All US states other than Vermont run balanced budgets, so those same politicians could do the same when they move to Washington. Apparently, the voters don't really care aboyt that any more once governor gets elected president.
Interestingly, Vermont owes $13,000 per person, or $30,000 per family. It seems that either you keep the politicians on a short leash (49 state) or allow them to overspend and they'll put you $30,000 in the hole (Vermont).
A couple of states are debatable as to whether or not their budgets are exactly balanced. Either way, none of them borrowed hundreds of billions from social security, spent it, and then bragged that they "balanced" the budget by balancing their spending with borrowing.
Network operating systems such as Linux take a different approach from the Windows line of disk operating systems. You CAN get some Windows-style anti-malware stuff for Linux or Mac, but it's main use is to scan emails on the server in order to protect the Windows clients. To protect the Linux/BSD/Mac systems, we take the opposite approach. Not anti-malware, loading up another 75,000 virus signatures to try in vain to identify the bad stuff, but a pro-goodware approach, identifying the 20 or so programs that are supposed to be running. An excellent example of this is Tripwire http://sourceforge.net/project... . One primary function of Tripwire is that is does a scan of your system before anything bad happens, hopefully when you first set up the system, and it catalogs which files are supposed to be there. Then when it does it's nightly run it doesn't try to figure out if any of the files are malware, it looks for anything that has changed from the day before. My computer should be the same today as it was yesterday, except for some emails and logs, so any new files are suspect. Any new programs running is definitely suspect. The first few days that you run Tripwire or another IDS it'll catch some things that legitimately change from day to day. You set it not to alert you to that stuff that's normal. I'd leave it where it still tells you about new programs that show up - though installing software is "normal", I don't install new stuff every day so I don't mind being alerted to the fact.
An IDS like Tripwire is just one example of the different approach. Another example, which Windows is starting to emulate now, is that normally on Linux nothing is allowed to come in from the network except what you specifically allow. Some think that works better than intensively scrutinizing everything that comes in and trying to identify the bad stuff.
> You seem to paint only a positive picture of corporations.
The title of my post is "a few hundred years earlier than that". My post talks about when corporations were developed and for what purpose. Obviously, people create new things because they think they'll be good, so I guess in that since the reasons that corporations were first created could be seen as positive. I wasn't making any judgement about any effects of any particular corporations several hundred years later, in the United States. I see you'd like to talk about that separate topic, and you bring up a couple of good questions.
Mainly you seem to be interested in avoiding "accumulated wealth and power". Thanks a good thing to discuss, I think. You're not talking about the mom-and-pop ice cream on the corner, Smithville Cones, Inc. You're talking about big corporations like Microsoft, right? On a side note, Microsoft has about 1 million owners, mostly people who buy a chunk of Microsoft as their retirement savings. The importance of that will become clear in a moment.
We probably don't want to live in a tribal world, where the farthest we can travel in our canoe is a few miles. We want to have ships, factories, and other big things. So somebody needs to have ships and factories and stuff. Earlier in US history it was guys like Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie had $300 billion dollars. To give some perspective, Microsoft is worth about $350 billion and Paypal sold for $1.3 billion. So Carnegie's personal wealth was more than two hundred times that of Paypal. Talk about "accumulated wealth and power"! That's a big pile of wealth for one guy. John D. Rockefeller was similar.
Which is best at avoiding "accumulated wealth and power", if Carnegie and Rockefeller personally own factories and railroads, or if a million different grandmas own the company? Carnegie's empire was the same size as Microsoft. Would you rather have one guy own that empire, or a million people share it? Apple is the world's largest company. For $93.50, you can be an owner of Apple, so when Apple factories do well, you benefit. The corporate structure that allows you to participate for under a hundred dollars is the single best way we know to DISTRIBUTE wealth and power.
How many people become millionaires, and how do they do it? There are 9.6 MILLION millionaires in the country, one of every 30 households, and the vast majority became millionaires by ------ becoming owners, by investing part of their paycheck in corporations and allowing the corporations to make money for them. It is legal structure known as a corporation that allows any employee to become an owner of the company they work for by setting aside 5% of their check to slowly become wealthy. Personally, I much prefer that system to the system where Carnegie and Rockefeller own everything.
I'm going to challenge you to do something. Something that I think you'll find very interesting AFTER you do it, and something that almost everyone had to do before they got any of the "wealth and power" for themselves. I know there is a 99% chance you won't have the courage to step out of your comfort zone and do it. On that 1% chance that you will, I'm going to mention it because it'll raise your awareness and understanding if you do it. Pick a company you like - maybe it's Apple, maybe Starbucks, any company you think is cool. Then go to Scottrade.com and buy a share. Become an owner of the company you like. You may be very surprised at what happens next.
What do you mean "if a company achieves monopoly status"? They are GIVEN monopoly status by local governments. The NYC web site has a map showing which boroughs each company is allowed to operate in.
> The way to prevent their resources being used for things they disagree with is to lobby for political change, just like any other individual. I can't arbitrarily decide not to pay some of my taxes because I don't like some aspect of what the government does.
You seem to have decided that because the politicians decide how they use government money from taxes, those politicians should also decide whateveryone does with all of their resources. So basically, you're saying everything belongs to the government / politicians.
Politicians are SUPPOSED to decide how they spend tax money. YOU are supposed to decide how you spend your money. If you don'tewant to donate to the NRA PAC, government shouldn't make you do so. If you'd rather give your money to the KKK or it's parent organization, the DNC, that's your decision, not something the government should make you do.
> The court should consider the validity of the arguments against them and the facts of the case.
I've won two default judgements and that's precisely what happens. Of course, judges are not investigators. They consider the facts _as_presented_by_the_parties_. If one party doesn't show up, the judge doesn't hear their side of the story. The party who does show up still has to make a "prima facie" case, meaning that they briefly explain why they should win. The judge then considers the facts they present and their arguments and makes a decision. It's not too unusual the only party who shows up doesn't get EVERYTHING they want. They'll probably "win", meaning get most of what they want, though not always.
In one of my two cases, I showed the judge that what I was asking for was completely fair to the other party, that they would probably agree to it (which in fact they had, but we needed the court to make it official). The judge was interested in seeing that it was fair - he wasn't going to give me a default judgement that was clearly unfair to the party who didn't show up.
The losing party who didn't show up can then appeal. I had that happen with an insurance company. Their insured hit my car and it was his fault. When they didn't answer phone calls or letters, I sued. They didn't show up, allowing me to get a default judgement. I guess they were hoping I wouldn't show up either, because the very next day they filed an appeal - meaning they WERE paying close attention to the case. It's entirely possible they even had someone in the courtroom to see me win the default judgement, choosing to see if I would blow my own case in the default hearing before they paid their attorney to show up.
> I don't know what the right solution to untangling that mess is, but we have to do something different.
It always scares me when people say that, though it's true. So often it goes like this:
We have to do something different. Plan X is something different. Therefore, we have to do plan X.
Plan X may very well be much, much worse than what we have now. Three years ago a lot of people voted for "change", without asking "What change, exactly? Change my full-time job will change into a part-time job?"
> those running it choose to be above the law, no one does time. Jeffrey Skilling 24 years in prison, Andrew Fastow 6 years, Bernard Ebbers 25 years, Bernie Madoff 150 years, John Rigas 15 years, Timothy Rigas 20 years, Dennis Kozlowski 8 years, Mark Swartz 8 years, Jack Abramoff 6 years...
> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:
It was a few hundred years before that when corporations were created as legal persons who could purchase ships, undertake voyages, be sued, etc.
The whole idea of a corporation is that me, you, and a hundred other people can pool our resources to do something big, such as buying and outfitting a ship (or ISP), and if something went wrong a creditor could take the ship and its cargo, but you wouldn't be risking your house. As a legal person, the corporation could be sued, rather than filing 100 law suits against each of the individual investors, none of which could pay the judgement.
That's an interesting reading of it, and I can see how one might figure that the wording IMPLIES they'd prefer that. I can also see that if you have a patent LICENSE, restrictions placed on you by the license do not excuse you from the GPL.
What it says is that if you CAN'T distribute under the GPL without violating the patent license, you shouldn't violate the patent license by distributing anyway. However, if you OWN the patent, that paragraph doesn't apply - I COULD grant a patent license, I just choose not to.
Of course the big difference is GPL2 just doesn't give you permission to violate a patent license - GPL3 effectively revokes your patents, even patents that have nothing to do with any code you contributed.
You're reversing the two terms. "We're looking for the unicorn named Daisy Fluff" names a PARTICULAR unicorn. That's particularity.
A completely separate issue is whether there is any evidence that Daisy is iprobably in your house.
Two separate questions: Did the cops specify which particular thing they are looking for? Did they show evidence that it is probably there?
Particularity isn't "more" than "probable cause" any more than "four" is more than "water" - they are two, separate, unrelated concepts. Particularity doesn't have anything at all to do with burden of proof. It simply means they have to know what they're looking for, they can't search for "anything illegal".
Your post talks about two very different concepts in a way that might be unclear. Someone might get the idea that the particularity of the evidence sought has something to do with the burden of proof. It doesn't, of course. Those are two different concepts.
The police need to show that they have evidence that a particular thing will be found on the hard drive. As an example, "we're looking for the email that Ms. Lerner sent to Mr. Smith on March 3rd" satisfies that condition. That condition would not be satisfied by "we want to look to see if there is anything illegal in there".
Separately, there is also the question of standard of proof. In most cases, probable cause is the standard for a warrant - the thing sought is PROBABLY in the location to be searched.
I don't care one way or the other, but the fact is 84% Germany's power is not delivered by the public grid. The simple fact is, for that sunny moment, solar provided 8% of the power requirements. There is a big difference between 8% and 50%. Energy policy actually matters. It's important. It will have real impact on your life and mine, so it's important to get it right, to get the facts straight.
I've written about the benefits of hydroelectric power, of geothermal in the areas where it makes sense, for nuclear where it makes sense. I'm notinvested in any particular source of energy. We're all invested in getting it right. When you look at actual facts, solar electric makes good sense for 4%-8% of energy needs. Hydro, geo, wind, and especially nuclear each can provide more. Pretending that solar electric is going to provide the bulk of our energy implies devoting resources to solar that should be devoted to wind. By wasting too much on solar instead of developing more practical sources, we only ensure that we remain dependant on fossil fuels.
> due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available,
Requiring someone to buy it for you doesn't change the cost. It just means that someone else is paying the cost. In this case, that someone else ends up being the consumers, who have among the highest power bills in the world.
I guess you can't fix stupid. You can inform people, but stupid stays stupid.
I'm guessing you didn't read the page you to? It says 0.12% of sales in Germany, compared to 0.68% in the US. In other words, 99.88% of Germans don't buy electric cars.
I'm curious what language you're thinking of. Certainly if you contribute anything which implements your patent to ANY public project, that could be construed as implied permission for people to use the whatever you contributed. That really has little to do with GPL, though.
GPLv3 affects patents that have nothing whatsoever to do with any contribution you make, if you mirror the project on Github or similar.
It wasn't nearly half of the POWER used in Germany at that moment. It was, for a moment, about half of the public ELECTRIC grid, in a country where electric is unpopular because it's becoming outrageously expensive. Most of the power used in Germany is not from the public electricity grid.
Here's a thought experiment: Germany could shut off all of their generators, so there is no electricity on the public grid. They could then attach a single 9-volt battery to the grid, so the only power on the grid would be a few watts from that little battery. The headline could then be: 100% of German electricity provided by one 9-volt battery!
What Germany has actually done is simply a less extreme case of the thought experiment. They've shut down generators, so less power is available. It's not that solar is providing the needed power, the power simply isn't available like it used to be. By supply and demand, as well as tariffs, electricity has become far more expensive, so people have turned more and more to other sources of energy. You won't see a lot of people driving electric cars in Germany because the cost to charge them makes it prohibitive.
GPL3 can take away your patents. It doesn't say anything about software patents specifically. Which makes sense, because as any software engineer or systems engineer knows, there's really no such thing as a software patent.
There are patents on mechanisms. Some of those mechanisms could be implemented via software. In fact, most them could be. Most of them could also be implemented with wood, steel, or plastic. Whether you make it from wood, from plastic, or from electrons, it's essentially the same machine, in many cases.
Then of course there are also bogus patents, which don't describe a mechanism at all.
Interesting. As someone who had alcohol as a reason, I agree it wasn't an excuse. Not for long, anyway. When I was 16, I acted like an idiot because I was drunk. When I was 18, I KNEW that getting drunk would result in me acting like an idiot. When I was 20, I stopped getting drunk so I would stop acting like an idiot.
I don't think my brother had exactly the same choice. He had an overwhelming compulsion to drink when he was 20. I don't blame him for being unable to resist. When he was 21, he was introduced to a group of other people who had the same compulsion, but they also had a solution. They were sober alcoholics. They told him how he could get sober and stay sober . It was only after the solution was shown to him that it became his responsibility to do it, in my view.
Unfortunately for this very specific case, Linux (and most other GPL stuff) stuck with GPL 2. It's GPL 3 that strips a company of its patents.
The kernel devs thought GPL 3 went way too far in it's anti-patent attack, allowing any competitor to invalidate ANY patent the company owns just by contributing infringing code. If it were limited only to patents related to code that the company contributed, the kernel and other projects may have adopted v3.
I'm very glad they did stick with GPL 2, because it's risky for any large organization to contribute to a GPL 3 project, which means it may require approval from the chief legal counsel before some guy in some little office that's part of some minor department of an unimportant subsidiary can contribute a bug fix. That's because by the terms of GPL3, one employee at the company contributing a fix for one feature risks all the patents throughout the entire company, not just those related to the feature the helped fix.
From what I've been learning, there is a particular gene associated with chronic, hardcore alcoholism.* If it runs in your family, I hope you're as careful with alcohol as you would be with any other deadly poison. If you haven't drank much yet, it can grab hold of you without warning.
Of course if you're in your 40s and have done plenty of drinking without any trouble, you may be comfortable that you dodged that particular bullet.
* not to be confused with simple hard drinking. I refer to thekind of alcoholism where people literally drink themselves to death because they can not stop.
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All US states other than Vermont run balanced budgets, so those same politicians could do the same when they move to Washington. Apparently, the voters don't really care aboyt that any more once governor gets elected president.
Interestingly, Vermont owes $13,000 per person, or $30,000 per family. It seems that either you keep the politicians on a short leash (49 state) or allow them to overspend and they'll put you $30,000 in the hole (Vermont).
A couple of states are debatable as to whether or not their budgets are exactly balanced. Either way, none of them borrowed hundreds of billions from social security, spent it, and then bragged that they "balanced" the budget by balancing their spending with borrowing.
Network operating systems such as Linux take a different approach from the Windows line of disk operating systems. You CAN get some Windows-style anti-malware stuff for Linux or Mac, but it's main use is to scan emails on the server in order to protect the Windows clients. To protect the Linux/BSD/Mac systems, we take the opposite approach. Not anti-malware, loading up another 75,000 virus signatures to try in vain to identify the bad stuff, but a pro-goodware approach, identifying the 20 or so programs that are supposed to be running. An excellent example of this is Tripwire http://sourceforge.net/project... . One primary function of Tripwire is that is does a scan of your system before anything bad happens, hopefully when you first set up the system, and it catalogs which files are supposed to be there. Then when it does it's nightly run it doesn't try to figure out if any of the files are malware, it looks for anything that has changed from the day before. My computer should be the same today as it was yesterday, except for some emails and logs, so any new files are suspect. Any new programs running is definitely suspect. The first few days that you run Tripwire or another IDS it'll catch some things that legitimately change from day to day. You set it not to alert you to that stuff that's normal. I'd leave it where it still tells you about new programs that show up - though installing software is "normal", I don't install new stuff every day so I don't mind being alerted to the fact.
An IDS like Tripwire is just one example of the different approach. Another example, which Windows is starting to emulate now, is that normally on Linux nothing is allowed to come in from the network except what you specifically allow. Some think that works better than intensively scrutinizing everything that comes in and trying to identify the bad stuff.
> You seem to paint only a positive picture of corporations.
The title of my post is "a few hundred years earlier than that". My post talks about when corporations were developed and for what purpose. Obviously, people create new things because they think they'll be good, so I guess in that since the reasons that corporations were first created could be seen as positive. I wasn't making any judgement about any effects of any particular corporations several hundred years later, in the United States. I see you'd like to talk about that separate topic, and you bring up a couple of good questions.
Mainly you seem to be interested in avoiding "accumulated wealth and power". Thanks a good thing to discuss, I think. You're not talking about the mom-and-pop ice cream on the corner, Smithville Cones, Inc. You're talking about big corporations like Microsoft, right? On a side note, Microsoft has about 1 million owners, mostly people who buy a chunk of Microsoft as their retirement savings. The importance of that will become clear in a moment.
We probably don't want to live in a tribal world, where the farthest we can travel in our canoe is a few miles. We want to have ships, factories, and other big things. So somebody needs to have ships and factories and stuff. Earlier in US history it was guys like Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie had $300 billion dollars. To give some perspective, Microsoft is worth about $350 billion and Paypal sold for $1.3 billion. So Carnegie's personal wealth was more than two hundred times that of Paypal. Talk about "accumulated wealth and power"! That's a big pile of wealth for one guy. John D. Rockefeller was similar.
Which is best at avoiding "accumulated wealth and power", if Carnegie and Rockefeller personally own factories and railroads, or if a million different grandmas own the company? Carnegie's empire was the same size as Microsoft. Would you rather have one guy own that empire, or a million people share it? Apple is the world's largest company. For $93.50, you can be an owner of Apple, so when Apple factories do well, you benefit. The corporate structure that allows you to participate for under a hundred dollars is the single best way we know to DISTRIBUTE wealth and power.
How many people become millionaires, and how do they do it? There are 9.6 MILLION millionaires in the country, one of every 30 households, and the vast majority became millionaires by ------ becoming owners, by investing part of their paycheck in corporations and allowing the corporations to make money for them. It is legal structure known as a corporation that allows any employee to become an owner of the company they work for by setting aside 5% of their check to slowly become wealthy. Personally, I much prefer that system to the system where Carnegie and Rockefeller own everything.
I'm going to challenge you to do something. Something that I think you'll find very interesting AFTER you do it, and something that almost everyone had to do before they got any of the "wealth and power" for themselves. I know there is a 99% chance you won't have the courage to step out of your comfort zone and do it. On that 1% chance that you will, I'm going to mention it because it'll raise your awareness and understanding if you do it. Pick a company you like - maybe it's Apple, maybe Starbucks, any company you think is cool. Then go to Scottrade.com and buy a share. Become an owner of the company you like. You may be very surprised at what happens next.
What do you mean "if a company achieves monopoly status"? They are GIVEN monopoly status by local governments. The NYC web site has a map showing which boroughs each company is allowed to operate in.
> The way to prevent their resources being used for things they disagree with is to lobby for political change, just like any other individual. I can't arbitrarily decide not to pay some of my taxes because I don't like some aspect of what the government does.
You seem to have decided that because the politicians decide how they use government money from taxes, those politicians should also decide whateveryone does with all of their resources. So basically, you're saying everything belongs to the government / politicians.
Politicians are SUPPOSED to decide how they spend tax money. YOU are supposed to decide how you spend your money. If you don'tewant to donate to the NRA PAC, government shouldn't make you do so. If you'd rather give your money to the KKK or it's parent organization, the DNC, that's your decision, not something the government should make you do.
> The court should consider the validity of the arguments against them and the facts of the case.
I've won two default judgements and that's precisely what happens. Of course, judges are not investigators. They consider the facts _as_presented_by_the_parties_. If one party doesn't show up, the judge doesn't hear their side of the story. The party who does show up still has to make a "prima facie" case, meaning that they briefly explain why they should win. The judge then considers the facts they present and their arguments and makes a decision. It's not too unusual the only party who shows up doesn't get EVERYTHING they want. They'll probably "win", meaning get most of what they want, though not always.
In one of my two cases, I showed the judge that what I was asking for was completely fair to the other party, that they would probably agree to it (which in fact they had, but we needed the court to make it official). The judge was interested in seeing that it was fair - he wasn't going to give me a default judgement that was clearly unfair to the party who didn't show up.
The losing party who didn't show up can then appeal. I had that happen with an insurance company. Their insured hit my car and it was his fault. When they didn't answer phone calls or letters, I sued. They didn't show up, allowing me to get a default judgement. I guess they were hoping I wouldn't show up either, because the very next day they filed an appeal - meaning they WERE paying close attention to the case. It's entirely possible they even had someone in the courtroom to see me win the default judgement, choosing to see if I would blow my own case in the default hearing before they paid their attorney to show up.
The democrats held the Senate 2001-2003 and 2007-2009.
> I don't know what the right solution to untangling that mess is, but we have to do something different.
It always scares me when people say that, though it's true. So often it goes like this:
We have to do something different.
Plan X is something different.
Therefore, we have to do plan X.
Plan X may very well be much, much worse than what we have now. Three years ago a lot of people voted for "change", without asking "What change, exactly? Change my full-time job will change into a part-time job?"
> There's a reason the UK banned them several centuries ago.
Here's the government web site explaining how you form a corporation in the UK:
http://www.companieshouse.gov....
Here are the corporate tax rates in the UK:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/c...
> those running it choose to be above the law, no one does time. ...
Jeffrey Skilling 24 years in prison, Andrew Fastow 6 years, Bernard Ebbers 25 years, Bernie Madoff 150 years, John Rigas 15 years, Timothy Rigas 20 years, Dennis Kozlowski 8 years, Mark Swartz 8 years, Jack Abramoff 6 years
> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09...
It was a few hundred years before that when corporations were created as legal persons who could purchase ships, undertake voyages, be sued, etc.
The whole idea of a corporation is that me, you, and a hundred other people can pool our resources to do something big, such as buying and outfitting a ship (or ISP), and if something went wrong a creditor could take the ship and its cargo, but you wouldn't be risking your house. As a legal person, the corporation could be sued, rather than filing 100 law suits against each of the individual investors, none of which could pay the judgement.
This is a flying saucer as much as any cow is a flying cow. Falling is not flying.
That's an interesting reading of it, and I can see how one might figure that the wording IMPLIES they'd prefer that. I can also see that if you have a patent LICENSE, restrictions placed on you by the license do not excuse you from the GPL.
What it says is that if you CAN'T distribute under the GPL without violating the patent license, you shouldn't violate the patent license by distributing anyway. However, if you OWN the patent, that paragraph doesn't apply - I COULD grant a patent license, I just choose not to.
Of course the big difference is GPL2 just doesn't give you permission to violate a patent license - GPL3 effectively revokes your patents, even patents that have nothing to do with any code you contributed.
You're reversing the two terms. "We're looking for the unicorn named Daisy Fluff" names a PARTICULAR unicorn. That's particularity.
A completely separate issue is whether there is any evidence that Daisy is iprobably in your house.
Two separate questions:
Did the cops specify which particular thing they are looking for?
Did they show evidence that it is probably there?
Particularity isn't "more" than "probable cause" any more than "four" is more than "water" - they are two, separate, unrelated concepts. Particularity doesn't have anything at all to do with burden of proof. It simply means they have to know what they're looking for, they can't search for "anything illegal".
Your post talks about two very different concepts in a way that might be unclear. Someone might get the idea that the particularity of the evidence sought has something to do with the burden of proof. It doesn't, of course. Those are two different concepts.
The police need to show that they have evidence that a particular thing will be found on the hard drive. As an example, "we're looking for the email that Ms. Lerner sent to Mr. Smith on March 3rd" satisfies that condition. That condition would not be satisfied by "we want to look to see if there is anything illegal in there".
Separately, there is also the question of standard of proof. In most cases, probable cause is the standard for a warrant - the thing sought is PROBABLY in the location to be searched.
I don't care one way or the other, but the fact is 84% Germany's power is not delivered by the public grid. The simple fact is, for that sunny moment, solar provided 8% of the power requirements. There is a big difference between 8% and 50%. Energy policy actually matters. It's important. It will have real impact on your life and mine, so it's important to get it right, to get the facts straight.
I've written about the benefits of hydroelectric power, of geothermal in the areas where it makes sense, for nuclear where it makes sense. I'm notinvested in any particular source of energy. We're all invested in getting it right. When you look at actual facts, solar electric makes good sense for 4%-8% of energy needs. Hydro, geo, wind, and especially nuclear each can provide more. Pretending that solar electric is going to provide the bulk of our energy implies devoting resources to solar that should be devoted to wind. By wasting too much on solar instead of developing more practical sources, we only ensure that we remain dependant on fossil fuels.
> due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available,
Requiring someone to buy it for you doesn't change the cost. It just means that someone else is paying the cost. In this case, that someone else ends up being the consumers, who have among the highest power bills in the world.
I guess you can't fix stupid. You can inform people, but stupid stays stupid.
I'm guessing you didn't read the page you to? It says 0.12% of sales in Germany, compared to 0.68% in the US. In other words, 99.88% of Germans don't buy electric cars.
I'm curious what language you're thinking of.
Certainly if you contribute anything which implements your patent to ANY public project, that could be construed as implied permission for people to use the whatever you contributed. That really has little to do with GPL, though.
GPLv3 affects patents that have nothing whatsoever to do with any contribution you make, if you mirror the project on Github or similar.
It wasn't nearly half of the POWER used in Germany at that moment. It was, for a moment, about half of the public ELECTRIC grid, in a country where electric is unpopular because it's becoming outrageously expensive. Most of the power used in Germany is not from the public electricity grid.
Here's a thought experiment:
Germany could shut off all of their generators, so there is no electricity on the public grid.
They could then attach a single 9-volt battery to the grid, so the only power on the grid would be a few watts from that little battery. The headline could then be:
100% of German electricity provided by one 9-volt battery!
What Germany has actually done is simply a less extreme case of the thought experiment. They've shut down generators, so less power is available. It's not that solar is providing the needed power, the power simply isn't available like it used to be. By supply and demand, as well as tariffs, electricity has become far more expensive, so people have turned more and more to other sources of energy. You won't see a lot of people driving electric cars in Germany because the cost to charge them makes it prohibitive.
GPL3 can take away your patents. It doesn't say anything about software patents specifically. Which makes sense, because as any software engineer or systems engineer knows, there's really no such thing as a software patent.
There are patents on mechanisms. Some of those mechanisms could be implemented via software. In fact, most them could be. Most of them could also be implemented with wood, steel, or plastic. Whether you make it from wood, from plastic, or from electrons, it's essentially the same machine, in many cases.
Then of course there are also bogus patents, which don't describe a mechanism at all.
Interesting. As someone who had alcohol as a reason, I agree it wasn't an excuse. Not for long, anyway. When I was 16, I acted like an idiot because I was drunk. When I was 18, I KNEW that getting drunk would result in me acting like an idiot. When I was 20, I stopped getting drunk so I would stop acting like an idiot.
I don't think my brother had exactly the same choice. He had an overwhelming compulsion to drink when he was 20. I don't blame him for being unable to resist. When he was 21, he was introduced to a group of other people who had the same compulsion, but they also had a solution. They were sober alcoholics. They told him how he could get sober and stay sober . It was only after the solution was shown to him that it became his responsibility to do it, in my view.
Unfortunately for this very specific case, Linux (and most other GPL stuff) stuck with GPL 2. It's GPL 3 that strips a company of its patents.
The kernel devs thought GPL 3 went way too far in it's anti-patent attack, allowing any competitor to invalidate ANY patent the company owns just by contributing infringing code. If it were limited only to patents related to code that the company contributed, the kernel and other projects may have adopted v3.
I'm very glad they did stick with GPL 2, because it's risky for any large organization to contribute to a GPL 3 project, which means it may require approval from the chief legal counsel before some guy in some little office that's part of some minor department of an unimportant subsidiary can contribute a bug fix. That's because by the terms of GPL3, one employee at the company contributing a fix for one feature risks all the patents throughout the entire company, not just those related to the feature the helped fix.
From what I've been learning, there is a particular gene associated with chronic, hardcore alcoholism.* If it runs in your family, I hope you're as careful with alcohol as you would be with any other deadly poison. If you haven't drank much yet, it can grab hold of you without warning.
Of course if you're in your 40s and have done plenty of drinking without any trouble, you may be comfortable that you dodged that particular bullet.
* not to be confused with simple hard drinking. I refer to thekind of alcoholism where people literally drink themselves to death because they can not stop.
That sounds a lot like my family. 18 years clean and sober here.