I don't care why the image was pulled, or that the image was really on Davidson's site, or that bandwidth was being used.
The thing a judge would (or should) look at is that the image was changed intentionally for the specific purpose of having that image appear on McCain's website.
Refining the sugar from plant sources would likely be somewhat energy positive.
Only if you don't apply correct accounting. Total energy yield from photosynthetic organic material is always going to be less than (absorbed solar energy + energy to refine).
Or, if you use the flawed methodology, using pure solar + wind + geothermal to electrolyze water means hydrogen is 100% positive gain.
I think the flawed thinking comes from the fact that with things like oil, (energy to refine) is far less than (energy available), but that doesn't take into account whatever energy went into creating the oil in the first place.
What I meant by "intrinsic value" is that a house is always a house (assuming it isn't crumbling) despite the fact that it may not be in a nice neighborhood, or even if it doesn't have a high trade value. I think taxes are irrelevant and just confuse the issue because that's a social construct and involves opportunity cost, not intrinsic value.
Don't confuse "monetary value" with "intrinsic value". Put another way: does a slice of bread have any less nutritional value if it costs $0.05 instead of $1.00? The answer is no. A slice of bread may have a different relative value (based on its monetary price) but a piece of bread is always a piece of bread (until it rots, in which case it is no longer a piece of bread). Simpler still: Does a thing cease to be that thing if its price changes?
That last question is related most closely to what I mean by 'intrinsic value': It is the property of an object that does not change when its trade value changes.
For something like virtual "property" there is no intrinsic value, because inherently the thing is entirely trade value: for instance, the amount of time required to obtain the virtual "good" without trading some currency units for it. This is the only value associated with virtual goods because there is no intrinsic value to a store of information. I would give DNA an example of this; the sequence of bases in a molecule of DNA has no intrinsic value, but that base sequence encoded physically as a DNA molecule has intrinsic value because it can direct the creation of other molecules. That is, the "information" itself is not useful, but the physical embodiment of that information is. Everything to-date which is classified as "virtual property" does not, as far as I am aware, have any corresponding physical embodiment which has intrinsic value. It's a subtle difference, but a very important one (consider: a listing of the base sequences of DNA cannot develop into an organism; you have to actually build a physical object with that sequence to do accomplish anything).
If Second Life "dies" you are left with a valueless property, the same way that an exodus of people and businesses or an environmental disaster might leave real life property worthless.
The only problem there is that real physical property always has some level of intrinsic value simply because it physically exists. Sure, it might not have any people living near it, and it may be somehow polluted or wrecked by natural disaster, but there is always intrinsic value in matter because it is, well, matter.
This is significantly different than what "virtual property" is, which is really an embodiment of human effort. Basically, I think all "virtual goods" need to be treated as a service, because they are really the result of creative effort or time spent by individuals; there is no other value associated with the virtual items.
I know I'm not the only "long distance" driver. I quite often take trips just on either side of the 400 mile mark, and having to stop in the middle is annoying. My most frequent trip recently is 450 miles, which only takes about 7 hours including a stop in the middle. Suffice it to say that "400 miles is more than enough for anything but commercial truck drivers" is ignoring all the people out there who have to drive distances for a living. Also consider couriers, real-estate agents, etc. who have to drive quite a bit more than 100 miles in a day, and having to stop for more than 5 minutes would adversely affect their business.
Having to rent a different vehicle or rely on mass transit for trips, in my mind, is unacceptable. Aside from that, how often does something come up in the middle of the night which might require an unscheduled trip (e.g., something requiring a hospital - take childbirth for instance) but, oh, look, our car isn't charged:(
Take $0.10 per kW-hr. A kg of gasoline has around 42000 kJ, or about 10 kW-hr (1 kW-hr = 3600 kJ) (I'm rounding horribly for simplicity, but it's not going to change the analysis much). A gallon of gasoline has about 2.5 kg of liquid, so that's about 25 kW-hr. Assuming similar efficiencies as gasoline - not unreasonable considering compression of air is typically adiabatic but then stored so you bleed out a lot of energy as heat (insulation to keep that energy would be heavy). So 10 gallons would be about 250 kW-hr. At $0.10 a kW-hr, that means about $25 in electricity.
So, to get down to $3 a fill-up, you'd need something that's about 8x the thermal efficiency of gasoline, or something that is quite microscopic so doesn't have much drag. Considering you can't get 8x the efficiency of gasoline (it's already between 20% and 30%), I don't see a fill-up costing $3.
That said, $25 a tank is very comparable to gasoline, so it's probably reasonable.
However, my requirement for alternative fuels is still 400+ miles (note 200-300km from the article is only 124 to 186 miles) on a single "charge", and able to get a complete charge in 5 minutes, for $30 or less, with no nominal increase in vehicle cost.
Other than that, I don't really care what the technology is...
Testing, in my opinion, is only for things that you don't have a deterministic way of proving "by construction". For instance, in something as simple as the change noted above regarding/dev/random, this should have been noted just based on documentation alone - no need for testing.
One problem is documentation is either insufficient, inaccurate, or completely missing.
I also would put some of the blame on both system and application developers: this is one of the problems with the shared library concept. My philosophy is "If you have something that, if the implementation changes things will break, make sure that implementation cannot change - that is, use a static library."
The other rule of thumb is "Never rely on side effects." The trick there is sometimes side effects are not obviously a side effect....
What if the garguatuan dataset was the filtered through a community process ? like everyone can submit ideas and everyone can vote for the ideas they like best
Except "most popular" does not imply "best", and "best" does not imply "most popular". This is what the GP was stating by asserting that democracies aren't really that good at determining "best" courses of action.
Of course, for this discussion to have any meaning, you have to have some more objective measure of what is meant by "best" in the first place.
Indeed. I've often wondered how many resources are used just to push usable energy around, and if there is in fact a benefit to having massively distributed power generation rather than massive power plants.
Sure, this would have to be a different paradigm then shipping fuels to a single location, but you'd think that everyone could have a solar array and windmill on their property - except for goofy things like zoning and 'beautification' rules:(
Heck, using that method you don't even lose all the power industry jobs, because they can then be on-site maintenance and installation engineers for the millions of new "miniature" plants.
The problem isn't that it takes a while to find new stuff. The problem is the barriers to entry are so high that sufficient competition can't take place, hence there is no pressure to work quickly. Basically the medical industry is *not* a free market.
Now, I don't think the barriers need to be removed, because most of the high barrier is to ensure that treatments are effective without nasty side effects. About the only part of the barrier I can see being removed is somehow changing the liability laws, but I don't know what would be acceptable.
True with all the features and such, but my experience (granted, possibly with an early version) with OpenOffice was that it took forever to open (ok, about 5 times as long as Word) and didn't really do much other than change all the paradigms I was used to.
Also, I just can't keep a straight face when I think about using a product called "OO.o" which looks like what Galahad said when trying to say Ni.
I bet you could increase adoption by a couple orders of magnitude if you fixed the name (why the heck would you put "dot anything" in the name of a product?)
By the way, other "professional" software around which I can't keep a straight face is being used by my company: Whizible (heh).
...I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
It's all about discount rates and risk. Estimate the loss of a house at $600k, and say that happens once every 30 years. At a discount rate of, say, 5% that's a cost of about $8500 per year - much more than the cost of a smoke detector and insurance, so you pay the latter.
Now, let's say that's once per hundred years - now the rate is only $219 per year. Once per thousand years, and it's less than 0.00000 dollars per year (Excel hit its limits). So, let's say the cost of an asteroid impact is, oh, 1x10^15 dollars. ($1000 trillion). Excel can't do math that small, but Matlab says the annual discounted cost of $1000 trillion at 5% over 1000 years is $3.23 x 10^-8. Heck, increase the cost to $10^24, and the discount is still only $32 / year.
The point is, risks of that scale - even with insane costs, just don't happen often enough to have a significant present value when discounted.
For instance, what do you call the removal of incorrect information from the public eye (say, on Wikipedia)? Technically that's censorship, but nobody complains.
I think the issue is not about pure technical censorship, but oppressive censorship that actually infringes on people's rights - which typically can only be done by governments.
Could be, but the big problem with the legislation (if it really bans "incandescent lamps") is that it is mandating an implementation rather than legislating a desired result.
Anyone with decent training and/or experience in the realm of requirements knows that you *never* specify an implementation because you will end up getting undesired consequences. You specify the desired result, and a means to test that you have achieved that result. That way innovation is not hampered by having to re-write laws to accommodate reality (such as the old EPA regulation that said if the city fuel economy of a car was higher than the highway, the label had to put the highway number; lots of waste took place when the first hybrids came out because the law did not reflect physical reality and they had to change the regs).
(As an aside, there are two types of legislation - legislation on physical phenomenon should be on the effects rather than implementation, where legislation on behavior or processes can often be on the implementation without conflicting with physical reality.)
Re:Misses the point
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Heh - you would think people compile with all warnings turned on. I've been working on a project recently that didn't.
Also, the thing that neither static checkers nor semantic analysis can replace is a really good up-front requirements and architecture. Those things are often the ones that are the most lacking, and really have the most impact on things. A bad architectural decision early on can make life so much worse later, and that's not something that can be "fixed" in the traditional code review process - by the time you're coding, it's too late to fix requirements and architecture errors
The interesting question is, if you take a special-purpose processor (GPU) and turn it into a general-purpose processor, which was the wrong classification initially?
The only thing that concerns me about the Branson prize is the magnitude: a billion (metric) tons of CO2 per year is a little over 2.7 million tons/day. I don't know what product or market out there might exist for that amount of quantity; there is surely no "new" market, and any existing market, to suffer the displacement of that much product, would also have unwanted effects. Let's say you convert that CO2 into something like gasoline (I personally hate the idea of alcohol as a fuel; sure it might burn clean, but the drop in energy content per unit volume is not attractive, let alone the impact of grain being traded as energy instead of food). The sheer mass Branson is requiring is the equivalent of the mass of around the order of 10 million barrels of gasoline per day - approximately the entire US market for gasoline. I don't think any of the oil interests are going to look fondly at instantaneously losing an entire market - there are severe political ramifications for any product that would be able to sequester a billion tons of CO2 per year. That's just energy - think about the effect on a food market, or any other market.
That's a key point, because if something is not economically viable, society isn't ready to just "donate" resources to save the environment; sure some minority of the population is going to do this, but without immediate beneficial impact or blatant punishment tactics, the only way to get people to change their ways is to make things more convenient for them now.
We have, today, the technology to extract CO2 from the atmosphere; just run big chillers, distill the CO2 out then split it into charcoal and oxygen...but that requires massive amounts of energy (say, solar and/or wind) which could be used directly instead, and without a large enough market for that much new charcoal and oxygen, the "threat" of future climate problems is not enough an incentive for people to build large enough conversion factories. The "future benefit" of sequestering the CO2 is not worth more (in the eyes of the average individual) than the opportunity cost today. It's a political and economic problem only, not a technical one.
So, unless there is a way for society to economically absob the cost to pull this much carbon out of the atmosphere without a loss in standard of living it's not likely to be successful. The tradeoff then becomes the perceived risk of climate change versus loss of standard of living to implement the changes. That's the troubling part; humans have a tendency to worry (probably rightly, though often to an unhealthy extreme) about today rather than the future.
Reading through the details is still a bit discouraging. They seem to still give programs the ability to specify and manage privilege.
I would rather have a system that indicated to the person installing something what types of resources an application might use, and then the person explicitly making or not making connections. For instance, in the example of solitaire used in the link above, the installer should have a picture of the application, and maybe pictures of "the network", a pen (to represent the ability to write files) that then points to certain locations, and a...i don't know what icon would represent "read"...that you'd then link to various readable resources; perhaps a lightswitch to show which other programs a program might execute....
I don't care what a program wants to access, I would want the ability to control all of it. Even things like the scheduler....I hate it when programs just start running in the background without me telling them to run (most installers are notorious for not telling you what things they install beside the main application itself).
And, by the way, if the ideas I've proposed above haven't been proposed before, I now declare them in the public domain for free use.
This debate is all about the incorrect question. The reason is that code can be secure or not secure, regardless of its "open" or "closed" status.
Until the industry realizes that "secure is secure" and stops worrying about the open or proprietary nature of things, this debate will probably prevent things from being as secure as they could be by diverting resources to an analysis rather than any solutions.
Put another way: Is a homemade door more or less secure than a professionally installed door? My answer is "it depends on the skills of those involved and the quality of materials".
I think he meant 18 kW-h/day, not for the entire month; that would be about 540 kW-h/month, which is only about $.27 per kW-h; probably not too far off considering taxes and the typical flat-fee "customer charge" that many companies bill even if you used 0 energy.
This is why I think the real solution to the problem is not to require "consistent" identification for various purposes. The solution should be to minimize the instances where identification even matters, not make 'identification' more ubiquitous.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care why the image was pulled, or that the image was really on Davidson's site, or that bandwidth was being used.
The thing a judge would (or should) look at is that the image was changed intentionally for the specific purpose of having that image appear on McCain's website.
Only if you don't apply correct accounting. Total energy yield from photosynthetic organic material is always going to be less than (absorbed solar energy + energy to refine).
Or, if you use the flawed methodology, using pure solar + wind + geothermal to electrolyze water means hydrogen is 100% positive gain.
I think the flawed thinking comes from the fact that with things like oil, (energy to refine) is far less than (energy available), but that doesn't take into account whatever energy went into creating the oil in the first place.
What I meant by "intrinsic value" is that a house is always a house (assuming it isn't crumbling) despite the fact that it may not be in a nice neighborhood, or even if it doesn't have a high trade value. I think taxes are irrelevant and just confuse the issue because that's a social construct and involves opportunity cost, not intrinsic value.
Don't confuse "monetary value" with "intrinsic value". Put another way: does a slice of bread have any less nutritional value if it costs $0.05 instead of $1.00? The answer is no. A slice of bread may have a different relative value (based on its monetary price) but a piece of bread is always a piece of bread (until it rots, in which case it is no longer a piece of bread). Simpler still: Does a thing cease to be that thing if its price changes?
That last question is related most closely to what I mean by 'intrinsic value': It is the property of an object that does not change when its trade value changes.
For something like virtual "property" there is no intrinsic value, because inherently the thing is entirely trade value: for instance, the amount of time required to obtain the virtual "good" without trading some currency units for it. This is the only value associated with virtual goods because there is no intrinsic value to a store of information. I would give DNA an example of this; the sequence of bases in a molecule of DNA has no intrinsic value, but that base sequence encoded physically as a DNA molecule has intrinsic value because it can direct the creation of other molecules. That is, the "information" itself is not useful, but the physical embodiment of that information is. Everything to-date which is classified as "virtual property" does not, as far as I am aware, have any corresponding physical embodiment which has intrinsic value. It's a subtle difference, but a very important one (consider: a listing of the base sequences of DNA cannot develop into an organism; you have to actually build a physical object with that sequence to do accomplish anything).
The only problem there is that real physical property always has some level of intrinsic value simply because it physically exists. Sure, it might not have any people living near it, and it may be somehow polluted or wrecked by natural disaster, but there is always intrinsic value in matter because it is, well, matter.
This is significantly different than what "virtual property" is, which is really an embodiment of human effort. Basically, I think all "virtual goods" need to be treated as a service, because they are really the result of creative effort or time spent by individuals; there is no other value associated with the virtual items.
I also like the fact that they say "any physicist will tell you it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving".
So, what they're saying is, the majority of the tank of gas I use on a 400 mile trip is getting my car from a stop up to highway speed.
I think I'm going to vomit now.
I know I'm not the only "long distance" driver. I quite often take trips just on either side of the 400 mile mark, and having to stop in the middle is annoying. My most frequent trip recently is 450 miles, which only takes about 7 hours including a stop in the middle. Suffice it to say that "400 miles is more than enough for anything but commercial truck drivers" is ignoring all the people out there who have to drive distances for a living. Also consider couriers, real-estate agents, etc. who have to drive quite a bit more than 100 miles in a day, and having to stop for more than 5 minutes would adversely affect their business.
Having to rent a different vehicle or rely on mass transit for trips, in my mind, is unacceptable. Aside from that, how often does something come up in the middle of the night which might require an unscheduled trip (e.g., something requiring a hospital - take childbirth for instance) but, oh, look, our car isn't charged :(
Take $0.10 per kW-hr. A kg of gasoline has around 42000 kJ, or about 10 kW-hr (1 kW-hr = 3600 kJ) (I'm rounding horribly for simplicity, but it's not going to change the analysis much). A gallon of gasoline has about 2.5 kg of liquid, so that's about 25 kW-hr. Assuming similar efficiencies as gasoline - not unreasonable considering compression of air is typically adiabatic but then stored so you bleed out a lot of energy as heat (insulation to keep that energy would be heavy). So 10 gallons would be about 250 kW-hr. At $0.10 a kW-hr, that means about $25 in electricity. So, to get down to $3 a fill-up, you'd need something that's about 8x the thermal efficiency of gasoline, or something that is quite microscopic so doesn't have much drag. Considering you can't get 8x the efficiency of gasoline (it's already between 20% and 30%), I don't see a fill-up costing $3.
That said, $25 a tank is very comparable to gasoline, so it's probably reasonable.
However, my requirement for alternative fuels is still 400+ miles (note 200-300km from the article is only 124 to 186 miles) on a single "charge", and able to get a complete charge in 5 minutes, for $30 or less, with no nominal increase in vehicle cost.
Other than that, I don't really care what the technology is...
You're obviously not familiar with European - especially Scandanavian - vacation practices.
It's quite common for an entire company to go on vacation for the same several weeks of the year.
I experienced this directly several years ago with a simulation (physics simulation, that is) software company based in Sweden.
Testing, in my opinion, is only for things that you don't have a deterministic way of proving "by construction". For instance, in something as simple as the change noted above regarding /dev/random, this should have been noted just based on documentation alone - no need for testing.
One problem is documentation is either insufficient, inaccurate, or completely missing.
I also would put some of the blame on both system and application developers: this is one of the problems with the shared library concept. My philosophy is "If you have something that, if the implementation changes things will break, make sure that implementation cannot change - that is, use a static library."
The other rule of thumb is "Never rely on side effects." The trick there is sometimes side effects are not obviously a side effect....
Except "most popular" does not imply "best", and "best" does not imply "most popular". This is what the GP was stating by asserting that democracies aren't really that good at determining "best" courses of action.
Of course, for this discussion to have any meaning, you have to have some more objective measure of what is meant by "best" in the first place.
Indeed. I've often wondered how many resources are used just to push usable energy around, and if there is in fact a benefit to having massively distributed power generation rather than massive power plants.
Sure, this would have to be a different paradigm then shipping fuels to a single location, but you'd think that everyone could have a solar array and windmill on their property - except for goofy things like zoning and 'beautification' rules :(
Heck, using that method you don't even lose all the power industry jobs, because they can then be on-site maintenance and installation engineers for the millions of new "miniature" plants.
But if you shoot down a UFO, and then identify it, it is no longer a UFO.
I think this is the big problem - every time one is shot down or analyzed it loses the "U" from its designation.
The problem isn't that it takes a while to find new stuff. The problem is the barriers to entry are so high that sufficient competition can't take place, hence there is no pressure to work quickly. Basically the medical industry is *not* a free market.
Now, I don't think the barriers need to be removed, because most of the high barrier is to ensure that treatments are effective without nasty side effects. About the only part of the barrier I can see being removed is somehow changing the liability laws, but I don't know what would be acceptable.
True with all the features and such, but my experience (granted, possibly with an early version) with OpenOffice was that it took forever to open (ok, about 5 times as long as Word) and didn't really do much other than change all the paradigms I was used to.
Also, I just can't keep a straight face when I think about using a product called "OO.o" which looks like what Galahad said when trying to say Ni.
I bet you could increase adoption by a couple orders of magnitude if you fixed the name (why the heck would you put "dot anything" in the name of a product?)
By the way, other "professional" software around which I can't keep a straight face is being used by my company: Whizible (heh).
Oh, my... what are schools teaching these days?
* sigh *
It's all about discount rates and risk. Estimate the loss of a house at $600k, and say that happens once every 30 years. At a discount rate of, say, 5% that's a cost of about $8500 per year - much more than the cost of a smoke detector and insurance, so you pay the latter.
Now, let's say that's once per hundred years - now the rate is only $219 per year. Once per thousand years, and it's less than 0.00000 dollars per year (Excel hit its limits). So, let's say the cost of an asteroid impact is, oh, 1x10^15 dollars. ($1000 trillion). Excel can't do math that small, but Matlab says the annual discounted cost of $1000 trillion at 5% over 1000 years is $3.23 x 10^-8. Heck, increase the cost to $10^24, and the discount is still only $32 / year.
The point is, risks of that scale - even with insane costs, just don't happen often enough to have a significant present value when discounted.
An odd thought though:
Is all censorship bad?
For instance, what do you call the removal of incorrect information from the public eye (say, on Wikipedia)? Technically that's censorship, but nobody complains.
I think the issue is not about pure technical censorship, but oppressive censorship that actually infringes on people's rights - which typically can only be done by governments.
Could be, but the big problem with the legislation (if it really bans "incandescent lamps") is that it is mandating an implementation rather than legislating a desired result.
Anyone with decent training and/or experience in the realm of requirements knows that you *never* specify an implementation because you will end up getting undesired consequences. You specify the desired result, and a means to test that you have achieved that result. That way innovation is not hampered by having to re-write laws to accommodate reality (such as the old EPA regulation that said if the city fuel economy of a car was higher than the highway, the label had to put the highway number; lots of waste took place when the first hybrids came out because the law did not reflect physical reality and they had to change the regs).
(As an aside, there are two types of legislation - legislation on physical phenomenon should be on the effects rather than implementation, where legislation on behavior or processes can often be on the implementation without conflicting with physical reality.)
Heh - you would think people compile with all warnings turned on. I've been working on a project recently that didn't.
Also, the thing that neither static checkers nor semantic analysis can replace is a really good up-front requirements and architecture. Those things are often the ones that are the most lacking, and really have the most impact on things. A bad architectural decision early on can make life so much worse later, and that's not something that can be "fixed" in the traditional code review process - by the time you're coding, it's too late to fix requirements and architecture errors
The interesting question is, if you take a special-purpose processor (GPU) and turn it into a general-purpose processor, which was the wrong classification initially?
The only thing that concerns me about the Branson prize is the magnitude: a billion (metric) tons of CO2 per year is a little over 2.7 million tons/day. I don't know what product or market out there might exist for that amount of quantity; there is surely no "new" market, and any existing market, to suffer the displacement of that much product, would also have unwanted effects. Let's say you convert that CO2 into something like gasoline (I personally hate the idea of alcohol as a fuel; sure it might burn clean, but the drop in energy content per unit volume is not attractive, let alone the impact of grain being traded as energy instead of food). The sheer mass Branson is requiring is the equivalent of the mass of around the order of 10 million barrels of gasoline per day - approximately the entire US market for gasoline. I don't think any of the oil interests are going to look fondly at instantaneously losing an entire market - there are severe political ramifications for any product that would be able to sequester a billion tons of CO2 per year. That's just energy - think about the effect on a food market, or any other market.
That's a key point, because if something is not economically viable, society isn't ready to just "donate" resources to save the environment; sure some minority of the population is going to do this, but without immediate beneficial impact or blatant punishment tactics, the only way to get people to change their ways is to make things more convenient for them now.
We have, today, the technology to extract CO2 from the atmosphere; just run big chillers, distill the CO2 out then split it into charcoal and oxygen...but that requires massive amounts of energy (say, solar and/or wind) which could be used directly instead, and without a large enough market for that much new charcoal and oxygen, the "threat" of future climate problems is not enough an incentive for people to build large enough conversion factories. The "future benefit" of sequestering the CO2 is not worth more (in the eyes of the average individual) than the opportunity cost today. It's a political and economic problem only, not a technical one.
So, unless there is a way for society to economically absob the cost to pull this much carbon out of the atmosphere without a loss in standard of living it's not likely to be successful. The tradeoff then becomes the perceived risk of climate change versus loss of standard of living to implement the changes. That's the troubling part; humans have a tendency to worry (probably rightly, though often to an unhealthy extreme) about today rather than the future.
Reading through the details is still a bit discouraging. They seem to still give programs the ability to specify and manage privilege.
I would rather have a system that indicated to the person installing something what types of resources an application might use, and then the person explicitly making or not making connections. For instance, in the example of solitaire used in the link above, the installer should have a picture of the application, and maybe pictures of "the network", a pen (to represent the ability to write files) that then points to certain locations, and a...i don't know what icon would represent "read"...that you'd then link to various readable resources; perhaps a lightswitch to show which other programs a program might execute....
I don't care what a program wants to access, I would want the ability to control all of it. Even things like the scheduler....I hate it when programs just start running in the background without me telling them to run (most installers are notorious for not telling you what things they install beside the main application itself).
And, by the way, if the ideas I've proposed above haven't been proposed before, I now declare them in the public domain for free use.
This debate is all about the incorrect question. The reason is that code can be secure or not secure, regardless of its "open" or "closed" status.
Until the industry realizes that "secure is secure" and stops worrying about the open or proprietary nature of things, this debate will probably prevent things from being as secure as they could be by diverting resources to an analysis rather than any solutions.
Put another way: Is a homemade door more or less secure than a professionally installed door? My answer is "it depends on the skills of those involved and the quality of materials".
The same applies to software.
I think he meant 18 kW-h/day, not for the entire month; that would be about 540 kW-h/month, which is only about $.27 per kW-h; probably not too far off considering taxes and the typical flat-fee "customer charge" that many companies bill even if you used 0 energy.
This is why I think the real solution to the problem is not to require "consistent" identification for various purposes. The solution should be to minimize the instances where identification even matters, not make 'identification' more ubiquitous.