My guess is that the house could be built for a lot less. Considering where this house is being built, I doubt cost is much of a concern.
If you consider the fuselage to be nothing more than the outer shell, $40k is still reasonable. What you put in it is up to you. In areas where land is cheap, I wonder if this approach could be used to construct office or warehouse facilities.
That's what happens when you tell the ticket agent, "Please don't lose my bags." Stop making such outrageous requests and they will let you sit with the rest of the passengers.
Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) works as you expect. Those batteries are old technology, but they are still used in some cordless power tools and certain other applications. Unless you let them fully run down, the develop "memory" and refuse to run out a normal cycle. The memory issue does not apply to NiMH and Lithium Ion, but each of those technologies has its own limitations.
Lithium Ion is gradually replacing NiCd in power tools. But there are issues such as the temperature extremes and high current loads that such tools can be subjected to. In a professional environment where the tools are used intensively every day with battery packs fully discharged, Lithium Ion may not prove to be the best choice.
NiMH prefers what NiCd hates: a partial charge/discharge. I am told the NiMH batteries in a Toyota Prius are charged only to 55% of capacity, and allowed to run down only to 45% before charging begins. The car carries 10x as much battery capacity as it actually uses, supposedly to maximize battery life. I don't know for sure if it works that way, but that's what I heard.
I have seen it done in Connecticut. A guy bought an old Mercedes, installed an auxiliary fuel tank in the spare tire well, using what looked like an electric blanket to heat the tank. The car starts on regular diesel fuel, and after everything is suitably warmed up, the driver switches to vegetable oil. I have no idea how long it takes the veggie tank to warm up, or if there might be some days when it's too cold to switch at all.
I am told that the heating and insulation requirements are not that bad -- a small price to pay if you can run your car on (untaxed) waste vegetable oil.
That goes a long way towards solving the transmission problem. But a small diesel engine can charge the batteries with better fuel economy and still run on fuels like vegetable oil.
I'm also not so sure how the turbine would handle short duty cycles. Some turbine parts have published lifetimes rated in hours, but some are rated in cycles. You can't just spin it up every few minutes. Actually you can, but guess what happens?
On an aircraft, you spin up the turbine and fly. It won't be shut down until you land. In a car, even if the turbine ran 100% of the time every little trip would be another on/off cycle.
Gearing down from 50,000 rpm to less than 100 is tricky. Helicopters do it, but the transmission is one of the most expensive, failure-prone components in the design. A car would have an even bigger problem.
Is there money in the current budget to buy a content management system?
Even if there is, the way to pitch open source is to go ahead and install a prototype system on a spare computer. Call it an "extended evaluation", or whatever. Set up Plone as you would if you were going to use it for the actual project. If it works well, then it becomes the winner by default. Since this is not "trialware", you don't have that "30-day" BS to worry about.
The pitch to management is this: "If we can save money by doing this, then let's do it. If by some chance the effort fails, we can always fall back on the more expensive option. The worst possible outcome is that we make mistakes that we learn to avoid during the real implementation."
This puts open source products on the fast track to adoption, since you don't need budgets or expenditures to get the ball rolling. Managed properly, IT gets credit for getting things done without a perpetual beg-a-thon for more money.
Anywhere you have IT governance that delivers more policies than solutions, rogue IT fills the gap.
In the case of the Federal government, I can imagine this getting out of hand. I wonder how many virtual machines are sitting there in the Amazon cloud quietly doing the government's business?
Simple enough, but it all depends on what breaks and who complains. Even worse if the users don't complain immediately or the server was supplying some kind of support function that is not facing the users directly. In that case, you might have a quiet failure that becomes a fiasco. If the users are actually customers, how many are you willing to disappoint? At what cost?
I wouldn't know so much about the various failure modes if I had not seen so many of them in real life. There is an attitude in modern IT that underestimates the cost of downtime. As an old-school mainframe guy, I cringe at the thought of deliberately inducing it (without knowing for sure what will happen) just because we didn't properly document our actions.
I worked in a place that had excessive downtime, much of it due to poor planning, fragile infrastructure, and sloppy operational procedures. Your suggestion would be standard operating procedure for them. The sysadmins seemed to think they had an unlimited number of do-overs. They would accidentally trigger giant problems and then spend days hunting down the solution. By the time I left, management had still not made sweeping personnel changes -- but it's only a matter of time.
It should never come down to guessing what your VMs are doing, but sometimes it does. Your technique of "freeze 'em and see what happens" should never be the strategy, but sometimes it is.
Even if inventory and operations live together in perfect harmony, the tags identify PHYSICAL servers. Thanks to the magic of virtualization, you might have several zombie virtual machines along with [maybe] one that is truly needed -- all in the same physical box.
Even if the tags do their job and you think you have positively identified a defunct box to be shut down and removed, what level of confidence do you have that NONE of the virtual machines are still necessary?
We have few options to buy long-lasting products because nobody wants to pay a premium for higher quality. There is a good reason for this. Factory production is a process that can be automated from end to end with most of the labor coming from low-cost offshore workers.
Repair is a different matter. It takes more labor to fix an appliance than it does to make one. The repair tech has a higher skill level than most of the factory workers, and this labor cannot be sent offshore. The cost of parts is much higher as well. Somebody has to operate a warehouse full of replacement parts for machines made over many years. Some of those parts will sit on the shelf for years, some will never be sold. Therefore, the markup on parts has to subsidize the slow-selling and non-selling parts.
If someone could make a durable appliance that NEVER had to be fixed, it would be worth the premium. But as soon as service is required, we all know that a service call is dangerously close to the cost of a cheapie replacement appliance. Consumers generally demand features (like computerized controls) that increase the chance of failure at some point -- regardless of how well-made the rest of the machine is.
Kirby vacuum cleaners are awesome machines. But if you buy a plastic Hoover every 3 years, it will probably cost less (even if you buy 7 of them over 21 years). Your carpet will still be clean, and your risk at any given point is limited to the cost of a Walmart plastic vacuum cleaner. The Kirby will cost more to fix than the Hoover will cost to buy.
Some people buy exotic cars with the full understanding that the annual cost of repairs will be dangerously close to the payments on a brand new Toyota. But if you love the car, you accept the tradeoff. This happens far less often with appliances because it's hard to love a refrigerator all that much.
Ditching that second job is not just for wealthy families. You don't have to be earning all that much to encounter the marriage penalty. The surprise is how many couples don't know about it. After all, this is never shown on a pay stub. If Form 1040 could talk, it would say things like:
"Your refund is $X, but it would be $X+5000 if you and your spouse were single and filed separately."
"We are taxing that second job at an extraordinarily high rate by adding both incomes together. This enables us to collect tax at a rate that neither spouse would ever have to pay as an individual."
The tax code was originally designed to favor married couples, and up until the 1970's it did. For families with only one income, it still does. When it became common for both spouses to work, problems emerged.
Back to your point about an economic system that requires both parents to work. People think we have this problem, but the tax code does everything it possibly can to encourage families to rely on a single salary.
With all due respect to engineers and economists, I enter this discussion as someone who has very complicated taxes and has spent some time analyzing the system.
You would be surprised how many dual-income families could drop to one job with negligible loss of real income. Why? The marginal tax rate on that second job is sky high. Ever hear of the "marriage penalty"? My wife CAN'T work because we would end up getting hammered with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)! Personally, I would prefer she stay home and raise the kids. This is good, because the government doesn't offer us any choice.
Many of the "luxuries" found in dual-income households are in fact necessities triggered by the second wage earner. By this, I mean things like another car, additional clothing, convenience foods, eating out, daycare, etc. Most of this gets paid for with after-tax income. There are many things that would either cost less or nothing at all if the wife stayed home. When dual-income couples buy a snazzy car or a huge TV, it's not really the second job that pays for the upgrade. We already know these second jobs don't bring in much after taxes and expenses. The second job merely enables a higher debt burden. Most of the true luxuries are purchased on credit.
I can understand married women having a right to work, but I wonder how many of them realize they are working very hard for a salary that amounts to less than minimum wage! The marriage penalty is not something you see as a payroll deduction. It's a hidden cost that is only visible when filing a tax return -- and even then most people don't figure it out.
I saw a TV show where Dateline NBC was helping some families determine if Mom could quit her job and stay home to raise the kids. They had some accountants analyzing the families' tax returns, checking accounts and credit card statements. In most cases, the couples were shocked at how little it would cost them to have Mom stay home. In one case, they found a family where the mother was earning NEGATIVE income from her job! She said to the accountant, "This is great news! Does this mean I can quit in a few months?" The accountant says, "You should quit TOMORROW. In fact, the sooner you quit the less money you will lose."
1. Corn. A lot of food is loaded with high-fructose corn syrup because it's cheap. Modern meat has a higher percentage of fat because subsidized corn is a cheap way to fatten livestock and increase the quantity of meat. The surplus fat ends up in all kinds of products as a cheap way to provide flavor that consumers have developed a preference for. And of course, corn products of all types end up in high-carb foods that are cheap and supported by relentless marketing. Corn doesn't just fatten livestock, it fattens humans too. Healthy food is more expensive than junk food. All of this happens because corn is sold for less than the cost of production (thanks to the government).
2. Fear. When I was a kid, we would go to a nearby forest and play outside all day. Or we would play unsupervised baseball, football, etc. from dawn to dusk. Today, we don't let kids play without a boatload of supervision, protective equipment, etc. Therefore, outside play is infrequent. Walking through the woods is now out of the question, thanks to lenient sentencing of violent criminals and paranoia that we get from watching crime dramas on TV.
3. Homework. Teachers are pressured into assigning homework far beyond what is needed to support academic progress. Administrators seem to think that keeping kids busy will keep them out of trouble (by keeping them seated and indoors, of course). This has a number of side effects, none of which help the kids.
A colleague of mine had a cable modem. For a number of reasons, he just happened to be aware of his IP address. It was DHCP assigned, but essentially a static assignment because it never changed. Then one day, there was a technical problem. Whatever the problem was, the cable company's solution consisted of changing his IP address. Great! New IP address! Problem solved.
A few months later, he gets a nastygram from the cable ISP. "Your IP address x.x.x.x was used for illegal file sharing activity on $DATE, and your contact information been supplied to the copyright holder pursuant to a subpeona..." One TINY little problem. The address in question was his NEW IP address and the date in question was BEFORE THE ADDRESS WAS ASSIGNED TO HIM! It seems the ISP looked up the IP address in question and identified the CURRENT user, with no consideration about who was using it at the time!
It gets better. The colleague in question has a lot of money, lawyers, and the willingness to use them. The cable clowns got spanked big-time. I have reason to believe they paid a substantial settlement to avoid a defamation suit. And of course, the process of identifying users by IP address has now been proven to be error-prone. Reasonable doubt for everyone!
In addition to incompetent ISP research, there are a number of ways for a user to hijack your IP address, which I won't go into here. But trust me, it's possible. More reasonable doubt.
It's one thing to accuse someone of sharing "The Sound of Music" and say "oops" when the user in question turns out to deaf and clueless about P2P. But when the movie is "Debbie Does Detroit", the reputation of the defendant is damaged. That's a BIG problem if the user identification process is flawed (as described above). Sooner or later, the plaintiffs are going to go to court armed with bad information and all hell will break loose.
Usenet spam and porn? The message recipient is indistinguishable from 10,000 horny teenage porn surfers while government authorities can only keep one hand on the keyboard at a time.
Last I heard, fossil fuels were heavily taxed. Governments are addicted to the revenue stream they produce. So powerful is this addiction, the concept of global warming was established to accelerate the money grab to astronomical proportions.
I am not saying there is no such thing as fossil fuel subsidy, but the article never mentioned any specifics. Any such calculations need to deduct fuel taxes, since taxation is the opposite of a subsidy.
They won't be asked to give the grant money back. After all, the findings were in line with the sponsors of the research, so it was money well spent. In fact, preserving the value of that investment requires a whitewash that negates the need to ask for a refund. How convenient.
Spin or no spin, we still have those pesky little e-mails. And the miscalculations and misrepresentations (the hockey stick). And the publishing of baseless blogs as proven research (the Himalayan melting debacle). You would think that with all these errors, at least one of them would understate climate change instead of overstate it. What an incredible coincidence that all of the errors fall one way.
The whitewash works well enough to serve its purpose. Nobody gets fired and they can keep the money. But the unintended side effect is that credibility will not be restored anytime soon.
I don't think either side of the climate debate has "clean hands". There is no shortage of biased research on either side. The question is: What (if anything) should be done about climate change if the proof is less than absolute and the fastest growing economies (China and India) are preparing to pick up the slack for any voluntary reductions that might take place elsewhere? In other words: How stupid to they think we are?
No amount of research will change the fact that we are globally on course to do nothing, regardless of what the North America and Europe decide to do or not do. The developing world will not participate without handouts, which they will ultimately use for activities that generate CO2.
Climate change might be a total scam. I sure hope so, because I have yet to see a solution that can overcome the political/economic obstacles. Anyone who thinks the answer is a whitewash followed by a money grab is sure to be disappointed.
Thinking about your post makes me feel even older. When I was in college the "new" terminals were VT-100. The lab was open 24 hours a day because there weren't enough terminals to go around. For those who knew where to look, there were a few VT-52s hiding in relative obscurity.
Granted, the VAX had less power than a Mac mini, but it also had reliability that modern systems can't match.
I think the best way to resist taxation is to boycott the taxed activity. Let the idiots sit around scratching their heads, wondering how to stimulate the economy when they in fact discourage economic activity every chance they get. Given the current levels of taxation, it's time to greet each new tax initiative with a royal smackdown.
The amount collected in Internet sales tax won't cover the unemployment for the workers who lose their jobs when sales volume goes down the toilet.
Although I agree with most of what you say about MS, your analysis assumes far too much intelligence in corporate IT.
An entire generation of IT people grew up with Windows. They defend MS as if their careers depend on it (because they do). A certain amount of downtime, user frustration, etc. are all viewed as part of the cost of doing business -- by people who don't know how to do business any other way.
From a corporate IT point of view, the weakest link in the chain is cleaning up after viruses and spyware. If an app store offers a reliable way to lock out trialware, crapware, malware, spyware, etc. while allowing the users full permission to install updates of apps from the store, the fanbois will pound the drums loudly. These people are tired of watching Apple commercials and seeing themselves in the role of "PC".
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My guess is that the house could be built for a lot less. Considering where this house is being built, I doubt cost is much of a concern.
If you consider the fuselage to be nothing more than the outer shell, $40k is still reasonable. What you put in it is up to you. In areas where land is cheap, I wonder if this approach could be used to construct office or warehouse facilities.
That's what happens when you tell the ticket agent, "Please don't lose my bags." Stop making such outrageous requests and they will let you sit with the rest of the passengers.
If there was ever a perfect place to advertise life insurance, this is it.
On move-in day, each item is a carry-on and subject to a baggage fee of $50. You can't have an airplane without junk fees!
Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) works as you expect. Those batteries are old technology, but they are still used in some cordless power tools and certain other applications. Unless you let them fully run down, the develop "memory" and refuse to run out a normal cycle. The memory issue does not apply to NiMH and Lithium Ion, but each of those technologies has its own limitations.
Lithium Ion is gradually replacing NiCd in power tools. But there are issues such as the temperature extremes and high current loads that such tools can be subjected to. In a professional environment where the tools are used intensively every day with battery packs fully discharged, Lithium Ion may not prove to be the best choice.
NiMH prefers what NiCd hates: a partial charge/discharge. I am told the NiMH batteries in a Toyota Prius are charged only to 55% of capacity, and allowed to run down only to 45% before charging begins. The car carries 10x as much battery capacity as it actually uses, supposedly to maximize battery life. I don't know for sure if it works that way, but that's what I heard.
I have seen it done in Connecticut. A guy bought an old Mercedes, installed an auxiliary fuel tank in the spare tire well, using what looked like an electric blanket to heat the tank. The car starts on regular diesel fuel, and after everything is suitably warmed up, the driver switches to vegetable oil. I have no idea how long it takes the veggie tank to warm up, or if there might be some days when it's too cold to switch at all.
I am told that the heating and insulation requirements are not that bad -- a small price to pay if you can run your car on (untaxed) waste vegetable oil.
That goes a long way towards solving the transmission problem. But a small diesel engine can charge the batteries with better fuel economy and still run on fuels like vegetable oil.
I'm also not so sure how the turbine would handle short duty cycles. Some turbine parts have published lifetimes rated in hours, but some are rated in cycles. You can't just spin it up every few minutes. Actually you can, but guess what happens?
On an aircraft, you spin up the turbine and fly. It won't be shut down until you land. In a car, even if the turbine ran 100% of the time every little trip would be another on/off cycle.
Gearing down from 50,000 rpm to less than 100 is tricky. Helicopters do it, but the transmission is one of the most expensive, failure-prone components in the design. A car would have an even bigger problem.
Is there money in the current budget to buy a content management system?
Even if there is, the way to pitch open source is to go ahead and install a prototype system on a spare computer. Call it an "extended evaluation", or whatever. Set up Plone as you would if you were going to use it for the actual project. If it works well, then it becomes the winner by default. Since this is not "trialware", you don't have that "30-day" BS to worry about.
The pitch to management is this: "If we can save money by doing this, then let's do it. If by some chance the effort fails, we can always fall back on the more expensive option. The worst possible outcome is that we make mistakes that we learn to avoid during the real implementation."
This puts open source products on the fast track to adoption, since you don't need budgets or expenditures to get the ball rolling. Managed properly, IT gets credit for getting things done without a perpetual beg-a-thon for more money.
Anywhere you have IT governance that delivers more policies than solutions, rogue IT fills the gap.
In the case of the Federal government, I can imagine this getting out of hand. I wonder how many virtual machines are sitting there in the Amazon cloud quietly doing the government's business?
Simple enough, but it all depends on what breaks and who complains. Even worse if the users don't complain immediately or the server was supplying some kind of support function that is not facing the users directly. In that case, you might have a quiet failure that becomes a fiasco. If the users are actually customers, how many are you willing to disappoint? At what cost?
I wouldn't know so much about the various failure modes if I had not seen so many of them in real life. There is an attitude in modern IT that underestimates the cost of downtime. As an old-school mainframe guy, I cringe at the thought of deliberately inducing it (without knowing for sure what will happen) just because we didn't properly document our actions.
I worked in a place that had excessive downtime, much of it due to poor planning, fragile infrastructure, and sloppy operational procedures. Your suggestion would be standard operating procedure for them. The sysadmins seemed to think they had an unlimited number of do-overs. They would accidentally trigger giant problems and then spend days hunting down the solution. By the time I left, management had still not made sweeping personnel changes -- but it's only a matter of time.
It should never come down to guessing what your VMs are doing, but sometimes it does. Your technique of "freeze 'em and see what happens" should never be the strategy, but sometimes it is.
Even if inventory and operations live together in perfect harmony, the tags identify PHYSICAL servers. Thanks to the magic of virtualization, you might have several zombie virtual machines along with [maybe] one that is truly needed -- all in the same physical box.
Even if the tags do their job and you think you have positively identified a defunct box to be shut down and removed, what level of confidence do you have that NONE of the virtual machines are still necessary?
Isn't that technically committing perjury? Not that I've ever heard about anyone facing consequences for such things...
It is, but that doesn't seem to be stopping the bogus DMCA complaints. If large corporations are getting away with it, why shouldn't everyone else?
We have few options to buy long-lasting products because nobody wants to pay a premium for higher quality. There is a good reason for this. Factory production is a process that can be automated from end to end with most of the labor coming from low-cost offshore workers.
Repair is a different matter. It takes more labor to fix an appliance than it does to make one. The repair tech has a higher skill level than most of the factory workers, and this labor cannot be sent offshore. The cost of parts is much higher as well. Somebody has to operate a warehouse full of replacement parts for machines made over many years. Some of those parts will sit on the shelf for years, some will never be sold. Therefore, the markup on parts has to subsidize the slow-selling and non-selling parts.
If someone could make a durable appliance that NEVER had to be fixed, it would be worth the premium. But as soon as service is required, we all know that a service call is dangerously close to the cost of a cheapie replacement appliance. Consumers generally demand features (like computerized controls) that increase the chance of failure at some point -- regardless of how well-made the rest of the machine is.
Kirby vacuum cleaners are awesome machines. But if you buy a plastic Hoover every 3 years, it will probably cost less (even if you buy 7 of them over 21 years). Your carpet will still be clean, and your risk at any given point is limited to the cost of a Walmart plastic vacuum cleaner. The Kirby will cost more to fix than the Hoover will cost to buy.
Some people buy exotic cars with the full understanding that the annual cost of repairs will be dangerously close to the payments on a brand new Toyota. But if you love the car, you accept the tradeoff. This happens far less often with appliances because it's hard to love a refrigerator all that much.
Popcorn indeed. Extra butter.
Ditching that second job is not just for wealthy families. You don't have to be earning all that much to encounter the marriage penalty. The surprise is how many couples don't know about it. After all, this is never shown on a pay stub. If Form 1040 could talk, it would say things like:
"Your refund is $X, but it would be $X+5000 if you and your spouse were single and filed separately."
"We are taxing that second job at an extraordinarily high rate by adding both incomes together. This enables us to collect tax at a rate that neither spouse would ever have to pay as an individual."
The tax code was originally designed to favor married couples, and up until the 1970's it did. For families with only one income, it still does. When it became common for both spouses to work, problems emerged.
Back to your point about an economic system that requires both parents to work. People think we have this problem, but the tax code does everything it possibly can to encourage families to rely on a single salary.
With all due respect to engineers and economists, I enter this discussion as someone who has very complicated taxes and has spent some time analyzing the system.
You would be surprised how many dual-income families could drop to one job with negligible loss of real income. Why? The marginal tax rate on that second job is sky high. Ever hear of the "marriage penalty"? My wife CAN'T work because we would end up getting hammered with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)! Personally, I would prefer she stay home and raise the kids. This is good, because the government doesn't offer us any choice.
Many of the "luxuries" found in dual-income households are in fact necessities triggered by the second wage earner. By this, I mean things like another car, additional clothing, convenience foods, eating out, daycare, etc. Most of this gets paid for with after-tax income. There are many things that would either cost less or nothing at all if the wife stayed home. When dual-income couples buy a snazzy car or a huge TV, it's not really the second job that pays for the upgrade. We already know these second jobs don't bring in much after taxes and expenses. The second job merely enables a higher debt burden. Most of the true luxuries are purchased on credit.
I can understand married women having a right to work, but I wonder how many of them realize they are working very hard for a salary that amounts to less than minimum wage! The marriage penalty is not something you see as a payroll deduction. It's a hidden cost that is only visible when filing a tax return -- and even then most people don't figure it out.
I saw a TV show where Dateline NBC was helping some families determine if Mom could quit her job and stay home to raise the kids. They had some accountants analyzing the families' tax returns, checking accounts and credit card statements. In most cases, the couples were shocked at how little it would cost them to have Mom stay home. In one case, they found a family where the mother was earning NEGATIVE income from her job! She said to the accountant, "This is great news! Does this mean I can quit in a few months?" The accountant says, "You should quit TOMORROW. In fact, the sooner you quit the less money you will lose."
1. Corn. A lot of food is loaded with high-fructose corn syrup because it's cheap. Modern meat has a higher percentage of fat because subsidized corn is a cheap way to fatten livestock and increase the quantity of meat. The surplus fat ends up in all kinds of products as a cheap way to provide flavor that consumers have developed a preference for. And of course, corn products of all types end up in high-carb foods that are cheap and supported by relentless marketing. Corn doesn't just fatten livestock, it fattens humans too. Healthy food is more expensive than junk food. All of this happens because corn is sold for less than the cost of production (thanks to the government).
2. Fear. When I was a kid, we would go to a nearby forest and play outside all day. Or we would play unsupervised baseball, football, etc. from dawn to dusk. Today, we don't let kids play without a boatload of supervision, protective equipment, etc. Therefore, outside play is infrequent. Walking through the woods is now out of the question, thanks to lenient sentencing of violent criminals and paranoia that we get from watching crime dramas on TV.
3. Homework. Teachers are pressured into assigning homework far beyond what is needed to support academic progress. Administrators seem to think that keeping kids busy will keep them out of trouble (by keeping them seated and indoors, of course). This has a number of side effects, none of which help the kids.
A colleague of mine had a cable modem. For a number of reasons, he just happened to be aware of his IP address. It was DHCP assigned, but essentially a static assignment because it never changed. Then one day, there was a technical problem. Whatever the problem was, the cable company's solution consisted of changing his IP address. Great! New IP address! Problem solved.
A few months later, he gets a nastygram from the cable ISP. "Your IP address x.x.x.x was used for illegal file sharing activity on $DATE, and your contact information been supplied to the copyright holder pursuant to a subpeona..." One TINY little problem. The address in question was his NEW IP address and the date in question was BEFORE THE ADDRESS WAS ASSIGNED TO HIM! It seems the ISP looked up the IP address in question and identified the CURRENT user, with no consideration about who was using it at the time!
It gets better. The colleague in question has a lot of money, lawyers, and the willingness to use them. The cable clowns got spanked big-time. I have reason to believe they paid a substantial settlement to avoid a defamation suit. And of course, the process of identifying users by IP address has now been proven to be error-prone. Reasonable doubt for everyone!
In addition to incompetent ISP research, there are a number of ways for a user to hijack your IP address, which I won't go into here. But trust me, it's possible. More reasonable doubt.
It's one thing to accuse someone of sharing "The Sound of Music" and say "oops" when the user in question turns out to deaf and clueless about P2P. But when the movie is "Debbie Does Detroit", the reputation of the defendant is damaged. That's a BIG problem if the user identification process is flawed (as described above). Sooner or later, the plaintiffs are going to go to court armed with bad information and all hell will break loose.
Usenet spam and porn? The message recipient is indistinguishable from 10,000 horny teenage porn surfers while government authorities can only keep one hand on the keyboard at a time.
Last I heard, fossil fuels were heavily taxed. Governments are addicted to the revenue stream they produce. So powerful is this addiction, the concept of global warming was established to accelerate the money grab to astronomical proportions.
I am not saying there is no such thing as fossil fuel subsidy, but the article never mentioned any specifics. Any such calculations need to deduct fuel taxes, since taxation is the opposite of a subsidy.
They won't be asked to give the grant money back. After all, the findings were in line with the sponsors of the research, so it was money well spent. In fact, preserving the value of that investment requires a whitewash that negates the need to ask for a refund. How convenient.
Spin or no spin, we still have those pesky little e-mails. And the miscalculations and misrepresentations (the hockey stick). And the publishing of baseless blogs as proven research (the Himalayan melting debacle). You would think that with all these errors, at least one of them would understate climate change instead of overstate it. What an incredible coincidence that all of the errors fall one way.
The whitewash works well enough to serve its purpose. Nobody gets fired and they can keep the money. But the unintended side effect is that credibility will not be restored anytime soon.
I don't think either side of the climate debate has "clean hands". There is no shortage of biased research on either side. The question is: What (if anything) should be done about climate change if the proof is less than absolute and the fastest growing economies (China and India) are preparing to pick up the slack for any voluntary reductions that might take place elsewhere? In other words: How stupid to they think we are?
No amount of research will change the fact that we are globally on course to do nothing, regardless of what the North America and Europe decide to do or not do. The developing world will not participate without handouts, which they will ultimately use for activities that generate CO2.
Climate change might be a total scam. I sure hope so, because I have yet to see a solution that can overcome the political/economic obstacles. Anyone who thinks the answer is a whitewash followed by a money grab is sure to be disappointed.
Thinking about your post makes me feel even older. When I was in college the "new" terminals were VT-100. The lab was open 24 hours a day because there weren't enough terminals to go around. For those who knew where to look, there were a few VT-52s hiding in relative obscurity.
Granted, the VAX had less power than a Mac mini, but it also had reliability that modern systems can't match.
I think the best way to resist taxation is to boycott the taxed activity. Let the idiots sit around scratching their heads, wondering how to stimulate the economy when they in fact discourage economic activity every chance they get. Given the current levels of taxation, it's time to greet each new tax initiative with a royal smackdown.
The amount collected in Internet sales tax won't cover the unemployment for the workers who lose their jobs when sales volume goes down the toilet.
Although I agree with most of what you say about MS, your analysis assumes far too much intelligence in corporate IT.
An entire generation of IT people grew up with Windows. They defend MS as if their careers depend on it (because they do). A certain amount of downtime, user frustration, etc. are all viewed as part of the cost of doing business -- by people who don't know how to do business any other way.
From a corporate IT point of view, the weakest link in the chain is cleaning up after viruses and spyware. If an app store offers a reliable way to lock out trialware, crapware, malware, spyware, etc. while allowing the users full permission to install updates of apps from the store, the fanbois will pound the drums loudly. These people are tired of watching Apple commercials and seeing themselves in the role of "PC".