Your first quote blows your whole argument out of the water.
Except the IRS has declared that bitcoin is property, not currency.
Q-1: How is virtual currency treated for federal tax purposes? A-1: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency.
Lets break down the answer
For federal tax purposes,
This clause limits the scope of the statement. It specifically states that is applies only to federal tax purposes. Since money laundering statutes have nothing to do with federal taxes the rest of the statement does not apply to money laundering statutes.
virtual currency
They use the term "virtual currency" and not a phrase like "items known as virtual currency" which is evidence that the IRS thinks Bitcoin is currency.
is treated as property
Notice they say "is treated as" and not "is". One can treat anything as anything else but that does not change what the thing actually is. For example "the man is treated as a dog". Does the man change shape and turn into a dog? No. All that statement refers to is how the man is treated not what the man is.
Taken together the IRS statement does not declare Bitcoin property as it relates to money laundering statutes. It, in fact, gives credence to the idea that the IRS thinks that Bitcoin is a currency but decided to treat them as property anyway.
The F-25 project was started in 1996 and is planned to be completed in 2019. That is 23 years for an average of $17.4B/year. Also there will be about 2,443 aircraft in the use military which will be used for the next 20 years or more. Comparing a single year budget with a multi-year budged on raw numbers is not valid. You need to convert them to the same scale
According to this article there were 3,600 copies of the book sold at Costco during the month of June. Costco has 649 stores therefore they sold on average 5.5 books per store over a month's time. Costco make profits on volume and 5.5 books per store in a month is extremely low volume. No matter the content, Costco would return any book with such low sales. This was a sales decision not political censorship.
By the way, after the movie came out sale of the book rose so Costco re-ordered it.
Not to mention, how do people think Costco buys books? Just randomly? There is no way that this book ended up at Costco without awareness of the content of the book, as well as the history of the publisher and author. Dinesh D’Souza, the author has made a whole career of writing books and making documentaries about how horrible liberals and Obama are for the US. And the list of books from the publisher, Regnery Publishing, makes it abundantly clear what side of the political aisle they are on, and it is definitely not the same one as the the current administration. I think Costco had sales expectations for this book that it did not meet. Perhaps they should have waited to make a decision about its continued poor sales record until after the movie was released. Of course, maybe this was just a part of the regular process they have for reviewing book sales. But whatever the reasoning, it looks tenuous at best to say that dropping the book was based on the political content of the book.
Don't you think that if they wanted to "censor" the book they would never have put it on their shelves in the first place?
I bet that the AC is, or is associated with, the author. Sorry but reader here can do a little research and math as well as read books.
Urm, the 'cloud' solutions are what the whole damned article and discussion are about!
Can you quotes anything in the summary or linked article that even mentions the word "cloud"?
If all you had to do is lock down the firewall in your router,
I guess yo don't understand opening ports from the device side. What if the device uses open outgoing ports in the firewall. Incoming ports are needwed to remotely access the equipment? What if the software on the phone that is being used to monitor the home forwards the data?
I suggested the Free software so that whatever solution you go with is auditable
Autidable by whom? Definitely not by the average user. What is there to stop a person from modifying open source software so that they can monitor the homes they install the hardware into? Companies are not the only entities with nefarious intent.
The hacker solution is just as easy to replicate as any other.
BS. Hacking is much more complex than walking into a store and buying a product. It it entails taking a bunch of electronics, wires and software to make a device they will not do it.
Whatever works in one house will likely work in the next.
Different houses. Different people, Different skill levels. Different time availability. Different interest DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS. The solution may work but the different person implementing it will make the outcome different. Get out of your own head for a second and attempt to think like a person who can not tell the difference between a resistor and a capacitor and has never picked up a soldering iron. About 90% of the population falls into that category. If it does not come as a complete product most people don't want it.
That HAS been done before, successfully with DRMed media.
Hardware is not even close to DRM software.
That is not necessarily true. I would suggest going with a Free software solution though.
The software is the simplest part of the installation. Take the whole thing into account. The OP was talking about 1 wire sensors, a raspberry pie and a relay board for one simple function. That is hacking. A manufactured device with open source software is not hacking. By your logic every linux server is a hacker solution.
The problem with the 'cloud' solutions is that they quit working if you don't let them phone home.
Cloud solutions are where the software is in the cloud. That would be stupid for a monitoring system and I don't see where anyone mentioned that method. What they are talking about is hardware that may be accessible from the web; not hardware where the software is stored in the "cloud".
Would that be the standard contract where they claim the right to alter the deal at any time and your only real option is to pray that they don't alter it further?
Any court would throw out any contract that was modified to allow spying without the customer explicitly signing that contract. You are reaching now.
Just because it's a hacker made solution doesn't mean the solution won't be the same for every install.
If the same piece of hardware is made and installed a large number of times by the same company it is no longer a hacker solution. It is a corporate product that the OP is suspicious of with a thin veneer to hide that fact. If a company makes a business out of making and installing the system it is no longer a hacker solution.
For 1, then why would you trust a whole corporation full of unknown people?
Because you can sue them if they do not follow their contract and spy on you. It is difficult to sue someone you can not find. Individuals can easily hide. It is much more difficult for a large company.
people hire contractors to install A/C, new mahor appliances, siding, etc all the time.
The original poster has an issue with corporations making devices that could spy on homes. A "cookie cutter" install would be an installation of those devices. I was talking about hiring someone to install hacker made devices.
You missed the point completely. I am not talking about lack of resources. If people do not have the tools, time and/or inclination to hack electronics it does not matter if people like Nimbus are around. Why would the average person spend $100 on tools, 40 hours learning the skills and 40 hours getting a piece of electronics to work when they can go buy it for $50. Keep in mind that they do not enjoy those 80 hours of work and it would have to be spread out over a few months due to time constraints. They will also probably waste quite a bit of equipment due to frying them with circuit mistakes. You might do it because you think it is interesting but most people won't.
1) find someone who will do it. Most businesses have no incentive to do a small job. I would also not trust an unknown person to place electronics in my home. 2) afford the cost of hiring someone for a custom job.
Not everyone in the world is like you. I would bet that at least 90% of the world population does not have the tools, skills, time and/or inclination to do as you suggest. Only a very tiny portion of the population are into DIY electronics like you are.
Take a look at this real world data from Germany. Take a look at page 10. In July they produced 5.1TWh. In January they produced.35TWh. So in January they produced 7% of what they produced in July. Also notice they overall they produced 29.7TWh with and installed capacity of 35.65Gw. Here is the math 35.65*365*24=312TWh of capacity. 29.7/312= 9.5%. So the actual production was 9.5% of capacity. So using real world data your figures are at least off by an order of magnitude.
A the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both of which are technologies under active development.
You are absolutely correct. The problem is that the storage problem has not been cracked yet. Pumped hydro needs a lot of water to be pumped and can only be done in certain mountainous wet areas. If the area is too dry the surface water just evaporates. It also had major environmental impact as it floods areas and uses lots of water. Compressed air reservoirs have been found to leak and be inefficient. Batteries are too expensive (even metal salt) to store Terra Watt Hours of energy. While there is some research into electricity storage there is not enough and that is a problem. Long range transmission can be done with high voltage DC but even that has losses. It is also very expensive as it has to be converted to AC for general use. At every conversion there is a loss. DC does not step up or down very well.
Arizona's insolation doesn't vary all that much over the year, and you'd only need to cover 60% of it with solar panels to provide the entire nation's energy needs.
Sorry but you forget conversion/transmission losses. Also, 14% is not a small number. Much of Arizona is unsuitable for the installation of solar panels. Hills pointing the wrong direction, mountains, cities, farms, etc. Arizona is not a blank slate. Have you run any number on how much it would cost to install a nation wide HVDC network and install all those PV installations? The US population is about 314million. Even using your figures of 142 sqM/person that comes out to 44,600sqkm. Lets look at the cost of just the panels. Here is a basic panel with an area of 1.6 SqM at $417. Lets play with the cost a bit. lets quarter the cost for bulk by and double for high efficiency. Therefore half the cost. Here is the math 44.600sqkm/1.6sqM*417/2= $5.8Trillion. And that is just for the panels and not a lot of other costs involved with installation. Here is a simpler calculation. Take a real world installation. It produced 626.22 GWh in a year and cost of $1.8 billion. You propose to generate 28,308,670GWh. To produce that would require about 626 such plants costing about $1.1 Trillion. Then there is the cost of transmitting that power. Where will that money come from?
Another point you might want to look at is the efficiency of that plant in Arizona. It has an installed capacity of 290 MW and produced 626.22Gwh. 290*24*365= 2540.4GWh. That works out to a 25% efficiency even in Arizona on an optimal site.
One huge problem with your calculations is that they work on averages. The world does not work like that. What do you do in winter time when the real output is 10% of the average output and the demand is double the average? To deal with that you would need twenty times your calculated area of PVs.
Also you numbers are way off. You state "5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day". According to this " most efficient mass-produced solar modules have power density values of up to 175 W/m2". So 5000/175 = 28.5 hours. The sun does not shine 28.5 hours a day. On the shortest day of the year in Seattle one square meter of panel would only produce 1.5 kWh. Even on the longest day it would only produce 2.8kWh.
if the DMCA takedown is filed on behalf of one of the major media companies
That is a rather broad interpretation of what is actually said.
In exchange for this, some of these music copyright owners require us to handle videos containing their sound recordings and/or musical works in ways that differ from the usual processes on YouTube.
Your interpretation assumes that YouTube has contracts with all major media companies and that all contracts have this special handling clause. Where is your evidence of those assumptions?
This process is also outside of the DMCA process and does open YouTube up to litigation. This is also completely different than your original scenario of checking with the original complainant. There is nothing the the YouTube policy about investigation. The policy does not even mention DMCA.
the hosting company actually does some investigating of it's own (which is rare)
What is your expertise on this? That is so far from the DMCA procedure as to be laughable. The whole reason for DMCA is to take responsability out of the hands of the hosting company. The hosting company never does an investigation. All they do is respond to complaints and counter complaints. If the hosting company opened an investigation they are taking responsibility for finding the voracity of the claims. That would open them up to litigation and any competent lawyer for the hosting company would avoid that like the plague. Finding the voracity of claims is the job of the courts and not the hosting companies.
What may confuse you is that the initial complainant has a number of days in which to file a law suit to keep the information down. Action on a counter claim is not immediate. If no lawsuit is file the data goes back up.
Posting a quote without a reference is questionable at best.
Second, a statement that the person sending the notice is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner is the most important part. Most bogus take down notices are for copyrights not owned or authorized to be represented by the complaining party or do not exist at all (as in the case of a name). Part of the take down notice is "under penalty of perjury" and part of it isn't. The part of it that is (ownership/representation) has a basis in verifiable fact. The part of it that isn't is based on "good faith belief" which is almost impossible to disprove.
Thanks for this. "Good faith belief" can cover a multitude of sins.
That covers possible misinterpretation of the law. The courts are there to make the fine decisions. The perjury comes in making a claim of copyright when no copyright exists.
Nevertheless, it can be subject to a legal takedown. What a messed-up system.
That is only the first step. The site owner then can make a counter claim and the information goes back up. The copyright holder can then file suit in court and the information comes down again. Do you have a better idea of how to deal with infringing material posted on the web? Sorry but the court system is much too slow to do it on it's own. Waiting a couple of years to get infringing material taken down is much too long. I agree that it is being misused by some people but until a better solution is found it is the best available.
Once, a congressman from the United States said of his constituents, "There are no law-abiding citizens, there are only citizens who haven't yet broken a law."
If you are going to quote someone then you need to give a name and, if possible, a reference. Saying "a congressman from the United States" is meaningless. Yes, I did a Google search for that phrase and found nothing.
Read this. Yes,the take down notice is under penalty of perjury..
Filing a DMCA Notice to Remove Copyrighted Content-for Copyright Holders If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please provide us with a written notice containing the following information:
1. Your name, address, telephone number, and email address (if any). 2. A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed. 3. A description of where on the Vimeo Site the material that you claim is infringing may be found, sufficient for VIMEO to locate the material (e.g., the URL). 4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the copyrighted work is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. 5. A statement by you UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf. 6. Your electronic or physical signature.
So you'd risk a Seal team rather than using the old push a button method? I thought you didn't want to have soldiers (in this case sailors) die?
Things are not as black and white as you seem to want them to be. I am definitely willing to risk a few lives but I am not willing to risk a few hundred lives.
He was a higher value target presumably it would have been better to take him alive.
As a prisoner Al-Alawaki is worthless. He is not going to say anything and will never get out of jail. It is also highly doubtful that he could be taken alive. Don't you think he might have an AK close by and know how to use it? The outcome would be the same except for the addition deaths of American soldiers, local civilians and terrorists. You seem very happy to throw away people's lives needlessly.
So as long as there's a 5 year old kid out there with an AK-47 Al-Qaeda is still a threat?
Again, not black and white. While a 5 year old with and AK is a threat he is not going to plan/ cause to be executed another 911.
if there's a camp full of his pupils running around the job wasn't completed, so what good was it?
A leaderless bunch of money-less, directionless people is not much of a threat. Leaders who can train, direct and finance them are the danger. Who is to say that a significant number of "fighters" didn't desert when the learned that they could die at any moment. Al-Qaeda will never die. The objective is to keep it weak enough that the threat is minimal.
Put this into context, the riots of the late 60s. If the government had thought it was okay to kill its own citizens because they posed a threat, in this case destruction of property, loss of life, what stopped Johnson from sending in the Army and just killing all of the rioters?
Here are some differences; 1. The rioters would be on American soil. 2. The rioters were not armed with or trained to use automatic and heavier weapons. 3. The rioters did not move form country to country to evade capture. 4. The rioters did not kill thousands of people in a number of raids across the world. 5. In riots the loss of life is not the main objective. In terrorism it is one of the main objectives. 6. Riots are a short term issue that solve themselves in a few days at most. Al-Qaeda is a long term issue and weakening it is a long term problem. The way riots are dealt with is to cordon off the area and wait till it dies down. You can't deal with al-Quada that way. Again, a very bad parallel.
Some parts of Yemen are lawless. The Yemeni government wanted to capture the al-Qaeda leaders but could not.
If this was so why couldn't the US land troops there and apprehend Al-Awlaki?
They could but it would cause the deaths of many soldiers and civilians. Do you remember the landings in Mogadishu?
We seemed to go after Bin Laden with a small team of special forces,
You continue to draw inaccurate parallels. Bin Laden was trying to hide by keeping a low profile. He had less than 5 guards. The camp in Yemen had hundreds of fighters training. That is a huge difference.
why not take out Bin Laden's compound with a drone?
Because it could be done by a couple of helicopters full of Seals. The assault on the Yemen base would take many more.
Also bombing the Iraqi headquarters was an act of war, with a country where all the provocations, declarations, warnings and other aspects had been fully vetted not only with congress but the UN.
I'm not aware of any Vietnam POWs or German POWs still being held are you?
Those wars are over. Al-Qaeda is still working.
You also brought up WWII anybody remember when we put our own Japanese citizens [wikipedia.org] in camps
Those Japanese citizens didn't go on television extolling their followers to attack US citizens anywhere in the world. They are very different situations. Al-qaeda is a real threat as seen by their actions. The Japanese Americans were never a threat.
Where's the "mounds of evidence" so the public can see it?
Look up any of the targets on the internet. It will take a few minutes to find plenty of evidence.
Al-Awlaki was a bad US citizen and I'm sure he deserved to die, and the way that this has been handled and it's taken a lawsuit by the ACLU and the New York Times to get this information into the public. If this is supposed to be the "most open and transparent administration ever" why did it take a lawsuit to get this information?
Now you are changing the subject. You seem to be OK with sending in hundreds of soldiers in to kill him and now have issues with secrecy. Those are different issues.
In the situation you bring up, it's up to the courts to decided if a homicide is justifiable,
The courts get involved in justifiable homicide cases only after the homicide happens and not before. They also do not get involved when the homicide is obviously justifiably. There are many cases of people killing other people that never go to court.
My biggest problem with this is that the executive branch of the government conducted this operation and neither the judicial nor legislative branches seem to have been involved here.
It is the executive branch that prosecutes wars. Al-Qaeda was the one to declare war.
We've held enemy combatants in Guantanamo without due process of law because they're not US citizens
And in WW2, Vietnam, etc we held thousands of enemy combatants without due process of law. You do not seem to see a difference between individuals breaking laws and an organization committing terrorist attacks. The latter are treated as prisoners of wars not suspects.
I'm not saying Al-Awlaki was a model citizen, far from it, he was a nut job but isn't Manson?
The difference between Al-Awlaki and Manson is that Manson did not sit in a lawless land surrounded by a large number of armed guards planning attacks on US citizens and bragging about it. There were only two ways to stop him. Kill him or send hundreds of men in to capture him. While you might want the latter, the loss of life would have been much higher on both sides. An assault on a well guarded compound would take hundreds of soldiers. In the end there is a very good chance that the target would be killed in the combat. You tell the spouses and families of the soldiers that were killed in the assault that we had the technology to do the same thing without loss of their loved one's life but chose to send him/her into battle. How is this different than the precision bombing of Iraqi headquarters during the First Gulf War?
Because we now have the technological means of killing somebody the government doesn't like,
Your bar is very far below the actual standard. Every target has mounds of evidence, some supplied by their own mouths, that thy were high ranking members of terrorist organizations who have planned past attacks or are planning future attacks on US citizens. That this evidence did not come out in court is beside the point. Wars do not go through the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first quote blows your whole argument out of the water.
Except the IRS has declared that bitcoin is property, not currency.
Q-1: How is virtual currency treated for federal tax purposes?
A-1: For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property. General tax
principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual
currency.
Lets break down the answer
For federal tax purposes,
This clause limits the scope of the statement. It specifically states that is applies only to federal tax purposes. Since money laundering statutes have nothing to do with federal taxes the rest of the statement does not apply to money laundering statutes.
virtual currency
They use the term "virtual currency" and not a phrase like "items known as virtual currency" which is evidence that the IRS thinks Bitcoin is currency.
is treated as property
Notice they say "is treated as" and not "is". One can treat anything as anything else but that does not change what the thing actually is. For example "the man is treated as a dog". Does the man change shape and turn into a dog? No. All that statement refers to is how the man is treated not what the man is.
Taken together the IRS statement does not declare Bitcoin property as it relates to money laundering statutes. It, in fact, gives credence to the idea that the IRS thinks that Bitcoin is a currency but decided to treat them as property anyway.
The F-25 project was started in 1996 and is planned to be completed in 2019. That is 23 years for an average of $17.4B/year. Also there will be about 2,443 aircraft in the use military which will be used for the next 20 years or more. Comparing a single year budget with a multi-year budged on raw numbers is not valid. You need to convert them to the same scale
The NASA budget is a little bit bigger than a few millon at about $18B.
According to this article there were 3,600 copies of the book sold at Costco during the month of June. Costco has 649 stores therefore they sold on average 5.5 books per store over a month's time. Costco make profits on volume and 5.5 books per store in a month is extremely low volume. No matter the content, Costco would return any book with such low sales. This was a sales decision not political censorship.
By the way, after the movie came out sale of the book rose so Costco re-ordered it.
This article brings up an interesting point;
Not to mention, how do people think Costco buys books? Just randomly? There is no way that this book ended up at Costco without awareness of the content of the book, as well as the history of the publisher and author. Dinesh D’Souza, the author has made a whole career of writing books and making documentaries about how horrible liberals and Obama are for the US. And the list of books from the publisher, Regnery Publishing, makes it abundantly clear what side of the political aisle they are on, and it is definitely not the same one as the the current administration. I think Costco had sales expectations for this book that it did not meet. Perhaps they should have waited to make a decision about its continued poor sales record until after the movie was released. Of course, maybe this was just a part of the regular process they have for reviewing book sales. But whatever the reasoning, it looks tenuous at best to say that dropping the book was based on the political content of the book.
Don't you think that if they wanted to "censor" the book they would never have put it on their shelves in the first place?
I bet that the AC is, or is associated with, the author. Sorry but reader here can do a little research and math as well as read books.
Urm, the 'cloud' solutions are what the whole damned article and discussion are about!
Can you quotes anything in the summary or linked article that even mentions the word "cloud"?
If all you had to do is lock down the firewall in your router,
I guess yo don't understand opening ports from the device side. What if the device uses open outgoing ports in the firewall. Incoming ports are needwed to remotely access the equipment? What if the software on the phone that is being used to monitor the home forwards the data?
I suggested the Free software so that whatever solution you go with is auditable
Autidable by whom? Definitely not by the average user. What is there to stop a person from modifying open source software so that they can monitor the homes they install the hardware into? Companies are not the only entities with nefarious intent.
The hacker solution is just as easy to replicate as any other.
BS. Hacking is much more complex than walking into a store and buying a product. It it entails taking a bunch of electronics, wires and software to make a device they will not do it.
Whatever works in one house will likely work in the next.
Different houses. Different people, Different skill levels. Different time availability. Different interest DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS. The solution may work but the different person implementing it will make the outcome different. Get out of your own head for a second and attempt to think like a person who can not tell the difference between a resistor and a capacitor and has never picked up a soldering iron. About 90% of the population falls into that category. If it does not come as a complete product most people don't want it.
Again, most people are not you.
That HAS been done before, successfully with DRMed media.
Hardware is not even close to DRM software.
That is not necessarily true. I would suggest going with a Free software solution though.
The software is the simplest part of the installation. Take the whole thing into account. The OP was talking about 1 wire sensors, a raspberry pie and a relay board for one simple function. That is hacking. A manufactured device with open source software is not hacking. By your logic every linux server is a hacker solution.
The problem with the 'cloud' solutions is that they quit working if you don't let them phone home.
Cloud solutions are where the software is in the cloud. That would be stupid for a monitoring system and I don't see where anyone mentioned that method. What they are talking about is hardware that may be accessible from the web; not hardware where the software is stored in the "cloud".
Would that be the standard contract where they claim the right to alter the deal at any time and your only real option is to pray that they don't alter it further?
Any court would throw out any contract that was modified to allow spying without the customer explicitly signing that contract. You are reaching now.
Just because it's a hacker made solution doesn't mean the solution won't be the same for every install.
If the same piece of hardware is made and installed a large number of times by the same company it is no longer a hacker solution. It is a corporate product that the OP is suspicious of with a thin veneer to hide that fact. If a company makes a business out of making and installing the system it is no longer a hacker solution.
For 1, then why would you trust a whole corporation full of unknown people?
Because you can sue them if they do not follow their contract and spy on you. It is difficult to sue someone you can not find. Individuals can easily hide. It is much more difficult for a large company.
people hire contractors to install A/C, new mahor appliances, siding, etc all the time.
The original poster has an issue with corporations making devices that could spy on homes. A "cookie cutter" install would be an installation of those devices. I was talking about hiring someone to install hacker made devices.
You missed the point completely. I am not talking about lack of resources. If people do not have the tools, time and/or inclination to hack electronics it does not matter if people like Nimbus are around. Why would the average person spend $100 on tools, 40 hours learning the skills and 40 hours getting a piece of electronics to work when they can go buy it for $50. Keep in mind that they do not enjoy those 80 hours of work and it would have to be spread out over a few months due to time constraints. They will also probably waste quite a bit of equipment due to frying them with circuit mistakes. You might do it because you think it is interesting but most people won't.
The "Everyone be a hacker" meme is just stupid.
1) find someone who will do it. Most businesses have no incentive to do a small job. I would also not trust an unknown person to place electronics in my home.
2) afford the cost of hiring someone for a custom job.
Not everyone in the world is like you. I would bet that at least 90% of the world population does not have the tools, skills, time and/or inclination to do as you suggest. Only a very tiny portion of the population are into DIY electronics like you are.
Take a look at this real world data from Germany. Take a look at page 10. In July they produced 5.1TWh. In January they produced .35TWh. So in January they produced 7% of what they produced in July. Also notice they overall they produced 29.7TWh with and installed capacity of 35.65Gw. Here is the math 35.65*365*24=312TWh of capacity. 29.7/312= 9.5%. So the actual production was 9.5% of capacity. So using real world data your figures are at least off by an order of magnitude.
A the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both of which are technologies under active development.
You are absolutely correct. The problem is that the storage problem has not been cracked yet. Pumped hydro needs a lot of water to be pumped and can only be done in certain mountainous wet areas. If the area is too dry the surface water just evaporates. It also had major environmental impact as it floods areas and uses lots of water. Compressed air reservoirs have been found to leak and be inefficient. Batteries are too expensive (even metal salt) to store Terra Watt Hours of energy. While there is some research into electricity storage there is not enough and that is a problem. Long range transmission can be done with high voltage DC but even that has losses. It is also very expensive as it has to be converted to AC for general use. At every conversion there is a loss. DC does not step up or down very well.
Arizona's insolation doesn't vary all that much over the year, and you'd only need to cover 60% of it with solar panels to provide the entire nation's energy needs.
Sorry but you forget conversion/transmission losses. Also, 14% is not a small number. Much of Arizona is unsuitable for the installation of solar panels. Hills pointing the wrong direction, mountains, cities, farms, etc. Arizona is not a blank slate.
Have you run any number on how much it would cost to install a nation wide HVDC network and install all those PV installations? The US population is about 314million. Even using your figures of 142 sqM/person that comes out to 44,600sqkm. Lets look at the cost of just the panels. Here is a basic panel with an area of 1.6 SqM at $417. Lets play with the cost a bit. lets quarter the cost for bulk by and double for high efficiency. Therefore half the cost. Here is the math 44.600sqkm/1.6sqM*417/2= $5.8Trillion. And that is just for the panels and not a lot of other costs involved with installation. Here is a simpler calculation. Take a real world installation. It produced 626.22 GWh in a year and cost of $1.8 billion. You propose to generate 28,308,670GWh. To produce that would require about 626 such plants costing about $1.1 Trillion. Then there is the cost of transmitting that power. Where will that money come from?
Another point you might want to look at is the efficiency of that plant in Arizona. It has an installed capacity of 290 MW and produced 626.22Gwh. 290*24*365= 2540.4GWh. That works out to a 25% efficiency even in Arizona on an optimal site.
One huge problem with your calculations is that they work on averages. The world does not work like that. What do you do in winter time when the real output is 10% of the average output and the demand is double the average? To deal with that you would need twenty times your calculated area of PVs.
Also you numbers are way off. You state "5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day". According to this " most efficient mass-produced solar modules have power density values of up to 175 W/m2". So 5000/175 = 28.5 hours. The sun does not shine 28.5 hours a day. On the shortest day of the year in Seattle one square meter of panel would only produce 1.5 kWh. Even on the longest day it would only produce 2.8kWh.
if the DMCA takedown is filed on behalf of one of the major media companies
That is a rather broad interpretation of what is actually said.
In exchange for this, some of these music copyright owners require us to handle videos containing their sound recordings and/or musical works in ways that differ from the usual processes on YouTube.
Your interpretation assumes that YouTube has contracts with all major media companies and that all contracts have this special handling clause. Where is your evidence of those assumptions?
This process is also outside of the DMCA process and does open YouTube up to litigation. This is also completely different than your original scenario of checking with the original complainant. There is nothing the the YouTube policy about investigation. The policy does not even mention DMCA.
Here is one that is ongoing now.
the hosting company actually does some investigating of it's own (which is rare)
What is your expertise on this? That is so far from the DMCA procedure as to be laughable. The whole reason for DMCA is to take responsability out of the hands of the hosting company. The hosting company never does an investigation. All they do is respond to complaints and counter complaints. If the hosting company opened an investigation they are taking responsibility for finding the voracity of the claims. That would open them up to litigation and any competent lawyer for the hosting company would avoid that like the plague. Finding the voracity of claims is the job of the courts and not the hosting companies.
What may confuse you is that the initial complainant has a number of days in which to file a law suit to keep the information down. Action on a counter claim is not immediate. If no lawsuit is file the data goes back up.
Posting a quote without a reference is questionable at best.
Second, a statement that the person sending the notice is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner is the most important part. Most bogus take down notices are for copyrights not owned or authorized to be represented by the complaining party or do not exist at all (as in the case of a name). Part of the take down notice is "under penalty of perjury" and part of it isn't. The part of it that is (ownership/representation) has a basis in verifiable fact. The part of it that isn't is based on "good faith belief" which is almost impossible to disprove.
Thanks for this. "Good faith belief" can cover a multitude of sins.
That covers possible misinterpretation of the law. The courts are there to make the fine decisions. The perjury comes in making a claim of copyright when no copyright exists.
Nevertheless, it can be subject to a legal takedown. What a messed-up system.
That is only the first step. The site owner then can make a counter claim and the information goes back up. The copyright holder can then file suit in court and the information comes down again. Do you have a better idea of how to deal with infringing material posted on the web? Sorry but the court system is much too slow to do it on it's own. Waiting a couple of years to get infringing material taken down is much too long. I agree that it is being misused by some people but until a better solution is found it is the best available.
Once, a congressman from the United States said of his constituents, "There are no law-abiding citizens, there are only citizens who haven't yet broken a law."
If you are going to quote someone then you need to give a name and, if possible, a reference. Saying "a congressman from the United States" is meaningless. Yes, I did a Google search for that phrase and found nothing.
Then go have a nice relaxing vacation on the idiot's life savings.
Not much help if the idiot's life savings is $5.20.
Read this. Yes,the take down notice is under penalty of perjury..
Filing a DMCA Notice to Remove Copyrighted Content-for Copyright Holders
If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please provide us with a written notice containing the following information:
1. Your name, address, telephone number, and email address (if any).
2. A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed.
3. A description of where on the Vimeo Site the material that you claim is infringing may be found, sufficient for VIMEO to locate the material (e.g., the URL).
4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the copyrighted work is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
5. A statement by you UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.
6. Your electronic or physical signature.
(emphasis mine)
So you'd risk a Seal team rather than using the old push a button method? I thought you didn't want to have soldiers (in this case sailors) die?
Things are not as black and white as you seem to want them to be. I am definitely willing to risk a few lives but I am not willing to risk a few hundred lives.
He was a higher value target presumably it would have been better to take him alive.
As a prisoner Al-Alawaki is worthless. He is not going to say anything and will never get out of jail. It is also highly doubtful that he could be taken alive. Don't you think he might have an AK close by and know how to use it? The outcome would be the same except for the addition deaths of American soldiers, local civilians and terrorists. You seem very happy to throw away people's lives needlessly.
So as long as there's a 5 year old kid out there with an AK-47 Al-Qaeda is still a threat?
Again, not black and white. While a 5 year old with and AK is a threat he is not going to plan/ cause to be executed another 911.
if there's a camp full of his pupils running around the job wasn't completed, so what good was it?
A leaderless bunch of money-less, directionless people is not much of a threat. Leaders who can train, direct and finance them are the danger. Who is to say that a significant number of "fighters" didn't desert when the learned that they could die at any moment. Al-Qaeda will never die. The objective is to keep it weak enough that the threat is minimal.
Put this into context, the riots of the late 60s. If the government had thought it was okay to kill its own citizens because they posed a threat, in this case destruction of property, loss of life, what stopped Johnson from sending in the Army and just killing all of the rioters?
Here are some differences;
1. The rioters would be on American soil.
2. The rioters were not armed with or trained to use automatic and heavier weapons.
3. The rioters did not move form country to country to evade capture.
4. The rioters did not kill thousands of people in a number of raids across the world.
5. In riots the loss of life is not the main objective. In terrorism it is one of the main objectives.
6. Riots are a short term issue that solve themselves in a few days at most. Al-Qaeda is a long term issue and weakening it is a long term problem.
The way riots are dealt with is to cordon off the area and wait till it dies down. You can't deal with al-Quada that way.
Again, a very bad parallel.
Alternate One: Get close to your destination. Pull out your phone,run into someone while futzing with your phone...
The place to pull over to use your phone to look for a parking space is called a parking space.
So Yemen is a lawless country?
Some parts of Yemen are lawless. The Yemeni government wanted to capture the al-Qaeda leaders but could not.
If this was so why couldn't the US land troops there and apprehend Al-Awlaki?
They could but it would cause the deaths of many soldiers and civilians. Do you remember the landings in Mogadishu?
We seemed to go after Bin Laden with a small team of special forces,
You continue to draw inaccurate parallels. Bin Laden was trying to hide by keeping a low profile. He had less than 5 guards. The camp in Yemen had hundreds of fighters training. That is a huge difference.
why not take out Bin Laden's compound with a drone?
Because it could be done by a couple of helicopters full of Seals. The assault on the Yemen base would take many more.
Also bombing the Iraqi headquarters was an act of war, with a country where all the provocations, declarations, warnings and other aspects had been fully vetted not only with congress but the UN.
Congress approved this.
I'm not aware of any Vietnam POWs or German POWs still being held are you?
Those wars are over. Al-Qaeda is still working.
You also brought up WWII anybody remember when we put our own Japanese citizens [wikipedia.org] in camps
Those Japanese citizens didn't go on television extolling their followers to attack US citizens anywhere in the world. They are very different situations. Al-qaeda is a real threat as seen by their actions. The Japanese Americans were never a threat.
Where's the "mounds of evidence" so the public can see it?
Look up any of the targets on the internet. It will take a few minutes to find plenty of evidence.
Al-Awlaki was a bad US citizen and I'm sure he deserved to die, and the way that this has been handled and it's taken a lawsuit by the ACLU and the New York Times to get this information into the public. If this is supposed to be the "most open and transparent administration ever" why did it take a lawsuit to get this information?
Now you are changing the subject. You seem to be OK with sending in hundreds of soldiers in to kill him and now have issues with secrecy. Those are different issues.
In the situation you bring up, it's up to the courts to decided if a homicide is justifiable,
The courts get involved in justifiable homicide cases only after the homicide happens and not before. They also do not get involved when the homicide is obviously justifiably. There are many cases of people killing other people that never go to court.
My biggest problem with this is that the executive branch of the government conducted this operation and neither the judicial nor legislative branches seem to have been involved here.
It is the executive branch that prosecutes wars. Al-Qaeda was the one to declare war.
We've held enemy combatants in Guantanamo without due process of law because they're not US citizens
And in WW2, Vietnam, etc we held thousands of enemy combatants without due process of law. You do not seem to see a difference between individuals breaking laws and an organization committing terrorist attacks. The latter are treated as prisoners of wars not suspects.
I'm not saying Al-Awlaki was a model citizen, far from it, he was a nut job but isn't Manson?
The difference between Al-Awlaki and Manson is that Manson did not sit in a lawless land surrounded by a large number of armed guards planning attacks on US citizens and bragging about it. There were only two ways to stop him. Kill him or send hundreds of men in to capture him. While you might want the latter, the loss of life would have been much higher on both sides. An assault on a well guarded compound would take hundreds of soldiers. In the end there is a very good chance that the target would be killed in the combat. You tell the spouses and families of the soldiers that were killed in the assault that we had the technology to do the same thing without loss of their loved one's life but chose to send him/her into battle. How is this different than the precision bombing of Iraqi headquarters during the First Gulf War?
Because we now have the technological means of killing somebody the government doesn't like,
Your bar is very far below the actual standard. Every target has mounds of evidence, some supplied by their own mouths, that thy were high ranking members of terrorist organizations who have planned past attacks or are planning future attacks on US citizens. That this evidence did not come out in court is beside the point. Wars do not go through the courts.