You're being a little bit "flamebaity," but you have a good point. One of the reasons that the Middle East is a hotbed for radical movements that express their agenda through terrorism is that the region is plumb full of totalitarian governments set up by the departing colonial powers. These governments do not provide anything like the civil rights guarantees that emerged in western countries (only after war, revolution, and great effusion of blood if you will recall). The repression is so thorough that fundamentalistism and the radical violent subset of fundamentalism are the only outlets.
Why is the US a target? The Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We are not seen as neutral arbiter. We are seen as the sole reason Israel survives.
Personally, I think we should do a little less invading and a little more active peacemaking.
While we are at it, we should be agressively working on renewable energy so that the motivation to muck about imperially in the region GOES AWAY. It is hard to maintain an implacable hatred for someone who leaves you alone.
As nice as that would be, the Israel/Palestine issue still must be solved the hard way. So long as we support Israel (and I don't see how we can stop doing that morally, even if the region's oil becomes irrelevant) and so long as the Palestinians remain under Israeli rule, the ire of the other nations in the region will be aimed at us (and Israel).
Security comes from justice, not repression, and not war. Until there is justice, there will not be peace. Until there is peace, there will not be security.
I don't have the answers, but I do know that war will not improve stability in the region. Unless we are prepared to act as an overt colonial power (and read your history books to see how that fares over the long haul), the region will become even more hostile to us, because not only will the populace hate us, but governments will cease to trust us. How do they know when they will move off our list of "good dictators" and on to our list of "bad dictators?"
There is a formula for peace and security.
1) Kick the oil habit. 2) Work, work, work on the Palestinian issue in good faith and with justice as a goal.
In the longer run, support democracy throughout the region. The problem is that from a power point of view, a stable dictatorship is much easier to deal with than real representative democracy, especially when you want the deal to be one-sided: Give us your oil, cheap.
We have to wean ourselves from the oil. Because democratic governments in the region (with the exception of Israel) are going to hate and mistrust us (with justification) for some time. If democracies are ever allowed to emerge. If these nations were tolerant of dissent, the actually violent Islamic groups would be tiny minorities. As it is, they are minorities that appeal to people tired of western imperialism and repressive governments that profit from the western thirst for oil.
For this reason, if a space elevator can make massive continuous solar power a reality (although I've always had my doubts about the safety of gigawatt masers in orbit), then I'm all for it.
If he doesn't name the person who said it or the company for whom she works, yes. That's what "off the record" means. It doesn't mean you won't repeat it. It means you won't attribute it to the real source.
Horse feathers! This is what we call "spin control." The point is that a key is placed in the "boot track." Yes, a Windows OS PC has nothing there, but some alternate boot loaders do. The key is a unique identifier that Intuit associates with your registration data ON THEIR SERVERS. From then on, they can ask their installed software to provide this key on demand when you visit their web sites, partner web sites with whom they may share the data, and any future Intuit software can examine this key. It's a token they can associate with any future data.
Moreover, the purpose is ye olde Digital Restrictions Management. I'm not a software thief. I resent being presumed to be one. Yes, I bought and installed this crippleware, but I won't next year. No matter how much they change. They violated my trust. They don't get it back automatically because some PR flak said nice things. Yes, Intuit, that's right. I've spent several hundred dollars on your software over the years (every version of Quicken from 5 through 2000 where I stopped for lack of Linux support) and every version of TurboTax for roughly the same length of time. Not one dollar more. Ever. Period.
I'm not saying they are using this key, or sharing this key for nefarious purposes, but fer gudness sake! Get bent, Intuit! I can't install TurboTax on another one of my PC's, even if I deinstall it first from the first PC (well, it'll install but I can't file or print!).
(BTW, I think in my spare time I might write a little utility, you'll have to go down to DOS mode to use it, but the BIOS disk calls could be used to copy cyl 0 to a file and then to write that file to cyl 0 of another hard drive. Oh, wait! There's the DMCA. I could go to jail for presuming that software I bought and put on hardware I own was mine to use. Foolish me!)
This pattern of contempt for customers shouldn't be ignored just because a company backpedals a little bit. We lose choice when we do not make a choice. Intuit would have to come out and say "We were wrong. We will never use any such technology ever again." before I would even THINK about giving them another dime. Nope. I've never used a personal finance or tac package from a company other than Intuit before. But never again. TaxCut 2003, here I come. Gnucash, here I come. I'm done with Intuit. And I hope you are too.
Re:Enviorment, not Genes for personality...
on
The Taste of Pain
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To those with modpoints, I think this person was trying to point out the "flamebait" nature of the parent post.
I'm leery of any statement that begins "All [some class of people]..." I think there is a serious message in this post that we Americans ought to consider. What we are is less important to our security that what the rest of the world thinks we are. We don't need to invade Iraq. We need a massive public relations campaign.
The difference is that if I buy a PC with an AMD processor, Intel does NOT still get part of the sale. Microsoft still does when I buy a PC with Linux on it (in the case of a Viao, anyways). Yes, there are some vendors of true "OS-less" PCs and yes, there are vendors of PCs built with Linux or other alternate OSes from the get-go, but these are the exception, not the rule.
Until there is significant consumer demand for Linux (or OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS-less, whatever) PCs, the discounts the OEMs get for going along with the "per-CPU" Windows pricing will exceed the benefit of meeting the limited demand. Part of the problem is that these alternate OSes tend to appeal to a relatively tech-saavy user community; a community that isn't afraid to install their own OS. Thus, the OEMs and VARs do not see the market as being as large as it actually is. Even so, and being a Linux "partisan" myself, the market for Windows is still much larger. If for no reason other than the vast majority is ignorant of an alternative or, heresy! Doesn't need the alternative.
That consent decree covered only MS-DOS, which is why such hoopla was made over Window 95 "booting to Windows." They went right back to their old OEM licensing.
This is a pattern, folks. Since C-dilla is a key based system, writing software to save, restore, or move cylinder 0 of your hard drive might be illegal under the DMCA. This has to be fought. Here's what I've done:
1. I wrote to Intuit telling them why I will not buy TurboTax ever again. They violated my trust. I will not trust them with my taxes again. I already stopped upgrading Quicken with Deluxe 2000 because it became noticably slower and because it is not available in a Linux version. Tell them you will buy TaxCut (if you plan to buy tax software again) next year and that this is why.
2. Join the EFF. I give them a small contribution every year.
3. Write your congressional delegation about your opposition to the DMCA. The existing laws are enough. The DMCA could be construed as making disk image backup software illegal!
Vote with your dollars. Intuit is never, EVER getting another dime from me.
If you feel the same way, great. But be sure to LET THEM KNOW.
It is, in fact, the high manufacturing energy costs of refinied silicon combined with the fact that monocrystalline PV cells are indirect absorbers of photons in the visible spectrum (thus they have to be thick, using a lot of the refinied silicon) that makes PV not terribly economical right now. It takes about 300kWh per kilogram to refine silicon to the point it is usable for PV cells. The energy costs to manufacture take about 2 years to pay back.
If you are near the grid, it doesn't pay to buy PV as opposed to invest the money. But you might have values (like environmental concerns) that motivate you to do the one ahead of the other (opportunity cost to you economists).
Also, if you are more 1/2 mile from the grid, PV is much cheaper than running a line.
As for hazardous waste in manufacture, not for the crystalline silicon cells. It is the thin-film cells (including amorphous silicon) that use highly reactive gasses (like silane).
Solar is ready today to supply large parts of our energy cleanly and economically. The remaining problems are ecnomies of scale in the maufacture and thus price. As oil prices climb (which they will) it will become more and more feasible to turn to solar.
Solar won't easily do 100% of our electricty needs. The sun isn't available all the time. But it can do much. And it will. Check out Home Power Magazine. I wish it were editorially more willing to embrace a mass-marketing, consumer culture version of solar power, instead on insisting on a sort of home-grown, hemp-wearing, almost neo-hippie approach (just because I think success will only come when people strut their PV arrays like they do their three-season porches and their luxury cars), but the magazine provides good, hard information on doing renewable energy at home, right now, today.
Batteries. They are the weak link. If you want to live off grid, batteries are necessary, and they are heavy, toxic, expensive, and inefficient. But if you are willing to do grid-intertie, you can do your good and not worry about cloudy days or the expense of batteries.
Why a short commuter isn't just using public transit is a different question. I wasn't attempting to evaluate zoning, planning, "smart growth," or any other such issue. I telecommute 100% of the time, so, at the moment, I could not care less about highways, meters, and transit, except for the air pollution angle. That consideration also favors the meters.
You assume the sensor is "dead," but these traffic management systems set ramp meters based on conditions further down the road. Traffic may be rushing towards a stop. Minneapolis-St. Paul has had these sensors and ramp meters for years now. One of State Senators got a bug up his backside about them and forced MnDOT to do a "study" (well, it was a real study) that involved shutting down all the ramp meters for weeks. The results? A disaster. Congestion increased severly on most roads. Most trips *increased* in drive time (yes, even when you include time spent being an "asshat" at a ramp meter).
The interesting thing was that this was not 100% true. Some routes got better. And drive times improved over the course of the study, although they didn't come back to anywhere near as good (on average) as they were before metering. In other words, people found alternate routes.
One outcome of this was the appearence of lighted arrow signs along side streets of the most congested highways that come on to point motorists on to alternate routes when congestion is severe. Unlike the ramp meters, these are mere suggestions. But it seems to have improved things.
Transit is a huge political issue here. The Republicans took over Minnesota government last election largely by promising massive road building instead of public transit. That's pretty remarkable for MN which has long been considered a Democratic stronghold. People get "het up" about traffic.
Traffic metering WORKS. Sure, you get annoyed waiting on the ramps, but they really do improve travel time.
Oh yeah, the study did improve their meter rates. They were able to speed some meters up and slow some others down and *improve* travel times over the pre-study metering system. It didn't stop me cursing that senator every time I commuted during the study! BTW, in 2001, when the study was done, there were 233 metered ramps in the metro area during the morning rush, and 283 metered ramps in the afternoon rush. I don't really know how many meters exist now, although MnDOT's web site could probably tell you. They have data on the study and its aftermath on their web site.
And why are minorities dispropotionately poor? That couldn't have anything to do with the white man, could it?
Come on. I'm not saying my white liberal guilt means that I should go to prison for the crimes of an inner city child, but to pretend that the end of the Civil War immediately put the races into a just and equitable society is pretty damned stupid.
IIRC, the law is different for computer software than it is for books and videos even now. I think the Copyright Act was amended in 1976, and specific language was added for computer software. (Non-lawyer, dim memory, YMMV.)
Yes indeed. I'll never spell his name correctly, but the Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels (did I spell it right?) had his famous comment about "the Big Lie." Just say it loud enough and often enough and it becomes the truth. If I may engage in a little Valenti-esque hyperbole, Valenti is the entertainment industry's Goebbels, saying it loud and often.
Copyright infringement already WAS a crime 100 years ago. All the law that is needed is already on the books. I don't download music files. I don't "pirate" software (luckily, I'm able to use Free software for almost everything I need and I can afford the closed stuff I still need until Free versions mature). I don't copy movies from friends or strangers. But I do rip my CDs into ogg and mp3 files. That was legal. (Still is, unless I need to "circumvent" a copy-protection system to do it -- then the DMCA kicks in).
Valenti not only doesn't have to speak the truth, he doesn't want to speak the truth. He is selling the Big Lie.
I hate to sound like a broken record (for anyone who still remembers what that means), but the best thing you can do is to educate, say, two non-techie friends on fair-use, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, and the Big Lie about DVD region encoding (it's price fixing, folks, not copy protection) and ask them to do the same. Then support organizations that are taking the fight back to the entertainment lobbyists: Support the EFF.
One Big Lie I'd like to put to rest is that the world is filled with people longing to destroy intellectual property. I'm sure there are some. But I'm opposed to the DMCA, UCITA, CBDPTA (did I get that acronym right?) and the extension of copyright terms, but I'm still in favor of the existence of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Copying something under copyright illegally is and should be a crime. But making a device that copies something for fair-use purposes shouldn't be, especially if that device has uses for non-protected works as well.
So, if I may pretend I have the man's ear for a moment:
You see, Mr. Valenti, I have no desire at all to steal your industry's products. Zero. Zilch. But I do refuse to let you or our government look into my home to prevent me from doing so. To be Valenti-esque again, if the DMCA makes sense, then we should pass another law that makes similar sense: Since the majority of violent crime is perpetrated by young men from the ages of 15-30 years, we should lock all males between those ages in prison. It would dramatically reduce violent crime. That seems like a legitimate public goal to me.
You see, opposition to the egregious expansion of IP law is a civil liberties issue for many of us. Not a "I want free stuff issue."
Personally, I think you just need to replace closed proprietary software with open, Free software. Frankly, I think it is surprising how much this has happened already when you consider how many developers there are working in their spare time (or for the handful of companies that are paying people to develop Free software).
Still, I agree that having familiar favorites would help bring "the masses" over.
One difficulty in doing this is convincing ISVs that a market exists. There is simply no good data on how many people use Linux on their desktops. So I write. I've written to Intuit explaining that I run Quicken Deluxe 2000 (the last version I bought) under wine, and that I will not upgrade again until there is a native one. Every time they send me an upgrade announcement, I write them again.
If every Linux user who wanted Quicken did this, we might see a Quicken for Linux before too long. (Although, given Quicken's ever increasing IE integration, I think it is becoming less and less technically feasible for Intuit, and it becomes less and less desirable for me).
Quicken is the last non-Free product I still use (I was never a gamer). Gnucash is fine, but until recently install dependencies made it a nightmare. It is pretty easy these days, since it is now packaged for most distros (both rpm and deb).
If you have a piece of software that you want on Linux, write to the vendor. Yes, even to Microsoft, if you want one of their products. I don't promise anything, but they definitely won't supply a demand they don't know about.
I can offer my anecdotal "amen" to this post. My life has changed completely since I got my CPAP, and (almost) all for the better.
I, like the parent post, woke nearly 100 times per hour. By the time I finally went to my doctor and TOLD him to put me in a sleep clinic, I had apparently not slept properly for over 15 years. After only about 2 hours of montiored sleep, they put me on the CPAP. I woke the next morning feeling like a completely new person. It was amazing.
There are problems. The mask is annoying. It has to be cleaned regularly (daily). My insurance won't spring for the good humidifier and it can be painful when extremely dry Minnesota winter air is blasted through your nostrils. When you have a head cold, you are back to your "waking dead" state because the CPAP can't force air through an obstructed nose.
The biggest annoyance, however, is that while I am again sleeping with my wife (which was limited by snoring for some time), the mask was designed by some geek who "wasn't gettin' any," because it vents air out the bottom, meaning that if you should absently try to be a little bit intimate while wearing it (cuddling or spooning), you are blowing cold air down her back. Not popular. Still, it can be fun to have it torn from your head when the right kind of enthusiasm is built up.
Still, sleep is good. And it is worth every little annoyance to have it back.
Apnea sneaks up on people, because it tends to come on gradually (often due to weight gain). You start to lose sleep and it gets progressively worse. If you snore loudly, if your partner wakes you frequently to shut you up, or if you have ever woken with bile in your mouth or unable to breathe, for goodness sake, go to your doctor and ask for a sleep study. You will be very glad you did.
When I first read the headline, I thought, "We're doomed!" But really this just brings us back to a fact. The US Constitution is vague on this and the court (by what vote, and were there dissenting opinions? Let's wait for the details before we speculate too far) decided that the power rests with the legislature (again, we'll have to see the opinions to know what the reasoning was), which is pretty reasonable, even if the legislature is not.
The lesson to take from this is that it does indeed matter who represents you in the House and Senate. Write to them. Give them your opinion. Let them know that where they stand on the balance between protecting profit for creators and the cultural commons will affect your vote. Apply pressure to congress. That's what the media companies are doing, and look how it is working for them.
People see government doing things they don't like and they throw up their hands and say, "Stupid government! Who needs 'em? Who cares?" Well, that is the exact attitude that corporate lobbyists want. The antidote is participation. Go to your precinct caucus. Talk about how you would like the law to work. And don't just go alone. Find like-minded people in your precinct and go as a group.
Government hasn't turned its back on the people; people have turned their backs on government.
Think about it. Is liberty worth a few hours a year? Or is it too much trouble? The decision lies not with government, but with you.
I dont generaly do "me too posts, but I will in this case. I got my amateur license in 1993 because I wanted to do TCP/IP packet radio and I wanted my home on the Internet (not easily done at home in '93). Back then, the main uses were e-mail, telnet, and USENET news. None of the bandwidth hogging rich content so common today. So AX.25 with 1200 baud and later 9600 baud was fast enough.
I'll admit that my interest has since waned. My fastest digital gear is still 9600 baud, and while it is quite easy for me to communicate over 60 miles, 9600 baud doesn't cut it.
The emergence of some high speed spread spectrum stuff is pretty exciting. I will probably renew my license this year so I ca be ready to get involved. Wireless broadband over wide areas appeals to me.
Its strange how ham radio was leading-edge in wireless networking a decade ago, with pioneers like Phil Karn (KA9Q) actually contributing to the specification of the TCP protocol itself as a result of his packet radio experiements, to now, where it has been sitting well behind the part 15 world. I hope this exploration brings the hobby back to the innovative levels of 10 years ago and brings some new hobbyists in.
Well, economies of scale are part of the problem. Energy to manufacture for mono and polyscrytalline silicon PV cells are still high enough that it takes two to five years to pay back their energy to manufacture (I don't know if the paper I used for this figure is still available on-line. It was the Palz-Zibetta paper on the energy payback times of silicon PV cells). So, PV is still a long way from looking really attractive using only time-value of money as a measurement. But it is already very attractive to me. (And mono and polycrystalline cells should last a very long time, 20 years is not at all an unreasonable minimum life).
What I would like to see improved is the integration of PV cells and "BOS" (Balance of System) components. I should be able to get everything I need to add a grid-intertied solar PV system (with optional wind turbines) to my home at my local Home Depot, Menard's, or Loew's home improvement store.
I'm a regular reader of Home Power magazine (a great resource for those who are interested in DIY home power), but I must say that I've always thought they were mssing out on something. The culture of home power and of the magzine of the same name, if I may stereotype for a moment, is a sort of backpack-wearing, public-radio-listening, anti-corporate, neo-hippie type (and a small number of right-wing survivalist nut-jobs). Now, I am all for living better, and for the freedom of lifestyle choice, but a handful of self-congratulatory people living off grid in mountain homes will not save the world. Nope. We need to get people to view their PV systems like they view their SUVs: Something to show their status. We need to enlist the tools of the consumer culture to draw people into using clean technology. Don't talk about how many things you had to shut off or get rid of. Talk about the luxury of having power during rolling blackouts. I don't know, I'm not a marketer. But I do know: Make it easy, make it affordable, make it appealing. The vast majority of people want to live better environmentally, but they don't really know how, and they don't really want to sacrifice comfort.
I don't think they have to, because the world will be a lot better off if we could get 75% of the people getting 20% of their power from renewables than we are now with <1% of the people getting 100% of their power from renewables.
That's what I said. I don't buy cheap for work, but I buy cheap for home (because money is my most valuable resource), so when I buy, I buy well back from the bleeding edge on price. I'm saying it seems you can get higher quality by either spending more money in toto (same capacity, higher price), or my spending more money per gigabyte (lower capacity, same price). I tend to do the former at work, the latter at home.
I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.
So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.
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You're being a little bit "flamebaity," but you have a good point. One of the reasons that the Middle East is a hotbed for radical movements that express their agenda through terrorism is that the region is plumb full of totalitarian governments set up by the departing colonial powers. These governments do not provide anything like the civil rights guarantees that emerged in western countries (only after war, revolution, and great effusion of blood if you will recall). The repression is so thorough that fundamentalistism and the radical violent subset of fundamentalism are the only outlets.
Why is the US a target? The Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We are not seen as neutral arbiter. We are seen as the sole reason Israel survives.
Personally, I think we should do a little less invading and a little more active peacemaking.
While we are at it, we should be agressively working on renewable energy so that the motivation to muck about imperially in the region GOES AWAY. It is hard to maintain an implacable hatred for someone who leaves you alone.
As nice as that would be, the Israel/Palestine issue still must be solved the hard way. So long as we support Israel (and I don't see how we can stop doing that morally, even if the region's oil becomes irrelevant) and so long as the Palestinians remain under Israeli rule, the ire of the other nations in the region will be aimed at us (and Israel).
Security comes from justice, not repression, and not war. Until there is justice, there will not be peace. Until there is peace, there will not be security.
I don't have the answers, but I do know that war will not improve stability in the region. Unless we are prepared to act as an overt colonial power (and read your history books to see how that fares over the long haul), the region will become even more hostile to us, because not only will the populace hate us, but governments will cease to trust us. How do they know when they will move off our list of "good dictators" and on to our list of "bad dictators?"
There is a formula for peace and security.
1) Kick the oil habit.
2) Work, work, work on the Palestinian issue in good faith and with justice as a goal.
In the longer run, support democracy throughout the region. The problem is that from a power point of view, a stable dictatorship is much easier to deal with than real representative democracy, especially when you want the deal to be one-sided: Give us your oil, cheap.
We have to wean ourselves from the oil. Because democratic governments in the region (with the exception of Israel) are going to hate and mistrust us (with justification) for some time. If democracies are ever allowed to emerge. If these nations were tolerant of dissent, the actually violent Islamic groups would be tiny minorities. As it is, they are minorities that appeal to people tired of western imperialism and repressive governments that profit from the western thirst for oil.
For this reason, if a space elevator can make massive continuous solar power a reality (although I've always had my doubts about the safety of gigawatt masers in orbit), then I'm all for it.
If he doesn't name the person who said it or the company for whom she works, yes. That's what "off the record" means. It doesn't mean you won't repeat it. It means you won't attribute it to the real source.
Horse feathers! This is what we call "spin control." The point is that a key is placed in the "boot track." Yes, a Windows OS PC has nothing there, but some alternate boot loaders do. The key is a unique identifier that Intuit associates with your registration data ON THEIR SERVERS. From then on, they can ask their installed software to provide this key on demand when you visit their web sites, partner web sites with whom they may share the data, and any future Intuit software can examine this key. It's a token they can associate with any future data.
Moreover, the purpose is ye olde Digital Restrictions Management. I'm not a software thief. I resent being presumed to be one. Yes, I bought and installed this crippleware, but I won't next year. No matter how much they change. They violated my trust. They don't get it back automatically because some PR flak said nice things. Yes, Intuit, that's right. I've spent several hundred dollars on your software over the years (every version of Quicken from 5 through 2000 where I stopped for lack of Linux support) and every version of TurboTax for roughly the same length of time. Not one dollar more. Ever. Period.
I'm not saying they are using this key, or sharing this key for nefarious purposes, but fer gudness sake! Get bent, Intuit! I can't install TurboTax on another one of my PC's, even if I deinstall it first from the first PC (well, it'll install but I can't file or print!).
(BTW, I think in my spare time I might write a little utility, you'll have to go down to DOS mode to use it, but the BIOS disk calls could be used to copy cyl 0 to a file and then to write that file to cyl 0 of another hard drive. Oh, wait! There's the DMCA. I could go to jail for presuming that software I bought and put on hardware I own was mine to use. Foolish me!)
This pattern of contempt for customers shouldn't be ignored just because a company backpedals a little bit. We lose choice when we do not make a choice. Intuit would have to come out and say "We were wrong. We will never use any such technology ever again." before I would even THINK about giving them another dime. Nope. I've never used a personal finance or tac package from a company other than Intuit before. But never again. TaxCut 2003, here I come. Gnucash, here I come. I'm done with Intuit. And I hope you are too.
To those with modpoints, I think this person was trying to point out the "flamebait" nature of the parent post.
I'm leery of any statement that begins "All [some class of people]..." I think there is a serious message in this post that we Americans ought to consider. What we are is less important to our security that what the rest of the world thinks we are. We don't need to invade Iraq. We need a massive public relations campaign.
The difference is that if I buy a PC with an AMD processor, Intel does NOT still get part of the sale. Microsoft still does when I buy a PC with Linux on it (in the case of a Viao, anyways). Yes, there are some vendors of true "OS-less" PCs and yes, there are vendors of PCs built with Linux or other alternate OSes from the get-go, but these are the exception, not the rule.
Until there is significant consumer demand for Linux (or OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS-less, whatever) PCs, the discounts the OEMs get for going along with the "per-CPU" Windows pricing will exceed the benefit of meeting the limited demand. Part of the problem is that these alternate OSes tend to appeal to a relatively tech-saavy user community; a community that isn't afraid to install their own OS. Thus, the OEMs and VARs do not see the market as being as large as it actually is. Even so, and being a Linux "partisan" myself, the market for Windows is still much larger. If for no reason other than the vast majority is ignorant of an alternative or, heresy! Doesn't need the alternative.
That consent decree covered only MS-DOS, which is why such hoopla was made over Window 95 "booting to Windows." They went right back to their old OEM licensing.
Duh! It has 64 sectors, numbered 0 to 63.
This is a pattern, folks. Since C-dilla is a key based system, writing software to save, restore, or move cylinder 0 of your hard drive might be illegal under the DMCA. This has to be fought. Here's what I've done:
1. I wrote to Intuit telling them why I will not buy TurboTax ever again. They violated my trust. I will not trust them with my taxes again. I already stopped upgrading Quicken with Deluxe 2000 because it became noticably slower and because it is not available in a Linux version. Tell them you will buy TaxCut (if you plan to buy tax software again) next year and that this is why.
2. Join the EFF. I give them a small contribution every year.
3. Write your congressional delegation about your opposition to the DMCA. The existing laws are enough. The DMCA could be construed as making disk image backup software illegal!
Vote with your dollars. Intuit is never, EVER getting another dime from me.
If you feel the same way, great. But be sure to LET THEM KNOW.
It is, in fact, the high manufacturing energy costs of refinied silicon combined with the fact that monocrystalline PV cells are indirect absorbers of photons in the visible spectrum (thus they have to be thick, using a lot of the refinied silicon) that makes PV not terribly economical right now. It takes about 300kWh per kilogram to refine silicon to the point it is usable for PV cells. The energy costs to manufacture take about 2 years to pay back.
If you are near the grid, it doesn't pay to buy PV as opposed to invest the money. But you might have values (like environmental concerns) that motivate you to do the one ahead of the other (opportunity cost to you economists).
Also, if you are more 1/2 mile from the grid, PV is much cheaper than running a line.
As for hazardous waste in manufacture, not for the crystalline silicon cells. It is the thin-film cells (including amorphous silicon) that use highly reactive gasses (like silane).
Solar is ready today to supply large parts of our energy cleanly and economically. The remaining problems are ecnomies of scale in the maufacture and thus price. As oil prices climb (which they will) it will become more and more feasible to turn to solar.
Solar won't easily do 100% of our electricty needs. The sun isn't available all the time. But it can do much. And it will. Check out Home Power Magazine. I wish it were editorially more willing to embrace a mass-marketing, consumer culture version of solar power, instead on insisting on a sort of home-grown, hemp-wearing, almost neo-hippie approach (just because I think success will only come when people strut their PV arrays like they do their three-season porches and their luxury cars), but the magazine provides good, hard information on doing renewable energy at home, right now, today.
Batteries. They are the weak link. If you want to live off grid, batteries are necessary, and they are heavy, toxic, expensive, and inefficient. But if you are willing to do grid-intertie, you can do your good and not worry about cloudy days or the expense of batteries.
Why a short commuter isn't just using public transit is a different question. I wasn't attempting to evaluate zoning, planning, "smart growth," or any other such issue. I telecommute 100% of the time, so, at the moment, I could not care less about highways, meters, and transit, except for the air pollution angle. That consideration also favors the meters.
You assume the sensor is "dead," but these traffic management systems set ramp meters based on conditions further down the road. Traffic may be rushing towards a stop. Minneapolis-St. Paul has had these sensors and ramp meters for years now. One of State Senators got a bug up his backside about them and forced MnDOT to do a "study" (well, it was a real study) that involved shutting down all the ramp meters for weeks. The results? A disaster. Congestion increased severly on most roads. Most trips *increased* in drive time (yes, even when you include time spent being an "asshat" at a ramp meter).
The interesting thing was that this was not 100% true. Some routes got better. And drive times improved over the course of the study, although they didn't come back to anywhere near as good (on average) as they were before metering. In other words, people found alternate routes.
One outcome of this was the appearence of lighted arrow signs along side streets of the most congested highways that come on to point motorists on to alternate routes when congestion is severe. Unlike the ramp meters, these are mere suggestions. But it seems to have improved things.
Transit is a huge political issue here. The Republicans took over Minnesota government last election largely by promising massive road building instead of public transit. That's pretty remarkable for MN which has long been considered a Democratic stronghold. People get "het up" about traffic.
Traffic metering WORKS. Sure, you get annoyed waiting on the ramps, but they really do improve travel time.
Oh yeah, the study did improve their meter rates. They were able to speed some meters up and slow some others down and *improve* travel times over the pre-study metering system. It didn't stop me cursing that senator every time I commuted during the study! BTW, in 2001, when the study was done, there were 233 metered ramps in the metro area during the morning rush, and 283 metered ramps in the afternoon rush. I don't really know how many meters exist now, although MnDOT's web site could probably tell you. They have data on the study and its aftermath on their web site.
And why are minorities dispropotionately poor? That couldn't have anything to do with the white man, could it?
Come on. I'm not saying my white liberal guilt means that I should go to prison for the crimes of an inner city child, but to pretend that the end of the Civil War immediately put the races into a just and equitable society is pretty damned stupid.
It's simple: "Broken record" really means scratche...eally means scratche...eally means scratche...
There is also such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. Copyright law gives both criminal and civil causes of action.
IIRC, the law is different for computer software than it is for books and videos even now. I think the Copyright Act was amended in 1976, and specific language was added for computer software. (Non-lawyer, dim memory, YMMV.)
Kinda my point...
Yes indeed. I'll never spell his name correctly, but the Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels (did I spell it right?) had his famous comment about "the Big Lie." Just say it loud enough and often enough and it becomes the truth. If I may engage in a little Valenti-esque hyperbole, Valenti is the entertainment industry's Goebbels, saying it loud and often.
Copyright infringement already WAS a crime 100 years ago. All the law that is needed is already on the books. I don't download music files. I don't "pirate" software (luckily, I'm able to use Free software for almost everything I need and I can afford the closed stuff I still need until Free versions mature). I don't copy movies from friends or strangers. But I do rip my CDs into ogg and mp3 files. That was legal. (Still is, unless I need to "circumvent" a copy-protection system to do it -- then the DMCA kicks in).
Valenti not only doesn't have to speak the truth, he doesn't want to speak the truth. He is selling the Big Lie.
I hate to sound like a broken record (for anyone who still remembers what that means), but the best thing you can do is to educate, say, two non-techie friends on fair-use, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, and the Big Lie about DVD region encoding (it's price fixing, folks, not copy protection) and ask them to do the same. Then support organizations that are taking the fight back to the entertainment lobbyists: Support the EFF.
One Big Lie I'd like to put to rest is that the world is filled with people longing to destroy intellectual property. I'm sure there are some. But I'm opposed to the DMCA, UCITA, CBDPTA (did I get that acronym right?) and the extension of copyright terms, but I'm still in favor of the existence of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Copying something under copyright illegally is and should be a crime. But making a device that copies something for fair-use purposes shouldn't be, especially if that device has uses for non-protected works as well.
So, if I may pretend I have the man's ear for a moment:
You see, Mr. Valenti, I have no desire at all to steal your industry's products. Zero. Zilch. But I do refuse to let you or our government look into my home to prevent me from doing so. To be Valenti-esque again, if the DMCA makes sense, then we should pass another law that makes similar sense: Since the majority of violent crime is perpetrated by young men from the ages of 15-30 years, we should lock all males between those ages in prison. It would dramatically reduce violent crime. That seems like a legitimate public goal to me.
You see, opposition to the egregious expansion of IP law is a civil liberties issue for many of us. Not a "I want free stuff issue."
Personally, I think you just need to replace closed proprietary software with open, Free software. Frankly, I think it is surprising how much this has happened already when you consider how many developers there are working in their spare time (or for the handful of companies that are paying people to develop Free software).
Still, I agree that having familiar favorites would help bring "the masses" over.
One difficulty in doing this is convincing ISVs that a market exists. There is simply no good data on how many people use Linux on their desktops. So I write. I've written to Intuit explaining that I run Quicken Deluxe 2000 (the last version I bought) under wine, and that I will not upgrade again until there is a native one. Every time they send me an upgrade announcement, I write them again.
If every Linux user who wanted Quicken did this, we might see a Quicken for Linux before too long. (Although, given Quicken's ever increasing IE integration, I think it is becoming less and less technically feasible for Intuit, and it becomes less and less desirable for me).
Quicken is the last non-Free product I still use (I was never a gamer). Gnucash is fine, but until recently install dependencies made it a nightmare. It is pretty easy these days, since it is now packaged for most distros (both rpm and deb).
If you have a piece of software that you want on Linux, write to the vendor. Yes, even to Microsoft, if you want one of their products. I don't promise anything, but they definitely won't supply a demand they don't know about.
I can offer my anecdotal "amen" to this post. My life has changed completely since I got my CPAP, and (almost) all for the better.
I, like the parent post, woke nearly 100 times per hour. By the time I finally went to my doctor and TOLD him to put me in a sleep clinic, I had apparently not slept properly for over 15 years. After only about 2 hours of montiored sleep, they put me on the CPAP. I woke the next morning feeling like a completely new person. It was amazing.
There are problems. The mask is annoying. It has to be cleaned regularly (daily). My insurance won't spring for the good humidifier and it can be painful when extremely dry Minnesota winter air is blasted through your nostrils. When you have a head cold, you are back to your "waking dead" state because the CPAP can't force air through an obstructed nose.
The biggest annoyance, however, is that while I am again sleeping with my wife (which was limited by snoring for some time), the mask was designed by some geek who "wasn't gettin' any," because it vents air out the bottom, meaning that if you should absently try to be a little bit intimate while wearing it (cuddling or spooning), you are blowing cold air down her back. Not popular. Still, it can be fun to have it torn from your head when the right kind of enthusiasm is built up.
Still, sleep is good. And it is worth every little annoyance to have it back.
Apnea sneaks up on people, because it tends to come on gradually (often due to weight gain). You start to lose sleep and it gets progressively worse. If you snore loudly, if your partner wakes you frequently to shut you up, or if you have ever woken with bile in your mouth or unable to breathe, for goodness sake, go to your doctor and ask for a sleep study. You will be very glad you did.
IIRC, Microsoft moved to their own products relatively recently. Before that they used Unix for their server systems.
When I first read the headline, I thought, "We're doomed!" But really this just brings us back to a fact. The US Constitution is vague on this and the court (by what vote, and were there dissenting opinions? Let's wait for the details before we speculate too far) decided that the power rests with the legislature (again, we'll have to see the opinions to know what the reasoning was), which is pretty reasonable, even if the legislature is not.
The lesson to take from this is that it does indeed matter who represents you in the House and Senate. Write to them. Give them your opinion. Let them know that where they stand on the balance between protecting profit for creators and the cultural commons will affect your vote. Apply pressure to congress. That's what the media companies are doing, and look how it is working for them.
People see government doing things they don't like and they throw up their hands and say, "Stupid government! Who needs 'em? Who cares?" Well, that is the exact attitude that corporate lobbyists want. The antidote is participation. Go to your precinct caucus. Talk about how you would like the law to work. And don't just go alone. Find like-minded people in your precinct and go as a group.
Government hasn't turned its back on the people; people have turned their backs on government.
Think about it. Is liberty worth a few hours a year? Or is it too much trouble? The decision lies not with government, but with you.
I dont generaly do "me too posts, but I will in this case. I got my amateur license in 1993 because I wanted to do TCP/IP packet radio and I wanted my home on the Internet (not easily done at home in '93). Back then, the main uses were e-mail, telnet, and USENET news. None of the bandwidth hogging rich content so common today. So AX.25 with 1200 baud and later 9600 baud was fast enough.
I'll admit that my interest has since waned. My fastest digital gear is still 9600 baud, and while it is quite easy for me to communicate over 60 miles, 9600 baud doesn't cut it.
The emergence of some high speed spread spectrum stuff is pretty exciting. I will probably renew my license this year so I ca be ready to get involved. Wireless broadband over wide areas appeals to me.
Its strange how ham radio was leading-edge in wireless networking a decade ago, with pioneers like Phil Karn (KA9Q) actually contributing to the specification of the TCP protocol itself as a result of his packet radio experiements, to now, where it has been sitting well behind the part 15 world. I hope this exploration brings the hobby back to the innovative levels of 10 years ago and brings some new hobbyists in.
73 DE N0ZES
Well, economies of scale are part of the problem. Energy to manufacture for mono and polyscrytalline silicon PV cells are still high enough that it takes two to five years to pay back their energy to manufacture (I don't know if the paper I used for this figure is still available on-line. It was the Palz-Zibetta paper on the energy payback times of silicon PV cells). So, PV is still a long way from looking really attractive using only time-value of money as a measurement. But it is already very attractive to me. (And mono and polycrystalline cells should last a very long time, 20 years is not at all an unreasonable minimum life).
What I would like to see improved is the integration of PV cells and "BOS" (Balance of System) components. I should be able to get everything I need to add a grid-intertied solar PV system (with optional wind turbines) to my home at my local Home Depot, Menard's, or Loew's home improvement store.
I'm a regular reader of Home Power magazine (a great resource for those who are interested in DIY home power), but I must say that I've always thought they were mssing out on something. The culture of home power and of the magzine of the same name, if I may stereotype for a moment, is a sort of backpack-wearing, public-radio-listening, anti-corporate, neo-hippie type (and a small number of right-wing survivalist nut-jobs). Now, I am all for living better, and for the freedom of lifestyle choice, but a handful of self-congratulatory people living off grid in mountain homes will not save the world. Nope. We need to get people to view their PV systems like they view their SUVs: Something to show their status. We need to enlist the tools of the consumer culture to draw people into using clean technology. Don't talk about how many things you had to shut off or get rid of. Talk about the luxury of having power during rolling blackouts. I don't know, I'm not a marketer. But I do know: Make it easy, make it affordable, make it appealing. The vast majority of people want to live better environmentally, but they don't really know how, and they don't really want to sacrifice comfort.
I don't think they have to, because the world will be a lot better off if we could get 75% of the people getting 20% of their power from renewables than we are now with <1% of the people getting 100% of their power from renewables.
Give us this day our daily rant... Sorry...
That's what I said. I don't buy cheap for work, but I buy cheap for home (because money is my most valuable resource), so when I buy, I buy well back from the bleeding edge on price. I'm saying it seems you can get higher quality by either spending more money in toto (same capacity, higher price), or my spending more money per gigabyte (lower capacity, same price). I tend to do the former at work, the latter at home.
I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.
So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.