You have those no matter that kind of plant you use. Nobody wants a coal or nuclear plant in their yard, hydroelectric requires... well, enough water to supply the power needed, and even gas plants tend to be in low rent districts. why are these transmission line losses suddenly so notable when the power comes from solar?
The solar field in california (bakersfield, I believe) uses high temperature collectors, molten brine, and a stirling engine to generate power, and so far as I know the best that's done is about 30%. You can get very nearly that right now from concentrated PV - a single cell a few inches on a side can supply as much power as a whole panel if it's made properly, the rest of the assembly is just mirror and a cooling manifold (which also provides a steady supply of heat for storage). This is present day tech - within the next decade there's serious talk of multilayer cells that can go as high as 60% efficiency in concentrated applications. That could mean a kW supplied by as little as 16 sq. in. of semiconductor material.
I didn't look at the pdf to see if it uses a heat closet, but the fact is most of that "high tech" ain't expensive at all - heat storage, for example, is just well insulated water jugs. PVC pipe ain't that expensive, neither is foam or styrene insulation. You can store hundreds of thousands of BTUs in a solar closet that only takes up a few square feet of floor space. Combine that with a roof collector and a fifty dollar pump and you have all the heat you need for water and heat - and you can use the space to dry clothes, no electric dryer needed. That's the equivalent of three conventional appliances occupying about the same amount of floor space as one in a conventional house - and it's not much more expensive to construct than buying a regular old water heater.
By the time you ditch the heater, air conditioner, water heater, dishwasher... how much money do you think that saves? The stove and fridge will be more expensive than "conventional" but the fridge is only maybe twice as expensive, the stove less than that.
My dream home isn't even this big - I've been working on plans for one roughly half this size, constructed on part of an old house trailer frame. I had an office in the back (now used as a storage shed) roughly 10x12 feet, 2x4 walls and one layer of fiberglass insulation - even when it was ten degrees outside I sometimes had to open the door to cool the place off because the heat from the computer and stereo would get the place so hot.
A developer here in Mississippi has been building tiny homes for years and has, pretty much by himself, converted a run down part of town into a fairly high rent community - there's a "church" (where my buddy used to live) and across from that what looks like a Beale Street hotel, and several other small homes. It looks almost like a toy model of New Orleans, and the houses are very practical. It's just a matter of accepting the paradigm - once you stop saying it can't be done, one quickly realizes just how practical it can be.
What you just described is Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar magazine. It was one of the first online and even offered BBS access to usenet to its members way back when even Playboy had yet to come to the internet. They were my email address for years and the thousands of posts I made to usenet will, I guess, forever linger in the google archive.
Anyway, it seems nobody remembers steve, because I expected to see someone here mention how this magazine looks pretty much like a "mainstream" version of Circuit Cellar. The whole "aerial photography with a kite" thing was done AGES ago in that magazine - as well as helium balloons, hot air balloons, rockets and R/C airplanes, helicopters, and cars (and, I believe I recall, even model trains). And "home control" was the project that got steve started on all this way back when. The magazine often cooperates with manufacturers of chips to sponsor design contests, and some really nice projects have evolved from this.
MS has oodles more "installed systems" than linux. Now, I personally take great pride in that I support others with linux systems and have even moved MS users away to linux - but the fact remains MS controls lots of seats that will probably never even consider linux. The fact is, windows is already free - the only thing holding ms back are these antiquated notions about their source code.
Now, think what might happen if all that desktop code was opened up to little ISVs. No one said OSS has to be the gnu license - all the good stuff about linux could end up happening in the windows world, and MS would still control the essence of it all. Heck, they might even get enough help to get that fancy new desktop done on schedule...
Quite honestly, I think we're rapidly approaching the day when that power becomes moot. I think the management at MS will look back on these days in another decade and realize they made the biggest business world blunder of the century by not embracing an OSS license early - and retaining all those folks who have already made, and are making, the not-so-distant leap to the alternative.
Most of the people using P2P networks are stealing.... This is something that most slashdotters don't seem to understand.
Wrong. I cannot speak for "most slashdotters" but I can say with some certainty that, in this case, it ain't a matter of understanding on their (our?) part. It's simply a matter of ethical disagreement. You cannot make a logical argument someone is "stealing" when there is no opportunity to deprive others of the work.
Simple as that... you (and the other corporate parrots who have shown an inability to think for themselves) are just plain wrong in that assertion. You can try other arguments, but to say "sharing is stealing" is idiocy at its finest - and you will never win over any thinking individual with such a trite "argument."
If the artist made the music I wanted and to my specificatins then I would be stealing his or her time if I did not pay for the work. If an artist comes to my house and plays for me and I do not pay, I am stealing that time from them.
Can you really not understand the difference between this and a recorded work they created of their own volition?
Listening to people like me is like walking into a jail? I would say "people like you" already are in jail - you're in a corporate prison, and you're too addled to realize it.
You through? The tell me what makes it "their music" - and who "they" be? The record execs? Surely you aren't arguing that - those guys couldn't invent their way out of an inflatable pool.
Because if what I said is "your point exactly" then you blew it royally. Once a media product - movie, music, software - is made, then it (unlike someone's time, which very much is a finite resource and, therefore, quite tangible) can be split, essentially, infinitely.
just as soon as you figure out how to duplicate my time for free. Hell, you tell me how to do that and I'll work for you the rest of your natural life - after all, I would have all the time in the world if I knew how to split my time infinitely. While I was working for you I could work for a few others and then be off blowing that income living in some nice third world country where life is cheap and american dollars priceless.
Ability to pay has nothing to do with it. If you care about an artist you will support that artist. If you don't care, you won't - it's simple as that. Does this mean you have no right to listen to their music? Of course not - no more than you have no right to enjoy a Neiman hanging on the wall of a museum... or filling your desktop background.
It's amazing how the music and movie industry has managed to brainwash so many people. Reading the comments of so many of you is like walking into an aviary filled with one type of bird. I'll leave it to you to figure out which...
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc)..
Where is the corporation's motive to do this? Why should they let you feel good about giving Neil Young fifty bucks for all his hard work so you can then feel justified in not buying the round silver things the corporation sells?
Bands already do this. You can order CDs online from many bands, but damn few of them are on major labels. Allowing bands to get income that doesn't come from the massas in the sharkskin suits would utterly destroy the hollywood power base - it just ain't gonna happen.
Siouxsie and Budgie travel he world, play, sell CDs from a chateau in France. And even though they had a name before they spun off on their own it took years for Sioux records to get the kind of distribution that would allow someone to order one of their CDs from Amazon or Border's - in fact, had it not been for that kind of competition it's easily argued they would still be looking for a distribution deal. It will get better in the future - but record labels setting up "tip jars" for the artists they control ain't quite likely...
Is it moral that we, in an industrialized society are forced to compete (on any footing, much less wages) with political prisoners in china? With people who have been so oppressed by their government the opportunity to work for a dollar a day in a factory is a step up in the world? With nations that have few or no environmental laws and no organizations to protect the rights of the employees?
"The world economy" has reduced all our laws to the lowest common denominator. It has resulted in our nation passing increasingly immoral laws in the name of protecting corporate profits. Information is now the one product where corporations will not be able to regulate the proletariat through threat of outsourcing, so they struggle for artificial regulation. Apparently you stand on the side of the corporations on all these issues... and likewise consider it moral to deprive someone of something which is freer than air and that costs us, as a society, nothing. I don't.
If it means "this is ok but I wouldn't buy it" then so what? At least the listener is going to be that much more likely to "preview" the next release.
The argument about "everything is free and no one pays" is utterly stupid and a lame duck. Besides the people who have made an overt decision to boycott this industry, I personally don't know a single person who never buys music they like. Everyone I know downloads music and, so far as I can tell, not one of them has actually boycotted the industry or never buys new work (and this includes myself, who HAS boycotted the US music industry - I still buy plenty of stuff from overseas). Perhaps a small sampling, but I doubt anyone reading this can point to a single person they know who never buys but downloads large amounts of media.
it all comes down to the free market. Either you believe in it, or you don't. Apparently many of you believe in freedom just so long as it doesn't mean you have to practice it.
It's not stealing anything. Unless, of course, you also consider it stealing jobs when our "free market" (backed by a constitution that protects those other freedoms) is forced to compete "on an even footing" with enslaved nations like china.
It's either a "free world economy" or it isn't. You can parrot the corporations all you like - your arguments will then remain just as irrational and moot.
Gee, that's right... because artifical barriers erected by governments always work... right?
How about this? we all support speech we like, don't support that we don't like, and let the fucking free market (that thing the entertainment industry likes to spin but doesn't believe in any more than most of us believe in Santa Claus) decide where the money goes.
You need a database created? Fine - if you can get it free, so what? That means I have to come up with some way to add value to it, or I make no money. It means I contribute or I perish... gee, what a novel fucking concept: people actually succeeding based on their own merit - without government intervention.
You know, since the ho-town crackdown on "internet reedom" I have resolved not to buy anything from them. This is in spite of the fact I left virtually all my music cds behind but I still have the sleeves and CD jackets - hey I wonder if they would just GIVE me the CDs since I already bought them?
I have avoided making purchases in spite of the fact I used to spend - literally - thousands of dollars a year on records, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Through most of my life, in fact, because I'm one of those "artsy" types who likes to have lots of the good stuff around. You think I don't miss my Smashing Pumpkins collection? My Alice Cooper discography? Sgt. Peppers?
You think it doesn't suck boycotting these motherfuckers? You really think none of us are making sacrifices? You think I can't tell the difference in sound between the MP3 rips available most places and the CD? I wish these motherfuckers would pull their heads out of their asses and get it together to the point I didn't feel like a traitor to my ethics (not to mention my Constitution) when I entertain the notion of giving them my money to replace the tangible items I have lost.
Because those corrupt Russians don't have the same laws we have here, spending money on stuff properly licensed, but in a struggling economy, is really just "stealing?"
Errrmm... I mean, unless you're an international corporation. Then exploiting cost loopholes and licensing structures is just free market economics.
So, if I buy a cutout from the record store, that's not stealing? Wait... that's not, in fact, "paying to steal?"
Man, did your momma have any offspring that can think for themselves?
Re:Files they've just taken and not bought or dele
on
The File Sharing Report
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What about all of the files that these people continue to listen to, but don't delete or buy legit copies of?
What about it? Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth.
How much of their music do they actually own?
Unless they are a music publisher, none of it. You think those CDs you bought means you "own" that music?
You bought a CD. You can sell the CD. The CD only happens to contain the music - scratch it so it doesn't play, then see how much you can get for it.
Now, where there is no tangible good, there is no "loss" and no ability to deprive others - and, therefore, no ownership. As someone who just lost about 40GB of music to the brain-dead mandrake partition manager, I can personally attest to this - the "loss" was entirely my own.
My friends like to tell me that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so downloading it doesn't hurt anybody. This may be true in some cases, but I think most of the time people just decide that they wouldn't have bought it post download.
I'm sorry you missed this, because that's the whole freaking point!.
Actually, many FCC regulations are passed by the board - they are not laws, they are regulations. Congress has given the FCC the authority to regulate the airwaves and may pass laws to help with this, but the FCC has always demonstrated quite a bit of leeway in enforcing rules as it sees fit.
When they still had the heirarchy, getting a first class radiotelephone license granted an individual a certain amount of "power" to assist the FCC in enforcement. You could even carry a badge if you so chose, as a public servant. Of course, the "power" of that badge is almost entirely imaginary... just like the FCC's. Much of what they get away with, they do so only because they are allowed.
You cannot provide access to University resources to non-University folks.
Again I'll ask: what back-woods university do you represent? Hope it's not a publicly funded university - if word got out about this "policy" you might just have to deal with the protestations of a mob of angry taxpayers.
State and other public universities have a responsibility to the community that supports them. Do you also have no provision for local residents to audit classes at substantially reduced tuition, or enter and use the library? How is denying on-site access to the internet any different than denying these things?
Where on earth are you? Here in the "backwards south" I can go to the local university library, plug in my laptop, and do pretty much anything I want or need to do. No ID card, no "members only" - as a taxpayer I should be able to use certain facilities of my local, taxpayer supported, university... and I can.
There is wireless support as well as wired, but I have never tried the wireless so I do not know if the encryption engine they use requires a university network account. But considering anyone with a laptop can sit down at a computer and do what they need to do (or perhaps even easier, anyone without a laptop just to sit down at one of the provided PCs) then what is served by locking down the wireless AP? No one is asking for ID to use the faclity; unless they have tracking cameras there's little hope of "policing" illegal activity, so why worry about this great, imagined, "wireless security hole?"
"Swipe the IPs?" So, your basic model for security is security through obscurity? And you are trusting your own users - thousands of teenagers, many away from home for the first time in their lives - not to run port sniffers and do other bad stuff? You know, here in Mississippi the admins are known to use things like firewalls (for the important stuff) and DMZs (like at the library). You might look into that...
Slashdot Mirror
the makings of a tiny trailer park
The solar field in california (bakersfield, I believe) uses high temperature collectors, molten brine, and a stirling engine to generate power, and so far as I know the best that's done is about 30%. You can get very nearly that right now from concentrated PV - a single cell a few inches on a side can supply as much power as a whole panel if it's made properly, the rest of the assembly is just mirror and a cooling manifold (which also provides a steady supply of heat for storage). This is present day tech - within the next decade there's serious talk of multilayer cells that can go as high as 60% efficiency in concentrated applications. That could mean a kW supplied by as little as 16 sq. in. of semiconductor material.
By the time you ditch the heater, air conditioner, water heater, dishwasher... how much money do you think that saves? The stove and fridge will be more expensive than "conventional" but the fridge is only maybe twice as expensive, the stove less than that.
My dream home isn't even this big - I've been working on plans for one roughly half this size, constructed on part of an old house trailer frame. I had an office in the back (now used as a storage shed) roughly 10x12 feet, 2x4 walls and one layer of fiberglass insulation - even when it was ten degrees outside I sometimes had to open the door to cool the place off because the heat from the computer and stereo would get the place so hot.
A developer here in Mississippi has been building tiny homes for years and has, pretty much by himself, converted a run down part of town into a fairly high rent community - there's a "church" (where my buddy used to live) and across from that what looks like a Beale Street hotel, and several other small homes. It looks almost like a toy model of New Orleans, and the houses are very practical. It's just a matter of accepting the paradigm - once you stop saying it can't be done, one quickly realizes just how practical it can be.
Anyway, it seems nobody remembers steve, because I expected to see someone here mention how this magazine looks pretty much like a "mainstream" version of Circuit Cellar. The whole "aerial photography with a kite" thing was done AGES ago in that magazine - as well as helium balloons, hot air balloons, rockets and R/C airplanes, helicopters, and cars (and, I believe I recall, even model trains). And "home control" was the project that got steve started on all this way back when. The magazine often cooperates with manufacturers of chips to sponsor design contests, and some really nice projects have evolved from this.
Now, think what might happen if all that desktop code was opened up to little ISVs. No one said OSS has to be the gnu license - all the good stuff about linux could end up happening in the windows world, and MS would still control the essence of it all. Heck, they might even get enough help to get that fancy new desktop done on schedule...
Quite honestly, I think we're rapidly approaching the day when that power becomes moot. I think the management at MS will look back on these days in another decade and realize they made the biggest business world blunder of the century by not embracing an OSS license early - and retaining all those folks who have already made, and are making, the not-so-distant leap to the alternative.
Wrong. I cannot speak for "most slashdotters" but I can say with some certainty that, in this case, it ain't a matter of understanding on their (our?) part. It's simply a matter of ethical disagreement. You cannot make a logical argument someone is "stealing" when there is no opportunity to deprive others of the work.
Simple as that... you (and the other corporate parrots who have shown an inability to think for themselves) are just plain wrong in that assertion. You can try other arguments, but to say "sharing is stealing" is idiocy at its finest - and you will never win over any thinking individual with such a trite "argument."
You can't even spell it - and it's obvious you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Ciao.
No.
You really suck at this. No soup for you!
Can you really not understand the difference between this and a recorded work they created of their own volition?
You through? The tell me what makes it "their music" - and who "they" be? The record execs? Surely you aren't arguing that - those guys couldn't invent their way out of an inflatable pool.
Think time is intangible? You must be young.
It's amazing how the music and movie industry has managed to brainwash so many people. Reading the comments of so many of you is like walking into an aviary filled with one type of bird. I'll leave it to you to figure out which...
Where is the corporation's motive to do this? Why should they let you feel good about giving Neil Young fifty bucks for all his hard work so you can then feel justified in not buying the round silver things the corporation sells?
Bands already do this. You can order CDs online from many bands, but damn few of them are on major labels. Allowing bands to get income that doesn't come from the massas in the sharkskin suits would utterly destroy the hollywood power base - it just ain't gonna happen.
Siouxsie and Budgie travel he world, play, sell CDs from a chateau in France. And even though they had a name before they spun off on their own it took years for Sioux records to get the kind of distribution that would allow someone to order one of their CDs from Amazon or Border's - in fact, had it not been for that kind of competition it's easily argued they would still be looking for a distribution deal. It will get better in the future - but record labels setting up "tip jars" for the artists they control ain't quite likely...
"The world economy" has reduced all our laws to the lowest common denominator. It has resulted in our nation passing increasingly immoral laws in the name of protecting corporate profits. Information is now the one product where corporations will not be able to regulate the proletariat through threat of outsourcing, so they struggle for artificial regulation. Apparently you stand on the side of the corporations on all these issues... and likewise consider it moral to deprive someone of something which is freer than air and that costs us, as a society, nothing. I don't.
The argument about "everything is free and no one pays" is utterly stupid and a lame duck. Besides the people who have made an overt decision to boycott this industry, I personally don't know a single person who never buys music they like. Everyone I know downloads music and, so far as I can tell, not one of them has actually boycotted the industry or never buys new work (and this includes myself, who HAS boycotted the US music industry - I still buy plenty of stuff from overseas). Perhaps a small sampling, but I doubt anyone reading this can point to a single person they know who never buys but downloads large amounts of media.
it all comes down to the free market. Either you believe in it, or you don't. Apparently many of you believe in freedom just so long as it doesn't mean you have to practice it.
It's either a "free world economy" or it isn't. You can parrot the corporations all you like - your arguments will then remain just as irrational and moot.
How about this? we all support speech we like, don't support that we don't like, and let the fucking free market (that thing the entertainment industry likes to spin but doesn't believe in any more than most of us believe in Santa Claus) decide where the money goes.
You need a database created? Fine - if you can get it free, so what? That means I have to come up with some way to add value to it, or I make no money. It means I contribute or I perish... gee, what a novel fucking concept: people actually succeeding based on their own merit - without government intervention.
I have avoided making purchases in spite of the fact I used to spend - literally - thousands of dollars a year on records, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Through most of my life, in fact, because I'm one of those "artsy" types who likes to have lots of the good stuff around. You think I don't miss my Smashing Pumpkins collection? My Alice Cooper discography? Sgt. Peppers?
You think it doesn't suck boycotting these motherfuckers? You really think none of us are making sacrifices? You think I can't tell the difference in sound between the MP3 rips available most places and the CD? I wish these motherfuckers would pull their heads out of their asses and get it together to the point I didn't feel like a traitor to my ethics (not to mention my Constitution) when I entertain the notion of giving them my money to replace the tangible items I have lost.
Errrmm... I mean, unless you're an international corporation. Then exploiting cost loopholes and licensing structures is just free market economics.
Man, did your momma have any offspring that can think for themselves?
What about it? Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth.
How much of their music do they actually own?
Unless they are a music publisher, none of it. You think those CDs you bought means you "own" that music?
You bought a CD. You can sell the CD. The CD only happens to contain the music - scratch it so it doesn't play, then see how much you can get for it.
Now, where there is no tangible good, there is no "loss" and no ability to deprive others - and, therefore, no ownership. As someone who just lost about 40GB of music to the brain-dead mandrake partition manager, I can personally attest to this - the "loss" was entirely my own.
My friends like to tell me that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so downloading it doesn't hurt anybody. This may be true in some cases, but I think most of the time people just decide that they wouldn't have bought it post download.
I'm sorry you missed this, because that's the whole freaking point!.
Think about that part again...
When they still had the heirarchy, getting a first class radiotelephone license granted an individual a certain amount of "power" to assist the FCC in enforcement. You could even carry a badge if you so chose, as a public servant. Of course, the "power" of that badge is almost entirely imaginary... just like the FCC's. Much of what they get away with, they do so only because they are allowed.
Again I'll ask: what back-woods university do you represent? Hope it's not a publicly funded university - if word got out about this "policy" you might just have to deal with the protestations of a mob of angry taxpayers.
State and other public universities have a responsibility to the community that supports them. Do you also have no provision for local residents to audit classes at substantially reduced tuition, or enter and use the library? How is denying on-site access to the internet any different than denying these things?
There is wireless support as well as wired, but I have never tried the wireless so I do not know if the encryption engine they use requires a university network account. But considering anyone with a laptop can sit down at a computer and do what they need to do (or perhaps even easier, anyone without a laptop just to sit down at one of the provided PCs) then what is served by locking down the wireless AP? No one is asking for ID to use the faclity; unless they have tracking cameras there's little hope of "policing" illegal activity, so why worry about this great, imagined, "wireless security hole?"
"Swipe the IPs?" So, your basic model for security is security through obscurity? And you are trusting your own users - thousands of teenagers, many away from home for the first time in their lives - not to run port sniffers and do other bad stuff? You know, here in Mississippi the admins are known to use things like firewalls (for the important stuff) and DMZs (like at the library). You might look into that...