then why aren't you fiscally responsible enough to pay a repair shop a couple of hundred bucks to replace a tube instead of paying a few thousand bucks to replace a perfectly good TV?
Because many TVs don't give you that option: they are constructed in such a way that it is impractical to replace the tube.
When Richard Stallman is able to strongarm [Red Hat] into [releasing the code to the extensions they made to the GNU/Linux operating system], then your comparison will make sense.
Stallman can only force Red Hat to follow the GPL license that Red Hat voluntarily agreed to as part of distributing GPL code that he owns the copyright to. If Red Hat decided not to use that code, they would not be bound by its license. It was their choice to use Stallman's code, they weren't strong-armed into anything. If the RIAA had been licensing source code to Microsoft then we could have a similar situation for them... but they haven't. So, do I win after all?:^)
How does using a technical solution to solve this problem prove to the user that the problem is "not technical in nature?"
Because it puts the lie any possible claim that 32-bit systems aren't technically capable of playing HD video. The user would then have an existence-proof that their computer is capable of HD playback, thus the reason Windows isn't playing HD content is clearly not because they cannot, but rather because they don't want to.
Much like the FSF "dictates" what some of it's users can do with its code.*
Except that FSF produces and thus owns the code it writes. The media companies do not produce computers or operating systems, and yet they try to dictate rules to the companies that do. See the difference? When Richard Stallman is able to strongarm Microsoft into removing all DRM from Vista, then your comparison will make sense.
If all Iran wanted was nuclear power, A, B, and C, would not even be on the table for discussion. And frankly, the would wouldn't care nearly as much.
But Iran says all it wants is nuclear power -- nuclear weapons are the farthest thing from their minds!:^) Of course Iran is probably lying about that, but you see the problem: it's hard to give a government access to nuclear power without also giving them access to nuclear weapon technology. You could argue that the answer is to only give the technology to countries we trust, but what if those countries are simply better liars than Iran is? Or what if they are genuinely peacable countries now, but change their minds later due to a change in government? Nuclear power proliferation and nuclear weapons proliferation go hand-in-hand.
For all their other problems, the above is one problem that solar/wind/etc do not have.
And the entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall." This is just what we need.
Actually, it is just what we need, if the goal is to replace personal computers with cell phones. Imagine 10 or 20 years from now, ugly beige boxes have gone the way of the VCR and everybody just carries their "PC" with them in their pocket wherever they go. Wireless Internet access is available everywhere, of course, and while you can still use the small screen on the train, you can also sit down at any desk and use your phone the same way you use a PC now: with a full-size projected display, keyboard, and mouse. So now we've got the display part solved (in theory), the next step is to figure out how to fit a mouse and keyboard into a cell phone....:^)
Until the world gets over its anti-nuclear paranoia, energy is still a major issue.
That's what the government of Iran keeps saying, and yet the Bush administration remains adamantly against allowing Iran access to nuclear power, despite the fact that it's perfectly safe! It's idiocy, I tell you...
But can anyone tell me what $5 billion of our tax payer dollars has done for us?
Arguably not so much so far, other than give us half a permanently manned outpost in space. But it would be stupid to abandon the project now, when it's so far along -- better to finish it up and make the best of it. If nothing else, it gives us more experience living and working in space.
And why is it that construction grinds to a halt when only one of the member nations involved grounds its shuttles? Is this really an "international" space station?
Presumably because it was designed to be built using Space Shuttles, and the cost of redesigning everything to be lifted by (say) Russian rockets was high enough that it was considered better to just wait for the shuttles to come back on line. It's still "international" because it's still being developed by multiple nations. "international" doesn't mean "fully redundant space agencies".
Also, doesn't this leave the United States eternally committed to developing this project?
Probably, unless we want to abandon it. But why would we want to do that? Once it's set up, the costs of maintaining it are minimal -- they are dwarfed by what the US spends on other things. Putting all that stuff up there and then not amortizing the costs by actually using it would be extremely cost-ineffective; no doubt it would be held up as an example of the government wasting money.
Why is it that "small government conservatives" have the knack to make that clock jump by large percentages?
The people running the current US government have one set of principles they use for PR, and another set that they implement as policy. Their trick is to get the voting population to confuse the two -- which is not so difficult to do when the press willing repeats everything they say without ever checking it for accuracy.
And when they do, they're prohibitively expensive to replace.
True... I wonder why some manufacturer doesn't make an LCD display with an easily replaceable backlight(*). I'd pay extra for a display if I knew I wouldn't have to throw it away in a few years.
(*) Actually, I have some ideas as to why, but they are too cynical to be worth repeating here
Nonsense. Aluminum is aluminum is aluminum. Steel is steel.
Agreed, but your rusted-out car body isn't pure aluminum or pure steel. It's some metal, plus some paint, plus various other materials that you will need to separate out in order to get your useful raw material back out again. The separation takes work and energy, and you'll never get all of the material back -- there will always be some lost during the processing. The waste percentage is much smaller for metals than it is for other materials, but it's not zero.
Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century?
No -- read what I said again. The word was "entrepreneurs". This is a change in the attitude of the business community, not the technical community. And yes, many in the business community have been idiots for years and years, because they weren't able to see the potential value of post-consumer waste. Recycling this content was considered a money-loser; something you might do because you're a good person, but not something you could do to make a profit.
but what these people are doing is not recycling. What they are doing is delaying the inevitable.
That's really just two ways of saying the same thing. And in any case, isn't delaying the inevitable a worthwhile thing to do? The more slowly the landfills fill, the more time we have to come up with a way to solve the problem.
When that happens, we will have the same volume of trash as we started with.
No matter what happens (barring space exploration, and meteorites, anyway), we will always have the same volume of stuff that we started with: one Earth-sized planet's worth of various materials, mixed into various combinations that are either more useful to us, or less useful to us. The trick is to increase our skill at converting the less-useful forms (aka "garbage") into more-useful forms (aka "products"). This is a step along that path.
Now most of it goes in trash even tho more than half is perfectly useable merchandise that doesnt even need reprocessing:(
Dunno whether it applies to bulk medical supplies so much, but in general this sort of problem ("I have item X that I don't need and can't profitably sell, but it's still perfectly useful if only I could find the person who could use it") is a search/discovery problem. 99% of the time, the person who could use the item is out there, if only there was a way for you to find them (or them to find you).
The Internet is a great mechanism for solving this sort of problem -- if you haven't checked out services like FreeCycle, I highly recommend them -- it's an excellent way to get (or get rid of) all kinds of useful things. The giver gets his junk removed for free (no storage, shipping, or dumping fees to pay), the recipient gets free stuff, and the useful stuff stays out of the landfills.
So all they seem to have done is take some small part of the rubber trash stream and make it go 'round just one more time.
Correct.
This doesn't seem to me like what we normally think of as "recycling."
It's exactly what we normally think of as recycling. Every trip through the recycling cycle degrades the material to some extent -- that's why white paper gets recycled as newspaper, and newspaper gets recycled as filler, and so on. Even aluminum cans and plastic bottles can't be recycled indefinitely, because on every pass some percentage of them will end up lost or corrupted by foreign materials. So it's just a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. You're certainly free to argue that "only one" extra round of usefulness isn't "enough", but even one extra cycle is an improvement over none. In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage. With any luck, the profit motive will lead to technological innovations that make more and more kinds of recycling practical and profitable, and everybody wins: the inventors get rich, and what was once a problem (what do we do with all this garbage?) becomes a benefit (garbage as a valuable resource).
The bags made out of old inner tubes cost way more than similar bags imported from China and sold at Walmart
And yet still they are able to sell them at a profit. Strange, eh? But not so strange when you consider that people willing pay $99 for a designer t-shirt when essentially the same thing being sold elsewhere for $5. If nothing else, the symbolism and novelty makes these things worth the extra cost, at least in the eyes of some.
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner
Well, the trick to any business is to bring in more money than you send out. Looks like these people have figured out a way to do it, Walmart or no Walmart.
Incidentally, the "unnamed chip" (an Atheros USB) is supported by OpenBSD - with a 100% open source driver. I can safely browse the web at a coffee shop without being 0wned!
It's entirely possible for your "100% open source driver" to have a security hole in it... hell, it could be based on the same exact codebase that was used in the OS/X driver exploit. You shouldn't get too complacent just because you're running open source software.
"peaceful and law-abiding" does not include conspiracy, harboring fugitives, funding terrorist organizations, purgery, and being an accessory to others' crimes.
Obviously not -- all of those things are against the law, so anyone doing them is by definition not 'law-abiding'.
As for how much "ill will" this is causing, I'd say not much.
And you would be wrong.
Most of those being "harrased" in this manner have no love for western society in the first place. How much harm can you really create by harrasing people who would be quite happy to make your nation part of a Global Caliphate?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, there is a huge difference between disliking something and being willing to turn to violence against it; and it is that difference that keeps the vast majority of the population from day to day. If your actions change someone from "dislikes the west, but is peaceful and law-abiding" to "hates the west and will attack when given the opportunity", then congratulation, you've just created a terrorist. I'd call that harmful.
Now we have democrats that spend every dime we have and the changes they want are the changes that benefit mostly their own power and the other rich people.
Can you name some examples of Democrats that are doing this? How is it that "democrats are spending every dime we have" when they control neither the White House nor either branch of Congress? Seems to me that one of the few advantages to being completely out of power is that you don't have to take the blame for the actions of the people who are in power...
You want dramatic, practical scientific advances? Don't fund it with government money.
The amusing thing about the above post is that it was composed using a computer, delivered via TCP/IP, and posted to a web site. At every step, the above post was made possible by technologies whose development was funded by government money.
Maybe you've lost your faith in the art of investigation, but I sure haven't
Why must it be a case of either/or? Why not have both first-rate detective work and highly accurate chemical sensors? You have nothing to lose but your tax dollars....;^)
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Because many TVs don't give you that option: they are constructed in such a way that it is impractical to replace the tube.
Stallman can only force Red Hat to follow the GPL license that Red Hat voluntarily agreed to as part of distributing GPL code that he owns the copyright to. If Red Hat decided not to use that code, they would not be bound by its license. It was their choice to use Stallman's code, they weren't strong-armed into anything. If the RIAA had been licensing source code to Microsoft then we could have a similar situation for them... but they haven't. So, do I win after all?
Because it puts the lie any possible claim that 32-bit systems aren't technically capable of playing HD video. The user would then have an existence-proof that their computer is capable of HD playback, thus the reason Windows isn't playing HD content is clearly not because they cannot, but rather because they don't want to.
Except that FSF produces and thus owns the code it writes. The media companies do not produce computers or operating systems, and yet they try to dictate rules to the companies that do. See the difference? When Richard Stallman is able to strongarm Microsoft into removing all DRM from Vista, then your comparison will make sense.
Until they find some software that will play HD on their old computer... then it will be clear that the problem isn't technical in nature.
But Iran says all it wants is nuclear power -- nuclear weapons are the farthest thing from their minds!
For all their other problems, the above is one problem that solar/wind/etc do not have.
Actually, it is just what we need, if the goal is to replace personal computers with cell phones. Imagine 10 or 20 years from now, ugly beige boxes have gone the way of the VCR and everybody just carries their "PC" with them in their pocket wherever they go. Wireless Internet access is available everywhere, of course, and while you can still use the small screen on the train, you can also sit down at any desk and use your phone the same way you use a PC now: with a full-size projected display, keyboard, and mouse. So now we've got the display part solved (in theory), the next step is to figure out how to fit a mouse and keyboard into a cell phone....
Hard to believe nobody has posted this yet, but the direct link to the study is here.
That's what the government of Iran keeps saying, and yet the Bush administration remains adamantly against allowing Iran access to nuclear power, despite the fact that it's perfectly safe! It's idiocy, I tell you...
Arguably not so much so far, other than give us half a permanently manned outpost in space. But it would be stupid to abandon the project now, when it's so far along -- better to finish it up and make the best of it. If nothing else, it gives us more experience living and working in space.
And why is it that construction grinds to a halt when only one of the member
nations involved grounds its shuttles? Is this really an "international" space station?
Presumably because it was designed to be built using Space Shuttles, and the cost of redesigning everything to be lifted by (say) Russian rockets was high enough that it was considered better to just wait for the shuttles to come back on line. It's still "international" because it's still being developed by multiple nations. "international" doesn't mean "fully redundant space agencies".
Also, doesn't this leave the United States eternally committed to developing this project?
Probably, unless we want to abandon it. But why would we want to do that? Once it's set up, the costs of maintaining it are minimal -- they are dwarfed by what the US spends on other things. Putting all that stuff up there and then not amortizing the costs by actually using it would be extremely cost-ineffective; no doubt it would be held up as an example of the government wasting money.
Why is it that "small government conservatives" have the knack to make that clock jump by large percentages?
The people running the current US government have one set of principles they use for PR, and another set that they implement as policy. Their trick is to get the voting population to confuse the two -- which is not so difficult to do when the press willing repeats everything they say without ever checking it for accuracy.
True... I wonder why some manufacturer doesn't make an LCD display with an easily replaceable backlight(*). I'd pay extra for a display if I knew I wouldn't have to throw it away in a few years.
(*) Actually, I have some ideas as to why, but they are too cynical to be worth repeating here
Agreed, but your rusted-out car body isn't pure aluminum or pure steel. It's some metal, plus some paint, plus various other materials that you will need to separate out in order to get your useful raw material back out again. The separation takes work and energy, and you'll never get all of the material back -- there will always be some lost during the processing. The waste percentage is much smaller for metals than it is for other materials, but it's not zero.
Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century?
No -- read what I said again. The word was "entrepreneurs". This is a change in the attitude of the business community, not the technical community. And yes, many in the business community have been idiots for years and years, because they weren't able to see the potential value of post-consumer waste. Recycling this content was considered a money-loser; something you might do because you're a good person, but not something you could do to make a profit.
That's really just two ways of saying the same thing. And in any case, isn't delaying the inevitable a worthwhile thing to do? The more slowly the landfills fill, the more time we have to come up with a way to solve the problem.
When that happens, we will have the same volume of trash as we started with.
No matter what happens (barring space exploration, and meteorites, anyway), we will always have the same volume of stuff that we started with: one Earth-sized planet's worth of various materials, mixed into various combinations that are either more useful to us, or less useful to us. The trick is to increase our skill at converting the less-useful forms (aka "garbage") into more-useful forms (aka "products"). This is a step along that path.
Dunno whether it applies to bulk medical supplies so much, but in general this sort of problem ("I have item X that I don't need and can't profitably sell, but it's still perfectly useful if only I could find the person who could use it") is a search/discovery problem. 99% of the time, the person who could use the item is out there, if only there was a way for you to find them (or them to find you).
The Internet is a great mechanism for solving this sort of problem -- if you haven't checked out services like FreeCycle, I highly recommend them -- it's an excellent way to get (or get rid of) all kinds of useful things. The giver gets his junk removed for free (no storage, shipping, or dumping fees to pay), the recipient gets free stuff, and the useful stuff stays out of the landfills.
Correct.
This doesn't seem to me like what we normally think of as "recycling."
It's exactly what we normally think of as recycling. Every trip through the recycling cycle degrades the material to some extent -- that's why white paper gets recycled as newspaper, and newspaper gets recycled as filler, and so on. Even aluminum cans and plastic bottles can't be recycled indefinitely, because on every pass some percentage of them will end up lost or corrupted by foreign materials. So it's just a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. You're certainly free to argue that "only one" extra round of usefulness isn't "enough", but even one extra cycle is an improvement over none. In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage. With any luck, the profit motive will lead to technological innovations that make more and more kinds of recycling practical and profitable, and everybody wins: the inventors get rich, and what was once a problem (what do we do with all this garbage?) becomes a benefit (garbage as a valuable resource).
And yet still they are able to sell them at a profit. Strange, eh? But not so strange when you consider that people willing pay $99 for a designer t-shirt when essentially the same thing being sold elsewhere for $5. If nothing else, the symbolism and novelty makes these things worth the extra cost, at least in the eyes of some.
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner
Well, the trick to any business is to bring in more money than you send out. Looks like these people have figured out a way to do it, Walmart or no Walmart.
So you're complaining because sidewalks aren't exciting enough? What exactly were you expecting, trampoline action?
It's entirely possible for your "100% open source driver" to have a security hole in it... hell, it could be based on the same exact codebase that was used in the OS/X driver exploit. You shouldn't get too complacent just because you're running open source software.
Obviously not -- all of those things are against the law, so anyone doing them is by definition not 'law-abiding'.
And you would be wrong.
Most of those being "harrased" in this manner have no love for western society in the first place. How much harm can you really create by harrasing people who would be quite happy to make your nation part of a Global Caliphate?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, there is a huge difference between disliking something and being willing to turn to violence against it; and it is that difference that keeps the vast majority of the population from day to day. If your actions change someone from "dislikes the west, but is peaceful and law-abiding" to "hates the west and will attack when given the opportunity", then congratulation, you've just created a terrorist. I'd call that harmful.
Ah, I think here you've come across the real problem.
Can you name some examples of Democrats that are doing this? How is it that "democrats are spending every dime we have" when they control neither the White House nor either branch of Congress? Seems to me that one of the few advantages to being completely out of power is that you don't have to take the blame for the actions of the people who are in power...
The amusing thing about the above post is that it was composed using a computer, delivered via TCP/IP, and posted to a web site. At every step, the above post was made possible by technologies whose development was funded by government money.
Why must it be a case of either/or? Why not have both first-rate detective work and highly accurate chemical sensors? You have nothing to lose but your tax dollars....
Really? Cool! As an example, can you tell me what the BCD representation of exactly 1/3 would be?