The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere.
You know, I think this is a very apt comparison.
Like reproducive organs, especially the testes mammals, we enact extensive changes on the whole planet; not all of which are beneficial. Yet, we're the one big hope for reproduction; so almost ANYTHING is worth it. If we do relocated, odds are we'll take a big chunk of the rest of the biosphere with us.
After that, it breaks down a bit; Gaia is neither male or female.;)
As opposed to the fuel it's going to take to have the various other functional satellites, shuttles, and the station dodge all the time?
One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
That *still* wouldn't fall under the open source definition;
Why wouldn't it? You pays your money; you gets to use it. The money is simply $0 for personal/non-commercial use.
Red Hat's legal ability to charge money is the norm, not the exception.
That's what I'm talking about. When using open source code for business/commercial purposes, you need to pay attention to the licenses because while many are completely free, many are only free for personal/non-commercial use. A fee needs to be paid for commercial use. The fact that the source still needs to be provided upon request if not shipped with the product doesn't enter into the financial part.
Somehow I doubt that the soon-to-be-fired lawyer was just worried about Scilab's deceptive marketing but was totally cool with the Apache License and the GPL.
Either he was looking to pile up billable hours reviewing the licenses and making recommendations or he was truly ignorant of how many open source projects are out there for how many different uses. This, of course, rests on the idea that things are as Scilab described them(I make similar disclaimers for court cases).
By definition, a license that tries to say this is not open source.
Hmm... from your link:
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The parent probably wasn't meaning 'you can't use this in business', it was probably along the lines of software that's 'free for private use, but you have to pay $$ fee to use it commercially'.
Oh, and just because something isn't open source by the definition you posted, doesn't mean that it isn't advertised as 'open source' elsewhere.
Still, the lawyer could probably have waited until the design was to the stage of 'Okay, we're going to need a database system, SSH, SSL, a webserver, etc...'
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types. That's why you often get TOS and such that are so bad - lawyers, not having to fight against the other side's lawyers, tend to write things in their own favor, using simple, broad, ultimately overreaching terms. Still in legalize, of course, so you need a lawyer to understand the suckers.
People that do their own mixing are a very small percentage of total computer users. If it means getting a larger slice of the digital media pie, I'm sure Microsoft would gladly give up that market.
Ok, so you give up the digital audio mixers. Then you give up the video mixers. Then you give up the photoshop types...
It adds up - the next thing you know Microsoft isn't the default OS anymore.
As is, those draconian measures will drive people who do their own mixing and such away from microsoft and either back to apple or linux. IE it'll cost them marketshare, marketshare that they're losing anyways with the problems(real or perceived) with vista.
It's kinda like how the media section of Sony has hurt the hardware section for years by demanding all sorts of restrictions and limitations on the hardware - that other company's hardware simply didn't have.
It depends, different plants require different amounts of light, and remember, NYC is quite far north - there's a strong bias towards the south over light coming from directly above.
So you can put plants that like shade behind the full sun ones, even make up some of the difference with artificial lighting, especially if you're trying to grow extreme sun plants like tropical fruit bearers.
Compare the lifestyle of a US citizen from the '40s and one from today, then a Chinese worker from the '40s to today, and you'll see the Chinese worker has made a heck of a lot more progress.
Playing catch-up is in many ways easier than maintaining your lead.
On a similar note, we have all sorts of regulations on worker conditions. It seems an inconsistency to me to say that employers in this country have to follow all sorts of rules, but it's then perfectly fine to import goods that avoid those regulations.
Well, part of the problem is that China, on paper at least, as most of the same regulations. In some cases cribbed almost directly. They just extensively don't follow said regulations.
Then you have the difficulty that if you want to insist on this sort of stuff, you'd have to pay for an audit of every one of your suppliers; this is generally impractical. In the case of Chinese companies, they'll frequently quite happily lead you through a show factory if you do that.
the employees in these countries are still choosing to work there because it's better than what they had before. The danger is that imposing any rules will mean that companies have less reason to offer jobs in these countries in the first place.
I agree. I figure this stuff will shake out in ~20-40 years, for the most part. By that time enough Chinese will be working industrial jobs, be better off than before to have some power and improve conditions. It's been a pretty much universal phase for industrializing societies.
I'll admit I should have double checked the dictionary.com source. It had a handy 'cite this source' link next to the part of the definition I wanted, so I grabbed it.
Read the definition of combustion; the processes of life certainly meet the requirements, combining a fuel and oxygen to produce heat.
Sure, dead cells don't respirate. However, the live ones EATING the dead ones certainly do. That's what biodegradable means, after all, that life processes will break it down, normally by eating it.
the big companies will relocate their production facilities somewhere else where the cost of producing the parts is even cheaper than everywhere else. Probably in Africa.
Considering that you need a certain amount of stability for this to be profitable, even assuming cheap wages, if we ever see cheap manufacturing moving to Africa I'd consider it a major win for the world for the average standard of living.
After India and China, there's only Africa, and maybe the Middle East. The Middle East, if you remove India, is on average a bit better off than China. Limited cheap labor availability there. That leaves Africa. The current population of Africa is ~955M. China's is 1.3 Billion. India 1.1B.
So, let's say that India and China, totaling 2.4 Billion people, have their wages rise to the point that companies are looking for cheap outsourcing opportunities. By the same token though, the 300M of the USA, the 731M of Europe are no longer the major outsourcers. China and India will be getting in on the act. So we have 3.4B of people looking to outsource to 955M potential workers vs. ~1B outsourcing to ~2.4B.
Africa wouldn't last long as an outsourcing opportunity.
Like some others, I actually consider this stuff an overall positive sign - the wall around China is breaking down, this stuff is considered a problem now, conditions will improve. It's not a pretty phase, but a common one out of history for industrializing societies. You got stuff like this in Europe and the USA in the past.
It's more along the lines of 'every little bit helps'.
In my area, more CO2 emissions can be prevented by NOT recycling paper, throwing it in the land fill, than could be saved by doing it.
We're just too far from the paper recycling and producing factories. Figure in the shipping costs, the lower number of trees grown, etc... It's more cost efficient to throw the stuff away.
Actually, the part I was talking about was the bit that keeps rain off my head - in the case of my house, asphalt shingles and tar paper.
Below that is indeed wood, but wood specifically treated with nasty chemicals(especially considering it's age) to keep it from biodegrading even if it does get wet occasionally. Treat wood the right way and it becomes very much less biodegradable - 50 year old wooden piers, for example.
On the whole, though, I'm a bit amazed at how the offhand comment part of my post attracted so much in the way of replies.
With that great of a difference in efficiency, it's cheaper for me, in the long run, to accept some inequality in charges because the 'unfair' gasoline system is so much more efficient that the 'fair' toll system is more expensive.
The only other fair usage fee for road use that I can think of would be an "odometer tax": pay for your road use according to your odometer reading, just like you pay for your electricity use by your electric meter reading. But that would be much more expensive to collect, and easy for people to avoid.
It also doesn't necessarily cover the 'driving a heavy vehicle' or 'driving like an ass' tax gasoline taxes tend to impose - both tending to increase road maintenance costs.
If, however, plug-in hybrids ever become a significant fraction of the cars on the road, then there will have to be a "gasoline tax" equivalent on electricity!
I said elsewhere that I see a good chance that electric vehicles will end up being pretty much restricted to urban usage - at that point you treat the roads like schools, parks, etc... Basically, fund them through real estate taxes - In general property owners are responsible to pay for the general maintenance on the roads fronting their property and an appropriate percentage of the feeders. Basically, the city gets an appropriate amount of fuel taxes for the estimated driving via taxed fuel in the city; it's up to them to make up the difference as they see fit. This will likely end up being a substantial subsidy of electric(or plug-ins that the owner manages to keep mostly electric) vehicles; but I can live with that - powered by whatever non-polluting systems that come up, they're very clean. Air quality is a substantial concern in cities, and IC Engines still produce localized pollution even if they're running ethanol/biodiesel/whatever. If that's excessive, then you back it up with an odo tax.
And while like you I believe in being an informed parent there are simply too many games released at once for me to keep up with everything released and about to be released to retail.
Well, generally speaking you or your kids will narrow it down with what's in the store. My point is that those details are generally obvious by what's on the box; in greater detail as a matter of fact. For example, Doom's healthkits and stimpacks could be considered 'drugs', Heck, X-Com medikits were rather explicit. Would this be the same as a game like Fallout where you perhaps have to deal with the dangers of addiction?
Still, most of this stuff is, like I said, on the box.
And do you really think that just because it's done in a organism/cell that the reaction is any less energetic? Improperly stored grain/hay can get so hot that it ends up combusting from the heat of rotting.
To be perfectly honest, I'm against biodegradable products in areas that demand environmental resistance. I'd hate to have a biodegradable roof, for example.;)
Still, my shampoo being biodegradable is for the best.
To get to the parent's point, biodegradation is essentially rotting, a slow form of combustion. Life forms, just like humans, eat whatever, break down the hydrocarbons and exhaust it as H2O and CO2.
So if the idea is to prevent the release of CO2, the prevention of rotting is a good thing. One CO2 sequestration method often talked about up here is a couple of different plowing methods that tends to keep CO2 in the ground. They're talking about being able to sell them as carbon credits. Some already are. Thing is, those very methods are also good for soil fertilization and preservation, so they're just good business practices depending on the soil; many were already doing it.
That's one of the arguments against recycling paper. In most areas for effective recycling you spend so much energy transporting and treating it that it's much cheaper and better for the environment to put it in a landfill.
Or even burn it to do something useful to heat somewhere or run a power plant.
How do you determine the mileage driven? GPS device like what one state was proposing(that also reports ALL of your travels, gee, that's not a violation of privacy, is it? Or some sort of odometer?
I trust those to work about as well as most copy protection systems. - IE not very.
Mounting in my case is by tower. The antenna comes with mounting hardware required to attach it to a standard antenna pole; the tower/pole and mounting for it is for you to provide.
My antenna is very directional, yes. All of my stations are effectively in the same direction, so I'm mounted statically. My grandfather has a motor as he's located between a number of different cities, so he'll turn the antenna depending on what he wants to watch; a lot of duplication today though compared to when I was a kid.
Running the wire, well, I only have 1 TV that I really use, but it'd be easy enough to add a splitter in the attic. I might need to add a amp if I did that. The wire goes down the wall to a box with the post.
And yes, it needs to be grounded. Mine is grounded through my tower, and the tower has a nice long copper post.
I did it myself, however it was mostly just replacing the old antenna.
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What do you mean, micrwaving my router every six months for an hour isn't routine maintenance?
The two satellites were, and the cores and fragments visible to amateurs remain, respectably clear of Hubble's orbit.
For people not aware; the satellites that collided were on the low end of LEO. Hubble is considerably higher.
although it would free up one more shuttle flight with minimal cost to re-assign to the ISS.
From what I remember, the ISS is lower than the Hubble; wouldn't the risks be very similar for either mission?
The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere.
You know, I think this is a very apt comparison.
Like reproducive organs, especially the testes mammals, we enact extensive changes on the whole planet; not all of which are beneficial. Yet, we're the one big hope for reproduction; so almost ANYTHING is worth it. If we do relocated, odds are we'll take a big chunk of the rest of the biosphere with us.
After that, it breaks down a bit; Gaia is neither male or female. ;)
As opposed to the fuel it's going to take to have the various other functional satellites, shuttles, and the station dodge all the time?
One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
That *still* wouldn't fall under the open source definition;
Why wouldn't it? You pays your money; you gets to use it. The money is simply $0 for personal/non-commercial use.
Red Hat's legal ability to charge money is the norm, not the exception.
That's what I'm talking about. When using open source code for business/commercial purposes, you need to pay attention to the licenses because while many are completely free, many are only free for personal/non-commercial use. A fee needs to be paid for commercial use. The fact that the source still needs to be provided upon request if not shipped with the product doesn't enter into the financial part.
Somehow I doubt that the soon-to-be-fired lawyer was just worried about Scilab's deceptive marketing but was totally cool with the Apache License and the GPL.
Either he was looking to pile up billable hours reviewing the licenses and making recommendations or he was truly ignorant of how many open source projects are out there for how many different uses. This, of course, rests on the idea that things are as Scilab described them(I make similar disclaimers for court cases).
By definition, a license that tries to say this is not open source.
Hmm... from your link:
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The parent probably wasn't meaning 'you can't use this in business', it was probably along the lines of software that's 'free for private use, but you have to pay $$ fee to use it commercially'.
Oh, and just because something isn't open source by the definition you posted, doesn't mean that it isn't advertised as 'open source' elsewhere.
Still, the lawyer could probably have waited until the design was to the stage of 'Okay, we're going to need a database system, SSH, SSL, a webserver, etc...'
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types. That's why you often get TOS and such that are so bad - lawyers, not having to fight against the other side's lawyers, tend to write things in their own favor, using simple, broad, ultimately overreaching terms. Still in legalize, of course, so you need a lawyer to understand the suckers.
People that do their own mixing are a very small percentage of total computer users. If it means getting a larger slice of the digital media pie, I'm sure Microsoft would gladly give up that market.
Ok, so you give up the digital audio mixers. Then you give up the video mixers. Then you give up the photoshop types...
It adds up - the next thing you know Microsoft isn't the default OS anymore.
You're probably right; still, it makes no sense.
As is, those draconian measures will drive people who do their own mixing and such away from microsoft and either back to apple or linux. IE it'll cost them marketshare, marketshare that they're losing anyways with the problems(real or perceived) with vista.
It's kinda like how the media section of Sony has hurt the hardware section for years by demanding all sorts of restrictions and limitations on the hardware - that other company's hardware simply didn't have.
It depends, different plants require different amounts of light, and remember, NYC is quite far north - there's a strong bias towards the south over light coming from directly above.
So you can put plants that like shade behind the full sun ones, even make up some of the difference with artificial lighting, especially if you're trying to grow extreme sun plants like tropical fruit bearers.
*looks at a picture of the POTUS*
*Remembers a recent article about the Appalachian Mountains, and the people there*
Doesn't that prove my thought, in a different way?
Compare the lifestyle of a US citizen from the '40s and one from today, then a Chinese worker from the '40s to today, and you'll see the Chinese worker has made a heck of a lot more progress.
Playing catch-up is in many ways easier than maintaining your lead.
On a similar note, we have all sorts of regulations on worker conditions. It seems an inconsistency to me to say that employers in this country have to follow all sorts of rules, but it's then perfectly fine to import goods that avoid those regulations.
Well, part of the problem is that China, on paper at least, as most of the same regulations. In some cases cribbed almost directly. They just extensively don't follow said regulations.
Then you have the difficulty that if you want to insist on this sort of stuff, you'd have to pay for an audit of every one of your suppliers; this is generally impractical. In the case of Chinese companies, they'll frequently quite happily lead you through a show factory if you do that.
the employees in these countries are still choosing to work there because it's better than what they had before. The danger is that imposing any rules will mean that companies have less reason to offer jobs in these countries in the first place.
I agree. I figure this stuff will shake out in ~20-40 years, for the most part. By that time enough Chinese will be working industrial jobs, be better off than before to have some power and improve conditions. It's been a pretty much universal phase for industrializing societies.
I'll admit I should have double checked the dictionary.com source. It had a handy 'cite this source' link next to the part of the definition I wanted, so I grabbed it.
Read the definition of combustion; the processes of life certainly meet the requirements, combining a fuel and oxygen to produce heat.
Sure, dead cells don't respirate. However, the live ones EATING the dead ones certainly do. That's what biodegradable means, after all, that life processes will break it down, normally by eating it.
the big companies will relocate their production facilities somewhere else where the cost of producing the parts is even cheaper than everywhere else. Probably in Africa.
Considering that you need a certain amount of stability for this to be profitable, even assuming cheap wages, if we ever see cheap manufacturing moving to Africa I'd consider it a major win for the world for the average standard of living.
After India and China, there's only Africa, and maybe the Middle East. The Middle East, if you remove India, is on average a bit better off than China. Limited cheap labor availability there. That leaves Africa. The current population of Africa is ~955M. China's is 1.3 Billion. India 1.1B.
So, let's say that India and China, totaling 2.4 Billion people, have their wages rise to the point that companies are looking for cheap outsourcing opportunities. By the same token though, the 300M of the USA, the 731M of Europe are no longer the major outsourcers. China and India will be getting in on the act. So we have 3.4B of people looking to outsource to 955M potential workers vs. ~1B outsourcing to ~2.4B.
Africa wouldn't last long as an outsourcing opportunity.
Like some others, I actually consider this stuff an overall positive sign - the wall around China is breaking down, this stuff is considered a problem now, conditions will improve. It's not a pretty phase, but a common one out of history for industrializing societies. You got stuff like this in Europe and the USA in the past.
It's more along the lines of 'every little bit helps'.
In my area, more CO2 emissions can be prevented by NOT recycling paper, throwing it in the land fill, than could be saved by doing it.
We're just too far from the paper recycling and producing factories. Figure in the shipping costs, the lower number of trees grown, etc... It's more cost efficient to throw the stuff away.
Actually, the part I was talking about was the bit that keeps rain off my head - in the case of my house, asphalt shingles and tar paper.
Below that is indeed wood, but wood specifically treated with nasty chemicals(especially considering it's age) to keep it from biodegrading even if it does get wet occasionally. Treat wood the right way and it becomes very much less biodegradable - 50 year old wooden piers, for example.
On the whole, though, I'm a bit amazed at how the offhand comment part of my post attracted so much in the way of replies.
I agree wholeheartedly, though I am tempted to say [citation needed] on the 50% figure.
Well, you'd be right to ask for [citation needed], per the source I finally found, it's more like 22%, only the worst toll roads bust 50%.
Still, compare it to the gasoline tax - Toll roads cost $22 per $100 collected. On average, gas taxes for the whole USA cost only $0.88 for that $100.
Some other links -
$82M revenue, $19M costs, 23%
$169.5M, $48.8M toll and administrion, 29%
Same data as in first source
With that great of a difference in efficiency, it's cheaper for me, in the long run, to accept some inequality in charges because the 'unfair' gasoline system is so much more efficient that the 'fair' toll system is more expensive.
The only other fair usage fee for road use that I can think of would be an "odometer tax": pay for your road use according to your odometer reading, just like you pay for your electricity use by your electric meter reading. But that would be much more expensive to collect, and easy for people to avoid.
It also doesn't necessarily cover the 'driving a heavy vehicle' or 'driving like an ass' tax gasoline taxes tend to impose - both tending to increase road maintenance costs.
If, however, plug-in hybrids ever become a significant fraction of the cars on the road, then there will have to be a "gasoline tax" equivalent on electricity!
I said elsewhere that I see a good chance that electric vehicles will end up being pretty much restricted to urban usage - at that point you treat the roads like schools, parks, etc... Basically, fund them through real estate taxes - In general property owners are responsible to pay for the general maintenance on the roads fronting their property and an appropriate percentage of the feeders. Basically, the city gets an appropriate amount of fuel taxes for the estimated driving via taxed fuel in the city; it's up to them to make up the difference as they see fit. This will likely end up being a substantial subsidy of electric(or plug-ins that the owner manages to keep mostly electric) vehicles; but I can live with that - powered by whatever non-polluting systems that come up, they're very clean. Air quality is a substantial concern in cities, and IC Engines still produce localized pollution even if they're running ethanol/biodiesel/whatever. If that's excessive, then you back it up with an odo tax.
And while like you I believe in being an informed parent there are simply too many games released at once for me to keep up with everything released and about to be released to retail.
Well, generally speaking you or your kids will narrow it down with what's in the store. My point is that those details are generally obvious by what's on the box; in greater detail as a matter of fact. For example, Doom's healthkits and stimpacks could be considered 'drugs', Heck, X-Com medikits were rather explicit. Would this be the same as a game like Fallout where you perhaps have to deal with the dangers of addiction?
Still, most of this stuff is, like I said, on the box.
rust though, specifies iron.
And do you really think that just because it's done in a organism/cell that the reaction is any less energetic? Improperly stored grain/hay can get so hot that it ends up combusting from the heat of rotting.
At least according to Wikipedia, cellular respiration is a form of slow combustion.
To be perfectly honest, I'm against biodegradable products in areas that demand environmental resistance. I'd hate to have a biodegradable roof, for example. ;)
Still, my shampoo being biodegradable is for the best.
To get to the parent's point, biodegradation is essentially rotting, a slow form of combustion. Life forms, just like humans, eat whatever, break down the hydrocarbons and exhaust it as H2O and CO2.
So if the idea is to prevent the release of CO2, the prevention of rotting is a good thing. One CO2 sequestration method often talked about up here is a couple of different plowing methods that tends to keep CO2 in the ground. They're talking about being able to sell them as carbon credits. Some already are. Thing is, those very methods are also good for soil fertilization and preservation, so they're just good business practices depending on the soil; many were already doing it.
That's one of the arguments against recycling paper. In most areas for effective recycling you spend so much energy transporting and treating it that it's much cheaper and better for the environment to put it in a landfill.
Or even burn it to do something useful to heat somewhere or run a power plant.
How do you determine the mileage driven? GPS device like what one state was proposing(that also reports ALL of your travels, gee, that's not a violation of privacy, is it? Or some sort of odometer?
I trust those to work about as well as most copy protection systems. - IE not very.
Who told you that? As the AC mentioned, The FCC has rather extensively said 'you can'. HOAs and such can't tell you no.
Do you own or rent? Apartment or house?
Mounting in my case is by tower. The antenna comes with mounting hardware required to attach it to a standard antenna pole; the tower/pole and mounting for it is for you to provide.
My antenna is very directional, yes. All of my stations are effectively in the same direction, so I'm mounted statically. My grandfather has a motor as he's located between a number of different cities, so he'll turn the antenna depending on what he wants to watch; a lot of duplication today though compared to when I was a kid.
Running the wire, well, I only have 1 TV that I really use, but it'd be easy enough to add a splitter in the attic. I might need to add a amp if I did that. The wire goes down the wall to a box with the post.
And yes, it needs to be grounded. Mine is grounded through my tower, and the tower has a nice long copper post.
I did it myself, however it was mostly just replacing the old antenna.