Building the solar pannel requiers more energy than you get out of it. Same as a battery. It's only "efficient" for the end user.
Petrolium is efficient because we are just harvesting millions of years of sunlight-and-plant stored energy. In real terms, it's not efficient at all. Ethanol is more efficient, brewing burnable liquid fuel out of sugar, or using lye and methanol to crack vegetable oil into "diesel" fuel. Or just burn the veggie oil directly, like Heir Diesel did in his original engines.
All of these convert sunlight into fuel, with various efficiencies and usefulness. I think the direct use of veggie oil to be the best myself, but one still has to press the oil out!
The answer, I believe, is to use them all. Bio-diesel, veggie oil, ethanol, hydrogen, tide and wave forces, wind, sunlight, petrolium.
The "scarce resource" idea is a myth. 150 years ago, whale oil was an important strategic national resource. Silica is as common as sand, and more valuable than gold when formed into a computer chip.
Disecting commercials is an interesting exercise. Too bad it's tax money being spent on giving the commercials yet *another* showing.
I think it's fascinating the cultural and social aspects of advertizing. Effective commercials have to hook into as much "common" thinking as possible in order to be profitable. Or, like the famous Mac "Metropolis" commercial, link into our cultural shared imagery.
I look forward to real "smart chips", that can be used to recognize commercials and turn the sound off, maybe turn down the contrast for the duration of the commercial. I really hate the way stations turn up the volume during the commercials as a form of forced attention grabbing.
But the extra volume is good for one thing, I can hear the commercials end so I know when to come back from the kitchen/bathroom.
And if you come up with something that runs a net surplus, sell the power back to your local government mandated utility. Most government grants of monopoly for electrical power include a requirement that the utility buy back what you as a private individual produce.
Not all, you can be sure, but HomePower has good information sources on that.
You could, of course, spend a decade lobying governments and buying influence with the politicians, but that would just make you another Enron. It's much more efficient to just build it yourself.
However, taking you at face value, I would remind you that it was only after 1992, when the US Government stopped trying to control the routing tables, that what YOU know as "the internet" actually took off.
You might be surprised to know there was a time when it was illegal to use "the internet" for commercial purposes.
Many thousands of private individuals who worked on, contributed to, and built what you know as "the internet" didn't work for any government.
I recomend you read a book next time before posting.
If you want to risk your life in a home-built, go for it. That the faceless bureaucrats at the DMV get to decide what is and isn't "street legal" for everyone is a perfect example of corruption. A bit of bribery, you too can street legal.
To those who argue "safety safety safety!!!", that's simple. Prosecute liability for damage done. Gee, just like now. Being killed by a drunk in a wooden car is no worse than being killed by a drunk in a Ford Pinto.
In fact, with the weight savings, you're much less likely to be killed by some idiot in a wooden car.
About a year after I bought my latest Corbin motorcycle seat, I saw that they were going into the electric car business. Yep, saw the picture and knew it was a Corbin.
I'm glad they're selling. Good metro-area commuter/shopper.
Considering the 40,000 people who die in 4-wheeled and greater vehicles on the roads in America alone each year, I think you have no room to bemoan anyone elses choices in number of wheels.
I have outlined how coersion hurts some people, which you agree with. I have also stated that a lack of coersion hurts fewer people, which you disagree with.
You believe that it is right to take care of "everyone", yet you state that your system of coersion does, in fact, hurt people. This is a contradiction. Your ends are so important to you that you use force against others to achieve them. That you admit that you fail to achieve the universally beneficial ends demonstrates the weakness of your claims.
I also believe it is right to take care of people, and I do it by not using coersion. There may very well be some individuals who "slip through the cracks", but since you state that your system hurts people also, I consider these to at least cancel each other out.
Which leaves coersion as the only difference. Your system depends on it, my community flourishes without it.
The beauty of not enforcing one answer on everyone is also that if you, or anyone, comes up with a "better way" to do something, you are free to implement it. If it's good, I'll use it to. No force required.
You state, "What you MUST understand, is that there has to be SOME way to run the administration of communial costs."
I agree with you. Let those who use the service pay for it. As with my hospital example, I will gladly patronize those institutions that provide services to those who cannot afford it.
And those who you call thieves, who refuse to pay, are simply choosing not to use that service in the same way I don't buy a movie ticket for a movie I don't want to see.
That was easy, and no coersion used or needed.
Again, you have made no case for the benefit of using force against your neighbors, other than that projects that you approve of get funded more than you are willing to pay for them yourself. That's theft.
You're deeply confused. By making payment for something whether it is used or not manditory, you are robbing others. Just because you like to think that your pet program or project is so important that you are justified in coercing others to pay for it, does not make it any less theft.
You accuse someone who does not pay your tax as being a "thief". Yet this person has done nothing other than reject your theft of their property.
Consider the initiation of force. Someone who rejects a tax need do nothing. There is no action to take that initiates force or fraud against anyone.
Yet to collect the tax, coersion must be used against those who do *nothing*. That is the initiation of force.
And as yet, you have not shown me how someone who does nothing is somehow "wrong", and the black-suited thugs who break down their door in the middle of the night are "right".
If it were being run with tax money, there is also the matter that people would consider it a "free" serice and abuse it too. One glance at any government budget will show you the vast sums spent on pointless redundancy and outright graft.
That the users have to pay for it keeps the project lean and mean. Yes, I know the city backed it, even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.
You might be interested in the fact that this same service is being deployed in many different places around the world, for profit.
To counter the "socialist" arguments, lots of places I've lived have private water suppliers who always provide cleaner water than the "city" supply. Yes, even through their own pipes in the ground.
Metropolitan area fiber providers exist and are flourishing, selling LAN like speeds across town and further. there are lots of companies selling this kind of equipment from the startups to Lucent, the company formerly known as Bell Labs.
The only "unique" feature to this project is its starting as a "community" project. However, since no one is forced to pay for it, no one is forced to use it, it's hardly "socialist".
I applaud the for-thinking of the design engineers. This might as well be called an "open source" project all by itself! Vivat!
If you do store DNA sequencing information, make sure you only use lossless compression.
Or, for that matter, the issue for me is backup capasity again. With the advent of DVD-R (or whatever it's called today) I thought that "full backups" were going to be possible again. But now, with such vast quantities of data possible to have online and changing, backup issues again come to the fore.
Lossless compression helps, but now I'm stuck writing not 50% of a 4-Gig tape over the weekend, I have to write two or three full tapes.
As memory and disk space has become cheaper, bloat-ware uses more and more of it. I don't consider bloat-ware a good thing, but it cannot be fought any more than the monster shopping mall can be fought just because I happen to like mom and pop shops.
The difference between information and data, I guess. The next great invention I think will be the personal digital secretary, like the ones detailed by Daniel Keys Moran in his wonderful "books of continuing time", designed to sift through the impossible quantities of data yet still have the personal touch to say "Gee, that bit over there looks interesting. I think Bob would like that."
Remember that the SEC is not a cooperatively run citizens advocacy group, or watchdog group, or anything voluntary at all. It is a government agency that spends other peoples money to fund their pet projects.
That said, I might have contributed to such an educational program myself, if given the choice. Taxes provide no such choice.
"Certainly by those that pay property tax (and therefore own property)."
Good sir, if it is not compulsory, why is it a tax? What happens to someone who disagrees, and does not pay the tax? Why do you make such dependence on land being equal to wealth, when many wealthy people live in apartments, and many poor people live on farms?
I'm impressed by how deeply you feel your community benefits from this system. I'm not going to deny that your system of coercion provides some functionality, I merely wish you to justify your use of force and theft against others. Your alternative to "move if you don't like it" does not work, for the same reason that you would reject "move if you don't like it" if a thief broke into your home and stole your wealth.
Are you sure I'm the only person you have ever met who objects to someone else telling me how to live my life? I find that to be difficult to believe. This community of yours sounds more like Stepford-wives than any community I have ever seen.
Of course, since you are happy with your "tax", and everyone around you is happy with it, and everyone in the community agrees with what the money is spent on, I still do not understand why it is a tax. Why compulse people to pay what they are happy to pay?
Over and over again you say how your "community" depends on coersion to operate. Yet you also state you're happy about that. Since you're happy, there is no reason for coersion. The only reason for coersion is that someone is not happy with the situation and would not cooperate without being forced.
This is not a safe or stable community you live in. Anyone is able to be made a criminal by no action of their own, only the "vote" of their neighbors, or representitives they never wanted in the first place.
Since your community is based on initiating force against the people who live there, and you seem to believe this is a "good" thing, can you describe to me what argument it was that convinced you that initiating force against others was the right thing to do?
I'm also interested in why you want thieves to rob you. If you don't, then how do you reconsile defending your self while robbing others?
"My" community runs just fine by those who use a service paying for that use. There are also several different groups of people who get together to handle big projects, anyone not interested doesn't contribute. This makes for very efficient use of resources.
I make sure to only use a hospital that donates services to those who need it, but cannot afford it. Yes, it costs me more, but I feel it's worth while. Who knows when I'm going to need that service myself!
It's too bad that your community runs on coercion and force. I'm surprised that there are any people who are productive who haven't left for communities where their abilities are apreciated rather than punished. On the other hand, maybe your community doesn't let them leave.
I've noticed that some times I have to scroll through some random text in order to press "next" during installs, but so far I've never had to read anything.
Don't misunderstand me, it's clear that Sony tends to win in this matter. However, I would prefer not to pay twice. Making a backup might already be impossible, since my AiboLife has already run to "adulthood". I don't know, and I'm not sure I will ever try. I like knowing that I have the option however.
Sony has a history of propriatary thinking, e.g. Betamax.
As an Aibo owner, having the ability to revert to the original state of the software that I bought, the "Aibo Life" that lets the machine "age", would be wonderful. Since the original images have been removed, now I have no option but to buy the $100 software again.
Does your purchase of a "product" confer "ownership" or "license"?
I'm completely serious. The basis of property and income taxes is that the land or your labor isn't yours, you're just renting it from the government.
As with the Furbie example, the makers decided to treat "purchase" as "ownership". Sony, the RIAA, the DMCA, Microsoft, all consider "purchase" to be only a limited license to use the product.
Subject, of course, to change without notice by the license holder.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I couldn't have said it half as well.
Bravo.
Bob-
Building the solar pannel requiers more energy than you get out of it. Same as a battery. It's only "efficient" for the end user.
Petrolium is efficient because we are just harvesting millions of years of sunlight-and-plant stored energy. In real terms, it's not efficient at all. Ethanol is more efficient, brewing burnable liquid fuel out of sugar, or using lye and methanol to crack vegetable oil into "diesel" fuel. Or just burn the veggie oil directly, like Heir Diesel did in his original engines.
All of these convert sunlight into fuel, with various efficiencies and usefulness. I think the direct use of veggie oil to be the best myself, but one still has to press the oil out!
The answer, I believe, is to use them all. Bio-diesel, veggie oil, ethanol, hydrogen, tide and wave forces, wind, sunlight, petrolium.
The "scarce resource" idea is a myth. 150 years ago, whale oil was an important strategic national resource. Silica is as common as sand, and more valuable than gold when formed into a computer chip.
Bob-
Disecting commercials is an interesting exercise. Too bad it's tax money being spent on giving the commercials yet *another* showing.
I think it's fascinating the cultural and social aspects of advertizing. Effective commercials have to hook into as much "common" thinking as possible in order to be profitable. Or, like the famous Mac "Metropolis" commercial, link into our cultural shared imagery.
I look forward to real "smart chips", that can be used to recognize commercials and turn the sound off, maybe turn down the contrast for the duration of the commercial. I really hate the way stations turn up the volume during the commercials as a form of forced attention grabbing.
But the extra volume is good for one thing, I can hear the commercials end so I know when to come back from the kitchen/bathroom.
Bob-
So, what's stopping you?
Home Power magazine is a good place to start for ideas and things.
And if you come up with something that runs a net surplus, sell the power back to your local government mandated utility. Most government grants of monopoly for electrical power include a requirement that the utility buy back what you as a private individual produce.
Not all, you can be sure, but HomePower has good information sources on that.
You could, of course, spend a decade lobying governments and buying influence with the politicians, but that would just make you another Enron. It's much more efficient to just build it yourself.
Bob-
Creative reading of my earlier post.
However, taking you at face value, I would remind you that it was only after 1992, when the US Government stopped trying to control the routing tables, that what YOU know as "the internet" actually took off.
You might be surprised to know there was a time when it was illegal to use "the internet" for commercial purposes.
Many thousands of private individuals who worked on, contributed to, and built what you know as "the internet" didn't work for any government.
I recomend you read a book next time before posting.
Bob-
If you want to risk your life in a home-built, go for it. That the faceless bureaucrats at the DMV get to decide what is and isn't "street legal" for everyone is a perfect example of corruption. A bit of bribery, you too can street legal.
To those who argue "safety safety safety!!!", that's simple. Prosecute liability for damage done. Gee, just like now. Being killed by a drunk in a wooden car is no worse than being killed by a drunk in a Ford Pinto.
In fact, with the weight savings, you're much less likely to be killed by some idiot in a wooden car.
Bob-
About a year after I bought my latest Corbin motorcycle seat, I saw that they were going into the electric car business. Yep, saw the picture and knew it was a Corbin.
I'm glad they're selling. Good metro-area commuter/shopper.
Bob-
Considering the 40,000 people who die in 4-wheeled and greater vehicles on the roads in America alone each year, I think you have no room to bemoan anyone elses choices in number of wheels.
Bob-
I have outlined how coersion hurts some people, which you agree with. I have also stated that a lack of coersion hurts fewer people, which you disagree with.
You believe that it is right to take care of "everyone", yet you state that your system of coersion does, in fact, hurt people. This is a contradiction. Your ends are so important to you that you use force against others to achieve them. That you admit that you fail to achieve the universally beneficial ends demonstrates the weakness of your claims.
I also believe it is right to take care of people, and I do it by not using coersion. There may very well be some individuals who "slip through the cracks", but since you state that your system hurts people also, I consider these to at least cancel each other out.
Which leaves coersion as the only difference. Your system depends on it, my community flourishes without it.
The beauty of not enforcing one answer on everyone is also that if you, or anyone, comes up with a "better way" to do something, you are free to implement it. If it's good, I'll use it to. No force required.
Bob-
You state, "What you MUST understand, is that there has to be SOME way to run the administration of communial costs."
I agree with you. Let those who use the service pay for it. As with my hospital example, I will gladly patronize those institutions that provide services to those who cannot afford it.
And those who you call thieves, who refuse to pay, are simply choosing not to use that service in the same way I don't buy a movie ticket for a movie I don't want to see.
That was easy, and no coersion used or needed.
Again, you have made no case for the benefit of using force against your neighbors, other than that projects that you approve of get funded more than you are willing to pay for them yourself. That's theft.
Bob-
Blymie,
You're deeply confused. By making payment for something whether it is used or not manditory, you are robbing others. Just because you like to think that your pet program or project is so important that you are justified in coercing others to pay for it, does not make it any less theft.
You accuse someone who does not pay your tax as being a "thief". Yet this person has done nothing other than reject your theft of their property.
Consider the initiation of force. Someone who rejects a tax need do nothing. There is no action to take that initiates force or fraud against anyone.
Yet to collect the tax, coersion must be used against those who do *nothing*. That is the initiation of force.
And as yet, you have not shown me how someone who does nothing is somehow "wrong", and the black-suited thugs who break down their door in the middle of the night are "right".
Bob-
Yes, I find their use of open source commendable, from a personal point of view.
They still used tax money to do it.
Bob-
If it were being run with tax money, there is also the matter that people would consider it a "free" serice and abuse it too. One glance at any government budget will show you the vast sums spent on pointless redundancy and outright graft.
That the users have to pay for it keeps the project lean and mean. Yes, I know the city backed it, even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.
Bob-
You might be interested in the fact that this same service is being deployed in many different places around the world, for profit.
To counter the "socialist" arguments, lots of places I've lived have private water suppliers who always provide cleaner water than the "city" supply. Yes, even through their own pipes in the ground.
Metropolitan area fiber providers exist and are flourishing, selling LAN like speeds across town and further. there are lots of companies selling this kind of equipment from the startups to Lucent, the company formerly known as Bell Labs.
There are styles for wiring your own little community together on the cheap, then providing ISP service through something like the Linux router mentioned in this article.
The only "unique" feature to this project is its starting as a "community" project. However, since no one is forced to pay for it, no one is forced to use it, it's hardly "socialist".
I applaud the for-thinking of the design engineers. This might as well be called an "open source" project all by itself! Vivat!
Bob-
If you do store DNA sequencing information, make sure you only use lossless compression.
Or, for that matter, the issue for me is backup capasity again. With the advent of DVD-R (or whatever it's called today) I thought that "full backups" were going to be possible again. But now, with such vast quantities of data possible to have online and changing, backup issues again come to the fore.
Lossless compression helps, but now I'm stuck writing not 50% of a 4-Gig tape over the weekend, I have to write two or three full tapes.
As memory and disk space has become cheaper, bloat-ware uses more and more of it. I don't consider bloat-ware a good thing, but it cannot be fought any more than the monster shopping mall can be fought just because I happen to like mom and pop shops.
The difference between information and data, I guess. The next great invention I think will be the personal digital secretary, like the ones detailed by Daniel Keys Moran in his wonderful "books of continuing time", designed to sift through the impossible quantities of data yet still have the personal touch to say "Gee, that bit over there looks interesting. I think Bob would like that."
Bob-
The SEC is spending my tax money on this.
Remember that the SEC is not a cooperatively run citizens advocacy group, or watchdog group, or anything voluntary at all. It is a government agency that spends other peoples money to fund their pet projects.
That said, I might have contributed to such an educational program myself, if given the choice. Taxes provide no such choice.
Bob-
"Certainly by those that pay property tax (and therefore own property)."
Good sir, if it is not compulsory, why is it a tax? What happens to someone who disagrees, and does not pay the tax? Why do you make such dependence on land being equal to wealth, when many wealthy people live in apartments, and many poor people live on farms?
I'm impressed by how deeply you feel your community benefits from this system. I'm not going to deny that your system of coercion provides some functionality, I merely wish you to justify your use of force and theft against others. Your alternative to "move if you don't like it" does not work, for the same reason that you would reject "move if you don't like it" if a thief broke into your home and stole your wealth.
Are you sure I'm the only person you have ever met who objects to someone else telling me how to live my life? I find that to be difficult to believe. This community of yours sounds more like Stepford-wives than any community I have ever seen.
Of course, since you are happy with your "tax", and everyone around you is happy with it, and everyone in the community agrees with what the money is spent on, I still do not understand why it is a tax. Why compulse people to pay what they are happy to pay?
Bob-
Blymie,
Over and over again you say how your "community" depends on coersion to operate. Yet you also state you're happy about that. Since you're happy, there is no reason for coersion. The only reason for coersion is that someone is not happy with the situation and would not cooperate without being forced.
This is not a safe or stable community you live in. Anyone is able to be made a criminal by no action of their own, only the "vote" of their neighbors, or representitives they never wanted in the first place.
Since your community is based on initiating force against the people who live there, and you seem to believe this is a "good" thing, can you describe to me what argument it was that convinced you that initiating force against others was the right thing to do?
I'm also interested in why you want thieves to rob you. If you don't, then how do you reconsile defending your self while robbing others?
I can suggest some reading on the subject: Democracy, the God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for one.
Bob-
"My" community runs just fine by those who use a service paying for that use. There are also several different groups of people who get together to handle big projects, anyone not interested doesn't contribute. This makes for very efficient use of resources.
I make sure to only use a hospital that donates services to those who need it, but cannot afford it. Yes, it costs me more, but I feel it's worth while. Who knows when I'm going to need that service myself!
It's too bad that your community runs on coercion and force. I'm surprised that there are any people who are productive who haven't left for communities where their abilities are apreciated rather than punished. On the other hand, maybe your community doesn't let them leave.
Bob-
I've noticed that some times I have to scroll through some random text in order to press "next" during installs, but so far I've never had to read anything.
Is this the "agreement" you're talking about?
Bob-
Pay off the IRS, or you're not allowed to work.
Don't misunderstand me, it's clear that Sony tends to win in this matter. However, I would prefer not to pay twice. Making a backup might already be impossible, since my AiboLife has already run to "adulthood". I don't know, and I'm not sure I will ever try. I like knowing that I have the option however.
Sony has a history of propriatary thinking, e.g. Betamax.
If it saves just one life, it's worth it!
Only an idiot would argue against such a common sense safety measure.
Do it for the children.
As an Aibo owner, having the ability to revert to the original state of the software that I bought, the "Aibo Life" that lets the machine "age", would be wonderful. Since the original images have been removed, now I have no option but to buy the $100 software again.
Bob-
Does your purchase of a "product" confer "ownership" or "license"?
I'm completely serious. The basis of property and income taxes is that the land or your labor isn't yours, you're just renting it from the government.
As with the Furbie example, the makers decided to treat "purchase" as "ownership". Sony, the RIAA, the DMCA, Microsoft, all consider "purchase" to be only a limited license to use the product.
Subject, of course, to change without notice by the license holder.
Bob-