I would be in favor of more algae research and deployment, but not necessarily in the oceans but in controlled pools/tanks in the desert, in combination with some some solar and geo thermal and perhaps very large greenhouses. And mostly because they will most likely go for genetically modified algae and I wouldn't want to chance such a crop going wild with unintended consequences. I also think they could control it better in pools or tanks than in the wide open ocean. I've worked on the ocean before, it ain't always a flat millpond...
I think the energy question will be answered with an "all of the above" solution, I am not seeing any single one solution fitting all circumstances everywhere. although back to the jatropha, mexico's oil fields are now in decline, it probably wouldn't hurt them a bit to see if they could start to squeeze a few million acres of the plant in there before it goes into fast decline....
Personally I am trying to eventually go full personal production for the fuels I need/use, to decentralize production (doing my bit to be part of the solution rather than just part of the problem), and also pure self interest-keep my wallet stuffed more than "theirs". I am not real far along yet, just wood as primary heating fuel, perpetual supply and carbon neutral, some solar PV,a greenhouse for year round food production (helps drop shipping demand/fuel use/pollution from imported foods, plus it is just better to make your own food onsite, IMO, tastier!), but am working towards liquid biodiesel next, that's why I happened to know about the jatropha, I had looked into it and had to abandon the idea. Most likely we will be looking at using waste chicken litter for a feedstock source, as we have that in rather large abundance;)
Jatropha will not grow in the bulk of the US landmass, it is a subtropical plant and can only tolerate a few light frosts. I looked into it for a fuel crop here and even this being Georgia, we are too far north.
I agree with the other poster, either switchgrass or industrial hemp are better targets for exploitation for biofuels using marginal land in most areas of the US.
They have a 20 year old notion of how much a "unit" they need to make. This notion is ludicrous given the tech advances we have. They failed to keep dropping prices for their disks when they could. Instead of using the volume sales concept, they stubbornly stuck to making dollars profits on cents worth of plastic and paper. They just don't get it that price gouging doesn't work. The ultimate decision makers in that industry who decide pricing levels are *all millionaires*, they just can't relate to what stuff costs anymore for people who are not. And the legislators they "consult" with, similar. they live and work in an extremely expensive part of the US, DC, and none of them can be considered "working class" in the traditional sense. In short, the pair of them that try to set pricing and laws when it comes to IP and tech advances mean for tangibles cost just can't see the forest for the trees, they have no practical frame of reference. And even with "market studies", those can be flawed as well, and the ultimate proof of "market studies" is whether or not your widget you sell sells with full customer satisfaction or not, and in this case, they fail it, so even their marketing studies are therefore flawed by empirical evidence. We can all see it, right there in plain sight. If they weren't, we wouldn't be seeing these articles all the time or be discussing copies and copyright and so on. They just can't handle the innovation and ramifications of replicator technology so far, even though we are still in the tiny opening phases of such tech. That means as we get closer to cheap tangibles replication for the "masses" guy, star trek level tech, headed that way, they will continue to screw up, using their concept of enforced luddism by "law" as a business model. It is not only just plain ignorant and stupid, it is harmful to the over all economy and for society in general.
Copyright in and of itself, to me anyway, is not as bad as the ridiculous notion that somehow it is illegal or unethical or whatever to do format shifting. I was just thinking a bit ago, how many times am I supposed to re-buy the rolling stones songs again? I think a first copy was on reel to reel (OK, I admit, snagged off the radio), then LPs, then cassette and..I stopped right there because that was the last time I had a cheap way to format shift. (burners and players were expensive when they first came out)What I have on CD is bought used, I just had enough by that point and could see then they wanted a legal lock on technology, advances OK for them, make it as illegal as possible for the common media buyer, plus keep coming up with new formats forever. Now for all practical purposes copyright is indefinite, no outside limit, because they have restrictions on circumvention for format shifting. Ya, you can still do it, but it is highly unclear about the legal status, but I bet it is eventually fond to be in violation of DMCA by some "ruling" from a "ruler". And I see zero hope from either side of the political fence with the mainstream candidates and pols that this will change anytime soon, because the US corporations have done everything they can to bork the manufacturing sector to be replaced with this vague "IP as products" stuff. If anything, restrictions will be getting more severe than even what we have now. This goes along with the proprietary text format fubars article, they want you to re-buy the new format and re-pay to have the same stuff on it, like once a decade a new thing you have to buy, just to have the same content or to view your own docs. Ludicrous, but sacks of cash money talks there at the highest levels,(quite literally, I would bet a year's pay that outright bribery is common) it won't be going away anytime soon, just get worse. (this is all US I mean, other places, good luck, on your own)
There's a dearth of rugged laptops on the market, just a few and pretty expensive. On the other hand, you can get any number of delicate laptops that commonly turn to junkage within a short time. I think this project has really pushed the envelope and embarrassed other manufacturers into considering similar better/cheaper/tougher machines. It hasn't hurt, put it that way. There are different market segments based on needs and price, we need them all, there is no one sits fits everyone machine. You want expensive and delicate, you can get that right now, they'll gladly sell you one. You want real tough and cheap,until this thing came around, not so much doable. And one of the main points with laptops are they are portable, even *gasp*, the theoretical ability to use one out in the big room with the yellow light and blue wall paint. Regular laptops are pretty sucky there, the screens disappear, you have to worry about the weather, the battery life sucks with all of them, this one however claims it is actually usable out in the light and also has a few different self powered options, meaning long range "battery life" away from a wall plug..
I know I have been holding out getting another laptop, after having three of them, because I just can't use them outside. If I am inside, well duh I have a desktop with a big screen. and I don't hang out in starbucks and so on, but I am an outside worker and could actually use one now and then. But it has to be dust and moisture proof/resistant and be able to take some knocks beyond the normal lightweight commuter train ride and sitting at a cafe or conference table. Hopefully this better screen tech and "ruggedness" will induce other builders into making adult sized versions without them costing more than semi-decent used cars.
..fire on the runway. No planes crashed yet though. Still doesn't take away from my acknowledgment (see, I agree it is a problem...) that current lithium tech is borken from the lighter is better marketing fetish. They need to make them whatever size they need to be to make sure the tech is safe before it is shipped. And if that means larger and heavier, so be it. and also rein in the cheap crap counterfeit or otherwise crap made lowest specs possible bogus products, even if that means skewing with the current globalist business model. I don't care whatsoever if they have to go to full trade sanctions to do it either, better now while we still have a chance of getting back some decent manufacturing in the west. I am not a fan of outsourcing just based on "cheapness" or to pump up some suits golden parachute, because so far, that is way more of what we are getting, quality has become an issue from the past, soon to be forgotten..and that is the whole point of the article, current battery tech with lithium is SO bad they have to put restrictions on it. Ya, it is powerful, also dangerous and mostly crappily made. Like I said, want to solve it the fastest? Slap a ten billion dollar full liability requirement on each model they ship, any company, any battery, that stuff will get sorted out fast, and by making it a universal law, we'll still have full competition..
"what should they do now?" and stuff. Besides nothing-no planes are falling down lately from this problem- Force the lithium ion battery manufacturers to carry one billion dollar liability insurance for their products. and that's it. heck, make it ten billion, typed up text is cheap. They'd go to get the insurance bonds, the beady eyed actuaries would take a look, give them a quote, joe sony and friends would first swoon and pass out on the floor, then they'd be down in engineering, dragging the marketing droids with them by their ears, and next thing you would see would be *much safer batteries* coming out of the factories. And if laptops (and other do dads and gadgets) had to weigh one more pound (or equivalent based on do-dad) then they do now..who cares? They've oversold and overhyped "lightweight and trendy and oh so fashionable" to the point that the batteries got to be unsafe. There's the problem, along with this constant problem we keep seeing with the economic policy of utter uberlaxitude on allowing cheap low-rent, built from the lamest lowest specced crap imaginable counterfeits from the "manufacturer to the world" nation.
variation on the old engineering maxim: "cheap, lightweight, good-pick two"
Look around for one of the older diesel nissan maximas. Good mileage, tough engine. Might be worth it even if you had to do some rebuilding. They had both sedans and wagons.
All those jobs can be and are done daily by natguard guys, including fighter pilots and so on. I think we could pull off a full return to the organized militia. Training = "organized" in this context. A cadre of full time professionals gets too far removed from the "we the people" concept and turns into the royal guard and king's hessian mercenaries who just blindly "follow orders" from a single human. This is just a bad idea and we can see daily in the headlines why this is so. We need a return to looking at the US as a real "union" of 50 soveriogn states who share a few critical things, and also that the doofus clerk in chief doesn't usurp all the power, like what has happened now. Congress is a paper tiger, the nutso one just issues "signing statements" and does what he wants and all those orders, no matter how insane, inanae or outright ludicrous, are followed.
This is really a bad idea. Real bad. "We the people" tell our representatives what to do, they in turn tell the hired help employee "clerk in chief" what to do, and he is supposed to do that and besides that but out of lawmaking and policy. Not his gig at all.. That's the theory. the US is the first nation ever devised with a bottom up sort of government, evertything flows from the free and sovereign individual with government having a very limited and restricted set of powers and duties and *that's it*. It's completely bass ackwards right now, and needs to change back to the original design.
Of course, you would have to just stop with the wallstreet and bankers wars of aggression and maximum blood profits for this to happen, they got WAY too much actual power and are driving this political bus with the politicians as stand-ins, so they need to be toned down a bunch as well, which IMO would be another good thing. Ike warned us this takeover/coup thing for cash would happen, and it did, and I just dare to say it out loud "he was right, and stuff needs to change back".
Youtube is success. There are winners and stinkers mixed up in the huge offering there, just as you would expect, but overall it is successful. Open source software is a success, winners and stinkers, but so it goes. People are free to look at what doesn't work and what does and improve on it. Closed source you get winners and stinkers, but it is much harder to get to the nitty gritty details to see how to improve it, you have to wait for the limited set of eyeballs to do it.
Really, if you want an historical example, just look back in history with closed guilds, commoners being disallowed the ability to read, etc. The called it the dark ages for several reasons.
As to "risk", with closed source you are relying on faith, a cult like behavior model, to insure your product you are getting is "good quality" and depending on their word alone for that. that's like believing the used car salesman in the seersucker suit. Nuts. Which means they have every economic incentive to push to you the strangest crappiest stuff imaginable and lead you to believe that is the "best" that can be done. My comment there is Orly? For some reason I am just not trusting the snakeoil-caveat emptor model, which is what closed source and closed knowledge is, you have to have "faith" that what you are getting is the best and will work. I say that is much riskier than being able to actually see and verify (in some fashion) all the ingredients.
I run linux now because I can get the most and best code out there for the best price and least effort. I could run windows I guess..and I have.... in the past, along with a lot of macs/apple code..but no way am I going to pay serious folding scratch to run inferior code, not in 2007 where there are so many great open source avenues to explore. I'm not a dev or a coder, hyst a regular normal computer criver, I've used all three, for me, linux works the best for a variety of reasons cost/quality/usefulness/ease of use, etc. I can get the most bang for my total hardware/software buck, and it just so happens it is "open" mostly, and I don't think that is purely a coincidence.
I contend that same concept can work with most any research, in fact, I think this is why when you read academic papers you'll see cross university collaboration with the authors so much, because *it just works*. And like I pointed out, the nobel guys say the same, and the hard nosed wall street bean counters just analyzed it and came up with the same. The NYSE guys don't give a rats ass on the social implications, they just looked to see where the best bottom line was, and switched to open linux over closed unix. I am not in their league, chances are you aren't either. I'll defer to the smarter guys on this one. Open knowledge just works better, closed off walled knowledge-gardens are not only last years models, they are last millenium's model.
You can be ahead of the curve, behind it, or try to stay on top, pick one that suits you the best.
..mine was a 74 dart, same slant six. In retrospect, probably the best normal basic transpo car I have owned. Plenty roomy, great mileage, never needed *anything*. I mean, it just didn't, put in gas, the dang oil never got dirty! Never needed a tuneup, the plugs would stay clean even. I changed oil anyway, but that was a nice car. I think it was too good, they weren't breaking down as required to keep people buying new cars, so they had to fix what wasn't broken and muck it up with the K car concept, which was total crap. The only thing I don't like about the slant six is where they stuck the distributor, road splash would sometimes get the wires and cap wet and cause misfires, etc. (especially when I had to cross streams living rural and they didn't build bridges for small streams, just concrete/rocks in the water...) I solved that with some plastic and tape.
The detroit big three actually all made a few what of I would consider industrial quality engines, get a vehicle with one of those and they were usually pretty good, the straight sixes from chrysler 225 and ford 250 and 300 and chevy 300 cu inch engines. I've had at least one of each and they were all great. I am seriously considering swapping my 350 chev in my old big van for a 300 inch straight six.
We really aren't supposed to have a large permanent paid for standing career-professional army. The founders were adamant about that, calling it a danger as some powerful leader could take over, ie, a dictatorship (I think they were correct in this assessment...too bad we didn't follow their advice and guidance). They preferred a well trained and always on call civilian militia. And as such, there would still be well trained folks of all ranks and ages, just not as full time careers. We have that concept now in a limited fashion with the natguard, where they have all ranks/skills/ages, etc. there would be no outside time limit on that, because it isn't a job with the government, so it falls outside the ten year theoretical rule, it is a service that all men between 17 and 45 are required to be available for (organized), and others outside that age bracket and gender could be used if they volunteered and were accepted (everyone else, the unorganized..but willing). "We the people" for the national defense (as opposed to speculative offensive wars for profit or..pick some other wild reason).
HTH I've thought this through a lot, and obviously that comes up quickly as a potential sticking point, but I feel it can be adequately addressed just by going back to the old original design criteria.
Your posit is that our governmental expenses would go up. I say the exact opposite would happen, if the results were "open sourced", a variety of different people and businesses could take advantage of the new knowledge, expanding jobs and opportunities many fold over just the one company who would have exclusive "license" to use this new knowledge for x-years. I don't care how big your company is, it isn't as large as "everyone". "Everyone" will always have more points of view and a larger collective intelligence to tap into. And all these companies and people would pay taxes based on an increase of wealth production. Governmental expenses could theoretically go *down*, or they could take the new additional monies created, at the same exact previous percentile parity, and fund more research than what they could previously, the compounding effect.
Closed source is a valid model, but open source allows for faster development and more "wealth production", even if it is initially just more IP. Heck, even the heart of capitalism agrees now, look at the next article, NYSE goes open source. It works with code, it can work with a variety of other types of new research as well. A group of Nobel Laureates just called for more international collaboration with scientific advances, because they think it would work better,a free exchange of results, rather than stricter and more closed-off research. Other smart guys are calling for dropping the economic barriers to expensive peer reviewed articles. I would agree there as well.
Me, I am gonna trust the smart guys on this one. When you have both the planet's leading and honored professional smart guys AND the planet's leading professional and quite well compensated shrewd big money guys actually agreeing on something, a simple basic premise...well..you wanna bet against the house? The uni can make more by sharing (long run), because as you and others all give out-share- "you" the uni in this case- get to take back as well, because everyone's efforts can be "force multiplied", and that multiplied force down the road can and will turn into money, along with other things, these research results we all want to see.
I have been in favor of something similar, but more wide ranging (and a shorter term, ten years). Make this rule apply to all government, top to bottom, every worker there, elected, hired, appointed, it doesn't matter. No more lifelong careers in government. There is zero incentive to improve government from the inside when the way it is setup insures your entire existence for life. There's no incentive to alter that, the incentive is to perpetuate it and make it even larger, government as a growth and jobs industry is what we have now, and politicians are just the public face of it, the problem permeates the entire thing. Eliminate full time careers and pensions. Ten years in any combination of government "service", then back to the private sector.
Once people realize it is in their best interest to make government functional, cheap, efficient, fair, etc, because they will not always be there, you'll see some decent changes. You have to remove the opposite incentive, and that incentive is the governmental perpetual paycheck, or even two or three with "sheep dipping" as it is called.
People should want to be in government because it's theoretically a place to give back a little, to truly be "of service" to your community and nation, but the way it is now is "us versus them". We lost that government "of the people" a long time ago, it's turned schizoid.
That's why I said an independent backup. I tell you, I've seen automatic generators not start before,despite being "plugged in", but my batteries attached to solar panels always "just work" and stay in tip top shape, mostly because I think the other devices associated with solar panels (charge controllers and desulphators primarily) are of such good a quality. With a genset, having three ways to keep the starter batteries charged is a good deal, grid supplied trickle/float/smart charger, the alternator on the engine itself once it is running, and I would add a panel or two and a charge controller, just for redundancy and backup insurance. Perhaps on another starter battery attached through an isolator circuit and transfer switch in case the primary fails for some reason.
I'm a *big* fan of solar, having used it so much and seeing how solid it is. IMO, the government needs to do a manhattan project scale R&D effort with solar, not a joke level, a real level,, serious multiple billions, because I think "practical fusion power" is just a winner. The other fusion power projects are decades away and are costing tons of cash, they are extremely complex and delicate advanced rube goldberg efforts at this point (eventually might pay off but we need stuff that works now, not 50 years from now). Solar fits that bill, it works now, it really is fusion power ( I have started a one guy campaign, like with this post and others I have made to call it practical fusion power), and it is already proving that it can work day in and day out with extreme minimal maintenance all over the planet (got to love zero moving parts for example), so now we need to get economies of scale going to a much greater extent (put a ton of rust belt guys back to work, manufacturing and installing/servicing) and keep improving the efficiencies of both the panels and storage technologies-along with keeping work going on improving electric device power demands and various other conservation issues.
I think our society would be well served right now to stop wasting so much good silicon on crap like cellphones that get thrown away every year (I bet everyone here has a box full of them) and throw away music players and *forced computer upgrades from operating system bloat-age* and so on. That's the biggest problem the solar manufacturers are having now, and what is keeping prices high, they have orders up the wazoo, demand is just fantastic, but they can't get the silicon because of throw away cheap gadgets sucking it up.
I know they are working on ultra thin film and different composites and so forth for solar (like nanosolar company), but that stuff is still mostly unobtanium. Silicon based panels just work and can be built now and will produce good power for 30 years or better. the process will evolve, but we can't wait until oil cracks two hundred a barrel and so on to think about maybe using some alternatives and doing a massive decentralization of power production so we don't need to waste money on upgrading the grid infrastructure, we have to do it while it is still cheap and not an ecological and economic emergency situation. Just like with this article and backup power for the cell towers, you need your backup power plan in place and operational and in "normal-working" status *before* it is needed, not think about it once the emergency hits. That concept is valid on any scale imaginable.
Those things are great! Last for freaking decades. In ye olden days of alternative energy they were the scrounged batteries of choice (do they still sell them used at scrap prices?) if you could get them*. Old beat on and used they were a better deal than brand new from other sources.
*I've heard submarine batteries were nice too, but I have never seen or used them myself. With that said, whenever my personal storage batts need replacing now I would probably go with an electric forklift battery pack.
Propane. I see a lot of big propane generators at farms, fairly common now along with diesel, but propane lasts indefinitely and doesn't go bad. And most of the phone company huts use propane generators now for backups (at least that is what I see around my state). A good industrial engine and propane is about as reliable as diesel. Tradeoffs mostly. Diesel engines are more robust, but much more expensive. Diesel has to be used and replaced often,even with additional treatments like anti gel and anti microbial, propane doesn't, meaning you could get the propane now at cheap prices (relatively speaking) and ten years from now it would still be good fuel.
With that said we have three large diesel gensets to keep the farm running here in case of power outtage,(and they certainly get used for that as well, quite often) but joe farmer boss said if he was building the farm today he'd use propane. The last large poultry farm I worked on used propane generators though (nissan engines actually). We're not a massive data center or cell phone company, but as farms around here go we are the largest. We store several thousand gallons of diesel in tanks, but have well over 100,000 gallons of propane in huge tanks at any one time.
So I agree with you in a sense, diesels are by far just more robust and longer running engines, but given how infrequently the cell towers would have to be running purely on generators I think propane powered generators and large storage tanks and some solar panels to keep the starter batteries charged constantly (as an independent backup) along with periodic test running might be more useful and come in a lot cheaper in terms of dollars and still be able to do the job as required, probably two for one or better there in cost.
...when bigass companies like Verizon violate the GPL copyright provisions that joe government will seize all of Verizon's stuff? Or just nail small fry college student downloaders and single moms and flea market disk resellers? And will the government be auditing all the "closed source" code out there now looking for copyright infringement?
There exists different types of aid and governmental and non governmental help. The OLPC is an education project. If you can just think of it that way *first*, then it perhaps makes more sense. Using an innovative low and self powered and rugged kid proof laptop, they are able to deliver a variety of text books and other sorts of educational materials suitable for children at an extremely low cost compared to traditional text books and materials, plus the central server that goes with the laptops is web enabled and the laptops themselves meshnetworking enabled, so one good connection per school or village will help all those people get exposed to modern information of all sorts, weather reports, markets, whatever you-it's a big web out there. In other words, it's a tool Mr. Dvorak. Upgradable as to content. The content is easily shared then. the kids can create their own content as well. Ya know, "human being stuff".
Mr. Dvorak can donate both the ton of rice and the laptop. He could also donate some water filters, innoculations or other medical gear, or open pollinated seeds, or solar panels and DC lighting and radios for night time lighting and some sort of entertainment and news resources, or good steel carpentry and gardening tools, or even a stout diesel tractor and a years fuel if he wants to-all of them qualify as worthy donation targets to help the poorest out there who are trying to make centuries of progress in just years. It's up to him. One sort of donation does nothing to alter any other sort of donation, and having a variety to pick from just makes it *better*.
I knew they had a decent open source effort, just couldn't remember the URL off the top of my head, had to look it up again. Hopefully a little/. exposure will get them some more dev action, because, ya, FOSS is a good idea overall, space-or anything else.
Why the blatant hypocrisy? You've got corporations falling out of their chairs trying to outsource everything they possibly can to [large asian nation with only one uber controlling political party known to have murdered millions of their own people] with a pretty dismal and long running bleak human rights record. So it's OK for these other corporations to make money hand over fist "cooperating with the regime", but if ISPs/ web based content providers do it it needs some special laws? How about a binary Yoda level decision instead, nation A is acceptable to do business with because they follow some normal human rights principles, or they do not, so you do not do business with them until they change *first*.
Note: I am not letting Yahoo off the hook, I am saying all these other for profit corporations need to be stuck on the same hook
Slashdot Mirror
I would be in favor of more algae research and deployment, but not necessarily in the oceans but in controlled pools/tanks in the desert, in combination with some some solar and geo thermal and perhaps very large greenhouses. And mostly because they will most likely go for genetically modified algae and I wouldn't want to chance such a crop going wild with unintended consequences. I also think they could control it better in pools or tanks than in the wide open ocean. I've worked on the ocean before, it ain't always a flat millpond...
;)
I think the energy question will be answered with an "all of the above" solution, I am not seeing any single one solution fitting all circumstances everywhere. although back to the jatropha, mexico's oil fields are now in decline, it probably wouldn't hurt them a bit to see if they could start to squeeze a few million acres of the plant in there before it goes into fast decline....
Personally I am trying to eventually go full personal production for the fuels I need/use, to decentralize production (doing my bit to be part of the solution rather than just part of the problem), and also pure self interest-keep my wallet stuffed more than "theirs". I am not real far along yet, just wood as primary heating fuel, perpetual supply and carbon neutral, some solar PV,a greenhouse for year round food production (helps drop shipping demand/fuel use/pollution from imported foods, plus it is just better to make your own food onsite, IMO, tastier!), but am working towards liquid biodiesel next, that's why I happened to know about the jatropha, I had looked into it and had to abandon the idea. Most likely we will be looking at using waste chicken litter for a feedstock source, as we have that in rather large abundance
Jatropha will not grow in the bulk of the US landmass, it is a subtropical plant and can only tolerate a few light frosts. I looked into it for a fuel crop here and even this being Georgia, we are too far north.
I agree with the other poster, either switchgrass or industrial hemp are better targets for exploitation for biofuels using marginal land in most areas of the US.
They have a 20 year old notion of how much a "unit" they need to make. This notion is ludicrous given the tech advances we have. They failed to keep dropping prices for their disks when they could. Instead of using the volume sales concept, they stubbornly stuck to making dollars profits on cents worth of plastic and paper. They just don't get it that price gouging doesn't work. The ultimate decision makers in that industry who decide pricing levels are *all millionaires*, they just can't relate to what stuff costs anymore for people who are not. And the legislators they "consult" with, similar. they live and work in an extremely expensive part of the US, DC, and none of them can be considered "working class" in the traditional sense. In short, the pair of them that try to set pricing and laws when it comes to IP and tech advances mean for tangibles cost just can't see the forest for the trees, they have no practical frame of reference. And even with "market studies", those can be flawed as well, and the ultimate proof of "market studies" is whether or not your widget you sell sells with full customer satisfaction or not, and in this case, they fail it, so even their marketing studies are therefore flawed by empirical evidence. We can all see it, right there in plain sight. If they weren't, we wouldn't be seeing these articles all the time or be discussing copies and copyright and so on. They just can't handle the innovation and ramifications of replicator technology so far, even though we are still in the tiny opening phases of such tech. That means as we get closer to cheap tangibles replication for the "masses" guy, star trek level tech, headed that way, they will continue to screw up, using their concept of enforced luddism by "law" as a business model. It is not only just plain ignorant and stupid, it is harmful to the over all economy and for society in general.
Copyright in and of itself, to me anyway, is not as bad as the ridiculous notion that somehow it is illegal or unethical or whatever to do format shifting. I was just thinking a bit ago, how many times am I supposed to re-buy the rolling stones songs again? I think a first copy was on reel to reel (OK, I admit, snagged off the radio), then LPs, then cassette and..I stopped right there because that was the last time I had a cheap way to format shift. (burners and players were expensive when they first came out)What I have on CD is bought used, I just had enough by that point and could see then they wanted a legal lock on technology, advances OK for them, make it as illegal as possible for the common media buyer, plus keep coming up with new formats forever. Now for all practical purposes copyright is indefinite, no outside limit, because they have restrictions on circumvention for format shifting. Ya, you can still do it, but it is highly unclear about the legal status, but I bet it is eventually fond to be in violation of DMCA by some "ruling" from a "ruler". And I see zero hope from either side of the political fence with the mainstream candidates and pols that this will change anytime soon, because the US corporations have done everything they can to bork the manufacturing sector to be replaced with this vague "IP as products" stuff. If anything, restrictions will be getting more severe than even what we have now. This goes along with the proprietary text format fubars article, they want you to re-buy the new format and re-pay to have the same stuff on it, like once a decade a new thing you have to buy, just to have the same content or to view your own docs. Ludicrous, but sacks of cash money talks there at the highest levels,(quite literally, I would bet a year's pay that outright bribery is common) it won't be going away anytime soon, just get worse. (this is all US I mean, other places, good luck, on your own)
There's a dearth of rugged laptops on the market, just a few and pretty expensive. On the other hand, you can get any number of delicate laptops that commonly turn to junkage within a short time. I think this project has really pushed the envelope and embarrassed other manufacturers into considering similar better/cheaper/tougher machines. It hasn't hurt, put it that way. There are different market segments based on needs and price, we need them all, there is no one sits fits everyone machine. You want expensive and delicate, you can get that right now, they'll gladly sell you one. You want real tough and cheap,until this thing came around, not so much doable. And one of the main points with laptops are they are portable, even *gasp*, the theoretical ability to use one out in the big room with the yellow light and blue wall paint. Regular laptops are pretty sucky there, the screens disappear, you have to worry about the weather, the battery life sucks with all of them, this one however claims it is actually usable out in the light and also has a few different self powered options, meaning long range "battery life" away from a wall plug..
I know I have been holding out getting another laptop, after having three of them, because I just can't use them outside. If I am inside, well duh I have a desktop with a big screen. and I don't hang out in starbucks and so on, but I am an outside worker and could actually use one now and then. But it has to be dust and moisture proof/resistant and be able to take some knocks beyond the normal lightweight commuter train ride and sitting at a cafe or conference table. Hopefully this better screen tech and "ruggedness" will induce other builders into making adult sized versions without them costing more than semi-decent used cars.
..fire on the runway. No planes crashed yet though. Still doesn't take away from my acknowledgment (see, I agree it is a problem...) that current lithium tech is borken from the lighter is better marketing fetish. They need to make them whatever size they need to be to make sure the tech is safe before it is shipped. And if that means larger and heavier, so be it. and also rein in the cheap crap counterfeit or otherwise crap made lowest specs possible bogus products, even if that means skewing with the current globalist business model. I don't care whatsoever if they have to go to full trade sanctions to do it either, better now while we still have a chance of getting back some decent manufacturing in the west. I am not a fan of outsourcing just based on "cheapness" or to pump up some suits golden parachute, because so far, that is way more of what we are getting, quality has become an issue from the past, soon to be forgotten..and that is the whole point of the article, current battery tech with lithium is SO bad they have to put restrictions on it. Ya, it is powerful, also dangerous and mostly crappily made. Like I said, want to solve it the fastest? Slap a ten billion dollar full liability requirement on each model they ship, any company, any battery, that stuff will get sorted out fast, and by making it a universal law, we'll still have full competition..
"what should they do now?" and stuff. Besides nothing-no planes are falling down lately from this problem- Force the lithium ion battery manufacturers to carry one billion dollar liability insurance for their products. and that's it. heck, make it ten billion, typed up text is cheap. They'd go to get the insurance bonds, the beady eyed actuaries would take a look, give them a quote, joe sony and friends would first swoon and pass out on the floor, then they'd be down in engineering, dragging the marketing droids with them by their ears, and next thing you would see would be *much safer batteries* coming out of the factories. And if laptops (and other do dads and gadgets) had to weigh one more pound (or equivalent based on do-dad) then they do now..who cares? They've oversold and overhyped "lightweight and trendy and oh so fashionable" to the point that the batteries got to be unsafe. There's the problem, along with this constant problem we keep seeing with the economic policy of utter uberlaxitude on allowing cheap low-rent, built from the lamest lowest specced crap imaginable counterfeits from the "manufacturer to the world" nation.
variation on the old engineering maxim: "cheap, lightweight, good-pick two"
...Chuck Norris's law will suit YOU!
...Chuck Norris's law will suit YOU!
Look around for one of the older diesel nissan maximas. Good mileage, tough engine. Might be worth it even if you had to do some rebuilding. They had both sedans and wagons.
All those jobs can be and are done daily by natguard guys, including fighter pilots and so on. I think we could pull off a full return to the organized militia. Training = "organized" in this context. A cadre of full time professionals gets too far removed from the "we the people" concept and turns into the royal guard and king's hessian mercenaries who just blindly "follow orders" from a single human. This is just a bad idea and we can see daily in the headlines why this is so. We need a return to looking at the US as a real "union" of 50 soveriogn states who share a few critical things, and also that the doofus clerk in chief doesn't usurp all the power, like what has happened now. Congress is a paper tiger, the nutso one just issues "signing statements" and does what he wants and all those orders, no matter how insane, inanae or outright ludicrous, are followed.
This is really a bad idea. Real bad. "We the people" tell our representatives what to do, they in turn tell the hired help employee "clerk in chief" what to do, and he is supposed to do that and besides that but out of lawmaking and policy. Not his gig at all.. That's the theory. the US is the first nation ever devised with a bottom up sort of government, evertything flows from the free and sovereign individual with government having a very limited and restricted set of powers and duties and *that's it*. It's completely bass ackwards right now, and needs to change back to the original design.
Of course, you would have to just stop with the wallstreet and bankers wars of aggression and maximum blood profits for this to happen, they got WAY too much actual power and are driving this political bus with the politicians as stand-ins, so they need to be toned down a bunch as well, which IMO would be another good thing. Ike warned us this takeover/coup thing for cash would happen, and it did, and I just dare to say it out loud "he was right, and stuff needs to change back".
Youtube is success. There are winners and stinkers mixed up in the huge offering there, just as you would expect, but overall it is successful. Open source software is a success, winners and stinkers, but so it goes. People are free to look at what doesn't work and what does and improve on it. Closed source you get winners and stinkers, but it is much harder to get to the nitty gritty details to see how to improve it, you have to wait for the limited set of eyeballs to do it.
Really, if you want an historical example, just look back in history with closed guilds, commoners being disallowed the ability to read, etc. The called it the dark ages for several reasons.
As to "risk", with closed source you are relying on faith, a cult like behavior model, to insure your product you are getting is "good quality" and depending on their word alone for that. that's like believing the used car salesman in the seersucker suit. Nuts. Which means they have every economic incentive to push to you the strangest crappiest stuff imaginable and lead you to believe that is the "best" that can be done. My comment there is Orly? For some reason I am just not trusting the snakeoil-caveat emptor model, which is what closed source and closed knowledge is, you have to have "faith" that what you are getting is the best and will work. I say that is much riskier than being able to actually see and verify (in some fashion) all the ingredients.
I run linux now because I can get the most and best code out there for the best price and least effort. I could run windows I guess..and I have.... in the past, along with a lot of macs/apple code..but no way am I going to pay serious folding scratch to run inferior code, not in 2007 where there are so many great open source avenues to explore. I'm not a dev or a coder, hyst a regular normal computer criver, I've used all three, for me, linux works the best for a variety of reasons cost/quality/usefulness/ease of use, etc. I can get the most bang for my total hardware/software buck, and it just so happens it is "open" mostly, and I don't think that is purely a coincidence.
I contend that same concept can work with most any research, in fact, I think this is why when you read academic papers you'll see cross university collaboration with the authors so much, because *it just works*. And like I pointed out, the nobel guys say the same, and the hard nosed wall street bean counters just analyzed it and came up with the same. The NYSE guys don't give a rats ass on the social implications, they just looked to see where the best bottom line was, and switched to open linux over closed unix. I am not in their league, chances are you aren't either. I'll defer to the smarter guys on this one. Open knowledge just works better, closed off walled knowledge-gardens are not only last years models, they are last millenium's model.
You can be ahead of the curve, behind it, or try to stay on top, pick one that suits you the best.
..mine was a 74 dart, same slant six. In retrospect, probably the best normal basic transpo car I have owned. Plenty roomy, great mileage, never needed *anything*. I mean, it just didn't, put in gas, the dang oil never got dirty! Never needed a tuneup, the plugs would stay clean even. I changed oil anyway, but that was a nice car. I think it was too good, they weren't breaking down as required to keep people buying new cars, so they had to fix what wasn't broken and muck it up with the K car concept, which was total crap. The only thing I don't like about the slant six is where they stuck the distributor, road splash would sometimes get the wires and cap wet and cause misfires, etc. (especially when I had to cross streams living rural and they didn't build bridges for small streams, just concrete/rocks in the water...) I solved that with some plastic and tape.
The detroit big three actually all made a few what of I would consider industrial quality engines, get a vehicle with one of those and they were usually pretty good, the straight sixes from chrysler 225 and ford 250 and 300 and chevy 300 cu inch engines. I've had at least one of each and they were all great. I am seriously considering swapping my 350 chev in my old big van for a 300 inch straight six.
We really aren't supposed to have a large permanent paid for standing career-professional army. The founders were adamant about that, calling it a danger as some powerful leader could take over, ie, a dictatorship (I think they were correct in this assessment...too bad we didn't follow their advice and guidance). They preferred a well trained and always on call civilian militia. And as such, there would still be well trained folks of all ranks and ages, just not as full time careers. We have that concept now in a limited fashion with the natguard, where they have all ranks/skills/ages, etc. there would be no outside time limit on that, because it isn't a job with the government, so it falls outside the ten year theoretical rule, it is a service that all men between 17 and 45 are required to be available for (organized), and others outside that age bracket and gender could be used if they volunteered and were accepted (everyone else, the unorganized..but willing). "We the people" for the national defense (as opposed to speculative offensive wars for profit or ..pick some other wild reason).
HTH I've thought this through a lot, and obviously that comes up quickly as a potential sticking point, but I feel it can be adequately addressed just by going back to the old original design criteria.
Your posit is that our governmental expenses would go up. I say the exact opposite would happen, if the results were "open sourced", a variety of different people and businesses could take advantage of the new knowledge, expanding jobs and opportunities many fold over just the one company who would have exclusive "license" to use this new knowledge for x-years. I don't care how big your company is, it isn't as large as "everyone". "Everyone" will always have more points of view and a larger collective intelligence to tap into. And all these companies and people would pay taxes based on an increase of wealth production. Governmental expenses could theoretically go *down*, or they could take the new additional monies created, at the same exact previous percentile parity, and fund more research than what they could previously, the compounding effect.
Closed source is a valid model, but open source allows for faster development and more "wealth production", even if it is initially just more IP. Heck, even the heart of capitalism agrees now, look at the next article, NYSE goes open source. It works with code, it can work with a variety of other types of new research as well. A group of Nobel Laureates just called for more international collaboration with scientific advances, because they think it would work better,a free exchange of results, rather than stricter and more closed-off research. Other smart guys are calling for dropping the economic barriers to expensive peer reviewed articles. I would agree there as well.
Me, I am gonna trust the smart guys on this one. When you have both the planet's leading and honored professional smart guys AND the planet's leading professional and quite well compensated shrewd big money guys actually agreeing on something, a simple basic premise...well..you wanna bet against the house? The uni can make more by sharing (long run), because as you and others all give out-share- "you" the uni in this case- get to take back as well, because everyone's efforts can be "force multiplied", and that multiplied force down the road can and will turn into money, along with other things, these research results we all want to see.
I have been in favor of something similar, but more wide ranging (and a shorter term, ten years). Make this rule apply to all government, top to bottom, every worker there, elected, hired, appointed, it doesn't matter. No more lifelong careers in government. There is zero incentive to improve government from the inside when the way it is setup insures your entire existence for life. There's no incentive to alter that, the incentive is to perpetuate it and make it even larger, government as a growth and jobs industry is what we have now, and politicians are just the public face of it, the problem permeates the entire thing. Eliminate full time careers and pensions. Ten years in any combination of government "service", then back to the private sector.
Once people realize it is in their best interest to make government functional, cheap, efficient, fair, etc, because they will not always be there, you'll see some decent changes. You have to remove the opposite incentive, and that incentive is the governmental perpetual paycheck, or even two or three with "sheep dipping" as it is called.
People should want to be in government because it's theoretically a place to give back a little, to truly be "of service" to your community and nation, but the way it is now is "us versus them". We lost that government "of the people" a long time ago, it's turned schizoid.
...it's called the Homersaurus IIRC
That's why I said an independent backup. I tell you, I've seen automatic generators not start before,despite being "plugged in", but my batteries attached to solar panels always "just work" and stay in tip top shape, mostly because I think the other devices associated with solar panels (charge controllers and desulphators primarily) are of such good a quality. With a genset, having three ways to keep the starter batteries charged is a good deal, grid supplied trickle/float/smart charger, the alternator on the engine itself once it is running, and I would add a panel or two and a charge controller, just for redundancy and backup insurance. Perhaps on another starter battery attached through an isolator circuit and transfer switch in case the primary fails for some reason.
I'm a *big* fan of solar, having used it so much and seeing how solid it is. IMO, the government needs to do a manhattan project scale R&D effort with solar, not a joke level, a real level,, serious multiple billions, because I think "practical fusion power" is just a winner. The other fusion power projects are decades away and are costing tons of cash, they are extremely complex and delicate advanced rube goldberg efforts at this point (eventually might pay off but we need stuff that works now, not 50 years from now). Solar fits that bill, it works now, it really is fusion power ( I have started a one guy campaign, like with this post and others I have made to call it practical fusion power), and it is already proving that it can work day in and day out with extreme minimal maintenance all over the planet (got to love zero moving parts for example), so now we need to get economies of scale going to a much greater extent (put a ton of rust belt guys back to work, manufacturing and installing/servicing) and keep improving the efficiencies of both the panels and storage technologies-along with keeping work going on improving electric device power demands and various other conservation issues.
I think our society would be well served right now to stop wasting so much good silicon on crap like cellphones that get thrown away every year (I bet everyone here has a box full of them) and throw away music players and *forced computer upgrades from operating system bloat-age* and so on. That's the biggest problem the solar manufacturers are having now, and what is keeping prices high, they have orders up the wazoo, demand is just fantastic, but they can't get the silicon because of throw away cheap gadgets sucking it up.
I know they are working on ultra thin film and different composites and so forth for solar (like nanosolar company), but that stuff is still mostly unobtanium. Silicon based panels just work and can be built now and will produce good power for 30 years or better. the process will evolve, but we can't wait until oil cracks two hundred a barrel and so on to think about maybe using some alternatives and doing a massive decentralization of power production so we don't need to waste money on upgrading the grid infrastructure, we have to do it while it is still cheap and not an ecological and economic emergency situation. Just like with this article and backup power for the cell towers, you need your backup power plan in place and operational and in "normal-working" status *before* it is needed, not think about it once the emergency hits. That concept is valid on any scale imaginable.
Those things are great! Last for freaking decades. In ye olden days of alternative energy they were the scrounged batteries of choice (do they still sell them used at scrap prices?) if you could get them*. Old beat on and used they were a better deal than brand new from other sources.
*I've heard submarine batteries were nice too, but I have never seen or used them myself. With that said, whenever my personal storage batts need replacing now I would probably go with an electric forklift battery pack.
Propane. I see a lot of big propane generators at farms, fairly common now along with diesel, but propane lasts indefinitely and doesn't go bad. And most of the phone company huts use propane generators now for backups (at least that is what I see around my state). A good industrial engine and propane is about as reliable as diesel. Tradeoffs mostly. Diesel engines are more robust, but much more expensive. Diesel has to be used and replaced often,even with additional treatments like anti gel and anti microbial, propane doesn't, meaning you could get the propane now at cheap prices (relatively speaking) and ten years from now it would still be good fuel.
With that said we have three large diesel gensets to keep the farm running here in case of power outtage,(and they certainly get used for that as well, quite often) but joe farmer boss said if he was building the farm today he'd use propane. The last large poultry farm I worked on used propane generators though (nissan engines actually). We're not a massive data center or cell phone company, but as farms around here go we are the largest. We store several thousand gallons of diesel in tanks, but have well over 100,000 gallons of propane in huge tanks at any one time.
So I agree with you in a sense, diesels are by far just more robust and longer running engines, but given how infrequently the cell towers would have to be running purely on generators I think propane powered generators and large storage tanks and some solar panels to keep the starter batteries charged constantly (as an independent backup) along with periodic test running might be more useful and come in a lot cheaper in terms of dollars and still be able to do the job as required, probably two for one or better there in cost.
...when bigass companies like Verizon violate the GPL copyright provisions that joe government will seize all of Verizon's stuff? Or just nail small fry college student downloaders and single moms and flea market disk resellers? And will the government be auditing all the "closed source" code out there now looking for copyright infringement?
There exists different types of aid and governmental and non governmental help. The OLPC is an education project. If you can just think of it that way *first*, then it perhaps makes more sense. Using an innovative low and self powered and rugged kid proof laptop, they are able to deliver a variety of text books and other sorts of educational materials suitable for children at an extremely low cost compared to traditional text books and materials, plus the central server that goes with the laptops is web enabled and the laptops themselves meshnetworking enabled, so one good connection per school or village will help all those people get exposed to modern information of all sorts, weather reports, markets, whatever you-it's a big web out there. In other words, it's a tool Mr. Dvorak. Upgradable as to content. The content is easily shared then. the kids can create their own content as well. Ya know, "human being stuff".
Mr. Dvorak can donate both the ton of rice and the laptop. He could also donate some water filters, innoculations or other medical gear, or open pollinated seeds, or solar panels and DC lighting and radios for night time lighting and some sort of entertainment and news resources, or good steel carpentry and gardening tools, or even a stout diesel tractor and a years fuel if he wants to-all of them qualify as worthy donation targets to help the poorest out there who are trying to make centuries of progress in just years. It's up to him. One sort of donation does nothing to alter any other sort of donation, and having a variety to pick from just makes it *better*.
I knew they had a decent open source effort, just couldn't remember the URL off the top of my head, had to look it up again. Hopefully a little /. exposure will get them some more dev action, because, ya, FOSS is a good idea overall, space-or anything else.
Why the blatant hypocrisy? You've got corporations falling out of their chairs trying to outsource everything they possibly can to [large asian nation with only one uber controlling political party known to have murdered millions of their own people] with a pretty dismal and long running bleak human rights record. So it's OK for these other corporations to make money hand over fist "cooperating with the regime", but if ISPs/ web based content providers do it it needs some special laws? How about a binary Yoda level decision instead, nation A is acceptable to do business with because they follow some normal human rights principles, or they do not, so you do not do business with them until they change *first*.
Note: I am not letting Yahoo off the hook, I am saying all these other for profit corporations need to be stuck on the same hook
Took 5 seconds with google, mostly because I type slow and am on dialup
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