Exactly the point -- Burning a large volume of something that didn't grow recently adds to atmospheric CO2, but if you grow all your fuel you are just cycling through the same carbon over and over.
As an aside, the idea that oil comes from 70 million year old organic matter is pretty much dead. Oil and natural gas have been found far below the organic layer, indicating a different origin, some process that happens deeper within the planet. The process is not known, but there is no reason to think it isn't still happening. As long as we keep developing deeper drilling techniques we may never run out of oil.
The best reason to search for an alternative to oil is the problems created by overloading the atmosphere with CO2. Switching to something totally replaceable can't be a bad thing. The article mentions that grass pellets produce 96% as much BTUs as wood pellets and can be grown on marginal farmland. Sounds like a great avenue to research.
Thanks for the info. From the Magnatune site: We split the amount we collect 50/50 with you. Note that most record companies split the profits: we split what we receive, no deductions.
This is a GREAT definition of "not evil." I salute Magnatune for getting the right idea and not just blowing smoke. Typical record contracts pay a much lower percentage, and all expenses to produce and distribute the CDs are deducted from the musician's royalties before paying out a dime, which in most cases leaves nothing. That's the reason the mainstream record industry's whining that file sharing steals from musicians is 100% bullshit. Musicians with standard recording contracts rarely get any actual money from sales of CDs. They make money from playing gigs, period. Making records gives them exposure and fame, which gets them bigger and better paying gigs, but that happens whether you buy a CD, hear it on the radio, download it or find it on the bus. Your method of getting the music affects only the record company.
I really like seeing a record company giving musicians a better deal. My first move after I write this will be to go back to Magnatune and look for something to buy. There hearts are obviously in the right place. Way to go, guys!
Nevertheless, as long as charging money per song is big business there will be a motivation to police who gets a copy and who doesn't. That means more and more DRM laws and technology to withhold content from people so the business model can keep working. The side effect is less and less freedom for everybody to do what they want with electronics that they buy, and even restrictions on what you yourself are allowed build in your own house with a soldering iron and some parts. That's why in the long run I think it's important that the whole idea of selling copies of music should become a thing of the past.
After that claim I'd love to hear more about your standard contract terms. Specifically, do you pay musicians royalties in actual money, or withhold until you have recovered your entire investment?
Bill Gates didn't switch to a flat monitor for health reasons. He probably did it because he can. Seven or eight years ago he had large flat monitors in picture frames installed on the walls of his house to display images of art.
Exactly the point. I don't know why this isn't totally obvious. Once somebody makes an estimate and establishes a schedule, no matter how they arrived at it, everything that doesn't measure up is deemed a failure. In almost 30 years of programming I've rarely seen an incompetent project team goof off or in other ways screw up a project. But I can't think how many times everything is going just fine, it's just not going the same as somebody 6 months ago thought it would. The staff is put under tremendous pressure to meet the pie in the sky deadline, features get cut, the customer is not satisfied and the project is deemed a failure. Those projects didn't fail, the estimate failed, and more often than not the estimate was simply designed to agree with what somebody higher up the food chain pulled out of their ass. How hard is it to see where the problem lies?
There have been many attempts to improve estimates by profiling code... a current one in vogue is called TSP - Team Software Process. These methodologies tend to be very top-heavy with record keeping, and assume that people work in ways that they really don't. For example, you don't think about only the UI for 11 minutes and then only the middle tier for the next 13 minutes. But that's the way you have to log your time. So your history data tends to be very approximate. On top of that you always have to factor in what fraction of time a developer is actually going to be doing productive work, which can be anything. Where I work we use 50%. So in the end after doing all that bookkeeping, you end up with a schedule based on making your best estimate and doubling it, which is how a lot of people who have no methodology do it anyway.
Not sure how "astroturfing" (posting msgs on public forums to create the false impression of a popular movement) is relevant to any of this, but anyway, I don't see why EU ministers should care if MS deliberately names their own product something that might diminish sales. That's Microsoft's problem. They could hardly claim the EU forced to call it any specific name. I would have said fine, call it XP Don't-Bother Edition if you want, as long as you rip out Media Player like we told you. I've got other things to deal with. But whatever.
I guess you're right. Putting "Reduced Edition" on a product that has had features removed from it, obviously and incontrovertibly shows outright contempt for a court decision. It's that simple. We're all familiar with Microsoft's history of arrogantly slapping names on its own products that say "don't buy this." How could anyone not see that? I bow to your superior psychic ability.
It's a clever idea, but screwing a few galvanized pipe fittings together hardly qualifies as a "project" worth a whole article, let alone a review. I've seen more complicated things in the "shop tips" section of American Woodworker magazine.
Jeez Louise, how much government manpower did it take to haggle this one out? I guess "Microsoft XP Euro" and now let's get back to working on more important problems would be too simple.
This weekend at NorWesCon I attended some presentations by LiftPort, the company that plans to implement a space elevator as envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke. The electric elevator, receiving power from ground based lasers, would climb up a ribbon made of carbon nanotubes anchored between an ocean platform and a space station. Their goal is to have it operational by 2018. As far-fetched as that idea seems, I found their presentations very intriguing. The small scale climber prototype they demo'd was pretty cool too, repeatedly running up and down a 4-story strip of sheetrock tape in the rain.
The technology to manufacture the carbon nanotube ribbon in arbitrarily long lengths is coming along too. From 15 nm 4 years ago to 4 cm today. After another similar leap in scale they will be up to 1 km, at which time I bet they'll be able to make them as long as them want.
To make money while the nanotube technology evolves, they plan to use their climber robots to service helium balloons anchored high above cities to provide WiFi and other services. The main reason permanent balloons aren't already being used for this purpose is that the helium leaks out in a matter of months. With a robot carrying spare helium tanks up the tether once in a while it would be viable.
Good stuff! The elevator will take about 5 hours to climb to low earth orbit at a leisurely 125 mph or so, and a week to get to geostationary. I'd much prefer a comfortable passenger lounge to riding a giant bomb into orbit.
Wouldn't it be great to sweep away all the legal and technical problems created by copyright? It's not a simple problem.
We could eliminate the whole concept of music copyrights with minimal impact on musicians. By "musicians" I don't mean Madonna, I mean the 99.9999% of musicians who make no money from sales of copies. For reasons involving the way record contracts are written, which you can read about here and elsewhere, most musicians make zero money from sales of copies. They make money by actually performing, same as they did for thousands of years before recordings were invented. Records just give them exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs, and they get that exposure whether you buy, rip or find a CD on the sidewalk. Eliminate music copyrights and record companies would have no reason to exist, but other than a handful of big hit artists who have managed their business affairs brilliantly, the vast majority of musicians would be just fine.
Authors present a different problem. They make a living directly from sales of copies. But in the filesharing world there's no difference between text and tunes. So to enforce copyrights in the book world we would still need DRM. So what we really need is some brilliant genius to come up with a way to pay authors for their work. Maybe with tax money, I don't know, but some system that lacks the overhead of withholding the material from people who haven't individually paid, and all the side-effects that slop over into restricting the way people use technology.
We really can't afford a future in which every image and printed word is owned and locked down. It won't work. Is there anybody in the world smart enough and forceful enough to put forward a practical and politically do-able fix?
Has anybody started arguing over what/how to name these extrasolar planets? They probably have cryptic alphanumerical designations like other celestial bodies, but I wonder if anyone has proposed any planet names?
A lot of people are afraid to be contractors, because of a mythical notion called "job security." They think that if the economy suddenly collapses their company will protect them while contractors starve. These people don't get out enough.
If you do a little arithmetic you will find that the amount you get paid over an FTE employee far exceeds the dollar value of the gym, paid vacation, insurance etc. If that's not the case you are with the wrong agency. Forget the award ceremony and take yourself out to dinner every time you deposit a paycheck. By being a contractor you are beating the system. Don't let the system convince you otherwise.
In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow...
You're not the only one. Bill's article distinctly lacked reasoning, at least as would apply to rebutting what Nicholas Carr said. Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No. That's all Carr was really saying.
As someone who has worked by choice as a contractor for most of the past 20 years, I wish the people involved in these lawsuits would just STFU. You make more money than fulltime employees, realistically you have about the same degree of job security, and if you really want a fulltime job you have the same chance to get one as anybody else. These whining lawsuits just make the environment more difficult for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly the point -- Burning a large volume of something that didn't grow recently adds to atmospheric CO2, but if you grow all your fuel you are just cycling through the same carbon over and over.
As an aside, the idea that oil comes from 70 million year old organic matter is pretty much dead. Oil and natural gas have been found far below the organic layer, indicating a different origin, some process that happens deeper within the planet. The process is not known, but there is no reason to think it isn't still happening. As long as we keep developing deeper drilling techniques we may never run out of oil.
The best reason to search for an alternative to oil is the problems created by overloading the atmosphere with CO2. Switching to something totally replaceable can't be a bad thing. The article mentions that grass pellets produce 96% as much BTUs as wood pellets and can be grown on marginal farmland. Sounds like a great avenue to research.
Thanks for the info. From the Magnatune site:
We split the amount we collect 50/50 with you. Note that most record companies split the profits: we split what we receive, no deductions.
This is a GREAT definition of "not evil." I salute Magnatune for getting the right idea and not just blowing smoke. Typical record contracts pay a much lower percentage, and all expenses to produce and distribute the CDs are deducted from the musician's royalties before paying out a dime, which in most cases leaves nothing. That's the reason the mainstream record industry's whining that file sharing steals from musicians is 100% bullshit. Musicians with standard recording contracts rarely get any actual money from sales of CDs. They make money from playing gigs, period. Making records gives them exposure and fame, which gets them bigger and better paying gigs, but that happens whether you buy a CD, hear it on the radio, download it or find it on the bus. Your method of getting the music affects only the record company.
I really like seeing a record company giving musicians a better deal. My first move after I write this will be to go back to Magnatune and look for something to buy. There hearts are obviously in the right place. Way to go, guys!
Nevertheless, as long as charging money per song is big business there will be a motivation to police who gets a copy and who doesn't. That means more and more DRM laws and technology to withhold content from people so the business model can keep working. The side effect is less and less freedom for everybody to do what they want with electronics that they buy, and even restrictions on what you yourself are allowed build in your own house with a soldering iron and some parts. That's why in the long run I think it's important that the whole idea of selling copies of music should become a thing of the past.
After that claim I'd love to hear more about your standard contract terms. Specifically, do you pay musicians royalties in actual money, or withhold until you have recovered your entire investment?
Calista Flockhart, Paula Devicq and Jennifer Aniston en route for monthly weigh-ins.
You read my mind, or what's left of it.
Bill Gates didn't switch to a flat monitor for health reasons. He probably did it because he can. Seven or eight years ago he had large flat monitors in picture frames installed on the walls of his house to display images of art.
Re-reading the article I see that you are absolutely right. Apologies for dissing you. It was a crappily written article.
How can MS "fine" someone ... blah blah ... hand out their own judgement and punishment?
The article clearly explains what's going on. If you moderate, please ask yourself if you really believe the poster RTFA.
Exactly the point. I don't know why this isn't totally obvious. Once somebody makes an estimate and establishes a schedule, no matter how they arrived at it, everything that doesn't measure up is deemed a failure. In almost 30 years of programming I've rarely seen an incompetent project team goof off or in other ways screw up a project. But I can't think how many times everything is going just fine, it's just not going the same as somebody 6 months ago thought it would. The staff is put under tremendous pressure to meet the pie in the sky deadline, features get cut, the customer is not satisfied and the project is deemed a failure. Those projects didn't fail, the estimate failed, and more often than not the estimate was simply designed to agree with what somebody higher up the food chain pulled out of their ass. How hard is it to see where the problem lies?
There have been many attempts to improve estimates by profiling code... a current one in vogue is called TSP - Team Software Process. These methodologies tend to be very top-heavy with record keeping, and assume that people work in ways that they really don't. For example, you don't think about only the UI for 11 minutes and then only the middle tier for the next 13 minutes. But that's the way you have to log your time. So your history data tends to be very approximate. On top of that you always have to factor in what fraction of time a developer is actually going to be doing productive work, which can be anything. Where I work we use 50%. So in the end after doing all that bookkeeping, you end up with a schedule based on making your best estimate and doubling it, which is how a lot of people who have no methodology do it anyway.
Not sure how "astroturfing" (posting msgs on public forums to create the false impression of a popular movement) is relevant to any of this, but anyway, I don't see why EU ministers should care if MS deliberately names their own product something that might diminish sales. That's Microsoft's problem. They could hardly claim the EU forced to call it any specific name. I would have said fine, call it XP Don't-Bother Edition if you want, as long as you rip out Media Player like we told you. I've got other things to deal with. But whatever.
I guess you're right. Putting "Reduced Edition" on a product that has had features removed from it, obviously and incontrovertibly shows outright contempt for a court decision. It's that simple. We're all familiar with Microsoft's history of arrogantly slapping names on its own products that say "don't buy this." How could anyone not see that? I bow to your superior psychic ability.
It's a clever idea, but screwing a few galvanized pipe fittings together hardly qualifies as a "project" worth a whole article, let alone a review. I've seen more complicated things in the "shop tips" section of American Woodworker magazine.
If they're going to do Star Fleet Academy I think they should go with Next Gen characters. Maybe Lindsay Lohan as med student Beverly Howard.
Jeez Louise, how much government manpower did it take to haggle this one out? I guess "Microsoft XP Euro" and now let's get back to working on more important problems would be too simple.
This weekend at NorWesCon I attended some presentations by LiftPort, the company that plans to implement a space elevator as envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke. The electric elevator, receiving power from ground based lasers, would climb up a ribbon made of carbon nanotubes anchored between an ocean platform and a space station. Their goal is to have it operational by 2018. As far-fetched as that idea seems, I found their presentations very intriguing. The small scale climber prototype they demo'd was pretty cool too, repeatedly running up and down a 4-story strip of sheetrock tape in the rain.
The technology to manufacture the carbon nanotube ribbon in arbitrarily long lengths is coming along too. From 15 nm 4 years ago to 4 cm today. After another similar leap in scale they will be up to 1 km, at which time I bet they'll be able to make them as long as them want.
To make money while the nanotube technology evolves, they plan to use their climber robots to service helium balloons anchored high above cities to provide WiFi and other services. The main reason permanent balloons aren't already being used for this purpose is that the helium leaks out in a matter of months. With a robot carrying spare helium tanks up the tether once in a while it would be viable.
Good stuff! The elevator will take about 5 hours to climb to low earth orbit at a leisurely 125 mph or so, and a week to get to geostationary. I'd much prefer a comfortable passenger lounge to riding a giant bomb into orbit.
You should have gone before liftoff.
I'm holding out for the Linux enabled dental crown -- with Bluetooth. /ducks
Wouldn't it be great to sweep away all the legal and technical problems created by copyright? It's not a simple problem.
We could eliminate the whole concept of music copyrights with minimal impact on musicians. By "musicians" I don't mean Madonna, I mean the 99.9999% of musicians who make no money from sales of copies. For reasons involving the way record contracts are written, which you can read about here and elsewhere, most musicians make zero money from sales of copies. They make money by actually performing, same as they did for thousands of years before recordings were invented. Records just give them exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs, and they get that exposure whether you buy, rip or find a CD on the sidewalk. Eliminate music copyrights and record companies would have no reason to exist, but other than a handful of big hit artists who have managed their business affairs brilliantly, the vast majority of musicians would be just fine.
Authors present a different problem. They make a living directly from sales of copies. But in the filesharing world there's no difference between text and tunes. So to enforce copyrights in the book world we would still need DRM. So what we really need is some brilliant genius to come up with a way to pay authors for their work. Maybe with tax money, I don't know, but some system that lacks the overhead of withholding the material from people who haven't individually paid, and all the side-effects that slop over into restricting the way people use technology.
We really can't afford a future in which every image and printed word is owned and locked down. It won't work. Is there anybody in the world smart enough and forceful enough to put forward a practical and politically do-able fix?
Has anybody started arguing over what/how to name these extrasolar planets? They probably have cryptic alphanumerical designations like other celestial bodies, but I wonder if anyone has proposed any planet names?
Oh wait, this isn't Fark. Sorry about that.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to post this info. I'm interested in doing the same type of thing. Can you give some specs on your laptops?
Apply for a job.
A lot of people are afraid to be contractors, because of a mythical notion called "job security." They think that if the economy suddenly collapses their company will protect them while contractors starve. These people don't get out enough.
If you do a little arithmetic you will find that the amount you get paid over an FTE employee far exceeds the dollar value of the gym, paid vacation, insurance etc. If that's not the case you are with the wrong agency. Forget the award ceremony and take yourself out to dinner every time you deposit a paycheck. By being a contractor you are beating the system. Don't let the system convince you otherwise.
In addition to Bill's reasoning, which I don't entirely follow...
You're not the only one. Bill's article distinctly lacked reasoning, at least as would apply to rebutting what Nicholas Carr said. Carr's main point is that modern PCs are ridiculously overpowered for the needs of the typical home or office user. I couldn't agree more, and Bill's predictable road-ahead fluff piece didn't address that point at all. Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No. That's all Carr was really saying.
As someone who has worked by choice as a contractor for most of the past 20 years, I wish the people involved in these lawsuits would just STFU. You make more money than fulltime employees, realistically you have about the same degree of job security, and if you really want a fulltime job you have the same chance to get one as anybody else. These whining lawsuits just make the environment more difficult for the rest of us.
I read recently that the free tax advice given by IRS employees is right only 50% of the time. Coincidence? [yeah probably]