Or just buy a product that meets your needs, save development costs, have them come in and install and support it and not have to pay extraneous developers money you don't need to spend.
Too simplistic. You always pay for development, the question is only what portion you get allocated. Open source and software companies are simply two different means of aggregating the resources of many users in order to produce software the users need. The users always pay for development one way or another. Purchased software has the development cost in the license fees, open source software has the development costs in the support contract, the hardware purchase, the programmer on staff, or whatever other means you can think of. The question is which gets you the most productivity for your dollar.
As opposed to FS/OSS, which just forks, or the maintainers leave it to die and nobody picks it up. Right... your idiocy knows no bounds.
All software can potentially die, closed source or open source. The advantage of open source is because the source is available, if you can afford it, some one will maintain it for you. This should theoretically work for closed source software as well, but other factors come in that can push the cost above what an OSS support contract might cost. One of those factors is competition.
I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying get fucking real with it's limitations right now. Right now, there is a lot of shit you can't do with open source.
This is a good point. There are definitely limitations to the currently available software. And, there are questions as to whether open source development will be the most cost effective model for getting some features.
Because Postgres doesn't have the infastructure due to high costs for software licenses. That is what stops Postgres from offering that type of support. Hiring and training support staff to provide support requires a good amount of investment. Postgres, unless they received heavy investments, will never be able to do this.
I think you are a little off. I could say many years ago:
"Oracle didn't have the infrastructure to to develop a database because they don't sell hardware. Hiring and training programmer's requires a good amount of investment. Oracle, unless they received heavy investments, will never be able to develop a database."
Obviously they did this. If a return on investment is there some one will make the investment. Now convincing some one to take that kind of risk to compete against a company with Oracle's reputation may never happen with out gradually building a reputation for quality support from the bottom up. Note this has nothing to do with Closed Source or Open Source. It is Oracle's reputation and talent in this area.
True, but you have burn rate for paying consultants in training. Burn rate is offset by investments and license costs.
This is no different than a company saying I want to develop a closed source database to compete against Oracle. That burn rate is equal to paying programmers to make the database and consultants in training to support it offset by investments and license costs. Using open source the burn rate is paying for just consultants in training offset by just investments. (somewhat simplistic, I know.)
I am not saying it will happen, but that the factors in the decision have little to do with open source or closed source.
Open source is not the end-all solution. You cannot do everything with open source. His gentoo forums may provide all the service he needs, but when it comes to my databases, our Oracle support contract is worth more than anything Postgres or MySQL can hope to provide.
Correct Open Source is not the end all solution, but your Oracle Support contract has nothing to do with Open Source or Closed Source. It has to do with what your support provider is willing to provide. There is no reason some one could not offer the same level of support you get from Oracle for Postgres. Whether anyone ever does has more to do with business and competetive issues than technical reasons. i.e. an equivalent support contract would not cost that much less for Postgres than Oracle support + licenses. Because the Postgres supporter will still have to stress test code to make sure they don't get hammered. After that, the discount would still have to be enough to overcome Oracle's reputation in this area.
I usually see someone rewrite the editor from scratch and advertise their version as having printing capabilities.
And, from that you get inefficiency. On the otherhand as long as it doesn't get too out of hand it introduces a little competition which results in better code. And, in a world of incomplete information you will definitely get people duplicating work. Especially in the early stages of development where everyone is trying to scratch the same itch, and has different priorities for which part fo the itch to scratch. I think the large number of open source web browsers are a good example of this. Mozilla, Konqueror,... are basically web browsers, but there feature sets are slightly different, and therefore scratch different itches. One issue with web browsers is that there are multiple niches (small feature set, small foot print; large feature sets, larger footprint). What I expect wil happen is that within each niche there will be convergence on one particular code base, and given compatible licenses convergence towards at least some common code.
Are you a programmer? We need more of them like you.
The success of a product at large depends on every developer having a common goal; the success of the product at large. It's not going to work to say "I need a text editor that does color coding of my HTML" and ignore basic needs like printing, display, sound and document model subsystems that the users truly need.
Why not? If all you need is a "text editor that does color coding of my HTML", and it fits your needs you just do it, and put it out there. Now, some one else might need the same thing with printing, so rather than write the text editor part on their own, they add printing to the original code. But, it does generally require a user with a need and the programming skill to write code to fulfill that need. That is where business comes into the picture. I am IBM and my customer needs a computer that does a list of things. I can give them 90% of those things with Open Source code already available. 5% requires changes to Open Source code which I then return to the Open Source projects. The other 5% involves custom code on top of the Open Source software, and/or code so customer specific that releasing the source doesn't make sense. I can make this solution available to the customer for less than the cost of using proprietary software, and possibly end up with a higher profit margin.
Oh come on. The GPL is about as close to communism as you can get in the software world.
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but you have to give back any changes to the community".
I want to requalify that slightly because the community isn't necessarily why some one licenses their code with the GPL (except RMS, maybe).
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but if you are going to distribute it make sure I can get your changes too."
This is how some one writing GPL software gets economic benefit from the software by receiving the benefit of programming by those who use his programming.
Note, if you modify GPL software and never distribute it, your changes never have to be revealed. Although there is benefit to revealing those changes in order that you don't have to keep adding them in when some one else makes a change that you want.
Commnity tends to develop from this as a means of preventing anarchy and excessive forking.
The MTBF for a component would be listed at 300 flight hours, and when he asked how they arrived at such a nice round figure, managers would retroactively come up with a listing where each sub-component had MTBFs listed to decimal places, 34.8712 hours, 29.1109 hours,... and they all conveniently added up to exactly 300 hours.
Is this as bad as looks with lower MTBF numbers adding up to a higher MTBF number?
Now that we have XML and standard libraries for reading XML, it makes handling these documents a snap. Any program that needs to read them can simply have an XML parser plugged into it. The integrity of the documents themselves is maintained by the fact that they don't work if they're not properly marked up. So all these documents work, 100% all the time, and writing programs to read said documents is very simple and not prone to errors.
I agree, I was waiting for some one from document land to chime in here. I think the big complaint seems to be applying XML to something other than documents.
For me the big advantage fo XML is as a simplification of SGML. The parsers are simpler. XSL and XSL:FO are significantly easier than DSSSL and FOSI (at least to me). Basically, XML has all the advantages of SGML while getting rid of a lot of the complications.
So, for everyone bitching about XML, please bitch about it possibly being shoehorned into apllications it isn't desgined for. And, if you don't like it as a document format, try writing a Perl parser for SGML.
I just wish we had gotten that huge particle accelerator and congress hadn't overturned it, oh for the chance to produce new and undiscovered particles...
The SSC is crap. The (Large Hadron Collider) LHC being built at CERN reaches higher energies at a fraction of the cost of the SSC. I think RHIC at Brookhaven gets pretty close to SSC energies. Although, applying the technology being used for LHC to a tunnel the size of the one SSC was supposed to use would reach even higher energies.
That suggests an idea. Maybe the tunnel and detector caverns should be approved and built first, then decide what to put in them later.
Being smart doesn't make you unpopular in school. I knew plenty of popular smart kids in high school. What makes you unpopular is not wearing the in-clothes, looking akward or having no social skills. It's about being obsessed with computers or Star Trek. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
And, if you actually read and comprehended the article you would realize this is exactly what he said. He said there is nothing inherent about being smart that makes you unpopular. The difference was that the popular kids spend most of their time working at beig popular and the nerds, don't. I know a lot of popular kids are very smart, but they apply more of those smarts and their time to being popular, and the "nerds" don't. So, the difference isn't intelligence it is priorities.
On the other hand, it makes me feel better about living in Philadelphia, PA, where we pay a 4% tax on our income for the apparent "privilege" of having a job.
Just to make you feel even better we pay 9% in California. Although it is progressive and doesn't start to kick in until $40,000.
The California government has become, for all intensive purposes, a socialist one.
I don't know if I would go quite as far as socialist. But, California Democrats are a bunch of tax and spend morons who don't know the first thing about balancing a budget, planning for the future, or what the average person wants. You know why there is a budget crisis according to them, the wealthy are not making enough money, so they have decided to take a larger proportion from them. I also use the term wealthy loosely, since just about anyone who still has a decent job is going to get raped.
Of course all their spending increases of the last few years were based on profits from stocks and options, which couldn't possibly last. But, what do they care. They are only in office for 6 or 8 years maximum (term limits). So, there sole priority is to pass as much legislation that will get them publicity and campaign donations so they can run for som eother office. While there are issues with career politicians who lose touch with their constituency, there appears to also be a serious problem with term limited politician whose sole purpose is to get as much publicity, campaign contributions, and/or special interest legislation to get them a job after office.
On top of this we have an election system whose purpose is to maintain the status quo. There are maybe 1 or 2 contested elections for legislature seats in California. Reapportionment was a collaboration by both parties to solidify party seats. The closed primary system guarantees that only the most liberal democrats and conservative Republicans get on the general election ballot because you win primaries by pandering to the most extreme members of your party, then because of reapportionment it is already decided which party's candidate will win. So, you end up with the most extreme examples of both parties in office.
and market manipulation I assume you mean the fact that the wholesalers didn't lower their prices and the distributers had to layoff their workers that maintain their systems.
Wholesale prices were lower. PG&E and SoCal Edison made a killing buying the much lower priced electricity on the open market and selling at the higher fixed price. Right up until the one time when demand outstripped supply because a San Onofre reactor was down and there was drought in the Pacific Northwest. Then they went crying to the government about how they got screwed for a few months after screwing ratepayers for years. And, government turned around and said "Here we will raise rate so you can screw ratepayers some more."
As I understood it, the deregulation bill was passed under the earlier Republican government, if this is true, then your comment about the liberal government not being able to let go, should apply to the conservatives as well.
The legislature was democrat dominated, but that is beside the point, since I think the vote was unanimous (maybe 1 dissenter).
Interestingly one can test these two competing views. One observation is that the highest prices hit not during summer when power usage is highest, but during a cooler period. The market manipulation theory is fine with this observation, as it predicts that the crisis was caused by power companies cutting supply rather than trying to meet demand. How would you explain this observation?
As for what caused the crisis, it is simple. One of the reactors at San Onofre Nuclear plant was down during the entire so called crisis. From memory I think it was a 1200 Megawatt reactor. Which is something like 5% of all the power used in the state. Initially it was down for refueling, I don't remember the exact timeline, but it was early in the crisis, and I don't think there were any rolling blackouts at the time. It came back online for about two weeks, before a turbine blade was destroyed. This downed the reactor and took about 60 (give or take) days to replace (could have been a lot longer, but the vendor really pulled through on this one.) As I recall all of the blackouts and stage 3 alerts, etc. All occurred after the turbine blade broke.
What does this suggest... Simple, there was just barely sufficient capacity to keep things going with the reactor down for refueling. Maintenance at other power plants was probably scheduled for after the reactor was refueled in order to guarantee enough power. But, with the turbine failure, the reactor was down longer than needed and the other plants started scheduled maintenance which pushed everything over the edge. This was also exacerbated by reduced hydro-electric available from the Pacfic Northwest due to drought. And, finaly the trader's jumped in to make a killing.
So, what was the correct way to deal with power short falls.
1) Tell the truth. San Onofre was down, tell people they need to conserve in order to prevent blackouts. This also makes profiteering traders look really bad, since instead of taking advantage of a bad system they are taking advantage of basically an Act of God failure.
2) Put up extra money to get the turbine blade done early. i.e. The power company pays the normal cost for the blade. The state puts up $xxxxx per day before a certain date that the reactor comes up.
One other point, I think that nuclear reactor produced more power than all the plants that came onlien in the next year or two combined. i.e. they kept shwoing Davis celebrating the building of 100-200 megawatt plants. Which is a joke.
Well, as big as Dell, Gateway, and HP are, there are still a lot of systems sold by Tier 2 OEMs, white box assemblers (3 asian guys in a little office), and specialty shops (alienware, falcon...). And, all of these assemblers pretty much use off the shelf motherboard. So, most dont' get bought by do-it-yourself.
"the worldwide introduction of its next-generation, 64-bit AMD Opteron(TM) processor for servers and workstations will take place on April 22 in New York City"
All you need to do is make sure all your tests and asignments are too hard to use a traditional scale of 100-90 = A, 90-80 = B, 80-70 = C, etc.
Define hard?
The hardest tests I had were the ones where the material tested did not correspond to the material taught. Or, the material tested corresponded to material that was barely touched in both class and homework (i.e. the class and home work emphasized stuff that was not tested). Or, the teacher just sucked.
I recall one class where I got a D on the first midterm, (I got cocky and didn't spend the time I needed). The next midterms and final I got an A on one, and B on the other. Mostly due to going to the review seesion prior to the tests which were run by the other professor. I made some other changes by working on the homework more, but I still didn't really ge the material until the review session. I would say that is pretty good evidence that the instuctor sucked, not my ability to learn.
Pedestrians are not *automatically* harmless, and an object that makes it easy to go at the maximum speed of a pedestrian is not necessarily harmless either.
I don't know for sure, but are people banned from running on sidewalks? A 3 hour marathon averages a little under 9 miles per hour. A 6 minute mile is 10 mph. So, I will agree with the segway ban as long as runners are not allowed on sidewalks either.
Read the complaint. IANAL. This probably won't get thrown out. Although the DMCA portion will probably be thrown out, but it will be buried in the rest of the suit in favor of the plaintiff. Even the patent infringement portion may be thrown out. But, arguably the deceptive trade practice section will probably stand in that the defendant implies the universal remote is just as good as the original, and it is not. So, what you will get is a big long ruling that rule sin favor of the plaintiff on decptive trade practices, and glosses over the DMCA and patent infringement counts.
Do you have any idea what it would take cover 66,000 km^2 with PV cells? The costs in dollars and natural resources would be astronomical. I don't even want to think about it.
No more than some other common human undertakings. How much natural resources were used to build housing and businesses across this country? How much forest was destroyed? How much earth is moved to mine coal? How many resources were required to build the road systems?
How many dollars and natural resources do all of our other energy resources cost, not to mention pollution?
And yeah, I think most people would be a little upset if we wiped out the entire mojave desert. Eh, we didn't care about that ecosystem, right? Sorry Mr Gila Monster!
Well, of course you couldn't use the whole mojave desert, it was just to give context. You would use roof tops across the country, combined with large scale production in places that have lots of sunlight. Spread out from Southern California to Texas most likely.
There is also the fact that there are other ways to harness solar energy than PV, that would supplment PV. This includes wind and hydro-electric. And, personally I don't have that much problem with fission power, yes, there are waste products that we actually have to deal with instead of just dumping them into the air, but I would rather deal with a few 100 tons of radioactive waste whose effect is generally well understood, than millions of tons of green house gases whose effects are unknown.
It would change the role of utilities. Utilities would provide extra power to those who cannot be self sufficient (businesses primarily), and they would purchase excess power to resell to businesses and store as hydrogen in order to provide energy to sell at night, on cloudy days, and auto fuel.
In addition, we already know cities like Tokyo have distinctly different weather patterns due to all the manmade structures. I wonder how covering a few thousand kilometers with metal and glass would affect the weather for the US Southwest?
And, how much does burning fossil fuels change the climate of the entire planet. The only other real alternative is fusion, and no one has figured out how to make that work, and it is perpetually 50 years off. Solar build out could start today. and, yes it would be decades before there was enough to replace fossil fuels, which is why you start today.
Even if you covered huge areas with PV, you still need to factor in how much petroleum products it would take to build it and maintain it.
PV generally pays back its energy input in 3-4 years. And, have life spans of at least 20 years (at least that is the warranty period). If you are referring to petroleum products used as raw material instead of energy, I think PV is mostly semiconductor which isn't made from petroleum. Current PV may have some plastics, but I don't believe it is a requirement, just cheap. Plus, you could use a couple more years worth of energy to convert plant matter to plastic.
Note, doubling efficiency at the same energy input would result in payback in half the time.
I suspect that once we have employed solar, wind, geothermal and etc to limits of any forseeable technology there will still be shortfall.
Not likely.
According to this site: http://www.nmsea.org/Curriculum/7_12/The_Solar_Res ource.htm
You need 33,400 square km to produce enough energy, now their efficiency estimate is about 2x what we are acepting here. So, double that to 66,800 square kilometers. The US has 9,158,960 of total area. So, to produce all of our electricity at 17% efficiency requires 0.7% of the total land area. Which is of course a meaningless number without some other reference. So, the mojave desert is about 65000 sq km, the sonoran desert in Arizona, California, and Mexico is 310,000 sq kilometers.
So, figure between rooftops, and god forsaken places in the middle of nowhere there is definitely enough room to put enough solar to power the entire US. Storage is a problem, but that is what hydrogen is for.
Of course, without fossil fuels to rail against rabid environmentalists will be pissed about covering large stretches of land with PV.
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Or just buy a product that meets your needs, save development costs, have them come in and install and support it and not have to pay extraneous developers money you don't need to spend.
Too simplistic. You always pay for development, the question is only what portion you get allocated. Open source and software companies are simply two different means of aggregating the resources of many users in order to produce software the users need. The users always pay for development one way or another. Purchased software has the development cost in the license fees, open source software has the development costs in the support contract, the hardware purchase, the programmer on staff, or whatever other means you can think of. The question is which gets you the most productivity for your dollar.
As opposed to FS/OSS, which just forks, or the maintainers leave it to die and nobody picks it up. Right... your idiocy knows no bounds.
All software can potentially die, closed source or open source. The advantage of open source is because the source is available, if you can afford it, some one will maintain it for you. This should theoretically work for closed source software as well, but other factors come in that can push the cost above what an OSS support contract might cost. One of those factors is competition.
I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying get fucking real with it's limitations right now. Right now, there is a lot of shit you can't do with open source.
This is a good point. There are definitely limitations to the currently available software. And, there are questions as to whether open source development will be the most cost effective model for getting some features.
Dastardly
Because Postgres doesn't have the infastructure due to high costs for software licenses. That is what stops Postgres from offering that type of support. Hiring and training support staff to provide support requires a good amount of investment. Postgres, unless they received heavy investments, will never be able to do this.
I think you are a little off. I could say many years ago:
"Oracle didn't have the infrastructure to to develop a database because they don't sell hardware. Hiring and training programmer's requires a good amount of investment. Oracle, unless they received heavy investments, will never be able to develop a database."
Obviously they did this. If a return on investment is there some one will make the investment. Now convincing some one to take that kind of risk to compete against a company with Oracle's reputation may never happen with out gradually building a reputation for quality support from the bottom up. Note this has nothing to do with Closed Source or Open Source. It is Oracle's reputation and talent in this area.
True, but you have burn rate for paying consultants in training. Burn rate is offset by investments and license costs.
This is no different than a company saying I want to develop a closed source database to compete against Oracle. That burn rate is equal to paying programmers to make the database and consultants in training to support it offset by investments and license costs. Using open source the burn rate is paying for just consultants in training offset by just investments. (somewhat simplistic, I know.)
I am not saying it will happen, but that the factors in the decision have little to do with open source or closed source.
Dastardly
Open source is not the end-all solution. You cannot do everything with open source. His gentoo forums may provide all the service he needs, but when it comes to my databases, our Oracle support contract is worth more than anything Postgres or MySQL can hope to provide.
Correct Open Source is not the end all solution, but your Oracle Support contract has nothing to do with Open Source or Closed Source. It has to do with what your support provider is willing to provide. There is no reason some one could not offer the same level of support you get from Oracle for Postgres. Whether anyone ever does has more to do with business and competetive issues than technical reasons. i.e. an equivalent support contract would not cost that much less for Postgres than Oracle support + licenses. Because the Postgres supporter will still have to stress test code to make sure they don't get hammered. After that, the discount would still have to be enough to overcome Oracle's reputation in this area.
Dastardly
I usually see someone rewrite the editor from scratch and advertise their version as having printing capabilities.
... are basically web browsers, but there feature sets are slightly different, and therefore scratch different itches. One issue with web browsers is that there are multiple niches (small feature set, small foot print; large feature sets, larger footprint). What I expect wil happen is that within each niche there will be convergence on one particular code base, and given compatible licenses convergence towards at least some common code.
And, from that you get inefficiency. On the otherhand as long as it doesn't get too out of hand it introduces a little competition which results in better code. And, in a world of incomplete information you will definitely get people duplicating work. Especially in the early stages of development where everyone is trying to scratch the same itch, and has different priorities for which part fo the itch to scratch. I think the large number of open source web browsers are a good example of this. Mozilla, Konqueror,
Are you a programmer? We need more of them like you.
Yes.
The success of a product at large depends on every developer having a common goal; the success of the product at large. It's not going to work to say "I need a text editor that does color coding of my HTML" and ignore basic needs like printing, display, sound and document model subsystems that the users truly need.
Why not? If all you need is a "text editor that does color coding of my HTML", and it fits your needs you just do it, and put it out there. Now, some one else might need the same thing with printing, so rather than write the text editor part on their own, they add printing to the original code. But, it does generally require a user with a need and the programming skill to write code to fulfill that need. That is where business comes into the picture. I am IBM and my customer needs a computer that does a list of things. I can give them 90% of those things with Open Source code already available. 5% requires changes to Open Source code which I then return to the Open Source projects. The other 5% involves custom code on top of the Open Source software, and/or code so customer specific that releasing the source doesn't make sense. I can make this solution available to the customer for less than the cost of using proprietary software, and possibly end up with a higher profit margin.
Dastardly
Oh come on. The GPL is about as close to communism as you can get in the software world.
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but you have to give back any changes to the community".
I want to requalify that slightly because the community isn't necessarily why some one licenses their code with the GPL (except RMS, maybe).
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but if you are going to distribute it make sure I can get your changes too."
This is how some one writing GPL software gets economic benefit from the software by receiving the benefit of programming by those who use his programming.
Note, if you modify GPL software and never distribute it, your changes never have to be revealed. Although there is benefit to revealing those changes in order that you don't have to keep adding them in when some one else makes a change that you want.
Commnity tends to develop from this as a means of preventing anarchy and excessive forking.
Dastardly
The MTBF for a component would be listed at 300 flight hours, and when he asked how they arrived at such a nice round figure, managers would retroactively come up with a listing where each sub-component had MTBFs listed to decimal places, 34.8712 hours, 29.1109 hours, ... and they all conveniently added up to exactly 300 hours.
Is this as bad as looks with lower MTBF numbers adding up to a higher MTBF number?
Dastardly
better yet, a windmill farm that converts the birds it kills into energy.
So, combine a wind farm with a Changing World Tech plant to convert organic material into oil.
It is 85% efficient. It only uses 15% of the extracted energy to run the process.
Now that we have XML and standard libraries for reading XML, it makes handling these documents a snap. Any program that needs to read them can simply have an XML parser plugged into it. The integrity of the documents themselves is maintained by the fact that they don't work if they're not properly marked up. So all these documents work, 100% all the time, and writing programs to read said documents is very simple and not prone to errors.
I agree, I was waiting for some one from document land to chime in here. I think the big complaint seems to be applying XML to something other than documents.
For me the big advantage fo XML is as a simplification of SGML. The parsers are simpler. XSL and XSL:FO are significantly easier than DSSSL and FOSI (at least to me). Basically, XML has all the advantages of SGML while getting rid of a lot of the complications.
So, for everyone bitching about XML, please bitch about it possibly being shoehorned into apllications it isn't desgined for. And, if you don't like it as a document format, try writing a Perl parser for SGML.
Dastardly
I just wish we had gotten that huge particle accelerator and congress hadn't overturned it, oh for the chance to produce new and undiscovered particles...
The SSC is crap. The (Large Hadron Collider) LHC being built at CERN reaches higher energies at a fraction of the cost of the SSC. I think RHIC at Brookhaven gets pretty close to SSC energies. Although, applying the technology being used for LHC to a tunnel the size of the one SSC was supposed to use would reach even higher energies.
That suggests an idea. Maybe the tunnel and detector caverns should be approved and built first, then decide what to put in them later.
Dastardly
Being smart doesn't make you unpopular in school. I knew plenty of popular smart kids in high school. What makes you unpopular is not wearing the in-clothes, looking akward or having no social skills. It's about being obsessed with computers or Star Trek. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
And, if you actually read and comprehended the article you would realize this is exactly what he said. He said there is nothing inherent about being smart that makes you unpopular. The difference was that the popular kids spend most of their time working at beig popular and the nerds, don't. I know a lot of popular kids are very smart, but they apply more of those smarts and their time to being popular, and the "nerds" don't. So, the difference isn't intelligence it is priorities.
On the other hand, it makes me feel better about living in Philadelphia, PA, where we pay a 4% tax on our income for the apparent "privilege" of having a job.
Just to make you feel even better we pay 9% in California. Although it is progressive and doesn't start to kick in until $40,000.
The California government has become, for all intensive purposes, a socialist one.
I don't know if I would go quite as far as socialist. But, California Democrats are a bunch of tax and spend morons who don't know the first thing about balancing a budget, planning for the future, or what the average person wants. You know why there is a budget crisis according to them, the wealthy are not making enough money, so they have decided to take a larger proportion from them. I also use the term wealthy loosely, since just about anyone who still has a decent job is going to get raped.
Of course all their spending increases of the last few years were based on profits from stocks and options, which couldn't possibly last. But, what do they care. They are only in office for 6 or 8 years maximum (term limits). So, there sole priority is to pass as much legislation that will get them publicity and campaign donations so they can run for som eother office. While there are issues with career politicians who lose touch with their constituency, there appears to also be a serious problem with term limited politician whose sole purpose is to get as much publicity, campaign contributions, and/or special interest legislation to get them a job after office.
On top of this we have an election system whose purpose is to maintain the status quo. There are maybe 1 or 2 contested elections for legislature seats in California. Reapportionment was a collaboration by both parties to solidify party seats. The closed primary system guarantees that only the most liberal democrats and conservative Republicans get on the general election ballot because you win primaries by pandering to the most extreme members of your party, then because of reapportionment it is already decided which party's candidate will win. So, you end up with the most extreme examples of both parties in office.
Dastardly
and market manipulation I assume you mean the fact that the wholesalers didn't lower their prices and the distributers had to layoff their workers that maintain their systems.
Wholesale prices were lower. PG&E and SoCal Edison made a killing buying the much lower priced electricity on the open market and selling at the higher fixed price. Right up until the one time when demand outstripped supply because a San Onofre reactor was down and there was drought in the Pacific Northwest. Then they went crying to the government about how they got screwed for a few months after screwing ratepayers for years. And, government turned around and said "Here we will raise rate so you can screw ratepayers some more."
As I understood it, the deregulation bill was passed under the earlier Republican government, if this is true, then your comment about the liberal government not being able to let go, should apply to the conservatives as well.
The legislature was democrat dominated, but that is beside the point, since I think the vote was unanimous (maybe 1 dissenter).
Interestingly one can test these two competing views. One observation is that the highest prices hit not during summer when power usage is highest, but during a cooler period. The market manipulation theory is fine with this observation, as it predicts that the crisis was caused by power companies cutting supply rather than trying to meet demand. How would you explain this observation?
As for what caused the crisis, it is simple. One of the reactors at San Onofre Nuclear plant was down during the entire so called crisis. From memory I think it was a 1200 Megawatt reactor. Which is something like 5% of all the power used in the state. Initially it was down for refueling, I don't remember the exact timeline, but it was early in the crisis, and I don't think there were any rolling blackouts at the time. It came back online for about two weeks, before a turbine blade was destroyed. This downed the reactor and took about 60 (give or take) days to replace (could have been a lot longer, but the vendor really pulled through on this one.) As I recall all of the blackouts and stage 3 alerts, etc. All occurred after the turbine blade broke.
What does this suggest... Simple, there was just barely sufficient capacity to keep things going with the reactor down for refueling. Maintenance at other power plants was probably scheduled for after the reactor was refueled in order to guarantee enough power. But, with the turbine failure, the reactor was down longer than needed and the other plants started scheduled maintenance which pushed everything over the edge. This was also exacerbated by reduced hydro-electric available from the Pacfic Northwest due to drought. And, finaly the trader's jumped in to make a killing.
So, what was the correct way to deal with power short falls.
1) Tell the truth. San Onofre was down, tell people they need to conserve in order to prevent blackouts. This also makes profiteering traders look really bad, since instead of taking advantage of a bad system they are taking advantage of basically an Act of God failure.
2) Put up extra money to get the turbine blade done early. i.e. The power company pays the normal cost for the blade. The state puts up $xxxxx per day before a certain date that the reactor comes up.
One other point, I think that nuclear reactor produced more power than all the plants that came onlien in the next year or two combined. i.e. they kept shwoing Davis celebrating the building of 100-200 megawatt plants. Which is a joke.
Dastardly
Well, as big as Dell, Gateway, and HP are, there are still a lot of systems sold by Tier 2 OEMs, white box assemblers (3 asian guys in a little office), and specialty shops (alienware, falcon...). And, all of these assemblers pretty much use off the shelf motherboard. So, most dont' get bought by do-it-yourself.
I can't afford a server. I need a workstation and i need 64bit now
From the press release (not the cnet article).
"the worldwide introduction of its next-generation, 64-bit AMD Opteron(TM) processor for servers and workstations will take place on April 22 in New York City"
Emphasis added.
Also that AMD will not release until M$ is ready. The should release for Linux, but want to keep us hanging on as Intel's grip on the market tightens.
Did you even read the article?? Opteron is still scheduled for April 22. It is the release for Linux.
All you need to do is make sure all your tests and asignments are too hard to use a traditional scale of 100-90 = A, 90-80 = B, 80-70 = C, etc.
Define hard?
The hardest tests I had were the ones where the material tested did not correspond to the material taught. Or, the material tested corresponded to material that was barely touched in both class and homework (i.e. the class and home work emphasized stuff that was not tested). Or, the teacher just sucked.
I recall one class where I got a D on the first midterm, (I got cocky and didn't spend the time I needed). The next midterms and final I got an A on one, and B on the other. Mostly due to going to the review seesion prior to the tests which were run by the other professor. I made some other changes by working on the homework more, but I still didn't really ge the material until the review session. I would say that is pretty good evidence that the instuctor sucked, not my ability to learn.
Dastardly
Pedestrians are not *automatically* harmless, and an object that makes it easy to go at the maximum speed of a pedestrian is not necessarily harmless either.
I don't know for sure, but are people banned from running on sidewalks? A 3 hour marathon averages a little under 9 miles per hour. A 6 minute mile is 10 mph. So, I will agree with the segway ban as long as runners are not allowed on sidewalks either.
Read the complaint. IANAL. This probably won't get thrown out. Although the DMCA portion will probably be thrown out, but it will be buried in the rest of the suit in favor of the plaintiff. Even the patent infringement portion may be thrown out. But, arguably the deceptive trade practice section will probably stand in that the defendant implies the universal remote is just as good as the original, and it is not. So, what you will get is a big long ruling that rule sin favor of the plaintiff on decptive trade practices, and glosses over the DMCA and patent infringement counts.
Do you have any idea what it would take cover 66,000 km^2 with PV cells? The costs in dollars and natural resources would be astronomical. I don't even want to think about it.
No more than some other common human undertakings. How much natural resources were used to build housing and businesses across this country? How much forest was destroyed? How much earth is moved to mine coal? How many resources were required to build the road systems?
How many dollars and natural resources do all of our other energy resources cost, not to mention pollution?
And yeah, I think most people would be a little upset if we wiped out the entire mojave desert. Eh, we didn't care about that ecosystem, right? Sorry Mr Gila Monster!
Well, of course you couldn't use the whole mojave desert, it was just to give context. You would use roof tops across the country, combined with large scale production in places that have lots of sunlight. Spread out from Southern California to Texas most likely.
There is also the fact that there are other ways to harness solar energy than PV, that would supplment PV. This includes wind and hydro-electric. And, personally I don't have that much problem with fission power, yes, there are waste products that we actually have to deal with instead of just dumping them into the air, but I would rather deal with a few 100 tons of radioactive waste whose effect is generally well understood, than millions of tons of green house gases whose effects are unknown.
It would change the role of utilities. Utilities would provide extra power to those who cannot be self sufficient (businesses primarily), and they would purchase excess power to resell to businesses and store as hydrogen in order to provide energy to sell at night, on cloudy days, and auto fuel.
In addition, we already know cities like Tokyo have distinctly different weather patterns due to all the manmade structures. I wonder how covering a few thousand kilometers with metal and glass would affect the weather for the US Southwest?
And, how much does burning fossil fuels change the climate of the entire planet. The only other real alternative is fusion, and no one has figured out how to make that work, and it is perpetually 50 years off. Solar build out could start today. and, yes it would be decades before there was enough to replace fossil fuels, which is why you start today.
Even if you covered huge areas with PV, you still need to factor in how much petroleum products it would take to build it and maintain it.
PV generally pays back its energy input in 3-4 years. And, have life spans of at least 20 years (at least that is the warranty period). If you are referring to petroleum products used as raw material instead of energy, I think PV is mostly semiconductor which isn't made from petroleum. Current PV may have some plastics, but I don't believe it is a requirement, just cheap. Plus, you could use a couple more years worth of energy to convert plant matter to plastic.
Note, doubling efficiency at the same energy input would result in payback in half the time.
I suspect that once we have employed solar, wind, geothermal and etc to limits of any forseeable technology there will still be shortfall.
s ource.htm
Not likely.
According to this site: http://www.nmsea.org/Curriculum/7_12/The_Solar_Re
You need 33,400 square km to produce enough energy, now their efficiency estimate is about 2x what we are acepting here. So, double that to 66,800 square kilometers. The US has 9,158,960 of total area. So, to produce all of our electricity at 17% efficiency requires 0.7% of the total land area. Which is of course a meaningless number without some other reference. So, the mojave desert is about 65000 sq km, the sonoran desert in Arizona, California, and Mexico is 310,000 sq kilometers.
So, figure between rooftops, and god forsaken places in the middle of nowhere there is definitely enough room to put enough solar to power the entire US. Storage is a problem, but that is what hydrogen is for.
Of course, without fossil fuels to rail against rabid environmentalists will be pissed about covering large stretches of land with PV.