First, this isn't "Apple" not letting you hear these things. It's the record companies and their licensing agreements. If you go into a record store in the US, do you see all these great Japanese artists? Hell no. Why? Isn't it just as easy to ship them over as it is to ship over US artists? It's not Apple limiting these things, it's the damned recording companies.
It's the same reason that TV shows on iTunes US aren't available on iTunes UK and vice versa. There are ancient licensing agreements (well, ancient in terms of the internet) between the media companies that Apple has to respect if you want any content on iTunes at all. Apple could have gone the eMusic route and filled the iTunes store with independent artists, but who would start doing that?
Finally, Apple's not preventing you from hearing these songs on your computer or your iPod. You're free to buy them on CDs and rip them into your computer. And you can even rip them in MP3 format with no DRM! Amazing!
It's natural for people to beat up on Apple because that's who's dealing with them when they don't get what they want. But that's just human nature. I used to work as a bus boy in a restuarant. I've seen people scream at waiters for the cooks screwing up their order. I've seen people yell at cashiers for something they bought there not working correctly. Most people are stupid. It's up to those of us who aren't to
It's not just their hardware side. My most recent business involved making web apps for small businesses. They seem incapable of knowing what they want and lack the ability to communicate these things clearly.
I listen to quite a few podcasts. I listen to them mostly when I'm doing housework. One day, I had just finished the dishes and had about ten minutes left on part one of MacCast's podcaster roundtable, so I sat down on the couch and took a quick break. My wife took that as the signal for "cuddle." Then she asked me "Why do you like listening to your people on your podcasts talk and not me?"
I said "Because they talk about interesting things."
"Remove" was a bad word to use. How about "internalize" externalities as much as possible, so that the cost of a product or service more closely reflects the true costs it.
My kids, and I've already gotten permission from my wife for this, will be able to view any porn they can get access to.
The key words in that statement are "they can get access to." It will be a delightful cat-and-mouse game between my kids and I. I'll try to block their access, and they'll try to get around my blocking. We'll both learn a lot, and my kids will have a head start in a career in network security, should they wish to pursue one.
I had the idea to take my fridge off the grid and use the 12V DC that comes out of the batteries to run my networking equipment (router, vonage box, cable modem) because they all run off of 12V DC anyways. I'll save money on them because the inverters in the power bricks won't be losing power.
I'm interested in making the economy work the way Adam Smith intended by removing externalities.
There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid.
However, there's economic costs to every form of power generation. Coal, oil, and natural gas power plants should pay for each ton of CO2 and other pollutant they emit. Nuclear power plants should pay for the disposal of their fuel and the power plant itself when it is end-of-lifed. Solar panel manufacturers should pay for the disposal or recycling of their panels at the end of life. Hell, McDonalds should pay for each pound of trash it generates with its packaging.
In this way consumers would be able to make better decisions because the true costs of them would be visible in the price. It would remove the externalities that Adam Smith said were the problem with his economic theory. Also, by paying these fees to the government and passing along the price to the consumer, we would be able to eliminate almost all taxes that we currently pay.
Some clarification: There's an economic benefit of generating electricity, and should be encouraged. That's why I say a per-megawatt subsidy regardless of generation capacity to show the benefit to society of having electricity.
Then, the government should work out a per-ton or per-rad cost that it charges companies that use nuclear, coal, gas, or oil power to provide a total cost to the consumer of using these power generation methods. The same goes for the toxic wastes in solar panels.
In this way, the government will be acting to create a market that functions more like the one that Adam Smith intended. The true cost of the product (electricity) would be able to be determined based on the generation method. If nuclear, coal, and natural gas can still compete with renewable energy sources, then it should be allowed to continue to exist.
60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
Solar panels require very little maintenance other than a quick hose down if it hasn't rained in a while. They're solid-state, so there's nothing to wear out, and most of them have a 25 year warranty.
Also, the government offers rebates that bring the price of solar power down for individuals. Then there's projects like Renu by CitizenRe that install and maintain the solar panels for you and you pay them what you would normally pay the power company per kWh. And that rate is locked in for 1, 5, or 25 years.
I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than solar power: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
As I said before, solar panels have a lifetime of over 25 years. So if it takes them ten years to produce the same amount of power it took to produce them, then they'll produce 150% more power than it took to make them. All without any intervention from the user. Also, the silicon, aluminum frames, and copper wiring can be recycled into new solar panels. Of course, this is only beginning to be a problem because the PV systems installed in the early 1980s are only just now coming to the end of their lives.
I'd like to see where you got your figures supporting your assertion that solar panels are not as effective as nuclear power plants
If you figure we have 15 years left on this roof, I have to wonder whether an expensive photovoltaic system will end up going the same way as the solar water heater.
Most good solar panels have a 25 year warranty. You should be able to disassemble the system and reassemble it once the new roof is on. If you've got it grid-intertied you won't notice any power outage.
Another question in my mind is the uncertainties related to the craziness California has been seeing in electric rates, as well as uncertainties about when is the right time to buy photovoltaics, given that the technology is advancing rapidly.
The latest thing in solar panels are flexible amorphous silicon solar shingles. But other than that, the standard amorphous silicon panels haven't changed much since the mid-80s. They've just gotten cheaper to manufacture as economies of scale have kicked in and larger players like BP and Sunoco have started producing them. I could take one of my dad's old Mother Earth News and design an identical PV system using modern technology and the only difference would be the efficiency.
And then there are all the other things that might be easier and more practical than installing solar panels. I replaced a bunch of incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents last month.
Very, very true. Installing solar panels is still in the realm of folks who want to go above and beyond. I'd say a better solution for you would be to find a way to buy your power from renewable energy sources. Or you could take one room, or your pool, off of the grid. For $600 and a couple weekends of work, you can make a system that will power a small workshop or a room of your house. And this system is easily expandable when you have a couple hundred extra dollars and want to go pick up a solar panel and a couple more batteries to increase your capacity.
I'm thinking of doing something similar to take my refrigerator, about 20% of my electric bill, and my network equipment off of the grid. Not only would it save me a ton of money, but I'd have the added security of knowing that my food won't go bad if the power goes out.
One of the big electricity hogs in our house is the pool pump, and there's not much you can do about that; if you don't pump long enough on the pool every day, it turns green.
All the more reason to develop a system to take just the pool pump off the grid. It's something that uses a lot of power, needs to run all the time, and is costing you a lot of money. The $600 solar power system I linked to before should be sufficient to run your pump 24/7, especially in SoCal.
And you'll even be able to get your own story on/. if you document it!
It's not exactly portable, but I've found that Pandora (pandora.com) is a great place to find new artists based on stuff you know. I listen to it all day at work and write down artists that I then go home and buy albums from.
I'm not an anti-nuke freak. In fact, I think they're necessary for human expansion into space.
However, I think that all sources of electricity should be treated equally. A per-megawatt subsidy to companies and individuals producing power should be implemented, and the electrical grid upgraded to allow the generation methods to compete fairly.
This would allow individual regions to produce electricity in the most efficient ways. In some places nuclear might be the most cost effective, once the total cost of construction, disposal, and security are taken into account. In a lot of places, it won't be. The Midwest, with its small population, strong winds, and large amounts of land, would be perfectly suited to wind power. New York and Maryland would have tidal power. Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico would use solar power.
What we should not do is provide special loans and incentives for companies to choose nuclear power, or any other specific power generation technology. The government should step in to make the true costs of generation match the price as closely as possible, and then let the market determine what power generation method to use.
My stance is that, since the experts are disagreeing over the issue, the worst thing to do is to write something into law.
I think the best solution is to use the system the way it was designed. The executive branch can't execute a law that doesn't exist, and the judiciary branch can't interpret a law that doesn't exist. So, at some point, a law that says "you can't block, slow, or otherwise degrade the transmission of content on your network based on origin, destination or content transmitted, so long as that content is legal" has to be put into place if it's something that the public feels strongly about.
The error we run into frequently in modern legislation is eliminating the leeway for the judiciary and executive branches of government. Mandatory sentencing for criminals is an example of this. If we merely wrote a law that said "Internet service providers cannot deliberately block, slow, or otherwise degrade the transmission of content over their networks based on the origin, destination or content transmitted so long as it is legal" and then let the executive branch enforce it and let the judiciary branch interpret it, we would be able to build up a history of case law to make things work the way they should.
However, the huge difference in the amount of money that opposing groups, the ultra-rich telecoms on one side and the comparatively poor government and citizens on the other, means that this puts the neutrality principles in jeopardy. Levelling this playing field would do more to allay the fears of net neutrality proponents than all the legislation in the world.
However, is Network Neutrality simply the inverse set of the scheme you refer to, or is it an over-the-top reaction that actually bans many quite legitimate activities an ISP might do (such as providing bandwidth over and above what an end user has paid for, to paying parties. ie you pay for a 256k connection, but it becomes a 1Mbps + 256k connection whenever Apple is sending data to it, because they paid.)
That would be just fine, IF I had a choice of more than two packages from more than two broadband providers. As it stands now, I can get two packages from Comcast and two packages from Verizon. There are no other broadband providers in the area. And because I don't have enough choice in the services provided, any differences in speed would not be a problem.
However, were I in a situation where there was sufficient choice in the broadband market, this sort of thing wouldn't affect me much. There are all kinds of value added services from my ISP that I never use, from that ridiculous "fan" to email to spyware and spam filtering.
My reading of network neutrality is it makes all forms of improved service in exchange for money illegal, even when the end user doesn't lose out because of it. I'd rather see lobbying for minimum guaranteed service levels than "neutrality", the Internet equivalent of banning 1-800 numbers.
There's two issues with network neutrality. The first is the backbone providers. At that level, all traffic should be neutral. Any preferential treatment would degrade the whole system because the of the way the Internet works. You can't tell which network your packet is going to be routed over, and so the consumer wouldn't have a choice in this case.
The second issue is with the last-mile providers, the ones who provide services to business and residential customers. As long as I got 8Mbps down and 768kbps up regardless of where I was sending the data, I wouldn't care if they improved service for something I don't use.
Microsoft can charge what they want for a product and you can decide whether or not to buy it. Or, you can decide to pirate a copy, but please don't justify stealing by presenting yourself as a crusader against high-prices. [by the way, I'm not saying necessarily that I believe using a hacked version of Windows is stealing]
I'd even go so far as to say: If you don't want to pay for Windows, then it's not worth it to steal it. Find a different, free, legal way to get what you want. That way, they can't say "Go after the pirates! They're stealing our stuff!" They'll just have to make a cheaper product.
DARPA: We don't make the things that kill people. We make the things that kill people better.
DARPA: We bring good things to life... that are then used to kill people.
DARPA: Who do you want to kill today?
You make a good, if tragic, point. Humans are absurdly violent creatures. We'll spend billions on guns to defend ourselves from something that would take millions in aid and some foresight to prevent.
I think it would be better if they gave up their nuclear weapons research rather than their space program. Better to cancel a destructive program than a constructive program to alleviate poverty.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you don't put financial data on Google. However, for keeping track of gas mileage or working on a document with someone else, there's not much that can beat it.
Mephisto and Gullery aren't by people who made RoR. They're the RoR equivalents of Wordpress and Gallery 2.0.
And I use Backpack and TadaList a lot. Tadalist is particularly useful for listening to Pandora at work and documenting which songs you liked so you can download them later.
Slashdot Mirror
First, this isn't "Apple" not letting you hear these things. It's the record companies and their licensing agreements. If you go into a record store in the US, do you see all these great Japanese artists? Hell no. Why? Isn't it just as easy to ship them over as it is to ship over US artists? It's not Apple limiting these things, it's the damned recording companies.
It's the same reason that TV shows on iTunes US aren't available on iTunes UK and vice versa. There are ancient licensing agreements (well, ancient in terms of the internet) between the media companies that Apple has to respect if you want any content on iTunes at all. Apple could have gone the eMusic route and filled the iTunes store with independent artists, but who would start doing that?
Finally, Apple's not preventing you from hearing these songs on your computer or your iPod. You're free to buy them on CDs and rip them into your computer. And you can even rip them in MP3 format with no DRM! Amazing!
It's natural for people to beat up on Apple because that's who's dealing with them when they don't get what they want. But that's just human nature. I used to work as a bus boy in a restuarant. I've seen people scream at waiters for the cooks screwing up their order. I've seen people yell at cashiers for something they bought there not working correctly. Most people are stupid. It's up to those of us who aren't to
It's not just their hardware side. My most recent business involved making web apps for small businesses. They seem incapable of knowing what they want and lack the ability to communicate these things clearly.
I listen to quite a few podcasts. I listen to them mostly when I'm doing housework. One day, I had just finished the dishes and had about ten minutes left on part one of MacCast's podcaster roundtable, so I sat down on the couch and took a quick break. My wife took that as the signal for "cuddle." Then she asked me "Why do you like listening to your people on your podcasts talk and not me?"
I said "Because they talk about interesting things."
That's funny. I'm going to start working out to build some more muscle so that I can eat more and be fit.
"Remove" was a bad word to use. How about "internalize" externalities as much as possible, so that the cost of a product or service more closely reflects the true costs it.
I'm not sure how I'll do it. But, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
Besides, I looked at tons of porn when I was a kid. I turned out alright.
My kids, and I've already gotten permission from my wife for this, will be able to view any porn they can get access to. The key words in that statement are "they can get access to." It will be a delightful cat-and-mouse game between my kids and I. I'll try to block their access, and they'll try to get around my blocking. We'll both learn a lot, and my kids will have a head start in a career in network security, should they wish to pursue one.
I had the idea to take my fridge off the grid and use the 12V DC that comes out of the batteries to run my networking equipment (router, vonage box, cable modem) because they all run off of 12V DC anyways. I'll save money on them because the inverters in the power bricks won't be losing power.
I'm interested in making the economy work the way Adam Smith intended by removing externalities.
There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid.
However, there's economic costs to every form of power generation. Coal, oil, and natural gas power plants should pay for each ton of CO2 and other pollutant they emit. Nuclear power plants should pay for the disposal of their fuel and the power plant itself when it is end-of-lifed. Solar panel manufacturers should pay for the disposal or recycling of their panels at the end of life. Hell, McDonalds should pay for each pound of trash it generates with its packaging.
In this way consumers would be able to make better decisions because the true costs of them would be visible in the price. It would remove the externalities that Adam Smith said were the problem with his economic theory. Also, by paying these fees to the government and passing along the price to the consumer, we would be able to eliminate almost all taxes that we currently pay.
Some clarification: There's an economic benefit of generating electricity, and should be encouraged. That's why I say a per-megawatt subsidy regardless of generation capacity to show the benefit to society of having electricity.
Then, the government should work out a per-ton or per-rad cost that it charges companies that use nuclear, coal, gas, or oil power to provide a total cost to the consumer of using these power generation methods. The same goes for the toxic wastes in solar panels.
In this way, the government will be acting to create a market that functions more like the one that Adam Smith intended. The true cost of the product (electricity) would be able to be determined based on the generation method. If nuclear, coal, and natural gas can still compete with renewable energy sources, then it should be allowed to continue to exist.
Solar panels require very little maintenance other than a quick hose down if it hasn't rained in a while. They're solid-state, so there's nothing to wear out, and most of them have a 25 year warranty.
Also, the government offers rebates that bring the price of solar power down for individuals. Then there's projects like Renu by CitizenRe that install and maintain the solar panels for you and you pay them what you would normally pay the power company per kWh. And that rate is locked in for 1, 5, or 25 years.
As I said before, solar panels have a lifetime of over 25 years. So if it takes them ten years to produce the same amount of power it took to produce them, then they'll produce 150% more power than it took to make them. All without any intervention from the user. Also, the silicon, aluminum frames, and copper wiring can be recycled into new solar panels. Of course, this is only beginning to be a problem because the PV systems installed in the early 1980s are only just now coming to the end of their lives.
I'd like to see where you got your figures supporting your assertion that solar panels are not as effective as nuclear power plants
Most good solar panels have a 25 year warranty. You should be able to disassemble the system and reassemble it once the new roof is on. If you've got it grid-intertied you won't notice any power outage.
The latest thing in solar panels are flexible amorphous silicon solar shingles. But other than that, the standard amorphous silicon panels haven't changed much since the mid-80s. They've just gotten cheaper to manufacture as economies of scale have kicked in and larger players like BP and Sunoco have started producing them. I could take one of my dad's old Mother Earth News and design an identical PV system using modern technology and the only difference would be the efficiency.
Very, very true. Installing solar panels is still in the realm of folks who want to go above and beyond. I'd say a better solution for you would be to find a way to buy your power from renewable energy sources. Or you could take one room, or your pool, off of the grid. For $600 and a couple weekends of work, you can make a system that will power a small workshop or a room of your house. And this system is easily expandable when you have a couple hundred extra dollars and want to go pick up a solar panel and a couple more batteries to increase your capacity.I'm thinking of doing something similar to take my refrigerator, about 20% of my electric bill, and my network equipment off of the grid. Not only would it save me a ton of money, but I'd have the added security of knowing that my food won't go bad if the power goes out.
All the more reason to develop a system to take just the pool pump off the grid. It's something that uses a lot of power, needs to run all the time, and is costing you a lot of money. The $600 solar power system I linked to before should be sufficient to run your pump 24/7, especially in SoCal.
And you'll even be able to get your own story on /. if you document it!
they want their article back.
It's not exactly portable, but I've found that Pandora (pandora.com) is a great place to find new artists based on stuff you know. I listen to it all day at work and write down artists that I then go home and buy albums from.
Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant.
Where do you get this figure?
I'm not an anti-nuke freak. In fact, I think they're necessary for human expansion into space.
However, I think that all sources of electricity should be treated equally. A per-megawatt subsidy to companies and individuals producing power should be implemented, and the electrical grid upgraded to allow the generation methods to compete fairly.
This would allow individual regions to produce electricity in the most efficient ways. In some places nuclear might be the most cost effective, once the total cost of construction, disposal, and security are taken into account. In a lot of places, it won't be. The Midwest, with its small population, strong winds, and large amounts of land, would be perfectly suited to wind power. New York and Maryland would have tidal power. Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico would use solar power.
What we should not do is provide special loans and incentives for companies to choose nuclear power, or any other specific power generation technology. The government should step in to make the true costs of generation match the price as closely as possible, and then let the market determine what power generation method to use.
I think the best solution is to use the system the way it was designed. The executive branch can't execute a law that doesn't exist, and the judiciary branch can't interpret a law that doesn't exist. So, at some point, a law that says "you can't block, slow, or otherwise degrade the transmission of content on your network based on origin, destination or content transmitted, so long as that content is legal" has to be put into place if it's something that the public feels strongly about.
The error we run into frequently in modern legislation is eliminating the leeway for the judiciary and executive branches of government. Mandatory sentencing for criminals is an example of this. If we merely wrote a law that said "Internet service providers cannot deliberately block, slow, or otherwise degrade the transmission of content over their networks based on the origin, destination or content transmitted so long as it is legal" and then let the executive branch enforce it and let the judiciary branch interpret it, we would be able to build up a history of case law to make things work the way they should.
However, the huge difference in the amount of money that opposing groups, the ultra-rich telecoms on one side and the comparatively poor government and citizens on the other, means that this puts the neutrality principles in jeopardy. Levelling this playing field would do more to allay the fears of net neutrality proponents than all the legislation in the world.
That would be just fine, IF I had a choice of more than two packages from more than two broadband providers. As it stands now, I can get two packages from Comcast and two packages from Verizon. There are no other broadband providers in the area. And because I don't have enough choice in the services provided, any differences in speed would not be a problem.
However, were I in a situation where there was sufficient choice in the broadband market, this sort of thing wouldn't affect me much. There are all kinds of value added services from my ISP that I never use, from that ridiculous "fan" to email to spyware and spam filtering.
There's two issues with network neutrality. The first is the backbone providers. At that level, all traffic should be neutral. Any preferential treatment would degrade the whole system because the of the way the Internet works. You can't tell which network your packet is going to be routed over, and so the consumer wouldn't have a choice in this case.
The second issue is with the last-mile providers, the ones who provide services to business and residential customers. As long as I got 8Mbps down and 768kbps up regardless of where I was sending the data, I wouldn't care if they improved service for something I don't use.
Microsoft can charge what they want for a product and you can decide whether or not to buy it. Or, you can decide to pirate a copy, but please don't justify stealing by presenting yourself as a crusader against high-prices. [by the way, I'm not saying necessarily that I believe using a hacked version of Windows is stealing]
I'd even go so far as to say: If you don't want to pay for Windows, then it's not worth it to steal it. Find a different, free, legal way to get what you want. That way, they can't say "Go after the pirates! They're stealing our stuff!" They'll just have to make a cheaper product.
DARPA: We don't make the things that kill people. We make the things that kill people better. DARPA: We bring good things to life... that are then used to kill people. DARPA: Who do you want to kill today?
The way you're quoting those things just shows how much of a cult you Randroids are.
You make a good, if tragic, point. Humans are absurdly violent creatures. We'll spend billions on guns to defend ourselves from something that would take millions in aid and some foresight to prevent.
I think it would be better if they gave up their nuclear weapons research rather than their space program. Better to cancel a destructive program than a constructive program to alleviate poverty.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you don't put financial data on Google. However, for keeping track of gas mileage or working on a document with someone else, there's not much that can beat it.
Mephisto and Gullery aren't by people who made RoR. They're the RoR equivalents of Wordpress and Gallery 2.0. And I use Backpack and TadaList a lot. Tadalist is particularly useful for listening to Pandora at work and documenting which songs you liked so you can download them later.