What about consistency? I talk to people all the time who are befuddled by MySQL's lax type checking. I know it's been hashed out before on/., but February 31st is NOT a date, and does not belong in any column named "date".
If your application has an bug and inserts an invalid date, you don't want that error to cascade to another application (or another part in your application) and cause more errors down the line. By the time you detect the bug, it could be almost impossible to determine the source of the bug.
Putting consistency checking in application A doesn't prevent application B from inserting invalid data. And when application A reports an error (due to it's wonderful in-application consistency checking), now you don't know what caused the error. It's long past the time that you can get meaningful state information from application B, at most you have database auditing tools that tell you "application B did it", but that's more easily implemented in PostgreSQL as well (triggers).
And I'm not talking about super-advanced users only. I am talking about everyone who wants to catch the error early when they have the most possible information. Everyone who's just a programmer who wants to be able to trust that data from the database comes in a meaningful form. Everyone that just wants the database to do either what they expect, or throw an error.
Exactly my feelings. Every time a non-Muslim does something horrible in the name of their religion, there are widespread denouncements of that person's actions among other members of that religion. When a Muslim does something horrible in the name of there religion, there are widespread excuses and defenses of their actions.
You are ignoring important points. Part of the reason the cli is so successful -- and it is successful -- is that it's not context-sensitive (for the most part).
What that means is that "grep" or another tool doesn't really care what program is passing it information, and it doesn't care what program it's passing information to. It has a well-defined input-output behavior, independent of context.
Your little idea for help might be nice, but it's limited. Some shells do offer little bits of help here or there (tab completion is the obvious example). There's only so much help you can display on the screen before it makes more sense to just use "man".
The thing about a CLI is that there are two major types of interfaces: those that present you with a set of options; and those that allow virtually limitless possibilities.
When people say windows or a mac is "easy", it's because the options are limited. Whatever is in your start menu, that's what you can do. If you want to do more, pop in a CD and hit "install", and now you have one additional option in your menu. Anything other than that and you need to start programming.
In a CLI, there are no predefined options. You do what you want. Which means, you need to know what you want to do, and what tools will help you do it. There are many, many tools, so it doesn't make sense to provide the tools as options.
Unix and unix-like OSes are used for such a wide variety of tasks that the CLI is important to those operating systems. I haven't heard you come up with any real suggestions for a unix-like OS aside from your nifty help feature, which is not exactly earth-shattering.
You also ignore other important usability points. Gedit and Notepad are "easy" because they are intuitive. Click where you want to type, and type. However, intuitive is not always the most effective interface. I personally like emacs because I have trained myself to edit files more quickly than I ever could with Notepad. If you want to compare emacs to VS.NET, one clear advantage of emacs is that it can be used on a wide variety of machines remotely very easily.
It's interesting that you can use those same ideas to promote the idea of outsourcing computer programming to another country.
The reasoning behind having a job like that here in the U.S. is so that your collegues can interact more directly with you and more promptly. The theory is that it's easy for requirements to change, or not be specified very well in the first place (often not the fault of management, but just the reality of projects is that it's difficult to specify exactly). So, it turns out that it's often more efficient to constantly change direction slightly to stay on course and meet the needs as they come. If that weren't true, all programming jobs would probably go to other countries.
That being said, there's a difference between a manager intervening to give you an important update on the big project, and some guy trying to get you to bet on some sport you don't care about, or endlessly rambling with other people 4 feet away from where you're trying to work.
I'm sure the Patriot Act contains some Unconstitutional provisions. Most bills do. I don't think it's nearly what people make it out to be.
I am much more scared of the Social Security Act and the IRS, which give the government the trillions of dollars* it needs to exercise power over us.
Most of the time, you have to expect an abuse by government now and then. The Unconstitutional provisions in the Patriot Act will (hopefully soon) be overturned as abuses occur and are challenged. However, when a centralized government has trillions of dollars to spend, the abuses become too numerous to even keep track of, and Unconstitutional bills are introduced faster than we can strike 'em down.
* And don't say the Social Security money is in a fund. If it is all invested in US Treasury bonds, that means the entire "fund" is lent to the federal government, i.e., it's already spent.
Government is consent of the people and as long as the consent with the structure of the government is greater than the dissent with the actions of the government, the law will remain in place.
You could say the same thing about Cuba or the USSR. Every society has democratic forces, simply because a strong majority has more physical power than a small minority. However, those forces do not always prevail, and when other forces are stronger, it's not called a democracy.
I do not want the U.S. to be a democracy. I want it to be a constitutional republic. Most laws at the federal level I think should instead be at the state level, as the 10th Amendment says. If someone disagrees, I think they should attempt to amend the Constitution rather than ignore it and pretend the 10th Amendment doesn't exist. Same thing with gun control: you may be able to convince me that gun control is a good idea, but you won't convince me that it's constitutional.
We should change the Constitution when necessary, not ignore it.
The U.S. is not a democracy. It is a somewhat democratic constitutional republic.
Democracy can be dangerous because a majority group will tend to abuse a minority group. That's why we have a constitution: there are some rights that cannot be taken away even by a majority vote, and some things that the Federal government does not have the authority to do even with a majority vote.
Or, that's the theory anyway. In reality, people vote based on what they want, and nobody gets outraged when the bounds of the republic are overstepped. Here's how it works: person A is "left-wing" and person B is "right-wing". The feds decide that the don't like freedom of speech, and so they pass a law to limit free speech. Person B doesn't mind the law, and doesn't stand up for person A. A year later, the federal government passes laws to limit the right to keep and bear arms, and person A doesn't stand up for person B. Now neither person A or B has the rights that are important to them.
Moral of story: even if you don't care about a certain right, you should be outraged if it is infringed. And don't
Some outsourcing is very economically efficient. Some outsourcing is inefficient. The inefficient firms will die*, and the efficient firms will prosper.
It's called global trade. Just like people have to decide whether 1000 bananas are worth 50 truck tires (often through a lot of indirect trading), people have to decide what functions are more efficiently performed in another country.
There's a lot of outsourcing and a lot of insourcing in the United States. And that's good, because that means that both insourced activity and outsourced activity is working efficiently and effectively.
Where do you think your "Japanese" or "Korean" car is made? There's a good chance it's made in the U.S.
* The firm, of course, won't die before inflating the stock price with buzzwords like "outsourcing" and the executives all selling out. There are always enough dumb investors to fall for whatever the latest buzzword is. A fool and his money are soon parted, no matter what laws are passed.
The thing that strikes me is that Sun Microsystems now offers 24x7 PostgreSQL support, and Fujitsu has been sponsoring PostgreSQL development. Are those companies big enough? Fujitsu is way bigger than Oracle.
That's why I argue for a limited-scope federal government.
Ignoring the other aspects of captialism vs socialism, socialism has a huge cost in terms of government administration and corruption. If the federal government did not have the power to enact tax favoritism, there would be no special interests trying to buy some.
If the government did less, theres a lot less room for sneaking favoritism through Congress. If someone tried, people would stand up and say "why does that person get special treatment?" and kick that guy out of Congress or the presidency or whatever. But now it happens so much, that we can't control it.
And both of those you can use, safely with no retrofitting, at least up to 10% (Believe it or not, if you always buy from the lowest-priced station in your area, you almost certainly already buy "Gasohol", or E10).
This article seems to suggest that E20 causes more engine wear than ULP. And you mostly made my point for me: cheap gas stations use more ethanol than premium stations. People aren't completely irrational, ethanol has been shown to reduce engine lifespan in some studies. This was the first thing I pulled off google, but I'm sure there are others. Many people, especially with more expensive cars, would pay an extra $0.10/gallon to avoid an expensive engine replacement later.
The US uses approximately half as much diesel as gasoline
You certainly can't fix all that with some industry waste oil. And it still needs to be cheaper for it to be economically effective. If it really is a drop-in replacement, they should sell biodiesel to the gas stations to mix in. But the only reason they don't is because biodiesel is more expensive to produce on a large scale, so nobody wants to produce it.
Additionally, biodiesel has almost reached the breakeven point with dinodiesel, and ethanol costs considerably less already (though I agree that we can't state that comfortably without considering corn subsidies).
You can't state it comfortably because it's not true. Remember that gasoline and diesel are both heavily taxed, also. If you want to compare real economic numbers, you have to remove all taxes and subsidies, meaning that biodiesel is still behind, and ethanol is WAY behind.
Gasoline could get more expensive, but right now it's cheap. While gasoline is cheap, it's not realistic (or desirable) to ask people to spend more.
The primary concern is that you're asking the government to cause even more favoritism for ethanol/biodiesel than they already do. Prices are at a certain level for a reason. If you force everyone to use more ethanol, it will cost everyone more money in the long run.
The most valid criticisms of gasoline are environmental (because it's so hard to pinpoint environmental costs, so it's pretty much impossible to argue against), and perhaps international policy. You can't say that ethanol is cheap if it's expensive. And we've already been producing ethanol for thousands of years, so you can't argue that all of a sudden we will find a way to make it cheap. With biodiesel, it's not cheaper than regular diesel, so it's inefficient to use it.
If we were paying "market" prices at the pump I'd wager this converstation would have a totally different tone.
Market prices would mean no government taxes or subsidies, and drilling in Alaska. Gasoline would be way cheaper then. You can argue that gasoline has other costs overseas, but I would have to see some real numbers before I believed that it added up to more than the price of corn per gallon on a large scale.
Who gets to decide what products are "alternative goods". You can either do a calculation on a pentium 4, a TI-85, or pencil and paper. Are all of those included in the calculation, or only companies like AMD? If you define a market narrowly enough, there's always a monopoly. And Intel can't know in advance how the market will be defined.
And still, the whole thing depends on what someone else does. If AMD has some bad luck, then all of a sudden Intel is a monopoly and breaking the law, even though their behavior is exactly the same.
We're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about companies.
But when we start talking about remedies, we start talking about confiscation. So someone's money or property is confiscated. Then you're talking about taking away someone's property based on what someone else does. Confiscation of property is not supposed to happen without due process of law, not the whims of a jury listening to a fancy lawyer's speech.
antitrust laws don't apply towards new and untested markets, so prospecting is always fair game
Who decides what's new? Intel is fairly new, as far as companies go. What about the multi-core industry? Even newer, so Intel can't be held responsible for what happens there. The outcome depends mostly on the judge or jury. If they define markets narrowly, Intel is a lone innovator that is in an emerging market. If they define the market as a little broader, and define new/untested a little more strictly, Intel is in trouble. That's why I say it is no longer the Rule of Law, it's the Rule of Man.
Lawyers love this stuff. A million here or there spent on a law firm can angle a company to look slightly more like an abusive monopoly, or slightly less.
Now, compare all this to real laws. If you take someone else's wallet, you go to jail. The gray area on that law is about one micron wide ("but I tripped and fell and happened to grab his wallet, it was all a misunderstanding!"), the black area is if you actually stole the wallet, and the white area is if you never touched his wallet. The gray area for anti-trust law is about 50 miles wide, with no black or white in sight. And they gray area is where lawyers make money, and politicians exercise power, and regular people get screwed.
For ethanol that is correct, but I was replying to your claim about industries producing oil as waste. I assumed you meant biodiesel, I don't think you can make ethanol that way (correct me if I'm wrong). And most of the cars in the U.S. can't run diesel.
In the case of ethanol the primary cost here is fueling stations needing to support and supply another type of fuel.
Those therefore take no overhead compared to running on traditional gasoline or diesel. Just mix whatever we can into the national supply.
There's nothing subtle about that. Most people would rather run gasoline than ethanol, because it's better for the engine (gasoline is a lubricant also). So, you'd either have to bring it on the market cheaper (which at this point means heavy government subsidies, hiding the real cost of ethanol, and costing the taxpayer for every gallon pumped), or you could mandate that all gasoline contain ethanol, which essentially means paying the same price for an inferior product.
Just because we consider it "garbage" doesn't mean it doesn't have a decent amount of energy in it.
Again, what is the cost? To get a gallon of ethanol from a bunch of yard waste, how much does it cost? If it costs more than gasoline, the idea is dead until gasoline's price rises above ethanol.
If you're gonna burn it directly, it's probably more environmentally sound to just put up nuke plants.
The questions we need to get to are not looking around at everyday things to see if we can scrounge energy out of 'em. We need to know if we can get that energy cheaper than sources already available. Right now, as far as I'm aware, the cheapest fuel available is gasoline. Maybe ethanol can help when gasoline starts to get more expensive. Maybe biodiesel. But if these fuels are propped up by government programs, that means that they won't scale to the level we consume gasoline at today.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
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AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I read that already, that was in one of the linked sources. I was wondering, did you actually see a rep from either company claim that AMD chips are incapable of hosting a conference call of 10 people? I believe you that it would be false if they did claim that. Also, I know the software makes that distinction. But what I don't see are the false claims. If Intel or Skype are making false claims when advertising, that makes this story much more serious.
Right now it looks like pretty basic product bundling or a partnership of some kind to make their products more "synergistic" or whatever (although the most minor kind of advantage I could possibly imagine...). That's very normal as long as nobody is making false claims. It's mildly annoying to the consumers, but if they are properly informed ahead of time, I see no real harm done. I can see how the anti-trust people would also get annoyed, seeing as Intel is the market leader, but I don't buy into that myself (that's another whole argument). But even for the anti-trust people, it's hard to imagine how Intel would corner the market with such a minor feature (slippery slope, I guess?).
That being said, it does annoy me that ANY software vendor would go out of their way to make their software less compatible. For that matter, anything that uses the CPU ID to influence high-level logic. It shouldn't be illegal, but it's like if MS Word had a (published) restriction that the spellchecker would only run if you had a Creative Labs(tm) SoundBlaster(tm) installed in the 3rd PCI slot, that would be really annoying.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
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AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
But if the capabilities are correctly published, you should expect it. If the capabilities said that you could conference call with 10 people on any platform, and you can't, that's a valid complaint.
Who cares whether the limitations are artificial or real? If Skype misrepresents the limitations, they are in hot water. Otherwise, not.
There are a million examples of artificial limitations that are not, and should not, be considered illegal. Software is an obvious example, Microsofts EULA "artificially limits" the number copied, and "restrains trade" by preventing you from selling copies. If you disagree with copyrights, there are physical property examples as well. If you have a private club, you can artificially limit the type of people that can enter.
What if AMD does something that the owner of a software company thinks is morally wrong? Can't the software company owner decide to not let his software run on AMD chips?
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
false claims ("AMD's chips can't handle the extra load")
Do you have a source on that? If it's a provably false claim, that's a case. If not, there's no case. Most likely, both companies are careful legally, and use "puffery" to imply that AMD chips aren't as good at handling the load as a shiny Intel. "Puffery" is perfectly legal, and should be.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
But if you buy skype, you can ask "how many calls does this software support in a conference". If they say "10" and you run it and it only support 5, they are in breach of contract. If they say "10 on intel, 5 every other chip", well, then you know in advance. No sulfur or anything else to bother you. You choose what you want with the information available. If they give you false information, that's not anti-trust, that's a contract dispute (or maybe false advertising).
"Restraint of trade" is the tricky part. Almost anything can be declared to restrain trade, or could also be declared to enable trade. The problem is that the law is not clear enough, so nobody knows in advance what a judge is going to say. That's why the legal costs are so high: because even if all the facts are known, it still isn't clear if anyone has broken a law or not. That is not The Rule of Law, that is The Rule of Man.
If company A bundles their product X with company B's product Y, and sells them at a lower price than individually, is that contract illegal? What if company C sells product Y' that competes with Y, and company C loses market share because of the contract between A and B? Does your answer change if company C is created after the contract was already signed between A and B? Is there ever a test involved about the actual result of the contract (i.e., whether trade increased or decreased after the contract was signed)?
It seems to me that by way of other people's actions, you could end up going from law-abiding to law-breaking. A person's legal status should not change based on market dynamics.
I lose a lot of respect for AMD for going after Intel on these shady "laws". AMD can and should compete in the open market place.
But we do have several industries that produce suitable oils as a waste product. Why not use that? If it contributes to lowering our need for non-renewable petroleum by 1%, we still come out 1% ahead.
That's where you're wrong. There is an overhead cost to supporting multiple types of fuel. It's not cost effective to retrofit a lot of cars just to be able to make use of some waste oil from restaurants. You ignored those costs.
Waste straw and woodchips. Even grass clippings.
I have my doubts that you could get energy in any kind of cost effective way from grass clippings. Again, when you ignore the costs -- and everything has a cost -- everything looks like a good idea. Which is why you came to the conclusion that we should use a little bit of everything.
The fact is, right now gasoline is cheap compared to other sources of fuel, and more importantly, has remained cheap despite a huge amount of consumption. That may not always be the case, eventually gasoline could be much more expensive. If you get rid of farm subsidies is ethanol or biodiesel still cost effective? What about the reduced engine lifespan when using ethanol vs. a naturally lubricating fuel like gasoline? These alternative fuels may be a great alternative when gasoline is expensive. But when gasoline is cheap, who wants to buy something more expensive?
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of support is certainly a reason that concerned many companies in the past.
Now that Sun has 24x7 support for PostgreSQL, that issue has been soundly put to rest.
What about consistency? I talk to people all the time who are befuddled by MySQL's lax type checking. I know it's been hashed out before on /., but February 31st is NOT a date, and does not belong in any column named "date".
If your application has an bug and inserts an invalid date, you don't want that error to cascade to another application (or another part in your application) and cause more errors down the line. By the time you detect the bug, it could be almost impossible to determine the source of the bug.
Putting consistency checking in application A doesn't prevent application B from inserting invalid data. And when application A reports an error (due to it's wonderful in-application consistency checking), now you don't know what caused the error. It's long past the time that you can get meaningful state information from application B, at most you have database auditing tools that tell you "application B did it", but that's more easily implemented in PostgreSQL as well (triggers).
And I'm not talking about super-advanced users only. I am talking about everyone who wants to catch the error early when they have the most possible information. Everyone who's just a programmer who wants to be able to trust that data from the database comes in a meaningful form. Everyone that just wants the database to do either what they expect, or throw an error.
Exactly my feelings. Every time a non-Muslim does something horrible in the name of their religion, there are widespread denouncements of that person's actions among other members of that religion. When a Muslim does something horrible in the name of there religion, there are widespread excuses and defenses of their actions.
There are more than 220 million guns in the U.S. There are a LOT of private gun owners in the U.S.
Unless the military wants to nuke the whole country, they will not be successful.
to make a context-sensitive CLI standard...
You are ignoring important points. Part of the reason the cli is so successful -- and it is successful -- is that it's not context-sensitive (for the most part).
What that means is that "grep" or another tool doesn't really care what program is passing it information, and it doesn't care what program it's passing information to. It has a well-defined input-output behavior, independent of context.
Your little idea for help might be nice, but it's limited. Some shells do offer little bits of help here or there (tab completion is the obvious example). There's only so much help you can display on the screen before it makes more sense to just use "man".
The thing about a CLI is that there are two major types of interfaces: those that present you with a set of options; and those that allow virtually limitless possibilities.
When people say windows or a mac is "easy", it's because the options are limited. Whatever is in your start menu, that's what you can do. If you want to do more, pop in a CD and hit "install", and now you have one additional option in your menu. Anything other than that and you need to start programming.
In a CLI, there are no predefined options. You do what you want. Which means, you need to know what you want to do, and what tools will help you do it. There are many, many tools, so it doesn't make sense to provide the tools as options.
Unix and unix-like OSes are used for such a wide variety of tasks that the CLI is important to those operating systems. I haven't heard you come up with any real suggestions for a unix-like OS aside from your nifty help feature, which is not exactly earth-shattering.
You also ignore other important usability points. Gedit and Notepad are "easy" because they are intuitive. Click where you want to type, and type. However, intuitive is not always the most effective interface. I personally like emacs because I have trained myself to edit files more quickly than I ever could with Notepad. If you want to compare emacs to VS.NET, one clear advantage of emacs is that it can be used on a wide variety of machines remotely very easily.
It's interesting that you can use those same ideas to promote the idea of outsourcing computer programming to another country.
The reasoning behind having a job like that here in the U.S. is so that your collegues can interact more directly with you and more promptly. The theory is that it's easy for requirements to change, or not be specified very well in the first place (often not the fault of management, but just the reality of projects is that it's difficult to specify exactly). So, it turns out that it's often more efficient to constantly change direction slightly to stay on course and meet the needs as they come. If that weren't true, all programming jobs would probably go to other countries.
That being said, there's a difference between a manager intervening to give you an important update on the big project, and some guy trying to get you to bet on some sport you don't care about, or endlessly rambling with other people 4 feet away from where you're trying to work.
Spectrometers measure the EM radiation. It doesn't need to actually touch the substance being measured.
Patriot Act and other attacks on our freedoms
I'm sure the Patriot Act contains some Unconstitutional provisions. Most bills do. I don't think it's nearly what people make it out to be.
I am much more scared of the Social Security Act and the IRS, which give the government the trillions of dollars* it needs to exercise power over us.
Most of the time, you have to expect an abuse by government now and then. The Unconstitutional provisions in the Patriot Act will (hopefully soon) be overturned as abuses occur and are challenged. However, when a centralized government has trillions of dollars to spend, the abuses become too numerous to even keep track of, and Unconstitutional bills are introduced faster than we can strike 'em down.
* And don't say the Social Security money is in a fund. If it is all invested in US Treasury bonds, that means the entire "fund" is lent to the federal government, i.e., it's already spent.
Government is consent of the people and as long as the consent with the structure of the government is greater than the dissent with the actions of the government, the law will remain in place.
You could say the same thing about Cuba or the USSR. Every society has democratic forces, simply because a strong majority has more physical power than a small minority. However, those forces do not always prevail, and when other forces are stronger, it's not called a democracy.
I do not want the U.S. to be a democracy. I want it to be a constitutional republic. Most laws at the federal level I think should instead be at the state level, as the 10th Amendment says. If someone disagrees, I think they should attempt to amend the Constitution rather than ignore it and pretend the 10th Amendment doesn't exist. Same thing with gun control: you may be able to convince me that gun control is a good idea, but you won't convince me that it's constitutional.
We should change the Constitution when necessary, not ignore it.
The U.S. is not a democracy. It is a somewhat democratic constitutional republic.
Democracy can be dangerous because a majority group will tend to abuse a minority group. That's why we have a constitution: there are some rights that cannot be taken away even by a majority vote, and some things that the Federal government does not have the authority to do even with a majority vote.
Or, that's the theory anyway. In reality, people vote based on what they want, and nobody gets outraged when the bounds of the republic are overstepped. Here's how it works: person A is "left-wing" and person B is "right-wing". The feds decide that the don't like freedom of speech, and so they pass a law to limit free speech. Person B doesn't mind the law, and doesn't stand up for person A. A year later, the federal government passes laws to limit the right to keep and bear arms, and person A doesn't stand up for person B. Now neither person A or B has the rights that are important to them.
Moral of story: even if you don't care about a certain right, you should be outraged if it is infringed. And don't
How is this post offtopic?
Some outsourcing is very economically efficient. Some outsourcing is inefficient. The inefficient firms will die*, and the efficient firms will prosper.
It's called global trade. Just like people have to decide whether 1000 bananas are worth 50 truck tires (often through a lot of indirect trading), people have to decide what functions are more efficiently performed in another country.
There's a lot of outsourcing and a lot of insourcing in the United States. And that's good, because that means that both insourced activity and outsourced activity is working efficiently and effectively.
Where do you think your "Japanese" or "Korean" car is made? There's a good chance it's made in the U.S.
* The firm, of course, won't die before inflating the stock price with buzzwords like "outsourcing" and the executives all selling out. There are always enough dumb investors to fall for whatever the latest buzzword is. A fool and his money are soon parted, no matter what laws are passed.
The thing that strikes me is that Sun Microsystems now offers 24x7 PostgreSQL support, and Fujitsu has been sponsoring PostgreSQL development. Are those companies big enough? Fujitsu is way bigger than Oracle.
That's why I argue for a limited-scope federal government.
Ignoring the other aspects of captialism vs socialism, socialism has a huge cost in terms of government administration and corruption. If the federal government did not have the power to enact tax favoritism, there would be no special interests trying to buy some.
If the government did less, theres a lot less room for sneaking favoritism through Congress. If someone tried, people would stand up and say "why does that person get special treatment?" and kick that guy out of Congress or the presidency or whatever. But now it happens so much, that we can't control it.
And both of those you can use, safely with no retrofitting, at least up to 10% (Believe it or not, if you always buy from the lowest-priced station in your area, you almost certainly already buy "Gasohol", or E10).
This article seems to suggest that E20 causes more engine wear than ULP. And you mostly made my point for me: cheap gas stations use more ethanol than premium stations. People aren't completely irrational, ethanol has been shown to reduce engine lifespan in some studies. This was the first thing I pulled off google, but I'm sure there are others. Many people, especially with more expensive cars, would pay an extra $0.10/gallon to avoid an expensive engine replacement later.
The US uses approximately half as much diesel as gasoline
You certainly can't fix all that with some industry waste oil. And it still needs to be cheaper for it to be economically effective. If it really is a drop-in replacement, they should sell biodiesel to the gas stations to mix in. But the only reason they don't is because biodiesel is more expensive to produce on a large scale, so nobody wants to produce it.
Additionally, biodiesel has almost reached the breakeven point with dinodiesel, and ethanol costs considerably less already (though I agree that we can't state that comfortably without considering corn subsidies).
You can't state it comfortably because it's not true. Remember that gasoline and diesel are both heavily taxed, also. If you want to compare real economic numbers, you have to remove all taxes and subsidies, meaning that biodiesel is still behind, and ethanol is WAY behind.
Gasoline could get more expensive, but right now it's cheap. While gasoline is cheap, it's not realistic (or desirable) to ask people to spend more.
The primary concern is that you're asking the government to cause even more favoritism for ethanol/biodiesel than they already do. Prices are at a certain level for a reason. If you force everyone to use more ethanol, it will cost everyone more money in the long run.
The most valid criticisms of gasoline are environmental (because it's so hard to pinpoint environmental costs, so it's pretty much impossible to argue against), and perhaps international policy. You can't say that ethanol is cheap if it's expensive. And we've already been producing ethanol for thousands of years, so you can't argue that all of a sudden we will find a way to make it cheap. With biodiesel, it's not cheaper than regular diesel, so it's inefficient to use it.
If we were paying "market" prices at the pump I'd wager this converstation would have a totally different tone.
Market prices would mean no government taxes or subsidies, and drilling in Alaska. Gasoline would be way cheaper then. You can argue that gasoline has other costs overseas, but I would have to see some real numbers before I believed that it added up to more than the price of corn per gallon on a large scale.
antitrust in the US concerns the HHI calculation
Who gets to decide what products are "alternative goods". You can either do a calculation on a pentium 4, a TI-85, or pencil and paper. Are all of those included in the calculation, or only companies like AMD? If you define a market narrowly enough, there's always a monopoly. And Intel can't know in advance how the market will be defined.
And still, the whole thing depends on what someone else does. If AMD has some bad luck, then all of a sudden Intel is a monopoly and breaking the law, even though their behavior is exactly the same.
We're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about companies.
But when we start talking about remedies, we start talking about confiscation. So someone's money or property is confiscated. Then you're talking about taking away someone's property based on what someone else does. Confiscation of property is not supposed to happen without due process of law, not the whims of a jury listening to a fancy lawyer's speech.
antitrust laws don't apply towards new and untested markets, so prospecting is always fair game
Who decides what's new? Intel is fairly new, as far as companies go. What about the multi-core industry? Even newer, so Intel can't be held responsible for what happens there. The outcome depends mostly on the judge or jury. If they define markets narrowly, Intel is a lone innovator that is in an emerging market. If they define the market as a little broader, and define new/untested a little more strictly, Intel is in trouble. That's why I say it is no longer the Rule of Law, it's the Rule of Man.
Lawyers love this stuff. A million here or there spent on a law firm can angle a company to look slightly more like an abusive monopoly, or slightly less.
Now, compare all this to real laws. If you take someone else's wallet, you go to jail. The gray area on that law is about one micron wide ("but I tripped and fell and happened to grab his wallet, it was all a misunderstanding!"), the black area is if you actually stole the wallet, and the white area is if you never touched his wallet. The gray area for anti-trust law is about 50 miles wide, with no black or white in sight. And they gray area is where lawyers make money, and politicians exercise power, and regular people get screwed.
Who said anything about retrofitting?
For ethanol that is correct, but I was replying to your claim about industries producing oil as waste. I assumed you meant biodiesel, I don't think you can make ethanol that way (correct me if I'm wrong). And most of the cars in the U.S. can't run diesel.
In the case of ethanol the primary cost here is fueling stations needing to support and supply another type of fuel.
Those therefore take no overhead compared to running on traditional gasoline or diesel. Just mix whatever we can into the national supply.
There's nothing subtle about that. Most people would rather run gasoline than ethanol, because it's better for the engine (gasoline is a lubricant also). So, you'd either have to bring it on the market cheaper (which at this point means heavy government subsidies, hiding the real cost of ethanol, and costing the taxpayer for every gallon pumped), or you could mandate that all gasoline contain ethanol, which essentially means paying the same price for an inferior product.
Just because we consider it "garbage" doesn't mean it doesn't have a decent amount of energy in it.
Again, what is the cost? To get a gallon of ethanol from a bunch of yard waste, how much does it cost? If it costs more than gasoline, the idea is dead until gasoline's price rises above ethanol.
If you're gonna burn it directly, it's probably more environmentally sound to just put up nuke plants.
The questions we need to get to are not looking around at everyday things to see if we can scrounge energy out of 'em. We need to know if we can get that energy cheaper than sources already available. Right now, as far as I'm aware, the cheapest fuel available is gasoline. Maybe ethanol can help when gasoline starts to get more expensive. Maybe biodiesel. But if these fuels are propped up by government programs, that means that they won't scale to the level we consume gasoline at today.
I read that already, that was in one of the linked sources. I was wondering, did you actually see a rep from either company claim that AMD chips are incapable of hosting a conference call of 10 people? I believe you that it would be false if they did claim that. Also, I know the software makes that distinction. But what I don't see are the false claims. If Intel or Skype are making false claims when advertising, that makes this story much more serious.
Right now it looks like pretty basic product bundling or a partnership of some kind to make their products more "synergistic" or whatever (although the most minor kind of advantage I could possibly imagine...). That's very normal as long as nobody is making false claims. It's mildly annoying to the consumers, but if they are properly informed ahead of time, I see no real harm done. I can see how the anti-trust people would also get annoyed, seeing as Intel is the market leader, but I don't buy into that myself (that's another whole argument). But even for the anti-trust people, it's hard to imagine how Intel would corner the market with such a minor feature (slippery slope, I guess?).
That being said, it does annoy me that ANY software vendor would go out of their way to make their software less compatible. For that matter, anything that uses the CPU ID to influence high-level logic. It shouldn't be illegal, but it's like if MS Word had a (published) restriction that the spellchecker would only run if you had a Creative Labs(tm) SoundBlaster(tm) installed in the 3rd PCI slot, that would be really annoying.
But if the capabilities are correctly published, you should expect it. If the capabilities said that you could conference call with 10 people on any platform, and you can't, that's a valid complaint.
Who cares whether the limitations are artificial or real? If Skype misrepresents the limitations, they are in hot water. Otherwise, not.
There are a million examples of artificial limitations that are not, and should not, be considered illegal. Software is an obvious example, Microsofts EULA "artificially limits" the number copied, and "restrains trade" by preventing you from selling copies. If you disagree with copyrights, there are physical property examples as well. If you have a private club, you can artificially limit the type of people that can enter.
What if AMD does something that the owner of a software company thinks is morally wrong? Can't the software company owner decide to not let his software run on AMD chips?
false claims ("AMD's chips can't handle the extra load")
Do you have a source on that? If it's a provably false claim, that's a case. If not, there's no case. Most likely, both companies are careful legally, and use "puffery" to imply that AMD chips aren't as good at handling the load as a shiny Intel. "Puffery" is perfectly legal, and should be.
But if you buy skype, you can ask "how many calls does this software support in a conference". If they say "10" and you run it and it only support 5, they are in breach of contract. If they say "10 on intel, 5 every other chip", well, then you know in advance. No sulfur or anything else to bother you. You choose what you want with the information available. If they give you false information, that's not anti-trust, that's a contract dispute (or maybe false advertising).
"Restraint of trade" is the tricky part. Almost anything can be declared to restrain trade, or could also be declared to enable trade. The problem is that the law is not clear enough, so nobody knows in advance what a judge is going to say. That's why the legal costs are so high: because even if all the facts are known, it still isn't clear if anyone has broken a law or not. That is not The Rule of Law, that is The Rule of Man.
If company A bundles their product X with company B's product Y, and sells them at a lower price than individually, is that contract illegal? What if company C sells product Y' that competes with Y, and company C loses market share because of the contract between A and B? Does your answer change if company C is created after the contract was already signed between A and B? Is there ever a test involved about the actual result of the contract (i.e., whether trade increased or decreased after the contract was signed)?
It seems to me that by way of other people's actions, you could end up going from law-abiding to law-breaking. A person's legal status should not change based on market dynamics.
I lose a lot of respect for AMD for going after Intel on these shady "laws". AMD can and should compete in the open market place.
But we do have several industries that produce suitable oils as a waste product. Why not use that? If it contributes to lowering our need for non-renewable petroleum by 1%, we still come out 1% ahead.
That's where you're wrong. There is an overhead cost to supporting multiple types of fuel. It's not cost effective to retrofit a lot of cars just to be able to make use of some waste oil from restaurants. You ignored those costs.
Waste straw and woodchips. Even grass clippings.
I have my doubts that you could get energy in any kind of cost effective way from grass clippings. Again, when you ignore the costs -- and everything has a cost -- everything looks like a good idea. Which is why you came to the conclusion that we should use a little bit of everything.
The fact is, right now gasoline is cheap compared to other sources of fuel, and more importantly, has remained cheap despite a huge amount of consumption. That may not always be the case, eventually gasoline could be much more expensive. If you get rid of farm subsidies is ethanol or biodiesel still cost effective? What about the reduced engine lifespan when using ethanol vs. a naturally lubricating fuel like gasoline? These alternative fuels may be a great alternative when gasoline is expensive. But when gasoline is cheap, who wants to buy something more expensive?