I'd rather have the nuclear plant, personally. Yay Jobs!!! Followed up by the wind farm. Oil/Coal? I'd probably end up moving.
Hmm... How to put it: For a power plant/farm of the same capacity, much less production, a whole lot more people are going to be living 'next'(IE in sight of) to the wind farm as they would to the nuclear plant.
Add in that a modern nuclear plant might actually be safer - toss up enough wind towers to replace the power a nuke plant produces and you're getting into statistical possibilities that one of the towers will fall and crush somebody, blade break, whatever. Heck, you might get more fatalities from traffic accidents by maintenance vehicles. Discounting Chernobyl(the textbook on how to NOT build/operate a fission power plant), the death rate for nuclear power plants is less than one worldwide, per year.
For the amount of economic activity, that's actually hard to beat.
I think what was derided was 'stupid' amounts of regulation.
Unlike the parent, I might have a wind turbine set up 'next' to my house as I live in a very small town, but Texas has the advantage over California in that they have both a lot fewer regulations outside of urban areas and a lot of available range/farmland. Where you'd logically place a wind farm, after all. I don't see a lot of regulations needed to keep wind turbines out of cities. You still have lots of basic safety rules - and most municipalities have airports, and that places limits on towers/turbines near that.
What Texas avoids is excessive 'environmental' studies, lawsuits by nearby landowners, etc...
Though I will note that at least 4 power plant proposals have been shot down in Texas. Those that want to build the plants shift between Coal(Dirty!) and Nuclear(Unsafe? Expensive!) depending on political winds.
Considering the energy will be "wasted" otherwise, the fact that your storage is inefficient really doesn't matter.
It does effect the 'break even' point for a energy generation solution though.
Building the storage solution costs money, after all. A more efficient storage system would be able to transfer more power from the wasted peak generation points during demand valleys to deman peaks - resulting in you needing less generation capability in the first place. That's where the money is saved in order to make the storage system worth it.
If you amortize the cost of a wind turbine/solar panel and come up with X cents/kwh, then the 'cost' of transfered power is X/(efficiency) + amortization cost of storage solution.
If your power cost is 10 cents, and the storage solution is 50% efficient, then a transfered kwh will cost 20 cents before you add in the 5-10 cents to cover the storage solution. You can end up building it anyways just because the power is otherwise 'wasted', or you can just shut down some of the turbines to save maintenance/lifespan.
I say 5-10 cents, but I've calculated figures as high as 20 cents for battery type solutions(for either a solar home or electric vehicle). I know there's better out there. It's just that I often find that the batteries end up costing more than the electricity itself.
As maxume noted, you have both diesel and LNG. According to the DOE, 'Alternative Fuel' vehicles are approximately 60% LPG(Propane), 5% ethanol, ~2% electric, 20% Natural Gas.
The problem comes when the goal of 'economic' becomes secondary to the goal of 'being first'.
You have to be careful with 'green' or 'renewable', because there's a certain amount of FUD out there.
Recycling programs that don't actually recycle. Recycling programs that create more pollution than they prevent. Lost a bit of my innocence when I found that out.
Same deal with carbon credits, not ALL 'green' power sources are actually green, especially when you look at some of the specific implimentations out there.
Just make them return the Wii once treatment is over. You don't get to keep "free" wheelchairs after you've recovered either.
I think that's dependent upon how long you're going to be using said wheelchair. Though generally if you're going to be using it long term they make you buy your own.
Personal thought - I see a number of issues, broken down by: 1. Effectiveness - Is the Wii fit effective for the dollars it costs. Dollar per dollar, does it produce enough benefit to be worth it? 2. Motivation - physical therapy sucks. Rehabilitive products, no matter how effective or expensive, don't work if they aren't used. If the Wii fit makes it bearable, therefore the party actually uses it, I'd consider it Effective 3. Cost - Part of the problem with the cost of medical treatment in the USA is the usage of more or less custom, therefore expensive and clunky, systems over mass market equipment/devices that end up doing more or less the same thing for a fraction of the price. I see this problem is not confined to the USA.
What does all this mean? I'd like to see some studies into the effectiveness of the Wii. Now, there's so many medical conditions that we can't really test for everything, but I'm sure a few studies could at least give some broad guidelines. Basically the study would simply back up common sense. I don't imagine that a Wii would help strength of motion hugely(unless they're so weak that even lifting the remote is difficult), but it might help with range, could help endurance for those who have trouble.
I'm not a doctor or a scientist who sets up these sorts of study. But heck, Wiis are cheap compared to typical medical devices, much less therapy, so even modest benefits could mean the cost/benefit ratio.
The wear/tear/depreciation on rechargeable batteries tends to cost more than the electricity. There are better ways to store grid energy, but they're all fairly expensive on a kwh basis, and not 100% efficient.
When you're generating electricity for 4-10 cents a kwh, and it'd cost another 4-10 cents to store it, while you're selling it for 10-20 cents a kwh, often less, 'storage' isn't a real solution. They can run demand fired gas turbines cheaper.
Still, if you can even out those peaks that's a lot fewer standby generators needed, which can save them oodles of money.
I figure that as long as they're giving a kickback to the consumer for the program, it's all good.
Personally, I like the idea of you needing to override it in person - helps ensure that you're actually there to enjoy the lower temperatures.
Of course, my first thoughts about this system was that you wouldn't even notice the shut-offs in many variations of my dream house - most have fairly massive amounts of thermal mass incorporated into the design. So yeah, I could set up my AC/Heating system to only operate when electricity is least in demand, smoothing peaks, allowing the electricity companies to get away with less standby power, meaning fewer generators, more green power, more efficiency in the generation.
It'd be something of a trickle-down, but cheaper in the end.
Ignoring the legal risks still seems like a bad game theory.
Never said there weren't benefits to being a nice guy.;)
It's even plausible that somehow the plaintiff finds an argument or a piece of case law or something that means he loses.
Al is so far into parodyland it's almost beyond belief that somebody could find against him.
He's no expert on copyright law so it would be daft for him to rely on that.
I'm willing to bet he's got expert advice from his lawyers though. Remember, he's a published artist, you know he's gotta have some people working the copyright end of his work.
His best outcome is break even and his worst is to lose heaps of money in legal fees.
More like 'break even and get lots of free publicity from somebody stupid enough to sue him'.
More people will need this than you might think. Let's look at each piece of your claim:
I think that the issue here is where you place the line on a 'proper' graphics card.
By that I mean that today even integrated video cards are easily able to keep up with GUIs, play even blue-ray movies, etc...
I'm not sure SVG/Canvas, rasterization will really bog down modern integrated graphic engines. Or if it doesn't support it, it'll fall back to the CPU, and assuming you're not doing anything too CPU intensive at that moment, it won't matter. You don't need a 5870 to run Office or IE.
But for a desktop PC, isn't this a disadvantage? If you're using a proper graphics card, couldn't that space in the CPU be used for better things than a redundant graphics circuit?
Don't look at the PC enthusiast/gamer market. Look at the desktop PC for basic business use. Cost is much more king there, as long as performance is acceptable. You gotta cut a lot of costs if you want to be able to slap down a whole PC for less than $200.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple more generations we're looking back at 'system on a chip' designs. No northbridge, southbridge, video controller, etc... Just a central chip on a board with power and interface leads.
There's problems connecting to nearly every game server through a router when a non-technical person is doing the connecting, because there's no standard way for the creators of the games to open up the correct ports;
One solution for NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal, called the Internet Gateway Device (IGD) Protocol, is implemented via UPnP. Many routers and firewalls expose themselves as Internet Gateway Devices, allowing any local UPnP controller to perform a variety of actions, including retrieving the external IP address of the device, enumerate existing port mappings, and adding and removing port mappings. By adding a port mapping, a UPnP controller behind the IGD can enable traversal of the IGD from an external address to an internal client.
Now, I know this isn't universal - not all games or routers support it, but UPnP was enabled on my home router by default, and modern games should take advantage of it.
If they turn out to be harmful but less so than cigarettes, perhaps they should be available on prescription for smoking cessation only, rather than just marketed to everybody as a harmless way to get addicted to nicotine.
In my mind that's like requiring a permit for non-leaded gas when you can still buy leaded without a permit.
As others have pointed out cigarettes are more addictive than most other forms of tobacco; it's not just the nicotine. In addition, the e-cig advertising I've seen was trying to lure smokers, not non-smokers.
And if they do turn out to be totally harmless, than they should just be spot-checked for purity like anything else.
There's a huge difference between spot checking and requiring a prescription/permit.
They're unlikely to be 'completely harmless', but if you can get them to be around the danger level of eating a salad(most common source of food poisoning) or a steak(heart attack), we're good.
'Nobody knows what the consumers are actually inhaling,' says Erika Sward, director of national advocacy at the American Lung Association."
Wouldn't it take the mythbusters around 5 minutes to come up with a gadget to get you an air sample? Feed it to a mass spectrometer and you have your list.
I'd push for testing before pushing for a ban, personally.
But does that argument has any legal basis? People are assuming these are safe; if it turns out otherwise, there could be a lot of upset. We could blame individuals for assuming they're safe without proof, but did you feel like you were going out on a limb when you asserted "no serious health consequences"?
Given the circumstances, all I personally ask for is that it's settled that they're statistically safer than cigarettes. The next step would be to make sure they're as safe as such a nicotine delivery method can realistically be. If they're a couple orders of magnitude safer, why the heck wouldn't we allow them?
Gasoline:.2 BsF/liter =.11 cents/gallon. I know you mentioned subsidization, but that much? Even if the decimal was off, that's still 1/3rd the price of US gasoline at ~$1.10/gallon. We're at ~$3/gallon here. Bread: 1.5 BsF is around what I pay for a loaf of bread here in the USA in dollars. 21 cents/loaf is around 1/7th US cost. 1 Room Apartment: $200k = $28.6k USD I was actually thinking monthly rent, but oh well. 3 Room House: $71.4k, around half that of US homes. I live in a relative hole. Cell Contract: ~$7/month. You can't even get a plan in most areas for less than $30. Again, I seem to pay around the same in USD as you would in BsF. Dinner: $28.57 US equivalent. One thing I forgot to specify, would this be for a single person, two, or a family of 4? This seems to be about the same cost as in the USA as for a couple. At least what I'd consider 'nice', IE a sit down, non-fast food place. I generally end up spending around $15-20 for myself.
In summary: Gas, insanely cheap. Bread, 1/7th cost, Homes, 1/2, Phone, 1/7th, chocolate at par, nothing ID'd as being more expensive.
Cost of living conclusion: Probably costs 1/3rd as much to live there in 'equivalent style'. Results not scientificially generated. An actual study would include hundreds of products, actual average cost studies, weighting, etc...
Hmmm. 50 cents extra for a mouse, or work children like slaves.
that 50 cents could be the difference between selling the mouse and not selling it, or perhaps making a profit or not. Margins are thin on electronics, after all.
Not that I disagree with you, it's just that I believe that the best way to truly prevent worker exploitation is to make them valuable - IE 'somewhat rare/hard to get'.
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I'd rather have the nuclear plant, personally. Yay Jobs!!! Followed up by the wind farm. Oil/Coal? I'd probably end up moving.
Hmm... How to put it: For a power plant/farm of the same capacity, much less production, a whole lot more people are going to be living 'next'(IE in sight of) to the wind farm as they would to the nuclear plant.
Add in that a modern nuclear plant might actually be safer - toss up enough wind towers to replace the power a nuke plant produces and you're getting into statistical possibilities that one of the towers will fall and crush somebody, blade break, whatever. Heck, you might get more fatalities from traffic accidents by maintenance vehicles. Discounting Chernobyl(the textbook on how to NOT build/operate a fission power plant), the death rate for nuclear power plants is less than one worldwide, per year.
For the amount of economic activity, that's actually hard to beat.
I think what was derided was 'stupid' amounts of regulation.
Unlike the parent, I might have a wind turbine set up 'next' to my house as I live in a very small town, but Texas has the advantage over California in that they have both a lot fewer regulations outside of urban areas and a lot of available range/farmland. Where you'd logically place a wind farm, after all. I don't see a lot of regulations needed to keep wind turbines out of cities. You still have lots of basic safety rules - and most municipalities have airports, and that places limits on towers/turbines near that.
What Texas avoids is excessive 'environmental' studies, lawsuits by nearby landowners, etc...
Though I will note that at least 4 power plant proposals have been shot down in Texas. Those that want to build the plants shift between Coal(Dirty!) and Nuclear(Unsafe? Expensive!) depending on political winds.
Considering the energy will be "wasted" otherwise, the fact that your storage is inefficient really doesn't matter.
It does effect the 'break even' point for a energy generation solution though.
Building the storage solution costs money, after all. A more efficient storage system would be able to transfer more power from the wasted peak generation points during demand valleys to deman peaks - resulting in you needing less generation capability in the first place. That's where the money is saved in order to make the storage system worth it.
If you amortize the cost of a wind turbine/solar panel and come up with X cents/kwh, then the 'cost' of transfered power is X/(efficiency) + amortization cost of storage solution.
If your power cost is 10 cents, and the storage solution is 50% efficient, then a transfered kwh will cost 20 cents before you add in the 5-10 cents to cover the storage solution. You can end up building it anyways just because the power is otherwise 'wasted', or you can just shut down some of the turbines to save maintenance/lifespan.
I say 5-10 cents, but I've calculated figures as high as 20 cents for battery type solutions(for either a solar home or electric vehicle). I know there's better out there. It's just that I often find that the batteries end up costing more than the electricity itself.
As maxume noted, you have both diesel and LNG. According to the DOE, 'Alternative Fuel' vehicles are approximately 60% LPG(Propane), 5% ethanol, ~2% electric, 20% Natural Gas.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/issues_trends/fig5.html
So I'll add ethanol, bio-diesel, and hydrogen*.
*Though the best generation method would use electricity; it's better to burn the NG in the engine than to crack it into hydrogen for that purpose.
The problem comes when the goal of 'economic' becomes secondary to the goal of 'being first'.
You have to be careful with 'green' or 'renewable', because there's a certain amount of FUD out there.
Recycling programs that don't actually recycle. Recycling programs that create more pollution than they prevent. Lost a bit of my innocence when I found that out.
Same deal with carbon credits, not ALL 'green' power sources are actually green, especially when you look at some of the specific implimentations out there.
Probably depends a bit on the 20-somethings that show up without kids to 'play' themselves to provide a bit of on the spot supervision.
Just make them return the Wii once treatment is over. You don't get to keep "free" wheelchairs after you've recovered either.
I think that's dependent upon how long you're going to be using said wheelchair. Though generally if you're going to be using it long term they make you buy your own.
Personal thought - I see a number of issues, broken down by:
1. Effectiveness - Is the Wii fit effective for the dollars it costs. Dollar per dollar, does it produce enough benefit to be worth it?
2. Motivation - physical therapy sucks. Rehabilitive products, no matter how effective or expensive, don't work if they aren't used. If the Wii fit makes it bearable, therefore the party actually uses it, I'd consider it Effective
3. Cost - Part of the problem with the cost of medical treatment in the USA is the usage of more or less custom, therefore expensive and clunky, systems over mass market equipment/devices that end up doing more or less the same thing for a fraction of the price. I see this problem is not confined to the USA.
What does all this mean? I'd like to see some studies into the effectiveness of the Wii. Now, there's so many medical conditions that we can't really test for everything, but I'm sure a few studies could at least give some broad guidelines. Basically the study would simply back up common sense. I don't imagine that a Wii would help strength of motion hugely(unless they're so weak that even lifting the remote is difficult), but it might help with range, could help endurance for those who have trouble.
I'm not a doctor or a scientist who sets up these sorts of study. But heck, Wiis are cheap compared to typical medical devices, much less therapy, so even modest benefits could mean the cost/benefit ratio.
but honestly dont give me the BS of well its 20 Meg down and then have someone tell me Well its actually 16 - 20.
Unexperienced sales droid vs experienced sales droid.
They can't be sure of the speed until it's installed - much like the old modem pools. Too many variables.
First, batteries are expensive.
The wear/tear/depreciation on rechargeable batteries tends to cost more than the electricity. There are better ways to store grid energy, but they're all fairly expensive on a kwh basis, and not 100% efficient.
When you're generating electricity for 4-10 cents a kwh, and it'd cost another 4-10 cents to store it, while you're selling it for 10-20 cents a kwh, often less, 'storage' isn't a real solution. They can run demand fired gas turbines cheaper.
Still, if you can even out those peaks that's a lot fewer standby generators needed, which can save them oodles of money.
I figure that as long as they're giving a kickback to the consumer for the program, it's all good.
Personally, I like the idea of you needing to override it in person - helps ensure that you're actually there to enjoy the lower temperatures.
Of course, my first thoughts about this system was that you wouldn't even notice the shut-offs in many variations of my dream house - most have fairly massive amounts of thermal mass incorporated into the design. So yeah, I could set up my AC/Heating system to only operate when electricity is least in demand, smoothing peaks, allowing the electricity companies to get away with less standby power, meaning fewer generators, more green power, more efficiency in the generation.
It'd be something of a trickle-down, but cheaper in the end.
how does one quickly and securely wipe a pile of hard drives?
In my area that's a 'fun trip to the rifle range' A few holes through the platter and you're good.
Ignoring the legal risks still seems like a bad game theory.
Never said there weren't benefits to being a nice guy. ;)
It's even plausible that somehow the plaintiff finds an argument or a piece of case law or something that means he loses.
Al is so far into parodyland it's almost beyond belief that somebody could find against him.
He's no expert on copyright law so it would be daft for him to rely on that.
I'm willing to bet he's got expert advice from his lawyers though. Remember, he's a published artist, you know he's gotta have some people working the copyright end of his work.
His best outcome is break even and his worst is to lose heaps of money in legal fees.
More like 'break even and get lots of free publicity from somebody stupid enough to sue him'.
More people will need this than you might think. Let's look at each piece of your claim:
I think that the issue here is where you place the line on a 'proper' graphics card.
By that I mean that today even integrated video cards are easily able to keep up with GUIs, play even blue-ray movies, etc...
I'm not sure SVG/Canvas, rasterization will really bog down modern integrated graphic engines. Or if it doesn't support it, it'll fall back to the CPU, and assuming you're not doing anything too CPU intensive at that moment, it won't matter. You don't need a 5870 to run Office or IE.
But for a desktop PC, isn't this a disadvantage? If you're using a proper graphics card, couldn't that space in the CPU be used for better things than a redundant graphics circuit?
Don't look at the PC enthusiast/gamer market. Look at the desktop PC for basic business use. Cost is much more king there, as long as performance is acceptable. You gotta cut a lot of costs if you want to be able to slap down a whole PC for less than $200.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple more generations we're looking back at 'system on a chip' designs. No northbridge, southbridge, video controller, etc... Just a central chip on a board with power and interface leads.
Legally the labels would still be entitled to take legal action. They'd most likely lose but Weird Al presumably doesn't want to deal with the hassle.
They'd most likely lose, and lose so hard that they end up paying Weird Al's legal fees.
Generally the only thing similar is the sound track, and even that's normally at least slightly different. After that it's pure re-make parody.
Weird Al is a nice guy.
There's problems connecting to nearly every game server through a router when a non-technical person is doing the connecting, because there's no standard way for the creators of the games to open up the correct ports;
Isn't that what UPnP is supposed to do?
NAT traversal
One solution for NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal, called the Internet Gateway Device (IGD) Protocol, is implemented via UPnP. Many routers and firewalls expose themselves as Internet Gateway Devices, allowing any local UPnP controller to perform a variety of actions, including retrieving the external IP address of the device, enumerate existing port mappings, and adding and removing port mappings. By adding a port mapping, a UPnP controller behind the IGD can enable traversal of the IGD from an external address to an internal client.
Now, I know this isn't universal - not all games or routers support it, but UPnP was enabled on my home router by default, and modern games should take advantage of it.
Actually on our network we've ended up installing personal firewalls AND boundary ones.
They end up protecting from different attacks, really.
It's all about the defense in depth. We also have intrusion detection and other stuff(I'm not going to get real specific).
If nothing else, a set of hardware firewalls are quicker to update against a new attack than umpteen clients.
For that matter, there's lots of people who won't fill a 50GB drive.
Still, a 80GB HD is like $35-50, a 64GB SSD is $130+.
SSDs need to halve in price a couple more times to get them economical.
I do as well, which is why I said 'excessive'. Steam isn't that excessive.
I do avoid games with SECUROM and things like limited activations. Crysis, for example. Anything that wants to root my computer for it's DRM - no way.
I also avoided SPORE because of the comments I heard.
Clearly the game was a runaway success, but the DRM was just not strong enough.
This is why I both don't buy and don't pirate games with excessive DRM.
It's too bad, I think a few of the games held interesting promise.
I deliberately seek out games without DRM to support.
It'd be a value judgment, we'd just hope that they'd do it right.
'Can we still make a profit, or at least lose less money, with X% higher maintenance costs as opposed to not flying at all'?
Given that no sane airline [i]wants[/i] to lose a plane, hopefully they'll just suck up the extra maintenance, if any.
If they turn out to be harmful but less so than cigarettes, perhaps they should be available on prescription for smoking cessation only, rather than just marketed to everybody as a harmless way to get addicted to nicotine.
In my mind that's like requiring a permit for non-leaded gas when you can still buy leaded without a permit.
As others have pointed out cigarettes are more addictive than most other forms of tobacco; it's not just the nicotine. In addition, the e-cig advertising I've seen was trying to lure smokers, not non-smokers.
And if they do turn out to be totally harmless, than they should just be spot-checked for purity like anything else.
There's a huge difference between spot checking and requiring a prescription/permit.
They're unlikely to be 'completely harmless', but if you can get them to be around the danger level of eating a salad(most common source of food poisoning) or a steak(heart attack), we're good.
'Nobody knows what the consumers are actually inhaling,' says Erika Sward, director of national advocacy at the American Lung Association."
Wouldn't it take the mythbusters around 5 minutes to come up with a gadget to get you an air sample? Feed it to a mass spectrometer and you have your list.
I'd push for testing before pushing for a ban, personally.
But does that argument has any legal basis? People are assuming these are safe; if it turns out otherwise, there could be a lot of upset. We could blame individuals for assuming they're safe without proof, but did you feel like you were going out on a limb when you asserted "no serious health consequences"?
Given the circumstances, all I personally ask for is that it's settled that they're statistically safer than cigarettes. The next step would be to make sure they're as safe as such a nicotine delivery method can realistically be. If they're a couple orders of magnitude safer, why the heck wouldn't we allow them?
Hmm...
Gasoline: .2 BsF/liter = .11 cents/gallon. I know you mentioned subsidization, but that much? Even if the decimal was off, that's still 1/3rd the price of US gasoline at ~$1.10/gallon. We're at ~$3/gallon here.
Bread: 1.5 BsF is around what I pay for a loaf of bread here in the USA in dollars. 21 cents/loaf is around 1/7th US cost.
1 Room Apartment: $200k = $28.6k USD I was actually thinking monthly rent, but oh well.
3 Room House: $71.4k, around half that of US homes. I live in a relative hole.
Cell Contract: ~$7/month. You can't even get a plan in most areas for less than $30. Again, I seem to pay around the same in USD as you would in BsF.
Dinner: $28.57 US equivalent. One thing I forgot to specify, would this be for a single person, two, or a family of 4? This seems to be about the same cost as in the USA as for a couple. At least what I'd consider 'nice', IE a sit down, non-fast food place. I generally end up spending around $15-20 for myself.
In summary: Gas, insanely cheap. Bread, 1/7th cost, Homes, 1/2, Phone, 1/7th, chocolate at par, nothing ID'd as being more expensive.
Cost of living conclusion: Probably costs 1/3rd as much to live there in 'equivalent style'. Results not scientificially generated. An actual study would include hundreds of products, actual average cost studies, weighting, etc...
Labor costs are about 15%.
Source, and what for?
Hmmm. 50 cents extra for a mouse, or work children like slaves.
that 50 cents could be the difference between selling the mouse and not selling it, or perhaps making a profit or not. Margins are thin on electronics, after all.
Not that I disagree with you, it's just that I believe that the best way to truly prevent worker exploitation is to make them valuable - IE 'somewhat rare/hard to get'.