So if I turned off my freezer all I'd have to do to keep the low temperature would be to "top up" the cooling agent to maintain heat lost through the insulation? Isn't that what refrigerators do already?
The primary reason for a refrigerator to run its cooling cycle is to cool the warm air that comes in when the door is opened. If you'd leave it closed, a refrigerator would use very little power. It's opening it that causes problems. This is why it is cheaper to keep cool a full refrigerator than an empty one. In the full refrigerator, there's less air that exchanges with the warm air (and requires cooling) when the door is opened.
This is why you are supposed to leave the freezer and refrigerator closed when there is a power outage. So long as the you don't open it (and the insulation is good), it will hold its temperature for some hours.
What I want to see is where taxpayers would allocate their money. I.e. when you fill out your tax form, you send along something that allocates the taxes paid per year to various programs. For example, assuming that you pay $10,000 in taxes, you might write:
Defense: $2000 Social security: $2100 Medical: $3300 Debt reduction: $800 NASA: $50 Other discretionary: $1750
That's what we have now (lumping a lot of things together to save typing). Or maybe you might prefer to spend nothing on defense and that $2000 would go to space research or welfare or whatever else you might want to select. Or you think too much is spent on welfare and not enough on defense, so you give the $10,000 to defense.
Even if this were non-binding, I think that we'd get some interesting information. Some discussion of how this might work (although based on a per person allocation rather than a per tax dollar allocation) is in the second press release ("New Poll: Public Would Allocate a Federal Budget Much Different from Washington's") at http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/usspend.htm
Binding (if feasible) would make this interesting. People could have the option of increasing their personal taxes paid and having the money go where they want it (e.g. NASA or welfare). Billionaires (e.g. Gates) would get the benefit of controlling the allocation of their taxes, giving them a reason to pay taxes (rather than the natural reasons to evade them).
This isn't the micromanagement of direct democracy, but it does allow people to participate directly in the decision with the most direct impact to them.
You still miss the point. Yes, Gates continues to exercise voting control over the stock, but that's only a portion of the value of the stock. He doesn't get the income from the stock. That goes to the foundation. And Gates cannot just transfer the shares back to his ownership. Tax law would treat the entire value of the stock as income.
At Gates' level of wealth, I strongly suspect control of the stock is more useful to him than personal receipt of the income. Particularly since he still controls the income.
Since he gets a tax deduction from donating the stock, I don't know that being taxed on getting it back would be a big issue. Further, he escapes the tax on the inflationary gain that way (although he would lose the special capital gains tax breaks).
You have to ask yourself what Gates would do with the stock if he did get it back. Would he just vote it? Then he doesn't need it back. Would he sell it? On what would he spend the proceeds?
Expensive party with friends? Ok, make it a fund raiser and have the foundation pay for it. New car? Having the foundation provide its chief executive with a car is a possible perk. Is the foundation going to pay for his health insurance? Personal secretary for answering correspondence? Pay him a salary? All those things are reasonable perks. Sure, some of those things will be taxable, but that only offsets his previous tax deduction.
There are plenty of real actions for which Gates deserves credit. The foundation is really giving away billions per year. Why insist on giving him credit for giving money to the foundation?
Supposedly that's the plan. Ok, what is it? I see a lot of promises about results, but no plan to get there. The goal is to build sufficient wind farms to supply 20% of US electric needs and shut down all electric production via natural gas (in the US). Take that natural gas and use it for cars instead. Fine, that sounds like a reasonable goal. What's the actual plan to get there? I.e. what's the pain?
In principle, I'm willing to support government action to support this goal. However, before I pledge to do so, I'd really like to know what the plan is. Why does he need government action? In what form?
I'm not so sure that the OP's original statement about Starship Troopers being "political" is on the money either. Or rather, it is, but getting kids to think about those kinds of things is important.
For pre-teens? These are elementary school kids. Start them on the Heinlein juveniles. If they take to them, they can find Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land on their own later, maybe when they are in the fifteen to seventeen range. Starship Troopers makes perfect sense as a high school (for the precocious) or college book to accompany classes on civics. It's not nearly as much sense in elementary school. Starship Troopers needs to be read with a grain of salt; it's about asking questions and thinking about how to answer them (e.g. does it make sense to limit the vote to people who finish a stint of government service or does the disenfranchising effects on non-voters outweigh the advantages).
Either way, the population isn't going anywhere (until the pubs cause wwIII), so we should NOT be using food grade arable land to grow biomass for fuel.
Europe currently has negative population growth. It's not unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to follow suit over the next century or so. While I wouldn't expect a precipitate fall in population, growth should level off (see http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/tables.html for recent history and some projected statistics for the next forty years).
Your point only applies if we get to the point of having a shortage of food grade arable land. If we're only using 50% of the potentially arable land, this doesn't seem like a long term problem. What we're hitting now (causing increasing food prices) is that it is not free to start cultivating the land because the infrastructure is not there. I.e. we're facing short term shortages rather than actual long term limits.
It's also worth noting that the US uses significantly more grain than other countries. The global average is one pound of grain per day, but the US uses five. If the US backed down to two pounds of grain per day, that would still leave three pounds of existing grain that could be used for biofuels.
It's also worth noting that biofuel produced from waste (e.g. the stems and stalks rather than the edible grains) can actually make food cheaper (by increasing the effective yield per acre or hectare and better amortizing the cultivation costs).
And bandwidth. Sure, it doesn't matter much if you're talking about doubling or tripling the size of a one time file, but in the Google case, presumably they are moving gigabytes, if not terabytes or petabytes, of data in an hour. At that level, the bandwidth cost is noticeable. Big.com sites see significant bandwidth improvements by turning on mod_deflate. This is just a better optimization.
That's 500 watts each. My computer alone takes up more than that
How do you know that? My computer has a 350 watt power supply, but even with monitor, speakers, router, etc., it only takes 136 watts on my UPS (which measures such things). What's your computer have that makes it so much higher than mine?
No, you're missing the point. When he gave the money to the foundation, he was not giving it away; he was just transferring the money from his personal wealth to the foundation's wealth (which he controls). I'll shift from the Gates foundation (which may be entirely legitimate) to the Ford Foundation for the example.
Henry Ford transferred stock from his personal wealth to the foundation. He gave away nothing, as he controlled both his personal wealth and the foundation. The difference is that when he died, his heirs paid inheritance taxes on the personal wealth transferred from him to them; no tax was paid on the foundation assets, even though control passed from Henry to heirs.
The Ford Foundation has since stopped being the largest owner of Ford stock (in 1956, when the stock went public) and stopped being controlled by the Ford family (in 1976, when Henry II stepped down).
It's also interesting that the Ford Foundation gives away an even smaller proportion of its assets than the Gates foundation does. According to wikipedia, the Ford Foundation gave away only $530 million on assets of $13.7 billion, about 4% rather than Gates' 10%.
Transferring wealth to a foundation is not like giving money away. The money isn't given away until the foundation actually does so. While its under foundation control, it can still be controlled by the person who established the foundation (depending on the rules of the foundation). That's ignoring any additional dodges, e.g. using the foundation money to issue loans to your corporation or employ your relatives.
No, the lens is the part in the front of the eye that lets light into the eye. The retina is the part in the back of the eye that converts light into nerve impulses. Picture of the human eye.
If you look at the depth of field link, it talks about a camera. The lens of the camera is the equivalent of the lens of the eye; the aperture is the pupil; the shutter is the iris; the retina is the film.
I don't know too many people who move back and forth much when sitting at a computer coding...unless, like mentioned above, you're coding in a rave.
Yes, but you look at different parts of the screen, which are different distances from your eyes. Incidentally, wikipedia suggests that the term should be "depth of field" rather than "depth of focus". Depth of field refers to the amount of the image that is in focus without refocusing; depth of focus would be the distance between lens and retina.
The issue isn't whether its infallible, but whether its more accurate then a human.
I'm not sure that it needs to be more accurate than a human, so long as it is less biased. A human referee's decision inherently includes factors like which player is more likable, which player is better, etc. Hawkeye does not include those extraneous factors. Sure, it might be wrong, but it will not give one player a consistent advantage over the other as a result of being wrong.
It's also worth noting that having human referees gives the impression that argument can change the outcome. If John McEnroe can convince the referee that the call is wrong, then McEnroe might get the next call in his favor. With an automated system, arguing obviously does not influence either current or future decisions.
If the system is both less biased and more decisive, then I think that that is enough to justify using it so long as it is competitive in accuracy.
Apparently they were willing to boost this company's product until they realized how much money could be made from it, at which point they decided to build their own clone and give it away for free.
Emphasis mine. How much money would Google make from their free product? Of course, reading more finds that the claim is that Google is integrating this into their paid product (Google Apps Premier) rather than giving it away for free. Perhaps you knew that, but it wasn't evident in what you said.
In particular, that article points out that LimitNone is claiming that it divulged technical secrets to Google that Google then used in making its own product. Also, Google apparently changed its Google Apps interface in May of 2008, which caused the gMove product to break. That's apparently the violation of Illinois consumer laws.
Is that related to the differences between Standard and Premier? Apparently Standard does not allow for third party integrations but Premier does. Did Google tell LimitNone that the free version would always support gMove? If so, that will be interesting, as it will help to set expectations around how long Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. have to maintain API compatibility when they want to break it. All of them offer programs like this that allow third party developers to create apps that integrate with their platform. How long are those integrations warranted to work?
The real problem here is not in the relationship between Google and LimitNone but between Google and users of Apps standard edition. Google had been encouraging its users to pay $19 for this product but the functionality no longer works. Further, it apparently stopped working as a result of changes that Google made. If it turns out that it stopped working because Google started charging for something that it previously offered for free, should Google pay back the $19 to users?
Or it's clear that both are way overvalued. The value of a company is the amount of revenue it can bring in. MySpace and Facebook have exactly one revenue source: advertising. Maybe Murdoch thought that MySpace could sell $500 million worth of ads. According to http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/news_corp_q3_ -- MySpace got about $900 million worth of ads last year -- Murdoch was shooting for $1 billion. Assuming 50% profit (i.e. that MySpace spends $90 million per year on development and maintenance), that would suggest that Murdoch already made back his investment.
Advertising is insanely profitable, just look at Google. Almost all Google's revenue is from advertising, but Google is not only making 50% profit, it's doing so on a growing sales base.
MySpace is still only doing $900 million in advertising -- is there any reason to think that Facebook is making more than $300 to $400 million? Those revenue figures suggest that MySpace is worth about $4.5 billion and Facebook about $2 billion. Facebook may grow enough to justify $15 billion -- that's aggressive but not impossible.
The GPL only requires one to give the source to whoever they're distributing the software to, not publicly to everyone else. That's not entirely true. The GPL (v2; v3 is similar but not exactly the same) requires that you do one of three things:
Transfer the source with the binary.
If you do not distribute the source with the binary, then you must distribute (with the binary) an offer to supply the source.
If you do not modify the source and received the binary without the source, you can transfer the offer you received with the binary (see 2) to the recipient.
In either of the last two cases, anyone can claim the offer to distribute the source. There is no need for them to claim to have received the binary from you. This is because there is no real way to check if they received the offer transitively.
All that said, if you ship the source with the binaries, you can not be required to provide the source to anyone else. Nor for that matter to those who already received the source. The simplest way to avoid legal concerns with distributing open source binaries on hardware is to add a source directory -- then even if you distributed the binaries, you have also completed the required source distribution.
It's not that production and consumption are carbon negative in total. Production (including growing the feedstock) is carbon negative and consumption is carbon positive. All that they are saying is that the carbon in the fuel was in the air recently rather than across the geologic time scales of traditional oil.
More people died of hunger that day than were killed in the attack. The US response to the attacks was totally illogical because people felt threatened and this caused them to stop using the higher levels of their brains. What's illogical about Americans feeling more threatened by terrorism than hunger? As an American, my risk of dying from hunger is much lower than my risk of dying by terrorism. According to the Surgeon General, there are 25,000 deaths from obesity in any given month in America. I strongly suspect that that's more than die from hunger in the United States.
And yes, I realize that you didn't limit hunger to the United States. What I'm saying is that as a resident of the United States, it is perfectly logical for me to be more concerned by terrorism than hunger. My personal chances of dying from hunger are ridiculously low (far more likely to die from obesity). Even if my personal chances of dying from terrorism are also low, they aren't quite as low as my chances of dying from hunger.
Your point (that terrorism is of only mild danger) is correct, but your argument is not. Instead of hunger, you should use obesity, drunk driving, or some other risk that actually affects Americans to argue that Americans should be more worried about that than terrorism.
You need the dp/0596514921 -- I think that it actually ignores the Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments part. That's just for search engine optimization purposes.
If you show $20,000 in gross receipts, but are claiming only $2,000 profit, they're going to take a much closer look at your deductions and business expenses. It may simply mean you had a bad year, or your business model needs a lot of work. OR it may mean that your itemized expenses are, shall we say, a tad exaggerated? $2000 profit on $20,000 in revenue is quite reasonable. Compare to Wal-Mart with $13 billion profit on $387 billion revenue or Best Buy with $9 billion profit on $90 billion revenue. In the kind of retail businesses where credit cards are accepted, 90% of revenue as costs is quite reasonable.
I agree with the thrust of your post, although I would put it differently. If a business can only generate $18,000 in expenses but has $20,000 in credit card receipts, then this prevents the business from stating its revenues as $18,200.
index => indices According to Merriam-Webster, indexes is also a valid spelling. In fact, indexes is listed prior to indices, which suggests that it is the preferred spelling.
Cecil Adams has an interesting discussion of Latin/English pluralizations hidden in a discussion of the proper plural of penis.
I don't want a link to my family while I'm dying I think that this is intended for the times when your survival is in doubt, not when your death is sure. Part of the problem in these situations is that the people can give up and die, whereas if they struggled to live they would. It's about giving people reasons to continue to fight to survive at a time when they might decide that it is impossible.
Example: a person falls into a well and has to kick her or his feet to stay above water and breathe. After some time of this, the person is tired and may decide to stop kicking, sink, and drown. This kind of robot would act to find ways to encourage the person to continue kicking.
The sniper fire example also indicates this. Assume that you are in a location where the sniper can't reach you. So long as you stay there, you are safe. One danger is that you might get frustrated with waiting and leave safety. A robot like this could make the waiting more bearable by providing things that you can do other than stare at the walls.
Slavery is a good deal more efficient than negotiating with unions. Actually, unions are more efficient. In general, it is more efficient to get the worker to voluntarily do things than to impose those conditions upon the worker. This is why the north was more developed than the south; the US was more developed than the USSR; the Renaissance occurred after the bubonic plague and its inroads on serfdom.
Slavery sounds like it should be more efficient, because theoretically the master can demand anything from the slave. However, in practice, the cost of enforcement demanded by slavery eliminated any advantages from this.
Both slavery and unions are inefficient in that they increase the cost of changing workers. Slavery due to the capital invested in buying the slave; unions due to the friction added by the union.
Applying your formula would always result in $0. I read the previous poster's formula as "apply property tax rate to the value of the intellectual property". You seem to be reading it as "apply property tax rate to the currently taxable value of the intellectual property" which obviously wouldn't change things. It's unlikely that the previous poster meant it that way.
Btw, in most jurisdictions, buildings get taxed as well as land. You probably realized this, but I think that it makes a nice complement to the way that you misread the previous post.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I turned off my freezer all I'd have to do to keep the low temperature would be to "top up" the cooling agent to maintain heat lost through the insulation? Isn't that what refrigerators do already?
The primary reason for a refrigerator to run its cooling cycle is to cool the warm air that comes in when the door is opened. If you'd leave it closed, a refrigerator would use very little power. It's opening it that causes problems. This is why it is cheaper to keep cool a full refrigerator than an empty one. In the full refrigerator, there's less air that exchanges with the warm air (and requires cooling) when the door is opened.
This is why you are supposed to leave the freezer and refrigerator closed when there is a power outage. So long as the you don't open it (and the insulation is good), it will hold its temperature for some hours.
What I want to see is where taxpayers would allocate their money. I.e. when you fill out your tax form, you send along something that allocates the taxes paid per year to various programs. For example, assuming that you pay $10,000 in taxes, you might write:
Defense: $2000
Social security: $2100
Medical: $3300
Debt reduction: $800
NASA: $50
Other discretionary: $1750
That's what we have now (lumping a lot of things together to save typing). Or maybe you might prefer to spend nothing on defense and that $2000 would go to space research or welfare or whatever else you might want to select. Or you think too much is spent on welfare and not enough on defense, so you give the $10,000 to defense.
Even if this were non-binding, I think that we'd get some interesting information. Some discussion of how this might work (although based on a per person allocation rather than a per tax dollar allocation) is in the second press release ("New Poll: Public Would Allocate a Federal Budget
Much Different from Washington's") at http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/usspend.htm
Binding (if feasible) would make this interesting. People could have the option of increasing their personal taxes paid and having the money go where they want it (e.g. NASA or welfare). Billionaires (e.g. Gates) would get the benefit of controlling the allocation of their taxes, giving them a reason to pay taxes (rather than the natural reasons to evade them).
This isn't the micromanagement of direct democracy, but it does allow people to participate directly in the decision with the most direct impact to them.
You still miss the point. Yes, Gates continues to exercise voting control over the stock, but that's only a portion of the value of the stock. He doesn't get the income from the stock. That goes to the foundation. And Gates cannot just transfer the shares back to his ownership. Tax law would treat the entire value of the stock as income.
At Gates' level of wealth, I strongly suspect control of the stock is more useful to him than personal receipt of the income. Particularly since he still controls the income.
Since he gets a tax deduction from donating the stock, I don't know that being taxed on getting it back would be a big issue. Further, he escapes the tax on the inflationary gain that way (although he would lose the special capital gains tax breaks).
You have to ask yourself what Gates would do with the stock if he did get it back. Would he just vote it? Then he doesn't need it back. Would he sell it? On what would he spend the proceeds?
Expensive party with friends? Ok, make it a fund raiser and have the foundation pay for it. New car? Having the foundation provide its chief executive with a car is a possible perk. Is the foundation going to pay for his health insurance? Personal secretary for answering correspondence? Pay him a salary? All those things are reasonable perks. Sure, some of those things will be taxable, but that only offsets his previous tax deduction.
There are plenty of real actions for which Gates deserves credit. The foundation is really giving away billions per year. Why insist on giving him credit for giving money to the foundation?
The problem is that the quotes don't appear in a context that explains them. Look at his site: http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/
Supposedly that's the plan. Ok, what is it? I see a lot of promises about results, but no plan to get there. The goal is to build sufficient wind farms to supply 20% of US electric needs and shut down all electric production via natural gas (in the US). Take that natural gas and use it for cars instead. Fine, that sounds like a reasonable goal. What's the actual plan to get there? I.e. what's the pain?
In principle, I'm willing to support government action to support this goal. However, before I pledge to do so, I'd really like to know what the plan is. Why does he need government action? In what form?
I'm not so sure that the OP's original statement about Starship Troopers being "political" is on the money either. Or rather, it is, but getting kids to think about those kinds of things is important.
For pre-teens? These are elementary school kids. Start them on the Heinlein juveniles. If they take to them, they can find Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land on their own later, maybe when they are in the fifteen to seventeen range. Starship Troopers makes perfect sense as a high school (for the precocious) or college book to accompany classes on civics. It's not nearly as much sense in elementary school. Starship Troopers needs to be read with a grain of salt; it's about asking questions and thinking about how to answer them (e.g. does it make sense to limit the vote to people who finish a stint of government service or does the disenfranchising effects on non-voters outweigh the advantages).
Either way, the population isn't going anywhere (until the pubs cause wwIII), so we should NOT be using food grade arable land to grow biomass for fuel.
Europe currently has negative population growth. It's not unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to follow suit over the next century or so. While I wouldn't expect a precipitate fall in population, growth should level off (see http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/tables.html for recent history and some projected statistics for the next forty years).
Your point only applies if we get to the point of having a shortage of food grade arable land. If we're only using 50% of the potentially arable land, this doesn't seem like a long term problem. What we're hitting now (causing increasing food prices) is that it is not free to start cultivating the land because the infrastructure is not there. I.e. we're facing short term shortages rather than actual long term limits.
It's also worth noting that the US uses significantly more grain than other countries. The global average is one pound of grain per day, but the US uses five. If the US backed down to two pounds of grain per day, that would still leave three pounds of existing grain that could be used for biofuels.
It's also worth noting that biofuel produced from waste (e.g. the stems and stalks rather than the edible grains) can actually make food cheaper (by increasing the effective yield per acre or hectare and better amortizing the cultivation costs).
The main problem, of course, is speed.
And bandwidth. Sure, it doesn't matter much if you're talking about doubling or tripling the size of a one time file, but in the Google case, presumably they are moving gigabytes, if not terabytes or petabytes, of data in an hour. At that level, the bandwidth cost is noticeable. Big .com sites see significant bandwidth improvements by turning on mod_deflate. This is just a better optimization.
That's 500 watts each. My computer alone takes up more than that
How do you know that? My computer has a 350 watt power supply, but even with monitor, speakers, router, etc., it only takes 136 watts on my UPS (which measures such things). What's your computer have that makes it so much higher than mine?
Give away a dollar to save 40 cents.
No, you're missing the point. When he gave the money to the foundation, he was not giving it away; he was just transferring the money from his personal wealth to the foundation's wealth (which he controls). I'll shift from the Gates foundation (which may be entirely legitimate) to the Ford Foundation for the example.
Henry Ford transferred stock from his personal wealth to the foundation. He gave away nothing, as he controlled both his personal wealth and the foundation. The difference is that when he died, his heirs paid inheritance taxes on the personal wealth transferred from him to them; no tax was paid on the foundation assets, even though control passed from Henry to heirs.
The Ford Foundation has since stopped being the largest owner of Ford stock (in 1956, when the stock went public) and stopped being controlled by the Ford family (in 1976, when Henry II stepped down).
It's also interesting that the Ford Foundation gives away an even smaller proportion of its assets than the Gates foundation does. According to wikipedia, the Ford Foundation gave away only $530 million on assets of $13.7 billion, about 4% rather than Gates' 10%.
Transferring wealth to a foundation is not like giving money away. The money isn't given away until the foundation actually does so. While its under foundation control, it can still be controlled by the person who established the foundation (depending on the rules of the foundation). That's ignoring any additional dodges, e.g. using the foundation money to issue loans to your corporation or employ your relatives.
Also, in this case the retina would be the lens ;)
No, the lens is the part in the front of the eye that lets light into the eye. The retina is the part in the back of the eye that converts light into nerve impulses. Picture of the human eye.
If you look at the depth of field link, it talks about a camera. The lens of the camera is the equivalent of the lens of the eye; the aperture is the pupil; the shutter is the iris; the retina is the film.
I don't know too many people who move back and forth much when sitting at a computer coding...unless, like mentioned above, you're coding in a rave.
Yes, but you look at different parts of the screen, which are different distances from your eyes. Incidentally, wikipedia suggests that the term should be "depth of field" rather than "depth of focus". Depth of field refers to the amount of the image that is in focus without refocusing; depth of focus would be the distance between lens and retina.
The issue isn't whether its infallible, but whether its more accurate then a human.
I'm not sure that it needs to be more accurate than a human, so long as it is less biased. A human referee's decision inherently includes factors like which player is more likable, which player is better, etc. Hawkeye does not include those extraneous factors. Sure, it might be wrong, but it will not give one player a consistent advantage over the other as a result of being wrong.
It's also worth noting that having human referees gives the impression that argument can change the outcome. If John McEnroe can convince the referee that the call is wrong, then McEnroe might get the next call in his favor. With an automated system, arguing obviously does not influence either current or future decisions.
If the system is both less biased and more decisive, then I think that that is enough to justify using it so long as it is competitive in accuracy.
Emphasis mine. How much money would Google make from their free product? Of course, reading more finds that the claim is that Google is integrating this into their paid product (Google Apps Premier) rather than giving it away for free. Perhaps you knew that, but it wasn't evident in what you said.
Incidentally, there is a better written article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9976405-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
In particular, that article points out that LimitNone is claiming that it divulged technical secrets to Google that Google then used in making its own product. Also, Google apparently changed its Google Apps interface in May of 2008, which caused the gMove product to break. That's apparently the violation of Illinois consumer laws.
Is that related to the differences between Standard and Premier? Apparently Standard does not allow for third party integrations but Premier does. Did Google tell LimitNone that the free version would always support gMove? If so, that will be interesting, as it will help to set expectations around how long Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. have to maintain API compatibility when they want to break it. All of them offer programs like this that allow third party developers to create apps that integrate with their platform. How long are those integrations warranted to work?
The real problem here is not in the relationship between Google and LimitNone but between Google and users of Apps standard edition. Google had been encouraging its users to pay $19 for this product but the functionality no longer works. Further, it apparently stopped working as a result of changes that Google made. If it turns out that it stopped working because Google started charging for something that it previously offered for free, should Google pay back the $19 to users?
Advertising is insanely profitable, just look at Google. Almost all Google's revenue is from advertising, but Google is not only making 50% profit, it's doing so on a growing sales base.
Of course, none of that means that Facebook is worth $15 billion. To justify that price, I would want to see indications that it would have $30 billion in revenue in the next ten years. That's conceivable, but MySpace still has more traffic and time spent per user: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/news_corp_don_t_worry_about_revenue_myspace_is_doing_great
MySpace is still only doing $900 million in advertising -- is there any reason to think that Facebook is making more than $300 to $400 million? Those revenue figures suggest that MySpace is worth about $4.5 billion and Facebook about $2 billion. Facebook may grow enough to justify $15 billion -- that's aggressive but not impossible.
In either of the last two cases, anyone can claim the offer to distribute the source. There is no need for them to claim to have received the binary from you. This is because there is no real way to check if they received the offer transitively.
All that said, if you ship the source with the binaries, you can not be required to provide the source to anyone else. Nor for that matter to those who already received the source. The simplest way to avoid legal concerns with distributing open source binaries on hardware is to add a source directory -- then even if you distributed the binaries, you have also completed the required source distribution.
They already have this for car sharing. See ZipCar for example.
It's not that production and consumption are carbon negative in total. Production (including growing the feedstock) is carbon negative and consumption is carbon positive. All that they are saying is that the carbon in the fuel was in the air recently rather than across the geologic time scales of traditional oil.
And yes, I realize that you didn't limit hunger to the United States. What I'm saying is that as a resident of the United States, it is perfectly logical for me to be more concerned by terrorism than hunger. My personal chances of dying from hunger are ridiculously low (far more likely to die from obesity). Even if my personal chances of dying from terrorism are also low, they aren't quite as low as my chances of dying from hunger.
Your point (that terrorism is of only mild danger) is correct, but your argument is not. Instead of hunger, you should use obesity, drunk driving, or some other risk that actually affects Americans to argue that Americans should be more worried about that than terrorism.
I think that you meant http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments/dp/0596514921
You need the dp/0596514921 -- I think that it actually ignores the Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments part. That's just for search engine optimization purposes.
I agree with the thrust of your post, although I would put it differently. If a business can only generate $18,000 in expenses but has $20,000 in credit card receipts, then this prevents the business from stating its revenues as $18,200.
Cecil Adams has an interesting discussion of Latin/English pluralizations hidden in a discussion of the proper plural of penis.
Example: a person falls into a well and has to kick her or his feet to stay above water and breathe. After some time of this, the person is tired and may decide to stop kicking, sink, and drown. This kind of robot would act to find ways to encourage the person to continue kicking.
The sniper fire example also indicates this. Assume that you are in a location where the sniper can't reach you. So long as you stay there, you are safe. One danger is that you might get frustrated with waiting and leave safety. A robot like this could make the waiting more bearable by providing things that you can do other than stare at the walls.
Slavery sounds like it should be more efficient, because theoretically the master can demand anything from the slave. However, in practice, the cost of enforcement demanded by slavery eliminated any advantages from this.
Both slavery and unions are inefficient in that they increase the cost of changing workers. Slavery due to the capital invested in buying the slave; unions due to the friction added by the union.
A quick Google finds http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1218 discussing some books comparing the relative efficiency of slave labor to free labor.
Btw, in most jurisdictions, buildings get taxed as well as land. You probably realized this, but I think that it makes a nice complement to the way that you misread the previous post.
There are other examples of taxes on property that is not "real" (as in real estate). Google "intangibles tax" for one example. http://www.ksrevenue.org/perstaxtypesint.htm
I found links to both papers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
Btw, looking in the Kotchen/Grant paper, I do find a reference to the Kellogg/Wolff paper, along with twenty-four other papers on the subject.