That's my point - who do you pay $60 to worry about it? Not Xbox Live! In fact, nobody I've ever seen has actually worried about a civil, fun server atmosphere, until they're losing more customers due to the lack of it than they would if they got rid of a lot of people.
If I could pay $5/month to have servers run well, I would do so. But I can't. All I can do is invest my time, since no corporate-run-server has the financial interest in policing the people paying them. The more heads, the more money they make. They're not going to ban anyone until it costs more money to keep them than to be rid of them. That's not a server environment I want to play in.
That doesn't make any sense - drink vodka instead of cheap beer. The quantity is far less and the price is less. $12 for a handle of awful 75 proof vodka will get you far drunker than $12 of the cheapest beer. I wonder if the real answer is that at the bar, the cheapest drunk is cheap beer. Even the lowest shelf vodka is probably more expensive than $1 cans of The Beast. And that's a common offer around here...if that's what you learn to drink on, maybe you just stick with what you know.
Feel free to offend people if they like it - they deserve it.
As to why...
I'm currently living in Wisconsin, the home of many such "piss-water beers". Also the home of some of the best beers I've ever had. Belgian style abbys and tripels, German style hefeweizen, English porters, Irish stouts, lambics, bachs, pilsners, etc. Take the best beers in the best traditions from Europe, and you'll find them here, recreated with 95% accuracy.
So why do people drink the crap beers? That's an easy one. If you want to get drunk, you have two choices: be a Beer Drinker, or be a Liquor Drinker. In the US, we have a culture which respects Beer Drinkers, and looks down upon Liquor Drinkers. The problem? Beer costs a lot more per unit of drunk than Liquor does. The solution for people who want to drink but keep the "Beer Drinker's Respect" is to drink the crappiest, cheapest beer possible.
It's a weird. cowboy sort of tradition we have here. $5 of moderately good vodka will get me just as drunk as $10 of decent beer will. But I'll be considered a drunk if I drink the vodka, and a social, party animal if I drink the beer. (250 ml of vodka vs 2L of beer)
If you're poor, either due to lack of work or due to college, and want the same amount of drunk for the same price as liquor, you need to look for the worst beer you can find. Coors Light, PBR, "The Beast", etc. Those will get you "drunk for $10", while avoiding the stigma that liquor brings. Why this is, I do not know. However, it is the case. Me? I drink nice scotch and vodka at home, and moderate amounts of nice beer when out being social. Tonight it was all good stuff - a local October Fest, another local Harvest Wheat in a decent Belgian style, and Spatan Optimator.
Like I said above, "I'm not going to be playing PC games much longer if I'm not allowed to run my own server.."
Recently, some high profile gaming event tried to showcase SC2. They ran into all sorts of issues, from authorization, to latency, to dead servers. It was an utter fail.
Wtf?
Either they need to come up with a lot of idiots to sell their product to, or they lose a lot of money. Me? I can't see paying $60 for each of their expansions when I can only play multi-player on their servers, with the douchebags that frequent the place. When the 3 races are in the "GoTY Edition" for $40, maybe I'll get it. But until that point, SC2 is off my list. If they allowed LAN play, or direct connections, it'd still be off my list until they games hit the $20 price-point. I'm past the impulse buying of $60 games. Either it's in my price range, or it's off my list. Bundle it with stupid server requirements, and it's totally off my list.
The game scene is either going to get awesome as everyone demands this, or it's going to die as those of us who do refuse to compromise. I have my money on dying...
Excellent suggestion to the EPA. When choosing between a Prius and a Corolla, I did that math. It was why I chose the Corolla - I wasn't going to break even in price until I hit 100k miles if I took the Prius. That was assuming $3 a gallon gas. Since it's been a lot lower than that, it's even further.
I'm not sure why Gallons per Mile (100 miles as you suggested is really much more useful) wasn't chosen in the first place. It's a much more useful measure for all involved. I drive 20 miles round trip to work every day. At 3 gallons per 100 miles, I use 3 gallons per week. That's easy math. Most high school graduates could figure that out. Miles per gallon? Not half of them.
It costs a lot less these days. If you're got a home with a good internet connection already, you're pretty much set. The bandwidth needed for a UT2k4 or even a UT3 (game I despise) server isn't all that much. Ours run unnoticed in a research lab at a university. When people are regularly moving around many terabytes of data per day, it's just a blip on the radar. Not that we couldn't run it off someone's 10mbit cable connection, however. It's just more "fair" to have it somewhere where nobody is on a LAN with it.
C&C Red Alert was one of my first RTS on a LAN. We had 8 computers on a co-ax network in an apartment a couple of friends rented. Aaaah, fun times...t-bars lying around everywhere, and terminators made out of paperclips, bottlecaps and gum.
It would benefit the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and all the other late-night comedians immensely. Nothing like lots of airtime to fill to say some really stupid stuff. Especially if you're tired from having to speak for hours on end. Good for all of us, I think.
Our UT servers have always been great places to play. Why? We offered the same services you describe the consoles offering, and did it for free, with a happy smile. Got a little server tucked away in a university research lab that a clan member runs, and we police the servers pretty well. It's meant to be a nice, fun, happy place to play games. Douchebags see the door at light speed. Why? There are plenty of non-douchbag players in the world to fill our servers with. And we'd rather it be empty than be filled with douchebags. The end result is that the people who come regularly are fun, polite people to be around. We've made a fair number of friends because of it. While we're competitive, we also like good games. We'll fairly regularly switch from the winning team to the losing team to try to help out. The whole point is that games are meant to be fun for everyone.
Why the long rant? Because yes, the PC market is still alive. Barely. Every new game I play has a company-run server, and no private or lan server available. And every one of them is filled with douchebags, racists/bigots/homophobes, rage-quitters, and teens who think cussing is the most awesome thing ever invented. It's shocking coming from such an amazing game playing experience for the last ten years or so. Our servers are great. I've not yet found a public server that holds a candle to ours. When your players earn you money, you have a vested interest in enfocing civility as little as possible. When you're like us, and have no financial or logistical or moral reason to tolerate any sort of douchebaggery, your servers are like heaven.
I'm not going to be playing PC games much longer if I'm not allowed to run my own server, and I'm forced to deal with shitheads all the time. However, I'm not going to be playing console games either, since they have the same problems, except tons more lockdown of the hardware, software, subscription requirements in some cases, etc.
Take away the ability for the hobbiests to run and police their own servers, and civil gaming is all but dead. I'm not sure how the group of great people I play games with would have ever gotten together if it wasn't for us having a lot of fun on some really quality servers. Now, you have games like League of Legends running "take a picture of you playing a LAN game and having fun and win prizes!!!!!" contests, despite there being no LAN client, and no private servers. Apparently for them, and for most other companies these days, it seems, "LAN party" means, "Bunch of you in a room, on a HARDCORE FUCKING CONNECTION, all playing on our servers. With all the issues with latency and bandwidth and shit you'd have had if you were at home. Doing something that you could have done in your individual houses. Am I the only one that remembers what a LAN party is, and what makes it special?
That may be the case. It's arguably one of the worst KDE distributions out there. However, I hate Gnome, and I know KDE. I like how much Ubuntu "just works". To be totally happy, I'll probably need to base a desktop on it rather than go to another distro. But it's hard to break the KDE train when I've been using it since I stared compiling it under Gentoo a long, long time ago. But I have used Xcfe on my netbook, and it wasn't bad....
Believe me, I love Linux. Been running it is my main OS for 7-8 years now. But Compiz and PulseAudio are not fixed. At all. (At least under Kubuntu)
My last upgrade still required me to purge PulseAudio before my audio worked, and I get regular notices that "composting was too slow and has been disabled". The last time that happened, I was sitting with my hands 6" from the keyboard and mouse, reading slashdot, with no other programs running. I hadn't touched the computer for at least a minute. And this is on a dual-core desktop, with a decent video card, and a couple GB of ram.
I've been holding off on an entire system wipe and reinstall, because I need to get around to getting a couple new hard drives anyway. I'm hoping that fixes at least the Compiz problem. But I'm still not impressed with Compiz. If I'd ever seen PulseAudio do anything but destroy all the sound on my computer, I might like it. The philosophy is fucking fantastic, and I've been drooling about it ever since it was announced. It's something that Linux desperately needs. To generically say that everything is fixed, however, is a sweeping overstatement. For you, perhaps. But based on my searches to fix the issues I have, a ton of people are still having a terrible time with those things
I've been saying this for some time now. Some idiot sees spam in their inbox, assumes that lots of other people see it too, and decides to hire a spammer. Spammer spams, nobody buys, spammer makes money, advertiser goes broke. However, all it takes is a couple more idiots to see spam in their inbox, and the cycle repeats.
For a long time now, people have been saying, "who buys this shit, and keeps spammers in business". I've been arguing that it's nobody, just the inertia of the system + idiots. You did the work to start to prove that. Thanks.
All the Brother printers I've had experience with were fantastic. They're the next 'HP Laserjet" from the 90s in terms of eternally chugging along. Not quite the tanks those were, but still great printers. I got a cheap, ($140, like 5 years ago) Brother Laserjet when I was working on a Master's Thesis which 2 of my readers insisted on getting paper copies of on a weekly basis. I've got 8,000+ pages through it now, and it's still chugging along happily. And all that was under Linux too.
For a reasonably priced printer, Brothers are the only thing I recommend at the moment. At some point I'll definitely be investing in one of their color lasers.
True, but is there a difference between knowing that they are located in the GMT+2 timezone and that their business day starts at 10?
If it's 20 now, and you know their business day starts at 10, you know it's 2 hours after a normal working day for them. Honestly, that seems easier than doing the mental math to figure out if their GMT +2 and your GMT -5 means that at 8pm your time it's ok to call them.
Sure, it's not quite something that you can look up on a table yet, like timezones are. I can't imagine it'd be overly hard to make the exact same sort of table, but with sunrise or "culturally normal work start times" on it. Once we ditch timezones, all the people who make timezone charts will need something else to do....
The knowledge that it's 11:00 gives you all the info you need, provided they provide you with their operating hours in GMT as well. If someone tells you they are open from 1 till 9, and it's 11, you can't call them and expect an answer. If we're all using GMT, UT, or some other such standardized time, it doesn't matter where in the world the two of you are located.
Twenty years ago, we needed time zones. We needed to be able to figure out when we could get in touch with people on the other side of the world, based on whether it was light there or not. With how networked our society is now, that's no longer necessary. I can look up the number and hours of a hotel in Germany from my living room, at any time of day or night. If we're all on GMT, I can instantly know if I can call them.
If we all use GMT, and it's a live broadcast, it's on at 11. Period. No matter if it's night or day, or if you're in Mountain, Alaska, or Hawaii. And in this day and age, with a move to mostly digital broadcast, I don't see the need for covering all markets in one broadcast lasting much longer. When we had to repeat an analog signal, it was a bit harder to customize it for every market.
I've argued for some time that we need to ditch timezones as well. Lets all use GMT. Then when I say my store is open from 11-19, it's open at those hours for everyone around the world. There's no trying to figure out how many hours behind or ahead I am. Yes, lots of people no longer have the sun highest in the sky at noon. That's a casualty of dropping timezones. Yes, some people will get up with the sun at 6, some at 7, some at 10, some at 16, some at 23. But when a TV show is on at 20, it's on at 20. Not 10pm Eastern time, 7pm Pacific.
We don't rely on the sun anymore. There's no good reason to go through all this trouble trying to keep it in the sky between 7am and 7pm, with a high point at 12. Those are just arbitrary numbers. Lets fix time so it's the same world-wide. Then we can get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark, and stop screwing around with the numbers. Really, there are a lot of better things we can do with our lives.
Yep. That'd totally explain it. Plus you'd need much larger capacity than at lower latitudes. Down here, we can get away with a single well if it's deep enough. I'd imagine that you'd be looking at more than one to be sure you didn't run out of heat capacity in the winter. The biggest issue with geothermal is that you freeze your well solid if you suck out heat faster than the earth can put it back in.
And if you're heating with wood for $400 a year? That's damn cheap. Around here, a cord is in the $150 range split and delivered. An average size house will run through about 6-8 cords in a winter, giving you a $900-$1200 heating bill. In that case, a retrofit has less than a 30 year payback, and a new install is under 20 years. Financially, not a super-great investment, but from a maintenance standpoint, a hell of a lot less work than wood is.
Having grown up in a wood burning house, if I were building new I'd definitely go geothermal. At the worst, it'd add a lot of resale value, while taking all the work out of heating. At the best, I'd live there long enough that it'd save me a lot of money.
Not sure where you are, but that's at least 50% more expensive than the quotes I heard in the North East US. I worked drilling water wells for a summer, and when our #1 competitor gave a talk at a green summit on geothermal, I went and listened in. His quotes were about twice what my company was charging for wells. Which made sense, since they were larger diameter wells that were going much deeper. But a retrofit came in well under $30k, which included the heat exchanger. The quote for a new home was in the high tens of thousands.
Wasteful? It's a whole hell of a lot worse than that. There have been an increasing number of media pieces about how we're pretty much educating ourselves out of jobs, cars and houses. The average student leaves their undergraduate degree with $23-$24,000 in student loan debt. While you're paying that off, that's $100-$300 per month that's not going to a car or a house. (For a recent grad, that might well be 10% or more of their monthly net income!) Add in 4-5 years less earning potential/job experience, and you have a large class of people who either can't get additional loans, or can't pay for them. Even if they could, they might not have a job to pay for them, due to the glut of college degrees in this country.
Part of the major issue we have is that we've tied college into our K-12 educational system. It's really, really hard get into college if you're not in the normal age progression. I went back to grad school 10 years after my undergraduate, and it was a real pain in the ass to get everything in order. Test scores expire, or tests don't exist any more. References move, die, and disappear. Transcripts are hard to come by. Part of the pressure to go to college is that the end of high school is geared towards applying, with some good reason. It's much harder to do so years later. Not impossible, but enough of a barrier that it keeps a lot of people out, I'd imagine.
If we made that easier, it'd be easier to break this chain of sending everyone to college. If you found out later you needed/wanted to go, then great. Go for it. There'd be no penalty for not doing it "when you were supposed to". Taking the risk out of not going in the first place would be a good step, I think. The current debt load that college requires just isn't going to be sustainable in the long run.
But it doesn't have to "be secure" so that nothing ever can possibly go wrong. It just has to "be as secure as" paper ballots. That's definitely doable now, and was doable 10 years ago. The problem isn't the maturity - it's the people implementing it.
I don't think that 50 years of maturity will make a difference. If the same sorts of idiots are in charge of setting the voting system up, it will be just as problematic.
That might work if there was any customer service to get ahold of. Plus, why would I want to "fight DRM" by wasting my time with it? Companies that use crappy DRM can do whatever the heck they want. I'm not spending time or money on them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my point - who do you pay $60 to worry about it? Not Xbox Live! In fact, nobody I've ever seen has actually worried about a civil, fun server atmosphere, until they're losing more customers due to the lack of it than they would if they got rid of a lot of people.
If I could pay $5/month to have servers run well, I would do so. But I can't. All I can do is invest my time, since no corporate-run-server has the financial interest in policing the people paying them. The more heads, the more money they make. They're not going to ban anyone until it costs more money to keep them than to be rid of them. That's not a server environment I want to play in.
That doesn't make any sense - drink vodka instead of cheap beer. The quantity is far less and the price is less. $12 for a handle of awful 75 proof vodka will get you far drunker than $12 of the cheapest beer. I wonder if the real answer is that at the bar, the cheapest drunk is cheap beer. Even the lowest shelf vodka is probably more expensive than $1 cans of The Beast. And that's a common offer around here...if that's what you learn to drink on, maybe you just stick with what you know.
Feel free to offend people if they like it - they deserve it.
As to why...
I'm currently living in Wisconsin, the home of many such "piss-water beers". Also the home of some of the best beers I've ever had. Belgian style abbys and tripels, German style hefeweizen, English porters, Irish stouts, lambics, bachs, pilsners, etc. Take the best beers in the best traditions from Europe, and you'll find them here, recreated with 95% accuracy.
So why do people drink the crap beers? That's an easy one. If you want to get drunk, you have two choices: be a Beer Drinker, or be a Liquor Drinker. In the US, we have a culture which respects Beer Drinkers, and looks down upon Liquor Drinkers. The problem? Beer costs a lot more per unit of drunk than Liquor does. The solution for people who want to drink but keep the "Beer Drinker's Respect" is to drink the crappiest, cheapest beer possible.
It's a weird. cowboy sort of tradition we have here. $5 of moderately good vodka will get me just as drunk as $10 of decent beer will. But I'll be considered a drunk if I drink the vodka, and a social, party animal if I drink the beer. (250 ml of vodka vs 2L of beer)
If you're poor, either due to lack of work or due to college, and want the same amount of drunk for the same price as liquor, you need to look for the worst beer you can find. Coors Light, PBR, "The Beast", etc. Those will get you "drunk for $10", while avoiding the stigma that liquor brings. Why this is, I do not know. However, it is the case. Me? I drink nice scotch and vodka at home, and moderate amounts of nice beer when out being social. Tonight it was all good stuff - a local October Fest, another local Harvest Wheat in a decent Belgian style, and Spatan Optimator.
Like I said above, "I'm not going to be playing PC games much longer if I'm not allowed to run my own server.."
Recently, some high profile gaming event tried to showcase SC2. They ran into all sorts of issues, from authorization, to latency, to dead servers. It was an utter fail.
Wtf?
Either they need to come up with a lot of idiots to sell their product to, or they lose a lot of money. Me? I can't see paying $60 for each of their expansions when I can only play multi-player on their servers, with the douchebags that frequent the place. When the 3 races are in the "GoTY Edition" for $40, maybe I'll get it. But until that point, SC2 is off my list. If they allowed LAN play, or direct connections, it'd still be off my list until they games hit the $20 price-point. I'm past the impulse buying of $60 games. Either it's in my price range, or it's off my list. Bundle it with stupid server requirements, and it's totally off my list.
The game scene is either going to get awesome as everyone demands this, or it's going to die as those of us who do refuse to compromise. I have my money on dying...
Excellent suggestion to the EPA. When choosing between a Prius and a Corolla, I did that math. It was why I chose the Corolla - I wasn't going to break even in price until I hit 100k miles if I took the Prius. That was assuming $3 a gallon gas. Since it's been a lot lower than that, it's even further.
I'm not sure why Gallons per Mile (100 miles as you suggested is really much more useful) wasn't chosen in the first place. It's a much more useful measure for all involved. I drive 20 miles round trip to work every day. At 3 gallons per 100 miles, I use 3 gallons per week. That's easy math. Most high school graduates could figure that out. Miles per gallon? Not half of them.
It costs a lot less these days. If you're got a home with a good internet connection already, you're pretty much set. The bandwidth needed for a UT2k4 or even a UT3 (game I despise) server isn't all that much. Ours run unnoticed in a research lab at a university. When people are regularly moving around many terabytes of data per day, it's just a blip on the radar. Not that we couldn't run it off someone's 10mbit cable connection, however. It's just more "fair" to have it somewhere where nobody is on a LAN with it.
C&C Red Alert was one of my first RTS on a LAN. We had 8 computers on a co-ax network in an apartment a couple of friends rented. Aaaah, fun times...t-bars lying around everywhere, and terminators made out of paperclips, bottlecaps and gum.
It would benefit the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and all the other late-night comedians immensely. Nothing like lots of airtime to fill to say some really stupid stuff. Especially if you're tired from having to speak for hours on end. Good for all of us, I think.
tl; dr edition:
What the GP said. PC gaming is almost dead for me because of it, and consoles are not a way out.
Unless you just are wasting time, then read what I wrote above. Otherwise disregard that rambling crap.
Our UT servers have always been great places to play. Why? We offered the same services you describe the consoles offering, and did it for free, with a happy smile. Got a little server tucked away in a university research lab that a clan member runs, and we police the servers pretty well. It's meant to be a nice, fun, happy place to play games. Douchebags see the door at light speed. Why? There are plenty of non-douchbag players in the world to fill our servers with. And we'd rather it be empty than be filled with douchebags. The end result is that the people who come regularly are fun, polite people to be around. We've made a fair number of friends because of it. While we're competitive, we also like good games. We'll fairly regularly switch from the winning team to the losing team to try to help out. The whole point is that games are meant to be fun for everyone.
Why the long rant? Because yes, the PC market is still alive. Barely. Every new game I play has a company-run server, and no private or lan server available. And every one of them is filled with douchebags, racists/bigots/homophobes, rage-quitters, and teens who think cussing is the most awesome thing ever invented. It's shocking coming from such an amazing game playing experience for the last ten years or so. Our servers are great. I've not yet found a public server that holds a candle to ours. When your players earn you money, you have a vested interest in enfocing civility as little as possible. When you're like us, and have no financial or logistical or moral reason to tolerate any sort of douchebaggery, your servers are like heaven.
I'm not going to be playing PC games much longer if I'm not allowed to run my own server, and I'm forced to deal with shitheads all the time. However, I'm not going to be playing console games either, since they have the same problems, except tons more lockdown of the hardware, software, subscription requirements in some cases, etc.
Take away the ability for the hobbiests to run and police their own servers, and civil gaming is all but dead. I'm not sure how the group of great people I play games with would have ever gotten together if it wasn't for us having a lot of fun on some really quality servers. Now, you have games like League of Legends running "take a picture of you playing a LAN game and having fun and win prizes!!!!!" contests, despite there being no LAN client, and no private servers. Apparently for them, and for most other companies these days, it seems, "LAN party" means, "Bunch of you in a room, on a HARDCORE FUCKING CONNECTION, all playing on our servers. With all the issues with latency and bandwidth and shit you'd have had if you were at home. Doing something that you could have done in your individual houses. Am I the only one that remembers what a LAN party is, and what makes it special?
You, sir, are awesome. Stay awesome.
"I may not always be a pedant, but when I am, I'm awesome."
I'm making any idiot who posts in monospace a foe at -6. It makes slashdot a better place. I'd highly encourage it.
Do it. Please. The more success stories like yours, the more likely it is for the rest of us to benefit from someone doing the same.
(Former NEsterner here, shipped to the Mid-West. Do it up!)
That may be the case. It's arguably one of the worst KDE distributions out there. However, I hate Gnome, and I know KDE. I like how much Ubuntu "just works". To be totally happy, I'll probably need to base a desktop on it rather than go to another distro. But it's hard to break the KDE train when I've been using it since I stared compiling it under Gentoo a long, long time ago. But I have used Xcfe on my netbook, and it wasn't bad....
Believe me, I love Linux. Been running it is my main OS for 7-8 years now. But Compiz and PulseAudio are not fixed. At all. (At least under Kubuntu)
My last upgrade still required me to purge PulseAudio before my audio worked, and I get regular notices that "composting was too slow and has been disabled". The last time that happened, I was sitting with my hands 6" from the keyboard and mouse, reading slashdot, with no other programs running. I hadn't touched the computer for at least a minute. And this is on a dual-core desktop, with a decent video card, and a couple GB of ram.
I've been holding off on an entire system wipe and reinstall, because I need to get around to getting a couple new hard drives anyway. I'm hoping that fixes at least the Compiz problem. But I'm still not impressed with Compiz. If I'd ever seen PulseAudio do anything but destroy all the sound on my computer, I might like it. The philosophy is fucking fantastic, and I've been drooling about it ever since it was announced. It's something that Linux desperately needs. To generically say that everything is fixed, however, is a sweeping overstatement. For you, perhaps. But based on my searches to fix the issues I have, a ton of people are still having a terrible time with those things
I've been saying this for some time now. Some idiot sees spam in their inbox, assumes that lots of other people see it too, and decides to hire a spammer. Spammer spams, nobody buys, spammer makes money, advertiser goes broke. However, all it takes is a couple more idiots to see spam in their inbox, and the cycle repeats.
For a long time now, people have been saying, "who buys this shit, and keeps spammers in business". I've been arguing that it's nobody, just the inertia of the system + idiots. You did the work to start to prove that. Thanks.
All the Brother printers I've had experience with were fantastic. They're the next 'HP Laserjet" from the 90s in terms of eternally chugging along. Not quite the tanks those were, but still great printers. I got a cheap, ($140, like 5 years ago) Brother Laserjet when I was working on a Master's Thesis which 2 of my readers insisted on getting paper copies of on a weekly basis. I've got 8,000+ pages through it now, and it's still chugging along happily. And all that was under Linux too.
For a reasonably priced printer, Brothers are the only thing I recommend at the moment. At some point I'll definitely be investing in one of their color lasers.
True, but is there a difference between knowing that they are located in the GMT+2 timezone and that their business day starts at 10?
If it's 20 now, and you know their business day starts at 10, you know it's 2 hours after a normal working day for them. Honestly, that seems easier than doing the mental math to figure out if their GMT +2 and your GMT -5 means that at 8pm your time it's ok to call them.
Sure, it's not quite something that you can look up on a table yet, like timezones are. I can't imagine it'd be overly hard to make the exact same sort of table, but with sunrise or "culturally normal work start times" on it. Once we ditch timezones, all the people who make timezone charts will need something else to do....
The knowledge that it's 11:00 gives you all the info you need, provided they provide you with their operating hours in GMT as well. If someone tells you they are open from 1 till 9, and it's 11, you can't call them and expect an answer. If we're all using GMT, UT, or some other such standardized time, it doesn't matter where in the world the two of you are located.
Twenty years ago, we needed time zones. We needed to be able to figure out when we could get in touch with people on the other side of the world, based on whether it was light there or not. With how networked our society is now, that's no longer necessary. I can look up the number and hours of a hotel in Germany from my living room, at any time of day or night. If we're all on GMT, I can instantly know if I can call them.
If we all use GMT, and it's a live broadcast, it's on at 11. Period. No matter if it's night or day, or if you're in Mountain, Alaska, or Hawaii. And in this day and age, with a move to mostly digital broadcast, I don't see the need for covering all markets in one broadcast lasting much longer. When we had to repeat an analog signal, it was a bit harder to customize it for every market.
I've argued for some time that we need to ditch timezones as well. Lets all use GMT. Then when I say my store is open from 11-19, it's open at those hours for everyone around the world. There's no trying to figure out how many hours behind or ahead I am. Yes, lots of people no longer have the sun highest in the sky at noon. That's a casualty of dropping timezones. Yes, some people will get up with the sun at 6, some at 7, some at 10, some at 16, some at 23. But when a TV show is on at 20, it's on at 20. Not 10pm Eastern time, 7pm Pacific.
We don't rely on the sun anymore. There's no good reason to go through all this trouble trying to keep it in the sky between 7am and 7pm, with a high point at 12. Those are just arbitrary numbers. Lets fix time so it's the same world-wide. Then we can get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark, and stop screwing around with the numbers. Really, there are a lot of better things we can do with our lives.
Yep. That'd totally explain it. Plus you'd need much larger capacity than at lower latitudes. Down here, we can get away with a single well if it's deep enough. I'd imagine that you'd be looking at more than one to be sure you didn't run out of heat capacity in the winter. The biggest issue with geothermal is that you freeze your well solid if you suck out heat faster than the earth can put it back in.
And if you're heating with wood for $400 a year? That's damn cheap. Around here, a cord is in the $150 range split and delivered. An average size house will run through about 6-8 cords in a winter, giving you a $900-$1200 heating bill. In that case, a retrofit has less than a 30 year payback, and a new install is under 20 years. Financially, not a super-great investment, but from a maintenance standpoint, a hell of a lot less work than wood is.
Having grown up in a wood burning house, if I were building new I'd definitely go geothermal. At the worst, it'd add a lot of resale value, while taking all the work out of heating. At the best, I'd live there long enough that it'd save me a lot of money.
Not sure where you are, but that's at least 50% more expensive than the quotes I heard in the North East US. I worked drilling water wells for a summer, and when our #1 competitor gave a talk at a green summit on geothermal, I went and listened in. His quotes were about twice what my company was charging for wells. Which made sense, since they were larger diameter wells that were going much deeper. But a retrofit came in well under $30k, which included the heat exchanger. The quote for a new home was in the high tens of thousands.
Wasteful? It's a whole hell of a lot worse than that. There have been an increasing number of media pieces about how we're pretty much educating ourselves out of jobs, cars and houses. The average student leaves their undergraduate degree with $23-$24,000 in student loan debt. While you're paying that off, that's $100-$300 per month that's not going to a car or a house. (For a recent grad, that might well be 10% or more of their monthly net income!) Add in 4-5 years less earning potential/job experience, and you have a large class of people who either can't get additional loans, or can't pay for them. Even if they could, they might not have a job to pay for them, due to the glut of college degrees in this country.
Part of the major issue we have is that we've tied college into our K-12 educational system. It's really, really hard get into college if you're not in the normal age progression. I went back to grad school 10 years after my undergraduate, and it was a real pain in the ass to get everything in order. Test scores expire, or tests don't exist any more. References move, die, and disappear. Transcripts are hard to come by. Part of the pressure to go to college is that the end of high school is geared towards applying, with some good reason. It's much harder to do so years later. Not impossible, but enough of a barrier that it keeps a lot of people out, I'd imagine.
If we made that easier, it'd be easier to break this chain of sending everyone to college. If you found out later you needed/wanted to go, then great. Go for it. There'd be no penalty for not doing it "when you were supposed to". Taking the risk out of not going in the first place would be a good step, I think. The current debt load that college requires just isn't going to be sustainable in the long run.
But it doesn't have to "be secure" so that nothing ever can possibly go wrong. It just has to "be as secure as" paper ballots. That's definitely doable now, and was doable 10 years ago. The problem isn't the maturity - it's the people implementing it.
I don't think that 50 years of maturity will make a difference. If the same sorts of idiots are in charge of setting the voting system up, it will be just as problematic.
That might work if there was any customer service to get ahold of. Plus, why would I want to "fight DRM" by wasting my time with it? Companies that use crappy DRM can do whatever the heck they want. I'm not spending time or money on them.