theora 1.1 is still not out.
By the time Theora finally gets tweaked enough that it's more or less competitive with H.264, I wouldn't be surprised if the next video standard has come out.
You've managed to cite comparisons from 2005. The theora decoder was completely rewritten since then.
Decoders don't affect video quality at all (if they do, it's a major bug), only playback performance.
And yes, Theora does low bitrate well. Thats why it's well suited for the web.
No, not just "low". EXTREMELY LOW. The deblocker doesn't really help until the video is a mess. And most people don't want to watch videos that look far worse than even YouTube. Still, it would be good for some things, if H.264 hadn't already taken over.
Think of Theora as a successor to MPEG-1 on the web. It works everywhere, is easy to support, and doesn't need much CPU to play back
To be a successor, it has to do something BETTER than those who came before...
Theora does not provide better quality than a good MPEG-1 encoder (Libavcodec, mjpegtools), can't possibly hope to ever overtake MPEG-1 in installed base of decoders (hardware, particularly), and you're completely wrong on performance... Theora does need a LOT of CPU to decode and playback.
Theora can't be overhauled without breaking the decoder,
Of course it can. It's been going on for decades now. Why is Xvid better than Divx? Are they different, incompatible formats? Did decoders break?
and even if it was overhauled as Theora 2.0, it couldn't implement any of a multitude of patented video compression technologies already used in MPEG or other standards.
Pretty much NONE of the underlying technologies used for MPEG standards are new, in and of themselves. The only thing they patent is the specific way they do it, and their designs are more often just for performance reasons and hardware restrictions rather than being somehow better than all implementations that preceded them.
From MPEG-1 to MPEG-4/H.264, video coding has always just been 8x8 DCT, quantization, and huffman coding (ala JPEG); plus motion vectors. All of which is older than any of us. The only trick is in putting together an efficient implementation (that means both quality, and performance).
The relative value of a lossy video codec is in how good the quality is, at a respective bitrate. If you crank up the bitrate on ANY video codec, you'll get something that is true to the original, but at a prohibitive bitrate.
VP3 and Theora have been tested, over and over again, and simply do not provide better quality than practically any other video format, at a reasonable bitrate. Nearly all Divx/MPEG-4 ASP and h.264/AVC codecs substantially outperform it, as has been demonstrated time and time again...
And yet, it's EXTREMELY computationally intensive... I doubt any CPU out there can decode 1080p Theora videos in real time. Many slightly older systems can't even decode DVD-resolution Theora videos. Putting Theora behind even H.264 in the performance dept.
The only thing VP3/Theora does well is extremely low bitrate videos, because of its deblocking filter. Still, it's not remotely as good as H.263 or H.264/AVC in that aspect, but still, it's something...
During decode, there's no additional CPU work to reference against a 2nd (or 3rd) frame, but it does take a lot more memory.
Yes, it does take additional "CPU work".
Aritmatic coding/CABAC I think is only used in the main profiles, most H.264 content the BBC would be sending would be baseline profile.
By the same token, you could say that the BBC would be restricting the video to 1 or 2 references frames, and a single B-frame (much like Quicktime does). Even then, you'll still have to deal with qpel.
And after all of these restrictions, you're probably not any better off with H.264 than you would be with ASP.
Slashdot Mirror
Distributed fuel sources are usually not economical to buy because the cost of collecting the small, disperse pockets of fuel usually increase the price past that of traditional fuels like coal, which are centrally located in large quantities. So, at the very least, you'll still be paying for collection.
Landfill fees will likely decrease, but probably not overwhelmingly, until/unless there are a significant number of such plants in one small geographic area. If this landfill lowers it's dumping fees significantly, trash trucks from miles around will take everything there in order to save a few hundred bucks per load. So, they either need to keep the prices close enough to other landfills that it isn't worth driving out of your way to dump there, or they could keep prices low, and be restricted only by daily quotas on how much can be dumped at a time... The latter case is the scenario in the Puenta Hills, CA landfill, where they siphon off the methane to power turbines rather than more exotic methods like plasma arcs.
Yes, they recently announced that... Just a few couple after the first slashdot story, where they announced it:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/09/10/0026243.shtml
That would only be true if companies were complete monopolies and purchasers were FORCED to buy their products at a specific time... Neither is true.
If Samsung and LG raise prices, their competitors will benefit, getting more sales, AND consumers will see that prices are a bit high, and opt not to buy a new device with an LCD screen.
I'm quite sure you're wrong.
Even an unresponsive hard drive should not cause Windows to crash (not since 9x went away, at least). And hard drives simply don't go through their death throes for long... If you have a failing HDD, you'll know it for sure within about a month of regular use.
The latter can certainly be caused by a bad HDD, but it's a very rare error to get, and even then, it's much more often caused by a failed windows update, a worm/virus infection, or some application behaving badly and corrupting files or RAM.
Windows is terribly unstable for no good reason. Like everything else in life which you can't guess and can't control, people develop all sorts of superstitions about things which cause it, and ways they can control it... But like all superstitions, they're nonsense, and out of your control. The hardware has very, very little to do with Windows instability. Those who have stopped running Windows entirely can attest that even cheap junk hardware runs 99.9% stable, and the rare hardware error is not subtle enough to be missed for long.
The illegality of prostitution does a significant amount to suppress both supply, and demand. Hence, larger numbers of prostitutes will be servicing a larger number of customers/johns.
I'm slightly embarrassed to have gotten that reference... Good show.
Even if per-capita criminal activity goes down, the sheer increase in the number of prostitutes is very likely to more than counter-act that effect.
IMHO, a supply of easy money is unhealthy for anybody, and professions where such success is very short-term, quickly leads to large numbers of poor people, desperate to maintain their expensive habits (and I don't *just* mean drugs).
Under-age prostitutes for everybody!
The primary "harm" is that Libertarian theory states that a monopoly can't exist under a system with no regulation. ie. That all monopolies are the direct result of government intervention, either directly establishing them (like the telcos, public utilities, etc.) or erecting barriers in the form of relevant legislation (like product safety laws, labor laws, whatever...) that prevents small competitors from starting up without large amounts of cash. My whole point is that the theory is wrong, and natural economic forces almost always trend toward monopolies, which will continue to gain more and more power.
In the more general sense, just search for "monopolistic behavior" or "anti-competitive tactics" and you'll surely find no end to the listing of harm large competitors have tried doing to unfairly eliminate their smaller counterparts, which is only stopped by have a strong government that forbids such behaviors in the name of the public interest.
No, they don't.
If they can make widgets for $5 in large quantities, but it costs $20 in small quantities, then they can charge $19 and still make tremendous profit, without making it possible for any other company to get a foothold.
And that's not the only circumstance by a long shot... Just the quickest way to explain how a free market, by nature, heavily discourages competition, and all manner of other relatively minor public-service burdens.
Wal-Mart could collude with, merge with, and/or outright buy-out (eg.) Target, if not for government regulation preventing monopolization of industries.
In fact, just search for "anti-competitive behavior". I'm sure you'll find a list of almost everything companies have tried, but have been shot down by the government.
I'd say most people don't know how to use SSH very well...
Stop typing passwords for every system: ssh-keygen, ssh-auth and ssh-add.
Transferring files both with scp/sftp and ssh user@host "cat file" > file, and the like.
Changing encryption algo for significantly improved speed, eg. -c arcfour
Enabling/disabling compression for internet/intranet. -C
An $HOME/.ssh/config file to map names to IP addresses, specify the default user names for each host, toggle compression per host, enable/disable port forwarding, keepalive, etc.:
host webserver
ForwardX11 no
ForwardAgent yes
Compression yes
hostname slashdot.org
port 2100
user cmdrtaco
And parenthesis and backticks seem to be going out of fashion in short order... Too bad, since they're quite time-saving: mkdir `date +%Y`
It's actually VERY useful.
Many programs output data that has a variable length, or variable number of fields/separators. In such cases it is often much easier to select the correct data as either a number of bytes, white-space or other separator, from the end-of-line, rather than the start.
Such things can be done with, eg. awk, but with much more complexity, and multiple-steps.
In what situations is 'detach' any better than nohup? The latter being included in every Unix system I've used in more than the past decade.
I didn't run benchmarks, but the difference wasn't noticeable. OTOH, setting acoustic management to the maximum did have a noticeable effect, though not enough to be a problem, or convince me to disable it and get the actuator noise back.
"Economies of scale" says otherwise. The larger the company, the lower their costs per-item, and in most cases that is a HUGE price difference.
A few, but there are many, many more where a monopoly used its money and influence to embrace said new technologies, while keeping prices rather high.
Note that all the electric-car startups are having next to zero effect on the market, while Toyota, Ford, GM, etc. are slowly jumping onto that bandwagon. You can't out-compete a heavily entrenched competitor.
Water absorbs light? Odd that.
I'm sure the reason for the lack of regulation is simply because such frequencies are so extremely directional that there's next to no possibility of even neighboring transceivers causing interference.
"It is not known for certain whether the lander reached the Martian surface; [...] It may have missed Mars altogether, skipped off the atmosphere and entered an orbit around the sun, or burned up during its descent."
It's a big assumption that Beagle 2 reached the surface, and one not based on any evidence.
No, actually it's incredibly lucky for you... Getting everything you want would have turned horribly ugly in short order.
Libertarianism is the antithesis of all economic theory, developed over the past 300+ years of human history. It is based in ignorance of all well-known economic forces.
Libertarians say that with competition, companies will all do the right thing, but after a few batches of Melamine show up in your food, you'll start having to rethink that lovely theory. The most pathetic thing in the world was watching Ron Paul hand-wave away Fox News' decision to refuse him airtime, and claim that even less regulation and complete self-rule would have made them decide differently...
Of course the other fundamental belief of Libertarianism is that, without regulations, companies will spring up, left and right, and out-compete the big existing corporations. The problem is, things like economies of scale are such a HUGE force in business, that a small startup can't possibly manage to get prices anywhere near as low as a big company... There's no government regulations requiring small shops to go bankrupt when Wal-Mart moves in next door, it's simple economics that a large company can be cheaper. And when you get rid of all regulations, they're going to start buying out all competitors in short order, and quickly become international monopolies, stronger than any government, able to fix prices, single-handedly driving countries or the world into recession, and each interested only in finding a way to make more money, with no regulations at all to stop them.
The Republicans have been taking us down the road of deregulation for the past two decades, and look where we are now... Rolling power outages in California (eg. Enron), Sub-prime mortgages, Largest bank failures in history, lending grinding to a halt, a global recession looming, etc.
But that won't stop the mass delusion of Libertarianism... No. It can all be chalked up to having not gone FAR enough. If banks were given even MORE freedom, then surely they wouldn't have screwed up as badly as they did with the relatively little freedom they did have, right? Be careful what you ask for.
Theora is an individual codec. It's can't be directly compared to a format. Your statement is nonsense, and it's clear you've simply fallen victim to Xiph.org dogma.
I've been following the progress as well. The new encoder looks like it will (FINALLY) make Theora competitive with MPEG-4 ASP codecs, like Divx and Xvid. It has no prayer against H.264 as of yet... Which is sad, since H.264 has been out for several years now, while Theora 1.1 is still not out.
By the time Theora finally gets tweaked enough that it's more or less competitive with H.264, I wouldn't be surprised if the next video standard has come out.
Decoders don't affect video quality at all (if they do, it's a major bug), only playback performance.
No, not just "low". EXTREMELY LOW. The deblocker doesn't really help until the video is a mess. And most people don't want to watch videos that look far worse than even YouTube. Still, it would be good for some things, if H.264 hadn't already taken over.
But the problem is, the people visiting Wikipedia aren't doing so for the video content.
That's a bit like touting a new image format because it's used (only) for the 1x1 pixel spacer/tracking images on, eg., Microsoft.com.
You know what else is easy and obvious? Aiming a solar-powered light at a solar panel... That doesn't mean it will accomplish anything.
To be a successor, it has to do something BETTER than those who came before...
Theora does not provide better quality than a good MPEG-1 encoder (Libavcodec, mjpegtools), can't possibly hope to ever overtake MPEG-1 in installed base of decoders (hardware, particularly), and you're completely wrong on performance... Theora does need a LOT of CPU to decode and playback.
Of course it can. It's been going on for decades now. Why is Xvid better than Divx? Are they different, incompatible formats? Did decoders break?
Pretty much NONE of the underlying technologies used for MPEG standards are new, in and of themselves. The only thing they patent is the specific way they do it, and their designs are more often just for performance reasons and hardware restrictions rather than being somehow better than all implementations that preceded them.
From MPEG-1 to MPEG-4/H.264, video coding has always just been 8x8 DCT, quantization, and huffman coding (ala JPEG); plus motion vectors. All of which is older than any of us. The only trick is in putting together an efficient implementation (that means both quality, and performance).
The relative value of a lossy video codec is in how good the quality is, at a respective bitrate. If you crank up the bitrate on ANY video codec, you'll get something that is true to the original, but at a prohibitive bitrate.
VP3 and Theora have been tested, over and over again, and simply do not provide better quality than practically any other video format, at a reasonable bitrate. Nearly all Divx/MPEG-4 ASP and h.264/AVC codecs substantially outperform it, as has been demonstrated time and time again...
http://www.doom9.org/codec-comparisons.htm
http://www.doom9.org/codecs-quali-105-3.htm
http://ww.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora-vs-h.264/
And yet, it's EXTREMELY computationally intensive... I doubt any CPU out there can decode 1080p Theora videos in real time. Many slightly older systems can't even decode DVD-resolution Theora videos. Putting Theora behind even H.264 in the performance dept.
The only thing VP3/Theora does well is extremely low bitrate videos, because of its deblocking filter. Still, it's not remotely as good as H.263 or H.264/AVC in that aspect, but still, it's something...
Yes, it does take additional "CPU work".
By the same token, you could say that the BBC would be restricting the video to 1 or 2 references frames, and a single B-frame (much like Quicktime does). Even then, you'll still have to deal with qpel.
And after all of these restrictions, you're probably not any better off with H.264 than you would be with ASP.