There is bitter resistance to ethanol from petrol lobby now. There would be even harsher one against cellulosic ethanol from combined forces of petrol lobby and corn ethanol lobby then.
The petrol lobby might not have the same political power that it did 2 months ago.
About the only real situation I can imagine is if you have two vehicles which you drive equal distances every month, and are deciding which to upgrade.
My wife and I deliberately picked a house which was more-or-less equidistant to our respective offices. So we do drive equal distance.
One (the minivan) gets 17MPG and the other gets 21MPG. So should I replace the minivan with a higher-mileage (but still big enough for the kids and their stuff) vehicle? The Jeep Patriot gets 23MPG, so that's a 6MPG savings. Or I could replace my 21MPG sedan with a 29MPG Fiesta, for a total of 8MPG savings. That's a bigger MPG savings, so we'll replace the sedan this year.
Let's try that with gallons-per-hundred-miles (GPHM). Replace the 5.9GPHM minivan with a 4.3GPHM Patriot for a savings of 1.5GPHM or replace the 4.8GPHM sedan with a 3.4GPHM Fiesta for a savings of... oh, 1.4GPHM. Turns out I'm better-off replacing the minivan.
This is not contrived, IMHO... except that I'm not really into the Fiesta or the Patriot... I just picked the best non-hybrid mileage in each segment. Hybrids are not for people worried about money.
Now in a general sense, should corn be used to produce ethanol? No, and that's a result of the lobby that you mentioned.
There IS a benefit to using corn (for now). If we encourage ethanol use, then an infrastructure gets built up which can handle ethanol. When the cellulosic ethanol starts to become more widely available, that can replace the corn-based, and the infrastructure will be in place. It is a bet, to be sure, but seems to be much more realistic than the hydrogen proposals out there. Bio-diesel is also a strong contender, but there's already a infrastructure in place for that, and you still need a fuel for the cold-weather states.
The average consumer is an idiot and will buy the thing with the biggest numbers.
That's actually the problem... Joe the plumber, who needs a pickup and drives a bazillion miles every year doing his trade-work will keep his ancient 10MPG pickup limping along forever while his wife will trade in her 30 MPG Civic in for a 38MPG Civic. If they are particularly bad at math, they will even blow their nest egg on a Prius. All the while, they'd be far better off getting a 15MPG pickup and stretching the Civic out a bit longer.
If the numbers were in gallons-per-hundred-miles (GPHM), Joe the plumber would see that the choice is trading in his 10GPHM pickup in for a 6.7GPHM pickup vs. trading in his wife's 3.3GPHM car for a 2.63GPHM car. According to this study, Joe is more likely to make the right decision and upgrade the pickup instead of the car - whereas before he would go for the larger absolute MPG difference.
In short, people don't do much math as they stand looking at the stickers - so design the sticker to minimize the math needed.
Nothing big other than another variable to throw in the mix... Macs have never had a BIOS and seem to run Windows, Linux, and BSD pretty well. IIRC, they just emulate a BIOS.
then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening.
I'm cool with limited regulation, so long as it doesn't allow the regulator to become to powerful. For instance, a rule like "your business can never grow to more than 5% of the total market" is a lot less ripe for corruption than "the rules that your business operates under are reviewed yearly by these 5 guys in this appointed committee".
I'm a little more nuanced... there SHOULD be punatives, but they should not go to the plaintiff. I'm open to where they should go - perhaps to a legal fund of some kind.
BP should get sued heavily and hard, but the punitive damages should not go to the fishermen et al. Similarly, the RIAA should not get more than damages and possibly legal costs. Winning a court case should not be like winning the lottery.
T-Mobile, which is not an option if you actually want your phone to be able to do basic things like receive and make calls.
As an urban dweller, T-Mobile reception is just fine. Hell, I even got by with Sprint service! I'm now living a whopping 1 mile out in the 'burbs, but I still get okay service. If I were in the sticks, I'd get Verizon... but it's not an issue in the city.
Different people work for different motivations. Some talented people are genuinely altruistic and will work for peanuts, so long as their work is fulfilling to them personally. Sometimes talented people are purely driven by the almighty dollar. Most talented people have some mix of drivers. The fact is that if you take away a profit motive, you will lose some talent. The more profit you remove, the more talent goes away until you are left with just idealists with some other means of support.
You think Microsoft would have been able to pull this off all for profit only? not a chance.
MS would be a bad example, but AOL sure as hell was heading in that direction. I have no doubt that AOL would have eventually created a giant, worldwide private network very similar to the internet. It probably would have taken longer without the academic types, just as curing cancer would take longer without the profit-seekers.
Am I to gather from this that the hackers are granted access to the machines? That isn't very realistic... I don't have hackers coming into my house while I'm at work trying to own my computers - they are limited to trying to bust through on the network, or infesting a site that I browse.
And it's damn near irrelevant to any company of a size big enough for Exchange to be useful, that isn't in dire financial trouble.
On the contrary - the larger the company, the larger the number and the more it looks like low-hanging fruit to a manager.
Employee smoke breaks and water cooler gossip would cost a company more every year than their Exchange CALs.
No one would argue otherwise, but those are fundamental to human nature... you can't expect people to work like robots, but you certainly CAN evaluate other email systems.
Note that I'm not railing against Exchange - I fully admit that it is not my area of expertise... but the argument that "it really isn't that much money" is not very persuasive - especially when there are free alternatives that may be good enough for many people.
it turned out to be a miserable environment for the kind of productivity apps your typical office droid needed to have access to
That's weird... the developers in our office during the 90's had Solaris boxes and... nothing else. They had Netscape for email and web, and I think WordPerfect for word processing. I can't remember what, if anything, they used for spreadsheets. A few of them couldn't stand it and also got a PC with Windows or OS2 or ran Mac in emulation, but mostly they were fairly happy (for developers).
The real whining started when our company got rid of the old unix email servers and forced everyone into Outlook on Windows.
If you seriously think Outlook+Exchange is "absurdly expensive", then you've little experience out in the real world.
$100-200 is expensive if it is unnecessary. You don't burn money unless you are really, really cold. Ask your users if they would like to pay $5/pay period more for health insurance - I bet they'll gripe... and that's the kind of money you are talking about here.
Companies mandate sending memos as word files, they mandate that presentations be submitted as.pptx.
Everyone exports to Word/PowerPoint/Excel these days, so export isn't a big deal. Excel will even treat a CSV file as a native file if you give it an XLS extension, and word will open a text/rich text file and behave normally if you give it a DOC extension. People who make broad mandates about sending things in MS formats aren't generally savvy enough to find you out - they just care that the file opens when they double-click on it in Outlook.
When your software can't open an MS office file because someone used some weird feature buried within MS office that 3rd part software can't handle; no one is going to be sympathetic. You'll be fired or written up
Fired or written up? Presumably if your office requires everything to be done in MS Office, they provide you with MS Office, right? Presumably if your boss hands you an iPad, he doesn't expect you to use MS Office!
"I'm sorry I can't open your proprietary formats, you should send them to me using open source software" is a douchebag thing to say in your personal life.
Every single time I forget to change the output format from DOCX in MS Office 2007, the person I send the file to can't open it. And I don't think "what a douchebag"... I just save it in an older, more compatible format. MS Office is not exactly the most compatible thing out there, you know. If an OO.org user asked me to save it in an older format, it would not really put me out in any way since I'm already doing it for MS Office users.
It is much better. They fumbled a bit on the 64/32-bit thing, but it's an improvement over Vista.
It is really annoying to have to keep both a 32-bit and 64-bit version of IE in the menubar/dock/quicklaunch thing for incompatible web sites. And worse, you have to paste your own icon in to differentiate them, since MS did not feel like they needed to put a little "32" or "64" on the two otherwise identical applications.
What does betting on "people will like Apple" have to do with "Apple needs a cash infusion"?
It's a pretty simple relationship... Apple can raise more cash by selling their stock. The more that the company is worth on the stock market, the more easily they can acquire "stuff" by using their stock. Do a Google search for Apple Acquires and see how many companies they have snatched up recently. And these acquisitions are critical to their success... the iPod was developed by a company that they acquired, as was the touch screen for the iPhone.
"Offensive" is a wiggle word. Huge swaths of the world are offended when two men kiss, or when someone draws Mohammad... saying something offensive should not be the end of civil discourse, because nearly everything that can be said is probably offensive to someone.
Anyway, you are misrepresenting their position - which I will repeat that I am not defending. For instance:
that Martin Luther King was a Black Panther
You have this almost exactly backward. They paint them as opposites. In any case, it's warping history because they were in fact on the same team and part of the same struggle.
Anyway, I'm not knocking the tactic of California forbidding textbook purchases which incorporate the Texas curriculum... quite the contrary, I think it is appropriate. However, I do take issue with this politician's polarizing speech.
One of the biggest arguments against private insurance is that they make a profit off of a fraction of the services they cover.
I'd have to say, that's one of the poorest arguments that I can fathom. A profit motive can be a powerful reducer of costs. I'm not sure why you think that they make more money when people use more services... most health insurance is flat-fee. They make the most money when you never use it, and it's all down-hill from there.
The only thing we can do is compare health insurance programs between countries which, of course, involves many variables so still would be difficult to quantify any particular cause of a discrepancy between their costs and ours.
Agreed, though in the US we do have the advantage of states having the freedom to experiment a little. Massachusetts operates within the same basic rules as the rest of the country and yet has a more "official" socialized medicine program than most of the US.
As you say, the problem is so complicated that it almost defies analysis. My personal opinion is that we should have the government setting up free clinics in populated areas and financing people's private HMOs in rural areas. We should not restrict lawsuits, but punitive damages should be put into some legal defense fund or something else OTHER than the plaintiff's pocket. They should be reimbursed, but a medical mistake shouldn't be like winning the lottery. The AMA should also set up review boards which have the power to yank medical licenses of doctors who make a career of making misleading testimony. Finally, I think that medical insurance should be more like car insurance - you pay up to a certain deductible and only then does it kick in. Only with that will price pressure actually kick in.
Go ahead and take all the profit out of health care and see how much it reduces your hospital bill. For-profit companies make under $100 per client, so the most it could reduce your monthly bill is less than $10.
Or are you saying that non-profits could run more efficiently? Perhaps, but I don't think people who have insurance through, say, Kaiser are paying dramatically lower insurance rates.
Even when they're absolutely accurate and appropriate?
Accurate? Yes. Appropriate? No. He's using derogatory language in the place of reasoned argument.
You're also a terrorist and a killer.
Exactly, and if all you want to do is label people and piss each other off, then your goal is met. If you want to have a constructive discussion that might actually solve a problem and bring all sides to a compromise, then calling people names - no matter how "correct" - is not going to get you there.
We're not talking about "blowing people up", we're talking about the contents of a freaking history book... this discussion should be civil.
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There is bitter resistance to ethanol from petrol lobby now. There would be even harsher one against cellulosic ethanol from combined forces of petrol lobby and corn ethanol lobby then.
The petrol lobby might not have the same political power that it did 2 months ago.
I fully agree... Brazilian ethanol is another reasonable source.
About the only real situation I can imagine is if you have two vehicles which you drive equal distances every month, and are deciding which to upgrade.
My wife and I deliberately picked a house which was more-or-less equidistant to our respective offices. So we do drive equal distance.
One (the minivan) gets 17MPG and the other gets 21MPG. So should I replace the minivan with a higher-mileage (but still big enough for the kids and their stuff) vehicle? The Jeep Patriot gets 23MPG, so that's a 6MPG savings. Or I could replace my 21MPG sedan with a 29MPG Fiesta, for a total of 8MPG savings. That's a bigger MPG savings, so we'll replace the sedan this year.
Let's try that with gallons-per-hundred-miles (GPHM). Replace the 5.9GPHM minivan with a 4.3GPHM Patriot for a savings of 1.5GPHM or replace the 4.8GPHM sedan with a 3.4GPHM Fiesta for a savings of... oh, 1.4GPHM. Turns out I'm better-off replacing the minivan.
This is not contrived, IMHO... except that I'm not really into the Fiesta or the Patriot... I just picked the best non-hybrid mileage in each segment. Hybrids are not for people worried about money.
Now in a general sense, should corn be used to produce ethanol? No, and that's a result of the lobby that you mentioned.
There IS a benefit to using corn (for now). If we encourage ethanol use, then an infrastructure gets built up which can handle ethanol. When the cellulosic ethanol starts to become more widely available, that can replace the corn-based, and the infrastructure will be in place. It is a bet, to be sure, but seems to be much more realistic than the hydrogen proposals out there. Bio-diesel is also a strong contender, but there's already a infrastructure in place for that, and you still need a fuel for the cold-weather states.
but I never did quite understand why they would limit an efficient car like that.
Smog. CA has to prioritize smog above all else because of how nasty the air in LA is.
The average consumer is an idiot and will buy the thing with the biggest numbers.
That's actually the problem... Joe the plumber, who needs a pickup and drives a bazillion miles every year doing his trade-work will keep his ancient 10MPG pickup limping along forever while his wife will trade in her 30 MPG Civic in for a 38MPG Civic. If they are particularly bad at math, they will even blow their nest egg on a Prius. All the while, they'd be far better off getting a 15MPG pickup and stretching the Civic out a bit longer.
If the numbers were in gallons-per-hundred-miles (GPHM), Joe the plumber would see that the choice is trading in his 10GPHM pickup in for a 6.7GPHM pickup vs. trading in his wife's 3.3GPHM car for a 2.63GPHM car. According to this study, Joe is more likely to make the right decision and upgrade the pickup instead of the car - whereas before he would go for the larger absolute MPG difference.
In short, people don't do much math as they stand looking at the stickers - so design the sticker to minimize the math needed.
Is it likely to cause problems for Linux and BSD?
Nothing big other than another variable to throw in the mix... Macs have never had a BIOS and seem to run Windows, Linux, and BSD pretty well. IIRC, they just emulate a BIOS.
then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening.
I'm cool with limited regulation, so long as it doesn't allow the regulator to become to powerful. For instance, a rule like "your business can never grow to more than 5% of the total market" is a lot less ripe for corruption than "the rules that your business operates under are reviewed yearly by these 5 guys in this appointed committee".
I'm a little more nuanced... there SHOULD be punatives, but they should not go to the plaintiff. I'm open to where they should go - perhaps to a legal fund of some kind.
BP should get sued heavily and hard, but the punitive damages should not go to the fishermen et al. Similarly, the RIAA should not get more than damages and possibly legal costs. Winning a court case should not be like winning the lottery.
Nope!
I remember very clearly when AOL joined up with the internet. It was referred to as Eternal September.
T-Mobile, which is not an option if you actually want your phone to be able to do basic things like receive and make calls.
As an urban dweller, T-Mobile reception is just fine. Hell, I even got by with Sprint service! I'm now living a whopping 1 mile out in the 'burbs, but I still get okay service. If I were in the sticks, I'd get Verizon... but it's not an issue in the city.
The ones that dont are never the Best
You had me up until that statement.
Different people work for different motivations. Some talented people are genuinely altruistic and will work for peanuts, so long as their work is fulfilling to them personally. Sometimes talented people are purely driven by the almighty dollar. Most talented people have some mix of drivers. The fact is that if you take away a profit motive, you will lose some talent. The more profit you remove, the more talent goes away until you are left with just idealists with some other means of support.
You think Microsoft would have been able to pull this off all for profit only? not a chance.
MS would be a bad example, but AOL sure as hell was heading in that direction. I have no doubt that AOL would have eventually created a giant, worldwide private network very similar to the internet. It probably would have taken longer without the academic types, just as curing cancer would take longer without the profit-seekers.
The world isn't so black-and-white.
Right, but with physical access to a machine, it matters very little what OS you are using.
Am I to gather from this that the hackers are granted access to the machines? That isn't very realistic... I don't have hackers coming into my house while I'm at work trying to own my computers - they are limited to trying to bust through on the network, or infesting a site that I browse.
And it's damn near irrelevant to any company of a size big enough for Exchange to be useful, that isn't in dire financial trouble.
On the contrary - the larger the company, the larger the number and the more it looks like low-hanging fruit to a manager.
Employee smoke breaks and water cooler gossip would cost a company more every year than their Exchange CALs.
No one would argue otherwise, but those are fundamental to human nature... you can't expect people to work like robots, but you certainly CAN evaluate other email systems.
Note that I'm not railing against Exchange - I fully admit that it is not my area of expertise... but the argument that "it really isn't that much money" is not very persuasive - especially when there are free alternatives that may be good enough for many people.
it turned out to be a miserable environment for the kind of productivity apps your typical office droid needed to have access to
That's weird... the developers in our office during the 90's had Solaris boxes and... nothing else. They had Netscape for email and web, and I think WordPerfect for word processing. I can't remember what, if anything, they used for spreadsheets. A few of them couldn't stand it and also got a PC with Windows or OS2 or ran Mac in emulation, but mostly they were fairly happy (for developers).
The real whining started when our company got rid of the old unix email servers and forced everyone into Outlook on Windows.
If you seriously think Outlook+Exchange is "absurdly expensive", then you've little experience out in the real world.
$100-200 is expensive if it is unnecessary. You don't burn money unless you are really, really cold. Ask your users if they would like to pay $5/pay period more for health insurance - I bet they'll gripe... and that's the kind of money you are talking about here.
Companies mandate sending memos as word files, they mandate that presentations be submitted as .pptx.
Everyone exports to Word/PowerPoint/Excel these days, so export isn't a big deal. Excel will even treat a CSV file as a native file if you give it an XLS extension, and word will open a text/rich text file and behave normally if you give it a DOC extension. People who make broad mandates about sending things in MS formats aren't generally savvy enough to find you out - they just care that the file opens when they double-click on it in Outlook.
When your software can't open an MS office file because someone used some weird feature buried within MS office that 3rd part software can't handle; no one is going to be sympathetic. You'll be fired or written up
Fired or written up? Presumably if your office requires everything to be done in MS Office, they provide you with MS Office, right? Presumably if your boss hands you an iPad, he doesn't expect you to use MS Office!
"I'm sorry I can't open your proprietary formats, you should send them to me using open source software" is a douchebag thing to say in your personal life.
Every single time I forget to change the output format from DOCX in MS Office 2007, the person I send the file to can't open it. And I don't think "what a douchebag"... I just save it in an older, more compatible format. MS Office is not exactly the most compatible thing out there, you know. If an OO.org user asked me to save it in an older format, it would not really put me out in any way since I'm already doing it for MS Office users.
Windows 7 is a great OS.
It is much better. They fumbled a bit on the 64/32-bit thing, but it's an improvement over Vista.
It is really annoying to have to keep both a 32-bit and 64-bit version of IE in the menubar/dock/quicklaunch thing for incompatible web sites. And worse, you have to paste your own icon in to differentiate them, since MS did not feel like they needed to put a little "32" or "64" on the two otherwise identical applications.
What does betting on "people will like Apple" have to do with "Apple needs a cash infusion"?
It's a pretty simple relationship... Apple can raise more cash by selling their stock. The more that the company is worth on the stock market, the more easily they can acquire "stuff" by using their stock. Do a Google search for Apple Acquires and see how many companies they have snatched up recently. And these acquisitions are critical to their success... the iPod was developed by a company that they acquired, as was the touch screen for the iPhone.
offensive to our communities
"Offensive" is a wiggle word. Huge swaths of the world are offended when two men kiss, or when someone draws Mohammad... saying something offensive should not be the end of civil discourse, because nearly everything that can be said is probably offensive to someone.
Anyway, you are misrepresenting their position - which I will repeat that I am not defending. For instance:
that Martin Luther King was a Black Panther
You have this almost exactly backward. They paint them as opposites. In any case, it's warping history because they were in fact on the same team and part of the same struggle.
Anyway, I'm not knocking the tactic of California forbidding textbook purchases which incorporate the Texas curriculum... quite the contrary, I think it is appropriate. However, I do take issue with this politician's polarizing speech.
One of the biggest arguments against private insurance is that they make a profit off of a fraction of the services they cover.
I'd have to say, that's one of the poorest arguments that I can fathom. A profit motive can be a powerful reducer of costs. I'm not sure why you think that they make more money when people use more services... most health insurance is flat-fee. They make the most money when you never use it, and it's all down-hill from there.
The only thing we can do is compare health insurance programs between countries which, of course, involves many variables so still would be difficult to quantify any particular cause of a discrepancy between their costs and ours.
Agreed, though in the US we do have the advantage of states having the freedom to experiment a little. Massachusetts operates within the same basic rules as the rest of the country and yet has a more "official" socialized medicine program than most of the US.
As you say, the problem is so complicated that it almost defies analysis. My personal opinion is that we should have the government setting up free clinics in populated areas and financing people's private HMOs in rural areas. We should not restrict lawsuits, but punitive damages should be put into some legal defense fund or something else OTHER than the plaintiff's pocket. They should be reimbursed, but a medical mistake shouldn't be like winning the lottery. The AMA should also set up review boards which have the power to yank medical licenses of doctors who make a career of making misleading testimony. Finally, I think that medical insurance should be more like car insurance - you pay up to a certain deductible and only then does it kick in. Only with that will price pressure actually kick in.
Disclosure: my wife is a doctor.
Go ahead and take all the profit out of health care and see how much it reduces your hospital bill. For-profit companies make under $100 per client, so the most it could reduce your monthly bill is less than $10.
Or are you saying that non-profits could run more efficiently? Perhaps, but I don't think people who have insurance through, say, Kaiser are paying dramatically lower insurance rates.
Even when they're absolutely accurate and appropriate?
Accurate? Yes. Appropriate? No. He's using derogatory language in the place of reasoned argument.
You're also a terrorist and a killer.
Exactly, and if all you want to do is label people and piss each other off, then your goal is met. If you want to have a constructive discussion that might actually solve a problem and bring all sides to a compromise, then calling people names - no matter how "correct" - is not going to get you there.
We're not talking about "blowing people up", we're talking about the contents of a freaking history book... this discussion should be civil.
No, the purity laws forbade the fermentation of wheat. It was to be reserved for food. Engilsh translation here