The only sensible defence is to say that ordinary Americans are quite sophisticated, but the publishers and film studios make patronising decisions for them, due to pre-conceived ideas. I'll listen to that, because it's plausible and I want to believe it.
Having read about some of Pratchett's dealings with the american book market, I'd have to agree. Many of our publishers seem to assume that the average american who actually reads can't handle a few differences in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, and either insist that it be changed or don't bring the book to market. Then they act surprised when it does go to market and sells.
I fail to see how a laser show would have much relevance in this. You'd have the sophisticated tracking system, but you still need to dump a large amount of heat into each individual target to disable/destroy it. The nature of the targets for a system such as this make them vulnerable to lasers - but the higher the intensity of the laser the more effective it is.
This is best done not by splitting up the laser among different targets but concentrating on one at a time. Consider that they weren't mounting a weaponized laser on a fighter or even a C-130. They mounted it in a 747, a relatively huge plane. Rather than trying to kill three targets at once, you kill them sequentially.
1 truck, one laser, one threat at a time. Ability to handle multiple projectiles would be to either have multiple trucks or deal with the attack sequentially. IE it takes 3 seconds to deal with one projectile while the set is targetable for 30.
Knocking out a barrage of RPG fire is unlikely, RPGs are actually very short ranged, pretty much strickly line of sight, sub 300 meters. There's several different technologies designed to help deal with RPG fire. As for plain bullets, the old technology still works best - armor.
Like I said it sounded good but those planes where made by well paid middle class people in the US.
The same thing happened when they put a luxury tax on yachts. yachtyards in central/south america prospered, thousands were put out of work in the USA as rich buyers simply switched to buying from outside the country.
It played well with the people since if you can afford to buy a light plane you are rich.
And the odd point is that you don't even have to be rich. Sure, it's expensive to own your own plane, but there's plenty of schemes such as time-sharing to allow an ordinary fellow the chance to fly his 'own' plane.
There's plenty of hobbies other middle income people are into that are more expensive and less useful. At least with a plane you can combine some of the benefits of driving with the increased speed/reduced distance of flying.
I'd tend to call that first postulate as flawed then.
First would be incubation times - You could have a 'healthy' creature with the microorganism that isn't sick yet because the disease hasn't reached a critical level yet - much like how the HIV virus can take over seven years to develop into an AIDS case, even without treatment.
Then there are many genetic differences between even humans - you could have a healthy creature with the organism that by some quirk of DNA or even diet stays healthy despite the microorganism.
Then again, it's all in the article - Koch abanoned the second part of his first postulate*, and modified the third(from *must* cause the disease to should cause the disease).
I love how many definitions and descriptions carry over from back when we couldn't tell the difference between a disease caused by an intrusion of microorganisms, a condition caused by a malfunction from within the body itself, allergic reactions as seperate from poisons, etc...
There can be multiple causes of AIDS - which as a syndrome is more a description of symptoms(a compromised immune system), the main one today is because of the actions of the HIV virus. It's a bit like how colds&flues come from dozens of related viruses.
*He came up with a theory. Research mandated it be modified. I'd call him a good scientist, especially considering that disease theory was barely understood back then.
Re:Not if today's kids are like I was.
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
nor have I ever made a personal phone call from a company phone.
You've never called your significant other that you're going to be late? You've never called up your insurance agent from work? Made an appointment with your doctor?
Most employers don't mind a little bit - but when it takes hours out of your day, then it becomes an issue. Other than that, the occasional phone call to get an issue sorted out can result in an employee who's not obsessing over it, thus being a happier and more productive worker.
T1 speeds don't always cut it anymore - besides, I'm getting a 3mbit DSL connection today for $30/month, a whole $470/month cheaper than your 'solution.
For $400/month many places can afford to deal with a little downtime occasionally, especially home users.
Heck, if I was a business user, I could get DSL AND Cable, and still likely save more than $300/month. Sure, my NAT solution would be a bit hairy unless the two companies are willing to cooperate, but there's a NAT gateway/router/switch out there* for ~$210 that can do it.
*I do not endorse this product, have never used this product, just pointing it out. There was another one that I vaguely remember having eight ports and costing ~3k.
Simple solution: don't print identifying info on the ballots. Just the votes, time (to the closest minute) and which machine the vote was made on. Then IF (and it's a pretty big if) a company demanded to see a voting receipt, they would have no way to prove it was the emplyee's actual receipt. They employee could have traded it with someone, or picked it out of the garbage.
What about the 'vote inspector' is waiting just outside the voting center? It still wrecks the anoniminity of the vote. Unless you provide a receipt forger right in the voting area, in which case the inspector wonders why you took so long... As I mentioned in the other response, you not only have to worry about extortion type attempts, but bribes as well($100 bonus for voting right!).
(Votes are in human-readable AND machine readable (ie: barcode) format).
Barcodes aren't very human readable. For the amount of data needed, bubblesheets work just as well or better, and the SAME information is easily readable by both humans and machines.
As for the voting machines themselves, it is trivial to make a secure server that sits in the corner of the room. It boots off a DVD, with another DVD for the canadate information. The terminals are just micro-atx boards in a locked box mounted to the back of a touch-screen LCD on a pedestal , with the printer sitting next to them.
How do you make sure the secure server isn't jiggered with? How to you prevent somebody from disconnecting the jack from one of your 'simple' voting PCs and using sofware on a PDA or micro-laptop to interface and jigger votes? How do we make sure that some dude in the election software office doesn't slip a worm into the system? Reflash the PC?
Personally, I think that I'd hire the people from the Nevada gaming board who drafted up the rules concerning slot machine certification. Now THERE were some security minded people.
We have laws protecting people against this already - if someone actually did this you can land them with one helluva suit.
There were laws about it back then as well, it still happened. Then there's always the opposite approach - vote purchase. With a receipt showing your votes you'd be able to prove how you voted to a paymaster.
Quite a fanciful remark there since it is impossible to make a perfect system without at the very least extensive redundancy. Are you telling me that your paper ballots are 100% perfectly reliable? If so a thing called "hanging chad" would like to differ.
Most people who want a paper ballot aren't talking about punch cards. Personally, I'm partial to scanotron fill in the bubble sheets. People today are familiar with them from school, they're aware of what counts as a good vote and what doesn't via printed instructions or even training by poll workers.
The whole point of paper ballots is that you enable a good audit trail. Paper ballets can be counted by hand if necessary, designed right they can be fed through multiple vendor's machines, etc...
In a good system you'd recount, hand count at least a few districts chosen by random each year to make sure the machines are doing their job.
It also helps that the machine readable portion is the same as the human readable portion. A barcode doesn't cut it in my mind, it'd be difficult to tell whether the barcode means 'candidate A' which I voted for, which is printed on the ballet, or 'candidate B' if scanned by a machine.
I work on computers, and have a background in programming and security. I really don't like what I've heard about current generation computer voting systems. Too easy for a single individual or group to jigger the elections their way, to be able to set vote totals to whatever they want.
You see, there's a strategy in computer security known as 'defense in depth'. Pure computer voting machines don't have it. I only have to compromise one system to completely jigger an election. With paper ballots - I'd have to worry about recounts, hand counts, multiple counting machines, etc...
Keeping extra ballots from being slipped in is a matter of physical security, which isn't even solved by current evote machines.
A proper paper trail needs to be provided including a receipt for both the voter themself and the voting district in the event of a recount.
No receipt to the voter. Why? They were historically used by unscrupulous men with power over others to verify votes. IE If you worked for me, I could tell you who to vote for, demand to see the receipt showing your vote, and fire you if you didn't vote correctly.
The design, production, and upkeep of electronic voting systems needs to be taken out of the the hands of the private sector and instead be taken care of by the government.
Doesn't guarantee non-partisan.
Lets not forget the people barred from voting in Florida because they simply shared a name with a convicted felon. Paper ballots would not have saved you from that one.
True, paper ballots or not, you have to pay attention to all aspects of the voting system. Personally, I like the fill in the bubble voting cards. They're both machine and human readable.
There were third party candidates available. I personally voted for Badnarik. Of course, I knew full well he wasn't going to be elected. Indeed, I wouldn't want many of his policies implimented. However, he would have certainly imposed deadlock, allowing our country to get on with business(other than politics). Maybe even lowered taxes.
Still, there were a number of candidates available before the election during the primaries. A number of them would have been better choices.
I don't think that Bush so much won the election as Al Gore managed to lose it.
Actually, it's important that tweaked remixes are allowed to be seen as derrivitive works that deserve protection
What I was thinking about was dirty tricks like changing 3 seconds of video(for a feature length movie) during each re-release to re-assert copyright on the 'new' stuff.
For example, someone could spend $100,000 restoring a poorly-kept movie by cleaning up all scratches and discolorations.
100k is a rather pathetic amount of money compared to the cost of making a movie today. Heck, replication costs alone for 25k discs would be $20k.
People still make money off from making extremely nice copies of things like Shakespeare's works, after all. Still, any massive restoration is more likely to be a labor of love than a profit center.
Besides, make copyright expire fast enough and you're less likely to have to attempt to restore an old moth eaten film because somebody has preserved a good copy.
That reminds me - another thing for copyright - use the additional fees to create a TRUE repository for this stuff, and require a master be submitted for copyright protection. That way, when the copyright expires, there's an unused master sitting in the office, available to copy for a fee.
Another issue with regard to copyright is that it can apply to the medium. Let's say that the copyright on a film in a vault is expired... Is the newly-encoded MPEG2 copyrightable? Thus, it could be illegal to copy a DVD of an expired film, but perfectly legal to stick an expired film into a telecine and master your own DVD.
I'd want to be careful about that. Yes, it takes some effort to transfer film to DVD, but it's still not a hugely expensive process, and whoever makes the effort will still be able to benefit from being first to market. Charge a cheap enough price and nobody else is going to bother for a while.
They could assert copyright over parts of a disk by including things like newly created commentary, the new menues would have new copyright, etc...
I'll bend so far as to give true derivitive releases and enhancements an extension, but they shouldn't get a repeat of the whole copyright term given new works.
which sounds extremely unlikely to me -- if anything, cellulose should be *harder* to convert than sugar, yes?
Yes, it's harder, in the sense that it's more expensive per gallon produced. However, it's not actually that more energy intensive - most of the work is done via enzymes, which is the big reason for the additional expense at this time.
On the other hand - you go from only being able to convert the sugars/starches*, which in a corn plant is pretty much the kernels. Go to a cellulose process, and suddenly you can process pretty much the entire plant - stalk, leaves, ear, etc... You're also not limited to sugar/starch producing plants. You can convert wood(this plant), grass, hemp**, pretty much any plant mass that's currently considered waste.
If I remember right, it also has some energy benefits in that it requires less heating.
*Ethanol production facilities actually prefer high starch corns over high sugar ones, more energy per bushel. **For that crowd...
I don't get it either. If he enjoys inviting a few prostitutes and throw parties that rivals Roman orgies, who cares? If he wants to be my hero, he'll make it available on pay-TV and let the revenue go to the state's money box.
At least our congress would once again be known for having balls. I enjoy watching the fights that occur in other country's congressional houses.
You won't find me in the libertarian corner, though. Still, what he does in his spare time is his business, not mine. I don't care about a politicians personal preferences. I care about his actions towards and for the country.
Sounds like you're pretty close to the libertarian corner though. You just mentioned a core libertarian principle. Of course, I consider myself a moderate libertarian mostly because both the republicans and democrats have done so much to piss me off. I'd be pretty happy with four things: Legalize drugs, prostitution, balance the budget, and get the heck out of our daily lives.
It'd affect quite a lot of it for quite a while, as there's loads of crud built up. Some piping networks are multipurpose(they'll ship multiple fuel types through them), so it'd affect the first portion of any ethanol shipment, resulting in more waste.
Essentially we'll have to build a new piping network for it.
Considering that it is the 'first in america', I'd call it a proof of concept - and test of profitability.
It turns enough of a profit, they'll spring up all over the place. I mean, we'd only need like two thousand more of them if they prove out. At 1000 jobs each(estimated), that'd be 2 million jobs for a substantial portion of our liquid fuel consumption.
Now, I have a problem with the idea that they're going to be fueling it with wood chips(not exactly an annual crop), but I'm sure that can be adjusted.
Religious insanity is the farse being used to justify a war that really has nothing to do with religious fanatics and everything to with oil.
That's funny, seeing as how we're waging the war in a mannor completely unsuited towards keeping oil supplies up. We could have done that with orders of magnitude less money. Or just relaxed sanctions against Saddam.
We have corn and sugar beet crops that could be used for the regular process. Not sure if soy would work for that also. I do think having a cellulosic ethanol plant (if it works as advertised)is a better option because it should work with a variety of US sources.
Soy is best used for biodiesel, if you're going to convert it into a motor fuel. Would probably also be a good base for synthetic lubricants. You could certainly get some ethanol out of the remaining plant, and the rest ends up as feedstock for animals.
With any regime such as this, you're going to have to define a lot of stuff.
For example, my initial thoughts for tv segments would be to charge by the minute. Either do the series as individual episodes or by season (IE all episodes of 'house' produced in 2007 are under one copyright).
And too high for most books. Many books only make a thousand a year - and we're talking about an industry where the auther still holds the copyright, rather than a studio/company. There are authers out there who make a decent/good living, while still writing, off of a dozen or more older books.
Now, $1k for a decade would be workable. Cheap enough that if still in print it's not that big of a fee, but still enough, especially as a lump sump, to make the auther consider renewal carefully.
I'd have to agree with this. A straight percentage rate wouldn't work too well - 5% of 0 is still 0, easy to pay.
Now a Flat fee of $1k/year to keep a movie* copyright free. Studios such as MGM would have to pay millions a year to keep their products under copyright, eventually the accountants would point out that OldMovies 1-100 aren't making $1k, there's no guarantee that they'd make $1k if released on DVD, so they let the copyright expire.
I'd have the fee vary, and go up over time. For example - $10/year for a book, for the second 20 years of copyright(the first 20 are free).
Note: All numbers are approximate.
*original audiovisual production in excess of 60 minutes, (by original I mean not just a tweaked remix)
Yeah, the stated reason 'to control illegal broadcasts' doesn't cut it with me, as people doing illegal things tend to not worry about laws period. Not paying a tax would go right along illegally broadcasting.
No mention in the article if it'd be a one time fee when the equipment is purchased, or an annual fee like the cell phone tax or the british TV tax.
Even with the fee, it would take police resources of an epic proportions, armed with sophisticated equipment to track most illegal broadcasters down, defined as 'didn't pay their tax'. Tracking down people who violate broadcasting standards would be much easier.
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The only sensible defence is to say that ordinary Americans are quite sophisticated, but the publishers and film studios make patronising decisions for them, due to pre-conceived ideas. I'll listen to that, because it's plausible and I want to believe it.
Having read about some of Pratchett's dealings with the american book market, I'd have to agree. Many of our publishers seem to assume that the average american who actually reads can't handle a few differences in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, and either insist that it be changed or don't bring the book to market. Then they act surprised when it does go to market and sells.
I fail to see how a laser show would have much relevance in this. You'd have the sophisticated tracking system, but you still need to dump a large amount of heat into each individual target to disable/destroy it. The nature of the targets for a system such as this make them vulnerable to lasers - but the higher the intensity of the laser the more effective it is.
This is best done not by splitting up the laser among different targets but concentrating on one at a time. Consider that they weren't mounting a weaponized laser on a fighter or even a C-130. They mounted it in a 747, a relatively huge plane. Rather than trying to kill three targets at once, you kill them sequentially.
1 truck, one laser, one threat at a time. Ability to handle multiple projectiles would be to either have multiple trucks or deal with the attack sequentially. IE it takes 3 seconds to deal with one projectile while the set is targetable for 30.
Knocking out a barrage of RPG fire is unlikely, RPGs are actually very short ranged, pretty much strickly line of sight, sub 300 meters. There's several different technologies designed to help deal with RPG fire. As for plain bullets, the old technology still works best - armor.
Like I said it sounded good but those planes where made by well paid middle class people in the US.
The same thing happened when they put a luxury tax on yachts. yachtyards in central/south america prospered, thousands were put out of work in the USA as rich buyers simply switched to buying from outside the country.
They actually *lost* tax revenue on that one.
It played well with the people since if you can afford to buy a light plane you are rich.
And the odd point is that you don't even have to be rich. Sure, it's expensive to own your own plane, but there's plenty of schemes such as time-sharing to allow an ordinary fellow the chance to fly his 'own' plane.
There's plenty of hobbies other middle income people are into that are more expensive and less useful. At least with a plane you can combine some of the benefits of driving with the increased speed/reduced distance of flying.
Well, cell phones aren't allowed in my workplace, so if I even bring my phone it's kept out in the car.
As for having people call you - I'll agree that pointing them to your cell phone is a good idea.
Yes, it does generally keep the number of Vioxx type cases down.
I don't think that it's too bad when on average the FDA revokes drug approvals less than once a year - while approving dozens a year.
FDA approval is tough and getting tougher.
I'd tend to call that first postulate as flawed then.
First would be incubation times - You could have a 'healthy' creature with the microorganism that isn't sick yet because the disease hasn't reached a critical level yet - much like how the HIV virus can take over seven years to develop into an AIDS case, even without treatment.
Then there are many genetic differences between even humans - you could have a healthy creature with the organism that by some quirk of DNA or even diet stays healthy despite the microorganism.
Then again, it's all in the article - Koch abanoned the second part of his first postulate*, and modified the third(from *must* cause the disease to should cause the disease).
I love how many definitions and descriptions carry over from back when we couldn't tell the difference between a disease caused by an intrusion of microorganisms, a condition caused by a malfunction from within the body itself, allergic reactions as seperate from poisons, etc...
There can be multiple causes of AIDS - which as a syndrome is more a description of symptoms(a compromised immune system), the main one today is because of the actions of the HIV virus. It's a bit like how colds&flues come from dozens of related viruses.
*He came up with a theory. Research mandated it be modified. I'd call him a good scientist, especially considering that disease theory was barely understood back then.
nor have I ever made a personal phone call from a company phone.
You've never called your significant other that you're going to be late? You've never called up your insurance agent from work? Made an appointment with your doctor?
Most employers don't mind a little bit - but when it takes hours out of your day, then it becomes an issue. Other than that, the occasional phone call to get an issue sorted out can result in an employee who's not obsessing over it, thus being a happier and more productive worker.
T1 speeds don't always cut it anymore - besides, I'm getting a 3mbit DSL connection today for $30/month, a whole $470/month cheaper than your 'solution.
For $400/month many places can afford to deal with a little downtime occasionally, especially home users.
Heck, if I was a business user, I could get DSL AND Cable, and still likely save more than $300/month. Sure, my NAT solution would be a bit hairy unless the two companies are willing to cooperate, but there's a NAT gateway/router/switch out there* for ~$210 that can do it.
*I do not endorse this product, have never used this product, just pointing it out. There was another one that I vaguely remember having eight ports and costing ~3k.
Simple solution: don't print identifying info on the ballots. Just the votes, time (to the closest minute) and which machine the vote was made on. Then IF (and it's a pretty big if) a company demanded to see a voting receipt, they would have no way to prove it was the emplyee's actual receipt. They employee could have traded it with someone, or picked it out of the garbage.
What about the 'vote inspector' is waiting just outside the voting center? It still wrecks the anoniminity of the vote. Unless you provide a receipt forger right in the voting area, in which case the inspector wonders why you took so long... As I mentioned in the other response, you not only have to worry about extortion type attempts, but bribes as well($100 bonus for voting right!).
(Votes are in human-readable AND machine readable (ie: barcode) format).
Barcodes aren't very human readable. For the amount of data needed, bubblesheets work just as well or better, and the SAME information is easily readable by both humans and machines.
As for the voting machines themselves, it is trivial to make a secure server that sits in the corner of the room. It boots off a DVD, with another DVD for the canadate information. The terminals are just micro-atx boards in a locked box mounted to the back of a touch-screen LCD on a pedestal , with the printer sitting next to them.
How do you make sure the secure server isn't jiggered with? How to you prevent somebody from disconnecting the jack from one of your 'simple' voting PCs and using sofware on a PDA or micro-laptop to interface and jigger votes? How do we make sure that some dude in the election software office doesn't slip a worm into the system? Reflash the PC?
Personally, I think that I'd hire the people from the Nevada gaming board who drafted up the rules concerning slot machine certification. Now THERE were some security minded people.
We have laws protecting people against this already - if someone actually did this you can land them with one helluva suit.
There were laws about it back then as well, it still happened. Then there's always the opposite approach - vote purchase. With a receipt showing your votes you'd be able to prove how you voted to a paymaster.
Quite a fanciful remark there since it is impossible to make a perfect system without at the very least extensive redundancy. Are you telling me that your paper ballots are 100% perfectly reliable? If so a thing called "hanging chad" would like to differ.
Most people who want a paper ballot aren't talking about punch cards. Personally, I'm partial to scanotron fill in the bubble sheets. People today are familiar with them from school, they're aware of what counts as a good vote and what doesn't via printed instructions or even training by poll workers.
The whole point of paper ballots is that you enable a good audit trail. Paper ballets can be counted by hand if necessary, designed right they can be fed through multiple vendor's machines, etc...
In a good system you'd recount, hand count at least a few districts chosen by random each year to make sure the machines are doing their job.
It also helps that the machine readable portion is the same as the human readable portion. A barcode doesn't cut it in my mind, it'd be difficult to tell whether the barcode means 'candidate A' which I voted for, which is printed on the ballet, or 'candidate B' if scanned by a machine.
I work on computers, and have a background in programming and security. I really don't like what I've heard about current generation computer voting systems. Too easy for a single individual or group to jigger the elections their way, to be able to set vote totals to whatever they want.
You see, there's a strategy in computer security known as 'defense in depth'. Pure computer voting machines don't have it. I only have to compromise one system to completely jigger an election. With paper ballots - I'd have to worry about recounts, hand counts, multiple counting machines, etc...
Keeping extra ballots from being slipped in is a matter of physical security, which isn't even solved by current evote machines.
A proper paper trail needs to be provided including a receipt for both the voter themself and the voting district in the event of a recount.
No receipt to the voter. Why? They were historically used by unscrupulous men with power over others to verify votes. IE If you worked for me, I could tell you who to vote for, demand to see the receipt showing your vote, and fire you if you didn't vote correctly.
The design, production, and upkeep of electronic voting systems needs to be taken out of the the hands of the private sector and instead be taken care of by the government.
Doesn't guarantee non-partisan.
Lets not forget the people barred from voting in Florida because they simply shared a name with a convicted felon. Paper ballots would not have saved you from that one.
True, paper ballots or not, you have to pay attention to all aspects of the voting system. Personally, I like the fill in the bubble voting cards. They're both machine and human readable.
There were third party candidates available. I personally voted for Badnarik. Of course, I knew full well he wasn't going to be elected. Indeed, I wouldn't want many of his policies implimented. However, he would have certainly imposed deadlock, allowing our country to get on with business(other than politics). Maybe even lowered taxes.
Still, there were a number of candidates available before the election during the primaries. A number of them would have been better choices.
I don't think that Bush so much won the election as Al Gore managed to lose it.
Actually, it's important that tweaked remixes are allowed to be seen as derrivitive works that deserve protection
What I was thinking about was dirty tricks like changing 3 seconds of video(for a feature length movie) during each re-release to re-assert copyright on the 'new' stuff.
For example, someone could spend $100,000 restoring a poorly-kept movie by cleaning up all scratches and discolorations.
100k is a rather pathetic amount of money compared to the cost of making a movie today. Heck, replication costs alone for 25k discs would be $20k.
People still make money off from making extremely nice copies of things like Shakespeare's works, after all. Still, any massive restoration is more likely to be a labor of love than a profit center.
Besides, make copyright expire fast enough and you're less likely to have to attempt to restore an old moth eaten film because somebody has preserved a good copy.
That reminds me - another thing for copyright - use the additional fees to create a TRUE repository for this stuff, and require a master be submitted for copyright protection. That way, when the copyright expires, there's an unused master sitting in the office, available to copy for a fee.
Another issue with regard to copyright is that it can apply to the medium. Let's say that the copyright on a film in a vault is expired... Is the newly-encoded MPEG2 copyrightable? Thus, it could be illegal to copy a DVD of an expired film, but perfectly legal to stick an expired film into a telecine and master your own DVD.
I'd want to be careful about that. Yes, it takes some effort to transfer film to DVD, but it's still not a hugely expensive process, and whoever makes the effort will still be able to benefit from being first to market. Charge a cheap enough price and nobody else is going to bother for a while.
They could assert copyright over parts of a disk by including things like newly created commentary, the new menues would have new copyright, etc...
I'll bend so far as to give true derivitive releases and enhancements an extension, but they shouldn't get a repeat of the whole copyright term given new works.
which sounds extremely unlikely to me -- if anything, cellulose should be *harder* to convert than sugar, yes?
Yes, it's harder, in the sense that it's more expensive per gallon produced. However, it's not actually that more energy intensive - most of the work is done via enzymes, which is the big reason for the additional expense at this time.
On the other hand - you go from only being able to convert the sugars/starches*, which in a corn plant is pretty much the kernels. Go to a cellulose process, and suddenly you can process pretty much the entire plant - stalk, leaves, ear, etc... You're also not limited to sugar/starch producing plants. You can convert wood(this plant), grass, hemp**, pretty much any plant mass that's currently considered waste.
If I remember right, it also has some energy benefits in that it requires less heating.
*Ethanol production facilities actually prefer high starch corns over high sugar ones, more energy per bushel.
**For that crowd...
I don't get it either. If he enjoys inviting a few prostitutes and throw parties that rivals Roman orgies, who cares? If he wants to be my hero, he'll make it available on pay-TV and let the revenue go to the state's money box.
At least our congress would once again be known for having balls. I enjoy watching the fights that occur in other country's congressional houses.
You won't find me in the libertarian corner, though. Still, what he does in his spare time is his business, not mine. I don't care about a politicians personal preferences. I care about his actions towards and for the country.
Sounds like you're pretty close to the libertarian corner though. You just mentioned a core libertarian principle. Of course, I consider myself a moderate libertarian mostly because both the republicans and democrats have done so much to piss me off. I'd be pretty happy with four things: Legalize drugs, prostitution, balance the budget, and get the heck out of our daily lives.
It'd affect quite a lot of it for quite a while, as there's loads of crud built up. Some piping networks are multipurpose(they'll ship multiple fuel types through them), so it'd affect the first portion of any ethanol shipment, resulting in more waste.
Essentially we'll have to build a new piping network for it.
Considering that it is the 'first in america', I'd call it a proof of concept - and test of profitability.
It turns enough of a profit, they'll spring up all over the place. I mean, we'd only need like two thousand more of them if they prove out. At 1000 jobs each(estimated), that'd be 2 million jobs for a substantial portion of our liquid fuel consumption.
Now, I have a problem with the idea that they're going to be fueling it with wood chips(not exactly an annual crop), but I'm sure that can be adjusted.
Religious insanity is the farse being used to justify a war that really has nothing to do with religious fanatics and everything to with oil.
That's funny, seeing as how we're waging the war in a mannor completely unsuited towards keeping oil supplies up. We could have done that with orders of magnitude less money. Or just relaxed sanctions against Saddam.
We have corn and sugar beet crops that could be used for the regular process. Not sure if soy would work for that also. I do think having a cellulosic ethanol plant (if it works as advertised)is a better option because it should work with a variety of US sources.
Soy is best used for biodiesel, if you're going to convert it into a motor fuel. Would probably also be a good base for synthetic lubricants. You could certainly get some ethanol out of the remaining plant, and the rest ends up as feedstock for animals.
With any regime such as this, you're going to have to define a lot of stuff.
For example, my initial thoughts for tv segments would be to charge by the minute. Either do the series as individual episodes or by season (IE all episodes of 'house' produced in 2007 are under one copyright).
And too high for most books. Many books only make a thousand a year - and we're talking about an industry where the auther still holds the copyright, rather than a studio/company. There are authers out there who make a decent/good living, while still writing, off of a dozen or more older books.
Now, $1k for a decade would be workable. Cheap enough that if still in print it's not that big of a fee, but still enough, especially as a lump sump, to make the auther consider renewal carefully.
I'd have to agree with this. A straight percentage rate wouldn't work too well - 5% of 0 is still 0, easy to pay.
Now a Flat fee of $1k/year to keep a movie* copyright free. Studios such as MGM would have to pay millions a year to keep their products under copyright, eventually the accountants would point out that OldMovies 1-100 aren't making $1k, there's no guarantee that they'd make $1k if released on DVD, so they let the copyright expire.
I'd have the fee vary, and go up over time. For example - $10/year for a book, for the second 20 years of copyright(the first 20 are free).
Note: All numbers are approximate.
*original audiovisual production in excess of 60 minutes, (by original I mean not just a tweaked remix)
Yeah, the stated reason 'to control illegal broadcasts' doesn't cut it with me, as people doing illegal things tend to not worry about laws period. Not paying a tax would go right along illegally broadcasting.
No mention in the article if it'd be a one time fee when the equipment is purchased, or an annual fee like the cell phone tax or the british TV tax.
Even with the fee, it would take police resources of an epic proportions, armed with sophisticated equipment to track most illegal broadcasters down, defined as 'didn't pay their tax'. Tracking down people who violate broadcasting standards would be much easier.