My neighbor just installed 22 solar panels, he says they will pay off in 7 years, but I don't see how it makes sense, except for government subsidies.
He says half the cost was just in the installation, then some percentage of the remainder is the brackets, wiring etc., and finally the solar panels themselves. Compare this to a massive installation.
There is only 7% transmission line loss, and I would imagine a solar installation of scale would cost 1/5th per kwh of what my neighbor did, plus they can store heat for use over the night.
So how does this make sense? It turns out he is getting 25% back from the federal govt., and PG&E pays him.36cents per KWH he feeds back into the grid. That's an insane amount of money. He gets to use the grid as a battery, and gets the consumer cost of.36c for the privilege.
The whole thing is silly, IMO. It just jacks up others rates by making a phony market.
The media has tried to support this war? Give me a break. They hated the war from the beginning. While whether or not the US ought to have invaded Iraq is debatable, worldwide opinion is not the measure of what actions the US ought to take.
Also, it seems Saddam was chipping away at the coalition. How much longer would it have held together? With a reactivated Iraq, what would the region look like today?
I'm not going to pretend to know the answers here. What I believe is the ME is much like eastern Europe before WWII, but with one exception. The states by and large tend to be politically weak. For this reason, there have been two, now perhaps three attempts to unify the area. Saddam Hussein, OBL, and now possibly this Ahmadinejad. In WWII, the human labor was the capital. In the ME, it is the stuff that runs the world's economy: oil.
The point is the future is slippery. I for one do not relish a united ME under any of these people's leadership. With US forces in Iraq, that possibility is much lessened. With a strong, democratic Iraq that possibility is much lessened.
Let them expose each other and their policies. Let's see how truly saintly Obama is.
I'm tired of this "Good for the party" bromide. Party goals are often not aligned with what's best for the party constituents or the party. So let's see lift up the hood and see what's really going on.
It doesn't take a lot to realize the liberals are winning. The federal government is growing hugely, and not just getting bigger in the absolute sense (i.e., consuming more real dollars), or in the sense it is even keeping abreast with the productivity increases (i.e., getting larger but maintaining its percentage of GDP), the government is getting bigger and bigger as a percentage of GDP.
The liberals are winning. Even Ronald Reagan wasn't much of a conservative: social programs blossomed under his presidency. The only conservatives I can think of were Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton who actually shed federal responsibilities and gave them to the states.
Given that Medicare and Social Security expenditures are expected to exceed GDP growth over the next twenty years, already there is built in government growth beyond GDP growth, and that's even before such new great ideas as socialized medicine.
Another advantage is you might actually be compensated for your expertise. Presumably you spent some non-trivial amount of time and money becoming an expert in your field. Why shouldn't you expect compensation.
People have to eat, and while I think Wikipedia may be a lesser order of this kind of evil, there are all kinds of people willing to take benefits from the hard work of those who love a field.
Another value I believe missing from Wikipedia is it does not credit the authors in a meaningful way, if at all. I think that ought to be rectified.
Let me ask the question, why do we always here the phrase:
"Global warming is happening, and it's man made."
Google says: Results 1 - 10 of about 536,000 for global warming man made
Should we feel about it differently if global warming were not man made? If the earth were entering an ice age, should we feel differently if man caused it or if it were natural?
In both cases the consequences are the same. But for some reason, there is a morality and imperative attached to the "Man Made" part of it. We should feel guilty, or responsible, that we have harmed the planet (as if it cares).
When a polar bear kills a baby seal, we watch it with scientific interest on national geographic and wonder at nature. But when man kills baby seal, we are horrified.
There is your "religion." And when religion is involved, I tend to wonder about the facts underneath it.
However, the idea "because it is easy to copy means it ought to be free" can spread to other things, some that are really important, like software and pharmaceuticals.
So I don't have the answer, I just believe it should be stopped, and the answer should not be to give in. Of course, that is what will happen, and so the system will increasingly decay and those who follow the rules will be punished relative to those who do not. That's also dangerous for societal decay.
This is the first I've heard of hundreds of thousands of bankrupt kids dropping out of college got a pointer for that?
I'd say the kids who aren't paying for their music are costing people their livelihoods. Hundreds (thousands?) of people have been let go because of it. Depending on the amount of skill these people have built up in their jobs, and are now losing, I would say it's a very significant impact to their lives.
The next question is how much the quality of the albums deteriorates. My personal opinion is most of the current stuff isn't worth the CD it's printed on, but others may feel they are losing value for that reason.
So if punishment is the only remedy, I would say the punishments currently do not fit the crime.
In the case of companies illegally using open source software in their products, who loses their job/loses money? One might argue that the software that isn't re-released hurts potential users, but on the other hand the reaction of the company might have been not to create the software at all if they felt they couldn't get away with the theft (on this note, I know some companies are moving away from Linux to FreeBSD because of the license).
Is "Piracy" the wrong word? It's been used since the 1500s. Aren't pirates thieves? These words have been used for a long time to describe copyright arrogation. Get used to it. Just because you justify stealing by saying "It isn't costing them anything because I wouldn't have bought it" doesn't make it any less of theft.
Do your conscience a favor. Buy all your music and don't steal any.
Regarding protection, what I was trying to get to is that IP protection (the laws, even social mores.) ought to protect all forms of IP similarly.
You feel we ought to ignore kids stealing music, but yet I suspect you would be adamantly opposed to a company using open source with disregard for the license. I think they are the same thing, and ought to be considered the same in a moral and legal sense.
And no, apparently the power of the government is not enough. Compare the copying of software vs. the copying of VHDL and Verilog as an example.
I'm certain "kids" make up a considerable percentage of the market for albums. I'll stop worrying about them stealing works when the open source community stops going after people and companies that use the work in violation of the license.
But seriously, giving away lesser works for free creates an additional burden on the copyright/patent holder. How do you do this with seeds, or drugs. Cutting up a large program can be quite difficult, and what an expense to do that for VHDL and Verilog (which currently have copy protection because it is hard to read, though not hard to copy).
I think any IP protection ought to extend to all forms of IP, not just the ones we happen to care about.
I'm trying to think of drugs developed by the voluntary pooling of money. I can't think of any. There is nothing preventing this model of drug development in the US, but it isn't happening, or at least not in any significant way. How do you account for that?
The use of "Piracy" for copyright infringement dates to 1603, according to wikipedia. I think of pirates as thieves, among other things, so I think stealing Intellectual Property is a long held accepted use of the english language to describe arrogating the right to copy a work. Copying someone's copyrighted work is piracy, theft, and copying. I recall a person I worked with who was laid off and who then downloaded (copied) the companies source code for a product. I think it is fair to say she stole the source code, even if she did just copy it.
The authors of copyright protection in the 1500s invented it because it stimulated works. In the US, there are roughly 172,000 books published per year, 30000 albums per year, and 490 movies per year. I wonder if Google would have paid to make Google Docs if it weren't for copyright protection. If drug companies couldn't patent their drugs, how long would they continue to pay the roughly $1b to create them.
As automation, etc. becomes increasingly prevalent, the world will only be left with IP. Copyright came into law with the advent of the printing press and the reduced value the copying process had in terms of the overall value of the product. Books, music, drugs, chips, software, and plant seeds are all great examples of how the primary value is in the Intellectual Property, not in the act of copying. I hope this continues because copying is a mundane act best left to machines.
In our capitalist society, those with the money invest in ideas to produce works that give a return. If these works can be freely copied, and if the cost of copying is very low, then investors won't invest. It's that simple. So you would need a different model to come up with the capital to create the works. So propose one. Hopefully it isn't this communist/socialist drivel that is being driven out of the world and is being replaced by capitalism.
What makes you think we are centuries away from cloning a species? I think the French tried to clone a wooley mammoth, though it has been extinct for 10K years.
Is anything more needed to prove Vaclav's point than the parent post? Shout down the dissenters.
Global warming, political correctness, the politics of race, all of the arguments around these things sound the same.
Another point here. To anyone who isn't deeply involved in the research, you only have an opinion, much the same as someone who reads the bible. It isn't possible to understand the totality of the situation. You just believe those who tell you what to believe.
On the one hand, open source advocates embrace a business model some intend will put the for profit software model out of business, and then seem indignant when the for profit businesses attack the threat.
While I respect the man very much, I doubt I would vote for him. But McCain authored The Community Broadband Act of 2005 when the telcos were trying so hard to kill muni wifi.
What is the scientific method? It starts with a theory, and then an experiment that can be verified. With global warming the theory is C02 and possibly other greenhouse gases increase because of man, and are warming up the earth. How do you run an independently verifiable experiment to prove this?
The answer is you don't because you can't. So instead you argue about models. A few things about modelling weather. First, the weatherman is often wrong. That tells me the ability of the models to predict weather even a few days from now is difficult. What I don't know is whether it is more difficult to model global trends or not, and no one does! Given many of the current models are wrong, and wrong on the high side (I would have to dig for the reference, but I believe it was an MIT climatologist), I question them. I also question how much of this is natural cycle, and outside of man's ability to control. After Louisiana, we all ought to take a bit of umbrage concerning man's ability to control the environment.
Where does that leave us. Well, this is one of those "end of mankind" sorts of things. We are all used to them starting with the apoclypse, then plague, continuing to communists, nuclear disaster, ebola, meteorites, and now even global warming. I don't mean to pooh pooh the chicken little nature of these things, all of these things are serious topics. Nonetheless, color me a bit jaded when there are those who stand to gain.
Where I begin to lose respect for the global warming crowd is when it turns into topics about penguins, dodos, etc. The world is changing and evolving to a new era with an intelligent creature calling many of the shots. I'm not advocating destroying animals, and do believe they ought to be protected, but man should not slow down on account of their being in jeopardy. We should not tear down dams, windmills, etc. for them. We should move forward as fast as possible.
One thing that always amazes me about the global warming crowd, incidentally, is that often the same people who fulminate about man's abuse of the planet often are also the same people against hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and who are increasingly against wind power.
Sounds like something else is going on to me in your post, and it isn't science, so sorry if I don't take it on the chin.
"We very much hope they don't start using it [GPS]. We believe this area of the brain increased in grey matter volume because of the huge amount or data they have to memorise.If they all start using GPS, that knowledge base will be less and possibly effect the brain changes we are seeing."
I'm not clear if Dr. Maguire (and whoever the "we" is she refers to), don't want taxi drivers to use GPS because she wants to require the cabbies to have a huge knowledge base or because she wants to see the brain changes. She doesn't indicate any value to the cabbies over GPS.
Perhaps she (and her "we") just likes the aesthetic of large brain sections?
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I guess this was politically incorrect!
I suppose they don't teach much math these days.
My neighbor just installed 22 solar panels, he says they will pay off in 7 years, but I don't see how it makes sense, except for government subsidies.
He says half the cost was just in the installation, then some percentage of the remainder is the brackets, wiring etc., and finally the solar panels themselves. Compare this to a massive installation.
There is only 7% transmission line loss, and I would imagine a solar installation of scale would cost 1/5th per kwh of what my neighbor did, plus they can store heat for use over the night.
So how does this make sense? It turns out he is getting 25% back from the federal govt., and PG&E pays him .36cents per KWH he feeds back into the grid. That's an insane amount of money. He gets to use the grid as a battery, and gets the consumer cost of .36c for the privilege.
The whole thing is silly, IMO. It just jacks up others rates by making a phony market.
The media has tried to support this war? Give me a break. They hated the war from the beginning.
While whether or not the US ought to have invaded Iraq is debatable, worldwide opinion is not the measure of what actions the US ought to take.
Also, it seems Saddam was chipping away at the coalition. How much longer would it have held together? With a reactivated Iraq, what would the region look like today?
I'm not going to pretend to know the answers here. What I believe is the ME is much like eastern Europe before WWII, but with one exception. The states by and large tend to be politically weak. For this reason, there have been two, now perhaps three attempts to unify the area. Saddam Hussein, OBL, and now possibly this Ahmadinejad. In WWII, the human labor was the capital. In the ME, it is the stuff that runs the world's economy: oil.
The point is the future is slippery. I for one do not relish a united ME under any of these people's leadership. With US forces in Iraq, that possibility is much lessened. With a strong, democratic Iraq that possibility is much lessened.
Whether Iraq will get there is anyone's guess.
Good for Americans.
Let them expose each other and their policies. Let's see how truly saintly Obama is.
I'm tired of this "Good for the party" bromide. Party goals are often not aligned with what's best for the party constituents or the party. So let's see lift up the hood and see what's really going on.
It doesn't take a lot to realize the liberals are winning. The federal government is growing hugely, and not just getting bigger in the absolute sense (i.e., consuming more real dollars), or in the sense it is even keeping abreast with the productivity increases (i.e., getting larger but maintaining its percentage of GDP), the government is getting bigger and bigger as a percentage of GDP.
The liberals are winning. Even Ronald Reagan wasn't much of a conservative: social programs blossomed under his presidency. The only conservatives I can think of were Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton who actually shed federal responsibilities and gave them to the states.
Given that Medicare and Social Security expenditures are expected to exceed GDP growth over the next twenty years, already there is built in government growth beyond GDP growth, and that's even before such new great ideas as socialized medicine.
Hopefully they will leave us enough to eat.
Another advantage is you might actually be compensated for your expertise. Presumably you spent some non-trivial amount of time and money becoming an expert in your field. Why shouldn't you expect compensation.
People have to eat, and while I think Wikipedia may be a lesser order of this kind of evil, there are all kinds of people willing to take benefits from the hard work of those who love a field.
Another value I believe missing from Wikipedia is it does not credit the authors in a meaningful way, if at all. I think that ought to be rectified.
Let me ask the question, why do we always here the phrase:
"Global warming is happening, and it's man made."
Google says: Results 1 - 10 of about 536,000 for global warming man made
Should we feel about it differently if global warming were not man made? If the earth were entering an ice age, should we feel differently if man caused it or if it were natural?
In both cases the consequences are the same. But for some reason, there is a morality and imperative attached to the "Man Made" part of it. We should feel guilty, or responsible, that we have harmed the planet (as if it cares).
When a polar bear kills a baby seal, we watch it with scientific interest on national geographic and wonder at nature. But when man kills baby seal, we are horrified.
There is your "religion." And when religion is involved, I tend to wonder about the facts underneath it.
I'm with you on the moral decay point.
However, the idea "because it is easy to copy means it ought to be free" can spread to other things, some that are really important, like software and pharmaceuticals.
So I don't have the answer, I just believe it should be stopped, and the answer should not be to give in. Of course, that is what will happen, and so the system will increasingly decay and those who follow the rules will be punished relative to those who do not. That's also dangerous for societal decay.
This is the first I've heard of hundreds of thousands of bankrupt kids dropping out of college got a pointer for that?
I'd say the kids who aren't paying for their music are costing people their livelihoods. Hundreds (thousands?) of people have been let go because of it. Depending on the amount of skill these people have built up in their jobs, and are now losing, I would say it's a very significant impact to their lives.
The next question is how much the quality of the albums deteriorates. My personal opinion is most of the current stuff isn't worth the CD it's printed on, but others may feel they are losing value for that reason.
So if punishment is the only remedy, I would say the punishments currently do not fit the crime.
In the case of companies illegally using open source software in their products, who loses their job/loses money? One might argue that the software that isn't re-released hurts potential users, but on the other hand the reaction of the company might have been not to create the software at all if they felt they couldn't get away with the theft (on this note, I know some companies are moving away from Linux to FreeBSD because of the license).
Is "Piracy" the wrong word? It's been used since the 1500s. Aren't pirates thieves? These words have been used for a long time to describe copyright arrogation. Get used to it. Just because you justify stealing by saying "It isn't costing them anything because I wouldn't have bought it" doesn't make it any less of theft.
Do your conscience a favor. Buy all your music and don't steal any.
Regarding protection, what I was trying to get to is that IP protection (the laws, even social mores.) ought to protect all forms of IP similarly.
You feel we ought to ignore kids stealing music, but yet I suspect you would be adamantly opposed to a company using open source with disregard for the license. I think they are the same thing, and ought to be considered the same in a moral and legal sense.
And no, apparently the power of the government is not enough. Compare the copying of software vs. the copying of VHDL and Verilog as an example.
I'm certain "kids" make up a considerable percentage of the market for albums. I'll stop worrying about them stealing works when the open source community stops going after people and companies that use the work in violation of the license.
But seriously, giving away lesser works for free creates an additional burden on the copyright/patent holder. How do you do this with seeds, or drugs. Cutting up a large program can be quite difficult, and what an expense to do that for VHDL and Verilog (which currently have copy protection because it is hard to read, though not hard to copy).
I think any IP protection ought to extend to all forms of IP, not just the ones we happen to care about.
I'm trying to think of drugs developed by the voluntary pooling of money. I can't think of any. There is nothing preventing this model of drug development in the US, but it isn't happening, or at least not in any significant way. How do you account for that?
The use of "Piracy" for copyright infringement dates to 1603, according to wikipedia. I think of pirates as thieves, among other things, so I think stealing Intellectual Property is a long held accepted use of the english language to describe arrogating the right to copy a work. Copying someone's copyrighted work is piracy, theft, and copying. I recall a person I worked with who was laid off and who then downloaded (copied) the companies source code for a product. I think it is fair to say she stole the source code, even if she did just copy it.
The authors of copyright protection in the 1500s invented it because it stimulated works. In the US, there are roughly 172,000 books published per year, 30000 albums per year, and 490 movies per year. I wonder if Google would have paid to make Google Docs if it weren't for copyright protection. If drug companies couldn't patent their drugs, how long would they continue to pay the roughly $1b to create them.
As automation, etc. becomes increasingly prevalent, the world will only be left with IP. Copyright came into law with the advent of the printing press and the reduced value the copying process had in terms of the overall value of the product. Books, music, drugs, chips, software, and plant seeds are all great examples of how the primary value is in the Intellectual Property, not in the act of copying. I hope this continues because copying is a mundane act best left to machines.
In our capitalist society, those with the money invest in ideas to produce works that give a return. If these works can be freely copied, and if the cost of copying is very low, then investors won't invest. It's that simple. So you would need a different model to come up with the capital to create the works. So propose one. Hopefully it isn't this communist/socialist drivel that is being driven out of the world and is being replaced by capitalism.
Flatland is a short movie and a book, that is intriguing.
What makes you think we are centuries away from cloning a species? I think the French tried to clone a wooley mammoth, though it has been extinct for 10K years.
So if you accidentally paid with a hundred instead of a twenty, you think the store owner should keep it? Just your bad luck?
Is anything more needed to prove Vaclav's point than the parent post? Shout down the dissenters.
Global warming, political correctness, the politics of race, all of the arguments around these things sound the same.
Another point here. To anyone who isn't deeply involved in the research, you only have an opinion, much the same as someone who reads the bible. It isn't possible to understand the totality of the situation. You just believe those who tell you what to believe.
On the one hand, open source advocates embrace a business model some intend will put the for profit software model out of business, and then seem indignant when the for profit businesses attack the threat.
While I respect the man very much, I doubt I would vote for him. But McCain authored The Community Broadband Act of 2005 when the telcos were trying so hard to kill muni wifi.
The error path almost never works in software. Software is just not sofisticated [sic] enough.
What is the scientific method? It starts with a theory, and then an experiment that can be verified. With global warming the theory is C02 and possibly other greenhouse gases increase because of man, and are warming up the earth. How do you run an independently verifiable experiment to prove this?
The answer is you don't because you can't. So instead you argue about models. A few things about modelling weather. First, the weatherman is often wrong. That tells me the ability of the models to predict weather even a few days from now is difficult. What I don't know is whether it is more difficult to model global trends or not, and no one does! Given many of the current models are wrong, and wrong on the high side (I would have to dig for the reference, but I believe it was an MIT climatologist), I question them. I also question how much of this is natural cycle, and outside of man's ability to control. After Louisiana, we all ought to take a bit of umbrage concerning man's ability to control the environment.
Where does that leave us. Well, this is one of those "end of mankind" sorts of things. We are all used to them starting with the apoclypse, then plague, continuing to communists, nuclear disaster, ebola, meteorites, and now even global warming. I don't mean to pooh pooh the chicken little nature of these things, all of these things are serious topics. Nonetheless, color me a bit jaded when there are those who stand to gain.
Where I begin to lose respect for the global warming crowd is when it turns into topics about penguins, dodos, etc. The world is changing and evolving to a new era with an intelligent creature calling many of the shots. I'm not advocating destroying animals, and do believe they ought to be protected, but man should not slow down on account of their being in jeopardy. We should not tear down dams, windmills, etc. for them. We should move forward as fast as possible.
One thing that always amazes me about the global warming crowd, incidentally, is that often the same people who fulminate about man's abuse of the planet often are also the same people against hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and who are increasingly against wind power.
Sounds like something else is going on to me in your post, and it isn't science, so sorry if I don't take it on the chin.
I'm not clear if Dr. Maguire (and whoever the "we" is she refers to), don't want taxi drivers to use GPS because she wants to require the cabbies to have a huge knowledge base or because she wants to see the brain changes. She doesn't indicate any value to the cabbies over GPS.
Perhaps she (and her "we") just likes the aesthetic of large brain sections?
Methane = CH4, which means no oxygen.
Science is not about fanciful thinking.
Nor is it about doubling down on the MARs failure (no life on mars, let's look to titan next).
The only thing funny about this is the special interest groups collide problem for the politically correct crowd.
Oops, we don't like guns, we don't like killing innocent animals, but we want everyone to have equal rights. What's our position?