The difference is, if it goes to a company with whom you have a business relationship that involves you paying them, then they have an incentive to do due diligence. If it goes to a site like YouTube, which gains no direct income from you, then they have no incentive to do anything other than just take it down and let you deal with it. Allowing hosts to charge a $50 processing fee for every DMCA takedown notice would also go a little way towards helping this.
There is nothing in the GPL that requires you to contribute back to the community. The only requirement is that you give the same rights to anyone that you give derived works to that you received. For example, you can take GPL'd code, extend it, and then sell the result to a company, with a contract prohibiting you from selling or giving it to anyone else. They are then free to redistribute it under the terms of the GPL, but they are not required to. The GPL does not require you or them to return any code upstream, only to pass rights downstream.
Another poster already called you an idiot, so I can skip that part and get onto exactly why you are wrong. People pay me to write software because they need that software written. That is the best motivation for writing software and the reason why about 90% gets written. The remaining 10% of commercial software is written because someone thinks it's a good idea and that they'll be able to sell finished versions.
Pretty much all of the software that I've been paid to write has been released under a permissive license (MIT, FreeBSD, or UIUC license). This is because there is a non-zero cost associated with maintaining a proprietary fork, which is basically what happens when you make any nontrivial changes to open source code and don't push them upstream. New features and bug fixes upstream may change some interfaces that you depend on and this means that you end up either having a version with known bugs (including security holes), or you spend money backporting the changes to your branch. If you upstream the code then someone else pays for this and it is cheaper for you. In FreeBSD land, we're currently working with Netflix and Juniper to upstream a load of their changes for exactly this reason: they want to spend developer time (and therefore money) on new features, not on keeping old ones working.
More importantly, if you don't upstream your code and it's useful to others then eventually someone else will implement the same feature, but often in a different way. You then either throw away the code that you've paid to have written and use theirs, or maintain a fork that is now radically different to upstream and therefore much more expensive.
As the developer, you also benefit from being able to use the code elsewhere. Everyone wins: your current customer gets a lower long-term maintenance cost, your next customer gets a smaller up-front cost, and you don't get bored implementing the same thing lots of times.
Indeed. Which is why my latest program is probably going to be GPL v3'ed, with a donation page on there somewhere. I'm going to put Benjamin Franklin's quote to the test, to see if something universally useful is better off not being patented / locked up / paid licensing
Two problems with this: first, you assume that some nebulous thing that you are creating is 'universally useful'. I don't think I've ever seen any software that falls into that category. Secondly, you pick an ultra-restrictive license that a lot of individuals and companies will avoid like the plague to test your hypothesis.
It's actually a good hint for people wanting to write realistic science fiction: stay away from describing the mechanism. A machine for cleaning your floors is a really obvious prediction to make because everyone has floors that need cleaning and no one likes doing it. A Heath Robinson contraption with brooms and dustpans, however, is a bad prediction because that's just the best that was available with the artist's grasp of the technology of the day. Something like the roomba would be quite easy to predict in visual form: a little box that crawls over your floor and cleans it, with no mention made of its interior workings. The same is true of a number of the other advances described. They produce effects like ones we have today, and they do so because those effects are things people want. They don't, however, work by the mechanisms described.
As soon as digital data storage became possible, it was possible to predict electronic books, for example. Lots of people had big libraries of books and these are very hard to move around. Being able to have a book-sized device that can be any book you want is an obviously desirable goal. It wasn't until the invention of the LCD display that it became possible to make such a thing, but if you'd written science fiction in the '30s you wouldn't have needed to describe how the display worked, just say that it's something like a sheet of paper that can show any image you want. And, if you were particularly clever, you might realise that if this is possible then it can also show any film, as well as any book.
No, what he's describing is selection bias: we claim predictions work because we look at the 1% that did work and then ignore the rest. This is the basis for a very simple stock scam. You set up 10 funds, all investing in random things. Some perform better than average, some worse. You liquidate the ones that do worse and then invite people to invest in the remaining ones (with a healthy commission, of course) and the disclaimer that past results don't necessarily reflect future performance. They will see a fund performing 20% better than the rest of the market and not see the one that you quietly closed that did 20% worse, so assume you have amazing insight and invest. You then pocket the commission and keep investing randomly. Your next guesses may or may not be profitable, but you can keep getting new people in for a while because the graphs look like a little downwards dip on a fund that usually goes up (which may mean now is a really good time to invest in it). By the time it's back down at the market average, you've made a healthy profit.
The communicator was basically a walkie-talkie, not attached to a phone network and only carried by a few elite people.
It's been a while since I watched Star Trek, but I think this is wrong on two counts. First, it was a fully switched network: every call started with '{caller} to {callee}' and then the network made the connection. Second, the show almost never touched on civilians within the Federation except (occasionally) those on frontiers, so there's no evidence that they were not carried by everyone (although presumably Star Fleet had their own version with longer range and a more generic and uniform case than the civilian models). We did see that most civilian comms traffic involved fixed terminals, but only because the ones we saw were video conferences, and these tend to be much more convenient if you have a big screen and somewhere to sit.
Flight to the cities is difficult for people who own houses because, as the cost of car ownship goes up so does the relative value of city housing to rural housing. When I was looking to buy my house, I drew a mental circle on the map denoting the area that was within easy walking or cycling distance of all of the places I wanted to go to regularly. Apparently this circle was similar for most other people, because as soon as you get into the region where you'd need to own a car, house prices drop dramatically. When you get completely outside the city, they drop even further.
Probably because Google is more potential evil at this point. They harvest and correlate a huge amount of data, but they don't seem to do much with it - they aren't even providing relevant adverts. Facebook, on the other hand, has a long and established track record of abusing any information that it manages to acquire and a mission statement of monetising absolutely anything it can.
The problem is that the choir decided to publicise its membership list without the consent of the members. In the EU, that would put them in direct violation of the Data Protection Directive. The secondary problem is that this happens automatically as a result of using Facebook for intragroup communication. The tertiary problem is that, in spite of this, a lot of groups believe that using Facebook for this is a sane idea.
I guess it worked on you then since you've forgotten all these MP3 players (Creative etc.),
The mobile music player market was immature. Most of the existing players had either tiny amounts (128MB or less) of Flash, or 2.5" microdrives. Apple introduced the iPod with a 1.8" drive almost as soon as they became available (Creative got there just before, but the delay between the two means both were in production at the same time) and, importantly, bought up enough of the drive supply that no one else could manage to ship the same sorts of volumes. The availability of the 1.8" drives was the tipping point for the portable music player, because it was the first time you could (affordably) fit enough storage into your pocket to hold a (small, initially) music collection.
phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc.)
Again, the capacitive touchscreen was a game changer. Apple, again, wasn't quite the first, but they were within a few months and brought the hype machine. People say 'iPhone-like' when they mean 'Smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen' because of this. Nokia didn't have anything similar, and I don't think Sony Ericsson did either. Samsung got there first, but not sufficiently early to define the market.
tablets (Microsoft etc.)
Microsoft is a bad example here - their tablets were a different class of device, just PCs with a (typically stylus-based) touchscreen, not a capacitive touchscreen and an interface designed around touch. There were Android tablet makers before the iPad though.
Of course they've picked their angle of attack to find trendsetters and increase market share quick, but I'd say Apply has pushed a fair number of competitors aside. They're really not into green-fielding completely new types of products, they ambush niches and rapidly increase their size into big markets.
Mostly their competitors are not well established, because it's a brand new market, which typically has only just become technically feasible.
I do agree they're looking to be the biggest player though they won't start anything where they'll be second or third fiddle.
That depends. Look at the mobile phone market. Apple could easily get 50% of the market share, but it would mean introducing low-end iPhones. They don't mind other companies getting the less-profitable end of the market, as long as they can hang onto the high-margin part. This is quite a risky strategy, as SGI will attest: it only works if you keep developing new markets before the old ones are commoditised.
The best strategy for the USA in this situation might have been to broker a peace deal between Germany and Britain and let Hitler and Stalin destroy weaken themselves with a long war before stepping in to pick up the pieces, providing covert support to whichever side looked like losing until both empires were in shambles. They didn't, because countenancing genocide on that scale wouldn't have gone over well with the electorate in any vaguely civilised nation.
In this situation, however, no one actually dies when the two sides 'fight', so the best strategy is to encourage them to pursue a course of mutual destruction until a non-obnoxious competitor appears (this may take a while).
a full blown laptop to compete with Microsoft's Surface
That's not how Apple works. Their business model is to identify market segments with no competitors, enter them, hype their product until it's identified with that market segment, and then move on to the next one before the race to the bottom takes over.
The Pentium M was competitive. It wasn't in the high-end market, but it had better performance per Watt than anything AMD had to offer. It took them a really long time to produce anything competitive for laptops - laptop sales had overtaken desktops by the time they did, and they missed out on the period when it was the fastest growing segment.
Intel had the advantage that they had a lot of chips under development. I strongly suspect that the Israeli team that was working on the low-power version of the P3 was underfunded and completely off the radar of Intel's strategists until they suddenly noticed that they desperately needed a decent laptop chip for a growing market and didn't have one.
I was about to post the same thing. Add to that, not all journals are at the same level and so something rejected from one might have been accepted at another. Picking the correct venue is important. Adding professors' names? A lot of journals require anonymous submissions, so pick one of these if you think you're being victimised. Or it could be that the work just isn't novel enough: I've not found a vaguely respectable journal that has as low standards as the US patent office...
The Foundation books are very much a product of their time. I enjoy them in the same way that I enjoy the Skylark series: they give a view of what people in a certain period in the past thought that the future would be like.
They could just release the information and get the drivers for free from the existing community effort
They could, but this involves producing decent documentation, which may not even exist internally, as the hardware and software are developed in tandem.
They knew about the license requirements when they started and freely chose a dead end over the objections of the community that could have helped them.
Some of this code was licensed from SGI, back when nVidia was founded. Back then, they only offered Windows drivers. Their Linux drivers are a port of the Windows version.
Intel had no graphics drivers. They started writing them from scratch, because they needed some. They chose to do it without licensing any third-party code and make it public. The cost of doing this was almost certainly not much greater than developing it totally in private - probably less because they got community contributions. nVidia, on the other hand, already has a massive investment in their driver. They'd need to throw that away and start again. Yes, they could do it, but what's the business case? It's something that would affect under 1% of their users and cost them a lot.
Intel did not release their drivers under the GPL. Intel implemented new drivers from scratch. Relicensing existing code is really hard for something like a graphics driver, which contains code licensed from third parties. Oh, and they're under an MIT license like the rest of X11 and the DRI infrastructure, not the GPL.
You speak as though changing your opinion is something that happens in isolation. A politician changing his opinions because he becomes better informed about an issue, or because the realities of the situation change, is laudable. A politician changing opinions because he thinks the new stand will make him more popular this week is not. The media (on both sides) tries hard to portray them as equivalent, but they are not. In a representative democracy, you elect someone to make the decisions that you would make if you were to spend the time studying the issues. Someone who changes their mind when they become better informed will continue making the same decisions that you'd want made. Someone who panders to the electorate may decide after the election that a different subset is easier to sway than you and stop representing you.
most here don't seem to grasp that "free" healthcare still has to be paid for by somebody.
No, that's just a Libertarian talking point. Most realise that healthcare does have to be paid, but that it's significantly cheaper overall if you don't have two layers of profit in the middle and that society benefits overall if people are cared for when they become ill. I am well aware that the NHS adds to the bottom line on my tax bill. I'm also aware that buying the same level of healthcare in the USA now (as a healthy young person) would cost me about twice as much if I lived in the USA and that would either rise or (before Obamacare) simply become unavailable if I contracted a long-term medical problem.
The poor don't pay taxes either and they get healthcare in Britain
Depends on what you mean by 'taxes'. If you're talking about income tax, then even someone with a full-time minimum wage pays a small amount, and that's a large proportion of poor people. I'd have to check the current figures to be exact, but if you're working under about 4 days a week on minimum wage then you're below the threshold for not paying income tax. The only people not paying any income tax are either unemployed, part time and on minimum wage, or on a low income with a non-working spouse.
Even then, you are still likely to be paying council tax, although possibly at a lower rate. If you're in a shared house then this will, again, be quite a small amount. It's typically around £50-100/month for a typical house, depending on the exact size and location, with a 25% discount for a single occupant.
Beyond that, if you're buying anything beyond absolute essentials then you're most likely paying VAT on most of what you buy. You'd have to try pretty hard to find many poor people who don't buy at least something that isn't VAT exempt (homeless people probably don't, but anyone who isn't completely destitute almost certainly does). Of course, they may not be paying much tax, but they are paying some, and the point of taxpayer-funded services is you're ability to use them isn't proportional to the amount that you pay.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is, if it goes to a company with whom you have a business relationship that involves you paying them, then they have an incentive to do due diligence. If it goes to a site like YouTube, which gains no direct income from you, then they have no incentive to do anything other than just take it down and let you deal with it. Allowing hosts to charge a $50 processing fee for every DMCA takedown notice would also go a little way towards helping this.
There is nothing in the GPL that requires you to contribute back to the community. The only requirement is that you give the same rights to anyone that you give derived works to that you received. For example, you can take GPL'd code, extend it, and then sell the result to a company, with a contract prohibiting you from selling or giving it to anyone else. They are then free to redistribute it under the terms of the GPL, but they are not required to. The GPL does not require you or them to return any code upstream, only to pass rights downstream.
I've seen lots of operating systems, but I've never seen one that is universally useful.
Another poster already called you an idiot, so I can skip that part and get onto exactly why you are wrong. People pay me to write software because they need that software written. That is the best motivation for writing software and the reason why about 90% gets written. The remaining 10% of commercial software is written because someone thinks it's a good idea and that they'll be able to sell finished versions.
Pretty much all of the software that I've been paid to write has been released under a permissive license (MIT, FreeBSD, or UIUC license). This is because there is a non-zero cost associated with maintaining a proprietary fork, which is basically what happens when you make any nontrivial changes to open source code and don't push them upstream. New features and bug fixes upstream may change some interfaces that you depend on and this means that you end up either having a version with known bugs (including security holes), or you spend money backporting the changes to your branch. If you upstream the code then someone else pays for this and it is cheaper for you. In FreeBSD land, we're currently working with Netflix and Juniper to upstream a load of their changes for exactly this reason: they want to spend developer time (and therefore money) on new features, not on keeping old ones working.
More importantly, if you don't upstream your code and it's useful to others then eventually someone else will implement the same feature, but often in a different way. You then either throw away the code that you've paid to have written and use theirs, or maintain a fork that is now radically different to upstream and therefore much more expensive.
As the developer, you also benefit from being able to use the code elsewhere. Everyone wins: your current customer gets a lower long-term maintenance cost, your next customer gets a smaller up-front cost, and you don't get bored implementing the same thing lots of times.
Indeed. Which is why my latest program is probably going to be GPL v3'ed, with a donation page on there somewhere. I'm going to put Benjamin Franklin's quote to the test, to see if something universally useful is better off not being patented / locked up / paid licensing
Two problems with this: first, you assume that some nebulous thing that you are creating is 'universally useful'. I don't think I've ever seen any software that falls into that category. Secondly, you pick an ultra-restrictive license that a lot of individuals and companies will avoid like the plague to test your hypothesis.
It's actually a good hint for people wanting to write realistic science fiction: stay away from describing the mechanism. A machine for cleaning your floors is a really obvious prediction to make because everyone has floors that need cleaning and no one likes doing it. A Heath Robinson contraption with brooms and dustpans, however, is a bad prediction because that's just the best that was available with the artist's grasp of the technology of the day. Something like the roomba would be quite easy to predict in visual form: a little box that crawls over your floor and cleans it, with no mention made of its interior workings. The same is true of a number of the other advances described. They produce effects like ones we have today, and they do so because those effects are things people want. They don't, however, work by the mechanisms described.
As soon as digital data storage became possible, it was possible to predict electronic books, for example. Lots of people had big libraries of books and these are very hard to move around. Being able to have a book-sized device that can be any book you want is an obviously desirable goal. It wasn't until the invention of the LCD display that it became possible to make such a thing, but if you'd written science fiction in the '30s you wouldn't have needed to describe how the display worked, just say that it's something like a sheet of paper that can show any image you want. And, if you were particularly clever, you might realise that if this is possible then it can also show any film, as well as any book.
No, what he's describing is selection bias: we claim predictions work because we look at the 1% that did work and then ignore the rest. This is the basis for a very simple stock scam. You set up 10 funds, all investing in random things. Some perform better than average, some worse. You liquidate the ones that do worse and then invite people to invest in the remaining ones (with a healthy commission, of course) and the disclaimer that past results don't necessarily reflect future performance. They will see a fund performing 20% better than the rest of the market and not see the one that you quietly closed that did 20% worse, so assume you have amazing insight and invest. You then pocket the commission and keep investing randomly. Your next guesses may or may not be profitable, but you can keep getting new people in for a while because the graphs look like a little downwards dip on a fund that usually goes up (which may mean now is a really good time to invest in it). By the time it's back down at the market average, you've made a healthy profit.
The communicator was basically a walkie-talkie, not attached to a phone network and only carried by a few elite people.
It's been a while since I watched Star Trek, but I think this is wrong on two counts. First, it was a fully switched network: every call started with '{caller} to {callee}' and then the network made the connection. Second, the show almost never touched on civilians within the Federation except (occasionally) those on frontiers, so there's no evidence that they were not carried by everyone (although presumably Star Fleet had their own version with longer range and a more generic and uniform case than the civilian models). We did see that most civilian comms traffic involved fixed terminals, but only because the ones we saw were video conferences, and these tend to be much more convenient if you have a big screen and somewhere to sit.
Flight to the cities is difficult for people who own houses because, as the cost of car ownship goes up so does the relative value of city housing to rural housing. When I was looking to buy my house, I drew a mental circle on the map denoting the area that was within easy walking or cycling distance of all of the places I wanted to go to regularly. Apparently this circle was similar for most other people, because as soon as you get into the region where you'd need to own a car, house prices drop dramatically. When you get completely outside the city, they drop even further.
Probably because Google is more potential evil at this point. They harvest and correlate a huge amount of data, but they don't seem to do much with it - they aren't even providing relevant adverts. Facebook, on the other hand, has a long and established track record of abusing any information that it manages to acquire and a mission statement of monetising absolutely anything it can.
The problem is that the choir decided to publicise its membership list without the consent of the members. In the EU, that would put them in direct violation of the Data Protection Directive. The secondary problem is that this happens automatically as a result of using Facebook for intragroup communication. The tertiary problem is that, in spite of this, a lot of groups believe that using Facebook for this is a sane idea.
Notepad.
I guess it worked on you then since you've forgotten all these MP3 players (Creative etc.),
The mobile music player market was immature. Most of the existing players had either tiny amounts (128MB or less) of Flash, or 2.5" microdrives. Apple introduced the iPod with a 1.8" drive almost as soon as they became available (Creative got there just before, but the delay between the two means both were in production at the same time) and, importantly, bought up enough of the drive supply that no one else could manage to ship the same sorts of volumes. The availability of the 1.8" drives was the tipping point for the portable music player, because it was the first time you could (affordably) fit enough storage into your pocket to hold a (small, initially) music collection.
phones (Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc.)
Again, the capacitive touchscreen was a game changer. Apple, again, wasn't quite the first, but they were within a few months and brought the hype machine. People say 'iPhone-like' when they mean 'Smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen' because of this. Nokia didn't have anything similar, and I don't think Sony Ericsson did either. Samsung got there first, but not sufficiently early to define the market.
tablets (Microsoft etc.)
Microsoft is a bad example here - their tablets were a different class of device, just PCs with a (typically stylus-based) touchscreen, not a capacitive touchscreen and an interface designed around touch. There were Android tablet makers before the iPad though.
Of course they've picked their angle of attack to find trendsetters and increase market share quick, but I'd say Apply has pushed a fair number of competitors aside. They're really not into green-fielding completely new types of products, they ambush niches and rapidly increase their size into big markets.
Mostly their competitors are not well established, because it's a brand new market, which typically has only just become technically feasible.
I do agree they're looking to be the biggest player though they won't start anything where they'll be second or third fiddle.
That depends. Look at the mobile phone market. Apple could easily get 50% of the market share, but it would mean introducing low-end iPhones. They don't mind other companies getting the less-profitable end of the market, as long as they can hang onto the high-margin part. This is quite a risky strategy, as SGI will attest: it only works if you keep developing new markets before the old ones are commoditised.
The best strategy for the USA in this situation might have been to broker a peace deal between Germany and Britain and let Hitler and Stalin destroy weaken themselves with a long war before stepping in to pick up the pieces, providing covert support to whichever side looked like losing until both empires were in shambles. They didn't, because countenancing genocide on that scale wouldn't have gone over well with the electorate in any vaguely civilised nation.
In this situation, however, no one actually dies when the two sides 'fight', so the best strategy is to encourage them to pursue a course of mutual destruction until a non-obnoxious competitor appears (this may take a while).
a full blown laptop to compete with Microsoft's Surface
That's not how Apple works. Their business model is to identify market segments with no competitors, enter them, hype their product until it's identified with that market segment, and then move on to the next one before the race to the bottom takes over.
The Pentium M was competitive. It wasn't in the high-end market, but it had better performance per Watt than anything AMD had to offer. It took them a really long time to produce anything competitive for laptops - laptop sales had overtaken desktops by the time they did, and they missed out on the period when it was the fastest growing segment.
Intel had the advantage that they had a lot of chips under development. I strongly suspect that the Israeli team that was working on the low-power version of the P3 was underfunded and completely off the radar of Intel's strategists until they suddenly noticed that they desperately needed a decent laptop chip for a growing market and didn't have one.
I was about to post the same thing. Add to that, not all journals are at the same level and so something rejected from one might have been accepted at another. Picking the correct venue is important. Adding professors' names? A lot of journals require anonymous submissions, so pick one of these if you think you're being victimised. Or it could be that the work just isn't novel enough: I've not found a vaguely respectable journal that has as low standards as the US patent office...
The Foundation books are very much a product of their time. I enjoy them in the same way that I enjoy the Skylark series: they give a view of what people in a certain period in the past thought that the future would be like.
They could just release the information and get the drivers for free from the existing community effort
They could, but this involves producing decent documentation, which may not even exist internally, as the hardware and software are developed in tandem.
They knew about the license requirements when they started and freely chose a dead end over the objections of the community that could have helped them.
Some of this code was licensed from SGI, back when nVidia was founded. Back then, they only offered Windows drivers. Their Linux drivers are a port of the Windows version.
Intel had no graphics drivers. They started writing them from scratch, because they needed some. They chose to do it without licensing any third-party code and make it public. The cost of doing this was almost certainly not much greater than developing it totally in private - probably less because they got community contributions. nVidia, on the other hand, already has a massive investment in their driver. They'd need to throw that away and start again. Yes, they could do it, but what's the business case? It's something that would affect under 1% of their users and cost them a lot.
Intel did not release their drivers under the GPL. Intel implemented new drivers from scratch. Relicensing existing code is really hard for something like a graphics driver, which contains code licensed from third parties. Oh, and they're under an MIT license like the rest of X11 and the DRI infrastructure, not the GPL.
You speak as though changing your opinion is something that happens in isolation. A politician changing his opinions because he becomes better informed about an issue, or because the realities of the situation change, is laudable. A politician changing opinions because he thinks the new stand will make him more popular this week is not. The media (on both sides) tries hard to portray them as equivalent, but they are not. In a representative democracy, you elect someone to make the decisions that you would make if you were to spend the time studying the issues. Someone who changes their mind when they become better informed will continue making the same decisions that you'd want made. Someone who panders to the electorate may decide after the election that a different subset is easier to sway than you and stop representing you.
most here don't seem to grasp that "free" healthcare still has to be paid for by somebody.
No, that's just a Libertarian talking point. Most realise that healthcare does have to be paid, but that it's significantly cheaper overall if you don't have two layers of profit in the middle and that society benefits overall if people are cared for when they become ill. I am well aware that the NHS adds to the bottom line on my tax bill. I'm also aware that buying the same level of healthcare in the USA now (as a healthy young person) would cost me about twice as much if I lived in the USA and that would either rise or (before Obamacare) simply become unavailable if I contracted a long-term medical problem.
The poor don't pay taxes either and they get healthcare in Britain
Depends on what you mean by 'taxes'. If you're talking about income tax, then even someone with a full-time minimum wage pays a small amount, and that's a large proportion of poor people. I'd have to check the current figures to be exact, but if you're working under about 4 days a week on minimum wage then you're below the threshold for not paying income tax. The only people not paying any income tax are either unemployed, part time and on minimum wage, or on a low income with a non-working spouse.
Even then, you are still likely to be paying council tax, although possibly at a lower rate. If you're in a shared house then this will, again, be quite a small amount. It's typically around £50-100/month for a typical house, depending on the exact size and location, with a 25% discount for a single occupant.
Beyond that, if you're buying anything beyond absolute essentials then you're most likely paying VAT on most of what you buy. You'd have to try pretty hard to find many poor people who don't buy at least something that isn't VAT exempt (homeless people probably don't, but anyone who isn't completely destitute almost certainly does). Of course, they may not be paying much tax, but they are paying some, and the point of taxpayer-funded services is you're ability to use them isn't proportional to the amount that you pay.
Grew up to become an engineer
Odd, I always assumed that becoming an engineer was something we did to avoid growing up...