The problem with this mentality is that precedent has already been set. Patents have already been filed and issued on other, naturally-occuring genes. In order to ensure that information about the genetic material of the SARS virus would remain available to the public, the Canadian researchers had to act. According to the article, just a day or two after these researchers filed their patent, Chinese researchers began clamboring for a patent for the entire SARS virus.
No game, not even other games in the series, have scared me quite as effectively as Resident Evil 2. When you first encounter Lickers, the one that skitters by the window puts you on edge. Then, in perfect form, just as you begin to forget about what you saw, you encounter this hideous, blood-drooling beast. And later, the scene in the interrogation/obersvation room...terrifying. Even knowing what's coming, I have to psysche myself up to do that room. After playing this game for the first time, I damn near killed my cat, when it leapt onto my bed. I thought the lickers were coming to eat my head!
I've been following this game for quite some time and I think that what's causing you to complain is the very element of EVE that I find most attractive. Instead of having in-game quests, provided by the administration (and there still might be those, if the administration is running the big entities on the grid, when the game is first released), the stories that occur are player-driven. To me, EverQuest and its ilk is like the high-end graphical evolution of the MUD - lots of things to kill, lots of quests, light on the character development (note: not stat advancement - real character development). EVE looks more like the graphical evolution of the MUX, the MUD's younger sibling, where interaction, role play, and storytelling are more often the goals.
The first question this raises in my mind concerns whether or not the law that imposes such a penalty on copyright infringement is new. Was existing copyright law amended to allow for stiffer penalties, since the possible magnitude of copyright infringement only becomes greater with so much information available digitally? Even if the law is new, is it merely an extension of existing copyright law, but applicable to all copyrights? Does it affect only copyright law and not other aspects which may affect copyright infringement?
If the answer to an/all of the above questions is yes, then I think this is a good thing! It means that the large-scale infractions of copyright law are still capable of being dealt with by simple applications of current laws or laws that deal specifically with copyrights. It demonstrates that one does not need a law like the DMCA (or the so-called super-DMCA's) to protect the rights of the music industry (as much as we like to whine, they do have rights).
This is a really sad phenomenon, too. It happens with a lot of games. I know that I rejected Final Fantasy VIII, because it's a wart on that great franchise. A lot of people I know despise Chrono Cross, because it tarnishes the name of Chrono Trigger. That's the problem with success - if you can't maintain the same high level of excess in your future endeavors, some of the people you wowed the first time around will be unhappy. I'm certainly going to try out HL2. As long as it plays well, I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I mean, I occasionally load up HL just to run through the hazard course, because the HEV suit is such a pleasure to operate.
Not only the vibrations that are caused when you're walking around with the phone in your pocket, but the vibrations that you cause when you're speaking into the phone. Not all of the energy of your voice is being converted to electrical signal. If some of that could be recaptured and used to power the phone, that would be a good use for this technology. I can also see this sort of thing being popular in the novelty industry. Little devices that stick on top of your speakers that light up or spin or dance when the speaker's vibrating. And instead of requiring batteries, like early incarnations of such novelty devices, these power themselves.
The first of these concerns is a matter of semantics. Changing humanity into something other than human - ie: being no longer able to breed with an unmodified human - may be considered an artificial boost to evolution. In other words, the development of a new species by "selection" (albeit, unnatural selection). Whether this is a good or bad thing is open to debate, of course.
The second concern is really very valid. I remember playing Civilization: Call to Power and seeing the jokes that were cracked about various models of children that were parcicularly popular. But all you have to do is look at inbred plant populations to realize that homoginization of the genome is not healthy for a species. Weren't Irish potato blights a particular problem because all of the plants were susceptible to a single disease?
This is very surprising news to me. Not only has our home Lexmark printer provided flawless service, the professional Lexmark printers I've seen also had better records than the HP printers next to them. Toner cartridges were easier to replace, paper jams were nominally less common. All around, I thought the Lexmarks were better. I'll keep an eye on our home printer, though. If it develops crooked printing, I'll note to my folks that this is a common problem with Lexmark printers. Maybe we'll just get a professional printer next time, anyhow.
I'm definitely interested in your remarks about Lexmark printers.
Having purchases HP Deskjet series printers since around the time of the 600 series, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the print quality. The first few pages with each ink cartridge are clean and crisp. Very quickly, however, problems develop and the print invariably becomes smeared on the page, resulting in unclear print and streaks and lines on the page.
However, within the past year we purchased an inexpensive Lexmark unit. Granted, the ink is costly, but the printer has held up remarkably well. It's used for semi-professional work, as my mother uses it to generate many handout templates for the class she teaches. (She gets copies made at the college, but even at that, a single handout could be fifteen pages.) The print is still clean and crisp, the allignment is just fine. It's not the fastest printer I've ever seen, but I'm much more satisfied with the quality of the end product than I was with the quality that HP printers provided. What sort of experiences have you had with Lexmark printers that you're so turned off to them?
The discussion has come full circle. The argument then, is not whether such technology should be allowed to exist, but whether it is ethical for it to be used to make free reproductions of music or software that was created by somebody else. I agree that the RIAA's response to these doings is excessive. However, I think that some response is justified. I don't agree that just because technology makes this sort of distribution possible that it's right for it to be used to do so.
The problem with that sort of model is that if you're able to get a digital reproduction of the music, then you can reproduce it for free for anybody who's interested. I'm not saying that you, personally, will do this. However, the recording industry's fears that this will be the trend, if they provide MP3's to subscribers is well-founded. It is not a terrible assumption to say that people who currently download all of their music will continue to do so, even if they can get individual tracks at some appropriate cost. They are tremendously afraid that a single user will have a subscription and then will make the music available to an entire university - and to be honest, I don't blame them for being afraid of this.
I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think it is a realistic assessment. Ethically speaking, socialism is ideal. Everybody's needs are satisfied and everybody works freely according to their ability. Unfortunately, it's never been seen to work in communities larger than just a few people (and even then, the community is likely only to thrive for a single generation). People look out for themselves to a greater or lesser degree and so this ideal case almost certainly cannot be achieved.
You ask whether it is ethical to create a society that implicitly contains intellectual haves and have nots. I feel, however, that this is inevitible, in the situation where intellectual property is the only thing of value (if software, for example, does not cost a relatively small fraction of the development cost for each user, then the idea that results in any piece of software is worth the entire development cost). That means that while I may have ideas that are valuable as a chemical engineer, unless everybody agrees to keep prices low and reasonable, which is just socialism, to a lesser degree, I'll have to charge an enormous premium for my chemical engineering ideas in order to afford music, computer software, literature, etc... Furthermore, people with less valuable ideas - those that provide utility but not productivity - will be harder pressed to identify the market to which their ideas are saleable.
A principle axiom of economics is that an action should be undertaken if the associated costs do not exceed the derived utility.
If I, a chemical engineer, never design a distillation column, never build a reactor, never work in a plant, have I earned my share of the food that the farmers and the fishermen in my community have gathered? The whole production/reward idea comes about as a result of having individuals not concentrating on producing food, but on doing other tasks which advance their society (which helps to preserve their way of life.) There has to be some way that I contribute to the society before I have the right to consume its resources. Otherwise, I'm a parasite. This is the origin of production/reward. People who contribute more to their society's wellbeing are agreed to deserve a greater share of the society's resources than those who produce less. This is fundamental to capitalism - the maintenance of equity. It relies on the principle that human beings are greedy, which you seem to think is not human nature. I disagree, because history bears out that moderate greed is a more successful strategy for survival than altruism.
I implicitly address this point in a later post. If people are no longer getting paid to produce consumer software, there will still be the open source software. However, if you're not a programmer, yourself, you're going to have to either be satisfied with what some other person thinks is a quality program (which may not really satisfy your needs, as a user) or personally comission the production of a piece of software that does satisfy your needs. Under the current model, market forces may be seen to drive software production toward better functionality and more widespread appeal. Consider the evolution of Windows, prior to it becoming the thousand-pound gorilla that it is now. Most people don't even remember versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was a vast improvement on these and, given how successful it has been Windows 95 (and subsequent, near-identical releases) are leaps and bounds ahead of 3.1. Granted, this market has become somewhat stagnant for other reasons, but up until this point, demand for this sort of software created a market for it.
From an economic standpoint, an item having a marginal cost of zero cannot be profitable. Such an item cannot be sold and therefore, initial costs cannot be recouped. This means that such an item will be produced only for personal use or comission (which is different than market sale).
If it is to be considered useful software, then it should provide some competetive advantage. If it does, then the company has incentive not to let anybody else get a hold of it. As soon as everybody has that software, then the company loses its advantage. Granted, once the software is out, then there's incentive for further innovation, since improvements must be made to regain competetive advantage.
I think that your analogy is the faulty one. If you could to go a concert and listen to a band play, then go home and reproduce the music yourself, by playing intstruments, singing, and making the recording, then your anaology would hold. Even then, did you write the lyrics or the musical score? Creation of those takes human talent - probably more talent than is required to record the music, once it's been written.
Why does Hostess - or the recording company - care how much effort it takes you to reproduce the item they sell? If the cost in equipment and effort is significantly lower than their sale price, then they must lower their sale price to match that cost. If they don't, consumers will simply go with the cheaper alternative. If the effective cost of producing your own CD (or your own cupcake) then the producer must lower his price to (you guessed it!) zero in order to keep up.
***
Another poster in this branch of the thread mentions that if the abovementioned situation comes to pass (legally), then new software will arise from the need of corporations performing other business functions. I don't think this is going to be beneficial to anybody, though. Under this model, the only people who produce software are the programmers employed by corporations to serve in-house needs and people who program largely for themselves or for a general cause (such as the open source movement.) However, the corporate software is going to be a huge trade secret. They can't really sell it, since as soon as one copy reaches the hands of somebody who doesn't stand to profit by keeping it a secret, anybody who wants it, has it for free. Furthermore, average users, like myself, who don't know much about programming (because we're employed in other fields) don't have a source of quality software. Since nobody's producing software solely for the purpose of selling software anymore, we have to rely on trickle-down from corporations or on small-scale programmers (You can certainly get what they think is quality software. Whether you'll like it is a crap shoot).
As far as this concerns music, I think that it will be harmful. I agree that today, music is manufactured and artificially high-priced. If there weren't such an incentive, there would be far fewer musicians. However, this means that there would also be less selection and variety. Like the software problem, described above, you'd have available the sort of music that the musicians like, but there's no guarantee that there'll be something that you like. I hapen to enjoy the selection that artificial scarcity provides (even if I think that the cost is not appropriate, even for the scarcity). Not all of the music is good, but there's enough of it that I can find something that is good. I am glad that I don't have to comission musicians to produce CD's for me. I have broad tastes and that would quickly grow very expensive. (Importing a pipes and drums band from Scotland would cost me more than all the CD's I own plus a dollar for every mp3 currently on my hard drive.)
Infinite reproduction at near-zero cost may be fine for material goods. However, ideas (and music is an idea, or sorts) need to be generated anew, as well as well as diseminated. If the near-zero cost of reproduction means that the consumer cost of the product will be near-zero, then you're going to have a difficult time finding people to generate new ideas. This means that there won't be any new products or new ideas, because it will be the easiest thing for everybody to just sit back and enjoy the free, readily available goods that they get by replication. Economics works on the principle that goods and services cost the producer something and that this cost will be conveyed to the consumer. If there is no cost associated with production, then there will be no producers (because there's no room for profit). Such a model cannot be any more successful than communism. In both situations, there is no reward for innovation or personal effort, which goes contrary to human nature. Communism fails because there arises an individual or group who will take advantage of the selflessness of the rest. Free Reproduction fails because it eliminates producers, which leads to stagnation.
I dislike this mentality and I think that it incorrectly identifies the meaning of 'sharing'. Sharing software is perfeclty fine in the same sense of sharing cupcakes. If I have enough cupcakes for the entire class and I give each one a cupcake, that's good. Likewise, if I buy 25 copies of SimCity 4 to hand out to my friends, that's okay too.
Where the issue grows problematical is that the means of reproducing software are far less expensive than the means of reproducing cupcakes. If I already have a computer (which is reasonable, if I own software), then reproducing it costs next to nothing. If I owned a Star Trek replicator and I bought a box of Hostess cupcakes, then replicated them and gave them away, I would have wronged Hostess. I did not come up with the recipe for those cupcakes nor did I do any real work to reproduce them. However, I'm distributing, for free, cupcakes that are identical to Hostess's. Just because I am able to do this does not mean that it is right or ethical for me to do so.
I don't know exactly what one would call the act of distributing, like that, but I certainly don't think it's sharing.
The maximum efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is, indeed, 100%. Obviously, this is impractical, because such an efficiency requires either an infinite difference between the temperature of the source and the sink or for the temperature of the sink to be absolute zero.
The equation for the efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is 1 - (TL/TH), where TL is the temperature of the cold sink and TH is the temperature of the hot source, both measured in an absolute temperature scale. Because practical considerations require that the sink be large and readily available, TL is seldom lower than 273K (the freezing temperature of water) and is often closer to 300K, which is a better approximation of room temperature. If your source is at approximately 500K, then the engine has an efficiency of 40%.
However, electrical storage media are considerably more efficient at releasing electrical or chemical energy than engines are at producing mechanical energy. Thus, batteries have enormous efficiencies. Fuel cells are still far behind batteries, in terms of efficiency.
You are correct about the heat problem. While fuel cells have a much higher energy density, allowing them to operate for much longer periods of time, thier efficiency is far less than that of batteries. While the energy lost to heat from a battery is just a few percent, the heat lost from a fuel cell can be as much as 50% of the total energy stored. However, since the energy density of hydrogen and methanol is more than twice that of batteries, you still get longer life. However, this does mean that as much energy is being disippated as heat (probably into your lap, in the case of a laptop computer!) as is being used to power the device.
The sheet is thinner than aluminum siding (which is very durable), I would presume. But so long as it's a little bit thicker and higher quality than kitchen foil, you can probably expect it to be durable enough to be used as an external material with little risk.
Unfortunately, I've seen disturbing evidence that some of the citizenry values the greed of corporations over the needs of the people. The other day, after reading the/. article about Nissan vs. Nissan, I told my parents about it, and they agreed that Nissan has more right to defend its name than Uzi Nissan does, because it's bigger, and that it would most appropriate for Uzi Nissan to change the name of his site or give up the URL entirely.
What this allows them to do is change the targetted demographic in realtime. They're allowed to change it as often as every four seconds. If the majority of the sample (60% of passing motorists, according to the article) are listening to a classic rock station, as you suggested, the appropriate ad may be for an automobile. On the other hand, if it's ten at night and the majority of motorists are listening to pop music, then the billboard can be changed to advertise Old Navy or Noxema. The gimmick here is not that the sign accurately targets any particular demographic. The gimmick is that a single sign may accurately target the most prevalent demographic currently looking.
It doesn't just apply to people with a cap on their bandwidth, beyond which they pay additional charges. I am unfortunate enough to still be connecting to the internet via a 56K modem. Every ad that comes up slows down my data transfer rate. If I pass through two or three sites and don't realize that I've accumulated a half dozen popups, my transfer rate is going to slow to a crawl. I'd much rather kill the popup before it can even start wasting my time.
Consider: If I know how to use VI or Emacs, I will know how to perform various important operations: opening files, saving files, printing documents, etc.. but I will not necessarily know, intuitively, how to do any of these things in a Windows application.
If I teach my kids to use Windows only for the operations that cannot be performed in Linux (mostly games, I would assume), unless I give them a Word clone like AbiWord or OpenWord, they're not going to know that Save, Open, and Print are obviously under the File menu. They won't know that Ctrl+S;Ctrl+P;[Return];Ctrl+X is a quick way to save, print, exit from any Office application. I don't want them to have to look around for these things when they're asked to write a paper in school. I want them to know these things like second nature.
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The problem with this mentality is that precedent has already been set. Patents have already been filed and issued on other, naturally-occuring genes. In order to ensure that information about the genetic material of the SARS virus would remain available to the public, the Canadian researchers had to act. According to the article, just a day or two after these researchers filed their patent, Chinese researchers began clamboring for a patent for the entire SARS virus.
No game, not even other games in the series, have scared me quite as effectively as Resident Evil 2. When you first encounter Lickers, the one that skitters by the window puts you on edge. Then, in perfect form, just as you begin to forget about what you saw, you encounter this hideous, blood-drooling beast. And later, the scene in the interrogation/obersvation room...terrifying. Even knowing what's coming, I have to psysche myself up to do that room. After playing this game for the first time, I damn near killed my cat, when it leapt onto my bed. I thought the lickers were coming to eat my head!
I've been following this game for quite some time and I think that what's causing you to complain is the very element of EVE that I find most attractive. Instead of having in-game quests, provided by the administration (and there still might be those, if the administration is running the big entities on the grid, when the game is first released), the stories that occur are player-driven. To me, EverQuest and its ilk is like the high-end graphical evolution of the MUD - lots of things to kill, lots of quests, light on the character development (note: not stat advancement - real character development). EVE looks more like the graphical evolution of the MUX, the MUD's younger sibling, where interaction, role play, and storytelling are more often the goals.
The first question this raises in my mind concerns whether or not the law that imposes such a penalty on copyright infringement is new. Was existing copyright law amended to allow for stiffer penalties, since the possible magnitude of copyright infringement only becomes greater with so much information available digitally? Even if the law is new, is it merely an extension of existing copyright law, but applicable to all copyrights? Does it affect only copyright law and not other aspects which may affect copyright infringement?
If the answer to an/all of the above questions is yes, then I think this is a good thing! It means that the large-scale infractions of copyright law are still capable of being dealt with by simple applications of current laws or laws that deal specifically with copyrights. It demonstrates that one does not need a law like the DMCA (or the so-called super-DMCA's) to protect the rights of the music industry (as much as we like to whine, they do have rights).
This is a really sad phenomenon, too. It happens with a lot of games. I know that I rejected Final Fantasy VIII, because it's a wart on that great franchise. A lot of people I know despise Chrono Cross, because it tarnishes the name of Chrono Trigger. That's the problem with success - if you can't maintain the same high level of excess in your future endeavors, some of the people you wowed the first time around will be unhappy. I'm certainly going to try out HL2. As long as it plays well, I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I mean, I occasionally load up HL just to run through the hazard course, because the HEV suit is such a pleasure to operate.
Not only the vibrations that are caused when you're walking around with the phone in your pocket, but the vibrations that you cause when you're speaking into the phone. Not all of the energy of your voice is being converted to electrical signal. If some of that could be recaptured and used to power the phone, that would be a good use for this technology. I can also see this sort of thing being popular in the novelty industry. Little devices that stick on top of your speakers that light up or spin or dance when the speaker's vibrating. And instead of requiring batteries, like early incarnations of such novelty devices, these power themselves.
The first of these concerns is a matter of semantics. Changing humanity into something other than human - ie: being no longer able to breed with an unmodified human - may be considered an artificial boost to evolution. In other words, the development of a new species by "selection" (albeit, unnatural selection). Whether this is a good or bad thing is open to debate, of course.
The second concern is really very valid. I remember playing Civilization: Call to Power and seeing the jokes that were cracked about various models of children that were parcicularly popular. But all you have to do is look at inbred plant populations to realize that homoginization of the genome is not healthy for a species. Weren't Irish potato blights a particular problem because all of the plants were susceptible to a single disease?
This is very surprising news to me. Not only has our home Lexmark printer provided flawless service, the professional Lexmark printers I've seen also had better records than the HP printers next to them. Toner cartridges were easier to replace, paper jams were nominally less common. All around, I thought the Lexmarks were better. I'll keep an eye on our home printer, though. If it develops crooked printing, I'll note to my folks that this is a common problem with Lexmark printers. Maybe we'll just get a professional printer next time, anyhow.
I'm definitely interested in your remarks about Lexmark printers.
Having purchases HP Deskjet series printers since around the time of the 600 series, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the print quality. The first few pages with each ink cartridge are clean and crisp. Very quickly, however, problems develop and the print invariably becomes smeared on the page, resulting in unclear print and streaks and lines on the page.
However, within the past year we purchased an inexpensive Lexmark unit. Granted, the ink is costly, but the printer has held up remarkably well. It's used for semi-professional work, as my mother uses it to generate many handout templates for the class she teaches. (She gets copies made at the college, but even at that, a single handout could be fifteen pages.) The print is still clean and crisp, the allignment is just fine. It's not the fastest printer I've ever seen, but I'm much more satisfied with the quality of the end product than I was with the quality that HP printers provided. What sort of experiences have you had with Lexmark printers that you're so turned off to them?
The discussion has come full circle. The argument then, is not whether such technology should be allowed to exist, but whether it is ethical for it to be used to make free reproductions of music or software that was created by somebody else. I agree that the RIAA's response to these doings is excessive. However, I think that some response is justified. I don't agree that just because technology makes this sort of distribution possible that it's right for it to be used to do so.
The problem with that sort of model is that if you're able to get a digital reproduction of the music, then you can reproduce it for free for anybody who's interested. I'm not saying that you, personally, will do this. However, the recording industry's fears that this will be the trend, if they provide MP3's to subscribers is well-founded. It is not a terrible assumption to say that people who currently download all of their music will continue to do so, even if they can get individual tracks at some appropriate cost. They are tremendously afraid that a single user will have a subscription and then will make the music available to an entire university - and to be honest, I don't blame them for being afraid of this.
I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think it is a realistic assessment. Ethically speaking, socialism is ideal. Everybody's needs are satisfied and everybody works freely according to their ability. Unfortunately, it's never been seen to work in communities larger than just a few people (and even then, the community is likely only to thrive for a single generation). People look out for themselves to a greater or lesser degree and so this ideal case almost certainly cannot be achieved.
You ask whether it is ethical to create a society that implicitly contains intellectual haves and have nots. I feel, however, that this is inevitible, in the situation where intellectual property is the only thing of value (if software, for example, does not cost a relatively small fraction of the development cost for each user, then the idea that results in any piece of software is worth the entire development cost). That means that while I may have ideas that are valuable as a chemical engineer, unless everybody agrees to keep prices low and reasonable, which is just socialism, to a lesser degree, I'll have to charge an enormous premium for my chemical engineering ideas in order to afford music, computer software, literature, etc... Furthermore, people with less valuable ideas - those that provide utility but not productivity - will be harder pressed to identify the market to which their ideas are saleable.
A principle axiom of economics is that an action should be undertaken if the associated costs do not exceed the derived utility.
If I, a chemical engineer, never design a distillation column, never build a reactor, never work in a plant, have I earned my share of the food that the farmers and the fishermen in my community have gathered? The whole production/reward idea comes about as a result of having individuals not concentrating on producing food, but on doing other tasks which advance their society (which helps to preserve their way of life.) There has to be some way that I contribute to the society before I have the right to consume its resources. Otherwise, I'm a parasite. This is the origin of production/reward. People who contribute more to their society's wellbeing are agreed to deserve a greater share of the society's resources than those who produce less. This is fundamental to capitalism - the maintenance of equity. It relies on the principle that human beings are greedy, which you seem to think is not human nature. I disagree, because history bears out that moderate greed is a more successful strategy for survival than altruism.
I implicitly address this point in a later post. If people are no longer getting paid to produce consumer software, there will still be the open source software. However, if you're not a programmer, yourself, you're going to have to either be satisfied with what some other person thinks is a quality program (which may not really satisfy your needs, as a user) or personally comission the production of a piece of software that does satisfy your needs. Under the current model, market forces may be seen to drive software production toward better functionality and more widespread appeal. Consider the evolution of Windows, prior to it becoming the thousand-pound gorilla that it is now. Most people don't even remember versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was a vast improvement on these and, given how successful it has been Windows 95 (and subsequent, near-identical releases) are leaps and bounds ahead of 3.1. Granted, this market has become somewhat stagnant for other reasons, but up until this point, demand for this sort of software created a market for it.
From an economic standpoint, an item having a marginal cost of zero cannot be profitable. Such an item cannot be sold and therefore, initial costs cannot be recouped. This means that such an item will be produced only for personal use or comission (which is different than market sale).
If it is to be considered useful software, then it should provide some competetive advantage. If it does, then the company has incentive not to let anybody else get a hold of it. As soon as everybody has that software, then the company loses its advantage. Granted, once the software is out, then there's incentive for further innovation, since improvements must be made to regain competetive advantage.
I think that your analogy is the faulty one. If you could to go a concert and listen to a band play, then go home and reproduce the music yourself, by playing intstruments, singing, and making the recording, then your anaology would hold. Even then, did you write the lyrics or the musical score? Creation of those takes human talent - probably more talent than is required to record the music, once it's been written.
Why does Hostess - or the recording company - care how much effort it takes you to reproduce the item they sell? If the cost in equipment and effort is significantly lower than their sale price, then they must lower their sale price to match that cost. If they don't, consumers will simply go with the cheaper alternative. If the effective cost of producing your own CD (or your own cupcake) then the producer must lower his price to (you guessed it!) zero in order to keep up.
***
Another poster in this branch of the thread mentions that if the abovementioned situation comes to pass (legally), then new software will arise from the need of corporations performing other business functions. I don't think this is going to be beneficial to anybody, though. Under this model, the only people who produce software are the programmers employed by corporations to serve in-house needs and people who program largely for themselves or for a general cause (such as the open source movement.) However, the corporate software is going to be a huge trade secret. They can't really sell it, since as soon as one copy reaches the hands of somebody who doesn't stand to profit by keeping it a secret, anybody who wants it, has it for free. Furthermore, average users, like myself, who don't know much about programming (because we're employed in other fields) don't have a source of quality software. Since nobody's producing software solely for the purpose of selling software anymore, we have to rely on trickle-down from corporations or on small-scale programmers (You can certainly get what they think is quality software. Whether you'll like it is a crap shoot).
As far as this concerns music, I think that it will be harmful. I agree that today, music is manufactured and artificially high-priced. If there weren't such an incentive, there would be far fewer musicians. However, this means that there would also be less selection and variety. Like the software problem, described above, you'd have available the sort of music that the musicians like, but there's no guarantee that there'll be something that you like. I hapen to enjoy the selection that artificial scarcity provides (even if I think that the cost is not appropriate, even for the scarcity). Not all of the music is good, but there's enough of it that I can find something that is good. I am glad that I don't have to comission musicians to produce CD's for me. I have broad tastes and that would quickly grow very expensive. (Importing a pipes and drums band from Scotland would cost me more than all the CD's I own plus a dollar for every mp3 currently on my hard drive.)
Infinite reproduction at near-zero cost may be fine for material goods. However, ideas (and music is an idea, or sorts) need to be generated anew, as well as well as diseminated. If the near-zero cost of reproduction means that the consumer cost of the product will be near-zero, then you're going to have a difficult time finding people to generate new ideas. This means that there won't be any new products or new ideas, because it will be the easiest thing for everybody to just sit back and enjoy the free, readily available goods that they get by replication. Economics works on the principle that goods and services cost the producer something and that this cost will be conveyed to the consumer. If there is no cost associated with production, then there will be no producers (because there's no room for profit). Such a model cannot be any more successful than communism. In both situations, there is no reward for innovation or personal effort, which goes contrary to human nature. Communism fails because there arises an individual or group who will take advantage of the selflessness of the rest. Free Reproduction fails because it eliminates producers, which leads to stagnation.
I dislike this mentality and I think that it incorrectly identifies the meaning of 'sharing'. Sharing software is perfeclty fine in the same sense of sharing cupcakes. If I have enough cupcakes for the entire class and I give each one a cupcake, that's good. Likewise, if I buy 25 copies of SimCity 4 to hand out to my friends, that's okay too.
Where the issue grows problematical is that the means of reproducing software are far less expensive than the means of reproducing cupcakes. If I already have a computer (which is reasonable, if I own software), then reproducing it costs next to nothing. If I owned a Star Trek replicator and I bought a box of Hostess cupcakes, then replicated them and gave them away, I would have wronged Hostess. I did not come up with the recipe for those cupcakes nor did I do any real work to reproduce them. However, I'm distributing, for free, cupcakes that are identical to Hostess's. Just because I am able to do this does not mean that it is right or ethical for me to do so.
I don't know exactly what one would call the act of distributing, like that, but I certainly don't think it's sharing.
The maximum efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is, indeed, 100%. Obviously, this is impractical, because such an efficiency requires either an infinite difference between the temperature of the source and the sink or for the temperature of the sink to be absolute zero.
The equation for the efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is 1 - (TL/TH), where TL is the temperature of the cold sink and TH is the temperature of the hot source, both measured in an absolute temperature scale. Because practical considerations require that the sink be large and readily available, TL is seldom lower than 273K (the freezing temperature of water) and is often closer to 300K, which is a better approximation of room temperature. If your source is at approximately 500K, then the engine has an efficiency of 40%.
However, electrical storage media are considerably more efficient at releasing electrical or chemical energy than engines are at producing mechanical energy. Thus, batteries have enormous efficiencies. Fuel cells are still far behind batteries, in terms of efficiency.
You are correct about the heat problem. While fuel cells have a much higher energy density, allowing them to operate for much longer periods of time, thier efficiency is far less than that of batteries. While the energy lost to heat from a battery is just a few percent, the heat lost from a fuel cell can be as much as 50% of the total energy stored. However, since the energy density of hydrogen and methanol is more than twice that of batteries, you still get longer life. However, this does mean that as much energy is being disippated as heat (probably into your lap, in the case of a laptop computer!) as is being used to power the device.
Unfortunately, complaints about unwanted email are considered spam by the filters and never actually reach support@aol.com.
The sheet is thinner than aluminum siding (which is very durable), I would presume. But so long as it's a little bit thicker and higher quality than kitchen foil, you can probably expect it to be durable enough to be used as an external material with little risk.
Unfortunately, I've seen disturbing evidence that some of the citizenry values the greed of corporations over the needs of the people. The other day, after reading the /. article about Nissan vs. Nissan, I told my parents about it, and they agreed that Nissan has more right to defend its name than Uzi Nissan does, because it's bigger, and that it would most appropriate for Uzi Nissan to change the name of his site or give up the URL entirely.
What this allows them to do is change the targetted demographic in realtime. They're allowed to change it as often as every four seconds. If the majority of the sample (60% of passing motorists, according to the article) are listening to a classic rock station, as you suggested, the appropriate ad may be for an automobile. On the other hand, if it's ten at night and the majority of motorists are listening to pop music, then the billboard can be changed to advertise Old Navy or Noxema. The gimmick here is not that the sign accurately targets any particular demographic. The gimmick is that a single sign may accurately target the most prevalent demographic currently looking.
It doesn't just apply to people with a cap on their bandwidth, beyond which they pay additional charges. I am unfortunate enough to still be connecting to the internet via a 56K modem. Every ad that comes up slows down my data transfer rate. If I pass through two or three sites and don't realize that I've accumulated a half dozen popups, my transfer rate is going to slow to a crawl. I'd much rather kill the popup before it can even start wasting my time.
Consider: If I know how to use VI or Emacs, I will know how to perform various important operations: opening files, saving files, printing documents, etc.. but I will not necessarily know, intuitively, how to do any of these things in a Windows application.
If I teach my kids to use Windows only for the operations that cannot be performed in Linux (mostly games, I would assume), unless I give them a Word clone like AbiWord or OpenWord, they're not going to know that Save, Open, and Print are obviously under the File menu. They won't know that Ctrl+S;Ctrl+P;[Return];Ctrl+X is a quick way to save, print, exit from any Office application. I don't want them to have to look around for these things when they're asked to write a paper in school. I want them to know these things like second nature.