The difference between a code of conduct and a EULA is that most codes of conduct are signed by the employee either at, before, or very shortly after getting hired. There IS a contract in place there. And as far as it being legal, there is a specific list of things that a company can't discriminate against, but how you choose to behave in public is not part of that list. It's also not helpful that challenges to codes of conduct only come about after said code of conduct has been violated and appropriate discipline enforced.
Assuming of course he wants more than one computer, which some people don't. I, of course, don't count myself in that catagory. I've got 8 computers in this house already and can easily find uses for 4 or 5 more.
This is actually a good thing for the retailer. The clever shopper wanting to take advantage of an error will proudly announce that error to the employees, who will reward him for his effort..... and immediately fix the error. This is unlike the gas stations that accidently misplace a decimal point and only figure out why they are suddenly so popular after they've sold several thousands of dollars worth of gas for 10 cents on the dollar.
1. Efficiency: This article talks about brightnesses of 100 suns. Well what about 1 sun? Or fraction of that (cloudyness)? Are these efficiencies realized then too? If not, does the technology still work at or near where that is?
Probably about the same. The point is, you can ramp up the solar energy hitting the cell 1000 fold and still get 40% efficiency from it.
Power cost: I've seen it said that many solar cells don't give back the energy required to manufacture them. By that I mean, acquiring the materials (mining, etc), refining them, and manufacturing them all take energy. How many days/months/years would it take to "pay back" the cost of manufacture, in energy?
A conventional solar cell will pay for itself in 10 years, at least based on what I could purchase the cells for vs. what the power cost 10 years ago. Power costs more now, so the ROI is probably less now.
Monetary cost: How much will this cost at the consumer level, for which wattages? How big would they have to be to cover some typical consumer usages?
I think a 12 sqft conventional solar panel will produce about 100 watts. YMMV. Do the math.
Power storage: With solar, it all eventually comes back to storing the power, as they obviously don't operate in darkness. So how much would the batteries cost (initially, and in maintenance) to make this a viable power solution? How much wattage would you need to have enough "storage" for nighttime? Or more practically, for a few cloudy/rainy days in a row?
This is only really an issue if you're off the grid. If you live in an area where you can sell your unused power back to the company, then you can use your power meter to save the power instead of batteries. Yes, I realize that they pay the wholesale rate vs the retail rate, but that only applies to the balance over the month. If you consume 10kwh off the grid today and roll back 10kwh tomorrow, you've consumed a total of 0 kwh. The trick is to be sure the balance is negative whenever the meter reader shows up.
Actually, I think it would work better the opposite way. Their age is going to be an investor deterrant. It'd be better, for investment purposes, for the parents to be front and center and having the kids do the grunt work in the background, if that's how it's actually happening. Don't get me wrong, there are good examples of young people accomplishing great things, and they'll have a head start over the rest of their class in the future when they're old enough to be taken seriously by the rest of the world.
On another note though, why do they even really need funding? The purpose of funding a startup is so you can pay the salary of the people working there while the company isn't making enough money to do so. Otherwise, the founders have to keep a day job to support themselves and perhaps their families, and that makes it much harder for a startup to make it. It's eaiser for the founders to devote 16 hour days to a startup if they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from... for a while at least.
But these are kids. They don't have to worry about all that. All they have to do is create a product and try to sell it. If it sells, great.. if it doesn't, well, they've got some good experience and that will have been time better spent than if they'd been watching TV or playing video games.
There won't be much use in trying to fix college textbooks.. They're expensive for a reason. They cost a lot to create, and there's a very limited consumerbase. Nobody EXCEPT a college student is going to buy them, and only for a specific class, and you're still competing with others producing similar texts for the same classes. And if someone just wants to learn the material without taking a specific course, they're not going to drop the full price of the book to get it as there are plenty of other resources available for much less money. I used to periodically shop at book faires and pick up textbooks for $1 in any subject matter I thought I might someday be interested in, just so I'd have something available to reference.
If activities in the virtual world result in income in the real world, that income can be taxed accordingly. Activities that stay in the virtual world are otherwise non-taxable. If I do something commercial in the virtual world that will someday be worth money in the real world, we wait until there is actually income in the real world from it before we tax it. Anything prior to that is pointless.
Think stocks... specifically a stock with no dividend. I can purchase a share for $100.. The $100 I spent on it has already been previously taxed. Later down the road, that same share of stock is worth $10000. However, until I actually sell it, its value is as virtual as lindons. Sure, I can probably find a buyer for it today for $10000, but tomorrow it could just as easily be worth $100 again.. or even less. Once I actually SELL the stock, and say I get $10000 for it... the $9900 difference (minus broker fees) is taxable at whatever rate the various governments decide it should be taxable at (capital gains in this case). So fine, if the feds want to determine exactly what rate virtual property should be taxed at when real money trades hands, that's an acceptable intervention. But as long as the money stays in the virtual world, nobody beyond the owner of the servers should be able to touch it.
Well, it IS possible that people who were chomping at the bit to play the game and eagarly awaiting the release date would have happily purchased it on the release date, since waiting for a fully cracked pirated copy to show up and download would take several more days. However, if they had a chance to download it a few weeks before the release date, vs waiting until the release date.... what do you think is more likely? It's a known fact that offline video games make the most of their money within a few months of the release, so controlling the distribution BEFORE release would likely have a sizeable impact on the bottom line. Of course, you're not going to stop the piracy, and you're not going to get the pirates who never buy a game to buy yours, no matter how impossible it is to crack.
So if someone is leaking copies prior to release, that is a serious problem, and one that is worth dealing with. That is the type of problem that is resulting in lost sales.
I've noticed something with regards to my own site and the few google ads I have placed on the back pages. On those occasions when I get heavy traffic from a link on a popular tech site, my average click ratio goes way down. Slashdot users aren't going to pages to search for products to buy, so it's highly unlikely more than a very few will ever click on any ads, if any at all. Now if the article was promoting a product that the average geek would be interested in, and there were ads on the page for that exact product, there might be a few ad hits, but for an article like this, the results would be negligible.
Many corporations and industries are hesitant to change their entire revenue model. This is especially the case in such industries such as the music and movie industries which work today much the same as they have since they were originally formed. Whenever a new technology becomes available that they have no control over they are presented with two opportunities. Spend a small amount, which is probably already an allocated expense, to use the government, courts, and other industries to stifle or outlaw the new technology, or spend a much larger amount of money to adapt the revenue model to the new technology. Even if in the long run the new technology will pay off for them, the inability to control the outcome will be an unacceptable risk to endure.
Oppose that to companies that create CPUs, Intel, AMD, etc. Sure, they have their share of patents, copyrights, and lawsuits to go around, but in the end those issues are insignificant. No manufacturer of CPUs would dare to decide to try to slow the growth or change in their industry, since any effort to do so would instantly give their competitors a significant, perhaps crippling advantage. And as far as lawsuits go, by the time any lawsuit has had its final day in court, the technology in question has long since been retired.
The music industry is still all caught up in the concept of CDs. They sign a contract with the artist for the copyright on a recording, market the recording, print the CDs, the coverart and inserts, and feed all the distribution and retail stages of the process. The industry is much more than the artist and the customer. But now it doesn't need to be. Sure, we might have less manufactuered boy bands, but there will still as many tabloid enhanced rock/pop/rapstars as ever even if the industry wasn't around to "help" them along. We don't NEED CDs anymore, but that's all the industry knows, that's all they have, and they risk losing it all if they're forced to dive right into a different method of distribution. Of course, in the long run they'll have very little choice, but they're going to go kicking and screaming about it.
I'm sure the horse and buggy makers didn't get along well with the automobile industry either, but you'd like to hope that the smart ones saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides before it was too late.
I haven't done any bandwidth calculations, but 20-30% of the TEXT portion of a page sounds about right. A single image will throw that ratio out the window though. However, the bigger issue with google ads comes about not in the total data transfered, but when loading the ad itself causes the page to freeze up if there's any delay in loading it, which there is sometimes. I ended up taking the ad off the front page of my site but left it on back pages that don't get as many hits and I still make as much money from them.... Which is to say, not very much.
It'd never happen that way though. Forget the fact that a miniscule number of people actually do this, and the number will be that small for quite some time, since although it pays off in the long run, the cost of entry is pretty steep, and any interest based financing for the project would kill the financial benefits, so you won't be seeing too many people taking out loans to pay for it either. So what happens when we can create solar panels at 10x the efficiency of current panels (or 1/10 the cost, whatever combination makes the most sense) and people can make a smaller investment that will be paid off in a year? More people will naturally make the shift, and the additional financial burden for the electric company will result in higher retail rates, which will encourage more customers to make the switch, both for the savings and for the recoup costs. Don't worry though, the electric company could fix this really easily if they wanted to. In fact, they do it already. Your first so many KWhours a month are at a lower rate than later ones. Keep your consumption under a certain level, and you pay less per KWH. This encourages power conservation AND results in paying the net meter crowd the lower rate.
In the end though, there are lots of places where sun and wind aren't sufficient enough to power everything, and you still need the grid for those windless days or nighttime for the solar customers. The grid is still cheaper than maintaining your own battery farm. Don't worry, the electric companies aren't going to go bankrupt.
Usenet for the moment remains under the radar for a variety of reasons. First off, the **AA tends to pursue a certain type of infringement. Basically, they go after the average Joe. The one that can't afford a lawsuit, and the one that will relate well with most everyone else. Hope to inspire some of the "if it happened to him, it could happen to me" lines of thought.
Usenet also has a bit of a learning curve. ISP newsservers for the most part are a crapshoot, so if you actually intend to USE it, you'll have to find a commercial usenet server and purchase an account. That's one more monthly bill to pay, as opposed to the P2P programs which are typically free. You'll have to find and learn (and sometimes purchase) some decent newsreader software that can handle the binary attachments with ease, as well as learn the archiving schemes typical to usenet (rar, pars, etc). That added complexity tends to keep the majority of people off. And that's a good thing if you ask me.
There's also the difficulty in tracking a usenet downloader. On all the P2P programs, you need only monitor the data stream or design your own client to sniff addresses and offerings of multitudes of people using the service. With usenet, the only information about a file you can gather is the hostname of the individual who posted it originally, and if they are smart, that will have been proxied. The usenet servers might maintain records of downloads, but that information will be hard to come by, and a lot harder to use as useful evidence. They could go after the servers themselves, but those are typically owned and managed by corporations that can afford lawyers, and therefore don't make easy targets.
When it comes down to it, everyone's heard of bittorrent, and kaaza, and if you're reading in the newspaper about 1000 college students getting busted for using it, it will at least get everyone's attention. A similar report about 1000 usenet users getting busted will just result in a bunch of people going "what's this usenet thing? and where can I download it?"
In texas, as far as I know, the only time you can place a property into a homeowners association is at the time the deed is created, when the house is built. You can vote a property OUT of the association or disband the association permanantly, but you can't vote it in. But that's just becasue of Texas homestead laws, and probably doesn't apply to every state.
It's not because they have to. Certainly the games managed to obtain a level of quality that built a fanbase sufficient to justify the making of a movie in the first place. So why does the movie inevitably let down? My opinion on the matter is that they actually succeed, at least in the long run, and in the eyes of those who are producing it. Otherwise, nobody would ever make video game movies. I have no stats to determine which ones made money and which didn't, but considering there's a sizeable audience that is virtually guaranteed to watch them if you can at least make the trailer look good, and the movies never seem to have much of a budget, throw in a couple of high profile stars, and you can probably at least break even, even if it sucks horribly. And even if the movies turned out to be superb in every way, what's the chance many more people will see them? It's going to be the same audience regardless. So hey, if you avoid wasting time on putting together a good script and quality direction, go ahead and save a few bucks. You'll never notice the difference anyway.
TNG and voyager promoted the concept that you must stick to your ethics and morality, for that is ultimately the only way to win. Many of the episodes, and "First Contact" and "Inssurection" movies specifically delt with that issue. DS9, specifically such episodes of "In the Pale Moonlight", "Blaze of Glory", "Extreme Measures" and all the Section 31 episodes show another side of the issue, where sometimes it's necessary to defy those ethics and morals in order to preserve the environment in which you can practice them. Nothing in life is Black and White. You have to have a ethical foundation to stand on, or society will collapse into chaos, but it's probably unrealistic to expect that society as a whole will always exclusively stand by those same ideals.
I liked the darker themes presented by the later shows. We've been shown the best The Federation and Starfleet has to offer. We see how peachy the future is going to be. But there IS an underworld, and there are lots of shades of grey. There exist those who would sell out their entire race to obtain a little more power. This theme has been demonstrated over and over in the history of our world, and it proves to continue to exist in the future as well.
I have yet to provide mine with a cell phone. How will that factor in... abuse wise? She's been begging for one afterall. Of course, she uses the "what if I have an emergency and I'm stranded out in the middle of nowhere". So I gave her one of my old phones that works for 911, but nothing else. She wasn't amused.:)
-Restil
Re:"Review Pictures" job would get old really fast
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The Man Behind MySpace
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You can review a lot more than one picture per second. A thumbnail page of 24 images can be reviewed in a few seconds at most. If something looks suspect, you can take a closer look. And people hired for the spot only need to enjoy the visual treasure hunt that results from finding all the ban-worthy pictures. Many people spend all day doing that for free. To each his own.
The reason ISPs don't generally want you to share your connection with the rest of the world, or even the rest of your neighborhood, comes down to two things. First off, they charge you a residential rate at a certain speed with the expectation that the average consumer will use an average small fraction of that actual capacity. You may have 4mbps of downstream, but the average consumer won't use all of it, and in most cases, won't even get close. This means they can actually offer you 4mbps and you'll have it available for those brief moments when you want to download that huge file quickly.
Once you start sharing your connection outside of your household, you increase the average bandwidth that gets used for your connection. Granted, on a case by case basis, this doesn't amount to much, but if they allowed it for one, they'd have to allow it for everyone, and eventually that would cut into their bottom line. Many ISPs DO allow to to purchase a resellable connection, where you can hook as many computers up as you like and you can, well, resell the bandwidth to your neighbors, if you want. You'll also pay at least 5 times as much for the privelage, or so has been my experience. The porch light analogy doesn't work either. That would be the equivalent of me downloading an email, saving it to my network, then having someone via wifi access that saved email, which the isp would certainly be ok with. The porch light doesn't use more electricity if someone else is utilizing the glow, but someone sharing your wifi connection does use more bandwidth.
The second issue is one of liability. With a simple "your connection, your responsibility" system, any problems are your problems. If someone using your wifi creates a problem, the isp doesn't want to have to expend resources determining who's at fault, nor do they want to get involved in determining who's legally responsible should law enforcement ever get involved. It's much easier to just say, it's THAT house right there, go get them. If they ALLOWED you to share your connection with the world, then they'd be put in the uncomfortable position of having to help determine the exact source of the issue.
As for co-oping a neighborhood, good luck with that. I've made inquiries in the past for such a project, and people are generally not interested. They MIGHT be interested after the service is already in place, but as long as there is any type of broadband available, you'll be unlikely to find more than a small handful of willing participants, and certainly even fewer willing to pony up any money in advance. It's one thing if there is NO broadband available and there's enough people in the community who want it, you could be reasonably assured of a return on your investment. But the installation is an unrecoverable cost. You'll spend a small fortune putting in the lines, and networking the neighborhood, and just hope you bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of the loan payments, let alone pay someone to stay on call 24/7 to fix physical problems with the network and field calls from morons who can't figure out how to get their email. You'll need at least $3000-4000 a month in revenue just to cover the operating expenses, over and above whatever the upstream provider will charge, which is not likely to be cheap, especially if you're expecting to use the capacity of that fiber.
I'm not saying it's a bad plan, overall. In the long run, it has a reasonably good chance of success. But, as with any business, there's also a reasonably good chance of fantastic and dramatic failure. You'll want to offer more than just basic internet service though. You'll need a full range of extras. Integrated VOIP, a license to offer streaming TV channels, perhaps a blanket agreement to the RIAA & MPAA to distribute digital music freely within the confines of the neighborhood.... legally, SOMETHING that would give you an upper edge over any local competing provider, besides just speed, because, lets face it, the guy who just checks his email won't really care about that anyway.
I was addicted to Ultima Online for a 6 month period starting a couple weeks after it was released. For that period of time, I would spend a minimum of 8 hours a day playing the game. The rest of my waking hours were spent thinking and scheming about the game, and most of my time at work I spent reading and contributing to various UO related websites. I wouldn't even say it was a positive experience, with all the grief and the lag and the server crashes, I found myself frustrated 24/7. Well, maybe 20/7, since I did sleep a LITTLE bit.
And one day, I just decided to quit. I've been unable to find it, but I was writing an article somewhere about the life of a UO player and by the time I had finished it I realized what a mess my life had become as a result of that game and decided to end it. I quit and didn't look back. It seemed to be an addiction, but not a dependancy. I didn't miss it once I'd quit, but I don't think it was something I could have handled in moderation, and for that reason I refuse to touch any MMORPGS no matter how much fun someone tells me one might be.
Ultimately, the decision was entirely mine, and certainly not suggested or motivated by anyone else. In fact, most of my friends at the time played the game and tried to discourage me from quitting. I really wouldn't know how to get someone else to quit, other than to find an activity that is enjoyable enough that it draws them away from the game, but you have to get them away from the game in both body and mind long enough for a competing interest to take hold. It's quite possible he realizes there's a problem and is just unsure about how to deal with it. You might have a tough sell recommending quitting, but it can be done.
Should we extend the same sympathy to those who "encourage" zombied machines to "visit" various websites by flooding them with numerous requests with the intent of slowing them down? Packet flooders don't seem to rank very high on the food chain, but this kid gets our undying support. Yes, I realize he probably couldn't cause a great deal of damage this way, but this was one incident. What was his motive? What greater purpose did he hope to accomplish by abusing school resources in this way? This wasn't some case of innocent exploring that's getting blown out of proportion, this is a case of blatent intent to create a denial of service. And more importantly, should we let him take this to the next logical step, which would be packetflooding said servers, only doing so anonymously so we don't even know who's door to knock on to make it stop?
Personally, I don't think he should be charged with anything, just discipline him within the school system and be done with it. As others have said, it would probably be considered a waste of public resources to prosecute him. Then again, it might be worth it in the long run to not let him off easy this time. Just a thought.
Virtual property has no actual real world value. Yes, you can sell it to anyone foolish enough to pay for it, but for the player playing to the TOS, there will never be a financial attachment to the "value" of virtual property. This might, in part, be why most of the game companies refuse to allow the sale of virtual property in meatspace, in spite of the fact that it happens anyway. As long as their stand is the property has no real world value, and any such transactions are unauthorized, the IRS is unlikely to get too interested. It also means they can cancel an account and not be liable to the player for the "real world value" of the property his characters have managed to obtain.
Of course, players that spend 16 hours a day playing games and accumulate a significant stockpile of high quality game items, instead of working a real job and obtaining such tangable objects in real life, might consider that the value of the in-game property they've obtained should at least partially compensate the value of the time they've waste.... er... spent playing the game, so that instead of treating it as addictive consumable entertainment, which has little to no real world value once spent, they treat it as tangible, if virtual, compensation for hard work. Be that as it may though, the player has no authority in determining the value of the virtual property. That right remains the sole discretion of the company that manages the game, and since the monthly fee paid is a service charge only, and not considered an investment in the company, the value of the money spent does not obligate the player to a stockholder status, nor does the hard work "working" toward obtaining virtual property give any real world value to it.
So some player decides to ignore the TOS and sell his virtual property on ebay anyway, and someone has enough money to waste to justify paying for it. It now comes time to report these "earnings" to the IRS. Fear not, the IRS will take your money, no matter how you obtained it. They don't really even care of the source was illegal, just as long as you report it accurately. They're unlikely to care if you had to violate the terms of service of some company to obtain the ill gotten income. On the same note, they're unlikely to pursue the game as a source of untapped tax revenue since because the majority of players will never engage in commerce outside of the game environment, there will be no real world value attached to the property for the players involved. After all, those items which are purchased and/or sold in meatspace can be removed from the game at the slightest keystroke of a game master, and there would be no recourse or compensation expected by the players involved. And this is the way it HAS to be. Otherwise, If I sell you a super glass sword of shattering for $1000 and 5 minutes after transferring it to you in game, some newbie thief comes along and steals it from you, can that player be prosecuted for a $1000 theft? So far, I've yet to see this happen. And as long as that doesn't happen, there's no recognizable real world value to any of the in-game property, and the IRS is not going to bother getting involved. They'll pay more attention when you quit the game and start working for a living.
The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe.
Because a tech company generating revenue and making stockholders comfortable, such that they might consider other tech companies as viable again.... is a bad thing.
"Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft."
This is how things happen in the real world. It will happen again.
"Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."
Yes, because as we all know, everything worth inventing has already been invented, except for the relatively minute number of things that Google is currently working on. Darn them!
Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.
And to think, a couple of years ago, we were whining that no qualified programmers could find jobs. Now we're whining that the qualfied programmers are getting snatched up so fast that we can't afford to pay their high salaries to compete. Bleed my heart does.
Why couldn't Google do what you're doing?' " said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.
Oh where shall I begin... A startup, with a name that is obviously intended to pick up some free indirect word of mouth advertising from Google because it's a likely offshoot of Google, has investors worried that someday Google will decide to do the same thing, only better. Imagine that....when earlier this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people lined up to replace him. I doubt Google has suffered any bad press from a comment like that. Certainly can't see how it raises the "ire" of anyone. Can you imagine? "Man, this job sucks so much... they pay me too much, give me free meals and all sorts of onsite perks.. they challenge me and give me time to be creative. I love it so much that I don't want to leave at the end of the day. Woe is me."
To be fair, I can understand the concern of some people that a single company can be too powerful and disrupt the industry as a whole. After all, it has happened before. Microsoft is a perfect example. But if you must look for evil, search out the roots. Compare if you will, a company who's core principle is "Do no evil" and a company that broke into the PC market by selling a product it didn't even own yet. Compare a company that offers multiple perfectly useable and useful "beta" applications, to a company that couldn't get through a staged product demonstration without crashing the system. Worry about Google if you must, but keep your concerns in context.
It's still going, and there will be a lot more lights soon. I ended up buying an OLD house and I've spent all my time rennovating it, so the site has been somewhat neglected of late. Landlords and roomies are evil btw. Just saying. I'll hopefully get things going strong again in a few months. Thanks for the plug.
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The difference between a code of conduct and a EULA is that most codes of conduct are signed by the employee either at, before, or very shortly after getting hired. There IS a contract in place there. And as far as it being legal, there is a specific list of things that a company can't discriminate against, but how you choose to behave in public is not part of that list. It's also not helpful that challenges to codes of conduct only come about after said code of conduct has been violated and appropriate discipline enforced.
-Restil
Assuming of course he wants more than one computer, which some people don't. I, of course, don't count myself in that catagory. I've got 8 computers in this house already and can easily find uses for 4 or 5 more.
-Restil
This is actually a good thing for the retailer. The clever shopper wanting to take advantage of an error will proudly announce that error to the employees, who will reward him for his effort..... and immediately fix the error. This is unlike the gas stations that accidently misplace a decimal point and only figure out why they are suddenly so popular after they've sold several thousands of dollars worth of gas for 10 cents on the dollar.
-Restil
1. Efficiency: This article talks about brightnesses of 100 suns. Well what about 1 sun? Or fraction of that (cloudyness)? Are these efficiencies realized then too? If not, does the technology still work at or near where that is?
Probably about the same. The point is, you can ramp up the solar energy hitting the cell 1000 fold and still get 40% efficiency from it.
Power cost: I've seen it said that many solar cells don't give back the energy required to manufacture them. By that I mean, acquiring the materials (mining, etc), refining them, and manufacturing them all take energy. How many days/months/years would it take to "pay back" the cost of manufacture, in energy?
A conventional solar cell will pay for itself in 10 years, at least based on what I could purchase the cells for vs. what the power cost 10 years ago. Power costs more now, so the ROI is probably less now.
Monetary cost: How much will this cost at the consumer level, for which wattages? How big would they have to be to cover some typical consumer usages?
I think a 12 sqft conventional solar panel will produce about 100 watts. YMMV. Do the math.
Power storage: With solar, it all eventually comes back to storing the power, as they obviously don't operate in darkness. So how much would the batteries cost (initially, and in maintenance) to make this a viable power solution? How much wattage would you need to have enough "storage" for nighttime? Or more practically, for a few cloudy/rainy days in a row?
This is only really an issue if you're off the grid. If you live in an area where you can sell your unused power back to the company, then you can use your power meter to save the power instead of batteries. Yes, I realize that they pay the wholesale rate vs the retail rate, but that only applies to the balance over the month. If you consume 10kwh off the grid today and roll back 10kwh tomorrow, you've consumed a total of 0 kwh. The trick is to be sure the balance is negative whenever the meter reader shows up.
-Restil
Actually, I think it would work better the opposite way. Their age is going to be an investor deterrant. It'd be better, for investment purposes, for the parents to be front and center and having the kids do the grunt work in the background, if that's how it's actually happening. Don't get me wrong, there are good examples of young people accomplishing great things, and they'll have a head start over the rest of their class in the future when they're old enough to be taken seriously by the rest of the world.
On another note though, why do they even really need funding? The purpose of funding a startup is so you can pay the salary of the people working there while the company isn't making enough money to do so. Otherwise, the founders have to keep a day job to support themselves and perhaps their families, and that makes it much harder for a startup to make it. It's eaiser for the founders to devote 16 hour days to a startup if they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from... for a while at least.
But these are kids. They don't have to worry about all that. All they have to do is create a product and try to sell it. If it sells, great.. if it doesn't, well, they've got some good experience and that will have been time better spent than if they'd been watching TV or playing video games.
-Restil
There won't be much use in trying to fix college textbooks.. They're expensive for a reason. They cost a lot to create, and there's a very limited consumerbase. Nobody EXCEPT a college student is going to buy them, and only for a specific class, and you're still competing with others producing similar texts for the same classes. And if someone just wants to learn the material without taking a specific course, they're not going to drop the full price of the book to get it as there are plenty of other resources available for much less money. I used to periodically shop at book faires and pick up textbooks for $1 in any subject matter I thought I might someday be interested in, just so I'd have something available to reference.
-Restil
If activities in the virtual world result in income in the real world, that income can be taxed accordingly. Activities that stay in the virtual world are otherwise non-taxable. If I do something commercial in the virtual world that will someday be worth money in the real world, we wait until there is actually income in the real world from it before we tax it. Anything prior to that is pointless.
Think stocks... specifically a stock with no dividend. I can purchase a share for $100.. The $100 I spent on it has already been previously taxed. Later down the road, that same share of stock is worth $10000. However, until I actually sell it, its value is as virtual as lindons. Sure, I can probably find a buyer for it today for $10000, but tomorrow it could just as easily be worth $100 again.. or even less. Once I actually SELL the stock, and say I get $10000 for it... the $9900 difference (minus broker fees) is taxable at whatever rate the various governments decide it should be taxable at (capital gains in this case). So fine, if the feds want to determine exactly what rate virtual property should be taxed at when real money trades hands, that's an acceptable intervention. But as long as the money stays in the virtual world, nobody beyond the owner of the servers should be able to touch it.
-Restil
Well, it IS possible that people who were chomping at the bit to play the game and eagarly awaiting the release date would have happily purchased it on the release date, since waiting for a fully cracked pirated copy to show up and download would take several more days. However, if they had a chance to download it a few weeks before the release date, vs waiting until the release date.... what do you think is more likely? It's a known fact that offline video games make the most of their money within a few months of the release, so controlling the distribution BEFORE release would likely have a sizeable impact on the bottom line. Of course, you're not going to stop the piracy, and you're not going to get the pirates who never buy a game to buy yours, no matter how impossible it is to crack.
So if someone is leaking copies prior to release, that is a serious problem, and one that is worth dealing with. That is the type of problem that is resulting in lost sales.
-Restil
I've noticed something with regards to my own site and the few google ads I have placed on the back pages. On those occasions when I get heavy traffic from a link on a popular tech site, my average click ratio goes way down. Slashdot users aren't going to pages to search for products to buy, so it's highly unlikely more than a very few will ever click on any ads, if any at all. Now if the article was promoting a product that the average geek would be interested in, and there were ads on the page for that exact product, there might be a few ad hits, but for an article like this, the results would be negligible.
-Restil
Many corporations and industries are hesitant to change their entire revenue model. This is especially the case in such industries such as the music and movie industries which work today much the same as they have since they were originally formed. Whenever a new technology becomes available that they have no control over they are presented with two opportunities. Spend a small amount, which is probably already an allocated expense, to use the government, courts, and other industries to stifle or outlaw the new technology, or spend a much larger amount of money to adapt the revenue model to the new technology. Even if in the long run the new technology will pay off for them, the inability to control the outcome will be an unacceptable risk to endure.
Oppose that to companies that create CPUs, Intel, AMD, etc. Sure, they have their share of patents, copyrights, and lawsuits to go around, but in the end those issues are insignificant. No manufacturer of CPUs would dare to decide to try to slow the growth or change in their industry, since any effort to do so would instantly give their competitors a significant, perhaps crippling advantage. And as far as lawsuits go, by the time any lawsuit has had its final day in court, the technology in question has long since been retired.
The music industry is still all caught up in the concept of CDs. They sign a contract with the artist for the copyright on a recording, market the recording, print the CDs, the coverart and inserts, and feed all the distribution and retail stages of the process. The industry is much more than the artist and the customer. But now it doesn't need to be. Sure, we might have less manufactuered boy bands, but there will still as many tabloid enhanced rock/pop/rapstars as ever even if the industry wasn't around to "help" them along. We don't NEED CDs anymore, but that's all the industry knows, that's all they have, and they risk losing it all if they're forced to dive right into a different method of distribution. Of course, in the long run they'll have very little choice, but they're going to go kicking and screaming about it.
I'm sure the horse and buggy makers didn't get along well with the automobile industry either, but you'd like to hope that the smart ones saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides before it was too late.
-Restil
I haven't done any bandwidth calculations, but 20-30% of the TEXT portion of a page sounds about right. A single image will throw that ratio out the window though. However, the bigger issue with google ads comes about not in the total data transfered, but when loading the ad itself causes the page to freeze up if there's any delay in loading it, which there is sometimes. I ended up taking the ad off the front page of my site but left it on back pages that don't get as many hits and I still make as much money from them.... Which is to say, not very much.
-Restil
It'd never happen that way though. Forget the fact that a miniscule number of people actually do this, and the number will be that small for quite some time, since although it pays off in the long run, the cost of entry is pretty steep, and any interest based financing for the project would kill the financial benefits, so you won't be seeing too many people taking out loans to pay for it either. So what happens when we can create solar panels at 10x the efficiency of current panels (or 1/10 the cost, whatever combination makes the most sense) and people can make a smaller investment that will be paid off in a year? More people will naturally make the shift, and the additional financial burden for the electric company will result in higher retail rates, which will encourage more customers to make the switch, both for the savings and for the recoup costs. Don't worry though, the electric company could fix this really easily if they wanted to. In fact, they do it already. Your first so many KWhours a month are at a lower rate than later ones. Keep your consumption under a certain level, and you pay less per KWH. This encourages power conservation AND results in paying the net meter crowd the lower rate.
In the end though, there are lots of places where sun and wind aren't sufficient enough to power everything, and you still need the grid for those windless days or nighttime for the solar customers. The grid is still cheaper than maintaining your own battery farm. Don't worry, the electric companies aren't going to go bankrupt.
-Restil
In addition, you can prevent google and other search engines from ever crawling your site in the first place if you just use the robots.txt file.
-Restil
Usenet for the moment remains under the radar for a variety of reasons. First off, the **AA tends to pursue a certain type of infringement. Basically, they go after the average Joe. The one that can't afford a lawsuit, and the one that will relate well with most everyone else. Hope to inspire some of the "if it happened to him, it could happen to me" lines of thought.
Usenet also has a bit of a learning curve. ISP newsservers for the most part are a crapshoot, so if you actually intend to USE it, you'll have to find a commercial usenet server and purchase an account. That's one more monthly bill to pay, as opposed to the P2P programs which are typically free. You'll have to find and learn (and sometimes purchase) some decent newsreader software that can handle the binary attachments with ease, as well as learn the
archiving schemes typical to usenet (rar, pars, etc). That added complexity tends to keep the majority of people off. And that's a good thing if you ask me.
There's also the difficulty in tracking a usenet downloader. On all the P2P programs, you need only monitor the data stream or design your own client to sniff addresses and offerings of multitudes of people using the service. With usenet, the only information about a file you can gather is the hostname of the individual who posted it
originally, and if they are smart, that will have been proxied. The usenet servers might maintain records of
downloads, but that information will be hard to come by, and a lot harder to use as useful evidence. They could go after the servers themselves, but those are typically owned and managed by corporations that can afford lawyers, and therefore don't make easy targets.
When it comes down to it, everyone's heard of bittorrent, and kaaza, and if you're reading in the newspaper about 1000 college students getting busted for using it, it will at least get everyone's attention. A similar report about 1000 usenet users getting busted will just result in a bunch of people going "what's this usenet thing? and where can I download it?"
-Restil
In texas, as far as I know, the only time you can place a property into a homeowners association is at the time the deed is created, when the house is built. You can vote a property OUT of the association or disband the association permanantly, but you can't vote it in. But that's just becasue of Texas homestead laws, and probably doesn't apply to every state.
-Restil
It's not because they have to. Certainly the games managed to obtain a level of quality that built a fanbase sufficient to justify the making of a movie in the first place. So why does the movie inevitably let down? My opinion on the matter is that they actually succeed, at least in the long run, and in the eyes of those who are
producing it. Otherwise, nobody would ever make video game movies. I have no stats to determine which ones made money and which didn't, but considering there's a sizeable audience that is virtually guaranteed to watch them if you can at least make the trailer look good, and the movies never seem to have much of a budget, throw in a couple of high profile stars, and you can probably at least break even, even if it sucks horribly. And even if the movies turned out to be superb in every way, what's the chance many more people will see them? It's going to be the same audience regardless. So hey, if you avoid wasting time on putting together a good script and quality direction, go ahead and save a few bucks. You'll never notice the difference anyway.
We will, but the producers won't.
-Restil
TNG and voyager promoted the concept that you must stick to your ethics and morality, for that is ultimately the only way to win. Many of the episodes, and "First Contact" and "Inssurection" movies specifically delt with that issue. DS9, specifically such episodes of "In the Pale Moonlight", "Blaze of Glory", "Extreme Measures" and all the Section 31 episodes show another side of the issue, where sometimes it's necessary to defy those ethics and morals in order to preserve the environment in which you can practice them. Nothing in life is Black and White. You have to have a ethical foundation to stand on, or society will collapse into chaos, but it's probably unrealistic to expect that society as a whole will always exclusively stand by those same ideals.
I liked the darker themes presented by the later shows. We've been shown the best The Federation and Starfleet has to offer. We see how peachy the future is going to be. But there IS an underworld, and there are lots of shades of grey. There exist those who would sell out their entire race to obtain a little more power. This theme has been demonstrated over and over in the history of our world, and it proves to continue to exist in the future as well.
-Restil
I have yet to provide mine with a cell phone. How will that factor in... abuse wise? She's been begging for one afterall. Of course, she uses the "what if I have an emergency and I'm stranded out in the middle of nowhere". So I gave her one of my old phones that works for 911, but nothing else. She wasn't amused. :)
-Restil
You can review a lot more than one picture per second. A thumbnail page of 24 images can be reviewed in a few seconds at most. If something looks suspect, you can take a closer look. And people hired for the spot only need to enjoy the visual treasure hunt that results from finding all the ban-worthy pictures. Many people spend all day doing that for free. To each his own.
-Restil
The reason ISPs don't generally want you to share your connection with the rest of the world, or even the rest of your neighborhood, comes down to two things. First off, they charge you a residential rate at a certain speed with the expectation that the average consumer will use an average small fraction of that actual capacity. You may have 4mbps of downstream, but the average consumer won't use all of it, and in most cases, won't even get close. This means they can actually offer you 4mbps and you'll have it available for those brief moments when you want to download that huge file quickly.
Once you start sharing your connection outside of your household, you increase the average bandwidth that gets used for your connection. Granted, on a case by case basis, this doesn't amount to much, but if they allowed it for one, they'd have to allow it for everyone, and eventually that would cut into their bottom line. Many ISPs DO allow to to purchase a resellable connection, where you can hook as many computers up as you like and you can, well, resell the bandwidth to your neighbors, if you want. You'll also pay at least 5 times as much for the privelage, or so has been my experience. The porch light analogy doesn't work either. That would be the equivalent of me downloading an email, saving it to my network, then having someone via wifi access that saved email, which the isp would certainly be ok with. The porch light doesn't use more electricity if someone else is utilizing the glow, but someone sharing your wifi connection does use more bandwidth.
The second issue is one of liability. With a simple "your connection, your responsibility" system, any problems are your problems. If someone using your wifi creates a problem, the isp doesn't want to have to expend resources determining who's at fault, nor do they want to get involved in determining who's legally responsible should law enforcement ever get involved. It's much easier to just say, it's THAT house right there, go get them. If they ALLOWED you to share your connection with the world, then they'd be put in the uncomfortable position of having to help determine the exact source of the issue.
As for co-oping a neighborhood, good luck with that. I've made inquiries in the past for such a project, and people are generally not interested. They MIGHT be interested after the service is already in place, but as long as there is any type of broadband available, you'll be unlikely to find more than a small handful of willing participants, and certainly even fewer willing to pony up any money in advance. It's one thing if there is NO broadband available and there's enough people in the community who want it, you could be reasonably assured of a return on your investment. But the installation is an unrecoverable cost. You'll spend a small fortune putting in the lines, and networking the neighborhood, and just hope you bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of the loan payments, let alone pay someone to stay on call 24/7 to fix physical problems with the network and field calls from morons who can't figure out how to get their email. You'll need at least $3000-4000 a month in revenue just to cover the operating expenses, over and above whatever the upstream provider will charge, which is not likely to be cheap, especially if you're expecting to use the capacity of that fiber.
I'm not saying it's a bad plan, overall. In the long run, it has a reasonably good chance of success. But, as with any business, there's also a reasonably good chance of fantastic and dramatic failure. You'll want to offer more than just basic internet service though. You'll need a full range of extras. Integrated VOIP, a license to offer streaming TV channels, perhaps a blanket agreement to the RIAA & MPAA to distribute digital music freely within the confines of the neighborhood.... legally, SOMETHING that would give you an upper edge over any local competing provider, besides just speed, because, lets face it, the guy who just checks his email won't really care about that anyway.
-Restil
I was addicted to Ultima Online for a 6 month period starting a couple weeks after it was released. For that period of time, I would spend a minimum of 8 hours a day playing the game. The rest of my waking hours were spent thinking and scheming about the game, and most of my time at work I spent reading and contributing to various UO related websites. I wouldn't even say it was a positive experience, with all the grief and the lag and the server crashes, I found myself frustrated 24/7. Well, maybe 20/7, since I did sleep a LITTLE bit.
And one day, I just decided to quit. I've been unable to find it, but I was writing an article somewhere about the life of a UO player and by the time I had finished it I realized what a mess my life had become as a result of that game and decided to end it. I quit and didn't look back. It seemed to be an addiction, but not a dependancy. I didn't miss it once I'd quit, but I don't think it was something I could have handled in moderation, and for that reason I refuse to touch any MMORPGS no matter how much fun someone tells me one might be.
Ultimately, the decision was entirely mine, and certainly not suggested or motivated by anyone else. In fact, most of my friends at the time played the game and tried to discourage me from quitting. I really wouldn't know how to get someone else to quit, other than to find an activity that is enjoyable enough that it draws them away from the game, but you have to get them away from the game in both body and mind long enough for a competing interest to take hold. It's quite possible he realizes there's a problem and is just unsure about how to deal with it. You might have a tough sell recommending quitting, but it can be done.
-Restil
Should we extend the same sympathy to those who "encourage" zombied machines to "visit" various websites by flooding them with numerous requests with the intent of slowing them down? Packet flooders don't seem to rank very high on the food chain, but this kid gets our undying support. Yes, I realize he probably couldn't cause a great deal of damage this way, but this was one incident. What was his motive? What greater purpose did he hope to accomplish by abusing school resources in this way? This wasn't some case of innocent exploring that's getting blown out of proportion, this is a case of blatent intent to create a denial of service. And more importantly, should we let him take this to the next logical step, which would be packetflooding said servers, only doing so anonymously so we don't even know who's door to knock on to make it stop?
Personally, I don't think he should be charged with anything, just discipline him within the school system and be done with it. As others have said, it would probably be considered a waste of public resources to prosecute him. Then again, it might be worth it in the long run to not let him off easy this time. Just a thought.
-Restil
Virtual property has no actual real world value. Yes, you can sell it to anyone foolish enough to pay for it, but for the player playing to the TOS, there will never be a financial attachment to the "value" of virtual property. This might, in part, be why most of the game companies refuse to allow the sale of virtual property in meatspace, in spite of the fact that it happens anyway. As long as their stand is the property has no real world value, and any such transactions are unauthorized, the IRS is unlikely to get too interested. It also means they can cancel an account and not be liable to the player for the "real world value" of the property his characters have managed to obtain.
Of course, players that spend 16 hours a day playing games and accumulate a significant stockpile of high quality game items, instead of working a real job and obtaining such tangable objects in real life, might consider that the value of the in-game property they've obtained should at least partially compensate the value of the time they've waste.... er... spent playing the game, so that instead of treating it as addictive consumable entertainment, which has little to no real world value once spent, they treat it as tangible, if virtual, compensation for hard work. Be that as it may though, the player has no authority in determining the value of the virtual property. That right remains the sole discretion of the company that manages the game, and since the monthly fee paid is a service charge only, and not considered an investment in the company, the value of the money spent does not obligate the player to a stockholder status, nor does the hard work "working" toward obtaining virtual property give any real world value to it.
So some player decides to ignore the TOS and sell his virtual property on ebay anyway, and someone has enough money to waste to justify paying for it. It now comes time to report these "earnings" to the IRS. Fear not, the IRS will take your money, no matter how you obtained it. They don't really even care of the source was illegal, just as long as you report it accurately. They're unlikely to care if you had to violate the terms of service of some company to obtain the ill gotten income. On the same note, they're unlikely to pursue the game as a source of untapped tax revenue since because the majority of players will never engage in commerce outside of the game environment, there will be no real world value attached to the property for the players involved. After all, those items which are purchased and/or sold in meatspace can be removed from the game at the slightest keystroke of a game master, and there would be no recourse or compensation expected by the players involved. And this is the way it HAS to be. Otherwise, If I sell you a super glass sword of shattering for $1000 and 5 minutes after transferring it to you in game, some newbie thief comes along and steals it from you, can that player be prosecuted for a $1000 theft? So far, I've yet to see this happen. And as long as that doesn't happen, there's no recognizable real world value to any of the in-game property, and the IRS is not going to bother getting involved. They'll pay more attention when you quit the game and start working for a living.
-Restil
Addressing specific "concerns" in the article...
...when earlier this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer.
The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe.
Because a tech company generating revenue and making stockholders comfortable, such that they might consider other tech companies as viable again.... is a bad thing.
"Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft."
This is how things happen in the real world. It will happen again.
"Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."
Yes, because as we all know, everything worth inventing has already been invented, except for the relatively minute number of things that Google is currently working on. Darn them!
Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.
And to think, a couple of years ago, we were whining that no qualified programmers could find jobs. Now we're whining that the qualfied programmers are getting snatched up so fast that we can't afford to pay their high salaries to compete. Bleed my heart does.
Why couldn't Google do what you're doing?' " said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.
Oh where shall I begin... A startup, with a name that is obviously intended to pick up some free indirect word of mouth advertising from Google because it's a likely offshoot of Google, has investors worried that someday Google will decide to do the same thing, only better. Imagine that.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people lined up to replace him. I doubt Google has suffered any bad press from a comment like that. Certainly can't see how it raises the "ire" of anyone. Can you imagine? "Man, this job sucks so much... they pay me too much, give me free meals and all sorts of onsite perks.. they challenge me and give me time to be creative. I love it so much that I don't want to leave at the end of the day. Woe is me."
To be fair, I can understand the concern of some people that a single company can be too powerful and disrupt the industry as a whole. After all, it has happened before. Microsoft is a perfect example. But if you must look for evil, search out the roots. Compare if you will, a company who's core principle is "Do no evil" and a company that broke into the PC market by selling a product it didn't even own yet. Compare a company that offers multiple perfectly useable and useful "beta" applications, to a company that couldn't get through a staged product demonstration without crashing the system. Worry about Google if you must, but keep your concerns in context.
-Restil
It's still going, and there will be a lot more lights soon. I ended up buying an OLD house and I've spent all my time rennovating it, so the site has been somewhat neglected of late. Landlords and roomies are evil btw. Just saying. I'll hopefully get things going strong again in a few months.
Thanks for the plug.
-Restil