We spend much of our energy on simple heating and cooling. California and Florida have the lowest household energy usage rates among the 50 states, because they have the mildest climates. Personally, our 70's era house uses about $1400 worth of electricity and gas over a year. Half of that--- half!-- went to the A/C and gas furnace. But what can be done? We've had quite a few salespeople try to persuade us to spend $10000 to upgrade the windows to dual pane. Also had a few float other ideas such as adding heat reflective material to the underside of the roof, or a roof peak vent. These ideas are not economical. Even if we got the absolute maximum of a 50% reduction in heating and cooling costs that the window sellers suggest is possible, that's only saving us $350 per year. Will take nearly 30 years to pay back those windows. This cheap cookie cutter house with foundation cracks might well be condemned and torn down before that happens. And suppose we don't get 50%, suppose it's only a 25% savings on heating and cooling? Oops, 60 year payback now. Or suppose the A/C fails after 10 years, and the replacement A/C is twice as efficient? That's actually rather likely. Our unit is rated at 12 SEER, and new units start at 13, and go past 20. Similar story with the gas furnace. It's only 80% efficient, mainly because it's not a condensing type which can get efficiencies of at least 95% .
Our economy is geared towards a great deal of waste. We put a lot of effort into convincing people that they must have more, always more. Manufacturers make selfish decisions that save them a few pennies in exchange for costing the buyer much more in energy. Door to door salespeople want to sell you on expensive home remodeling projects that will profit them more, rather than cheap ones that actually make sense.
Sub optimal for one purpose does not make it sub optimal. You're not asking for a sub optimal route, you're asking for the best route that satisfies some additional constraints.
Anyway, this kind of garbage is why the US inaugurated the numbered highway system in 1926. Before that, roads were promoted by private organizations that were not above directing travelers on sub optimal routes, in order to increase business at favored towns, which of course paid for the privelege. An example is the Bee Line Highway (now US 31) between Nashville and Birmingham. The original boosters lost control of the group that promoted the highway, and the new people tried to run the route through Gadsden, adding about 50 miles to the trip.
Sadly, I think the gender attack is not totally unjustified, even if it is unfair. What I mean is, computer science and engineering disciplines are dominated by men. CS is so skewed it's sunk to something like 10% female, which is the greatest disparaty among all the disciplines. Why this has happened is still a mystery. But because of the extreme disparity, the convenient mental shortcut of just assuming that any particular woman is bad at technology will be correct much more often than not.
It does sound like Whitman is not technically inclined. What sort of person should lead a technology company like HP? Who else but someone like the founders? We've seen that pure management, people skills, and contacts is not enough. Sculley's tenure at Apple is the iconic example. EBay is not primarily a technology company, they're an auction house that uses technology. The leader of HP absolutely has to have a feel for technology, and a stint at the helm of EBay doesn't qualify a person.
HP very badly needs to figure out what directions to go. Printers won't be a cash cow forever. And can't settle for being a mere producer of PCs, a sorry clone of Dell. What has become of the memristors they were supposedly producing?
This is why I still have a Yahoo account. When I created it, Gmail and Hotmail did not exist. And the university couldn't be trusted to treat email professionally. Lost some newly received emails once when they reverted to a day old backup. Spam handling was haphazard. Admittedly, Yahoo doesn't do such a great job there either. Of course
the university account was nuked shortly after I graduated. They ought to have a policy to retain email accounts. Great way to keep alumni in touch, I would think. Instead, they'd rather offer you credit card, landline, and auto insurance deals through snail mail. Doesn't look good when the bastions of higher education aren't with the times.
I tried to set up a web of forwarding accounts, to keep emails sorted. Had separate addresses for professional, business, family, friends, online games, etc. Most of it collapsed when most of the email forwarding sites folded.
I tried to save some money by printing up proxies. Scan, print, and slide into a sleeve, on top of some worthless common card. It was amazing how people vehemently objected to that. Acted as if I'd committed a crime, and as if that was cheating. Demanded to know whether I had the actual cards. Why should they care? It's not like they were stockholders. It's like they paid for their cards, and they wanted you to share that misery! Was another factor that helped me decide to quit MtG. Sad to see people acting like a bunch of rabid sheep. Tragic: The Spending indeed.
All these people complaining about being nickeled and dimed with temptations must not have ever been on the subscription model. Subscribing to EQ was one of the biggest gaming mistakes I ever made, right up there with playing the bottomless pit of spending known as Magic the Gathering. On the subscription model, I felt pressured to play, because it was costing me money. Not playing felt like buying a ticket to a movie, and then missing it. But playing so easily became a grind. I found it much easier to ignore the temptation to buy extras than to let a sunk cost go. Throwing good time after bad money. I finally quit EQ, and didn't replace it with anything until LOTRO went F2P. Some friends tried to suck me into WoW, but I declined, and now they don't play any more themselves. Burned out. Now I can play much more casually, just a few hours per month, without it costing a small fortune.
Still need a game where we can run the servers, a sort of "P2PMMORPG". I don't like that an MMORPG could shut down. I thought Neverwinter Nights might be it, but was not impressed with its editor.
The incentives are perverse and the mechanisms are not workable. That's the core of the problem for both copyrights and patents. Of all the ways to compensate artists and scientists, we just had to pick... monopolies? We've seen time and again that monopolies are bad. They're easy to abuse, and they are abused. They're very negative. They're all about denial and control of things that shouldn't be and can't be controlled. Just the sort of thing to attract abusive, controlling psychopaths, and it has.
Now we have entire industries built on acquiring these monopolies for outrageously low amounts, and hoarding and monetizing them. Remember, these are the guys who brought us such lovely terms as "Hollywood Accounting" and "Payola". They steal from the artists even as they accuse us of that. They've fought technology at every turn. They want to turn the Information Superhighway into a tollroad, with themselves as the gatekeepers. We have an entire generation driven underground, accused and very guilty of the non-crime known as "sharing" but called by the fiery slanted names of "piracy" and "theft". Yet that hasn't been enough for the extremists. They're constantly trying to broaden the meaning, length, and scope of the monopoly protections. They keep trying to transfer costs to the public while at the same time brainwashing and diverting us with the whole "starving artists deserve to be paid" and "copying is stealing" emotional appeals. They try to turn universities and ISPs into copyright police. They would like to destroy the used bookstore and the public library. They've had far too much success at all that. The system is very costly to run, and does not really work. Plus, as concentrations of media and media rights, they are a lot more vulnerable to censorship and loss.
Nice troll. Now face it, copyright is doomed and dying. No amount of whining and name calling will stop the world from advancing. You speak of fairness? It is unfair of you to want to hold us all back for the sake of a broken business model that never was much good, or necessary.
Why do you worship at the altar of copyright? You aren't capable of seeing any other way, anything at all, for encouraging the arts and sciences? You're afraid of change? It will be a much, much better world when copyright is gone.
Bittorrent works that way, but there are many P2P protocols that don't. How may total bytes did the person upload? About the number of bytes in the song file. Doesn't matter if that was 1/100th of the bytes 100 times, or all the bytes once. The technical details of the protocol do not matter for the argument I am making.
An individual couldn't have uploaded a song 1 billion times. Even just 100 times is very, very unlikely. Consider something known as amortization.
In this case, anyone can download a song from anyone else that has it. The maximum number of downloads required is the number of people in the network. Therefore, the amortized number of uploads per person is 1. It's highly unlikely anyone will upload any song more than a few times. That's how file sharing really works. Besides which, no private individual's connection is fast enough to support hundreds of uploads every day.
But these guys are trying to argue that an average uploader is no different than a manufacturer of physical media with bootleg songs. In that scenario, very few people can manufacture the media. Those who do could sell thousands of copies. Unfortunately, the judges and juries have bought this ridiculous argument.
That's still not all. The whole issue shouldn't be in the courts at all! Sharing of information should never have been criminalized. This college student is being tortured by the Copyright Inquisition, in hopes that the rest of us will be scared away from reaping the immense value the Internet has brought us all. Doesn't matter how severly they torture their victim, they can't stop us from using the Internet. What's been done to the student is cruel, senseless, and ineffective.
I would go much further, and in a different direction.
The problem with any patent can be summed up in one word: monopoly. But that's the direction we took, in order to come up with a fair price for an invention. Enforce a monopoly for the owners, and leave it up to them to figure out how to profit from it, if they can. Attempting to enforcing these monopolies costs us a great deal of money.
It's wrong on so many levels to grant a monopoly on an idea. It assumes the recipient is the only one in the world who could have done it. It overlooks that the recipient built on millenia of human advancement. It also forces dilemmas on the recipients, in how to collect their due. Individual inventors can spend lots of time trying to become experts in all kinds of areas that aren't related to their specialties, which of course takes them away from good work they could be doing. Or they have to seek out legal and business specialists, and hope the people they deal with don't turn out to be sharks looking to cheat them. Corporate inventors' work is already owned by their employers, as a condition of employment, and what they receive is solely what their employer is willing to pay in bonuses, which can be nothing. Worst of all, it adds to the huge pile of patents that hinder everyone, working against its purpose of advancing the arts and sciences.
So I would get rid of the monopoly protection part, and compensate inventors some other way. Handing out a monopoly is like giving paper currency to a starving man in a desert, where there is no food for sale.
Already did. The new $350 water heater is working fine so far. Yes, its longevity is a big concern. They all have warranties in multiples of 3 years, and their share of bad reviews. I avoided the models with the 3 year warranties. If the thing dies just after the 6 year warranty expires, then I haven't done so well. But as I said, I'm also just trying to gain a little more time for solar to get significantly cheaper. I hear tankless was much more expensive a few years ago, and that in the near term the price for solar may collapse just as tankless has. Maybe 6 years will be enough time.
As for the tap water temperatures, I am in the DFW area in Texas. It can freeze here, and we have had epic ice a few times (it's epic because no one around here knows how to drive on the stuff, not because it's thick). But on the whole, winters are mild. Still, that's a good point. Probably my annual cost was a bit higher than $180. I also have a gas furnace, and to remove that from the data, I used the summer months to figure what the water heater uses.
I do not say green is impractical! To the contrary. But I also try not to be swept up in the hype. I am not particularly fond of hybrid cars, not when there's still so much more we can do with conventional ones. Locking the torque converter of a conventional automatic, or replacing it with some other kind of tranny is big, big savings. Aerodynamic work on the undersides and wheel wells of cars is another. What's really aggravating about a car like the Prius is that they've poured all this money into the hybrid power train, and not done a thing to smooth the underside. It's hard to take their green credentials seriously when they ignore such simple, basic, and cheap improvements. The 1st generation Honda Insight was considerably better in that regard.
First, for the OP, quit using that phrase "scientists believe", especially in a discussion about global warming. Deniers love to interpret that word "believe" as evidence that scientists and science are no different than religion. Instead, say something like "scientists think".
Now, about that grey water reclamation. Last week, our 27 year old natural gas powered tank water heater rusted through and started leaking. I looked into gas tankless and solar. A cheap new gas powered tank heater is $350. The cheapest tankless one I found was $800. And then I'd have to convert the vent tubing to stainless steel for an additional $220, add a 1/2" to 3/4" adapter to the natural gas connection, add more water piping to connect to the bottom of the unit, and add in some sort of non flammable support structure as the tankless unit is not freestanding, all of which could easily cost another $200. At prices starting at $5000, solar was right out. There's really no reason for solar to be that expensive, but there it is. There are higher efficiency tanks, but those were also way high, at $960, and are only a little better. I estimated a higher efficiency tank would save me $2/month, which means a payback period of 25 years. If the tank doesn't last 25 years, which is likely, then I've lost. So I grudgingly went with the cheap tank, and still got a nice improvement. According to the labels, the old heater required $381/year to operate, and the new one needs only $254/year. But I keep the hot water temperature fairly low, and don't use that much. I estimate I was paying only $180/year to operate the old one. Ideas like reclaiming the heat from grey water would be fine if the up front cost wasn't so large as to cast doubt it would ever pay for itself. I'm not talking a payback period of 20 years, which is bad enough, I'm talking a payback period of never. The tank gains me another 5 years at a minimum, by which time I hope the price of solar will be reasonable. I sure wasn't interested in spending another $1000 or so to convert to tankless, only to see that surpassed by solar. Solar is where I ultimately want to go. As well as having the most potential to save energy, it also gets rid of the dangers of using gas.
Green tech has earned a dubious reputation of ignoring practicality. We should focus more on the stuff that we know is worth doing, as long as there's plenty to do, and there is.
They aren't the same. Tax code complexities can easily make that $100 vanish. You forget the US's little game with standard deduction and itemized deduction. You have to itemize to claim many of these tax breaks. If the itemized amount + that $100 tax break is less than the standard deduction, which can easily happen if you don't have mortgage payments, then those tax breaks are useless to you. (If you itemize, you can deduct mortgage payments, but not rental payments, because the US wants citizens to be homeowners, not renters.) Poor renters miss out, and rich homeowners get another break.
Itemized deductions? That's the biggest tax scam of all. Do it, and your chances of being audited go way up.
The tax code is the US's favorite place to enact policy, right where the poor can't use it. You can deduct mortgage payments, but not rent, because the government wants you to be a homeowner. Without mortgage payments (or cheating!), it's hard for an individual to come up with enough deductions to equal the standard deduction.
Recently, they've made various energy efficient home improvements deductable. Useless, when you're the renter but you pay the energy bills. There's no reason for the landlords to make these improvements when they don't pay for the energy. Even if you were crazy enough to spend your own money to upgrade the rental property, you still might not be able to use the tax break, because the standard deduction is more.
We all have dogs in this fight. We can't hide from the risks of being accused of piracy. Even not owning a computer or lacking an Internet connection is no guarantee of safety.
If you receive a letter from your ISP about supposed piracy on your connection, change your ISP if you can. They're spying on you. Not much difference between that and being watched by a Peeping Tom neighbor.
The long term answer is to get this "illegal activity" decriminalized. The activity should not be illegal. But how are we going to get the law changed if we're too scared to fight it? I don't mean running around filing countersuits or writing letters to our representatives, though that might help too. I mean passive aggression. Everyone should keep right on downloading. We have numbers on our side. Let them continue to make idiots of themselves by accusing entire nations of piracy.
Spaghetti code is pretty much gone because, except for rare grumbles about things like "multiple entry points" and that an assembler expert can still write more efficient code than a compiler, Structured Programming is clearly superior.
OOP, the next generation paradigm, has not displaced Structured Programming in any way close to the same extent. Why? Because it's not unequivocally better. Doesn't help that C++ is an especially poor realization of OOP. Name mangling? Templates? No automatic garbage collection? iostream? But those are only details. The major problem is with OOP, not C++. Class hierarchies can impose structure that is both unnecessary and detrimental. To avoid that, one doesn't use it. But then you have to ask yourself, why even use an OOP language? Polymorphism is cute, but it sure looks lame next to what Functional Programming can do.
Take hope in one important improvement: We did not support Mubarak, not this time, despite his friendliness with the US.
In the past, our government would have supported the ruler, as long as he professed friendship with the US, despite what US citizens or their people thought. The polite explanation was always "stability". Not so polite is "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard". Then the ruler and his cronies continue milking their people, who then hate us for supporting him. This always causes trouble, and undermines the very stability we sought. It's about time our government got smarter about this. Rulers who exploit and suppress their own people cannot be real friends of ours.
The US Government is as much victim as perpetrator. Haven't you been listening to the US right's hatred and contempt for government? And their proclivity for blanket statements and oversimplifications? It's expressed so well in this Reagan quote: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Our scientists and researchers do their jobs and come up with answers, and the right ignores them or makes ridiculous accusations of bias and incompetence. We pay for this attitude in many ways, not least being the low morale among bureaucrats. These hypocrites who profess such hatred for government are not shy about abusing and expanding government power when they are in control. The only parts of the government they like unconditionally, and like entirely too much, are the parts to do with security and force.
Links? Wikipedia and search engines are your friends. Reynolds has a Wikipedia entry.
Housing is one of the easiest things to criticize. It's full of incredibly wasteful methods and customs. Much of the work is done on site, rather than at a plant. They all just have to have fireplaces. I don't know about you, but if the fireplace was a $10000 optional item, I'd nix it in a heartbeat. What I find craziest are these people who will pony up $300000 or $500000, or more, and all they get is a larger version of the same old stuff. If you can afford that much, why wouldn't you put some of that money into practical things, like better insulation, double pane windows, a bit of solar water heating, etc.
Reynolds is the Earthship stuff. There's an Earthship housing development west of Taos, NM on hwy 64. They make houses out of old tires and bottles. It's interesting, and a little strange. I got a sense that the residents do not appreciate it. They view themselves as poor and hard done by, and act like they're stuck in these houses rather than proud of them. Didn't get much in the way of hard numbers about the building costs, maintenance, energy and water usage, so it's hard to judge.
In contrast, the Rocky Mountain Institute is one of the more scientific of the sustainable housing efforts.
That's why you do things gradually, not cold turkey. What if we simply said that starting 1 year from now, no more patent filings would be accepted? Current patents would remain valid. People who had been working towards a patent would have 1 year to finish their work and submit it. About 22 years from now, the last patents would expire, and we'd be completely free of them.
Software should not be patentable. Mathematical formulas are not patentable. Should Einstein have just "given away" Relativity? That's such a loaded question on so many levels. It implies that he suffered a loss, through his own carelessness in managing his work. Telling some information to the world is not really giving it away, though that expression is commonly used in this context. The information was never property to begin with. It didn't belong to Einstein or anyone else. Had he not announced it, eventually someone else would have figured out the same ideas.
Our very language gets us into trouble, using such possessive terminology. We say "I have an idea" when we mean "I thought of an idea", and "I have a car" when we mean "I possess a car". You might think of the same idea, independently. Then we both "have" the idea. That can't happen with a material good. But the terminology works against us, tempting us to treat these very different things the same, because we are using the same words. It's sick the way people grab and cling to ideas, futilely trying to keep them hostage, trying to shake a "fair" price out of the world, all the while wailing about theft and piracy and how is a starving inventor is to make a living.
It doesn't matter if he has nothing. What matters is that people believe the patent system covers ideas. Chilling Effects. This believe is so pervasive now that patents in effect do cover ideas. We have software patents and business method patents. Even if technically Apple has no grounds to stand on, they can still credibly threaten to sue, because they might win. Could a jury of average people make such a fine distinction as that between an idea and an implementation of an idea, with the lawyers doing their utmost to cast the issue in very different ways? Besides, they aren't really interested in a win, they'd rather it not actually go to trial at all. This is blackmail, not a serious and righteous reaction to a real injustice, and the punishment is not a loss in a court case which is of course uncertain, but the guarantee that a trial will cause expenses and delays no matter what the outcome.
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We spend much of our energy on simple heating and cooling. California and Florida have the lowest household energy usage rates among the 50 states, because they have the mildest climates. Personally, our 70's era house uses about $1400 worth of electricity and gas over a year. Half of that--- half!-- went to the A/C and gas furnace. But what can be done? We've had quite a few salespeople try to persuade us to spend $10000 to upgrade the windows to dual pane. Also had a few float other ideas such as adding heat reflective material to the underside of the roof, or a roof peak vent. These ideas are not economical. Even if we got the absolute maximum of a 50% reduction in heating and cooling costs that the window sellers suggest is possible, that's only saving us $350 per year. Will take nearly 30 years to pay back those windows. This cheap cookie cutter house with foundation cracks might well be condemned and torn down before that happens. And suppose we don't get 50%, suppose it's only a 25% savings on heating and cooling? Oops, 60 year payback now. Or suppose the A/C fails after 10 years, and the replacement A/C is twice as efficient? That's actually rather likely. Our unit is rated at 12 SEER, and new units start at 13, and go past 20. Similar story with the gas furnace. It's only 80% efficient, mainly because it's not a condensing type which can get efficiencies of at least 95% .
Our economy is geared towards a great deal of waste. We put a lot of effort into convincing people that they must have more, always more. Manufacturers make selfish decisions that save them a few pennies in exchange for costing the buyer much more in energy. Door to door salespeople want to sell you on expensive home remodeling projects that will profit them more, rather than cheap ones that actually make sense.
Sub optimal for one purpose does not make it sub optimal. You're not asking for a sub optimal route, you're asking for the best route that satisfies some additional constraints.
Anyway, this kind of garbage is why the US inaugurated the numbered highway system in 1926. Before that, roads were promoted by private organizations that were not above directing travelers on sub optimal routes, in order to increase business at favored towns, which of course paid for the privelege. An example is the Bee Line Highway (now US 31) between Nashville and Birmingham. The original boosters lost control of the group that promoted the highway, and the new people tried to run the route through Gadsden, adding about 50 miles to the trip.
Sadly, I think the gender attack is not totally unjustified, even if it is unfair. What I mean is, computer science and engineering disciplines are dominated by men. CS is so skewed it's sunk to something like 10% female, which is the greatest disparaty among all the disciplines. Why this has happened is still a mystery. But because of the extreme disparity, the convenient mental shortcut of just assuming that any particular woman is bad at technology will be correct much more often than not.
It does sound like Whitman is not technically inclined. What sort of person should lead a technology company like HP? Who else but someone like the founders? We've seen that pure management, people skills, and contacts is not enough. Sculley's tenure at Apple is the iconic example. EBay is not primarily a technology company, they're an auction house that uses technology. The leader of HP absolutely has to have a feel for technology, and a stint at the helm of EBay doesn't qualify a person.
HP very badly needs to figure out what directions to go. Printers won't be a cash cow forever. And can't settle for being a mere producer of PCs, a sorry clone of Dell. What has become of the memristors they were supposedly producing?
Drama.
The media loves the Dow because it can always be trusted to make dramatic moves. The S&P just isn't as exciting.
I keep expecting Apple to come crashing back to earth, but it keeps right on defying gravity.
This is why I still have a Yahoo account. When I created it, Gmail and Hotmail did not exist. And the university couldn't be trusted to treat email professionally. Lost some newly received emails once when they reverted to a day old backup. Spam handling was haphazard. Admittedly, Yahoo doesn't do such a great job there either. Of course the university account was nuked shortly after I graduated. They ought to have a policy to retain email accounts. Great way to keep alumni in touch, I would think. Instead, they'd rather offer you credit card, landline, and auto insurance deals through snail mail. Doesn't look good when the bastions of higher education aren't with the times.
I tried to set up a web of forwarding accounts, to keep emails sorted. Had separate addresses for professional, business, family, friends, online games, etc. Most of it collapsed when most of the email forwarding sites folded.
I tried to save some money by printing up proxies. Scan, print, and slide into a sleeve, on top of some worthless common card. It was amazing how people vehemently objected to that. Acted as if I'd committed a crime, and as if that was cheating. Demanded to know whether I had the actual cards. Why should they care? It's not like they were stockholders. It's like they paid for their cards, and they wanted you to share that misery! Was another factor that helped me decide to quit MtG. Sad to see people acting like a bunch of rabid sheep. Tragic: The Spending indeed.
All these people complaining about being nickeled and dimed with temptations must not have ever been on the subscription model. Subscribing to EQ was one of the biggest gaming mistakes I ever made, right up there with playing the bottomless pit of spending known as Magic the Gathering. On the subscription model, I felt pressured to play, because it was costing me money. Not playing felt like buying a ticket to a movie, and then missing it. But playing so easily became a grind. I found it much easier to ignore the temptation to buy extras than to let a sunk cost go. Throwing good time after bad money. I finally quit EQ, and didn't replace it with anything until LOTRO went F2P. Some friends tried to suck me into WoW, but I declined, and now they don't play any more themselves. Burned out. Now I can play much more casually, just a few hours per month, without it costing a small fortune.
Still need a game where we can run the servers, a sort of "P2PMMORPG". I don't like that an MMORPG could shut down. I thought Neverwinter Nights might be it, but was not impressed with its editor.
The incentives are perverse and the mechanisms are not workable. That's the core of the problem for both copyrights and patents. Of all the ways to compensate artists and scientists, we just had to pick... monopolies? We've seen time and again that monopolies are bad. They're easy to abuse, and they are abused. They're very negative. They're all about denial and control of things that shouldn't be and can't be controlled. Just the sort of thing to attract abusive, controlling psychopaths, and it has.
Now we have entire industries built on acquiring these monopolies for outrageously low amounts, and hoarding and monetizing them. Remember, these are the guys who brought us such lovely terms as "Hollywood Accounting" and "Payola". They steal from the artists even as they accuse us of that. They've fought technology at every turn. They want to turn the Information Superhighway into a tollroad, with themselves as the gatekeepers. We have an entire generation driven underground, accused and very guilty of the non-crime known as "sharing" but called by the fiery slanted names of "piracy" and "theft". Yet that hasn't been enough for the extremists. They're constantly trying to broaden the meaning, length, and scope of the monopoly protections. They keep trying to transfer costs to the public while at the same time brainwashing and diverting us with the whole "starving artists deserve to be paid" and "copying is stealing" emotional appeals. They try to turn universities and ISPs into copyright police. They would like to destroy the used bookstore and the public library. They've had far too much success at all that. The system is very costly to run, and does not really work. Plus, as concentrations of media and media rights, they are a lot more vulnerable to censorship and loss.
Nice troll. Now face it, copyright is doomed and dying. No amount of whining and name calling will stop the world from advancing. You speak of fairness? It is unfair of you to want to hold us all back for the sake of a broken business model that never was much good, or necessary.
Why do you worship at the altar of copyright? You aren't capable of seeing any other way, anything at all, for encouraging the arts and sciences? You're afraid of change? It will be a much, much better world when copyright is gone.
Bittorrent works that way, but there are many P2P protocols that don't. How may total bytes did the person upload? About the number of bytes in the song file. Doesn't matter if that was 1/100th of the bytes 100 times, or all the bytes once. The technical details of the protocol do not matter for the argument I am making.
An individual couldn't have uploaded a song 1 billion times. Even just 100 times is very, very unlikely. Consider something known as amortization.
In this case, anyone can download a song from anyone else that has it. The maximum number of downloads required is the number of people in the network. Therefore, the amortized number of uploads per person is 1. It's highly unlikely anyone will upload any song more than a few times. That's how file sharing really works. Besides which, no private individual's connection is fast enough to support hundreds of uploads every day.
But these guys are trying to argue that an average uploader is no different than a manufacturer of physical media with bootleg songs. In that scenario, very few people can manufacture the media. Those who do could sell thousands of copies. Unfortunately, the judges and juries have bought this ridiculous argument.
That's still not all. The whole issue shouldn't be in the courts at all! Sharing of information should never have been criminalized. This college student is being tortured by the Copyright Inquisition, in hopes that the rest of us will be scared away from reaping the immense value the Internet has brought us all. Doesn't matter how severly they torture their victim, they can't stop us from using the Internet. What's been done to the student is cruel, senseless, and ineffective.
I would go much further, and in a different direction.
The problem with any patent can be summed up in one word: monopoly. But that's the direction we took, in order to come up with a fair price for an invention. Enforce a monopoly for the owners, and leave it up to them to figure out how to profit from it, if they can. Attempting to enforcing these monopolies costs us a great deal of money.
It's wrong on so many levels to grant a monopoly on an idea. It assumes the recipient is the only one in the world who could have done it. It overlooks that the recipient built on millenia of human advancement. It also forces dilemmas on the recipients, in how to collect their due. Individual inventors can spend lots of time trying to become experts in all kinds of areas that aren't related to their specialties, which of course takes them away from good work they could be doing. Or they have to seek out legal and business specialists, and hope the people they deal with don't turn out to be sharks looking to cheat them. Corporate inventors' work is already owned by their employers, as a condition of employment, and what they receive is solely what their employer is willing to pay in bonuses, which can be nothing. Worst of all, it adds to the huge pile of patents that hinder everyone, working against its purpose of advancing the arts and sciences.
So I would get rid of the monopoly protection part, and compensate inventors some other way. Handing out a monopoly is like giving paper currency to a starving man in a desert, where there is no food for sale.
I wonder if the biggest obstacles aren't political.
1. Manufacturers don't want competitors to know the ingredients.
2. They also want to keep ingredients from public and government scrutiny and oversight.
3. And as usual, everyone fights change, no matter how beneficial.
Already did. The new $350 water heater is working fine so far. Yes, its longevity is a big concern. They all have warranties in multiples of 3 years, and their share of bad reviews. I avoided the models with the 3 year warranties. If the thing dies just after the 6 year warranty expires, then I haven't done so well. But as I said, I'm also just trying to gain a little more time for solar to get significantly cheaper. I hear tankless was much more expensive a few years ago, and that in the near term the price for solar may collapse just as tankless has. Maybe 6 years will be enough time.
As for the tap water temperatures, I am in the DFW area in Texas. It can freeze here, and we have had epic ice a few times (it's epic because no one around here knows how to drive on the stuff, not because it's thick). But on the whole, winters are mild. Still, that's a good point. Probably my annual cost was a bit higher than $180. I also have a gas furnace, and to remove that from the data, I used the summer months to figure what the water heater uses.
I do not say green is impractical! To the contrary. But I also try not to be swept up in the hype. I am not particularly fond of hybrid cars, not when there's still so much more we can do with conventional ones. Locking the torque converter of a conventional automatic, or replacing it with some other kind of tranny is big, big savings. Aerodynamic work on the undersides and wheel wells of cars is another. What's really aggravating about a car like the Prius is that they've poured all this money into the hybrid power train, and not done a thing to smooth the underside. It's hard to take their green credentials seriously when they ignore such simple, basic, and cheap improvements. The 1st generation Honda Insight was considerably better in that regard.
First, for the OP, quit using that phrase "scientists believe", especially in a discussion about global warming. Deniers love to interpret that word "believe" as evidence that scientists and science are no different than religion. Instead, say something like "scientists think".
Now, about that grey water reclamation. Last week, our 27 year old natural gas powered tank water heater rusted through and started leaking. I looked into gas tankless and solar. A cheap new gas powered tank heater is $350. The cheapest tankless one I found was $800. And then I'd have to convert the vent tubing to stainless steel for an additional $220, add a 1/2" to 3/4" adapter to the natural gas connection, add more water piping to connect to the bottom of the unit, and add in some sort of non flammable support structure as the tankless unit is not freestanding, all of which could easily cost another $200. At prices starting at $5000, solar was right out. There's really no reason for solar to be that expensive, but there it is. There are higher efficiency tanks, but those were also way high, at $960, and are only a little better. I estimated a higher efficiency tank would save me $2/month, which means a payback period of 25 years. If the tank doesn't last 25 years, which is likely, then I've lost. So I grudgingly went with the cheap tank, and still got a nice improvement. According to the labels, the old heater required $381/year to operate, and the new one needs only $254/year. But I keep the hot water temperature fairly low, and don't use that much. I estimate I was paying only $180/year to operate the old one. Ideas like reclaiming the heat from grey water would be fine if the up front cost wasn't so large as to cast doubt it would ever pay for itself. I'm not talking a payback period of 20 years, which is bad enough, I'm talking a payback period of never. The tank gains me another 5 years at a minimum, by which time I hope the price of solar will be reasonable. I sure wasn't interested in spending another $1000 or so to convert to tankless, only to see that surpassed by solar. Solar is where I ultimately want to go. As well as having the most potential to save energy, it also gets rid of the dangers of using gas.
Green tech has earned a dubious reputation of ignoring practicality. We should focus more on the stuff that we know is worth doing, as long as there's plenty to do, and there is.
They aren't the same. Tax code complexities can easily make that $100 vanish. You forget the US's little game with standard deduction and itemized deduction. You have to itemize to claim many of these tax breaks. If the itemized amount + that $100 tax break is less than the standard deduction, which can easily happen if you don't have mortgage payments, then those tax breaks are useless to you. (If you itemize, you can deduct mortgage payments, but not rental payments, because the US wants citizens to be homeowners, not renters.) Poor renters miss out, and rich homeowners get another break.
Itemized deductions? That's the biggest tax scam of all. Do it, and your chances of being audited go way up.
The tax code is the US's favorite place to enact policy, right where the poor can't use it. You can deduct mortgage payments, but not rent, because the government wants you to be a homeowner. Without mortgage payments (or cheating!), it's hard for an individual to come up with enough deductions to equal the standard deduction.
Recently, they've made various energy efficient home improvements deductable. Useless, when you're the renter but you pay the energy bills. There's no reason for the landlords to make these improvements when they don't pay for the energy. Even if you were crazy enough to spend your own money to upgrade the rental property, you still might not be able to use the tax break, because the standard deduction is more.
We all have dogs in this fight. We can't hide from the risks of being accused of piracy. Even not owning a computer or lacking an Internet connection is no guarantee of safety.
If you receive a letter from your ISP about supposed piracy on your connection, change your ISP if you can. They're spying on you. Not much difference between that and being watched by a Peeping Tom neighbor.
The long term answer is to get this "illegal activity" decriminalized. The activity should not be illegal. But how are we going to get the law changed if we're too scared to fight it? I don't mean running around filing countersuits or writing letters to our representatives, though that might help too. I mean passive aggression. Everyone should keep right on downloading. We have numbers on our side. Let them continue to make idiots of themselves by accusing entire nations of piracy.
Spaghetti code is pretty much gone because, except for rare grumbles about things like "multiple entry points" and that an assembler expert can still write more efficient code than a compiler, Structured Programming is clearly superior.
OOP, the next generation paradigm, has not displaced Structured Programming in any way close to the same extent. Why? Because it's not unequivocally better. Doesn't help that C++ is an especially poor realization of OOP. Name mangling? Templates? No automatic garbage collection? iostream? But those are only details. The major problem is with OOP, not C++. Class hierarchies can impose structure that is both unnecessary and detrimental. To avoid that, one doesn't use it. But then you have to ask yourself, why even use an OOP language? Polymorphism is cute, but it sure looks lame next to what Functional Programming can do.
Take hope in one important improvement: We did not support Mubarak, not this time, despite his friendliness with the US.
In the past, our government would have supported the ruler, as long as he professed friendship with the US, despite what US citizens or their people thought. The polite explanation was always "stability". Not so polite is "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard". Then the ruler and his cronies continue milking their people, who then hate us for supporting him. This always causes trouble, and undermines the very stability we sought. It's about time our government got smarter about this. Rulers who exploit and suppress their own people cannot be real friends of ours.
The US Government is as much victim as perpetrator. Haven't you been listening to the US right's hatred and contempt for government? And their proclivity for blanket statements and oversimplifications? It's expressed so well in this Reagan quote: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Our scientists and researchers do their jobs and come up with answers, and the right ignores them or makes ridiculous accusations of bias and incompetence. We pay for this attitude in many ways, not least being the low morale among bureaucrats. These hypocrites who profess such hatred for government are not shy about abusing and expanding government power when they are in control. The only parts of the government they like unconditionally, and like entirely too much, are the parts to do with security and force.
Links? Wikipedia and search engines are your friends. Reynolds has a Wikipedia entry.
Housing is one of the easiest things to criticize. It's full of incredibly wasteful methods and customs. Much of the work is done on site, rather than at a plant. They all just have to have fireplaces. I don't know about you, but if the fireplace was a $10000 optional item, I'd nix it in a heartbeat. What I find craziest are these people who will pony up $300000 or $500000, or more, and all they get is a larger version of the same old stuff. If you can afford that much, why wouldn't you put some of that money into practical things, like better insulation, double pane windows, a bit of solar water heating, etc.
Reynolds is the Earthship stuff. There's an Earthship housing development west of Taos, NM on hwy 64. They make houses out of old tires and bottles. It's interesting, and a little strange. I got a sense that the residents do not appreciate it. They view themselves as poor and hard done by, and act like they're stuck in these houses rather than proud of them. Didn't get much in the way of hard numbers about the building costs, maintenance, energy and water usage, so it's hard to judge.
In contrast, the Rocky Mountain Institute is one of the more scientific of the sustainable housing efforts.
That's why you do things gradually, not cold turkey. What if we simply said that starting 1 year from now, no more patent filings would be accepted? Current patents would remain valid. People who had been working towards a patent would have 1 year to finish their work and submit it. About 22 years from now, the last patents would expire, and we'd be completely free of them.
Software should not be patentable. Mathematical formulas are not patentable. Should Einstein have just "given away" Relativity? That's such a loaded question on so many levels. It implies that he suffered a loss, through his own carelessness in managing his work. Telling some information to the world is not really giving it away, though that expression is commonly used in this context. The information was never property to begin with. It didn't belong to Einstein or anyone else. Had he not announced it, eventually someone else would have figured out the same ideas.
Our very language gets us into trouble, using such possessive terminology. We say "I have an idea" when we mean "I thought of an idea", and "I have a car" when we mean "I possess a car". You might think of the same idea, independently. Then we both "have" the idea. That can't happen with a material good. But the terminology works against us, tempting us to treat these very different things the same, because we are using the same words. It's sick the way people grab and cling to ideas, futilely trying to keep them hostage, trying to shake a "fair" price out of the world, all the while wailing about theft and piracy and how is a starving inventor is to make a living.
Is it really? What's your source?
It doesn't matter if he has nothing. What matters is that people believe the patent system covers ideas. Chilling Effects. This believe is so pervasive now that patents in effect do cover ideas. We have software patents and business method patents. Even if technically Apple has no grounds to stand on, they can still credibly threaten to sue, because they might win. Could a jury of average people make such a fine distinction as that between an idea and an implementation of an idea, with the lawyers doing their utmost to cast the issue in very different ways? Besides, they aren't really interested in a win, they'd rather it not actually go to trial at all. This is blackmail, not a serious and righteous reaction to a real injustice, and the punishment is not a loss in a court case which is of course uncertain, but the guarantee that a trial will cause expenses and delays no matter what the outcome.