First off, I happen to believe that marriage is a personal issue and has no need for government intervention but that is not my point here.
The state has traditionally supported marriage by granting special priviledges to married persons because it has been recognized to be the optimal vehicle for the building up of society as a whole.
Extending priviledges to persons outside of the traditional family union opens up a whole can of worms that would ultimately give any kind of cohabitational relationship priviledged status, thus making the instituion meaningless.
The amendment is not intended to deny gay couples any rights they are otherwise constituionally entitled to, but to ensure the protection of privlidges granted to traditional marriage relationships.
Agreed the amendment is poorly worded (almost enough to keep me from voting for it). Its full impact will ultimately be decided by the courts, which in FL, are liberal leaning...
Yeah I could care less about the tracking system myself, I still use an old MS Intellimouse ball mouse. No batteries to replace, no lag, and good enough tracking. I really don't need an LED on my mouse, or weights, or other gimmicks. All I really want is solid construction that will last.
I might be tempted to upgrade if there was a significant reason to do so, like for example, the inclusion of an analog thumb hat switch similar to what the Saitek Cyborg mouse has. Unfortunately, I've yet to see a useable implementation. The Cyborg has a intrusive shelf on the bottom, so either you put your thumb on the shelf (awkward), you to put your thumb on the switch. Another gives no room at all to put the thumb, 'cause the switch takes up the entire face. Still another put it out of normal reach of the thumb forcing awkward finger positions to use it. Just a 4 position hat and not analog...
So did he reach the right conclusion, or did he happen upon an excuse for obscurity, or perhaps as other posters have suggested, are the dots themselves an artificial creation? The same dots can be connected in many ways, and lead one to very different conclusions. Normally, however, when one finds a problem, one would expect that those in charge fix it...
Good post. I bet people who are influenced by version numbers are probably also more likely to be support headaches.
It used to be that point releases corresponded to the introduction of major new features and extensions to point releases were for patches with minor updates or fixes. But since there isn't any standard, marketers have pretty much made this unofficial standard meaningless. My guess is that first time customers have been trained to look only at features, price, and support policies. Therefore I would think that stuff like number futzing would probably be just as likely drive people away from the offender as towards them.
It's 3 computers, not three re-installations. You only activate once after you install, and you don't even need the DVD in the drive. This isn't that bad of a policy so long as they do what MS does and allow you to re-activate via a call in procedure after your 3 machine limit is reached.
I've only ever needed to call in activation two or three times with all my re-installs of XP.
My biggest problem has always been needing to copy DVD's to my HDD so I could run a virtual drive to keep from having to load the DVD's every time I wanted to play a different game. With EA you no longer need to do this.
The plan here is to filter porn (ONLY porn) out of the "free" network, support it with ads by doing (i believe) location based targeting. They say they will offer non-filtered service for a price, but with all that crap setup to screw with users traffic and insert ads, no thanks.
So basically your problem is that you're upset you won't be getting free access to porn? Tough. Porn is targeted primarily towards yuppies, and anyone who has money to buy porn, is going to have money for a decent connection to view it over...
This network is targeted to serve the general public and people won't want their free less than 300kb/s already ad spammed, proxy bombed internet connection to be clogged by addictive high bandwidth content that provides no value in comparison to other high bandwidth content that offers a lot of value to the general consumer...
If the goal is to keep unnecessary traffic off the network, perhaps they should be blocking youtube,
So when the accountant at the kinky sex party is fired, he can sue for discrimination. I do expect a rash of court cases of this type over the next 10 years. Fortunately they should be easy to win.
I expect they will be very difficult to win as the responsibility to prove discrimination beyond reasonble doubt will be on the complaintant. This fact was brought to our county commission's attention recently during a presentation given by a lawyer lobbying aginst a proposed ammendment to county discrimination laws to allow for protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Incidentally, the commission passed the measure even with 2/3 of the citizens responding against it. I'm sure the county lawyers are really happy, and the taxpayers can't wait for the next election cycle.
See, that's where I'm with porcupine8 - it was never the government's responsibility to shirk.
Indeed it is. In fact, the responsibility of government to secure justice and promote the general welfare of the people is spelled out in the very first sentance of the Constitution.
You've completely mischaracterized what the constitution says. This is not a democracy;
Wrong again. I don't know what they are teaching you kids in your civics classes nowadays, but the fact is that America was a loose representative democracy even before the Constitution was drafted. Each of the thirteen original colonies had elected governmental assemblies. The fact that the founders intended for America to remain a democracy is also evident in the first sentance of the Constitution. The responsibilities, authority, and limitations assigned to the government in the Constitution are derived from the people; this is what "We the people..." is supposed to imply. You could make a very good case that the government has become an un-Constitutional body, but the founding fathers were very clear about the fact that government was intended to be a governmental body of the people, for the people, bound by oath to uphold the Constitution.
just because the whims of the people want something doesn't make it constitutional, first, and second, even if it was, I find it a dubious claim that the will of the people is for government intervention into their private lives.
Not only does the Constitution give the government the responsibility to provide for the general welfare of the people, it also gives the government the authority to violate a persons privacy in order to do so -- given that reasonable suspicion is justified. So for example, if a neighbor calls the police department to complain about another neighbor manufacturing drugs in their apartment, the police can legally enter that apartment if there is reason to believe that that is occuring; however, that is not really relavent to topic at hand. The harm in this case is being done in public to the public. That it can be explicitly legislated against is not debateable. There are many examples of government passing laws against activities deemed harmful to society and in some cases even repealing those laws at the urging of the public, the prohibition being a relevant example.
Are you sure about that?
My understanding was that a stationary rock in space was an asteroid, a space rock in motion was a meteor, a rock in motion within the amoshpere was a meteorite, and a rock inside the Earth's atmosphere that didn't move was called a politician.
Funny, I would have phrased that, "The government's aim is to allow parents to retain that responsibility."
Then you would make a poor moderator as that obvious fact is completely beside point I was making. Do I really need to say it again? The corporate govt. is looking to capitalize on the shirking of it's own responsibility, and the general public will thus pay for, and will continue to pay for, the suffering that comes as a result.
And I'd probably phrase that "The government is recognizing the limits of its powers."
Here you are completely wrong. According to the US Constitution, the govt. derives it's authority from the people who they are supposed to be representing. So if research shows that something is harmful to society, and that the general public wants the government to remove that harmful element, then the govt. has a responsibility to the people to legislate against it, and to enforce the legislation it passes. That is your secular system as it was established by America's founding fathers. Instead, society as a whole is devolving into a lawless non-govermenal system in the name of 'choice' and false freedom.
The problem is that what the govt. is doing will only help good parents be better parents.
Notice that the govt's aim is to shift the responsibility for the problem to the parents. Society as a whole will suffer as kids that don't have good parents will be bombarded with spam programming. The govt. is abdicating it's responsibility and as a result the US will likely develop the same problem with TV that it has with e-mail spam. You get the libertarian party whether you like it or not.
This failure was all the more recognizable when the problem was described in section 2. Section 2 was dropped before final passage, probably because they knew it would implicate them as facilitating a problem.
So once again the evidence was there -- they see the problem, and are simply chosing to ignore their governmental responsibility as supposedly elected respresentatives.
Yeah, if the US business model seems to work elsewhere but not in the US, then that would implicate the ISP's as the source of the problem. Another thing I wonder: how is it that an entire "YouTube Generation" constitutes only 3% usership as the ISP's claim? Haven't ISP's been doing OK on the user subsidization model just fine for a long time now? I think if US ISP's are struggling now, then they're suffering from the product of bad management (greed most likely).
I am afraid that p2p techs just won't be able to survive if the US adopts user targeted quota's. Nobody is going to want to contribute content back to the net if they personnaly aren't going to benfit from it when they have to pay for the increased BW usage themselves. That would be a shame, because legititmate p2p has the potential to help ISP's on the whole by distributing net traffic to localized demand.
The system can't heal itself because it's dead-locked. Someone will exploit the situation, promise salvation, and take control. By then, only drastic measures will do, so we will accept them, without further debate because there isn't time for debate.
I have a feeling that this initiative was born out of the desire of the ruling class to not have to live with the consequences of the mess that they made, and not to have to fix it either.
It's telling I think that the comparison was made to Manhattan, and it goes beyond merely size. Most likely, this city will be a monument to greed and corruption as only a small minority: those that are in good with local government officials, and who make enough money to live there, will. Meanwhile, the majority of the working class will be stuck in increasingly poor urban living conditions with incentive to evil only a stones throw away.
It's a model of a new form of empire building that transcends national boundries and employs the resources of both eastern and western governments and their corporate partners at the expense of working people.
The real punch line is this... he claimed technological ignorance wouldn't keep people from adopting the technology while simultaneously demonstrating how technological ignorance is keeping him from adopting technology. And... he got modded insightful for it! Thus intrinsically countering his proposition and proving that in fact ignorance is bliss.
I have a feeling that option D: keep your money and don't spend it on health care period, is becomming an ever more popular option for all but the corporate class.
Most of the companies you mentioned provie insurance against things that people have a great deal of control over. Only those records that pertain to health matters that people have control over should be made available to insurance companies. So for example, health insurers have a right to know if you drink or smoke, or have had elective proceedures that might pose health risks like plastic surgeries or abortions.
You're right however: it's a non-issue, but only because without tight controls over medical records and effective regulation it's going to happen anyway; and government won't require or provide either. Another reason it's a non-issue: health care is already priced out of range for most americans, unless your employer pays for it.
But essentially what sealed the fate of Europe and caused wide-spread rejection of the present and the Church in favour of rediscovering the ancient science and ways, were the plague outbursts. It proved repeatedly that the Church and faith can do nothing to prevent it, and present day alchemists can't do jack shit either.
Always it's science vs. religion; I bet bet you got this from a textbook you read as part of some secular course curriculum, just like I did. Everyone with half a brain can see the same rediculous divisions being fabricated by the God haters of today between science and religion (evolution vs. creationism being a prime example). Well guess what, the university system we know of today has it's roots in the Catholic Church, particularly in a few monastic orders like the Jesuits who, during the dark ages, studied and preserved what bits of ancient knowledge they had access to in their own collections.
What caused widespread rejection of the church were the abuses that occurred via troublemakers from within. In addition, the invention of the printing press and widespread dissemination of the Bible (which the Church actually encouraged) allowed people to edit and misinterpret as they wished. They attributed to the Faith the abilility to answer questions it was never meant to answer, and they do whatever they think they can get away with to hide the vastly more important message that it was intended to be. So the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
They continue doing the same thing today, secretly. But these are the activities of the eternal enemies of the church, not the Church proper. And these types of activities are most practiced by secular rulers, and alway have been. I'm willing to bet that devices like the one in this article have been handed down in secret 'labs' through countless generations of corrupted power mongerers. A thousand years from now, we will be reading about ingenious quantum tech devices or some such that were developed in secret labs by contemporary worldly leaders that were also secretly used to create 'supernatural' phenomenon to tip the scales of power in their own favor just as this device probably was by the 'kings of the east' that had it.
Still, I don't think anyone who has mentioned hard drive has meant just sticking a hard drive full of data in a shoe box and burying it.
Well we still have RS-232 ports even though we have USB, and USB is probably just as ubiquitous today as the serial port was 20 years ago. Actually we still use several 20 year old interface ports, and I'm guessing USB will join that list. The biggest question mark would be file system support, but Windows still supports FAT, so that probably won't be a problem either.
Personally I don't see the need for optical duplicates as is seems to be too much of a pain to be worth it -- even on archival media. But they do sell the stuff to general consumers, which suggests that even if there aren't DVD-R compatible drives 20 years from now, you'll probably be able to take the disks to Kinko's or a photo processing lab or something like that and get the data from them.
So I'm guessing that means you pay about $3/gal for crude, and we pay about $2.80/gal which I admit is much closer than I had thought. However, the EU is our strongest political ally and also the second biggest contributor of military power on behalf of western economic interests, so I guess it shouldn't have been much of a surprise.
So have you gotten anywhere with more responsible alternatives in return for your eco-tax? If our government would impliment something similar, maybe it would discourage the purchase of gas and instead subsidize the expansion of alternatives that have been larglely neglected by our political leaders. Unfortunately I don't believe that's coming anytime soon given our leadership's ties to international economic profiteering and the oil industry in particular.
You obviously have no background in electrical engineering, physics, entropy, etc. etc. and I'm not about to try and educate you.
Well that's probably the wisest thing you've said thus far, because I knew enough to recognize your BS after senior year high school physics, my BSEE not withstanding.
If you want to maximize your overall efficiency then you need to compare efficiency of each contributor under the various conditions under which they will be used. I'm not saying that heat pumps don't help, they do, but I see them as one part of a total home solution. Note that for some houses, heat pumps aren't capable of providing enough heat in cold weather conditions. This is why some other alternative (traditionally fullfilled by resistive heaters) is still needed.
Where do you get 5:1 from? Everything I've read suggests an average of 2:1.
The efficiency of heat pumps is dependent upon the heat available in the ambient environment as pumps must run for longer periods in order to maintain room temp in colder environments. Heat pumps also require electricity to run and grid eletricity has to be generated and transported to the home. Both generation from some natural resource, and transport, incur losses which impact overall efficiency. Solar electricity and solar thermal are generated directly at the home. Solar thermal is used to heat both water and the home where modern homes use a pipe grid system in the flooring to move heat throughout the house.
Resistive heaters waste a lot of electricity generating heat from electricity as compared to powering non resistive devices. Not only does it require a large amount of current to generate heat, but not all of the radiation produced in heater coils is in the low energy heat band. Here I'm taking about efficiency only of converting electricity into heat. However overall efficiency considers the additional factors that I mentioned earlier: losses that accrue from electricity generation (conversion) at the source, and transport. Modern homes that employ solar and solar thermal are highly efficient overall because there is no work that goes into the production of the source energy (which, unlike electricity from the grid, is why I said it is 'free'). Solar systems don't always need %40 efficient panels to provide enough energy to power a house. Even with what's typically sold today, some people have solar energy based systems that are capable enough to allow them to sell power back to the grid.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I happen to believe that marriage is a personal issue and has no need for government intervention but that is not my point here.
The state has traditionally supported marriage by granting special priviledges to married persons because it has been recognized to be the optimal vehicle for the building up of society as a whole.
Extending priviledges to persons outside of the traditional family union opens up a whole can of worms that would ultimately give any kind of cohabitational relationship priviledged status, thus making the instituion meaningless.
The amendment is not intended to deny gay couples any rights they are otherwise constituionally entitled to, but to ensure the protection of privlidges granted to traditional marriage relationships.
Agreed the amendment is poorly worded (almost enough to keep me from voting for it). Its full impact will ultimately be decided by the courts, which in FL, are liberal leaning...
Yeah I could care less about the tracking system myself, I still use an old MS Intellimouse ball mouse. No batteries to replace, no lag, and good enough tracking. I really don't need an LED on my mouse, or weights, or other gimmicks. All I really want is solid construction that will last.
I might be tempted to upgrade if there was a significant reason to do so, like for example, the inclusion of an analog thumb hat switch similar to what the Saitek Cyborg mouse has. Unfortunately, I've yet to see a useable implementation. The Cyborg has a intrusive shelf on the bottom, so either you put your thumb on the shelf (awkward), you to put your thumb on the switch. Another gives no room at all to put the thumb, 'cause the switch takes up the entire face. Still another put it out of normal reach of the thumb forcing awkward finger positions to use it. Just a 4 position hat and not analog...
Quite odd that nobody can seem to get it right.
So did he reach the right conclusion, or did he happen upon an excuse for obscurity, or perhaps as other posters have suggested, are the dots themselves an artificial creation? The same dots can be connected in many ways, and lead one to very different conclusions. Normally, however, when one finds a problem, one would expect that those in charge fix it...
Good post. I bet people who are influenced by version numbers are probably also more likely to be support headaches.
It used to be that point releases corresponded to the introduction of major new features and extensions to point releases were for patches with minor updates or fixes. But since there isn't any standard, marketers have pretty much made this unofficial standard meaningless. My guess is that first time customers have been trained to look only at features, price, and support policies. Therefore I would think that stuff like number futzing would probably be just as likely drive people away from the offender as towards them.
It's 3 computers, not three re-installations. You only activate once after you install, and you don't even need the DVD in the drive. This isn't that bad of a policy so long as they do what MS does and allow you to re-activate via a call in procedure after your 3 machine limit is reached.
I've only ever needed to call in activation two or three times with all my re-installs of XP.
My biggest problem has always been needing to copy DVD's to my HDD so I could run a virtual drive to keep from having to load the DVD's every time I wanted to play a different game. With EA you no longer need to do this.
The plan here is to filter porn (ONLY porn) out of the "free" network, support it with ads by doing (i believe) location based targeting. They say they will offer non-filtered service for a price, but with all that crap setup to screw with users traffic and insert ads, no thanks.
So basically your problem is that you're upset you won't be getting free access to porn? Tough. Porn is targeted primarily towards yuppies, and anyone who has money to buy porn, is going to have money for a decent connection to view it over...
This network is targeted to serve the general public and people won't want their free less than 300kb/s already ad spammed, proxy bombed internet connection to be clogged by addictive high bandwidth content that provides no value in comparison to other high bandwidth content that offers a lot of value to the general consumer...
If the goal is to keep unnecessary traffic off the network, perhaps they should be blocking youtube,
...like umm, YouTube.
I expect they will be very difficult to win as the responsibility to prove discrimination beyond reasonble doubt will be on the complaintant. This fact was brought to our county commission's attention recently during a presentation given by a lawyer lobbying aginst a proposed ammendment to county discrimination laws to allow for protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Incidentally, the commission passed the measure even with 2/3 of the citizens responding against it. I'm sure the county lawyers are really happy, and the taxpayers can't wait for the next election cycle.
...then you're screwed anyway! If the law is changed to cover past offenses retroactively, all bets are off.
Indeed, since at that point the Constitution will have been thrown away.
Isn't it illegal for a company to transmit confidential personal information about clients over an insecure network?
Indeed it is. In fact, the responsibility of government to secure justice and promote the general welfare of the people is spelled out in the very first sentance of the Constitution.
Wrong again. I don't know what they are teaching you kids in your civics classes nowadays, but the fact is that America was a loose representative democracy even before the Constitution was drafted. Each of the thirteen original colonies had elected governmental assemblies. The fact that the founders intended for America to remain a democracy is also evident in the first sentance of the Constitution. The responsibilities, authority, and limitations assigned to the government in the Constitution are derived from the people; this is what "We the people..." is supposed to imply. You could make a very good case that the government has become an un-Constitutional body, but the founding fathers were very clear about the fact that government was intended to be a governmental body of the people, for the people, bound by oath to uphold the Constitution.
Not only does the Constitution give the government the responsibility to provide for the general welfare of the people, it also gives the government the authority to violate a persons privacy in order to do so -- given that reasonable suspicion is justified. So for example, if a neighbor calls the police department to complain about another neighbor manufacturing drugs in their apartment, the police can legally enter that apartment if there is reason to believe that that is occuring; however, that is not really relavent to topic at hand. The harm in this case is being done in public to the public. That it can be explicitly legislated against is not debateable. There are many examples of government passing laws against activities deemed harmful to society and in some cases even repealing those laws at the urging of the public, the prohibition being a relevant example.
Are you sure about that? My understanding was that a stationary rock in space was an asteroid, a space rock in motion was a meteor, a rock in motion within the amoshpere was a meteorite, and a rock inside the Earth's atmosphere that didn't move was called a politician.
Then you would make a poor moderator as that obvious fact is completely beside point I was making. Do I really need to say it again? The corporate govt. is looking to capitalize on the shirking of it's own responsibility, and the general public will thus pay for, and will continue to pay for, the suffering that comes as a result.
Here you are completely wrong. According to the US Constitution, the govt. derives it's authority from the people who they are supposed to be representing. So if research shows that something is harmful to society, and that the general public wants the government to remove that harmful element, then the govt. has a responsibility to the people to legislate against it, and to enforce the legislation it passes. That is your secular system as it was established by America's founding fathers. Instead, society as a whole is devolving into a lawless non-govermenal system in the name of 'choice' and false freedom.
The problem is that what the govt. is doing will only help good parents be better parents.
Notice that the govt's aim is to shift the responsibility for the problem to the parents. Society as a whole will suffer as kids that don't have good parents will be bombarded with spam programming. The govt. is abdicating it's responsibility and as a result the US will likely develop the same problem with TV that it has with e-mail spam. You get the libertarian party whether you like it or not.
This failure was all the more recognizable when the problem was described in section 2. Section 2 was dropped before final passage, probably because they knew it would implicate them as facilitating a problem.
So once again the evidence was there -- they see the problem, and are simply chosing to ignore their governmental responsibility as supposedly elected respresentatives.
Yeah, if the US business model seems to work elsewhere but not in the US, then that would implicate the ISP's as the source of the problem. Another thing I wonder: how is it that an entire "YouTube Generation" constitutes only 3% usership as the ISP's claim? Haven't ISP's been doing OK on the user subsidization model just fine for a long time now? I think if US ISP's are struggling now, then they're suffering from the product of bad management (greed most likely).
I am afraid that p2p techs just won't be able to survive if the US adopts user targeted quota's. Nobody is going to want to contribute content back to the net if they personnaly aren't going to benfit from it when they have to pay for the increased BW usage themselves. That would be a shame, because legititmate p2p has the potential to help ISP's on the whole by distributing net traffic to localized demand.
I have a feeling that this initiative was born out of the desire of the ruling class to not have to live with the consequences of the mess that they made, and not to have to fix it either.
It's telling I think that the comparison was made to Manhattan, and it goes beyond merely size. Most likely, this city will be a monument to greed and corruption as only a small minority: those that are in good with local government officials, and who make enough money to live there, will. Meanwhile, the majority of the working class will be stuck in increasingly poor urban living conditions with incentive to evil only a stones throw away.
It's a model of a new form of empire building that transcends national boundries and employs the resources of both eastern and western governments and their corporate partners at the expense of working people.
Shhh! Let's not firebomb him with truth.
The real punch line is this... he claimed technological ignorance wouldn't keep people from adopting the technology while simultaneously demonstrating how technological ignorance is keeping him from adopting technology. And... he got modded insightful for it! Thus intrinsically countering his proposition and proving that in fact ignorance is bliss.
I have a feeling that option D: keep your money and don't spend it on health care period, is becomming an ever more popular option for all but the corporate class.
Most of the companies you mentioned provie insurance against things that people have a great deal of control over. Only those records that pertain to health matters that people have control over should be made available to insurance companies. So for example, health insurers have a right to know if you drink or smoke, or have had elective proceedures that might pose health risks like plastic surgeries or abortions.
You're right however: it's a non-issue, but only because without tight controls over medical records and effective regulation it's going to happen anyway; and government won't require or provide either. Another reason it's a non-issue: health care is already priced out of range for most americans, unless your employer pays for it.
Always it's science vs. religion; I bet bet you got this from a textbook you read as part of some secular course curriculum, just like I did. Everyone with half a brain can see the same rediculous divisions being fabricated by the God haters of today between science and religion (evolution vs. creationism being a prime example). Well guess what, the university system we know of today has it's roots in the Catholic Church, particularly in a few monastic orders like the Jesuits who, during the dark ages, studied and preserved what bits of ancient knowledge they had access to in their own collections.
What caused widespread rejection of the church were the abuses that occurred via troublemakers from within. In addition, the invention of the printing press and widespread dissemination of the Bible (which the Church actually encouraged) allowed people to edit and misinterpret as they wished. They attributed to the Faith the abilility to answer questions it was never meant to answer, and they do whatever they think they can get away with to hide the vastly more important message that it was intended to be. So the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
They continue doing the same thing today, secretly. But these are the activities of the eternal enemies of the church, not the Church proper. And these types of activities are most practiced by secular rulers, and alway have been. I'm willing to bet that devices like the one in this article have been handed down in secret 'labs' through countless generations of corrupted power mongerers. A thousand years from now, we will be reading about ingenious quantum tech devices or some such that were developed in secret labs by contemporary worldly leaders that were also secretly used to create 'supernatural' phenomenon to tip the scales of power in their own favor just as this device probably was by the 'kings of the east' that had it.
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k
Supposedly you need 2.6.25 at least.
Personally I don't see the need for optical duplicates as is seems to be too much of a pain to be worth it -- even on archival media. But they do sell the stuff to general consumers, which suggests that even if there aren't DVD-R compatible drives 20 years from now, you'll probably be able to take the disks to Kinko's or a photo processing lab or something like that and get the data from them.
So I'm guessing that means you pay about $3/gal for crude, and we pay about $2.80/gal which I admit is much closer than I had thought. However, the EU is our strongest political ally and also the second biggest contributor of military power on behalf of western economic interests, so I guess it shouldn't have been much of a surprise.
So have you gotten anywhere with more responsible alternatives in return for your eco-tax? If our government would impliment something similar, maybe it would discourage the purchase of gas and instead subsidize the expansion of alternatives that have been larglely neglected by our political leaders. Unfortunately I don't believe that's coming anytime soon given our leadership's ties to international economic profiteering and the oil industry in particular.
If you want to maximize your overall efficiency then you need to compare efficiency of each contributor under the various conditions under which they will be used. I'm not saying that heat pumps don't help, they do, but I see them as one part of a total home solution. Note that for some houses, heat pumps aren't capable of providing enough heat in cold weather conditions. This is why some other alternative (traditionally fullfilled by resistive heaters) is still needed.
Where do you get 5:1 from? Everything I've read suggests an average of 2:1.
The efficiency of heat pumps is dependent upon the heat available in the ambient environment as pumps must run for longer periods in order to maintain room temp in colder environments. Heat pumps also require electricity to run and grid eletricity has to be generated and transported to the home. Both generation from some natural resource, and transport, incur losses which impact overall efficiency. Solar electricity and solar thermal are generated directly at the home. Solar thermal is used to heat both water and the home where modern homes use a pipe grid system in the flooring to move heat throughout the house.
Resistive heaters waste a lot of electricity generating heat from electricity as compared to powering non resistive devices. Not only does it require a large amount of current to generate heat, but not all of the radiation produced in heater coils is in the low energy heat band. Here I'm taking about efficiency only of converting electricity into heat. However overall efficiency considers the additional factors that I mentioned earlier: losses that accrue from electricity generation (conversion) at the source, and transport. Modern homes that employ solar and solar thermal are highly efficient overall because there is no work that goes into the production of the source energy (which, unlike electricity from the grid, is why I said it is 'free'). Solar systems don't always need %40 efficient panels to provide enough energy to power a house. Even with what's typically sold today, some people have solar energy based systems that are capable enough to allow them to sell power back to the grid.