"Firemen set fires randomly in the middle of the night so they have something to put out"
Two words: Leonard Gregg. But I don't think it was random, or in the middle of the night.
Wherever people profit from cleaning up messes, you'll find some who are willing to make the messes themselves. It's human nature. The only question is whether current corporate governance factors improve on what humans bring to the organization, or exacerbate the worst parts. I think the latter is true, and getting more so all the time.
> the credit card companies (at least in the US) seem to have been happy enough just paying the price of fraud
And this is because the credit card companies make money coming and going. They make vast sums from merchants, by charging a few percent of the purchase price when you buy something. That's how some card companies can give you 1% back on purchases -- if they're skimming 3% off the top, and returning 1% to you, they're still skimming 2%. Fraud is just a cost of doing business to them, and as the fraud costs go up, so does the merchant charge -- and the end cost to you. I don't think it will ever be in their best interest to fix the fraud problem, until people find other ways to transact business and stop using their services.
I think making the banks pay the cost of fraud will have the same problem. It won't fix the root issue, it will just raise prices for everyone. I hope I'm wrong, but I've been watching this unfold for a decade and don't have much hope.
The reason the stock market works is that shares of common stock are all equivalent.
When I buy a share at the market price, I can later sell it at the market price and the share I have to sell is the same as a share that anyone else (even the company) might be selling.
To make it work as a market economy the way they want, the record company would have to be able to control the number of copies -- but they can't. Also there would have to be an exchange where I could sell my copy to someone else -- but exchanges already exist where I can give away newly-issued copies away for free, and continue using my own copy. It isn't like the stock market at all, and never will be.
Unless you can envision a stock market where people can photocopy stock certificates and issue thousands of shares that are, in every way, "real" shares that are as good as the ones the company issues. A market where, once I buy a share, the company that issued it sees me as a potential enemy rather than a voting shareholder; doesn't ever intend to share profits with me; and is looking for every way possible to prevent me from trading my shares to others.
No, the market for stocks and the market for music are very different. The stock market makes sense, and the current music distribution system doesn't.
It IS an interesting social experiment. So interesting that I, and thousands of other people, use it several times a week. We don't plan on stopping.
I don't worry about its "reputation", I worry whether the server is up and whether it has any usable information on the subject I want. I don't let others judge whether the information is useful, I do so myself.
I haven't opened a Brittanica volume in months, despite the high degree of respect I hold for it. Have you?
"Market value, someone is willing to pay." There is the difference. Once you buy a pair of shoes or a diamond necklace, it's yours. Nobody else wants it or will pay much for it. But this guy apparently found that this... nothing... was eminently salable. It's more like a baseball card than a pair of shoes, there was at least some hope that its value will rise instead of dropping like a stone.
> I don't sense the police state that you do, perhaps mostly because I'm life-long friends with people who are now in law enforcement and intel
I hold most law enforcement people in high regard, but there are all kinds. A former family friend was a local police officer but ended up shooting his own wife (maimed, not killed) after a messy divorce. Another friend recently lost his position as a local judge because of money laundering. And then there are the policemen who recently started frequenting a massage parlor a few miles from here to "gather evidence".
The real factor is not whether most people who have access to these tools are honorable people, bent on good. The fact is that there are real nuts out there who are part of the system and will use it for all manner of dubious "investigations", sophomoric pranks, or outright evil purposes. At the very least, the public needs to know that these tools exist and who has access to them.
And in the end, the criminals will end up having the same tools the law does. What we need are not a whole bunch of police with lots of firepower (both physical and electronic), but methods by which ordinary people can protect themselves. I don't fear black helecopters, but I also do not want to hand unstoppable secret powers to my government. Ever since I helped put Bush/Cheney into office (biggest voting mistake of my life, and I do apologize), I don't trust them. Not an inch.
> What makes you think the DRM code is going to be somehow "more resistant" to buffer exploits?
When I read the GP, I thought he meant DRM content, not code. If you can't trust your system to safely deal with whatever it encounters, then many consumers will be easily convinced that the solution is to guarantee that it only encounters trusted data.
For instance, you don't just stick any old CD from a mass mailing into your drive and install software to see what it does, do you? Most people understand now that this is dangerous, and they only install programs from CD's they've bought or received from people they trust in some way. Now, if just looking at an image online can cause harm, then people will do the same thing with their browsers -- they will only surf sites they trust. To prevent the loss of ad dollars, the big site owners will work with the DRM suppliers to promulgate a model where the browser checks every piece of content to verify who made it, before attempting to deal with it. This will be a large hurdle in the path of independent content providers who aren't in on the scheme.
In reality, we don't need all this. It is possible, and not really all that hard, to write a bulletproof algorithm to verify an image file format as it is being read, and it doesn't cost a lot of performance. The question is, will people demand this, or will they be lulled into accepting a continuous train of little "fixes" from their software supplier?
(Or will people perhaps demand a virtual OS instance that will allow them to surf even the most evil sites in a pure read-only mode?)
> a lot less people have the talent to pull it off
Talent to pull what off? Great songs with professional sound quality and instrumentation? This is not expensive, and there are tens of thousands of musicians who have the ability to do it. They just don't get noticed. What's popular is only made so through marketing, it isn't because it's inherently better than the 99% that doesn't get nationwide/worldwide attention.
The equipment to make great-quality music is very cheap now, unlike the situation twenty years ago. The barriers to entry are low, and mostly artificial constructs put up by the big studios. I also hold talented musicians in high regard, and I have worked with enough of them to think that there are enough talented musicians in any major city to fill the worldwide void if A&M, Warner, Sony, and the other conglomerates were to disappear from the map tomorrow. Nobody would have to look very hard for music to listen to, download, and (sometimes) pay for. Would it pay the artists enough to quit their day job? Maybe, maybe not, depends on the mechanism. But these are people aren't making loads of money off their music now, either. They do it because they're musicians, and (in my experience) you can't keep them from creating music.
Not that I wish ill to the artists with contracts, but I do hope the industry changes radically from its current form.
> Stating it did not happen is just a simple lie.
Did you read the linked article? They aren't saying it didn't happen. They're saying that the modern interpretation of its significance is wrong. They say that, far from resisting scientific inquiry, the church provided unprecedented support for scientific study in Europe across hundreds of years, and that the issue with Galileo was one of a few isolated incidents that arose due to politics and academic squabbles, not because of some intrinsic opposition to scientific discovery by the religious establishment.
Lissl claims that "Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium had been in print for nearly seventy years before the Church placed any restrictions on its teachings" and notes "how easy it had been for Galileo to obtain the Church's permission to publish his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, the book which got him into so much trouble". True? False? Seems important.
The interesting point here isn't whether Galileo had trouble with the Inquisition (he did), but whether modern accounts (the "myth") are accurrate. Was he tortured? No. Was the Church opposed to scientific study? No. Were they afraid that science might prove their worldview to be false? No. Were they afraid of where re-interpretation of Church positions by Catholic scientists during the Protestant reformation would lead? This is the interesting question. Lissl says, "Galileo was asserting, in effect, that where scientific findings conflicted with the literal sense of the Scriptures, scientists should have the right to independently determine what the Bible means. For a scientist to assert this was tantamount to sanctioning the private interpretation of the Bible, a Protestant view expressly forbidden by the Council of Trent. Galileo had unwittingly embroiled the Copernican question in a much larger and more complex controversy."
This point is most interesting here and now because of the whole controversy between evolutionists and creationists. All the evolutionists I know (well, except maybe one) think that a religious person must automatically oppose scientific study, deny funding for it, what have you. That there's some kind of philosophical denial of the worth of science. But this is totally incorrect. Part of the reason people think like this is that they learned how the Catholic church opposed Galileo's findings. But what if the truth of the matter is more complicated? What if what Lissl says is true?
American funding mechanisms in the scientific establishment are very much like the Catholic church all those years ago. You want to study HIV? Cancer? Great, we have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for you. Money everywhere. Want to study the evolution of organisms? Fantastic, great, let us write a check. You want to study the possibility that evolution is wrong, and that another explanation makes more sense? BZZZT, wrong answer. No dice. No funding. And if you try to publish any of your ideas, you are ostracized, a laughingstock, labelled "not a scientist". The only difference is that you can't legally shut people up in America, and politics and the courts hold power, not the Catholic church. Neither has anything to do with science, except that the money has to come from somewhere.
It's unfortunate because SGI wasn't just any old company with generic products. Many SGI boxes have been amazing! If you had your hands on a few of them, it felt like managing a stable full of stallions. I'm not surprised that a whole lot of people are saddened by the company's current straits, whether deserved or not.
Around 1990 I administered machines from SGI, NeXT, Sun, IBM (RS 6000), DEC, and Apple Macintosh, Dell x86, and Compaq x86 systems. This list is in order of how interesting they were to have around, and none of the others came close to SGI -- they had rendering capabilities and raw compute power that was all out of proportion to the others.
BMW and others offer engines and conversion packages to make dual-fuel vehicles using internal combustion engines that work on both hydrogen and gasoline. The fuel cell vehicle has the potential to be more energy efficient, but over the next few decades, if hydrogen catches on, I think the vast majority of hydrogen-technology users will NOT be using expensive and new fuel-cell technology. They'll be using fairly normal cars (maybe even the cars they have now) with dual-fuel engines that don't require any more platinum than they do now (and if the hydrogen infrastructure grows to the extent that we can stop burning gasoline, they won't need any at all -- no more pesky catalytic converters).
In the very long run, if America can finally get off the idea of having a separate car for every individual on the road, we will solve both the fuels problem and the platinum-availability problem. I don't see platinum as a limiting factor at all.
The slashdot article summary ("apparently the first fuel-cell car on the road anywhere in the world") is just wrong.
An article on the Honda site says "In December 2002, the city of Los Angeles began leasing the first of five Honda FCXs, which are now used in normal, everyday activities by city officials."... "While the 2005 Honda FCX is our second-generation fuel cell vehicle (FCV), it is the first to be powered by a Honda designed and manufactured fuel cell stack."
So this is a meaningful trial and a significant step but it is far from the "first fuel-cell car on the road".
Agreed. My experience at all libraries I've come in contact with is that the librarians sought to expand my horizons, not limit them. They have uniformly loaded me down with more information than I thought I needed, and helped me learn how to find it myself the next time.
I wouldn't be surprised if the GP was written by someone who had a bad experience at a middle school library or something, where he was denied help in accessing material that wasn't deemed acceptable. I've heard there are such problems in certain places, but none of the libraries I've used, in towns and schools up and down the west coast of the US, have ever given a hint of any restrictions or knowledge filtering. And I've been a voracious user of libraries since early grade school, worked in some of them, and talked to a LOT of librarians.
>Your monitor, however, cannot shine the sun in your eyes
So this is obviously what we need to fix. We just need displays which can faithfully reproduce 16-bit-per-color-channel dynamic range, with black values like a cave and white values that give you a flash burn.
Of course, the power requirements would be prohibitive and a virus that pokes pixels to the screen would REALLY ruin you...
> there is nothing that can be done by your average, above average, or below average person
You said it yourself, it's propaganda, and there IS something you can do. The thing that can be done by you, the average person, is to EXPRESS FEAR. If you can be convinced that something terrible is about to happen, before it happens, then you can be manipulated to do something (buy Tamiflu) and/or your elected representatives can take action, and be seen by you to be doing so. To the government and the corporations, this has two huge benefits: (1) someone gets a lot of your money, and (2) you feel good about giving it. The action, in this case, is that your elected representatives are going to allocate public funds for research and stockpiling vaccines, and the major question the general population will ask is whether enough is being done. Not "are you sure this is really necessary", or "why is this more important than people dying in our district right now from X" or "what else could be done with that $500 million".
Our "news" is like a big stock market, with politicians acting as mutual fund managers. Hmmm, there is a war? Who can benefit from that? Can we sell arms to one side? Next week, an ecological disaster. What laws can we make that will get our construction enterprises fully employed?
It is pure influence-peddling, with a side of entertainment. If it wasn't, then any 1-hour daily news program would be breathtaking. It would be FULL of amazing events from around the world, there would be no time at all for any fluff like "tomorrow it's probably going to rain" or "scientists predict that something bad MIGHT happen" or "look at that smile on Tom Cruise".
That's an oversimplification. We, the customers, are willing (barely) to part with our $45 a month, first to have access to the network, and for some amount of traffic.
But the phone company isn't just reselling bandwidth, they're recouping an investment on the infrastructure. They paid all those capital costs, not in hopes of making some percentage profit on "bandwidth", but in hopes that they could find a way of extracting profit from the monopoly on access.
The reason they haven't run fiber to you is just that you will continue to pay for copper. As long as you will, they won't improve service.
These companies are making enormous profits. But they will push too hard, eventually. Wireless hardware is simply too cheap. The land-line monopoly cannot last after people (our kids, most likely) figure out just how badly we're being taken.
We should also note that most of the shielding on a microwave is sheet metal, with no holes. Only the front faceplate has holes, so that you can watch the food boil over onto the turntable.
Or any of myriad other ways of avoiding the commute entirely.
Telecommuting is stil growing in popularity, but very slowly -- the single biggest contribution a company could make to reducing fuel use and emissions is to not require all its employees to show up physically every day. Most days I come in to work just because I have to show my face, not for any technical reason. And unlike monetary incentives to drive a special class of vehicle, telecommuting doesn't even cost the company any money!
To comment on your idea, though, I'd rather work 20 days on and 10 days off than the other way around. After each 20-day vacation, I think I'd forget what I was working on before...and 16-hour days don't do good things for my productivity. But everyone is different.
Addendum: going through this before, I had been figuring that my car takes about 10kW on average (true), so it would only require 10 kilowatt-hours produced at 100% efficiency. I had thought that conversion of electricity to hydrogen gas and then to power-at-the-wheels could be done with near 50% efficiency, but my reading today indicates this is quite a ways off. That's probably what led to overconfidence regarding costs.
I did the original calculations over a year ago, but you're right, I didn't factor in H2 compression. How big a factor is that?
Here's my math. My car (a Honda CRX HF, a very fuel-efficient car from 1988) currently gets 52 miles per gallon. I use it about an hour per day -- let's say I use one gallon of gas per day, which is about right. With a fuel-cell vehicle of similar size, this should be equivalent to about 0.5 kilograms of hydrogen.
My south-facing roof is 4x20 meters, or 80 square meters. Bright sunlight has 1020 watts/square meter, according to wikipedia, and current photovoltaics are 12% efficient, so the usable electrical output of a roof full of solar cells ought to be 9kW. This is borne out with an example: the bp 2150s solar cell gives 150 watts nominal maximum power, is 80x160cm (1.28 square meters), so the roof area accomodates about 60 panels, total output about 60*150=9kW.
If they work 6 hours per day, that's 54 kilowatt-hours. How much hydrogen will this produce? According to whatever web page I could turn up at the moment, it takes 39 kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen, or 78 kilowatt-hours at 50% efficiency. So my roof should be able to generate 0.7 kilograms per day.
Wikipedia says that solar panels cost about $4 per watt, which would give a cost of $36k for the panels. This is obviously way beyond feasibility, and renders my statement that the capital costs could be recouped in 10 years untrue. Is this what you meant by "better redo your calculations"?
You might also say that the cells wouldn't produce full power all the time (clouds), or that my roof isn't a good mounting place (no movable cell arrays). All of these are reasonable objections, I suppose. But the cells would also be working on days I don't drive, and I think 50% electricity-to-hydrogen conversion figure is low.
The article describes how activity in the basal ganglia changes when the subject experiences new situations, vs. how it behaves when following a pre-established pattern in response to a set of contextual cues.
Riding a bike, on the other hand, has a lot more to do with motor control patterns which I believe are established in the cerebellum.
There have been studies on people with brain damage (gunshot wounds to the head, etc.) which lead to a model where the cerebellum is the center of memory and learning for things like riding a bike or playing piano.
Not being a neuroscientist, I don't know the present state of research, but I think these motor-control "habits" are processed differently from habits like wanting to eat, drink, smoke, etc. in response to stimuli.
There's an article that would shed a lot of light on the discussion if it wasn't hidden behind subscription mechanisms (a pox on scientific journals that don't give open access to publicly-funded research!)
Because batteries are heavy (bad for a car) and they wear out and have to be replaced. If gas is the source, then electricity might be better for your house, but then that's what you already do if your house uses electric appliances and your power station uses a gas-fired generator (and it's more efficient than you'll be able to do with a converter at your house). But if you can store and use hydrogen, then you can get the original energy from other sources (a local solar or wind farm, for example, instead of a global energy conglomerate) and store it at your house in tanks instead of batteries -- which, again, wear out and have to be replaced periodically.
Besides the source and price flexibility you describe, using hydrogen as fuel brings true independence: it is feasible to produce all the hydrogen needed for a car at your residence.
My roof at home has ample area to generate all the power my car needs, even with today's not-very-efficient solar cells and using not-very-efficient electrolysis, with energy left over to sell or donate to my neighbors.
Once installed, I would never have to buy fuel except for long trips. It would take about 10 years to pay for the capital costs at last year's gas prices (let alone current prices), and there's no reason the equipment shouldn't last 20 years.
The ONLY things missing are the car, and a place to buy all the hydrogen generator parts so I don't have to engineer the whole thing myself. Using natural gas is a smart option, it would get me halfway to where I want to be. It's not a dumb idea, it's exciting. If it were on sale, I'd buy it now.
Put it this way: if Jesus wasn't who he said he was, I got nothing. But if he was, then I know plenty -- because he told us lots of things about his kingdom.
I have evidence for the existence of this kingdom, evidence that is convincing to me. My faith in God's power (and its visible effects) is just as strong as my faith in my car engine's power (and its visible effects). I "know" that my car will move when I press the gas pedal, and I "know" that Gods's plans and promises written in the Bible are true and do actually work out in the real world.
Obviously nothing I might say will convince you. So we are both being consistent. To the same extent that you "know" what you know, I "know" what I know. Unless, of course, you're some sort of super-human that works on a different plane of existence, and your ability to "know" is different from mine. Maybe you are god?
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: Leonard Gregg. But I don't think it was random, or in the middle of the night.
Wherever people profit from cleaning up messes, you'll find some who are willing to make the messes themselves. It's human nature. The only question is whether current corporate governance factors improve on what humans bring to the organization, or exacerbate the worst parts. I think the latter is true, and getting more so all the time.
And the reason you think Google is somehow immune to bad links is ... ??
And this is because the credit card companies make money coming and going. They make vast sums from merchants, by charging a few percent of the purchase price when you buy something. That's how some card companies can give you 1% back on purchases -- if they're skimming 3% off the top, and returning 1% to you, they're still skimming 2%. Fraud is just a cost of doing business to them, and as the fraud costs go up, so does the merchant charge -- and the end cost to you. I don't think it will ever be in their best interest to fix the fraud problem, until people find other ways to transact business and stop using their services.
I think making the banks pay the cost of fraud will have the same problem. It won't fix the root issue, it will just raise prices for everyone. I hope I'm wrong, but I've been watching this unfold for a decade and don't have much hope.
To make it work as a market economy the way they want, the record company would have to be able to control the number of copies -- but they can't. Also there would have to be an exchange where I could sell my copy to someone else -- but exchanges already exist where I can give away newly-issued copies away for free, and continue using my own copy. It isn't like the stock market at all, and never will be.
Unless you can envision a stock market where people can photocopy stock certificates and issue thousands of shares that are, in every way, "real" shares that are as good as the ones the company issues. A market where, once I buy a share, the company that issued it sees me as a potential enemy rather than a voting shareholder; doesn't ever intend to share profits with me; and is looking for every way possible to prevent me from trading my shares to others.
No, the market for stocks and the market for music are very different. The stock market makes sense, and the current music distribution system doesn't.
I haven't opened a Brittanica volume in months, despite the high degree of respect I hold for it. Have you?
"Market value, someone is willing to pay." There is the difference. Once you buy a pair of shoes or a diamond necklace, it's yours. Nobody else wants it or will pay much for it. But this guy apparently found that this ... nothing ... was eminently salable. It's more like a baseball card than a pair of shoes, there was at least some hope that its value will rise instead of dropping like a stone.
I hold most law enforcement people in high regard, but there are all kinds. A former family friend was a local police officer but ended up shooting his own wife (maimed, not killed) after a messy divorce. Another friend recently lost his position as a local judge because of money laundering. And then there are the policemen who recently started frequenting a massage parlor a few miles from here to "gather evidence".
The real factor is not whether most people who have access to these tools are honorable people, bent on good. The fact is that there are real nuts out there who are part of the system and will use it for all manner of dubious "investigations", sophomoric pranks, or outright evil purposes. At the very least, the public needs to know that these tools exist and who has access to them.
And in the end, the criminals will end up having the same tools the law does. What we need are not a whole bunch of police with lots of firepower (both physical and electronic), but methods by which ordinary people can protect themselves. I don't fear black helecopters, but I also do not want to hand unstoppable secret powers to my government. Ever since I helped put Bush/Cheney into office (biggest voting mistake of my life, and I do apologize), I don't trust them. Not an inch.
When I read the GP, I thought he meant DRM content, not code. If you can't trust your system to safely deal with whatever it encounters, then many consumers will be easily convinced that the solution is to guarantee that it only encounters trusted data.
For instance, you don't just stick any old CD from a mass mailing into your drive and install software to see what it does, do you? Most people understand now that this is dangerous, and they only install programs from CD's they've bought or received from people they trust in some way. Now, if just looking at an image online can cause harm, then people will do the same thing with their browsers -- they will only surf sites they trust. To prevent the loss of ad dollars, the big site owners will work with the DRM suppliers to promulgate a model where the browser checks every piece of content to verify who made it, before attempting to deal with it. This will be a large hurdle in the path of independent content providers who aren't in on the scheme.
In reality, we don't need all this. It is possible, and not really all that hard, to write a bulletproof algorithm to verify an image file format as it is being read, and it doesn't cost a lot of performance. The question is, will people demand this, or will they be lulled into accepting a continuous train of little "fixes" from their software supplier?
(Or will people perhaps demand a virtual OS instance that will allow them to surf even the most evil sites in a pure read-only mode?)
Talent to pull what off? Great songs with professional sound quality and instrumentation? This is not expensive, and there are tens of thousands of musicians who have the ability to do it. They just don't get noticed. What's popular is only made so through marketing, it isn't because it's inherently better than the 99% that doesn't get nationwide/worldwide attention.
The equipment to make great-quality music is very cheap now, unlike the situation twenty years ago. The barriers to entry are low, and mostly artificial constructs put up by the big studios. I also hold talented musicians in high regard, and I have worked with enough of them to think that there are enough talented musicians in any major city to fill the worldwide void if A&M, Warner, Sony, and the other conglomerates were to disappear from the map tomorrow. Nobody would have to look very hard for music to listen to, download, and (sometimes) pay for. Would it pay the artists enough to quit their day job? Maybe, maybe not, depends on the mechanism. But these are people aren't making loads of money off their music now, either. They do it because they're musicians, and (in my experience) you can't keep them from creating music.
Not that I wish ill to the artists with contracts, but I do hope the industry changes radically from its current form.
Did you read the linked article? They aren't saying it didn't happen. They're saying that the modern interpretation of its significance is wrong. They say that, far from resisting scientific inquiry, the church provided unprecedented support for scientific study in Europe across hundreds of years, and that the issue with Galileo was one of a few isolated incidents that arose due to politics and academic squabbles, not because of some intrinsic opposition to scientific discovery by the religious establishment.
Lissl claims that "Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium had been in print for nearly seventy years before the Church placed any restrictions on its teachings" and notes "how easy it had been for Galileo to obtain the Church's permission to publish his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, the book which got him into so much trouble". True? False? Seems important.
The interesting point here isn't whether Galileo had trouble with the Inquisition (he did), but whether modern accounts (the "myth") are accurrate. Was he tortured? No. Was the Church opposed to scientific study? No. Were they afraid that science might prove their worldview to be false? No. Were they afraid of where re-interpretation of Church positions by Catholic scientists during the Protestant reformation would lead? This is the interesting question. Lissl says, "Galileo was asserting, in effect, that where scientific findings conflicted with the literal sense of the Scriptures, scientists should have the right to independently determine what the Bible means. For a scientist to assert this was tantamount to sanctioning the private interpretation of the Bible, a Protestant view expressly forbidden by the Council of Trent. Galileo had unwittingly embroiled the Copernican question in a much larger and more complex controversy."
This point is most interesting here and now because of the whole controversy between evolutionists and creationists. All the evolutionists I know (well, except maybe one) think that a religious person must automatically oppose scientific study, deny funding for it, what have you. That there's some kind of philosophical denial of the worth of science. But this is totally incorrect. Part of the reason people think like this is that they learned how the Catholic church opposed Galileo's findings. But what if the truth of the matter is more complicated? What if what Lissl says is true?
American funding mechanisms in the scientific establishment are very much like the Catholic church all those years ago. You want to study HIV? Cancer? Great, we have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for you. Money everywhere. Want to study the evolution of organisms? Fantastic, great, let us write a check. You want to study the possibility that evolution is wrong, and that another explanation makes more sense? BZZZT, wrong answer. No dice. No funding. And if you try to publish any of your ideas, you are ostracized, a laughingstock, labelled "not a scientist". The only difference is that you can't legally shut people up in America, and politics and the courts hold power, not the Catholic church. Neither has anything to do with science, except that the money has to come from somewhere.
Around 1990 I administered machines from SGI, NeXT, Sun, IBM (RS 6000), DEC, and Apple Macintosh, Dell x86, and Compaq x86 systems. This list is in order of how interesting they were to have around, and none of the others came close to SGI -- they had rendering capabilities and raw compute power that was all out of proportion to the others.
BMW and others offer engines and conversion packages to make dual-fuel vehicles using internal combustion engines that work on both hydrogen and gasoline. The fuel cell vehicle has the potential to be more energy efficient, but over the next few decades, if hydrogen catches on, I think the vast majority of hydrogen-technology users will NOT be using expensive and new fuel-cell technology. They'll be using fairly normal cars (maybe even the cars they have now) with dual-fuel engines that don't require any more platinum than they do now (and if the hydrogen infrastructure grows to the extent that we can stop burning gasoline, they won't need any at all -- no more pesky catalytic converters). In the very long run, if America can finally get off the idea of having a separate car for every individual on the road, we will solve both the fuels problem and the platinum-availability problem. I don't see platinum as a limiting factor at all.
An article on the Honda site says "In December 2002, the city of Los Angeles began leasing the first of five Honda FCXs, which are now used in normal, everyday activities by city officials." ... "While the 2005 Honda FCX is our second-generation fuel cell vehicle (FCV), it is the first to be powered by a Honda designed and manufactured fuel cell stack."
So this is a meaningful trial and a significant step but it is far from the "first fuel-cell car on the road".
I wouldn't be surprised if the GP was written by someone who had a bad experience at a middle school library or something, where he was denied help in accessing material that wasn't deemed acceptable. I've heard there are such problems in certain places, but none of the libraries I've used, in towns and schools up and down the west coast of the US, have ever given a hint of any restrictions or knowledge filtering. And I've been a voracious user of libraries since early grade school, worked in some of them, and talked to a LOT of librarians.
So this is obviously what we need to fix. We just need displays which can faithfully reproduce 16-bit-per-color-channel dynamic range, with black values like a cave and white values that give you a flash burn.
Of course, the power requirements would be prohibitive and a virus that pokes pixels to the screen would REALLY ruin you...
You said it yourself, it's propaganda, and there IS something you can do. The thing that can be done by you, the average person, is to EXPRESS FEAR. If you can be convinced that something terrible is about to happen, before it happens, then you can be manipulated to do something (buy Tamiflu) and/or your elected representatives can take action, and be seen by you to be doing so. To the government and the corporations, this has two huge benefits: (1) someone gets a lot of your money, and (2) you feel good about giving it. The action, in this case, is that your elected representatives are going to allocate public funds for research and stockpiling vaccines, and the major question the general population will ask is whether enough is being done. Not "are you sure this is really necessary", or "why is this more important than people dying in our district right now from X" or "what else could be done with that $500 million".
Our "news" is like a big stock market, with politicians acting as mutual fund managers. Hmmm, there is a war? Who can benefit from that? Can we sell arms to one side? Next week, an ecological disaster. What laws can we make that will get our construction enterprises fully employed?
It is pure influence-peddling, with a side of entertainment. If it wasn't, then any 1-hour daily news program would be breathtaking. It would be FULL of amazing events from around the world, there would be no time at all for any fluff like "tomorrow it's probably going to rain" or "scientists predict that something bad MIGHT happen" or "look at that smile on Tom Cruise".
That's an oversimplification. We, the customers, are willing (barely) to part with our $45 a month, first to have access to the network, and for some amount of traffic. But the phone company isn't just reselling bandwidth, they're recouping an investment on the infrastructure. They paid all those capital costs, not in hopes of making some percentage profit on "bandwidth", but in hopes that they could find a way of extracting profit from the monopoly on access.
The reason they haven't run fiber to you is just that you will continue to pay for copper. As long as you will, they won't improve service.
These companies are making enormous profits. But they will push too hard, eventually. Wireless hardware is simply too cheap. The land-line monopoly cannot last after people (our kids, most likely) figure out just how badly we're being taken.
We should also note that most of the shielding on a microwave is sheet metal, with no holes. Only the front faceplate has holes, so that you can watch the food boil over onto the turntable.
To comment on your idea, though, I'd rather work 20 days on and 10 days off than the other way around. After each 20-day vacation, I think I'd forget what I was working on before...and 16-hour days don't do good things for my productivity. But everyone is different.
Addendum: going through this before, I had been figuring that my car takes about 10kW on average (true), so it would only require 10 kilowatt-hours produced at 100% efficiency. I had thought that conversion of electricity to hydrogen gas and then to power-at-the-wheels could be done with near 50% efficiency, but my reading today indicates this is quite a ways off. That's probably what led to overconfidence regarding costs.
Here's my math. My car (a Honda CRX HF, a very fuel-efficient car from 1988) currently gets 52 miles per gallon. I use it about an hour per day -- let's say I use one gallon of gas per day, which is about right. With a fuel-cell vehicle of similar size, this should be equivalent to about 0.5 kilograms of hydrogen.
My south-facing roof is 4x20 meters, or 80 square meters. Bright sunlight has 1020 watts/square meter, according to wikipedia, and current photovoltaics are 12% efficient, so the usable electrical output of a roof full of solar cells ought to be 9kW. This is borne out with an example: the bp 2150s solar cell gives 150 watts nominal maximum power, is 80x160cm (1.28 square meters), so the roof area accomodates about 60 panels, total output about 60*150=9kW.
If they work 6 hours per day, that's 54 kilowatt-hours. How much hydrogen will this produce? According to whatever web page I could turn up at the moment, it takes 39 kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen, or 78 kilowatt-hours at 50% efficiency. So my roof should be able to generate 0.7 kilograms per day.
Wikipedia says that solar panels cost about $4 per watt, which would give a cost of $36k for the panels. This is obviously way beyond feasibility, and renders my statement that the capital costs could be recouped in 10 years untrue. Is this what you meant by "better redo your calculations"?
You might also say that the cells wouldn't produce full power all the time (clouds), or that my roof isn't a good mounting place (no movable cell arrays). All of these are reasonable objections, I suppose. But the cells would also be working on days I don't drive, and I think 50% electricity-to-hydrogen conversion figure is low.
Riding a bike, on the other hand, has a lot more to do with motor control patterns which I believe are established in the cerebellum. There have been studies on people with brain damage (gunshot wounds to the head, etc.) which lead to a model where the cerebellum is the center of memory and learning for things like riding a bike or playing piano. Not being a neuroscientist, I don't know the present state of research, but I think these motor-control "habits" are processed differently from habits like wanting to eat, drink, smoke, etc. in response to stimuli.
There's an article that would shed a lot of light on the discussion if it wasn't hidden behind subscription mechanisms (a pox on scientific journals that don't give open access to publicly-funded research!)
Because batteries are heavy (bad for a car) and they wear out and have to be replaced. If gas is the source, then electricity might be better for your house, but then that's what you already do if your house uses electric appliances and your power station uses a gas-fired generator (and it's more efficient than you'll be able to do with a converter at your house). But if you can store and use hydrogen, then you can get the original energy from other sources (a local solar or wind farm, for example, instead of a global energy conglomerate) and store it at your house in tanks instead of batteries -- which, again, wear out and have to be replaced periodically.
The ONLY things missing are the car, and a place to buy all the hydrogen generator parts so I don't have to engineer the whole thing myself. Using natural gas is a smart option, it would get me halfway to where I want to be. It's not a dumb idea, it's exciting. If it were on sale, I'd buy it now.
Obviously nothing I might say will convince you. So we are both being consistent. To the same extent that you "know" what you know, I "know" what I know. Unless, of course, you're some sort of super-human that works on a different plane of existence, and your ability to "know" is different from mine. Maybe you are god?