Interesting discussion there...I feel like being amiably philosophical this morning so I decided to reply. Disclaimer: I do look at things from an admittedly idealistic standpoint rather than the legal standpoint (which are unfortunately not the same thing).
My argument for "obvious" is not so much tied directly to accelerometer-based navigation systems specifically, but rather tied to the fact that there is a known technology (accelerometers) which produces computer-readable signals based on motion and a known technology by which any computer-readable signal can be used to change the state of software.
It does become a question then of scope of "obviousness": is it truly novel for a desktop computer UI person to use an accelerometer for input instead of a cursor or keyboard? Just that idea in itself I don't think is novel. If there was some new novel mechanism or new accelerometer or something I would be more agreeable to a patent. But just simply interpreting specific arbitrary output patterns from a sensor to direct certain activities I don't think should be patentable. If they had a new method of processing the output to obtain certain information, that may be novel - but they are essentially patenting the idea "we're going to interpret this specific sequence of accelerometer outputs as a command" which is not an invention so much as a specification.
That actually may be a valid argument against certain "method" patents - if the patent is really a specification rather than an invention. For instance, the old USR AT commands are really just a specification, not an invention and should not have had the IP protection they had for a while. Similarly I don't feel that "interpret a reversing accelerometer signal as a selection command" is an invention so much as a specification. And I cannot agree that "putting an accelerometer in a mobile device" counts as a patentable invention - after all, mobile personal computing devices have had accelerometers for some time* to protect hard drives so there really isn't a technological leap to extend that "autonomous" use of the sensor to UI input.
Anyway, we could discuss this here ad infinitum and not really change the IP landscape.
*I fully understand that this may not have enough temporal significance to appease the IP lawyers. Searching for introduction date of hard drive accelerometers is pretty tough; I found a vague reference to 1998 and another claim of this feature first in an IBM laptop in 2003 and I can't seem to find a set of search terms to obtain more definitive results.
I'm still trying to figure out how this isn't invalid based on the prior art (and "obvious to anyone skilled in the art") of inertial navigation systems that have been around since the 1950's (or thereabouts) that used accelerations in all six degrees of freedom to change the operating state of a computer. This fails the common sense criteria: if I add accelerometers as interface inputs to a mobile computer, I get the expected result that those inputs can be used to control the computer. There's no "invention" there.
It may be the case that this patent is so specific that nothing really infringes - I only got to about claim 11 where it started talking about a server "control agent" before getting lost in patentese. Before that it specifically required a specific motion activating a highlighted region of an interface or something like that.
I think this highlights the difference between 'privacy' and 'anonymity.' Subtly different concepts. I think when most people scream 'privacy!' they are really advocating anonymity.
Privacy is being able to do things without others knowing about it. Anonymity is being able to do something without people knowing who you are. Notably privacy implies anonymity, but anonymity does not imply privacy. Case in point: if you are speeding in traffic, people know that there is someone speeding - it is not a private activity. However, they don't know *who* is speeding (even if they see you - you are still anonymous) so that is an anonymous activity.
(Sadly, the problem is that most people want anonymity because they don't want to suffer consequences for their actions. I can't say I advocate anonymity in all cases - some activities should have consequences. What I would rather argue is if there should be consequences for certain actions in the first place. If that problem is solved, then privacy/anonymity concerns would be irrelevant.)
And I'd like to add another thought. That is that if you buy software, there is no implied contract that the company you're buying from will exist in three months, leaving you holding software that may or may not be functional in a very short order.
This is a good argument for why things like periodic software licenses should be outlawed - you should be able to continue to use an otherwise perfectly functional piece of software even if the company that supports it is no longer in existence - or even more likely, just doesn't want to support it any more. Software/music/movies should be required by law to be functional (or have no mechanism to make artificially inoperative) in perpetuity after purchase. If a company doesn't think it can recoup development costs and/or make sufficient profit from initial sales, it should close its doors and stop making software, provide for-charge support to make up the difference, or charge more for the next product.
Same general concept should apply, in my opinion, to things like music, movies, books, cars, hammers, toothpaste, haircuts, health care, whatever. I don't understand why people think producing software, music, movies, etc. should be immune from the possibility of being a lossy investment - which is what you call any investment where the return is negative. Unfortunately governments seem all too keen recently to try and make all investments no worse than break-even.
Personally I think it makes sense to tax transactions from real-world currency to game-world currency. Essentially this is because the person trading real-world currency for some in-game asset is essentially purchasing the labor of the person who allocated those in-game resources.
What gets seriously complicated though is when you consider transactions that take place entirely within the confines of the game universe. Consider one player where a player spends time to get in-game currency units, and another who spends time to create an in-game item, and they exchange. If this was in the "real world" something like VAT or sales tax would be levied. The question is - what tax would be levied in the virtual world? The pithy comments like "when I can pay my taxes with in-game assets..." are actually pretty insightful.
Essentially trading real currency for virtual assets is like paying a performer at a concert: you can convert currency into entertainment but you can't really convert that entertainment into anything else.
For taxation of all in-game transactions, you'd have to have some mechanism to convert in-game activities back into real-world currency in some reasonable manner. Consider someone singing to themselves in their home: the person is creating "entertainment assets" but should those be taxed? What about if they are singing for their friends? This would be my argument against taxing sole in-game transactions.
Requiring taxes for all transactions would essentially force all game participants into real money traders, because they would have to sell assets to obtain currency to pay taxes (since game assets are not fungible like real-world currency). Either that or, terribly, people would have to pay out-of-pocket for their in-game "assets" which would be a hard pill to swallow. In fact, I'd assert that the latter would either put all virtual games out of business, or at best severely limit their business, or cause all game-players to essentially be relabeled criminals.
This incorrectly assumes "all innovations are equal." Which they are surely not. Anything related simply to [i]quantity[/i] without considering [i]quality[/i] is, in my opinion, a very bad metric for innovation.
Well, this solar plane isn't so much a plane as it is a motor glider given the wingspan and aspect ratio. The motor is just enough to get it off the ground and help gain altitude when thermals and other updraft conditions are not present. Gliders seem to fly just fine and they have a zero power-to-weight ratio, so that argument is a bit naive. Gliders can also be fairly fast given the right conditions: there are high-performance glider races where the gliders fly around 200 knots over a course of about 180 nautical miles (although I wouldn't say the particular aircraft in this article would be a "high performance" aircraft).
You see... is in the part of the Bible (the old testament) that Jesus repealed
Oddly enough, there's a statement from Jesus in the New Testament that explicitly states he didn't repeal anything from the Law (Old Testament). Something about jots and tittles if you care to look it up.
Personally, because of all this mess, I think the government should just back off. Marriage should be a religious choice rather than a legal one. Allow anyone to get a civil union and the legal protections afforded by it, and get out of the way when it comes to marriage.
This is my personal stance as well. Civil unions should only define the general social aspects like shared benefits, legal responsibility, adoption, etc. I believe, though, that "marriage" is indeed a religious institution, and I would argue that separation of church and state says that the State shouldn't dictate what "marriage" is and is not. I think we ultimately need two terms to distinguish between the civil union aspects of marriage and the religious aspects of marriage.
There is already precedent for religious organizations being able to promote certain worldviews: nobody (sensible) calls a religion intolerant because they say eating certain types of food is immoral, and you don't see people suing those religious institutions because of their dietary beliefs. If a particular religion wants to say that marriage between two same-sex people is immoral, the government should not intervene any more than it does regarding foodstuffs. (Or for the sake of equality do you want the government to say that you can't have special dietary requirements as well as special lifestyle requirements?)
While my beliefs mean that I have certain lifestyles I promote and others I do not, that does not mean that we should use any religious belief to direct law, or any law to direct religious belief (even though that's not a popular concept): separation applies both ways, and often times folks forget that the State condemning or opposing a certain religious belief is just as unconstitutional as the State promoting one religious belief over another*.
*I do realize that there are some complications when religious beliefs may conflict with social constructs like murder, child labor, slavery, crime, and other generally 'criminal' activities, but care must be taken to evaluate those on a case-by-case basis rather than as gross generalizations.
They placed a rigid chain of carbon atoms, just tens of atoms long, in a vacuum chamber and streamed 425 volts through the sample.
I'm used to reading stuff like this in the main stream press. However, I would expect an article from insidescience.org wouldn't use such a nonsensical phrase. It's kind of like saying they streamed 425 pounds per square inch of water through a pipe.
So the real breakthrough is that the research team was able to convert a fleet of GM's latest poster-child vehicle into data and transmit that information through a carbon sample!
Agreed. There seems to be a surprising assumption about how 'parallel' most computing tasks are. Any time the output of one computation depends on the input from another computation all the parallel computing in the world won't save you, because those computations must be performed in temporal sequence.
There is also the cost of distribution - any time you split up a task to make it parallel, you have to spend effort to break it up and then reassemble the parts. This effort grows with how many parts into which the task is split, so there is some limit where performance is actually hurt by making a task more parallel rather than improved.
I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying "parallel computing makes sense for some tasks but not all, and if you blindly make things parallel you will, on average, make things worse than picking the right tool for the job."
This sounds good until you realize how hard it is to classify what is food, clothing, and shelter. This is why the current tax code has so many loopholes - because they are trying to define what is "income" (at least from the standpoint of the US code).
Except the odd thing is, a value added tax is a tax on creation, not consumption. You don't "add value" by consuming, you add it by creating. A sales tax is, in fact, the best consumption tax. After all, would you rather be taxed because you built an addition onto your house, or taxed when you sold the house for profit?
That said, all forms of "consumption tax" (either sales or VAT) are regressive because they disproportionately tax people who spend higher percentages of their incomes on consumables. You want to make it progressive, you make the sales (or VAT) rate proportional to total price, so you pay more tax on more expensive things.
This isn't too surprising actually. Consider that regardless of region a person has some maximum income - call this 100%. Now, to estimate 'equilibrium prices' of various goods, you have to look at the entire basket. Say in the US you have 30% going to housing, 30% going to taxes, 5% going to personal transportation, 5% going to entertainment, 5% going to food, 15% going to health care, and 10% available for utilities including telecom. Now say that in some random other country, taxes and housing together account for 75% of total income instead of 60% - it's natural, then, that telecom will reach a lower nominal price in this instance. It doesn't even matter if the service is better in the country with lower sticker price, because it's just not possible to charge more for it.
In general all expenses will equal all income, so if you want cheaper telecom prices in the US, then expect, in the long run, the price of something else to increase. The little comment about "at least we have cheap gas prices" is probably much closer to the mark than intended.
This is the only one of these posts that made me smile =)
So you get my take on the issue: If you are in a technical field you can start quantifying the relative "smallness" or "slowness" or "coldness" when you create devices that can measure "smallness," "slowness," and "coldness." Otherwise please stick to proper phraseology and always use positive metrics and proper fractions (the new galaxy is 10% the size of the old ones, the old task takes 3 times longer to complete than the new one, etc.).
If, however, you're just the media or television or whatever, please don't try to come across as being accurate.
X-COM still has the distinction of being the only game that has ever caused me to jump out of my chair. If you don't think you can get scared by 640x480 graphics or whatever that was...try it.
I still think the original was the most terrifying though; Terror from the Deep never quite worked for me.
Situations such as the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org] where individuals are sharing a limited resource. Some argue (correctly, I believe) that the reason free markets fail in these situations is that the cost of depleting the shared resource is not correctly accounted for.
I would say that the markets do correctly account for the total current, local cost. The issue is that the realization of the "total" cost is so far in the future (or so far away geographically) that the discounted present,local cost is not very high. The market appears to be operating with the assessment that the rate of return for not spending to "fix it" now and having to pay in the future is better than spending now to avoid having to "fix it" in the future.
I was going to write a bit of agreement and some rebuttal to your post but it got me thinking of a better solution, though no legislature would ever pass such:
Ban all construction of new combustion-based stationary power plants, and prohibit repair of old plants - let them die. That's it.
This will have several effects, most of which are not pleasant in the short term. The first is this: The price of electricity will begin to increase as supply does not keep up with demand. This will have two knock-on effects which are more beneficial: rational consumers will start using less electricity and the relative affordability of "green" power will improve.
So in the long run things are better, but just like every investment there is a reallocation of present wealth to that investment for a payoff later. I just realized that the folks that are complaining about reduction in GDP growth to "deal with carbon dioxide" aren't considering that what that means is that they are "investing" some of today's GDP growth potential (or whatever metric they choose) to have a greater GDP growth in the future. Same thing as personal finances: I have to sacrifice some level of luxury today to put money in savings, but that savings means that I will have to put forth much less effort in the future to maintain a reasonable standard of living.
A Cap-and-trade system does this by creating artificial scarcity
So if the US has a cap of X tons, and we reach X-1 tons, is the government going to come in and shut down all CO2 emitting devices?
Cap and trade doesn't really create scarcity because the enforcing agency cannot physically enforce the cap without inciting civil (or probably global) war. Essentially it only works if enough of the parties which produce the capped good voluntarily participate.
What's irritating is that cap and trade can't even do what it's supposed to do anyway.
Consider this: a government says "Ok, we'll only sell licenses to produce 100 million tons of CO2 per year." Factories produce a net 130 million tons of CO2 that year, even though they were only licensed to produce 100 million. There is no mechanism the government can employ to enforce the licenses. They could potentially fine the "overproduction" but that doesn't actually prevent the production of the CO2.
The "credits" bit doesn't work either, and it's even worse than the inability to prevent overproduction. The way I understand it, if I do some activity that offsets CO2 production, I get a credit. The problem is that word "offset". If it was only for sequestration that would be great, but my impression is that if I create a wind farm that produces the same power as a coal plant that would produce 1 million tons, I get a 1 million ton CO2 credit that I can sell to someone else. But since it's possible to create an infinite amount of things that do not emit CO2, there is no cap here either because it doesn't actually prevent the creation of more CO2 - or whatever the target emission might be.
The only real solution is, even though it's not political, is to simply tax CO2 emissions straight up. Those who don't emit don't pay the tax, those who do pay it. For consumers it's simple - you roll it into fuel taxes because CO2 emissions are directly linked to fuel consumption. For powerplants and such you do the same, and the taxes get passed on to consumers.
This solution, I think, has the best chance of actually resulting in the desired outcome without being overly complicated or reliant on false ideas of caps that cannot be enforced.
The biggest issue I see is that CO2 is a byproduct of simply being alive, so you will get into the mess of "do you tax all CO2 emissions, or only those made by machines? What about if some farmer burns brush in his yard? What about campfires?"
In all, it's really quite a mess when at its core people try to dictate the behavior of others. If you offer an incentive and people don't take it, the solution should not be to beat them with a stick and force them to take it.
This is why I think that true security lies not in keeping people from obtaining information, but from setting things up so that it is irrelevant if people obtain that information.
Consider the situation where someone knows all the internal workings of, say, the JSF, but it's designed in such a way that that knowledge would not allow someone to prevent the use of the JSF.
Or consider "identity theft": what if it didn't matter if someone stole your "identity" because there was nothing they could do with it anyway? (Now, in that case, the tradeoff would likely be some loss of convenience.)
So I'll say it again: true security is knowing that you're safe* even when people get to places where you normally wouldn't want them.
*Of course, the definition of "safe" is fairly tricky in this instance. I would probably define "safe" as something along the lines of "suffering no direct immediate or prolonged-exposure-based physical harm."
If you put it like this then it makes sense. But if anything, converting energy from braking/slowing down should be done in the cars themselves.
Exactly. From an energy standpoint, this is just a form of regenerative braking. Nifty idea, nobody is arguing that.
The nefarious thing here is that in normal regenerative braking scenarios, the person paying for the energy supply (gasoline) gets the direct benefit of the regen. In this parking-lot scenario, the person purchasing the gasoline does not get a direct benefit of the regen. In fact, the energy purchaser will probably see no benefit at all.
Interesting economic note: electrical power costs are made up of fixed costs (infrastructure) and variable costs (fuel). Electrical power became cheap not because variable costs were low, but because enough people used it to share the high infrastructure cost among many people. If you reduce electricity demand from the grid too much, cost can actually increase because there will be some point where, even though variable cost reduces, economies of scale begin to fail, making the share of infrastructure cost per customer increase. So this won't in the long run make electricity (or even base fuel) cheaper for everyone.
What you call 'objective value' I would call 'wealth' - that is, the intrinsic quality of the object. The orange has (unless it rots, is destroyed, etc.) the same nutritional, visual, physical, and flavor properties regardless of people's current state of desire (the 'value') of the orange.
The way I look at it is: the 'wealth' of an object is related to what the object is, the 'value' of an object is related to what someone is willing to trade for an object. (Note: services have value, but I would not say they embody economic wealth as services are 'transient' things; the result of services is often the creation of wealth though.)
So in essence I agree with what you state - the "content industry" (what a terrible term in my opinion) does need to focus on providing things for which people are willing to trade.
That's actually a markedly wrong statement anyway. Value can be and is created and destroyed all the time. It's not like energy or charge or mass or momentum.
Consider - what is the value of an orange? If you just had a big meal, it's pretty small. If you haven't eaten in a week it's very large. Now if you have an orange and are starving, but just before you eat it someone offers you a four-course meal instead (and only if you do not consume the orange), the value of that orange is instantly and dramatically reduced (and it will never come back).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting discussion there...I feel like being amiably philosophical this morning so I decided to reply. Disclaimer: I do look at things from an admittedly idealistic standpoint rather than the legal standpoint (which are unfortunately not the same thing).
My argument for "obvious" is not so much tied directly to accelerometer-based navigation systems specifically, but rather tied to the fact that there is a known technology (accelerometers) which produces computer-readable signals based on motion and a known technology by which any computer-readable signal can be used to change the state of software.
It does become a question then of scope of "obviousness": is it truly novel for a desktop computer UI person to use an accelerometer for input instead of a cursor or keyboard? Just that idea in itself I don't think is novel. If there was some new novel mechanism or new accelerometer or something I would be more agreeable to a patent. But just simply interpreting specific arbitrary output patterns from a sensor to direct certain activities I don't think should be patentable. If they had a new method of processing the output to obtain certain information, that may be novel - but they are essentially patenting the idea "we're going to interpret this specific sequence of accelerometer outputs as a command" which is not an invention so much as a specification.
That actually may be a valid argument against certain "method" patents - if the patent is really a specification rather than an invention. For instance, the old USR AT commands are really just a specification, not an invention and should not have had the IP protection they had for a while. Similarly I don't feel that "interpret a reversing accelerometer signal as a selection command" is an invention so much as a specification. And I cannot agree that "putting an accelerometer in a mobile device" counts as a patentable invention - after all, mobile personal computing devices have had accelerometers for some time* to protect hard drives so there really isn't a technological leap to extend that "autonomous" use of the sensor to UI input.
Anyway, we could discuss this here ad infinitum and not really change the IP landscape.
*I fully understand that this may not have enough temporal significance to appease the IP lawyers. Searching for introduction date of hard drive accelerometers is pretty tough; I found a vague reference to 1998 and another claim of this feature first in an IBM laptop in 2003 and I can't seem to find a set of search terms to obtain more definitive results.
I'm still trying to figure out how this isn't invalid based on the prior art (and "obvious to anyone skilled in the art") of inertial navigation systems that have been around since the 1950's (or thereabouts) that used accelerations in all six degrees of freedom to change the operating state of a computer. This fails the common sense criteria: if I add accelerometers as interface inputs to a mobile computer, I get the expected result that those inputs can be used to control the computer. There's no "invention" there.
It may be the case that this patent is so specific that nothing really infringes - I only got to about claim 11 where it started talking about a server "control agent" before getting lost in patentese. Before that it specifically required a specific motion activating a highlighted region of an interface or something like that.
I think this highlights the difference between 'privacy' and 'anonymity.' Subtly different concepts. I think when most people scream 'privacy!' they are really advocating anonymity.
Privacy is being able to do things without others knowing about it. Anonymity is being able to do something without people knowing who you are. Notably privacy implies anonymity, but anonymity does not imply privacy. Case in point: if you are speeding in traffic, people know that there is someone speeding - it is not a private activity. However, they don't know *who* is speeding (even if they see you - you are still anonymous) so that is an anonymous activity.
(Sadly, the problem is that most people want anonymity because they don't want to suffer consequences for their actions. I can't say I advocate anonymity in all cases - some activities should have consequences. What I would rather argue is if there should be consequences for certain actions in the first place. If that problem is solved, then privacy/anonymity concerns would be irrelevant.)
This is a good argument for why things like periodic software licenses should be outlawed - you should be able to continue to use an otherwise perfectly functional piece of software even if the company that supports it is no longer in existence - or even more likely, just doesn't want to support it any more. Software/music/movies should be required by law to be functional (or have no mechanism to make artificially inoperative) in perpetuity after purchase. If a company doesn't think it can recoup development costs and/or make sufficient profit from initial sales, it should close its doors and stop making software, provide for-charge support to make up the difference, or charge more for the next product.
Same general concept should apply, in my opinion, to things like music, movies, books, cars, hammers, toothpaste, haircuts, health care, whatever. I don't understand why people think producing software, music, movies, etc. should be immune from the possibility of being a lossy investment - which is what you call any investment where the return is negative. Unfortunately governments seem all too keen recently to try and make all investments no worse than break-even.
Sometimes you just have to let a loss be a loss!
Personally I think it makes sense to tax transactions from real-world currency to game-world currency. Essentially this is because the person trading real-world currency for some in-game asset is essentially purchasing the labor of the person who allocated those in-game resources.
What gets seriously complicated though is when you consider transactions that take place entirely within the confines of the game universe. Consider one player where a player spends time to get in-game currency units, and another who spends time to create an in-game item, and they exchange. If this was in the "real world" something like VAT or sales tax would be levied. The question is - what tax would be levied in the virtual world? The pithy comments like "when I can pay my taxes with in-game assets..." are actually pretty insightful.
Essentially trading real currency for virtual assets is like paying a performer at a concert: you can convert currency into entertainment but you can't really convert that entertainment into anything else.
For taxation of all in-game transactions, you'd have to have some mechanism to convert in-game activities back into real-world currency in some reasonable manner. Consider someone singing to themselves in their home: the person is creating "entertainment assets" but should those be taxed? What about if they are singing for their friends? This would be my argument against taxing sole in-game transactions.
Requiring taxes for all transactions would essentially force all game participants into real money traders, because they would have to sell assets to obtain currency to pay taxes (since game assets are not fungible like real-world currency). Either that or, terribly, people would have to pay out-of-pocket for their in-game "assets" which would be a hard pill to swallow. In fact, I'd assert that the latter would either put all virtual games out of business, or at best severely limit their business, or cause all game-players to essentially be relabeled criminals.
This incorrectly assumes "all innovations are equal." Which they are surely not. Anything related simply to [i]quantity[/i] without considering [i]quality[/i] is, in my opinion, a very bad metric for innovation.
Why is it that only now have I just contemplated the horror that would be an actual MMO based on Care Bears. *shudder*
Well, this solar plane isn't so much a plane as it is a motor glider given the wingspan and aspect ratio. The motor is just enough to get it off the ground and help gain altitude when thermals and other updraft conditions are not present. Gliders seem to fly just fine and they have a zero power-to-weight ratio, so that argument is a bit naive. Gliders can also be fairly fast given the right conditions: there are high-performance glider races where the gliders fly around 200 knots over a course of about 180 nautical miles (although I wouldn't say the particular aircraft in this article would be a "high performance" aircraft).
Oddly enough, there's a statement from Jesus in the New Testament that explicitly states he didn't repeal anything from the Law (Old Testament). Something about jots and tittles if you care to look it up.
This is my personal stance as well. Civil unions should only define the general social aspects like shared benefits, legal responsibility, adoption, etc. I believe, though, that "marriage" is indeed a religious institution, and I would argue that separation of church and state says that the State shouldn't dictate what "marriage" is and is not. I think we ultimately need two terms to distinguish between the civil union aspects of marriage and the religious aspects of marriage.
There is already precedent for religious organizations being able to promote certain worldviews: nobody (sensible) calls a religion intolerant because they say eating certain types of food is immoral, and you don't see people suing those religious institutions because of their dietary beliefs. If a particular religion wants to say that marriage between two same-sex people is immoral, the government should not intervene any more than it does regarding foodstuffs. (Or for the sake of equality do you want the government to say that you can't have special dietary requirements as well as special lifestyle requirements?)
While my beliefs mean that I have certain lifestyles I promote and others I do not, that does not mean that we should use any religious belief to direct law, or any law to direct religious belief (even though that's not a popular concept): separation applies both ways, and often times folks forget that the State condemning or opposing a certain religious belief is just as unconstitutional as the State promoting one religious belief over another*.
*I do realize that there are some complications when religious beliefs may conflict with social constructs like murder, child labor, slavery, crime, and other generally 'criminal' activities, but care must be taken to evaluate those on a case-by-case basis rather than as gross generalizations.
So the real breakthrough is that the research team was able to convert a fleet of GM's latest poster-child vehicle into data and transmit that information through a carbon sample!
Agreed. There seems to be a surprising assumption about how 'parallel' most computing tasks are. Any time the output of one computation depends on the input from another computation all the parallel computing in the world won't save you, because those computations must be performed in temporal sequence.
There is also the cost of distribution - any time you split up a task to make it parallel, you have to spend effort to break it up and then reassemble the parts. This effort grows with how many parts into which the task is split, so there is some limit where performance is actually hurt by making a task more parallel rather than improved.
I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying "parallel computing makes sense for some tasks but not all, and if you blindly make things parallel you will, on average, make things worse than picking the right tool for the job."
This sounds good until you realize how hard it is to classify what is food, clothing, and shelter. This is why the current tax code has so many loopholes - because they are trying to define what is "income" (at least from the standpoint of the US code).
Except the odd thing is, a value added tax is a tax on creation, not consumption. You don't "add value" by consuming, you add it by creating. A sales tax is, in fact, the best consumption tax. After all, would you rather be taxed because you built an addition onto your house, or taxed when you sold the house for profit?
That said, all forms of "consumption tax" (either sales or VAT) are regressive because they disproportionately tax people who spend higher percentages of their incomes on consumables. You want to make it progressive, you make the sales (or VAT) rate proportional to total price, so you pay more tax on more expensive things.
This isn't too surprising actually. Consider that regardless of region a person has some maximum income - call this 100%. Now, to estimate 'equilibrium prices' of various goods, you have to look at the entire basket. Say in the US you have 30% going to housing, 30% going to taxes, 5% going to personal transportation, 5% going to entertainment, 5% going to food, 15% going to health care, and 10% available for utilities including telecom. Now say that in some random other country, taxes and housing together account for 75% of total income instead of 60% - it's natural, then, that telecom will reach a lower nominal price in this instance. It doesn't even matter if the service is better in the country with lower sticker price, because it's just not possible to charge more for it.
In general all expenses will equal all income, so if you want cheaper telecom prices in the US, then expect, in the long run, the price of something else to increase. The little comment about "at least we have cheap gas prices" is probably much closer to the mark than intended.
This is the only one of these posts that made me smile =)
So you get my take on the issue: If you are in a technical field you can start quantifying the relative "smallness" or "slowness" or "coldness" when you create devices that can measure "smallness," "slowness," and "coldness." Otherwise please stick to proper phraseology and always use positive metrics and proper fractions (the new galaxy is 10% the size of the old ones, the old task takes 3 times longer to complete than the new one, etc.).
If, however, you're just the media or television or whatever, please don't try to come across as being accurate.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this!
X-COM still has the distinction of being the only game that has ever caused me to jump out of my chair. If you don't think you can get scared by 640x480 graphics or whatever that was...try it.
I still think the original was the most terrifying though; Terror from the Deep never quite worked for me.
I would say that the markets do correctly account for the total current, local cost. The issue is that the realization of the "total" cost is so far in the future (or so far away geographically) that the discounted present,local cost is not very high. The market appears to be operating with the assessment that the rate of return for not spending to "fix it" now and having to pay in the future is better than spending now to avoid having to "fix it" in the future.
I was going to write a bit of agreement and some rebuttal to your post but it got me thinking of a better solution, though no legislature would ever pass such:
Ban all construction of new combustion-based stationary power plants, and prohibit repair of old plants - let them die. That's it.
This will have several effects, most of which are not pleasant in the short term. The first is this: The price of electricity will begin to increase as supply does not keep up with demand. This will have two knock-on effects which are more beneficial: rational consumers will start using less electricity and the relative affordability of "green" power will improve.
So in the long run things are better, but just like every investment there is a reallocation of present wealth to that investment for a payoff later. I just realized that the folks that are complaining about reduction in GDP growth to "deal with carbon dioxide" aren't considering that what that means is that they are "investing" some of today's GDP growth potential (or whatever metric they choose) to have a greater GDP growth in the future. Same thing as personal finances: I have to sacrifice some level of luxury today to put money in savings, but that savings means that I will have to put forth much less effort in the future to maintain a reasonable standard of living.
So if the US has a cap of X tons, and we reach X-1 tons, is the government going to come in and shut down all CO2 emitting devices?
Cap and trade doesn't really create scarcity because the enforcing agency cannot physically enforce the cap without inciting civil (or probably global) war. Essentially it only works if enough of the parties which produce the capped good voluntarily participate.
What's irritating is that cap and trade can't even do what it's supposed to do anyway.
Consider this: a government says "Ok, we'll only sell licenses to produce 100 million tons of CO2 per year." Factories produce a net 130 million tons of CO2 that year, even though they were only licensed to produce 100 million. There is no mechanism the government can employ to enforce the licenses. They could potentially fine the "overproduction" but that doesn't actually prevent the production of the CO2.
The "credits" bit doesn't work either, and it's even worse than the inability to prevent overproduction. The way I understand it, if I do some activity that offsets CO2 production, I get a credit. The problem is that word "offset". If it was only for sequestration that would be great, but my impression is that if I create a wind farm that produces the same power as a coal plant that would produce 1 million tons, I get a 1 million ton CO2 credit that I can sell to someone else. But since it's possible to create an infinite amount of things that do not emit CO2, there is no cap here either because it doesn't actually prevent the creation of more CO2 - or whatever the target emission might be.
The only real solution is, even though it's not political, is to simply tax CO2 emissions straight up. Those who don't emit don't pay the tax, those who do pay it. For consumers it's simple - you roll it into fuel taxes because CO2 emissions are directly linked to fuel consumption. For powerplants and such you do the same, and the taxes get passed on to consumers.
This solution, I think, has the best chance of actually resulting in the desired outcome without being overly complicated or reliant on false ideas of caps that cannot be enforced.
The biggest issue I see is that CO2 is a byproduct of simply being alive, so you will get into the mess of "do you tax all CO2 emissions, or only those made by machines? What about if some farmer burns brush in his yard? What about campfires?"
In all, it's really quite a mess when at its core people try to dictate the behavior of others. If you offer an incentive and people don't take it, the solution should not be to beat them with a stick and force them to take it.
This is why I think that true security lies not in keeping people from obtaining information, but from setting things up so that it is irrelevant if people obtain that information.
Consider the situation where someone knows all the internal workings of, say, the JSF, but it's designed in such a way that that knowledge would not allow someone to prevent the use of the JSF.
Or consider "identity theft": what if it didn't matter if someone stole your "identity" because there was nothing they could do with it anyway? (Now, in that case, the tradeoff would likely be some loss of convenience.)
So I'll say it again: true security is knowing that you're safe* even when people get to places where you normally wouldn't want them.
*Of course, the definition of "safe" is fairly tricky in this instance. I would probably define "safe" as something along the lines of "suffering no direct immediate or prolonged-exposure-based physical harm."
Exactly. From an energy standpoint, this is just a form of regenerative braking. Nifty idea, nobody is arguing that.
The nefarious thing here is that in normal regenerative braking scenarios, the person paying for the energy supply (gasoline) gets the direct benefit of the regen. In this parking-lot scenario, the person purchasing the gasoline does not get a direct benefit of the regen. In fact, the energy purchaser will probably see no benefit at all.
Interesting economic note: electrical power costs are made up of fixed costs (infrastructure) and variable costs (fuel). Electrical power became cheap not because variable costs were low, but because enough people used it to share the high infrastructure cost among many people. If you reduce electricity demand from the grid too much, cost can actually increase because there will be some point where, even though variable cost reduces, economies of scale begin to fail, making the share of infrastructure cost per customer increase. So this won't in the long run make electricity (or even base fuel) cheaper for everyone.
What you call 'objective value' I would call 'wealth' - that is, the intrinsic quality of the object. The orange has (unless it rots, is destroyed, etc.) the same nutritional, visual, physical, and flavor properties regardless of people's current state of desire (the 'value') of the orange.
The way I look at it is: the 'wealth' of an object is related to what the object is, the 'value' of an object is related to what someone is willing to trade for an object. (Note: services have value, but I would not say they embody economic wealth as services are 'transient' things; the result of services is often the creation of wealth though.)
So in essence I agree with what you state - the "content industry" (what a terrible term in my opinion) does need to focus on providing things for which people are willing to trade.
That's actually a markedly wrong statement anyway. Value can be and is created and destroyed all the time. It's not like energy or charge or mass or momentum.
Consider - what is the value of an orange? If you just had a big meal, it's pretty small. If you haven't eaten in a week it's very large. Now if you have an orange and are starving, but just before you eat it someone offers you a four-course meal instead (and only if you do not consume the orange), the value of that orange is instantly and dramatically reduced (and it will never come back).