Microsoft are just being..... well..... being Microsoft.
If Windows was perfect, they would never be able to sell a new version. But Microsoft have to sell new versions of Windows; it's the basis of their business. Therefore, Windows has to be defective in order for there to be something to put into a "better" version in future.
There's a similar line of reasoning which explains why governments haven't solved the major social problems of the day. There's good work for a government in a fucked-up society. If there is no unemployment you don't need the Dole, if there is no disease you don't need a National Health Service, if there is no crime you don't need a police force, and so on.
WordPad is not a word processor; it is merely a fairly primitive text editor which happens to support proportional fonts. It does not {at least, not the last time I checked} include a spelling checker, nor a style manager. Even nano can check your spelling! Admittedly, it uses an external program for this; but that's just how things are done in the unix world.
I think it says something about Microsoft's target audience that they value the ability to change fonts in a document more highly than the ability to have the computer check and correct your spelling.
I repeat: I was never going to buy the advertised products. I am merely saving these people the effort of sending me something I do not want, do not need and which might be better employed somewhere else.
I do leave the room when the adverts come on the TV and I do actively avoid products which I feel have been advertised in an intrusive fashion.
Perhaps they're just narked that Konqueror got there first?
I mean, they already paid for the non-Free QT library stuff. Now if they were going to make an Open Source browser, they'd have to download the Free QT libraries and they'd find that all the money they ever spent on the non-Free ones would have been better spent on lottery tickets.
Seriously, what does Opera do that Konqueror doesn't?
Re:OMG!? "Opera-specific extensions"!?
on
Opera 9.0 Released
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· Score: 1
..... and which could have been fixed with a turnaround time measured in minutes if we had only had access to the source.
The concept of co-operative play first shew up in "Space Invaders" for the Atari 2600, which featured various modes in which two players worked together. Canine sidekicks have been around since Hack, now NetHack. And "design your own character" was first seen in Citadel on the BBC and Electron. Admittedly, you only had a choice of "male" or "female"; but the clothing and hairstyle were a little bit different.
Just goes to show, whatever it is, you probably weren't the first person to think of it!
When you're trying to write a closed-source driver which interfaces to a closed-source kernel, and you have only incomplete and incorrect API documentation at your disposal, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's going to {to use a technical term} go Tango Uniform.
There is only one solution to the whole driver issue, and that is for it to be made law that driver software source code must be made available -- otherwise, the hardware can't legally be sold.
It's already technically illegal for manufacturers to keep this information secret anyway, since the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is by definition privy to any secret that it may embody. But in these paranoid times, when everybody is concerned about bogus "intellectual property", they won't change their ways without legislation. The fact is that their near competitors are already probing their products pretty severely. And they've got better-equipped labs than the average Fred in the Shed.
I'd also incorporate a "reasonable force" provision, granting anybody the explicit right to publish the results of reverse-engineering {which I consider to be a forcible technique, although less so than kidnapping the CEO's daughter demanding the driver source code for a ransom} that they may have conducted on hardware that they own in the event that the manufacturer illegally refuses to co-operate. The onus would be upon the manufacturer to demonstrate that a more benign method existed for obtaining the relevant information.
Needless to say, this would benefit all operating systems, not just Windows.
What we need is for developed countries and trading blocs, such as the USA and the EU, to pass -- and, just as important, enforce -- new laws demanding that all goods imported must be manufactured under conditions that would be acceptable in the destination country.
In the UK, for instance, we have strict rules about pollution, working conditions, discrimination, union membership rights, fair wages and so forth. It's simply not fair on British firms to expect them to compete with goods imported from countries where there are no such laws.
It still doesn't make a lot of difference, because the condenser cooling circuit should be sealed from the room anyway. The intake duct is on the outside to minimise the temperature gradient across the outer wall of the duct; it may be warmer than the room air, but still better if it's only a little bit warmer than a lot warmer.
That depends on your definition of stealing, really. There are some who would say that refusal to share is a form of stealing in its own right. E.G. if I have a lit candle, and I let you light an unlit candle from it, my room doesn't get any darker but you do get some light. By some definitions, it would be wrong for me not to let you light your candle from mine, since it would positively benefit someone while causing no loss or damage to me. {Unless you regard having light while others are in darkness as a form of power over them, which would be "lost" if they had light}.
Sex is just something people do; whether it's heterosexual two-person sex, gay two-person sex, multi-person sex or straightforward one-person sex. And there's nothing wrong with it. You can't even say it's a waste of sperm, since a maximum of one sperm per ejaculation will ever make it to fertilise an egg and most men don't ejaculate as many times in a lifetime as they produce sperm in a single ejaculation.
Some of the modern ones do have the two pipes side by side, but traditionally the flue of a gas boiler has comprised an outer duct supplying fresh air for combustion from outside the building, with an inner duct discharging waste products outside. This allows the combustion chamber to be completely sealed from the room. In older appliances, before fans and electronic ignition became commonplace, the inner and outer ducts would present equal cross-sectional areas to the outside air so that any wind pressure would affect both as nearly equally as possible {hence the name 'balanced flue'}. In any case, the terminal would be designed with baffles to minimise any direct wind. As the hot exhaust gases meet the cool outside air, they contract suddenly. This creates a draught without the need for a chimney.
Modern boilers use a fan to draw out the combustion products {or sometimes, to blast gas-air mixture into the firebox} so the traditional requirements for the flue are less pressing: the fan ensures that there will always be a positive draught. You do get some downward-firing, pre-mix condensing boilers designed for two-pipe installation nowadays, but they're rare compared to co-axial flues.
Also, a co-axial venting arrangement needs only a single terminal, and thus only one use of a core drill. If you've ever used one of those beasts, you'll understand!
What would be better, would be to modify a mobile air conditioner so it actually worked!
The problem with most mobile ACs is that there is only one vent pipe, which discharges the air that has been used to cool the condenser outside -- the condenser-cooling intake is in the room. So this means there is a continuous flow of air out of the room..... and so, what with the pressure in a fluid acting equally in all directions, a continuous flow of air into the room. This is likely to be warmer than you want {if it wasn't a hot day, then you wouldn't have the AC on in the first place} and also, some of that air you just spent good money cooling is being heated up and blasted outside! Better would be to have a coaxial arrangement like a gas boiler flue, where the {hot} exhaust pipe is actually mounted inside the {cool} intake pipe. Then the arrangement would work more like a "fixed" air conditioner, since the condenser-cooling airstream would be entirely separate from the evaporator-heating {or, if you prefer, room-cooling} airstream.
You probably could do all this with Peltier Effect devices {dry heat pumps}. In which case, you would need to attach two lumps of metal with large surface areas {heat sinks from your nearest electronic components store fit this description nicely.....}, one to each side of the device; separate them by means of the best thermal insulation you can get, and blow fans over each. Circulate air from the room over the cold side, and air from outdoors over the hot side. You will also need to shut off the current every so often, in order to allow the cold side to de-ice.
You miss my point, which is that any software where you have not seen the source code is inherently untrustworthy.
For me, access to the source code is more important than zero price or distribution rights. Even if someone insists for me to pay for their software and not hand out copies to all and sundry, I can just about live with that -- provided I get shown the source code, so I can make up my own mind about what it is really doing. Unless I have seen the source code, I have no reason to trust it. And if the supplier is actively seeking to prevent me from seeing the source code, they have earned themself a huge black mark.
If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.
One thing you can do is use electricity to pump water up from a reservoir at the bottom of a mountain to a reservoir at the top when demand is slack, and use that to spin a turbine when needed. There's a plant in Wales that does just that. You don't need to store the actual electricity that represents someone's savings in a battery, as long as you can prove that you have the capacity to produce it as fast as they can consume it. In fact, you are storing the energy in a way -- just in the form of gravitational potential energy in several megalitres of water, or chemical potential energy in unburned fuel. As for transporting the electricity to the people, I had this radical idea of running cables under the streets to each building, thereby maintaining a continuous supply with no breaks while swapping batteries. Of course, it might never catch on.....
Also, instead of being like the traditional banks where you would go in with a banknote and exchange it for a certain amount of silver or gold, I can see people turning up at the local Sojiedade Munizipal de Illuminacion y Traccion with anything that burns, and exchanging it for banknotes!
Anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware stuff..... it's all closed-source payware. That alone just goes to show that the primary motivation for writing it is not to get the job done properly, but to milk people for money.
Open Source software, which by definition is approaching perfection like 1-e**(-k*x) approaches unity, will never, ever be subject to malware. It's the very antithesis of everything the anti-malware industry is about.
The video games thing is bad. The Atari 2600 lasted years beyond its time precisely because third parties were producing game cartridges for it that were better than anything Atari could have done. As soon as some European manufacturer actually starts wanting to make PlayStation or XBox games, the courts will be in session quicker than you can say "anti-competitive behaviour".
Not having open source software means you don't get to look at computer code. Boo fucking hoo, frankly.
You really think it's as simple as that?
"Not getting to look at computer code" means all sorts of bad effects on all levels of society. Problems with computer systems go unrepaired, productivity is lost, time is wasted, probably even a few lives have been lost. All because of some stupid little problems which would never have existed in the first place, if only it was law that the supplier of software had to include the source code and permit the purchaser to inspect and modify it.
Anyway, back on topic, I remember a comment somewhere here saying "I bought a hammer because I wanted to bash some nails in, I didn't want to join some kind of hammer cult". Same thing.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, hammering nails has become a highly-charged political issue. Some hammer manufacturers want you only using it with their brand of nails and will try to take away your hammer if you try to use it to knock in another manufacturer's nails. Some hammer manufacturers don't want you to be allowed to buy your own hammer at all, but to have to rent it from them on a pay-per-hit basis. And some nail manufacturers want to try to stop you telling other people how many hits it takes to knock in one of their nails.....
Why should you have the right to enjoy? If I put a year's work into creating a beautiful garden, why should you automatically have the right to enjoy it? If I want to charge $10 per head admission, what's wrong with that? I deserve to be rewarded for my effort in creating the garden that you are enjoying.
Um..... No, actually, you don't. It's up to the rest of society to determine whether you should be rewarded, not you.
No-one is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humankind. When you created your garden, you were building on the hard work of others who had gone before. What did you do about rewarding them?
Why should you have the right to inspect or study? If I spend years of my life trying to solve a problem, and during that year I manage to create a solution that nobody else has thought of, why should you get the benefit of that? Why can't I ask (or require) you to pay me to use that solution which I have worked so hard to create? And the only way I can be sure that people are fairly paying me for the use of my solution is for me to keep it secret.
I'll say it again: No-one is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humankind. Why shouldn't other people get the benefit of "your" solution? In the course of finding it, you were building on the hard work of others who had gone before. Just because you thought of it first doesn't mean somebody else wouldn't have thought of it sooner or later, more likely sooner.
In addition, before I allow any program written by anyone to run on my computer, I want to know exactlywhat it's going to do; just in case it does nasty things. I think this is entirely reasonable; I don't let strange code onto my computer any more than I let strangers into my home. You wouldn't eat food without checking the ingredients. You wouldn't buy a suit without trying it on. You wouldn't employ someone without interviewing them. If you want me to run your program on my computer, you're first going to have to prove to me that it will do what I want it to do and not do anything I don't want it to do. The easiest way to accomplish that is for you to show me the source code.
If you really want to keep the source code secret from me, you can run the code on your computer; I'll send you the data to process, and you can send me back the results. And you can rest assured that as soon as I figure out what your program is doing, I'll write my own program to do the same thing -- and share it with the world.
Why should you have the right to share? That's got to be the silliest "right" I've heard of. If I spend a year of my time creating something, I'd like to be rewarded for that year of effort. Ideally, I'd like to be rewarded somewhere around $100,000 for that year of my life. I could try to sell one copy of my work for $100,000, but nobody wants it that much. So I want to sell 10,000 copies for $10. That way, I get rewarded, and 6000 people get to benefit from my work. Everyone's happy. But if you pay $10 for my work and then "share" it with the 9999 other people, I only get $10 for a year's work. That's good for your and your friends, but not good for me.
So what? There are more of us than there are of you. And look on the bright side, it's still ten dollars more than you've any right to expect.
The whole "I deserve to be rewarded for my effort" mentality is behind a lot of what's wrong with the world. Tell you what, why don't you go and whinge at the sewage company because they should be rewarding you for the shit you flush into their pipes?
Wood isn't a fossil fuel. It's entirely renewable. Growing trees abstract CO2 from the atmosphere and release oxygen..... spookily enough, exactly the same amounts of CO2 as you're going to produce and O2 as you're going to consume when you burn that wood. You were taught why in your third year chemistry classes. All the energy stored in the chemical bonds in plant matter originally came from the sun. As long as you plant enough trees, accounting for infant mortality, to replace the ones you are using up {which is not rocket science, just simple forestry management}, then you have a closed cycle. {Note that maintenance and harvesting require energy which is not released in burning, but there's no reason for this energy not to be sourced from renewables}. A tree being grown for energy should be harvested as soon as possible after its growth slows down, since beyond this point you are adding fewer kg. of wood, and hence MWh of energy, per day that passes. This is no different to killing a chicken for meat when its egg production slows down. Both come under the general heading of husbandry.
Where there is private ownership of land coupled with a high population density, there is an automatic incentive to make every square metre of land work for its keep. Poor forestry managers don't last long in that sort of climate; they invariably run out of money and get their business taken over by someone who can do the job properly. Basically what is happening is that the monetary value of the product is closely tracking the non-monetary value. The main failing of Capitalism as it is practised today is that it only takes notice of the monetary value of goods; but when non-monetary value is directly related to monetary value, then capitalism works.
Non-renewable energy appears cheap, because we're effectively stealing it from succeeding generations. The point will come eventually when it will cost more than renewable energy and that is when the world will have no option but to switch. The damage done by non-renewables is probably reversible, but that won't be anything like an instantaneous process.
I sometimes wonder if the answer to half the world's problems would not be to peg the world's currencies against the megawatt-hour, rather than the value of someting capricious like silver or gold. The price of crude oil being tied to the US dollar doesn't count: that is just as capricious, and the USA has a nasty tendency to invade countries who mention pricing their oil by the Euro.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
..... well ..... being Microsoft.
Microsoft are just being
If Windows was perfect, they would never be able to sell a new version. But Microsoft have to sell new versions of Windows; it's the basis of their business. Therefore, Windows has to be defective in order for there to be something to put into a "better" version in future.
There's a similar line of reasoning which explains why governments haven't solved the major social problems of the day. There's good work for a government in a fucked-up society. If there is no unemployment you don't need the Dole, if there is no disease you don't need a National Health Service, if there is no crime you don't need a police force, and so on.
WordPad is not a word processor; it is merely a fairly primitive text editor which happens to support proportional fonts. It does not {at least, not the last time I checked} include a spelling checker, nor a style manager. Even nano can check your spelling! Admittedly, it uses an external program for this; but that's just how things are done in the unix world.
I think it says something about Microsoft's target audience that they value the ability to change fonts in a document more highly than the ability to have the computer check and correct your spelling.
I repeat: I was never going to buy the advertised products. I am merely saving these people the effort of sending me something I do not want, do not need and which might be better employed somewhere else.
I do leave the room when the adverts come on the TV and I do actively avoid products which I feel have been advertised in an intrusive fashion.
If they are doing the job properly, then why won't they show us what's inside it? What are they afraid of?
Perhaps they're just narked that Konqueror got there first?
I mean, they already paid for the non-Free QT library stuff. Now if they were going to make an Open Source browser, they'd have to download the Free QT libraries and they'd find that all the money they ever spent on the non-Free ones would have been better spent on lottery tickets.
Seriously, what does Opera do that Konqueror doesn't?
..... and which could have been fixed with a turnaround time measured in minutes if we had only had access to the source.
Yes, closed source is bad. Read why.
No, I just block the advert servers at the proxy level.
I wasn't going to buy the products advertised anyway, so nobody is losing out.
The concept of co-operative play first shew up in "Space Invaders" for the Atari 2600, which featured various modes in which two players worked together. Canine sidekicks have been around since Hack, now NetHack. And "design your own character" was first seen in Citadel on the BBC and Electron. Admittedly, you only had a choice of "male" or "female"; but the clothing and hairstyle were a little bit different.
Just goes to show, whatever it is, you probably weren't the first person to think of it!
Is Trojan a brand of condom, then? In this country, the leading brand of condoms is Durex and the colloquial term for a condom is a "johnny".
When you're trying to write a closed-source driver which interfaces to a closed-source kernel, and you have only incomplete and incorrect API documentation at your disposal, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's going to {to use a technical term} go Tango Uniform.
There is only one solution to the whole driver issue, and that is for it to be made law that driver software source code must be made available -- otherwise, the hardware can't legally be sold.
It's already technically illegal for manufacturers to keep this information secret anyway, since the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is by definition privy to any secret that it may embody. But in these paranoid times, when everybody is concerned about bogus "intellectual property", they won't change their ways without legislation. The fact is that their near competitors are already probing their products pretty severely. And they've got better-equipped labs than the average Fred in the Shed.
I'd also incorporate a "reasonable force" provision, granting anybody the explicit right to publish the results of reverse-engineering {which I consider to be a forcible technique, although less so than kidnapping the CEO's daughter demanding the driver source code for a ransom} that they may have conducted on hardware that they own in the event that the manufacturer illegally refuses to co-operate. The onus would be upon the manufacturer to demonstrate that a more benign method existed for obtaining the relevant information.
Needless to say, this would benefit all operating systems, not just Windows.
What we need is for developed countries and trading blocs, such as the USA and the EU, to pass -- and, just as important, enforce -- new laws demanding that all goods imported must be manufactured under conditions that would be acceptable in the destination country.
In the UK, for instance, we have strict rules about pollution, working conditions, discrimination, union membership rights, fair wages and so forth. It's simply not fair on British firms to expect them to compete with goods imported from countries where there are no such laws.
It still doesn't make a lot of difference, because the condenser cooling circuit should be sealed from the room anyway. The intake duct is on the outside to minimise the temperature gradient across the outer wall of the duct; it may be warmer than the room air, but still better if it's only a little bit warmer than a lot warmer.
That depends on your definition of stealing, really. There are some who would say that refusal to share is a form of stealing in its own right. E.G. if I have a lit candle, and I let you light an unlit candle from it, my room doesn't get any darker but you do get some light. By some definitions, it would be wrong for me not to let you light your candle from mine, since it would positively benefit someone while causing no loss or damage to me. {Unless you regard having light while others are in darkness as a form of power over them, which would be "lost" if they had light}.
Sex is just something people do; whether it's heterosexual two-person sex, gay two-person sex, multi-person sex or straightforward one-person sex. And there's nothing wrong with it. You can't even say it's a waste of sperm, since a maximum of one sperm per ejaculation will ever make it to fertilise an egg and most men don't ejaculate as many times in a lifetime as they produce sperm in a single ejaculation.
I don't know about anyone else, but I actually quite enjoy having a wank into a johnny.
Some of the modern ones do have the two pipes side by side, but traditionally the flue of a gas boiler has comprised an outer duct supplying fresh air for combustion from outside the building, with an inner duct discharging waste products outside. This allows the combustion chamber to be completely sealed from the room. In older appliances, before fans and electronic ignition became commonplace, the inner and outer ducts would present equal cross-sectional areas to the outside air so that any wind pressure would affect both as nearly equally as possible {hence the name 'balanced flue'}. In any case, the terminal would be designed with baffles to minimise any direct wind. As the hot exhaust gases meet the cool outside air, they contract suddenly. This creates a draught without the need for a chimney.
Modern boilers use a fan to draw out the combustion products {or sometimes, to blast gas-air mixture into the firebox} so the traditional requirements for the flue are less pressing: the fan ensures that there will always be a positive draught. You do get some downward-firing, pre-mix condensing boilers designed for two-pipe installation nowadays, but they're rare compared to co-axial flues.
Also, a co-axial venting arrangement needs only a single terminal, and thus only one use of a core drill. If you've ever used one of those beasts, you'll understand!
What would be better, would be to modify a mobile air conditioner so it actually worked!
..... and so, what with the pressure in a fluid acting equally in all directions, a continuous flow of air into the room. This is likely to be warmer than you want {if it wasn't a hot day, then you wouldn't have the AC on in the first place} and also, some of that air you just spent good money cooling is being heated up and blasted outside! Better would be to have a coaxial arrangement like a gas boiler flue, where the {hot} exhaust pipe is actually mounted inside the {cool} intake pipe. Then the arrangement would work more like a "fixed" air conditioner, since the condenser-cooling airstream would be entirely separate from the evaporator-heating {or, if you prefer, room-cooling} airstream.
.....}, one to each side of the device; separate them by means of the best thermal insulation you can get, and blow fans over each. Circulate air from the room over the cold side, and air from outdoors over the hot side. You will also need to shut off the current every so often, in order to allow the cold side to de-ice.
The problem with most mobile ACs is that there is only one vent pipe, which discharges the air that has been used to cool the condenser outside -- the condenser-cooling intake is in the room. So this means there is a continuous flow of air out of the room
You probably could do all this with Peltier Effect devices {dry heat pumps}. In which case, you would need to attach two lumps of metal with large surface areas {heat sinks from your nearest electronic components store fit this description nicely
You miss my point, which is that any software where you have not seen the source code is inherently untrustworthy.
For me, access to the source code is more important than zero price or distribution rights. Even if someone insists for me to pay for their software and not hand out copies to all and sundry, I can just about live with that -- provided I get shown the source code, so I can make up my own mind about what it is really doing. Unless I have seen the source code, I have no reason to trust it. And if the supplier is actively seeking to prevent me from seeing the source code, they have earned themself a huge black mark.
If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.
One thing you can do is use electricity to pump water up from a reservoir at the bottom of a mountain to a reservoir at the top when demand is slack, and use that to spin a turbine when needed. There's a plant in Wales that does just that. You don't need to store the actual electricity that represents someone's savings in a battery, as long as you can prove that you have the capacity to produce it as fast as they can consume it. In fact, you are storing the energy in a way -- just in the form of gravitational potential energy in several megalitres of water, or chemical potential energy in unburned fuel. As for transporting the electricity to the people, I had this radical idea of running cables under the streets to each building, thereby maintaining a continuous supply with no breaks while swapping batteries. Of course, it might never catch on .....
Also, instead of being like the traditional banks where you would go in with a banknote and exchange it for a certain amount of silver or gold, I can see people turning up at the local Sojiedade Munizipal de Illuminacion y Traccion with anything that burns, and exchanging it for banknotes!
Anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware stuff ..... it's all closed-source payware. That alone just goes to show that the primary motivation for writing it is not to get the job done properly, but to milk people for money.
Open Source software, which by definition is approaching perfection like 1-e**(-k*x) approaches unity, will never, ever be subject to malware. It's the very antithesis of everything the anti-malware industry is about.
The video games thing is bad. The Atari 2600 lasted years beyond its time precisely because third parties were producing game cartridges for it that were better than anything Atari could have done. As soon as some European manufacturer actually starts wanting to make PlayStation or XBox games, the courts will be in session quicker than you can say "anti-competitive behaviour".
5. There are power points on the walls with electricity coming out of them which costs about 7p a kWh in the daytime, or 3p in the dead of night.
"Not getting to look at computer code" means all sorts of bad effects on all levels of society. Problems with computer systems go unrepaired, productivity is lost, time is wasted, probably even a few lives have been lost. All because of some stupid little problems which would never have existed in the first place, if only it was law that the supplier of software had to include the source code and permit the purchaser to inspect and modify it. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, hammering nails has become a highly-charged political issue. Some hammer manufacturers want you only using it with their brand of nails and will try to take away your hammer if you try to use it to knock in another manufacturer's nails. Some hammer manufacturers don't want you to be allowed to buy your own hammer at all, but to have to rent it from them on a pay-per-hit basis. And some nail manufacturers want to try to stop you telling other people how many hits it takes to knock in one of their nails
No-one is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humankind. When you created your garden, you were building on the hard work of others who had gone before. What did you do about rewarding them? I'll say it again: No-one is an island. All the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humankind. Why shouldn't other people get the benefit of "your" solution? In the course of finding it, you were building on the hard work of others who had gone before. Just because you thought of it first doesn't mean somebody else wouldn't have thought of it sooner or later, more likely sooner.
In addition, before I allow any program written by anyone to run on my computer, I want to know exactlywhat it's going to do; just in case it does nasty things. I think this is entirely reasonable; I don't let strange code onto my computer any more than I let strangers into my home. You wouldn't eat food without checking the ingredients. You wouldn't buy a suit without trying it on. You wouldn't employ someone without interviewing them. If you want me to run your program on my computer, you're first going to have to prove to me that it will do what I want it to do and not do anything I don't want it to do. The easiest way to accomplish that is for you to show me the source code.
If you really want to keep the source code secret from me, you can run the code on your computer; I'll send you the data to process, and you can send me back the results. And you can rest assured that as soon as I figure out what your program is doing, I'll write my own program to do the same thing -- and share it with the world. So what? There are more of us than there are of you. And look on the bright side, it's still ten dollars more than you've any right to expect.
The whole "I deserve to be rewarded for my effort" mentality is behind a lot of what's wrong with the world. Tell you what, why don't you go and whinge at the sewage company because they should be rewarding you for the shit you flush into their pipes?
Wood isn't a fossil fuel. It's entirely renewable. Growing trees abstract CO2 from the atmosphere and release oxygen ..... spookily enough, exactly the same amounts of CO2 as you're going to produce and O2 as you're going to consume when you burn that wood. You were taught why in your third year chemistry classes. All the energy stored in the chemical bonds in plant matter originally came from the sun. As long as you plant enough trees, accounting for infant mortality, to replace the ones you are using up {which is not rocket science, just simple forestry management}, then you have a closed cycle. {Note that maintenance and harvesting require energy which is not released in burning, but there's no reason for this energy not to be sourced from renewables}. A tree being grown for energy should be harvested as soon as possible after its growth slows down, since beyond this point you are adding fewer kg. of wood, and hence MWh of energy, per day that passes. This is no different to killing a chicken for meat when its egg production slows down. Both come under the general heading of husbandry.
Where there is private ownership of land coupled with a high population density, there is an automatic incentive to make every square metre of land work for its keep. Poor forestry managers don't last long in that sort of climate; they invariably run out of money and get their business taken over by someone who can do the job properly. Basically what is happening is that the monetary value of the product is closely tracking the non-monetary value. The main failing of Capitalism as it is practised today is that it only takes notice of the monetary value of goods; but when non-monetary value is directly related to monetary value, then capitalism works.
Non-renewable energy appears cheap, because we're effectively stealing it from succeeding generations. The point will come eventually when it will cost more than renewable energy and that is when the world will have no option but to switch. The damage done by non-renewables is probably reversible, but that won't be anything like an instantaneous process.
I sometimes wonder if the answer to half the world's problems would not be to peg the world's currencies against the megawatt-hour, rather than the value of someting capricious like silver or gold. The price of crude oil being tied to the US dollar doesn't count: that is just as capricious, and the USA has a nasty tendency to invade countries who mention pricing their oil by the Euro.