The sad thing is that you have to specify who you mean by 'we' when you indicate those who really get hit hard by the effects. I think 'we' only includes: people unwilling or unable to adapt.
Sounds like some form of evolution to me - adapt or perish?
At any rate, we have the technology to totally ignore (on a large scale, not necessarily for every individual on the planet) just about every distaster that you can imagine - including asteroid strikes - except for the sun expiring. Even then we'd probably be able to sustain some population for a while with nuclear power.
Remember folks, global climate change is not and has never been a technical problem; it is purely politics. Sure, the climate is changing, and we affect it. So what? We have the knowledge, resources, and capability to mitigate the effects of those changes. Sure, not everyone will survive, but how is that different than any other time in history when there has been a large change in the environment?
Yes, it sounds cold and callous, but that's reality - physics doesn't care about how you feel, and it really is about how you deal with things.
The real politics we need to worry about are how do you not penalize people for building structures to mitigate global warming? For providing greenhouses to feed themselves? The list goes on.
If people don't want to change, let them suffer the consequences. I think people just need to realize that things change, and that they need to bear some responsibility for their actions and their choices. If you don't evacuate a city where you know a hurricane is headed, how is that the fault of the weather or the government? Note that's a bit different than if you didn't know a tornado was coming - those don't give much warning, even though we do have more warning now than we used to. The way I see it, climate change is a big old bus that everyone in the world can see (regardless of the cause) and you can either sit there where you are and wait for someone else to push the bus out of the way, or you can get off your rear and move out of the way yourself.
I was raised to think that if I play in the street, it's not the drivers' responsibility to dodge me - I need to get out of the street!
Here's an interesting concept that I've been tossing around in relation to your rebuttals: What is valuable is not the created idea, but the ability to create ideas. That is, you can still be economically valuable as an idea producer because you can develop ideas, not because some idea has already been disseminated.
That's my take, anyway, and I think if "idea producers" - or anyone in the creative arts for that matter - took that stance, then you wouldn't have any issues with any intellectual property law, copyright law, etc. becuase what would be valued is not the work but the worker - and that is where, in my opinion, the value belongs aynway.
Think about it this way - would you rather have Einstein's works, or Einstein himself? Or Beethoven's works, or Beethoven himself?
This has to be one of the best responses to one of my not-so-well-thought-out-at-6-am posts ever.:-)
I have to agree with everything you said. And yeah, I didn't really think through my trying to cook 10g of egg with 1g of water. Too bad 'preview' does not catch sanity errors...
The one comment I have that is more on-topic: If a heatsink transfer to water or egg is greater than in air, which I agree with, that will mean that the temperature of the heatsink will drop faster for a given input energy. I'm assuming that the CPU under the heatsink does not increase to compensate for the extra outflow from the heatsink, so, since outflow > inflow, the temperature of the heatsink will drop. Maybe a better experiment would be "at what rate do you have to cook eggs on the heatsink to drop its temperature down to 50 degC"?
Temperature doesn't mean anything - it's heat dissipation that matters. Here's more basic math for ya:
I have 1 gram of water at 100 degC and that is my heat sink. Let's say I then have 10 grams of egg. Let's say the heat capacity of egg is the same as water. Let's say the egg is current room temperature of 20 degC. If no energy is added to the (water)heat sink, the equilibrium temperature between the egg and the water will only be about 27 degC, which is nowhere near enough to cook egg. Now, let's assume that the heat sink is currently dissipating 100W. If we just put water on that, that means we'd heat 1 gram of water (if it was absorbing all the energy) at around 24 degC/sec (about 3 seconds to reach boiling temperature) - so it appears that the heat sink has the capability to dish out quite a bit more than 100W (I don't know if this is a combination of the thermal dissipation from the circuit or a release of the energy that is stored in the heatsink; it's probably a combination of both).
That's the scary thing - not that it's hot, but that it *stays* hot!
An incredible, and increasing, amount of work happens just by email.
Eh, I'm beginning to think more and more that this is a dangerous direction that the "first world" economies are taking: they forget that real wealth comes not from talking about things, but actual matter-bashing (that is, things like agriculture, manufacturing, etc.). I don't know about you, but I don't get much "work" done when writing emails or attending meetings - I only get "real" work done when I measure physical data or cause physical things to change; all the rest of my activities may have value, but it's just shuffling already-present things around.
So, if you can show me how writing an email can actually transport goods from location A to location B, or make it require fewer resources to store goods for longer, I'll be impressed; until then, email is just a request that something happen, and there is still some physical thing which must occur. Now, if you say "what about an automated system, where an email causes a [robot] to put a crate onto a vehicle that transports it?" I will respond with "It is not the email which does the work, but the [robot] and vehicle - you just gave an instruction. I suppose that might be a bit pedantic, but I think details are far more important than most people realize.
If the sole issue is "what name points at what IP address in the most common DNS system" then who cares?
It's only when you get out of the technical realm and into the craziness of taxes, "legal" versus "illegal" sequences of numbers to send across the lines, and similar oddities, does a question of "governance" even come into the picture.
My take is: just have a central body for managing the DNS namespace (which is not "hardware enforced" anyway) and that's it. I honestly don't understand what the huge issue is, other than the fact that for many people it's too easy to get food and shelter so they sit around and create other things about which to fight.
I still have the same Sanyo (4500 I think is the model number) phone I got in 2001. People think it's "big and ugly" but:
I am still on the original battery - I still get about 5 days standby and around 2 if I'm talking all the time.
A simple, text-based menu system (any option in 3 clicks or less, up to 5 entries displayed at a time instead of 1 entry and a pretty picture)
The only problem it has developed is a single line of pixels has died - and it's probably been dropped a dozen times.
Unfortunately, the article states that the new "dumb" phone probably won't make it to mainstream (such as US) markets because they appear to want all the gimmicks.
Impressive...3 x 30 MW plus 4x2 MW!? What kind of 'project' other than municipal power or maybe an airport or hospital would require that? 98 MW is substantial generation capacity.
I've often wondered why they don't liquid cool these, or use ducted air cooling, then recover a portion of the waste energy. Any time you have a temperature difference you can get some returns. Considering these datacenters generate so much thermal energy, you'd think they would attempt to recover some rather than spend *more* energy to move it outside.
This is why certain engine testing facilities use their dynos to power portions of their facility - instead of burning fuel and paying for electricity, they reduce their electricity costs. Of course, this does require some up-front capital, but if people would think about the long run rather than the immediate, it shouldn't be that difficult a proposition.
Think - if you've got a 2 MW genset, that probably means you're running 1 MW continuous; let's say only 25% of that is computer (250 kW) and you can recover only 10% of that somehow. You'd be recovering 25 kW, which is actually a significant amount of power - probably enough to run a significant portion of lighting (that's over 400 60-watt lighting sources - or if you've got the new 15-watt fluorescents, over 1600 lights).
See my comment below for more details, but I wouldn't care if they patented the specific implementation. It appears that they patented something far more general than that (the idea of floating point framebuffers - not "this one way to make a floating point framebuffer").
Incidentally, part of "obvious" in my book is "It's so obvious, why bother trying to patent it?"
The difference I see is that the complete idea for using a floating point framebuffer existed - just nobody could afford it. I would equally have a problem if someone tried to patent the idea for a mechanical wheat thrasher. Now, patenting a specific mechanical mechanism, or a specific method of implementing a floating-point frame buffer, is fine.
That's ultimate difference in my book: implementations should be patentable, but ideas should not. (Similarly: Information (such as a chemical formula or genetic sequence) should not be patentable, but methods to get it should - and not the idea of coming up with a way to measure the information, but the actual method itself.) Granted, that may actually take some effort to separate those two things, but that's the crux of my disagreement with the patent system.
The problem is that this patent fails the obviousness test about 100%. The patent itself, if you follow the link, says that "People have used floating point before, just in emulation because hardware cost too much. Now that hardware is cheap, we just do floating point rasterization from the framebuffer instead of through emulation."
I don't understand how the USPTO granted a patent that says "This method has been known for some time, but now we just have the capability to do it."
I'm all for granting legitimate patents (they do actually exist) but this one does not pass the sanity check.
Remember, you have to scale that not by "hours they are working" but "across all hours they work in a year".
What if that's the only job they have in a year? Their effective wage is then $500/1920, which is pathetically low ($0.26 / hour). (NOTE: using 48 weeks of 40 hours as the standard hour-base).
I'm actually disappointed by how people typically skew hourly wage numbers one way or the other - what matters isn't wage per hour, but total income per larger unit time (for instance, time period between rent, meals, etc.).
I think the bigger issue is still the concept of 'owning' an idea. Most economic activities - including things like licenses, etc. - are based on the idea of scarcity. I'm still not convinced that ideas are scarce goods, and therefore all the conventional economic thought doesn't really apply.
What are, to some extent, scarce are the idea producers. The thing that scares "the industry" is that it is now with unprecedented ease that ideas can be developed and disseminated; the 'idea producer' is now not as scarce as it once was. This is the problem - when people before said they were protecting 'ideas' they were really protecting the equipment and expertise to generate those ideas - now expertise and equipment are so readily available that the value of 'thinking' is actually becoming diluted - it's really just the old supply and demand situation.
In order to answer your question, you have to clarify what you mean by "movie". If by "movie" you mean "a piece of film or other object that, perhaps when manipulated by another device, creates sounds and images" then a movie is in fact a tangible, real-world good. If you mean "the images produced by such an object" then no, a movie is not a tangible thing, but is an entertainment service. That is, playing a movie many times may have entertainment value, but it does not increase the number of pieces of film.
Interestingly enough, a virtual good does not actually increase the wealth of society, but it may have value. Remember, governments typically tax value, not wealth; there is a subtle, sneaky difference there.
Indeed. While apparently the courts for some reason tend to think that clicking a license implies consent, I would argue that cannot ever be proven. All a click-through EULA proves is that the software recognized inputs it deemed necessary to allow the program to continue operation. From a user standpoint, this means "I did whatever I needed to do to get that button to become active (scroll down, etc.), then clicked it so I could use my computer and/or the software I want to use."
The only comment I have is in response to the statement about how a prize helps "advance" something. Now, I can see how there might be some spin-off technologies from space travel that will help society in general cope with a changing world environment, but I can't for the life of me see how a system for recommending movies can really be all that much of a societal advance.
Sure, entertainment is great, and the general economic activity that is generated by entertainment may eventually bleed down to the more base improvements that are really needed for society, but I wish that the general populace would actually focus on those things...
Eh, that only works if you're traversing the list, not if you can possibly jump into the tree from a direct pointer to the object.
Of course, for things where you really only always just traverse the list, this would be fine...an interesting concept actually. Guess it's another instance of "use the correct tool for the task at hand."
Author's Note: In reviewing my post before submitting, I see that it's a bit of a brainstorming, but I like the way the thoughts developed. I think it fairly accurately illustrates what web-based "services" really are compared to other products and services. Please bear with the thought-development process.
True - but I would consider your example of hiring someone to plow your field the same as hiring someone to use software - bascially for their services to use the software. That's different than buying a tractor and hiring someone to drive it even.
I think what I'm trying to say is that it appears that the idea is an odd form of leasing; with leasing, say, a tractor, I pay installments for the use of the tractor. However, as long as I have posession of the tractor I can use it. The software model is more like "Hey, you have this tractor sitting on your lot, and you stopped paying for it but I'm not going to come pick it up ever, but don't use it while it's still there!" when it comes to the typical service agreements.
There was a post elsewhere regarding World of Warcraft - the online game is different, because you're not paying for the 'game' - it's more like cable or a bus pass where you are paying for access - another example might be tickets for an amusement park. The park exists, and you can get there, but if you don't have a ticket you cannot participate. The online game is a different beast again, and I think the amusement park is the closest analogy rather than thinking of "product" (i.e., tractor) or "service" (i.e., write software, plow the field, cut your hair).
Note that "subscription" models like newspapers are also different: With a newspaper subscription - a traditional one that is - you are paying for tangible goods to be delivered to your location periodically. Once you stop the subscription, you still have all the old material that was delivered to your location. This is different than "online" subscriptions which are typically really "access" agreements - if I paid to read news for Oct 5th on a site, and I don't pay tomorrow, I can't go back and see the news for Oct 5th because it is behind access control. But, if I have paid to receive the hard copy of news for the 5th, then I will always have that. Having the hard copy and an agreement that says "You paid for that, but don't go look in your bookshelf for it if you don't pay!" is really kind of foolish.
Hopefully that discussion illustrates the difference between what 'subscription' really means and what 'access-based payments' are and what 'services' and 'products' are. (Note, as a pet peeve, I hate it when organizations like banks call things like a savings account a 'product' - the only thing I could call a product from a bank is a checkbook perhaps. The rest is pure service and access control.)
The way I see it, *software* isn't a service, but *writing/updating/etc. software* is a service. Just the same as making a tractor is a service, but the tractor itself is not a service.
PPL is what is says on my bill - I assume that's "PA Power and Light" or something. Williamsport area. Of course, my assessment after being here for a year on business (finishing up this mongth) is that this part of the country is an economic twilight zone.
I don't know where you live to get power for 1 or 2 cents/kW-hr. Central Pennsylvania power bill in front of me:
$8 for being a customer
Distribution: 2.193 / kW-hr for 200, 1.984 after that
Transmission:.605 / kW-hr
Transition (whatever that is): 1.361 for 200, then 1.206
Generation: 5.663 for first 200, then 4.975 after that
So, excluding the $8 'customer charge', that's 8.5 cents/kW-hr for the first 200, and about 8 cents/kW-hr after that.
Also, I don't look at price per kW-hr anyway. Look at it this way:
If you currently spend $1000/year on electricity, and you expect inflation to be 2% per year, over the course of 10 years you'd expect to pay a total of $10,949.72 over those 10 years. If you pay $9000 today for that windmill, your (annual) rate of return would be 1.98%. Better than most savings accounts, AND you don't have any bills! Now, let's say inflation is 3% instead of 2% - now your rate of return is 2.45% - you pay $9000 today and in 10 years you have $11463.88.
Don't let the "cost per unit energy" fool you - it's really all about investment. And I just did the math for 10 years - the rates of return actually look better the longer you keep the thing running. (ok, so I'm a stickler: 20 years at 2% inflation is $9000 now for $24297.37 in 20 years, or an annual rate of return of 10.4% - with almost no risk (that's assuming you can get a windmill and associated systems to meet 100% of your power needs).
True, but if you generate less, and sell less, that means the revenue is less which means we have to lay workers off and can't pay back the bonds which were used to build the power plants. This means that power plant jobs will be lost, as well as the investors losing their money on the bonds, which will create panic in the streets.
The *true* solution is to waste MORE, so that we can create more jobs supporting and cleaning up the waste!
*removes sarcastic pessimism hat and fades into the shadows*
Lesson number 1: "wealth" is not the same thing as "value".
I would agree that the value that is placed on manufactured goods has been declining, but that does not mean that the wealth inherent to the manufactured goods is any less.
Put another way: The price of a house does not changes its square footage, ability to store things and protect from the environment, etc. The wealth of a house (sans damage or additions) is constant, regardless of the price (value) associated with that house. Yet another example: a wrench does not lose its "wrenchness" if it only costs $5 instead of $10.
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The sad thing is that you have to specify who you mean by 'we' when you indicate those who really get hit hard by the effects. I think 'we' only includes: people unwilling or unable to adapt.
Sounds like some form of evolution to me - adapt or perish?
At any rate, we have the technology to totally ignore (on a large scale, not necessarily for every individual on the planet) just about every distaster that you can imagine - including asteroid strikes - except for the sun expiring. Even then we'd probably be able to sustain some population for a while with nuclear power.
Remember folks, global climate change is not and has never been a technical problem; it is purely politics. Sure, the climate is changing, and we affect it. So what? We have the knowledge, resources, and capability to mitigate the effects of those changes. Sure, not everyone will survive, but how is that different than any other time in history when there has been a large change in the environment?
Yes, it sounds cold and callous, but that's reality - physics doesn't care about how you feel, and it really is about how you deal with things.
The real politics we need to worry about are how do you not penalize people for building structures to mitigate global warming? For providing greenhouses to feed themselves? The list goes on.
If people don't want to change, let them suffer the consequences. I think people just need to realize that things change, and that they need to bear some responsibility for their actions and their choices. If you don't evacuate a city where you know a hurricane is headed, how is that the fault of the weather or the government? Note that's a bit different than if you didn't know a tornado was coming - those don't give much warning, even though we do have more warning now than we used to. The way I see it, climate change is a big old bus that everyone in the world can see (regardless of the cause) and you can either sit there where you are and wait for someone else to push the bus out of the way, or you can get off your rear and move out of the way yourself.
I was raised to think that if I play in the street, it's not the drivers' responsibility to dodge me - I need to get out of the street!
Here's an interesting concept that I've been tossing around in relation to your rebuttals: What is valuable is not the created idea, but the ability to create ideas. That is, you can still be economically valuable as an idea producer because you can develop ideas, not because some idea has already been disseminated.
That's my take, anyway, and I think if "idea producers" - or anyone in the creative arts for that matter - took that stance, then you wouldn't have any issues with any intellectual property law, copyright law, etc. becuase what would be valued is not the work but the worker - and that is where, in my opinion, the value belongs aynway.
Think about it this way - would you rather have Einstein's works, or Einstein himself? Or Beethoven's works, or Beethoven himself?
This has to be one of the best responses to one of my not-so-well-thought-out-at-6-am posts ever. :-)
I have to agree with everything you said. And yeah, I didn't really think through my trying to cook 10g of egg with 1g of water. Too bad 'preview' does not catch sanity errors...
The one comment I have that is more on-topic: If a heatsink transfer to water or egg is greater than in air, which I agree with, that will mean that the temperature of the heatsink will drop faster for a given input energy. I'm assuming that the CPU under the heatsink does not increase to compensate for the extra outflow from the heatsink, so, since outflow > inflow, the temperature of the heatsink will drop. Maybe a better experiment would be "at what rate do you have to cook eggs on the heatsink to drop its temperature down to 50 degC"?
Temperature doesn't mean anything - it's heat dissipation that matters. Here's more basic math for ya:
I have 1 gram of water at 100 degC and that is my heat sink. Let's say I then have 10 grams of egg. Let's say the heat capacity of egg is the same as water. Let's say the egg is current room temperature of 20 degC. If no energy is added to the (water)heat sink, the equilibrium temperature between the egg and the water will only be about 27 degC, which is nowhere near enough to cook egg. Now, let's assume that the heat sink is currently dissipating 100W. If we just put water on that, that means we'd heat 1 gram of water (if it was absorbing all the energy) at around 24 degC/sec (about 3 seconds to reach boiling temperature) - so it appears that the heat sink has the capability to dish out quite a bit more than 100W (I don't know if this is a combination of the thermal dissipation from the circuit or a release of the energy that is stored in the heatsink; it's probably a combination of both).
That's the scary thing - not that it's hot, but that it *stays* hot!
Eh, I'm beginning to think more and more that this is a dangerous direction that the "first world" economies are taking: they forget that real wealth comes not from talking about things, but actual matter-bashing (that is, things like agriculture, manufacturing, etc.). I don't know about you, but I don't get much "work" done when writing emails or attending meetings - I only get "real" work done when I measure physical data or cause physical things to change; all the rest of my activities may have value, but it's just shuffling already-present things around.
So, if you can show me how writing an email can actually transport goods from location A to location B, or make it require fewer resources to store goods for longer, I'll be impressed; until then, email is just a request that something happen, and there is still some physical thing which must occur. Now, if you say "what about an automated system, where an email causes a [robot] to put a crate onto a vehicle that transports it?" I will respond with "It is not the email which does the work, but the [robot] and vehicle - you just gave an instruction. I suppose that might be a bit pedantic, but I think details are far more important than most people realize.
What is there in the Internet to govern anyway?
If the sole issue is "what name points at what IP address in the most common DNS system" then who cares?
It's only when you get out of the technical realm and into the craziness of taxes, "legal" versus "illegal" sequences of numbers to send across the lines, and similar oddities, does a question of "governance" even come into the picture.
My take is: just have a central body for managing the DNS namespace (which is not "hardware enforced" anyway) and that's it. I honestly don't understand what the huge issue is, other than the fact that for many people it's too easy to get food and shelter so they sit around and create other things about which to fight.
I still have the same Sanyo (4500 I think is the model number) phone I got in 2001. People think it's "big and ugly" but:
Unfortunately, the article states that the new "dumb" phone probably won't make it to mainstream (such as US) markets because they appear to want all the gimmicks.
Case Western incidents? What incidents happened at Case? And why did I not hear about something that happened at my alma mater?
Or did you perhaps mean the incident at Kent State?
Impressive...3 x 30 MW plus 4x2 MW!? What kind of 'project' other than municipal power or maybe an airport or hospital would require that? 98 MW is substantial generation capacity.
I've often wondered why they don't liquid cool these, or use ducted air cooling, then recover a portion of the waste energy. Any time you have a temperature difference you can get some returns. Considering these datacenters generate so much thermal energy, you'd think they would attempt to recover some rather than spend *more* energy to move it outside.
This is why certain engine testing facilities use their dynos to power portions of their facility - instead of burning fuel and paying for electricity, they reduce their electricity costs. Of course, this does require some up-front capital, but if people would think about the long run rather than the immediate, it shouldn't be that difficult a proposition.
Think - if you've got a 2 MW genset, that probably means you're running 1 MW continuous; let's say only 25% of that is computer (250 kW) and you can recover only 10% of that somehow. You'd be recovering 25 kW, which is actually a significant amount of power - probably enough to run a significant portion of lighting (that's over 400 60-watt lighting sources - or if you've got the new 15-watt fluorescents, over 1600 lights).
See my comment below for more details, but I wouldn't care if they patented the specific implementation. It appears that they patented something far more general than that (the idea of floating point framebuffers - not "this one way to make a floating point framebuffer").
Incidentally, part of "obvious" in my book is "It's so obvious, why bother trying to patent it?"
The difference I see is that the complete idea for using a floating point framebuffer existed - just nobody could afford it. I would equally have a problem if someone tried to patent the idea for a mechanical wheat thrasher. Now, patenting a specific mechanical mechanism, or a specific method of implementing a floating-point frame buffer, is fine.
That's ultimate difference in my book: implementations should be patentable, but ideas should not. (Similarly: Information (such as a chemical formula or genetic sequence) should not be patentable, but methods to get it should - and not the idea of coming up with a way to measure the information, but the actual method itself.) Granted, that may actually take some effort to separate those two things, but that's the crux of my disagreement with the patent system.
The problem is that this patent fails the obviousness test about 100%. The patent itself, if you follow the link, says that "People have used floating point before, just in emulation because hardware cost too much. Now that hardware is cheap, we just do floating point rasterization from the framebuffer instead of through emulation."
I don't understand how the USPTO granted a patent that says "This method has been known for some time, but now we just have the capability to do it."
I'm all for granting legitimate patents (they do actually exist) but this one does not pass the sanity check.
Remember, you have to scale that not by "hours they are working" but "across all hours they work in a year".
What if that's the only job they have in a year? Their effective wage is then $500/1920, which is pathetically low ($0.26 / hour). (NOTE: using 48 weeks of 40 hours as the standard hour-base).
I'm actually disappointed by how people typically skew hourly wage numbers one way or the other - what matters isn't wage per hour, but total income per larger unit time (for instance, time period between rent, meals, etc.).
I think the bigger issue is still the concept of 'owning' an idea. Most economic activities - including things like licenses, etc. - are based on the idea of scarcity. I'm still not convinced that ideas are scarce goods, and therefore all the conventional economic thought doesn't really apply.
What are, to some extent, scarce are the idea producers. The thing that scares "the industry" is that it is now with unprecedented ease that ideas can be developed and disseminated; the 'idea producer' is now not as scarce as it once was. This is the problem - when people before said they were protecting 'ideas' they were really protecting the equipment and expertise to generate those ideas - now expertise and equipment are so readily available that the value of 'thinking' is actually becoming diluted - it's really just the old supply and demand situation.
In order to answer your question, you have to clarify what you mean by "movie". If by "movie" you mean "a piece of film or other object that, perhaps when manipulated by another device, creates sounds and images" then a movie is in fact a tangible, real-world good. If you mean "the images produced by such an object" then no, a movie is not a tangible thing, but is an entertainment service. That is, playing a movie many times may have entertainment value, but it does not increase the number of pieces of film.
Interestingly enough, a virtual good does not actually increase the wealth of society, but it may have value. Remember, governments typically tax value, not wealth; there is a subtle, sneaky difference there.
Indeed. While apparently the courts for some reason tend to think that clicking a license implies consent, I would argue that cannot ever be proven. All a click-through EULA proves is that the software recognized inputs it deemed necessary to allow the program to continue operation. From a user standpoint, this means "I did whatever I needed to do to get that button to become active (scroll down, etc.), then clicked it so I could use my computer and/or the software I want to use."
The only comment I have is in response to the statement about how a prize helps "advance" something. Now, I can see how there might be some spin-off technologies from space travel that will help society in general cope with a changing world environment, but I can't for the life of me see how a system for recommending movies can really be all that much of a societal advance.
Sure, entertainment is great, and the general economic activity that is generated by entertainment may eventually bleed down to the more base improvements that are really needed for society, but I wish that the general populace would actually focus on those things...
Eh, that only works if you're traversing the list, not if you can possibly jump into the tree from a direct pointer to the object.
Of course, for things where you really only always just traverse the list, this would be fine...an interesting concept actually. Guess it's another instance of "use the correct tool for the task at hand."
Author's Note: In reviewing my post before submitting, I see that it's a bit of a brainstorming, but I like the way the thoughts developed. I think it fairly accurately illustrates what web-based "services" really are compared to other products and services. Please bear with the thought-development process.
True - but I would consider your example of hiring someone to plow your field the same as hiring someone to use software - bascially for their services to use the software. That's different than buying a tractor and hiring someone to drive it even.
I think what I'm trying to say is that it appears that the idea is an odd form of leasing; with leasing, say, a tractor, I pay installments for the use of the tractor. However, as long as I have posession of the tractor I can use it. The software model is more like "Hey, you have this tractor sitting on your lot, and you stopped paying for it but I'm not going to come pick it up ever, but don't use it while it's still there!" when it comes to the typical service agreements.
There was a post elsewhere regarding World of Warcraft - the online game is different, because you're not paying for the 'game' - it's more like cable or a bus pass where you are paying for access - another example might be tickets for an amusement park. The park exists, and you can get there, but if you don't have a ticket you cannot participate. The online game is a different beast again, and I think the amusement park is the closest analogy rather than thinking of "product" (i.e., tractor) or "service" (i.e., write software, plow the field, cut your hair).
Note that "subscription" models like newspapers are also different: With a newspaper subscription - a traditional one that is - you are paying for tangible goods to be delivered to your location periodically. Once you stop the subscription, you still have all the old material that was delivered to your location. This is different than "online" subscriptions which are typically really "access" agreements - if I paid to read news for Oct 5th on a site, and I don't pay tomorrow, I can't go back and see the news for Oct 5th because it is behind access control. But, if I have paid to receive the hard copy of news for the 5th, then I will always have that. Having the hard copy and an agreement that says "You paid for that, but don't go look in your bookshelf for it if you don't pay!" is really kind of foolish.
Hopefully that discussion illustrates the difference between what 'subscription' really means and what 'access-based payments' are and what 'services' and 'products' are. (Note, as a pet peeve, I hate it when organizations like banks call things like a savings account a 'product' - the only thing I could call a product from a bank is a checkbook perhaps. The rest is pure service and access control.)
The way I see it, *software* isn't a service, but *writing/updating/etc. software* is a service. Just the same as making a tractor is a service, but the tractor itself is not a service.
PPL is what is says on my bill - I assume that's "PA Power and Light" or something. Williamsport area. Of course, my assessment after being here for a year on business (finishing up this mongth) is that this part of the country is an economic twilight zone.
I don't know where you live to get power for 1 or 2 cents/kW-hr. Central Pennsylvania power bill in front of me:
$8 for being a customer .605 / kW-hr
Distribution: 2.193 / kW-hr for 200, 1.984 after that
Transmission:
Transition (whatever that is): 1.361 for 200, then 1.206
Generation: 5.663 for first 200, then 4.975 after that
So, excluding the $8 'customer charge', that's 8.5 cents/kW-hr for the first 200, and about 8 cents/kW-hr after that.
Also, I don't look at price per kW-hr anyway. Look at it this way:
If you currently spend $1000/year on electricity, and you expect inflation to be 2% per year, over the course of 10 years you'd expect to pay a total of $10,949.72 over those 10 years. If you pay $9000 today for that windmill, your (annual) rate of return would be 1.98%. Better than most savings accounts, AND you don't have any bills! Now, let's say inflation is 3% instead of 2% - now your rate of return is 2.45% - you pay $9000 today and in 10 years you have $11463.88.
Don't let the "cost per unit energy" fool you - it's really all about investment. And I just did the math for 10 years - the rates of return actually look better the longer you keep the thing running. (ok, so I'm a stickler: 20 years at 2% inflation is $9000 now for $24297.37 in 20 years, or an annual rate of return of 10.4% - with almost no risk (that's assuming you can get a windmill and associated systems to meet 100% of your power needs).
*dons sarcastic pessimism hat*
True, but if you generate less, and sell less, that means the revenue is less which means we have to lay workers off and can't pay back the bonds which were used to build the power plants. This means that power plant jobs will be lost, as well as the investors losing their money on the bonds, which will create panic in the streets.
The *true* solution is to waste MORE, so that we can create more jobs supporting and cleaning up the waste!
*removes sarcastic pessimism hat and fades into the shadows*
Lesson number 1: "wealth" is not the same thing as "value".
I would agree that the value that is placed on manufactured goods has been declining, but that does not mean that the wealth inherent to the manufactured goods is any less.
Put another way: The price of a house does not changes its square footage, ability to store things and protect from the environment, etc. The wealth of a house (sans damage or additions) is constant, regardless of the price (value) associated with that house. Yet another example: a wrench does not lose its "wrenchness" if it only costs $5 instead of $10.