Two very interesting things about this decision. First, the Judge appears to have over-ruled the factual findings made by the jury -- a fairly unusual practice, and one that is not likely to be upheld on appeal. Second, the Judge appears to have returned to "first principles" of contract law in reacher her decision -- good for her. We need more of this type of rational thinking.
There are two key points in the article (couldn't the actual opinion) hitting these points:
On June 12, a jury in the Alameda County lawsuit ruled in favor of Sprint Nextel, determining that its customers who canceled their service early had breached their contracts with the company and that early termination fees were warranted.
But in overruling that decision, Sabraw said the jurors appear to have erred in assuming the fees were valid, and she took issue with the way Sprint Nextel determined that its customers owed the fees.
Interesting; because judges are usually very reluctant to over-ride decisions made by juries. Generally, juries make findings of fact and the Judge makes the finding of law. Here, the Judge said that the Jury clearly erred in finding the contracts valid. Which makes me think that the Jury instructions were extremely poorly written, or that the Judge feels very strongly that the plaintiffs made the legal side of their case so well that "no reasonable jury" would have returned the decision that it did. (Also, I note that the Jury appears to have awarded damages despite finding that the contracts were valid -- this semi-contradictory result may have persuaded the judge to go in the direction she did.)
The second interesting argument:
"Sprint did no damage analysis that considered the lost revenue from contracts, the avoidable costs and Sprint's expected lost profits from contract terminations," she said.
YES! It is a founding principle of contract law that the non-breaching party's damage recovery is limited to its actual losses and its cost to make up the breaching party's violation of the agreement. Traditionally, a contract that agreed to damages in excess of the non-breaching party's actual exposure (i.e., punative damages) were ruled invalid and "reformed" by the court into something reasonable.
However, the courts over the past few decades have been relunctant to follow this principle -- instead, most consumer contracts today contain a "liquidated damages" clause, where the parties agree ahead of time on an estimate of what the actual damages would be. To me, fundamental principles of contract law dictate that an agreement to excessive liquidated damages clauses (particularly in consumer contracts) should not be upheld. I'm glad to see a court finally moving in that direction.
Actually, Hasbro withdrew their prior lawsuit against Scrabulous *until* such time as it could put its own service up on Facebook. Hasbro's version is now live, and they have recommenced their suit. Ergo, this is new news.
Way to pick the ONE article in the history of/. that is actually *not* a dupe.
Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property? The "creators" of Scrabulous don't even make a token effort to add some new intellectual component to their game.
So yeah, while I love Scrabulous, and will probably re-join the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group, I don't think that they really have a leg to stand on.
You realize that the language you quoted is required by SEC regulations and appears in every single financial document released by every single publicly traded company, right? I'm talking ExxonMobile down to Fly-By-Night, LLC.
I'm not commenting on the (rather dubious sounding) claims made by the company -- but to target their SEC disclosure statement as evidence that they are full of !@#$ is really not fair.
Unfortunately, the state government is in the pocket of the coal industry, which is also very big in ND. Wind farms put coal workers out of jobs. So they don't let many wind farms get built and they don't give the infrastructure necessary to do so (such as a way to tap in to the power grid).
The problem with wind in North Dakota is that it is in North Dakota. It has nothing to do with coal companies trying to kill it. The problem is getting the wind power from North Dakota to someone who needs it. That is a very difficult and extremely capital-intensive problem.
The current system that we use to fund our transmission system is simply not equipped to deal with this sort of chicken and egg problem. Here's a short list of the real reasons that North Dakota is not the short-term panacea to our energy problems:
1) North Dakota citizens do not want to pay billions to build new transmission line that will simply ship their power into other areas. (Rightfully so.)
2) No single wind company is big enough to fund the transmission upgrades by themselves, which leads to amazingly complicated squabbles over who gets to use whatever available transmission capacity is available, and attempts to screw over the competition in a scramble to get there first.
3) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 1). Try running a company where 20 percent (or more) of your employees may or may not show up on any given day. Moreover, on same days every single employee will come rushing in all at once; on other days, not a one will show up. (Never mind the engineering challenges of building an electrical system that can physically accommodate huge influxes one minute and then dead zones the next!)
4) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 2). Try running a company where 20 percent of your employees only show up in the evening / early morning hours. Sure, the majority of your customers (e.g. load) show up between 10 am and 4 pm -- but the wind tends to blow most in the early morning and later in the evening.
6) Transmitting power over long distances is problematic in terms of transmission line losses. (Yes, someone will inevitably raise the prospect of a DC-tie line -- but from a practical view, that's many, many years off in the future and hugely expensive.)
Please don't misunderstand -- I'm very pro-wind. But people need to understand that it's limited and will not be the automatic solution to our energy problems.
I'm an attorney tangentially involved in preparing SEC documents for a major corporation. Based on my experience with how seriously companies take their disclosure obligations, I would be shocked if Google were actively engaged in hiding a "material" settlement with Yahoo.
For what it's worth, materiality is a term of art -- and certainly any royalty paid by Google to Yahoo to settle a patent claim would almost certainly be material, likely and quantifiable -- which would likely trigger Google's obligation to disclose the potential liability in its 10-K and 10-Q.
Is it possible that Google is playing fast and loose with its securities obligations, or that it has come up with some novel legal theory about why it wouldn't be required to report such a deal? Well, sure. People and companies do stupid things all the time. But is it likely....?
Wow.... that's a really serious allegation to lodge without any "smoking gun". Interesting article, but I have to think there's an element of conspiracy theorism in it that does not sound credible to me.
Like most, I fell in love with SciFi and fantasy at about that age. I never really stopped, and still appreciate these books today. I tend to be more on the fantasy side, but I think they appeal to the same tastes.
A few modern teen-reading recommendations that I haven't seen listed yet:
* Garth Nix. His Abhorsen series is stellar -- it includes Sabriel, Lireal and Abhorsen. Shade's Children is good; the Keys to the Kingdom series is mediocre.
* Any of Robin McKinley's books. I particularly loved (and still love) "The Blue Sword." Also quite good are The Door in the Hedge, Rosedaughter, Beauty, Sherwood and anything else she's written with two important exceptions: Sunshine and Deerskin. Both of these deal with adult themes. Deerskin in particular feautres violent sexual abuse.
* Raymond E. Feist's "Magician" series -- especially the first two books -- are excellent for more ambitious young readers.
* Kingdom For Sale by Sword of Shannara author Terry Brooks were quite funny and made a nice easy and engaging intro to this genre.
The rest of these are okay books -- but they are easy to find and completely age-appropriate:
* Tamora Pierce's books are all middling-good fantasy books and almost all feature strong female leads.
* Diana Wynne Jones -- all of her books are also easy age-appropriate (if not ultimately inspiring).
* Phillip Pullman - His Dark Materials series is another fair-to-middling age-appropriate series.
Finally, I would be remiss in noting that the Star Trek books are actually quite excellent ways to introduce youngsters to reading. I loved them all when I was that age, and still have all my Blish short serializations sitting proudly on my shelf at home.
Exactly why I loved Valentine's Castle at about 12. Is it "appropriate" in the adult sense of the word....? Perhaps not. But any 12 year old boy will enjoy re-reading a few of those scenes under the covers at night.
What better way to intill a love of reading?
PS - it's actually pretty tame. But at 12, I was willing to take whatever I could find!
5.8 MWs of energy is far more than it takes to move a car. Gasoline engines are remarkably ineffecient at converting all that energy into actual power.
Third, and most importantly:
"If it were possible for human beings to digest gasoline, a gallon would contain about 31,000 food calories -- the energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy in about 110 McDonalds hamburgers!"
I am one of those non-techincal people who waste large sums of time on Slashdot (a.k.a., one of the idiots). My last "program" was a (poorly written) html homepage.
Yet for a non-technical person, I have a pretty damn good understanding of technology. Our job is to talk to the technical staff, translate technical arguments into English and all without sacrificing accuracy. There are any number of industries where techincal staff are required to interface with a non-technical personnel and where effective communication means the difference between "winning" and "losing." Someone with people and/or writing skills should think creatively about these types of opportunities.
I ended up going to law school. Lawyers with a technical understanding (note: I didn't say techincal skills) are in great demand. Of course, law school is a drastic option, but the principal is equally valid to a number of industries.
I think what many of find frustrating is that whatever bad environmental affects caused by solar plants are strictly localized to the immediate vicinity of the plant. What's the worst that could happen? A small portion of the planet is fouled.
Compare that to the potential harm resulting from other sources of electrical generation, where the affects are literally global in scale.
Even compared to the amount of space required for hydroelectric projects, the potential environmental harm is extremely limited in scope.
On the other hand, there are significant environmental affects related to the mining and production of the materials used in solar production -- so it's not like this is a perfect solution. However, those affects also have to be measured against the comparable affects of building other types of power plants.
To give a brief industry prospective, whether this is good or bad is entirely dependant on whether your company was part of the initial "land rush" to file a BLM permit. If you were, then you just put your company in a much better position vis-a-vis your less speedy competitors.
A couple industry realities that play into the importance of this decision:
1. Location, Location, Location.
Location is critical to establishing an economic generation project. Forget about the cost of the land -- that is generally incidental. But the location makes a critical difference in how much it costs to get your power to market. This principle applies to all technologies, but particularly to commercial scale solar. One of the major costs in developing a new power plant are the interconnection costs -- that is, the costs of reinforcing the already-built transmission system to handle the additional output of your facility. Depending on where you interconnect with the transmission system, this can cost very little or hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously, if you are on the high end of that number, there is less possibility that your project will be built. In extremely cases, the unavailability of a particular piece of federal land may kill the project, if the nearest privately owned option would result in unacceptably high interconnection costs.
Note: there are a variety of different ways the transission upgrades for these projects are funded, and California in particular has some creative financing mechanisms that reduce the interconnection costs -- but even then, they are still a major consideration.
2. Project Financing.
Ten years ago, it was common to finance large power generation projects on spec. The theory was, built it and they will come. That largely ended with the power crisis. Today, it is much harder to secure financing without a power purchase agreement ("PPA"). Currently a number of states are seeking bids for solar PPAs through Requests For Proposals ("RFPs") and other bilateral contracting options. In order to compete in an RFP, you generally need to show some level of site control and basic timeline and economic information. The fact that the BLM has stopped taking new applications is a great boon to those who already have their site proposal pending before BLM, and not good news for others. Time really is critical to these developers and the recent morotorium is going to prevent many companies from competing for these RFPs.
3. The Production Tax Credit.
In one of the more boneheaded moves in history, Congress has chosen to renew the Production Tax Credit ("PTC") every year or two. Whether you think a government subsidy is good business or not (personally, I think it's good), the PTC is critical to making the numbers work and getting a project financed. Currently, there is a major incentive to rush projects into commercial operation before the expiration of this year's PTC. Any additional administrative delay is potentially fatal to the financing of some of these projects.
4. Stupidity & Laziness.
Give me a break BLM. Just do the !@#$ing work and issue a Programatic Environmental Impact Statement covering all/most solar facilities in the desert south west. As a public policy matter, these projects are critically important to the survival of the earth. Get off your asses and get it done. (Though in fairness, the California grid operator and others throughout the country are equally overwhelmed with new solar project requests. But they at least are making major efforts to remove regulatory bottlenecks, not imposing new ones.)
You are thinking like nerds instead of lawyers. More importantly, you are neglecting the human element.
The lack of internet security is not why attorneys visit their clients in person. It is because their client will tell them things face to face that they would never say over a telephone or video conference, no matter how secure. Assuming that the lawyer trusted the technology, do you think the client is going to? I've had corporate clients practically whisper things to me in perfectly secure conference rooms when it is clear that nobody is listening in. Why? It's human nature. Now take a terrorism suspect, who likely is not that well educated and has a legitimate fear of being spied on, and tell him to speak clearly into the microphone. Do you seriously think that is going to work?
Moreover, lawyers -- the good ones anyway -- are half poker player. When we interview clients, we are looking for "tells" and evaluating everything the client says. Not only to determine if their client is telling the truth (sometimes it doesn't matter), but to determine if their client _looks like_ they are telling the truth. There is no way that you could ever evaluate whether to put a witness on the stand without seeing them in person. (Not that it matters in these cases where a jury trial is exceedingly unlikely, but still.) These human factors are every bit as important to properly representing your clients as knowing the law.
There's a wonderful and somewhat tragic tale from Bobby's youth that I think explains so much. (I'm sorry I don't remember which book I read it in, so I can't give credit.)
Bobby was living in New York City as a teenager and playing chess at an amazingly high level. He was also, clearly, a mentally troubled young man, and many of his chess playing friends noticed the instability as well as the genius. A number of friends convened a meeting and discussed taking up a collection to try to get Bobby some professional psyciatric help, which it was clear he needed even then. The meeting is going along, and most agree to encourage Bobby to get help.
Towards the end of the meeting, someone asks "What if Bobby gets well and stops playing good chess?" The meeting then breaks up and nothing ever came of it.
In many ways, Chess is about black versus white. My former chess teacher always prefered that we use the terms "light" and "dark" squares, rather then black and white, and I think it makes a very apt metaphor for Bobby's life. He lived some of his life on the light squares, accomplishing one of the greatest mental-athletic endeavors of all time. For this, he is rightly lionized as one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. He also led many of his years on the dark side of the board as well. Homeless in Los Angeles. Travling around penniless and without recognition for over 20 years. Finally reaping considerable financial rewards in Yogoslovia at the cost of his freedom.
Finally, people note that Bobby in his later years was an anti-semite and said some truly disturbing things. Yet that's not how I see it. Rather than spiteful, his ramblings should be chalked up to the mental illness that clearly ravaged his brain throughout his later life. Just as the deranged homeless man on street should be pitied, so should Bobby. He lived in the largely Jewish chess community of New York for years, and while he may have had issues, his hatred of Jews only reached full blown proportions as his mental health declined. Clearly, he did not suffer fools. But I see no evidence that his dislike for stupid people was anything other than color/creed blind until later in life. Truly, these were the untreated manifestations of the illness that his chess colleagues recognized all those years ago in New York.
RIP Bobby, and I hope that you find the peace in the next world (whether that be in the big chess board in the sky or simply as worm food) that eluded you in this one.
Did you miss the part where he discussed that if (a) he told the truth, his family would be tortured, and that if (b) he lied, his family would be tortured.
Yes, it's a horrible situation. But he himself provided the analysis -- why did he then chose to lie?
Please do not misunderstand me -- I do not condone what the FBI did. But compared to the things other portions of our government are alleged to have done (water boarding, frozen naked in cold cells, etc.) this particular case seems rather benign.
I've seen more "brutal" interrogation techniques (not to mention more effective) on Law and Order and I'm afraid I don't get the outrage. No physical violence was used. The suspect was provided an attorney. He received (relatively) speedy adjudication of his case. He did choose to lie, even if it was coerced.*
Is the FBI's suggestion that they will use local Egyptian authorities to go after his family a shinning moment of FBI history? Certainly not. But is it torture? No. Was it justified under the circumstances? Close call. Was it effective? Ha. Absolutely not. The suspect "confessed" to something that was not even remotely true. If it wasn't for his personal suffering, it would be comical.
Something I found interesting was that the government then prosecuted the hotel employee who initially implicated the suspect, and he actually served some home detention. Clearly, the government was not amused at being mislead in this manner.
Regarding the *, I would like to clarify that I don't think I'm holding the young man to an overly high standard. He should not have lied. Would I make up some story if waterboarded or physically tortured? Almost certainly. Would I make up some story in response to a verbal beating? Doubtful. Remember, that at the stage of the proceeding, it was "assumed" for purposes of summary judgment that all the facts alleged by the suspect were true.
Q: When does demonstrating actual experience with the subject matter of an article result in less credibility?
A: On/.!
Seriously, do you think/. users are a key target demographic for jewelry and beads? It was relevant. It was timely. It was interesting. It demonstrated that I have an informed basis for making my comments. Relax man.
Why don't you do his suggested search, click through to the page but no further -- and cost the fucking leech some real money? And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I (a) stopped our ads before posting, and (b) went to law school instead of opening more beadstores. Jewelry fashions come and go, but assholes are forever.
But I think my "marketing" strategy might need a little work. Somehow I suspect that/. is not exactly a target audience for selling jewelry; since, you know, most of our customers are girls and such.
To elaborate on the other response, this is precisely what Google does. I can set monthly or daily limits on the amount I spend on any particular key work, combination of key works, or for a total "campaign."
In fact, it even pro-rates the amount I'm willing to spend so that the ads don't all appear in the first day or two, or at any particular time of day. So if we have a $10 a day limit for the word "beads", not every search for that term would return our ad, since Google automatically spaces the ads out over the day. It's actually a pretty slick system with lots of controls.
My family runs a small business, http://www.beadstore.com./ We are not Apple or Microsoft. We do not gross anywhere near a million dollars a year. Each time you click on one of our ads you take somewhere between 5 cents to $1.00 directly out of our pocket.
Now we try to target our ads only to those who care about beads and jewelry and such -- but our ads sometimes display for completely random searches.
What on earth is possibly wrong with buying something off the internet? A Google search for "African King Beads" (including the quotes) and my store is the first hit.
I also happen to know many of the merchants listed on the right advertising for those key words; after all, the high end collectible bead family is relatively small. I would *never* click on one of their ads, because I know it costs them money every time I do. If I wouldn't do this to my competitors, why would you do it to a random stranger?
Google loses nothing as a result of clicks it determines to be fraudulent, other than its time and a little server space. On the balance sheet, it's simply as if those clicks never happened. No out of pocket expenses are incurred by google. Eliminating every fraudulent click out there would not increase Google's bottom line one iota, other than its incremental costs of dealing with this fraud.
We merchants/advertizers are the ones screwed. Google says that 10 percent of clicks are fraudulent? I have zero idea if this is an over-estimate, under-estimate, or dead-on accurate. However, I do know that google has very little incentive to "mark down" my bill every month. My family runs a small business -- http://www.beadstore.com/ -- and sometimes advertise on google. How many of those clicks I pay for each month are fraudulent? Who knows. I certainly can't tell.
This isn't to say that I distrust Google. The fact is, that when we advertise, our sales go up. So something is working. Advertising on Google makes a bigger difference than any of our other venues. But those numbers suggesting that 30 percent of our advertising budget may be/once was/is potentially lost to fraud? That is truly scary.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two key points in the article (couldn't the actual opinion) hitting these points:
Interesting; because judges are usually very reluctant to over-ride decisions made by juries. Generally, juries make findings of fact and the Judge makes the finding of law. Here, the Judge said that the Jury clearly erred in finding the contracts valid. Which makes me think that the Jury instructions were extremely poorly written, or that the Judge feels very strongly that the plaintiffs made the legal side of their case so well that "no reasonable jury" would have returned the decision that it did. (Also, I note that the Jury appears to have awarded damages despite finding that the contracts were valid -- this semi-contradictory result may have persuaded the judge to go in the direction she did.)
The second interesting argument:
YES! It is a founding principle of contract law that the non-breaching party's damage recovery is limited to its actual losses and its cost to make up the breaching party's violation of the agreement. Traditionally, a contract that agreed to damages in excess of the non-breaching party's actual exposure (i.e., punative damages) were ruled invalid and "reformed" by the court into something reasonable.
However, the courts over the past few decades have been relunctant to follow this principle -- instead, most consumer contracts today contain a "liquidated damages" clause, where the parties agree ahead of time on an estimate of what the actual damages would be. To me, fundamental principles of contract law dictate that an agreement to excessive liquidated damages clauses (particularly in consumer contracts) should not be upheld. I'm glad to see a court finally moving in that direction.
Actually, Hasbro withdrew their prior lawsuit against Scrabulous *until* such time as it could put its own service up on Facebook. Hasbro's version is now live, and they have recommenced their suit. Ergo, this is new news.
Way to pick the ONE article in the history of /. that is actually *not* a dupe.
No, actually, I didn't say "patent." Try looking to trademark law -- entirely different kettle of fish.
Is there any serious doubt that Scrabulous infringes on Hasbro's intellectual property? The "creators" of Scrabulous don't even make a token effort to add some new intellectual component to their game. So yeah, while I love Scrabulous, and will probably re-join the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group, I don't think that they really have a leg to stand on.
You realize that the language you quoted is required by SEC regulations and appears in every single financial document released by every single publicly traded company, right? I'm talking ExxonMobile down to Fly-By-Night, LLC.
I'm not commenting on the (rather dubious sounding) claims made by the company -- but to target their SEC disclosure statement as evidence that they are full of !@#$ is really not fair.
Unfortunately, the state government is in the pocket of the coal industry, which is also very big in ND. Wind farms put coal workers out of jobs. So they don't let many wind farms get built and they don't give the infrastructure necessary to do so (such as a way to tap in to the power grid).
The problem with wind in North Dakota is that it is in North Dakota. It has nothing to do with coal companies trying to kill it. The problem is getting the wind power from North Dakota to someone who needs it. That is a very difficult and extremely capital-intensive problem.
The current system that we use to fund our transmission system is simply not equipped to deal with this sort of chicken and egg problem. Here's a short list of the real reasons that North Dakota is not the short-term panacea to our energy problems:
1) North Dakota citizens do not want to pay billions to build new transmission line that will simply ship their power into other areas. (Rightfully so.)
2) No single wind company is big enough to fund the transmission upgrades by themselves, which leads to amazingly complicated squabbles over who gets to use whatever available transmission capacity is available, and attempts to screw over the competition in a scramble to get there first.
3) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 1). Try running a company where 20 percent (or more) of your employees may or may not show up on any given day. Moreover, on same days every single employee will come rushing in all at once; on other days, not a one will show up. (Never mind the engineering challenges of building an electrical system that can physically accommodate huge influxes one minute and then dead zones the next!)
4) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 2). Try running a company where 20 percent of your employees only show up in the evening / early morning hours. Sure, the majority of your customers (e.g. load) show up between 10 am and 4 pm -- but the wind tends to blow most in the early morning and later in the evening.
5) Integrating wind into the power system can lead to serious operational problems: http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/02/28/power-grid-narrowly-averted-rolling-blackouts/. On February 28, 2008, the wind in Texas dropped from 1,700 MW to 300 MW over an extremely short period and came close to causing blackouts.
6) Transmitting power over long distances is problematic in terms of transmission line losses. (Yes, someone will inevitably raise the prospect of a DC-tie line -- but from a practical view, that's many, many years off in the future and hugely expensive.)
Please don't misunderstand -- I'm very pro-wind. But people need to understand that it's limited and will not be the automatic solution to our energy problems.
I'm an attorney tangentially involved in preparing SEC documents for a major corporation. Based on my experience with how seriously companies take their disclosure obligations, I would be shocked if Google were actively engaged in hiding a "material" settlement with Yahoo.
For what it's worth, materiality is a term of art -- and certainly any royalty paid by Google to Yahoo to settle a patent claim would almost certainly be material, likely and quantifiable -- which would likely trigger Google's obligation to disclose the potential liability in its 10-K and 10-Q.
Is it possible that Google is playing fast and loose with its securities obligations, or that it has come up with some novel legal theory about why it wouldn't be required to report such a deal? Well, sure. People and companies do stupid things all the time. But is it likely....?
Wow.... that's a really serious allegation to lodge without any "smoking gun". Interesting article, but I have to think there's an element of conspiracy theorism in it that does not sound credible to me.
Like most, I fell in love with SciFi and fantasy at about that age. I never really stopped, and still appreciate these books today. I tend to be more on the fantasy side, but I think they appeal to the same tastes.
A few modern teen-reading recommendations that I haven't seen listed yet:
* Garth Nix. His Abhorsen series is stellar -- it includes Sabriel, Lireal and Abhorsen. Shade's Children is good; the Keys to the Kingdom series is mediocre.
* Any of Robin McKinley's books. I particularly loved (and still love) "The Blue Sword." Also quite good are The Door in the Hedge, Rosedaughter, Beauty, Sherwood and anything else she's written with two important exceptions: Sunshine and Deerskin. Both of these deal with adult themes. Deerskin in particular feautres violent sexual abuse.
* Raymond E. Feist's "Magician" series -- especially the first two books -- are excellent for more ambitious young readers.
* Kingdom For Sale by Sword of Shannara author Terry Brooks were quite funny and made a nice easy and engaging intro to this genre.
The rest of these are okay books -- but they are easy to find and completely age-appropriate:
* Tamora Pierce's books are all middling-good fantasy books and almost all feature strong female leads.
* Diana Wynne Jones -- all of her books are also easy age-appropriate (if not ultimately inspiring).
* Phillip Pullman - His Dark Materials series is another fair-to-middling age-appropriate series.
Finally, I would be remiss in noting that the Star Trek books are actually quite excellent ways to introduce youngsters to reading. I loved them all when I was that age, and still have all my Blish short serializations sitting proudly on my shelf at home.
Exactly why I loved Valentine's Castle at about 12. Is it "appropriate" in the adult sense of the word....? Perhaps not. But any 12 year old boy will enjoy re-reading a few of those scenes under the covers at night.
What better way to intill a love of reading?
PS - it's actually pretty tame. But at 12, I was willing to take whatever I could find!
Wrong on several levels.
First, the math:
491 kilowatt-hours = 0.491 megawatt-hours.
0.491 MWh over 5 minutes = 5.892 MWs of energy.
Second, you are ignoring efficiency:
5.8 MWs of energy is far more than it takes to move a car. Gasoline engines are remarkably ineffecient at converting all that energy into actual power.
Third, and most importantly:
"If it were possible for human beings to digest gasoline, a gallon would contain about 31,000 food calories -- the energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy in about 110 McDonalds hamburgers!"
Soure: http://science.howstuffworks.com/gasoline1.htm
(Okay, so maybe not most importantly, but it's the coolest.)
I am one of those non-techincal people who waste large sums of time on Slashdot (a.k.a., one of the idiots). My last "program" was a (poorly written) html homepage.
Yet for a non-technical person, I have a pretty damn good understanding of technology. Our job is to talk to the technical staff, translate technical arguments into English and all without sacrificing accuracy. There are any number of industries where techincal staff are required to interface with a non-technical personnel and where effective communication means the difference between "winning" and "losing." Someone with people and/or writing skills should think creatively about these types of opportunities.
I ended up going to law school. Lawyers with a technical understanding (note: I didn't say techincal skills) are in great demand. Of course, law school is a drastic option, but the principal is equally valid to a number of industries.
I want a browser that:
1) Does not hang for a good minute if I happen to type in an invalid address.
2) Does not crash if I happen to click on a non-standard page.
3) Does not require me to download some java/flash/newfangled invention in order to access content.
4) Never gives me a technical server error in some language I don't understand (and yes, I realize it's the server).
5) Does not allow a malicious web page to open an infinite number of new pages.
The rest of that junk? I mean who really cares if it slices and dices -- all I want is to be able to browse in comfort.
I think what many of find frustrating is that whatever bad environmental affects caused by solar plants are strictly localized to the immediate vicinity of the plant. What's the worst that could happen? A small portion of the planet is fouled.
Compare that to the potential harm resulting from other sources of electrical generation, where the affects are literally global in scale.
Even compared to the amount of space required for hydroelectric projects, the potential environmental harm is extremely limited in scope.
On the other hand, there are significant environmental affects related to the mining and production of the materials used in solar production -- so it's not like this is a perfect solution. However, those affects also have to be measured against the comparable affects of building other types of power plants.
To give a brief industry prospective, whether this is good or bad is entirely dependant on whether your company was part of the initial "land rush" to file a BLM permit. If you were, then you just put your company in a much better position vis-a-vis your less speedy competitors.
A couple industry realities that play into the importance of this decision:
1. Location, Location, Location.
Location is critical to establishing an economic generation project. Forget about the cost of the land -- that is generally incidental. But the location makes a critical difference in how much it costs to get your power to market. This principle applies to all technologies, but particularly to commercial scale solar. One of the major costs in developing a new power plant are the interconnection costs -- that is, the costs of reinforcing the already-built transmission system to handle the additional output of your facility. Depending on where you interconnect with the transmission system, this can cost very little or hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously, if you are on the high end of that number, there is less possibility that your project will be built. In extremely cases, the unavailability of a particular piece of federal land may kill the project, if the nearest privately owned option would result in unacceptably high interconnection costs.
Note: there are a variety of different ways the transission upgrades for these projects are funded, and California in particular has some creative financing mechanisms that reduce the interconnection costs -- but even then, they are still a major consideration.
2. Project Financing.
Ten years ago, it was common to finance large power generation projects on spec. The theory was, built it and they will come. That largely ended with the power crisis. Today, it is much harder to secure financing without a power purchase agreement ("PPA"). Currently a number of states are seeking bids for solar PPAs through Requests For Proposals ("RFPs") and other bilateral contracting options. In order to compete in an RFP, you generally need to show some level of site control and basic timeline and economic information. The fact that the BLM has stopped taking new applications is a great boon to those who already have their site proposal pending before BLM, and not good news for others. Time really is critical to these developers and the recent morotorium is going to prevent many companies from competing for these RFPs.
3. The Production Tax Credit.
In one of the more boneheaded moves in history, Congress has chosen to renew the Production Tax Credit ("PTC") every year or two. Whether you think a government subsidy is good business or not (personally, I think it's good), the PTC is critical to making the numbers work and getting a project financed. Currently, there is a major incentive to rush projects into commercial operation before the expiration of this year's PTC. Any additional administrative delay is potentially fatal to the financing of some of these projects.
4. Stupidity & Laziness.
Give me a break BLM. Just do the !@#$ing work and issue a Programatic Environmental Impact Statement covering all/most solar facilities in the desert south west. As a public policy matter, these projects are critically important to the survival of the earth. Get off your asses and get it done. (Though in fairness, the California grid operator and others throughout the country are equally overwhelmed with new solar project requests. But they at least are making major efforts to remove regulatory bottlenecks, not imposing new ones.)
My bar membership says differently -- but thank you for playing.
You are thinking like nerds instead of lawyers. More importantly, you are neglecting the human element.
The lack of internet security is not why attorneys visit their clients in person. It is because their client will tell them things face to face that they would never say over a telephone or video conference, no matter how secure. Assuming that the lawyer trusted the technology, do you think the client is going to? I've had corporate clients practically whisper things to me in perfectly secure conference rooms when it is clear that nobody is listening in. Why? It's human nature. Now take a terrorism suspect, who likely is not that well educated and has a legitimate fear of being spied on, and tell him to speak clearly into the microphone. Do you seriously think that is going to work?
Moreover, lawyers -- the good ones anyway -- are half poker player. When we interview clients, we are looking for "tells" and evaluating everything the client says. Not only to determine if their client is telling the truth (sometimes it doesn't matter), but to determine if their client _looks like_ they are telling the truth. There is no way that you could ever evaluate whether to put a witness on the stand without seeing them in person. (Not that it matters in these cases where a jury trial is exceedingly unlikely, but still.) These human factors are every bit as important to properly representing your clients as knowing the law.
There's a wonderful and somewhat tragic tale from Bobby's youth that I think explains so much. (I'm sorry I don't remember which book I read it in, so I can't give credit.)
Bobby was living in New York City as a teenager and playing chess at an amazingly high level. He was also, clearly, a mentally troubled young man, and many of his chess playing friends noticed the instability as well as the genius. A number of friends convened a meeting and discussed taking up a collection to try to get Bobby some professional psyciatric help, which it was clear he needed even then. The meeting is going along, and most agree to encourage Bobby to get help.
Towards the end of the meeting, someone asks "What if Bobby gets well and stops playing good chess?" The meeting then breaks up and nothing ever came of it.
In many ways, Chess is about black versus white. My former chess teacher always prefered that we use the terms "light" and "dark" squares, rather then black and white, and I think it makes a very apt metaphor for Bobby's life. He lived some of his life on the light squares, accomplishing one of the greatest mental-athletic endeavors of all time. For this, he is rightly lionized as one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. He also led many of his years on the dark side of the board as well. Homeless in Los Angeles. Travling around penniless and without recognition for over 20 years. Finally reaping considerable financial rewards in Yogoslovia at the cost of his freedom.
Finally, people note that Bobby in his later years was an anti-semite and said some truly disturbing things. Yet that's not how I see it. Rather than spiteful, his ramblings should be chalked up to the mental illness that clearly ravaged his brain throughout his later life. Just as the deranged homeless man on street should be pitied, so should Bobby. He lived in the largely Jewish chess community of New York for years, and while he may have had issues, his hatred of Jews only reached full blown proportions as his mental health declined. Clearly, he did not suffer fools. But I see no evidence that his dislike for stupid people was anything other than color/creed blind until later in life. Truly, these were the untreated manifestations of the illness that his chess colleagues recognized all those years ago in New York.
RIP Bobby, and I hope that you find the peace in the next world (whether that be in the big chess board in the sky or simply as worm food) that eluded you in this one.
Did you miss the part where he discussed that if (a) he told the truth, his family would be tortured, and that if (b) he lied, his family would be tortured.
Yes, it's a horrible situation. But he himself provided the analysis -- why did he then chose to lie?
Please do not misunderstand me -- I do not condone what the FBI did. But compared to the things other portions of our government are alleged to have done (water boarding, frozen naked in cold cells, etc.) this particular case seems rather benign.
I've seen more "brutal" interrogation techniques (not to mention more effective) on Law and Order and I'm afraid I don't get the outrage. No physical violence was used. The suspect was provided an attorney. He received (relatively) speedy adjudication of his case. He did choose to lie, even if it was coerced.*
Is the FBI's suggestion that they will use local Egyptian authorities to go after his family a shinning moment of FBI history? Certainly not. But is it torture? No. Was it justified under the circumstances? Close call. Was it effective? Ha. Absolutely not. The suspect "confessed" to something that was not even remotely true. If it wasn't for his personal suffering, it would be comical.
Something I found interesting was that the government then prosecuted the hotel employee who initially implicated the suspect, and he actually served some home detention. Clearly, the government was not amused at being mislead in this manner.
Regarding the *, I would like to clarify that I don't think I'm holding the young man to an overly high standard. He should not have lied. Would I make up some story if waterboarded or physically tortured? Almost certainly. Would I make up some story in response to a verbal beating? Doubtful. Remember, that at the stage of the proceeding, it was "assumed" for purposes of summary judgment that all the facts alleged by the suspect were true.
Q: When does demonstrating actual experience with the subject matter of an article result in less credibility?
/.!
/. users are a key target demographic for jewelry and beads? It was relevant. It was timely. It was interesting. It demonstrated that I have an informed basis for making my comments. Relax man.
A: On
Seriously, do you think
Priceless ;)
/. is not exactly a target audience for selling jewelry; since, you know, most of our customers are girls and such.
But I think my "marketing" strategy might need a little work. Somehow I suspect that
To elaborate on the other response, this is precisely what Google does. I can set monthly or daily limits on the amount I spend on any particular key work, combination of key works, or for a total "campaign."
In fact, it even pro-rates the amount I'm willing to spend so that the ads don't all appear in the first day or two, or at any particular time of day. So if we have a $10 a day limit for the word "beads", not every search for that term would return our ad, since Google automatically spaces the ads out over the day. It's actually a pretty slick system with lots of controls.
This is cruel.
My family runs a small business, http://www.beadstore.com./ We are not Apple or Microsoft. We do not gross anywhere near a million dollars a year. Each time you click on one of our ads you take somewhere between 5 cents to $1.00 directly out of our pocket.
Now we try to target our ads only to those who care about beads and jewelry and such -- but our ads sometimes display for completely random searches.
What on earth is possibly wrong with buying something off the internet? A Google search for "African King Beads" (including the quotes) and my store is the first hit.
I also happen to know many of the merchants listed on the right advertising for those key words; after all, the high end collectible bead family is relatively small. I would *never* click on one of their ads, because I know it costs them money every time I do. If I wouldn't do this to my competitors, why would you do it to a random stranger?
Google loses nothing as a result of clicks it determines to be fraudulent, other than its time and a little server space. On the balance sheet, it's simply as if those clicks never happened. No out of pocket expenses are incurred by google. Eliminating every fraudulent click out there would not increase Google's bottom line one iota, other than its incremental costs of dealing with this fraud.
We merchants/advertizers are the ones screwed. Google says that 10 percent of clicks are fraudulent? I have zero idea if this is an over-estimate, under-estimate, or dead-on accurate. However, I do know that google has very little incentive to "mark down" my bill every month. My family runs a small business -- http://www.beadstore.com/ -- and sometimes advertise on google. How many of those clicks I pay for each month are fraudulent? Who knows. I certainly can't tell.
This isn't to say that I distrust Google. The fact is, that when we advertise, our sales go up. So something is working. Advertising on Google makes a bigger difference than any of our other venues. But those numbers suggesting that 30 percent of our advertising budget may be/once was/is potentially lost to fraud? That is truly scary.