Call their bluff! Counter sue if you get cut off. Heck, take 'em to small claims court if you have to, then it is just you against any non lawyer they might have, they can't bring a lawyer into court. A judge will read the GPL, and you win most likely, unless they have some really obscure thing in their TOS that says you can get cut off for any reason at all, like they don't like your hat or something.
Besides that, I am having a hard time believing that any ISP, with some geeks there, would be totally unfamiliar with the GPL and legal downloads of stuff. Maybe you are with some huge ISP that uses script reading "tech support", perhaps in a "foreign land", people who really can't deviate from their script and instructions. If so, bump it up a notch there to second tier or first tier support.
What-ever, just seems silly to immediately cave to such wrongness.
How do you make your paper briquettes? Water, then a compactor, or what?
I make some woodstove "logs" from old cardboard boxes that I get from glanage, scrounging produce and fruits, etc.. Get the boxes slightly wet (by leaving them out in the rain, lol), then they are really easy to roll up tight, then they get wrapped with used and now recycled bailing twine (that I cut off of big round bales), then let dry again. I use that for kindling, or to get a fast heat boost in the morning when there are just some coals left. TIA.
We have to have a similar deal on the farm, loss of electricity would be devastating, and there's only a few minutes window there. So we have multiple large diesel generators on auto start. They each have four starter batteries,(that is for redundancy as well) and get tested and run periodically. Loss of grid power (or an out of bounds temperature reading, or loss of water pressure, or low propane pressure for the heaters, or low feed levels in the bins, whatever, it is all computerized, etc) causes loud external sirens to go on, and it sends a message to both an external monitoring service, then to the individual farmers, and the entire incident gets logged. That's really the only way, have good backups and fast response. When loss of power can cause an emergency situation that effects your bottom line, you can't have too much "insurance" there. The machinery is designed to respond to emergencies automatically, plus gets the relevant hoomannzz ass in gear to go check things out anyway.
If you can handle downtime and just want a clean shutdown, well, just get a better UPS and swap out to new batteries periodically. Always size one bigger than what you think you need, give yourself a cushion there.
All those car factories would still have existed, just with new owners now. They could still make cars, or perhaps something else. They would have needed workers, and would have been in a position to offer a fair, but less ridiculous salary and benefits package for factory work.
A real bankruptcy and liquidation is that, stuff gets sold, the new owners use it. Stockholders would have been taught a lesson that they need to do due diligence on their executive employees better, management would have learned you can't be stupidly top heavy, and the rank and file boys would have realized they need to not expect as much as they think they are worth, not in a global economy.. So all around, it would have been better for that to happen, long range.
I feel the same away about those bloated tick parasite casino banks, they should have been allowed to go bankrupt, then we could have sorted out what all those scam paper financial products are really worth, which is..not near as much as they contend now. I think society has hit "peak wealth leeching" with those guys.
Ya, it would have sucked a little for a couple of years, but the resulting economy would have been MUCH better. Less stupid overpaid fatcats sucking out of the system, more middle class actual productive wealth creation jobs back.
As it is now, all they have done is reward those who failed in the first place, and given them incentive to just follow the same failed policies. Quite dumb really. Slap this generation and the next several in debt for this to happen, too. That's not dumb, that's outright criminal.
Google could make money any number of ways. They could open their own online everything store, and take a cut, Googazon. They could offer ad free search for so much a year subscription. They are already getting into the phone business, and could extend that to netbooks, etc. ISP business as the recent article outlines. Hosting services. Heck, how about scientific journals that are open to the public for much more reasonable fees than what the current bigdogs charge? General news, and keep undercutting these proposed paywalls that certain of the other large news orgs will be going to. They could go into the alternative energy business in bulk, sell electricity, or even sell solar arrays, stuff like that. Put up their own huge windchargers.
How about a googlemobile? These guys are interested in all sorts of cool stuff. They have enough presence to get their own brand of electric vehicles out there if they wanted to. Googlemusic, make offers to bands to host and sell their tunes for like reasonable cheap, like a dime instead of a dollar, with a 50/50 split with the musicians. I mean geez, if you got buhzillions in cash right how, there are any number of interesting offshoot businesses you could get into, and by keeping margins really low, they could get market share..
They won't be stuck on advertising alone for income.
China has been acquiring the means to produce wealth, that's what they have been buying besides debt instruments. And that's why they are getting richer, and at such a rate. They buy anything at all related to manufacturing. You name it, they want it, either directly, or get just the R&D..whatever it takes. They bought the tools used to make more tools to then go on and build..anything. Anything at all, which they then export, and reap value-added profit from. They buy the means to produce wealth from the west and Japan, turn around, produce the wealth, sell it back to the places that were producing the wealth, undercutting the market there..obvious profit. They make so much doing this that not only can they continue to acquire more machinery, etc, but are sitting on quite the surplus of foreign cash, which they are now going around the planet and buying up natural resources and farmland with. Just sticking some in debt instruments helps them maintain their markets, it's a form of currency manipulation for the most part, it gives them mass leverage.
Crude example, they don't want to have to buy mass quantities of cars and airplanes from someplace else, that just costs wealth,. doesn't make wealth, they want to buy the factories to make cars and airplanes..because running those sorts of factories makes wealth, which expands their domestic economy and provides a lot of better paying jobs.. A to Z there, anything you can name or think of. That's what they have been buying and are still buying.
Eventually, they will have such a monopoly on manufacturing, owning the raw resources from all over the planet plus the factories and toolings needed, etc, that they can move on to the next step and slide away from a weaker yuan/renminbi and concentrate more on their internal markets, and those foreign markets where they get raw resources from. Their current western "consumer" markets won't be of as much importance to them then, there won't be this "need" to maintain really cheap exports that some of the more short sighted economists always talk about. they needed it in the past, and still do today -to a point- but eventually once they dominate that need evaporates rather quickly.
They are fairly close to that point now, on an historical long range timeline. They *had* to suck it up for a lot of years and have cheaper exports in order to keep getting more machinery and tools, etc, market by market by market. As they start to dominate market after market, this removes that particular niche from so much concern for them with exchange rates. They still need to export, but their target consumers will be shifting away from the places where they originally sourced all the machinery and expertise from, to internal and raw resource regions..because that's all they will need at that point. Check and mate then, they win. The 19th and 20th century industrialized west falls to second or even third tier status on the global scale. Much fun and games in those areas then..historians will have much to discuss.
6831 cells, form factor 18650-common industry standard for small devices, slightly larger than an AA, more storage and higher voltage (just for reference)
So it almost is being done with cars like that..close enough. They use some fancy wiring and cooling for the Tesla though...
You have good points on trash and packing though. That's a big price people pay for a lot of things today, then it just turns to junk instantly. My non favorite is blisterpacks. I keep aviation snips handy just for dealing with those things. They *are* good packaging, but a pain to open and then how to dispose of them cleanly?
Sometimes I wish they had an area right outside the checkout lanes where you could open your purchases, and they had a recycle bin sitting there for the packaging junk. Or just have lockable generic packages with clear covers to see what is in there. You pay for the item, it gets unlocked right then after ring up, they retain the packaging and it goes to the back where the next item-whatever that item might be that could fit in it, gets placed in there, then back out to the shelf.
That's the best, one sentence global economic over view I have read. "China is spending money on its future, we are spending money from the future."
Nailed it. And I don't blame them for doing that, because our own domestic economic traitors handed that opportunity to them on a silver platter, the Chinese would have been 'tards to turn it down. It was completely logical what they did and are still doing, building up their own nation, "protecting" themselves, adding to their real economy, etc. Of course they would take that deal, free stuff. And how it happened is we let those wall street pirates and bribed off politicians cook this whole scheme up, then they hard sold it all over, to great success, they sold that con and got most to "believe" in it, and now they are extorting trillions in bailouts on top of that. *Extorting*.
The Chinese guy is sort of a spy, I'm not all that concerned about him because I imagine he is merely one of tens of thousands in a similar (barely hidden) tech transfer situation. Because that's been the business of the US since they started this con job, transfer as much manufacturing tech as possible.
The real economic and security damage has been from the short term mega profits crowd who destroyed, in a single generation, sold it off cheap for a fat skim, what it took multiple generations to build up in the US, all that wealth creation manufacturing infrastructure, all of it, from A to Z. All those value added jobs..all mostly poofed now, so multi millionaires could become billionaires and another flock of corrupt politicians could get re-re-re elected, so they could keep accepting more bribe money, all the time spouting off all these economic and social promises to the US people that they knew in advance could never be met. And they are still doing it, and tons of people asre still falling for that noise.
They sold this global wealth transference con with massive credit expansion, got almost everyone faked out that credit=produced wealth, like it is the same thing. Something to keep the peons amused while their bank accounts, retirement savings, etc all got evaporated away, and will continue to evaporate away.
On a small scale they call it corporate raiding. A hostile take over, sell off all the assets cheap, gut the workforce, etc. Massive short term profits are the result, wall street loves it, politicians love it, they all get rewarded for their "hard work" of gutting companies, then they bail out with golden parachutes, leaving a company in mostly name only. Everyone has seen this happen and knows exactly what that is.
But do the exact same thing on an entire national scale, all of a sudden there's this mass blindfold gets slapped on, people *refuse* to see the situation for what it is, go into complete denial over it, claim it is something other than that. We are supposed to believe these national scale wall street/ DC politician corporate raiders that what they are doing isn't corporate raiding. They just call it something else and say it is a "good deal".
They have been saying that for near 25 years now, and if it WAS such a good deal, why all the recent economic meltdown? Could it be, that manufacturing really is the big kahuna when it comes to creating real wealth, and not phony IOU and credit crap so called "wealth"? I say yes, it is. And we let them crooks sell it off cheap for their fat middleman skims, now we are seriously hosed, and are borrowing against our future generations, which is a pure bogus abomination, we should have never had to do that. It wasn't necessary until we let them sell off/transfer all that good tech and generations of hard work and massive investment in R&D.
Not sure on any "lucrative" fields exclusion as basically all science eventually has engineering then lucrative aspects to it, even if it might be some time down the road and is obscured now.
Climate science and this huge acrimonious debate has trillions associated with it, such as the artificial carbon credits market,(among others) which had no previous business market or demand that existed, else there would have been a big demand for carbon credits previously. If anything, this lucrative "science" should therefore be as open as possible, precisely because trillions is a huge inducement for outright fraud and obfuscation of same.
Personally,if you want a cleaner environment with the possible long range benefit of possibly keeping the climate more moderate, the carbon tax then on to the wall street gamblers idea is quite a stretch as to real effectiveness.
I will contend there is a much cheaper way, a way wherein those same trillions would go *directly* to deployment of the new technologies, and that is the tax credit instead of the tax itself. If governments were serious, they could offer 100% tax credits for deployment of new cleaner tech, from a personal level to any size corporate level, then that would be that, the tech would get used, quite willingly, and all that money go to it, rather than getting most of it shuffled off to the already bloated artificial financial products "industry", which already takes an inordinate amount of wealth out of the system and places it into the international casino.
It's not fallacious at all, and even the people who design them and play them call them "bets", and you can find a million articles probably where they are called bets.
I know how they work and the other markets, I read and study on economics all the time, I just have always chose to invest elsewhere. I have my own sort of stock and investments, thanks, never wanted much to do with the other sorts, because I think they are crooked by design and a form of leeching. Had too many conversations with my direct generation before me relatives about the great depression.
Wall street crooks then, they corrupted government, bankrupted the nation, caused untold pain and misery, and we got the same sort of crooks today, with government even more corrupted. I want naught to do with it. The technicals of being in that system are not hard, it's like any other skill really, the will to be in the system requires-for me-rather severe integrity compromise, so I'll just pass, thanks anyway.
The phrase "make a killing" is in common parlance in money making circles. Well, that means, someone got murdered.....I have never sought, desired, or tried to "make a killing", I just don't want to do that.
It's gambling, pure and simple, and has near collapsed the economy, and is run primarily to extract wealth from productive people. Maybe 1% of them are even marginally useful, the rest are just high stakes gambling masquerading as productive business. And as others pointed out, socialized risk, and private profits, and even if there are no profits, get the tax payers to cover your markers.
That just sucks. You should be ashamed to support such nonsense. It would be fine if it really was run by some gaming commission, regulated like all other gambling, and treated as such, but it isn't, and basing an economy at the highest levels on gambling and credit and promises is rather foolish for a nation this size. As we have seen, or perhaps you haven't noticed any of the headlines the past two years now...
Anyway, no offense intended, but I'll take this dude's reasoning and warning and advice over your's on this subject..
"All the capital employed in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing, like that on a gaming table, no accession to itself, and is withdrawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common mass... It nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality... It has furnished effectual means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed." --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1792.
What's "getting much done"? You ask yourself, "is this working, am I employed doing something worthwhile that I enjoy, am I making enough to live on OK"? If all three answers are "yes", that qualifies as "getting much done", it's enough. Anything beyond that point is just gravy. It might be fun or more lucrative, but it isn't necessary either.
Buncha hypocrites. The whole dispute over online gaming is similar to the war on some drugs. Legal online gambling
Some people make money, others lose a lot. Some can get quite addicted to it and go really bust, and suffer all the social ills they worry about with online poker or whatever other game.
And we have never had any big economic meltdown from online poker or blackjack, but we sure as heck had a major problem with credit default swaps and so on "gaming", including the use of bots for gambling with massive bets that are large enough to move the markets themselves, plus crony gambling insiders being shuffled into and out of the official currency creation/interest setting and so called "regulation" part of that scene.
That's a fairly good idea you know..quick, get a business patent!
only half joking...they'd probably give it to you...
They used to make ball point pens that had four (or just three, don't recall exactly now) colors on the same pen. You could click down on one or the other, etc. Seems I had one like 45-50 years ago or something like that. Wonder if they still make them?
I never liked pens that much though, (all the way back to real fountain pens you had to suck the ink up into), I always liked either a mechanical pencil for fine writing, or a black warrior (a particular brand) #2 for fast and dirty writing.
But for *fun*, one of those old 100 lb cast iron harley davidson rebadged as a royal or underwood mechanical typewriters. You got a nice workout and they made a helluva nice racket when you typed. Even if you sucked at typing, they were still fun.
Maybe harder for women to get private funding, but much easier getting government loans, either small biz or schooling, etc.
Besides, VC stuff isn't that great, you are beholden to people who just want a huge return back, and swiftly. They won't ever care about the tech or doing a good job or being in it for the long haul.
You'd think this would be learned by now. Want a company, or to start your own business, expand on some ideas? That's fine! But you don't have to go this VC route either. Do what it takes to stay private and self funded some how. If this means you stay small for a long time..at least you are still working and don't have to put up with PHBs, dumb VC investors, dumber generic stockholders, etc.
Small does not necessarily translate into bad, and giant doesn't necessarily translate into good either, despite what those pirates believe and are taught in the biz schools.
There's more to life than some nebulous goal of being a big biz tycoon. We already have quite enough of those globalist turkeys running around, we don't need any more of them..we need less of them.
And this "bigger is always better" corporate mindset is wrecking the economy as a whole, not making it better. All these huge companies are just eating the middle class up and spitting them out, leaving them stuck with huge debts, personal and governmental, and shifting the wealth of the nation into fewer and fewer hands, where they don't care after that point, they'll go elsewhere with that stripped wealth and just let everyone else rot.
It's a vicious circle where they have to kowtow to the wall street pirates to achieve "growth" in their business, which has de evolved into just building up, acquiring with takeovers, stripping assets to achieve this growth, selling off the good stuff cheap and fast, shuffling off the jobs as fast as possible, another way they get short term profits, then bailing once your company and your idea has been destroyed with their golden parachutes they vote themselves to take. Lather, rinse, repeat, with co-opting our government in the meantime, to let them keep getting away with that.
So..stay away from those guys. Do it yourself, stay small and integrated, have a better life, less hassles and headaches and bogusness, don't be part of that corrupt and morally bankrupt system if you can avoid it.
Has there ever really been a serious option B effort to just pick a time and do a major kernel fork and maintain it forever by any company as large as google, with their level of developers and resources/cash behind them? Any precedent there?
That's why we need "corporate death penalties" for this sort of behavior. And payola is/was common, which shows ongoing behavior, or racketeering. And nothing really happens even when they get busted.
Just being able to pay a joke fine, that is just passed on to their next customers, for criminal actions isn't working with these big corporations very well. They need to lose their charters and their stock made worthless. Shareholders are not doing their due diligence and oversight as owners over their employees very well, and they need to learn the hard way that this free lunch just throw money at some companies comes with some responsibility as well as any profits. We could also try increasing whistle blower protections so that honest employees don't have to worry so much about disclosing criminality and shady dealings, and it wouldn't have to get to the point of delisting corporations then (applies to whistleblowers in their government jobs also).
As a side, to the music and movie industry, just for grins and amusement purposes, I dare some agency to do some surprise raids with drug dogs at any of these *AA affiliated outfits big offices and production and recording studios, just for a starter to get their attention. If they can do that to like junior high schools, just lock them down and run the dogs through there, they can do that to these various big money and entertainment places as well. If you are going fishing, why not try the very well stocked pond *first*? muahahahahaha!
I am wondering when something like a private, mass numbers of people, class action RICO (or similar, anything possible by non governmental folks)** suit is filed, for price fixing and collusion.
What all these places are charging for "legitimate" download songs, for a few megs of transfer, is *ridiculous*. They are out of the ballbark artificially high..way high. If it was any tangibles products out there with such high across the board and across alleged "competitors" prices, compared to costs of making copies of this or that for sale, the howls would be loud and all sorts of prosecutors would be on it.
But tens of thousands of percent markup seem to just fly with no worries in the digital products realm. I am wondering why this is? The only answer I can come up with is collusion, with perhaps a tad of governmental interference in there with "laws" if ya get my point I am "lobbying" for here.
I think if there wasn't collusion and price fixing, and perhaps some other more serious crimes, that we would be seeing five cent download songs today. And even at five cents it would be a hefty markup.
**seems to be the government is in no hurry to look at the prices of digital download "products" and why they seem to be so "coincidentally" high across the various music sites and official purchasing places. That's why I am wondering what possible private civil suits could be brought, an offensive strategy rather than defensive, and I am aware that under some circumstances, private RICO suits can be brought.
I've been so annoyed at that I have never purchased one single download song (nor pirated any, I just don't), I just have been boycotting. I'll byy a used CD for 50 cents or a dollar max, or listen to the radio, that's it. I was a loyal music purchaser from LPs and singles starting in the 50s, going to 8 track, then to cassette, then started getting seriously annoyed with the lack of price drops with cheap plastic disks, only bought a few new then quit, and when it hit download and it was near the same price..which I knew was jacked up outtasite...heck with it, started boycotting. It's tremendous price gouging, and across the industry. Smacks of collusion.
Jacked up RAM prices...feds on it. Jacked up LCD screen prices..they are on it. Jacked up digital products pricing, jacked up to the moon levels pricing...freekin *crickets*, like it isn't even happening.
I bet you are also guilty of not being psychic enough, to not only do the "correct thing", but to intuitively know when, where, how, and why, in advance.
It still has a gas engine, a fuel tank, an electric motor, and batteries, all crammed in the same package, this time with more weight than current hybrids. It's a traditional hybrid, albeit with more battery storage so it has some useful range on batteries alone, so they call it a "plug in", but that has been an aftermarket mod option guys have done to their priuses already. The potential was always there, just the cost shoots up fast (also the priusus have wimpy electrics, they need to go to a larger motor there). Anyway, did you really look at that genny trailer thing? It's tiny, you wouldn't even notice it for trips when you really needed that extra range, it isn't like it would be some huge chore to tow it, and the two point hitch is a spiffy idea.
One of the promises of pure electric, once made in mass quantities and not in limited production runs of exotic high performance sportscars, or "sports sedans", is a cheaper vehicle, plus more dependable and less maintenance. With the modular hybrid approach, if you just need to rent the generator trailer a few times a year at most, you eliminate all that maintenance, cost, etc, and stuff to break down, at least for yourself, the shop maintains those with pro mechanics. Just depends how much you really need to go beyond 40 miles (which I think is supposed to be the volt's range on batts). The volt is going to come in high, in the high end sedan class price wise, like 40-50 grand I bet once it stops being "coming soon" and they really sell the things. Glad some folks will be able to afford it, but I couldn't now. Or, they will sell it at a loss and hide the fact, just to sell them and justify their big loan to keep from going really bankrupt.
I used to work for those guys..I am not a huge fan of GM. I have one of their old vans, it was swell, but have seen too many other really not so hot rides come from there, and they all are overpriced (IMO, that's subjective..I don't like the management there, and being in the UAW..echhh).
Different strokes. I think there's a decent market for pure electrics, especially if they can hit around 20 grand, with grade B batteries and not top of the line. I know eventually I would like one, a small truck, as long as it has about a 40 mile range, that would suit my needs OK, that's the round trip to town for me, without completely depleting the batteries (it is really a bit over 30 miles in actual distance, so a 40 mile range is a nice cushion all around). That would help make the batts last longer. Or quite a bit of cruising around the farm here, I can get by there just a couple miles a day (800 acre farm). Most of the time, I would never need to burn any fuel at all then, could go all year and never burn any fuel, just charge it, and I have some solar panels already, and would get some more if I needed them. That would be full transportation independence, and no worries about either the grid being up, or price/availability of fuel *at all*, which to me is the ultimate goal, I dig on independence in things. right now, we are very close on food, real close.
Already went through that opec embargo and so on, actually lost my job at the time because I simply could not get to work at all, huge lines at the stations, two gallons max, ten bucks a gallon. It went from normal to that almost overnight. And if anything, the US imports a lot more than it did back then, (30% then, 60% now, around there) so any global oil availability "issues" would be worse than back then..say all those dummies decide to light up Iran, then Iran lights up all sorts of other interesting places, then the straits of hormuz go down, and etc. and this is not a wild improbability either. Oil is a global fungible, so the market would..take yer pick, I could see it hitting 3-400 a barrel within days. Because they could get it. When they got ya by the short and curlys, you squeal.
For a ride, I make do now with a small four cylinder diesel truck, gets around 40 MPG highway, 35 or so on secondary roads or going in a lower gear, etc.
The range problem has been long solved for electric cars, until such a time as a cheaper and better battery system is developed. It's a non issue, a red herring against electric cars. And it doesn't require exotic battery swap out stations and all that nonsense, which *don't* exist and would cost hundreds of billions in unnecessary infrastructure cost to create, money we just don't have right now for that, when we already have enough regular gas stations.
Now, look at this short video, see the thing on the back of that pure electric car? That's a rigidly attached range extender generator trailer. Not only does it give you unlimited range, just stop and fill up with gas as you would normally, but being a two point hitch instead of one, it doesn't flex, and even trailer noobs can use it, and back up easy, etc.
That can be taken any way you want it to go (I'd prefer a larger trailer that also had some cargo space to it), but that's the gist of it. A range extender turns your pure electric commuter into a "modular hybrid"** on demand, for those odd times you need a lot more range. You could buy one, use it also at your house for when the grid goes down in storms, etc, as is common now in suburbia or the country to have, the home backup genny, or just rent one for those longer trips.
**modular hybrids like this setup in the video make more sense to me than the "everything on board all the time" models like you have with the dual gasoline engine plus electric motor, plus batteries, plus fuel tank rube goldberg traditional hybrids like the prius or the upcoming volt. And heck, as to a generator trailer, you could DIY in one day with all off the shelf stuff from home depot, today, right now. Small trailer, appropriate sized generator, some u-bolt clamps, etc, and then build your charging plug and cable.
We just need the affordable electric cars out there on the dealers lots, and small trucks. And we could have them, if they just picked one steenking closed factory and retooled and just built the damn things, like a Model A electric car, just do it, in mass quantities rather than fooling around with more studies and only coming up with exotic sportscar high performance expensive electric cars, and with wasting time on those dual everything hybrids, which are the worst of both worlds, hauling around all the dual weight and taking up space when you don't have to most of the time.
30-40 mile range is plenty for like the bulk of commuting in the US, not all, but the bulk of it, potentially tens of millions of customers right there, with the affordable, non real exotic, battery tech we already have.
I am fully aware of those sorts of distinctions, and addressed them. I do a lot of macro and micro economic research and writing here, I am fully cognizant of normal economic terms, and also with the usual stupid and now boring lame excuses I hear from rip off price proponents and excusers.
Digital copy prices today are serious price gouging, no way around it.
You have your single production and then gold copy cost, after that...unlimited copies you can have "for sale" for chump change. It has been a pretty big game changer. So we need some game changing prices to reflect this reality.
There is no scarcity there with digital products, in any practical engineering or supply numbers, to justify such high retail costs, none whatsoever. And your "market", if you deign to notice, is and has been to a large degree routing severely around your blatant price gouging and going directly to the black market, despite all your ridiculous efforts to stop it, and you have no one to really to blame besides short sighted and incredibly stupid greed based last century level tech business policies.
You can expand your potential customer base, greatly, on a global scale, by making these virtually free to manufacture copies very cheap in legitimate retail price, and then hit volume sales instead of limited and restricted sales, and still get a decent markup per copy. And most likely, "make more money" long term than what you are doing now.
Instead, these digital copy peddlers went WAY high, just insanely ridiculously high, and people took the most obvious way to beat that, and started pirating and manufacturing their own copies for the cost of a few electrons moving around, and this big stupid no win for anyone war between the producers and the consumers began, and it never had to happen in the first place.
It's freekin dumber and more retarded than the "war on some drugs" those idiots started to "reduce crime", just short bus stoopid and has been a total long range failure, as was pointed out to them, by a lot more forward looking analysts, back when they first started that policy in earnest.
Now we have layers of DRM and other various schemes, cons and plans, draconian anti technology luddite laws, complete with ludicrous copyright extension limits, well beyond what is necessary or fair for society as a whole in the first place, and terrible precedents set that for this major technological breakthrough, that they have basically colluded to have carved in stone "per unit" pricing models that were first set way back when the only copies available for sale fell into the durable goods/expensive to make and distribute model.
Nuts.
It is blatantly unethical price gouging, and I contend business wise short sighted as well, they are making *less* money than they could, plus annoying their potential customer base.
There was never any need for maintaining those prices in the first place once the switch to digital production and delivery became possible, they could have just switched to lower prices, still at a real decent markup, much higher than in any other industry, that would still be *cheap*, as in really really cheap, for the consumers, and not have made enemies of all their potential customers, and probably we would not be seeing near as much piracy now.
And to make it worse, that I addressed previously, it is anti-humanitarian, they have restricted practical access because of these ridiculous prices to a smaller segment of the planet's people, rather than everyone, when there was no need for that, they could have made it affordable for all, anyplace. It is just slap wrong on many levels, and that is a large one.
I am in food production myself, and if I saw at the retail level food products that I knew were a 10,000% markup, I'd be just as annoyed, and would expose that, and rail against it in public, as well. One, I would never seek to restrict my products t
There are huge improvement gains to be garnered with more efficient use of the electricity we generate today, greatly reducing the need for more power plants of any kind. But energy conservation and efficiency isn't "business sexy" or "politically sexy", look what happened to Carter when he tried to emphasize just being more efficient with what we have, with either electricity or transportation fuels. And he is a big nuke guy himself, he just groks being more efficient as both a longer range cost savings and also from a national security viewpoint. He had a lot of faults, but as to energy he is still the top prez we ever had.
Conservation is a boring sell for the big players (outside of some niche markets now like Data Centers are taking it seriously), wall street investors don't like it that much, there are no huge short term profits to get there because of the nature of improving systems that use electricity, it is too widely diversified there, they can't monopolize it as much. In a lot of cases, there are zero new studies, patents, or anything like that required to accomplish big gains in efficiency, no "investment" potential to rake in the short term profits.
Politicians don't like it that much, no big buzzwords and it's been seriously demonized as an idea over the years, they are afraid of coming across like quality of life deniers, that you have to sacrifice comfort for efficiency. Now that isn't true, but that is what happens with these arguments "Oh noes, I don't want to sit in some cold cave with dim light".
Of course that's silly, but the anti efficiency people, the pro "just generate more power!" folks, just push that meme and mindset, and have been very successful at it.
The "generate more power"! folks, as their top (and a lot of times only) emphasis, nuke or otherwise, make as much (non)sense as the "drill, baby drill"! folks do when it comes to transportation fuels. Want to save oil? Pretty easy, here's just one way, push three or four cylinder cars over sixes and eights. Heck, I bet single person light commuter cars could be run with just two cylinder engines today. Most people and uses for basic transportation have absolutely no need whatsoever for larger six or eight cylinder engines, and vehicles that can easily do two or three times the maximum posted speed limits. Just wasting fuel, because they can.
Back to electricity, look at most homes today, thoroughly dismal levels of insulation or planned air in or out, not even built tight, wasting huge amounts of electricity to keep ACs running near non stop in the summer, or if electric heat of some kind, wasting huge amounts of electricity in the winter. How about all that massive outside huge commercial advertising that burns all night long in big cities, or all those lit up and unoccupied offices? I am always gobsmacked whenever I visit a larger city at night to see this huge lit up disneyland/vegas blinking whooshing cascading panorama of excessive ostentatious consumption. It's like every big city is in this race to see how many light photons they can transmit to the space aliens or something, when actually zero of that advertising nonsense is really needed to illuminate the streets for people. They *could* get by with non electric commercial signage, and just have to deal with people only reading their signs in the daylight.
Can't do that though, got to be massive electricity energy hogs.
There's just tons of examples there. A huge amount of this commuting that goes on to go sit in front of a computer screen, moving meatbags twice a day by the tens of millions, by any means, personal or mass transit, instead of moving electrons and having a lot more people just stay home and work with better broadband deployment. And that would, in turn, reduce this artificial "need" for so many huge office towers for those commuters to go sit in all day in front of a computer screen, that require tremendous energy to build and maintain. Big office towers came a
OK linux calculator and math geeks, here's a question I have wondered about before. This is just for fun, show off your leet skillz. Start with the first released linux kernel, get the size, look at some major releases, etc, do your magic as of today's sized kernel, and give us the best guess in your graph or projection when the kernel will reach or exceed one gigabyte in size, the release date as close as possible.
Maybe Apple gets all the first runs that pass QA well, and everyone else gets the rejects? Just sayin' because I haven't heard of Apple having a 45 percent failure rate. Or maybe on Apple's runs they have their own guys standing there watching the whole thing go down, to make sure they don't get stuck with lemons. Something like that.
note: not an apple fanboi, just thinking about what you have observed
Slashdot Mirror
Call their bluff! Counter sue if you get cut off. Heck, take 'em to small claims court if you have to, then it is just you against any non lawyer they might have, they can't bring a lawyer into court. A judge will read the GPL, and you win most likely, unless they have some really obscure thing in their TOS that says you can get cut off for any reason at all, like they don't like your hat or something.
Besides that, I am having a hard time believing that any ISP, with some geeks there, would be totally unfamiliar with the GPL and legal downloads of stuff. Maybe you are with some huge ISP that uses script reading "tech support", perhaps in a "foreign land", people who really can't deviate from their script and instructions. If so, bump it up a notch there to second tier or first tier support.
What-ever, just seems silly to immediately cave to such wrongness.
How do you make your paper briquettes? Water, then a compactor, or what?
I make some woodstove "logs" from old cardboard boxes that I get from glanage, scrounging produce and fruits, etc.. Get the boxes slightly wet (by leaving them out in the rain, lol), then they are really easy to roll up tight, then they get wrapped with used and now recycled bailing twine (that I cut off of big round bales), then let dry again. I use that for kindling, or to get a fast heat boost in the morning when there are just some coals left. TIA.
We have to have a similar deal on the farm, loss of electricity would be devastating, and there's only a few minutes window there. So we have multiple large diesel generators on auto start. They each have four starter batteries,(that is for redundancy as well) and get tested and run periodically. Loss of grid power (or an out of bounds temperature reading, or loss of water pressure, or low propane pressure for the heaters, or low feed levels in the bins, whatever, it is all computerized, etc) causes loud external sirens to go on, and it sends a message to both an external monitoring service, then to the individual farmers, and the entire incident gets logged. That's really the only way, have good backups and fast response. When loss of power can cause an emergency situation that effects your bottom line, you can't have too much "insurance" there. The machinery is designed to respond to emergencies automatically, plus gets the relevant hoomannzz ass in gear to go check things out anyway.
If you can handle downtime and just want a clean shutdown, well, just get a better UPS and swap out to new batteries periodically. Always size one bigger than what you think you need, give yourself a cushion there.
Maybe they could slave the high speed flywheel to the steering and tilt it for cornering.
All those car factories would still have existed, just with new owners now. They could still make cars, or perhaps something else. They would have needed workers, and would have been in a position to offer a fair, but less ridiculous salary and benefits package for factory work.
A real bankruptcy and liquidation is that, stuff gets sold, the new owners use it. Stockholders would have been taught a lesson that they need to do due diligence on their executive employees better, management would have learned you can't be stupidly top heavy, and the rank and file boys would have realized they need to not expect as much as they think they are worth, not in a global economy.. So all around, it would have been better for that to happen, long range.
I feel the same away about those bloated tick parasite casino banks, they should have been allowed to go bankrupt, then we could have sorted out what all those scam paper financial products are really worth, which is..not near as much as they contend now. I think society has hit "peak wealth leeching" with those guys.
Ya, it would have sucked a little for a couple of years, but the resulting economy would have been MUCH better. Less stupid overpaid fatcats sucking out of the system, more middle class actual productive wealth creation jobs back.
As it is now, all they have done is reward those who failed in the first place, and given them incentive to just follow the same failed policies. Quite dumb really. Slap this generation and the next several in debt for this to happen, too. That's not dumb, that's outright criminal.
Google could make money any number of ways. They could open their own online everything store, and take a cut, Googazon. They could offer ad free search for so much a year subscription. They are already getting into the phone business, and could extend that to netbooks, etc. ISP business as the recent article outlines. Hosting services. Heck, how about scientific journals that are open to the public for much more reasonable fees than what the current bigdogs charge? General news, and keep undercutting these proposed paywalls that certain of the other large news orgs will be going to. They could go into the alternative energy business in bulk, sell electricity, or even sell solar arrays, stuff like that. Put up their own huge windchargers.
How about a googlemobile? These guys are interested in all sorts of cool stuff. They have enough presence to get their own brand of electric vehicles out there if they wanted to. Googlemusic, make offers to bands to host and sell their tunes for like reasonable cheap, like a dime instead of a dollar, with a 50/50 split with the musicians. I mean geez, if you got buhzillions in cash right how, there are any number of interesting offshoot businesses you could get into, and by keeping margins really low, they could get market share..
They won't be stuck on advertising alone for income.
China has been acquiring the means to produce wealth, that's what they have been buying besides debt instruments. And that's why they are getting richer, and at such a rate. They buy anything at all related to manufacturing. You name it, they want it, either directly, or get just the R&D..whatever it takes. They bought the tools used to make more tools to then go on and build..anything. Anything at all, which they then export, and reap value-added profit from. They buy the means to produce wealth from the west and Japan, turn around, produce the wealth, sell it back to the places that were producing the wealth, undercutting the market there..obvious profit. They make so much doing this that not only can they continue to acquire more machinery, etc, but are sitting on quite the surplus of foreign cash, which they are now going around the planet and buying up natural resources and farmland with. Just sticking some in debt instruments helps them maintain their markets, it's a form of currency manipulation for the most part, it gives them mass leverage.
Crude example, they don't want to have to buy mass quantities of cars and airplanes from someplace else, that just costs wealth,. doesn't make wealth, they want to buy the factories to make cars and airplanes..because running those sorts of factories makes wealth, which expands their domestic economy and provides a lot of better paying jobs.. A to Z there, anything you can name or think of. That's what they have been buying and are still buying.
Eventually, they will have such a monopoly on manufacturing, owning the raw resources from all over the planet plus the factories and toolings needed, etc, that they can move on to the next step and slide away from a weaker yuan/renminbi and concentrate more on their internal markets, and those foreign markets where they get raw resources from. Their current western "consumer" markets won't be of as much importance to them then, there won't be this "need" to maintain really cheap exports that some of the more short sighted economists always talk about. they needed it in the past, and still do today -to a point- but eventually once they dominate that need evaporates rather quickly.
They are fairly close to that point now, on an historical long range timeline. They *had* to suck it up for a lot of years and have cheaper exports in order to keep getting more machinery and tools, etc, market by market by market. As they start to dominate market after market, this removes that particular niche from so much concern for them with exchange rates. They still need to export, but their target consumers will be shifting away from the places where they originally sourced all the machinery and expertise from, to internal and raw resource regions..because that's all they will need at that point. Check and mate then, they win. The 19th and 20th century industrialized west falls to second or even third tier status on the global scale. Much fun and games in those areas then..historians will have much to discuss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_trade_for_the_People's_Republic_of_China#History_of_Chinese_foreign_trade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Modernizations
http://www.heritage.org/press/commentary/ed061509d.cfm
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14239.html
6831 cells, form factor 18650-common industry standard for small devices, slightly larger than an AA, more storage and higher voltage (just for reference)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes#18650
Tesla roadster battery pack system
http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/TeslaRoadsterBatterySystem.pdf
So it almost is being done with cars like that..close enough. They use some fancy wiring and cooling for the Tesla though...
You have good points on trash and packing though. That's a big price people pay for a lot of things today, then it just turns to junk instantly. My non favorite is blisterpacks. I keep aviation snips handy just for dealing with those things. They *are* good packaging, but a pain to open and then how to dispose of them cleanly?
Sometimes I wish they had an area right outside the checkout lanes where you could open your purchases, and they had a recycle bin sitting there for the packaging junk. Or just have lockable generic packages with clear covers to see what is in there. You pay for the item, it gets unlocked right then after ring up, they retain the packaging and it goes to the back where the next item-whatever that item might be that could fit in it, gets placed in there, then back out to the shelf.
That's the best, one sentence global economic over view I have read. "China is spending money on its future, we are spending money from the future."
Nailed it. And I don't blame them for doing that, because our own domestic economic traitors handed that opportunity to them on a silver platter, the Chinese would have been 'tards to turn it down. It was completely logical what they did and are still doing, building up their own nation, "protecting" themselves, adding to their real economy, etc. Of course they would take that deal, free stuff. And how it happened is we let those wall street pirates and bribed off politicians cook this whole scheme up, then they hard sold it all over, to great success, they sold that con and got most to "believe" in it, and now they are extorting trillions in bailouts on top of that. *Extorting*.
The Chinese guy is sort of a spy, I'm not all that concerned about him because I imagine he is merely one of tens of thousands in a similar (barely hidden) tech transfer situation. Because that's been the business of the US since they started this con job, transfer as much manufacturing tech as possible.
The real economic and security damage has been from the short term mega profits crowd who destroyed, in a single generation, sold it off cheap for a fat skim, what it took multiple generations to build up in the US, all that wealth creation manufacturing infrastructure, all of it, from A to Z. All those value added jobs..all mostly poofed now, so multi millionaires could become billionaires and another flock of corrupt politicians could get re-re-re elected, so they could keep accepting more bribe money, all the time spouting off all these economic and social promises to the US people that they knew in advance could never be met. And they are still doing it, and tons of people asre still falling for that noise.
They sold this global wealth transference con with massive credit expansion, got almost everyone faked out that credit=produced wealth, like it is the same thing. Something to keep the peons amused while their bank accounts, retirement savings, etc all got evaporated away, and will continue to evaporate away.
On a small scale they call it corporate raiding. A hostile take over, sell off all the assets cheap, gut the workforce, etc. Massive short term profits are the result, wall street loves it, politicians love it, they all get rewarded for their "hard work" of gutting companies, then they bail out with golden parachutes, leaving a company in mostly name only. Everyone has seen this happen and knows exactly what that is.
But do the exact same thing on an entire national scale, all of a sudden there's this mass blindfold gets slapped on, people *refuse* to see the situation for what it is, go into complete denial over it, claim it is something other than that. We are supposed to believe these national scale wall street/ DC politician corporate raiders that what they are doing isn't corporate raiding. They just call it something else and say it is a "good deal".
They have been saying that for near 25 years now, and if it WAS such a good deal, why all the recent economic meltdown? Could it be, that manufacturing really is the big kahuna when it comes to creating real wealth, and not phony IOU and credit crap so called "wealth"? I say yes, it is. And we let them crooks sell it off cheap for their fat middleman skims, now we are seriously hosed, and are borrowing against our future generations, which is a pure bogus abomination, we should have never had to do that. It wasn't necessary until we let them sell off/transfer all that good tech and generations of hard work and massive investment in R&D.
Not sure on any "lucrative" fields exclusion as basically all science eventually has engineering then lucrative aspects to it, even if it might be some time down the road and is obscured now.
Climate science and this huge acrimonious debate has trillions associated with it, such as the artificial carbon credits market,(among others) which had no previous business market or demand that existed, else there would have been a big demand for carbon credits previously. If anything, this lucrative "science" should therefore be as open as possible, precisely because trillions is a huge inducement for outright fraud and obfuscation of same.
Personally,if you want a cleaner environment with the possible long range benefit of possibly keeping the climate more moderate, the carbon tax then on to the wall street gamblers idea is quite a stretch as to real effectiveness.
I will contend there is a much cheaper way, a way wherein those same trillions would go *directly* to deployment of the new technologies, and that is the tax credit instead of the tax itself. If governments were serious, they could offer 100% tax credits for deployment of new cleaner tech, from a personal level to any size corporate level, then that would be that, the tech would get used, quite willingly, and all that money go to it, rather than getting most of it shuffled off to the already bloated artificial financial products "industry", which already takes an inordinate amount of wealth out of the system and places it into the international casino.
It's not fallacious at all, and even the people who design them and play them call them "bets", and you can find a million articles probably where they are called bets.
I know how they work and the other markets, I read and study on economics all the time, I just have always chose to invest elsewhere. I have my own sort of stock and investments, thanks, never wanted much to do with the other sorts, because I think they are crooked by design and a form of leeching. Had too many conversations with my direct generation before me relatives about the great depression.
Wall street crooks then, they corrupted government, bankrupted the nation, caused untold pain and misery, and we got the same sort of crooks today, with government even more corrupted. I want naught to do with it. The technicals of being in that system are not hard, it's like any other skill really, the will to be in the system requires-for me-rather severe integrity compromise, so I'll just pass, thanks anyway.
The phrase "make a killing" is in common parlance in money making circles. Well, that means, someone got murdered.....I have never sought, desired, or tried to "make a killing", I just don't want to do that.
It's gambling, pure and simple, and has near collapsed the economy, and is run primarily to extract wealth from productive people. Maybe 1% of them are even marginally useful, the rest are just high stakes gambling masquerading as productive business. And as others pointed out, socialized risk, and private profits, and even if there are no profits, get the tax payers to cover your markers.
That just sucks. You should be ashamed to support such nonsense. It would be fine if it really was run by some gaming commission, regulated like all other gambling, and treated as such, but it isn't, and basing an economy at the highest levels on gambling and credit and promises is rather foolish for a nation this size. As we have seen, or perhaps you haven't noticed any of the headlines the past two years now...
Anyway, no offense intended, but I'll take this dude's reasoning and warning and advice over your's on this subject..
"All the capital employed in paper speculation is barren and useless, producing, like that on a gaming table, no accession to itself, and is withdrawn from commerce and agriculture where it would have produced addition to the common mass... It nourishes in our citizens habits of vice and idleness instead of industry and morality... It has furnished effectual means of corrupting such a portion of the legislature as turns the balance between the honest voters whichever way it is directed." --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1792.
What's "getting much done"? You ask yourself, "is this working, am I employed doing something worthwhile that I enjoy, am I making enough to live on OK"? If all three answers are "yes", that qualifies as "getting much done", it's enough. Anything beyond that point is just gravy. It might be fun or more lucrative, but it isn't necessary either.
Buncha hypocrites. The whole dispute over online gaming is similar to the war on some drugs. Legal online gambling
Some people make money, others lose a lot. Some can get quite addicted to it and go really bust, and suffer all the social ills they worry about with online poker or whatever other game.
And we have never had any big economic meltdown from online poker or blackjack, but we sure as heck had a major problem with credit default swaps and so on "gaming", including the use of bots for gambling with massive bets that are large enough to move the markets themselves, plus crony gambling insiders being shuffled into and out of the official currency creation/interest setting and so called "regulation" part of that scene.
That's a fairly good idea you know..quick, get a business patent!
only half joking...they'd probably give it to you...
They used to make ball point pens that had four (or just three, don't recall exactly now) colors on the same pen. You could click down on one or the other, etc. Seems I had one like 45-50 years ago or something like that. Wonder if they still make them?
I never liked pens that much though, (all the way back to real fountain pens you had to suck the ink up into), I always liked either a mechanical pencil for fine writing, or a black warrior (a particular brand) #2 for fast and dirty writing.
But for *fun*, one of those old 100 lb cast iron harley davidson rebadged as a royal or underwood mechanical typewriters. You got a nice workout and they made a helluva nice racket when you typed. Even if you sucked at typing, they were still fun.
Maybe harder for women to get private funding, but much easier getting government loans, either small biz or schooling, etc.
Besides, VC stuff isn't that great, you are beholden to people who just want a huge return back, and swiftly. They won't ever care about the tech or doing a good job or being in it for the long haul.
You'd think this would be learned by now. Want a company, or to start your own business, expand on some ideas? That's fine! But you don't have to go this VC route either. Do what it takes to stay private and self funded some how. If this means you stay small for a long time..at least you are still working and don't have to put up with PHBs, dumb VC investors, dumber generic stockholders, etc.
Small does not necessarily translate into bad, and giant doesn't necessarily translate into good either, despite what those pirates believe and are taught in the biz schools.
There's more to life than some nebulous goal of being a big biz tycoon. We already have quite enough of those globalist turkeys running around, we don't need any more of them..we need less of them.
And this "bigger is always better" corporate mindset is wrecking the economy as a whole, not making it better. All these huge companies are just eating the middle class up and spitting them out, leaving them stuck with huge debts, personal and governmental, and shifting the wealth of the nation into fewer and fewer hands, where they don't care after that point, they'll go elsewhere with that stripped wealth and just let everyone else rot.
It's a vicious circle where they have to kowtow to the wall street pirates to achieve "growth" in their business, which has de evolved into just building up, acquiring with takeovers, stripping assets to achieve this growth, selling off the good stuff cheap and fast, shuffling off the jobs as fast as possible, another way they get short term profits, then bailing once your company and your idea has been destroyed with their golden parachutes they vote themselves to take. Lather, rinse, repeat, with co-opting our government in the meantime, to let them keep getting away with that.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19658
That's what you want, to be part of that system?
So..stay away from those guys. Do it yourself, stay small and integrated, have a better life, less hassles and headaches and bogusness, don't be part of that corrupt and morally bankrupt system if you can avoid it.
Has there ever really been a serious option B effort to just pick a time and do a major kernel fork and maintain it forever by any company as large as google, with their level of developers and resources/cash behind them? Any precedent there?
That's why we need "corporate death penalties" for this sort of behavior. And payola is/was common, which shows ongoing behavior, or racketeering. And nothing really happens even when they get busted.
Just being able to pay a joke fine, that is just passed on to their next customers, for criminal actions isn't working with these big corporations very well. They need to lose their charters and their stock made worthless. Shareholders are not doing their due diligence and oversight as owners over their employees very well, and they need to learn the hard way that this free lunch just throw money at some companies comes with some responsibility as well as any profits. We could also try increasing whistle blower protections so that honest employees don't have to worry so much about disclosing criminality and shady dealings, and it wouldn't have to get to the point of delisting corporations then (applies to whistleblowers in their government jobs also).
As a side, to the music and movie industry, just for grins and amusement purposes, I dare some agency to do some surprise raids with drug dogs at any of these *AA affiliated outfits big offices and production and recording studios, just for a starter to get their attention. If they can do that to like junior high schools, just lock them down and run the dogs through there, they can do that to these various big money and entertainment places as well. If you are going fishing, why not try the very well stocked pond *first*? muahahahahaha!
the best defense is a good offense.
I am wondering when something like a private, mass numbers of people, class action RICO (or similar, anything possible by non governmental folks)** suit is filed, for price fixing and collusion.
What all these places are charging for "legitimate" download songs, for a few megs of transfer, is *ridiculous*. They are out of the ballbark artificially high..way high. If it was any tangibles products out there with such high across the board and across alleged "competitors" prices, compared to costs of making copies of this or that for sale, the howls would be loud and all sorts of prosecutors would be on it.
But tens of thousands of percent markup seem to just fly with no worries in the digital products realm. I am wondering why this is? The only answer I can come up with is collusion, with perhaps a tad of governmental interference in there with "laws" if ya get my point I am "lobbying" for here.
I think if there wasn't collusion and price fixing, and perhaps some other more serious crimes, that we would be seeing five cent download songs today. And even at five cents it would be a hefty markup.
**seems to be the government is in no hurry to look at the prices of digital download "products" and why they seem to be so "coincidentally" high across the various music sites and official purchasing places. That's why I am wondering what possible private civil suits could be brought, an offensive strategy rather than defensive, and I am aware that under some circumstances, private RICO suits can be brought.
I've been so annoyed at that I have never purchased one single download song (nor pirated any, I just don't), I just have been boycotting. I'll byy a used CD for 50 cents or a dollar max, or listen to the radio, that's it. I was a loyal music purchaser from LPs and singles starting in the 50s, going to 8 track, then to cassette, then started getting seriously annoyed with the lack of price drops with cheap plastic disks, only bought a few new then quit, and when it hit download and it was near the same price..which I knew was jacked up outtasite...heck with it, started boycotting. It's tremendous price gouging, and across the industry. Smacks of collusion.
Jacked up RAM prices...feds on it. Jacked up LCD screen prices..they are on it. Jacked up digital products pricing, jacked up to the moon levels pricing...freekin *crickets*, like it isn't even happening.
I bet you are also guilty of not being psychic enough, to not only do the "correct thing", but to intuitively know when, where, how, and why, in advance.
It still has a gas engine, a fuel tank, an electric motor, and batteries, all crammed in the same package, this time with more weight than current hybrids. It's a traditional hybrid, albeit with more battery storage so it has some useful range on batteries alone, so they call it a "plug in", but that has been an aftermarket mod option guys have done to their priuses already. The potential was always there, just the cost shoots up fast (also the priusus have wimpy electrics, they need to go to a larger motor there). Anyway, did you really look at that genny trailer thing? It's tiny, you wouldn't even notice it for trips when you really needed that extra range, it isn't like it would be some huge chore to tow it, and the two point hitch is a spiffy idea.
One of the promises of pure electric, once made in mass quantities and not in limited production runs of exotic high performance sportscars, or "sports sedans", is a cheaper vehicle, plus more dependable and less maintenance. With the modular hybrid approach, if you just need to rent the generator trailer a few times a year at most, you eliminate all that maintenance, cost, etc, and stuff to break down, at least for yourself, the shop maintains those with pro mechanics. Just depends how much you really need to go beyond 40 miles (which I think is supposed to be the volt's range on batts). The volt is going to come in high, in the high end sedan class price wise, like 40-50 grand I bet once it stops being "coming soon" and they really sell the things. Glad some folks will be able to afford it, but I couldn't now. Or, they will sell it at a loss and hide the fact, just to sell them and justify their big loan to keep from going really bankrupt.
I used to work for those guys..I am not a huge fan of GM. I have one of their old vans, it was swell, but have seen too many other really not so hot rides come from there, and they all are overpriced (IMO, that's subjective..I don't like the management there, and being in the UAW..echhh).
Different strokes. I think there's a decent market for pure electrics, especially if they can hit around 20 grand, with grade B batteries and not top of the line. I know eventually I would like one, a small truck, as long as it has about a 40 mile range, that would suit my needs OK, that's the round trip to town for me, without completely depleting the batteries (it is really a bit over 30 miles in actual distance, so a 40 mile range is a nice cushion all around). That would help make the batts last longer. Or quite a bit of cruising around the farm here, I can get by there just a couple miles a day (800 acre farm). Most of the time, I would never need to burn any fuel at all then, could go all year and never burn any fuel, just charge it, and I have some solar panels already, and would get some more if I needed them. That would be full transportation independence, and no worries about either the grid being up, or price/availability of fuel *at all*, which to me is the ultimate goal, I dig on independence in things. right now, we are very close on food, real close.
Already went through that opec embargo and so on, actually lost my job at the time because I simply could not get to work at all, huge lines at the stations, two gallons max, ten bucks a gallon. It went from normal to that almost overnight. And if anything, the US imports a lot more than it did back then, (30% then, 60% now, around there) so any global oil availability "issues" would be worse than back then..say all those dummies decide to light up Iran, then Iran lights up all sorts of other interesting places, then the straits of hormuz go down, and etc. and this is not a wild improbability either. Oil is a global fungible, so the market would..take yer pick, I could see it hitting 3-400 a barrel within days. Because they could get it. When they got ya by the short and curlys, you squeal.
For a ride, I make do now with a small four cylinder diesel truck, gets around 40 MPG highway, 35 or so on secondary roads or going in a lower gear, etc.
The range problem has been long solved for electric cars, until such a time as a cheaper and better battery system is developed. It's a non issue, a red herring against electric cars. And it doesn't require exotic battery swap out stations and all that nonsense, which *don't* exist and would cost hundreds of billions in unnecessary infrastructure cost to create, money we just don't have right now for that, when we already have enough regular gas stations.
Now, look at this short video, see the thing on the back of that pure electric car? That's a rigidly attached range extender generator trailer. Not only does it give you unlimited range, just stop and fill up with gas as you would normally, but being a two point hitch instead of one, it doesn't flex, and even trailer noobs can use it, and back up easy, etc.
You can have your shorter range electric commuter car, and still be able to do just as long of trips on the highway as any other pure fuel burning car.
That can be taken any way you want it to go (I'd prefer a larger trailer that also had some cargo space to it), but that's the gist of it. A range extender turns your pure electric commuter into a "modular hybrid"** on demand, for those odd times you need a lot more range. You could buy one, use it also at your house for when the grid goes down in storms, etc, as is common now in suburbia or the country to have, the home backup genny, or just rent one for those longer trips.
**modular hybrids like this setup in the video make more sense to me than the "everything on board all the time" models like you have with the dual gasoline engine plus electric motor, plus batteries, plus fuel tank rube goldberg traditional hybrids like the prius or the upcoming volt. And heck, as to a generator trailer, you could DIY in one day with all off the shelf stuff from home depot, today, right now. Small trailer, appropriate sized generator, some u-bolt clamps, etc, and then build your charging plug and cable.
We just need the affordable electric cars out there on the dealers lots, and small trucks. And we could have them, if they just picked one steenking closed factory and retooled and just built the damn things, like a Model A electric car, just do it, in mass quantities rather than fooling around with more studies and only coming up with exotic sportscar high performance expensive electric cars, and with wasting time on those dual everything hybrids, which are the worst of both worlds, hauling around all the dual weight and taking up space when you don't have to most of the time.
30-40 mile range is plenty for like the bulk of commuting in the US, not all, but the bulk of it, potentially tens of millions of customers right there, with the affordable, non real exotic, battery tech we already have.
I am fully aware of those sorts of distinctions, and addressed them. I do a lot of macro and micro economic research and writing here, I am fully cognizant of normal economic terms, and also with the usual stupid and now boring lame excuses I hear from rip off price proponents and excusers.
Digital copy prices today are serious price gouging, no way around it.
You have your single production and then gold copy cost, after that...unlimited copies you can have "for sale" for chump change. It has been a pretty big game changer. So we need some game changing prices to reflect this reality.
There is no scarcity there with digital products, in any practical engineering or supply numbers, to justify such high retail costs, none whatsoever. And your "market", if you deign to notice, is and has been to a large degree routing severely around your blatant price gouging and going directly to the black market, despite all your ridiculous efforts to stop it, and you have no one to really to blame besides short sighted and incredibly stupid greed based last century level tech business policies.
You can expand your potential customer base, greatly, on a global scale, by making these virtually free to manufacture copies very cheap in legitimate retail price, and then hit volume sales instead of limited and restricted sales, and still get a decent markup per copy. And most likely, "make more money" long term than what you are doing now.
Instead, these digital copy peddlers went WAY high, just insanely ridiculously high, and people took the most obvious way to beat that, and started pirating and manufacturing their own copies for the cost of a few electrons moving around, and this big stupid no win for anyone war between the producers and the consumers began, and it never had to happen in the first place.
It's freekin dumber and more retarded than the "war on some drugs" those idiots started to "reduce crime", just short bus stoopid and has been a total long range failure, as was pointed out to them, by a lot more forward looking analysts, back when they first started that policy in earnest.
Now we have layers of DRM and other various schemes, cons and plans, draconian anti technology luddite laws, complete with ludicrous copyright extension limits, well beyond what is necessary or fair for society as a whole in the first place, and terrible precedents set that for this major technological breakthrough, that they have basically colluded to have carved in stone "per unit" pricing models that were first set way back when the only copies available for sale fell into the durable goods/expensive to make and distribute model.
Nuts.
It is blatantly unethical price gouging, and I contend business wise short sighted as well, they are making *less* money than they could, plus annoying their potential customer base.
There was never any need for maintaining those prices in the first place once the switch to digital production and delivery became possible, they could have just switched to lower prices, still at a real decent markup, much higher than in any other industry, that would still be *cheap*, as in really really cheap, for the consumers, and not have made enemies of all their potential customers, and probably we would not be seeing near as much piracy now.
And to make it worse, that I addressed previously, it is anti-humanitarian, they have restricted practical access because of these ridiculous prices to a smaller segment of the planet's people, rather than everyone, when there was no need for that, they could have made it affordable for all, anyplace. It is just slap wrong on many levels, and that is a large one.
I am in food production myself, and if I saw at the retail level food products that I knew were a 10,000% markup, I'd be just as annoyed, and would expose that, and rail against it in public, as well. One, I would never seek to restrict my products t
There are huge improvement gains to be garnered with more efficient use of the electricity we generate today, greatly reducing the need for more power plants of any kind. But energy conservation and efficiency isn't "business sexy" or "politically sexy", look what happened to Carter when he tried to emphasize just being more efficient with what we have, with either electricity or transportation fuels. And he is a big nuke guy himself, he just groks being more efficient as both a longer range cost savings and also from a national security viewpoint. He had a lot of faults, but as to energy he is still the top prez we ever had.
Conservation is a boring sell for the big players (outside of some niche markets now like Data Centers are taking it seriously), wall street investors don't like it that much, there are no huge short term profits to get there because of the nature of improving systems that use electricity, it is too widely diversified there, they can't monopolize it as much. In a lot of cases, there are zero new studies, patents, or anything like that required to accomplish big gains in efficiency, no "investment" potential to rake in the short term profits.
Politicians don't like it that much, no big buzzwords and it's been seriously demonized as an idea over the years, they are afraid of coming across like quality of life deniers, that you have to sacrifice comfort for efficiency. Now that isn't true, but that is what happens with these arguments "Oh noes, I don't want to sit in some cold cave with dim light".
Of course that's silly, but the anti efficiency people, the pro "just generate more power!" folks, just push that meme and mindset, and have been very successful at it.
The "generate more power"! folks, as their top (and a lot of times only) emphasis, nuke or otherwise, make as much (non)sense as the "drill, baby drill"! folks do when it comes to transportation fuels. Want to save oil? Pretty easy, here's just one way, push three or four cylinder cars over sixes and eights. Heck, I bet single person light commuter cars could be run with just two cylinder engines today. Most people and uses for basic transportation have absolutely no need whatsoever for larger six or eight cylinder engines, and vehicles that can easily do two or three times the maximum posted speed limits. Just wasting fuel, because they can.
Back to electricity, look at most homes today, thoroughly dismal levels of insulation or planned air in or out, not even built tight, wasting huge amounts of electricity to keep ACs running near non stop in the summer, or if electric heat of some kind, wasting huge amounts of electricity in the winter. How about all that massive outside huge commercial advertising that burns all night long in big cities, or all those lit up and unoccupied offices? I am always gobsmacked whenever I visit a larger city at night to see this huge lit up disneyland/vegas blinking whooshing cascading panorama of excessive ostentatious consumption. It's like every big city is in this race to see how many light photons they can transmit to the space aliens or something, when actually zero of that advertising nonsense is really needed to illuminate the streets for people. They *could* get by with non electric commercial signage, and just have to deal with people only reading their signs in the daylight.
Can't do that though, got to be massive electricity energy hogs.
There's just tons of examples there. A huge amount of this commuting that goes on to go sit in front of a computer screen, moving meatbags twice a day by the tens of millions, by any means, personal or mass transit, instead of moving electrons and having a lot more people just stay home and work with better broadband deployment. And that would, in turn, reduce this artificial "need" for so many huge office towers for those commuters to go sit in all day in front of a computer screen, that require tremendous energy to build and maintain. Big office towers came a
OK linux calculator and math geeks, here's a question I have wondered about before. This is just for fun, show off your leet skillz. Start with the first released linux kernel, get the size, look at some major releases, etc, do your magic as of today's sized kernel, and give us the best guess in your graph or projection when the kernel will reach or exceed one gigabyte in size, the release date as close as possible.
Maybe Apple gets all the first runs that pass QA well, and everyone else gets the rejects? Just sayin' because I haven't heard of Apple having a 45 percent failure rate. Or maybe on Apple's runs they have their own guys standing there watching the whole thing go down, to make sure they don't get stuck with lemons. Something like that.
note: not an apple fanboi, just thinking about what you have observed