The viewing of the ads is irrelevant. What matters is that the people maintaining a [website] have enough incoming revenue to continue that activity. It is currently often the case that this revenue comes from commercial enterprises in exchange for putting certain information on the [website]. The reason these enterprices pay to put that information on the [website] is that there is empiracle evidence of correlation between the amount of "exposure" of such information and their revenue.
What is happening is that viewers of the [website] do not want the advertisement information, so they developed a tool to block it, or simply cease to visit the [website]. This supposedly reduces the "exposure" mentioned above, which would theoretically reduce ad revenue to the [website]. This means that revenue for the [website] maintainers must come from somewhere else or the [website] will cease to exist.
This is complete free-market behavior, and eventually there will arise some sort of dynamic equilibrium. However, if the [websites] have enough revenue to continue the site, the odd thing about [the internet] is that the number of people who can use it is not strongly proportional to the cost to maintain it - that is, a very small bit of revenue can provide information for a vast number of individuals. This is different than newspapers, because the cost of newspapers is much more strongly proportional to the number of newspapers.
Just like the entertainment industries, the advertising industry should have to adapt to changing market environments. The whole issue really does require a change of perspective, from "Everyone who uses [x] needs to pay me" to "As long as enough people continue to pay me enough to do [x], I will keep doing it." - It is a shift from "what can I get away with" to "what do I need."
The thing I think is funny is that commercial enterprises appear to believe they are entitled to advertise and that entitlement should be protected by the legal system.
I'd love to see how they define "make life better" for someone. Sure, Google is great for finding various tidbits of information, but Google can't build a water purification plant, set up irrigation, or build a house. (I'm of the belief that information is potential, but action is where the value lies. Thus, providing more information just gives potential...) It might facilitate that somehow, but there's nothing that Google provides that cannot be done by other means. Sure you might be able to do something "a little faster" which is a type of innovation, but there is nothing new there: maps have been around for centuries, catalogs and directories have been around for centuries, etc.
I want to see something fundamentally different that makes a difference - not shinier, more complicated versions of centuries-old things. That run on a computer.
What should be "applicable" to all intellectual "property" is what I'd like to call recognition rights. What artists want (for copyright) and programmers want (for software copyright/patent) and what manufacturers want ("traditional patents") is for the people that enjoy their idea will know and have a mechanism for compensating them. For instance, if I write a piece of software, I don't care if I have a patent or not; I just care that I have enough money for food, utilities, and the lifestyle I want. If folks don't know that I have this ability, or someone else claims they wrote it, then they likely won't give me compensation. If I can't get enough compensation for what I do, then I'll do something else and society will lose my contribution in that art. (The ideal free-market situation).
Instead of telling people they cannot use a technology, they should just be required to give proper recognition to where it is due. This does get complicated when a group of people develop an idea or product though - I don't pretend that it's not a complex issue.
However, I agree that all restrictions on ideas are actually a hindrance to society - patents are almost restricting the "free speech" of ideas. As I and others have said before, the problem with treating ideas as property is that ideas are not an economically scarce thing, so concepts like property rights do not naturally apply; the trying to force these things to apply is what causes all the drag on innovation.
Rather than complain that the system is broken, though, we ought to spend our efforts coming up with a proposal that will allow the free transfer and use of ideas but provide for appropriate compensation for the developer of those ideas. Note that this is very different in software versus hardware: software has almost zero reproduction cost while hardware is almost all reproduction cost - this is what patents were to protect, becuase the "backyard inventor" does not have a factory. The "backyard software" person *does* have the resources, so the difference between a big software company and a little one is not in production capacity but in talent. Patents were never meant to have anything to do with talent - only production capacity.
I've seen a couple comments now on the effects of competition. The effects of competition were left out for simplicity, but if we put them back in things become a bit more complicated. But that's what makes it fun, right?:)
The interesting thing is that prices go down because there is an oversupply, not because of the innovation. Note that in my earlier post where the builder got a machine, he didn't lower the price - he just had to work less. With an oversupply, either the price has to come down (which means working longer due to less retirement savings or having to build more than one house per year to get enough to meet needs) or, in the case where even at zero price there will be no more demand (for instance, everyone already has all the item X they want) one of the suppliers will have to do something else to meet their needs and wants.
The concepts here are that, with a fixed demand, if the supply increases the price will tend to go down. With a fixed demand and a fixed supply the prices will probably stay the same but may go down or up. With a fixed supply and increasing demand, price may go down (mass production) or might go up (increased demand for a scarce resource like oil). You see, with competition, anything can happen, because competition is not just between producers but also between consumers.
Note also that producer competition for limited consumers benefits the consumers but puts a drag on the producers. Since all producers are also consumers, this is a complicated effect. However, the reduced "drag" on the consumer due to the lower-priced good gives them a bit of a lift. I would be willing to wager that this is less efficient than cooperation between all parties, just as some energy is lost when using a clutch to match speeds of two rotating bodies - friction results in a loss when bringing the slower body up to the equilibrium speed while slowing the faster one down. One of the major factors here, I believe, is that -generally speaking- the capability of those that are primarily consumers to produce is less than those who are primarily producers, so increasing the "free time" of the consumers by reducing prices for certain of their goods will not increase wealth as much as freeing up the free time of the producers. (Note that this is speaking ideally of course - it neglects such things as greed or corruption). The solution to that is mostly rooted in education and politics, but I don't have a firm theory on that yet - other than it's probably related to some form of oppression of the "haves" over the "have nots".
All in all, the interesting side effect is that lower prices aren't really all they're cracked up to be - just ask anyone around you in production industries. Sure, everyone loves Wal-Mart pricing, but someone somewhere has a slower increase in their quality of living because of it (and, since the wealthy in this world pull some odd strings, the drag actually goes back to the consumers who are paying lower prices. Very strange concept, but that's how things appear to be transpiring).
One thing to remember, though, is that if nobody's willing to buy what you produce, you either need to produce something else, somehow convince them to buy what you produce, or you have to go without.
Your scenario 2 is a little flawed. It might turn out that way, but it's not guaranteed. This is even assuming that the purchase price of a house is only based on labor [robots] and materials instead of goofy market speculation and politics.
Here's a situation: person A can build 1 house in 1 year, so he will charge the person to whom he sells the house 1 year's worth of "stuff" he needs and wants: payment for his house, food, savings, entertainment, some free time, etc. Now let's say person A builds a machine (using some of the 'free time' and 'etc.' included in the price he was charing) that allows him to make 1 house in half a year. If person A decides to still only build one house per year and take half a year off, he would probably still charge the original price to pay for his house, food, etc. Person A would probably tell you his quality of life has improved greatly, even though he doesn't have more money. Person A may decide to build 2 houses instead, in which case the price of each house needs to sum to what the person wants, but they don't necessarily have to go to half the original. Even if the person does take "full price" for each house, conceivably the person might not work for as many years and retire early (since he could have saved quite a lot) and the net production of houses he produced might be no greater than before - so there might not be more houses with the machine than without.
I hope this example shows that it is not clear at all how technology really affects the economy - it really depends on the individuals in that economy.
Interesting quote from the summary: "countless computer files stored in outmoded formats" led me to an interesting train of thought I've been mulling around for a while, somewhat affected by me recent reading of G.E.B.
The universal format for documentation, I believe, is the printed hard-copy document. Think of it this way: If we received the Rosetta Stone, or bits of the Torah or Quran, on some electronic media, would we have been able to get the content off - especially if it was encrypted somehow?
I think the only universal format is the printed page, which requires no "special equipment" to read (it might not be interpretable, but it can easily be recognised as a document) whereas a computer-recorded pile of numbers, while perhaps recognisable has having meaningful content, will probably, in the future, have no context in which to extract its meaning. Consider this: you receive some piece of hardware in the future which you realise stores binary data. Is it numbers? Is it a program? Is it sample data from atmospheric noise collection? All you know is there is binary data. All you know is there is binary data, and you don't even know if it is stored in 8-bit blocks, 16-bit blocks, 3 bit-blocks, or whatever. You don't know if it's in ASCII or some weird encoding of, say, Farsi. You might try running some statistical analysis on it to see if it's some kind of language, but against what do you compare the 'glyphs' of the numbers?
When you see a stone like the rosetta stone, it's obvious what you've got; when you've got a list of numbers, there is no way to tell what it is other than a list of numbers.
This is a great danger of the digital age, in my opinion, and it is good that there is still expertise floating around about the "old" equipment. But remember, the "old" equipment is still less than a century old: what will happen in 100 more years? 400? I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations. I think this is why I really don't like the idea of digitising the libraries, or even digitising photography.
Definitely something to consider for all those folks concerned with "the best data format" and if.DOC or.PDF or XML or whatever is better.
The best format is one that contains enough information to clue the interpreters how to interpret it rather than relying on something else. Right now, all digital documents are merely a string of numbers, and a string of numbers is not sufficient to contain meaning to interpret itself - those numbers rely on some interpreter to receive meaning (as an excersise to prove this, take any file on your computer and look at it in a debugger - on various systems, a hex-editor, and a program that will use the contents of any file as raw image or audio data. It might not be rendered sensibly (I don't know that I'd want to listen to the "song" that, say, Firefox would be), but there is no effective way to tell if the string of numbers has meaning by using trial and error.
A printed document unequivocally has more information than this - a schemaatic diagram is different than a picture of an apple is different than a poem... and while we may not know 'apple' or the language of the poem or have the capability to understand the diagram, we know that those things aren't, say, a random paint splatter.
So, again, while I applaud the efforts of these guys for writing down their knowledge, if they don't do it in a "universal" format, who will be around to interpret their blogs and digital records in 1000 years?
Ah, it only appears to be a contradiction, because I left out some information. Here's some clarification: Perhaps I shouldn't have said POTS, as I personally have a cell-phone only (which I got because it was cheaper, and has added benefit of no telemarketers. I pay $35 / month for cell phone.)
I guess I should clarify that what constitutes 'quality of life change' or 'cost of living change' is different per person. My personal assessment was correct though. True, if I was paying $65 for phone and could go to $25, that would be worth it. For my case, though, $25 instead of $35 is not worth the $10 / month, especially when I'd lose mobility and be tied in to my ISP. (Also, VOIP has the detractor that if power goes out I can't use VOIP; this is different than POTS/cells which have separate power grids. I suppose you could have VOIP over cell modem, but that's kind of silly isn't it?).
However, this discussion was about alternatives, and I used cell instead of POTS or VOIP. This does not mean that any of these technologies are not worth it (there was benefit, else I wouldn't have adopted the technology); my goal was to get people to really think about why they choose to adopt a given technology. (And yes, sometimes "cool factor" is a benefit for which some people will pay.)
...holding back technologies that offer benefits greater than their security risks...
This leads to the question, "What do you mean by benefits of technology?"
This is actually a good question, especially in light of the security risk question. I think the only way to evaluate benefits of technology is to look at how much a technology reduces the cost of living and/or how much it improves quality of living. For instance, a plow greatly reduced the cost of living for farmers - they now had to spend less time plowing for a given amount of production. The invention of air conditioning increased quality of living quite a bit. It's a little more difficult to measure just what having VOIP, for instance, gives us. VOIP doesn't really reduce the cost of living, and it really doesn't improve the quality of living compared to POTS. Perhaps it does slightly reduce the costs, if VOIP is less expensive than POTS, because that means VOIP users spend less of their "time" paying for communications.
The risks need to be weighed against the benefit though. For instance, there's a greater risk of getting injured by a plow than by digging things by hand, but the benefit is huge. The way I think things should be examined is what is the added risk for added benefit?
My personal assessment is that VOIP or wireless hotspots, or whatever, are not going to improve my life quality over what it is now, nor will they reduce my cost of living significantly. So, if there is *any* added security risk, it's not even in my consideration.
I too was curious about the required strengths for this, and I did the calculations (they are fairly simple, you're right). For the rest of the folks out there, the maximum tensile stress in a required cable is going to be around the order of tens of gigapascals (10 GPa). A quick search on carbon nanotube tensile strength revealed this which indicates that nanotube tensile strength is somewhere around 60 GPa, which looks like it might be enough. You can even do some other tricks like tying buoys at intervals along the cable to releive some stress.
I think what most people miss is that there are limited possible locations for the elevator, because you have to make it orthogonal to earth's rotation axis and, ideally, you want it on the equator - even better would be anchored to a mountain on the equator.
What's really interesting about the tensile stress is that it's possible to make the cable long enough so that zero anchor force is required at the surface of the earth:) You can also reduce the maximum tensile stress requirement if you allow compressive stresses at earth surface.
Oddly enough, it's effectively giving [the homeless] jobs through the use of taxes, without having too much bureaucracy in the middle. That is, instead of taxes going to the government to pay clean-up crews, the recycling fee goes to the store which holds it then gives it back out when the trash comes in.
I wonder how difficult it would be to add this to more products than just a limited selection of beverage containers?
Of course, you'd still have to fix the law so that the [can deposit] is based on the container material and not the contents. I'm still amused that pop bottles are charged a deposit but water and juice bottles are not.
Well, I think the big thing here is that in some cultures this weird idea of "one price for everyone, I take it or leave it" and in others there is the haggling mindset - the truest free market. For instance, there is no law that says you have to agree on a price; you could probably try to go haggle with the wal-mart manager but he'll probably say "no, if you don't want to pay what's on the sticker, then I won't sell it to you" but you can probably go into a specialty shop and haggle a couple bucks off things.
Some states have laws that a price must be displayed on an item, but there is no law that says that you can't pay less than that price (I think there are laws that say you don't have to pay more, assuming the label is for that item and not a "swapped" label).
That's why the whole concept is called "shopping" anyway - you look for the thing that you want at the price you're willing to pay. If you're willing to pay $100 to site A, then it's not site A's fault that you didn't go to Site B where they had it for $90.
This sounds like people not wanting to be responsible for their purchases. Gotta be careful there, giving up that responsibility...
There's a little problem with your 10-15 minute recharge. Assuming you want to store the same amount of energy you'd have in a tank of gas, let's say a 15-gallon tank:
15 gallons x 6 lbm/gallon x 1 kg/2.2046 lbm = 40.8 kg
40.8 kg x 42 MJ/kg = 1713.6 MJ per tank of gasoline (at 42 MJ/kg enery content - a little on the low side but it's close).
Assume that an all-electric system is 60% efficient instead of 30%, so we'd only need 856.8 MJ instead of the amount we had to carry in gasoline; let's round to 860 MJ.
To get that 860 MJ in 15 minutes, you'd need an average of about 956 kW electrical input. I don't even care about volts or amps here, almost a megawatt is a daunting engineering challenge for mobile applications. I don't even care if you have good batteries, you're probably not going to be able to have 956 kW recharges; the only way to do this would be to have a swappable battery pack and have more reasonable charging at the stations. However, if you figure a station fills 1000 cars in a day, they still have to come up with 860 GJ in a day, which is an average of almost 10 MW continuous over 24 hours.
Hopefully this gives an indication of why we use fossil fuels: Even if biodiesel was 100% efficient from solar to chemical, 10 MW means that a field would have to be at least 100m x 100m (almost 2.5 acres) on a very high-solar load day (1000 W/m^2) to meet that power demand. Consider that sunlight is probably on average only available at that peak for 8 hours a day, you'd need almost 10 acres, and considering that you probably only get that output on average for a third of the year you'd need 30 acres. Add in some efficiency issues, and you probably need 100 acres just to catch the power you need from the sun - more would probably be required for processing, etc.. (You could also figure total energy required per year and how much land you'd need to meet that per year - likely a better estimate).
This is definitely why the biodiesel folks want it, though, as that's a lot of farming work that would become available. As for how that compares to the economics of the mine (which apply to pumping oil), I'll have to do some more research.
[offtopic]
I have that same book! That was an entertaining story - I love the picture of the guy in the little bean-shaped car yelling at the guy...
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I can verify this; I recently did a road trip and had a stopwatch with me. My odometer was correct to within 0.1 miles in about 80 relative to the road signs. My speedometer, however, was off by about 3 mph at 70 mph measured by mile markers and stopwatch (that is, to go 7 miles in 6 stopwatch minutes, my speedometer had to read about 73). That's an odometer accuracy of 1/800 (or.125%) and a speedometer accuracy of 3/70 (or 4%).
The reason, I believe, is that the speedometer gets a "speed value" from a computer, then moves an actuator. So if the actuator isn't calibated correctly, or weird filtering is applied, the analog dial will be off.
I have heard that on some vehicles you can boot the console into a mode where it will display "computer MPH" on the trip miles screen and compare against the analog. I should try this one day...
"Fairness" aside, mandating equipment like this simply puts the responsibility on the sensor / car manufacturers instead of upon the vehicle operator. This is the worse situation in my book as any time responsibility is taken away from the individual (or given up by an individual), freedom goes with it. This is more insidious and costly than the additional $600 or $100 or whatever a device would end up adding to a vehicle. Sure, people might think that it's better to have everyone with one of these, but this is just as much an attack on freedom as all the privacy stuff which is often discussed.
The best solution to this problem is to actually work to make the system place responsibility where it belongs, on the individual who did not make wise decisions regarding driving and current ability to drive. If the laws were written with responsibility in mind, instead of chemical tests, the scale would naturally slide with each individuals' tolerance and ability (as many mentioned, some sober folks would fail a vehicle control aptitude / skills test while some "drunk" people would pass).
Anyway, the thing that irritates me with these discussions is people are always looking to put responsibility on someone else; in this instance if the gadget didn't work, it would be "the gadget didn't work! It's Gadget Company's fault that I drove when I couldn't control my car and ran into that storefront and maimed myself!" instead of, more appropriately, "I made a poor choice. I shall have to humble myself and live with the consequences of my actions, and change my ways in the future."
Your proposal for the 'food cards' is definitely interesting, and it does fit into the realm of 'public good', but it has some other shortcomings.
Firstly, it puts the responsibility of feeding people onto the government. (Whether or not you think that should be the government's responsibility is another issue entirely.)
Secondly, such food programs cannot guarantee that people will spend the money on food. I have friends that work in the inner city (Detroit) and people use their foodstamps to get food and necessities (toilet paper, soap, etc.) which they then take and trade for various vices. While this isn't what everyone does, it's probably higher than 10%. It appears that when people have no responsibility for providing their basic needs, they will abuse the system that provides them.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by an increase in sales tax of 4 cents - is that 4 cents on each dollar (which is pretty big) or 4 cents per capita...I'm just trying to clarify.
(I should have clarified on the lightposts - 2 designer lamps in the median every 75 yds for 3 miles on a 50mph 6-lane heavy-commercial boulevard was less a 'safety' issue than an aesthetics issue - especially since other lights were there previously.)
Tax reform starts with spending reform, and this means more involvement in governments by the members of the public. How many people here go to town meetings?
Seriously, tax revenue should probably only go to things like infrastructure, education, emergency services, courts, and things that help the general public. Things like spending a million dollars on new lightposts (like the city to which I just moved did shortly before I moved here) is kind of a waste.
Where it gets tricky is when you have to define what "help the general public" means. For instance, what about small business grants? These produce jobs. What about government-funded programs? These produce jobs. It's not all that simple, to be sure, but there are some things that we can do by starting at the local level.
Just remember that, somewhere, all money eventually equates to man-hours of labor. Even being generous (in the US) at $30k per man-year, you can get an idea of how much things should cost and start to act accordingly.
But, the only way to get tax reform in any area is to be involved; that's the whole point of representative government. If you don't like the way your city / county is doing taxes, you're (probably) free to go to those meetings.
While quality control processes are partly to blame, there is an inherent limitation in digitising analog works. Think about it this way: what's the resolution of a chemical film frame? It's surely higher than most digitial representations. Also, the amount of "storage" required for a single frame of analog is kind of meaningless. You have to go things like information theory to determine the information content in analog work. Another interesting thing to note is that the shape of a pixel in chemical film is definitely not the same as in a digital representation: in fact, I'm pretty sure that pixels in chemical film are not uniformly sized or arranged, and this helps avoid "pixelisation" of those images.
This is also evident in digitisation of music: it's the old sample rate issue. CD sampling at 44 kHz means a maximum resolvable frequency of 22 kHz, which some audiophiles notice. The same thing happens with images.
Now, we do have some tools that have high enough resolutions to prevent noticable pixelation of lines at angles, so the fact that these weren't used is important. However, there are differences between digital and analog that need to be acknowledged.
Hrm - perhaps, but those are things that cannot be "stolen" either - they can be consumed, and they can be exploited, but I don't know if they can be "stolen". (I hope you - nor the rest of the slashdot crowd - do not mind too much of a philosophical discussion).
As far as how people taking [code] I wrote and using it without paying me is "stealing" my time, I'm not sure how to define that. I can see it as "taking advantage of me" or something of that nature, but I don't know about stealing. Of course, I think taking advantage of people is a different entity than stealing, but I will agree that, like real property protection, there should be some protection to prevent people taking advantage of others.
So, in a situation where a musician, say, makes music and performs at places and gets paid enough to make a living, but some number of people "steal" music by downloading it, is that taking advantage of the musician? It's a sticky area to be sure, and mostly it revolves around odd concepts like the right (or lack thereof) to survival.
Anyway, to summarise: I think I agree with you that there are some things about providing services like coding and performing music that should be protected, but I don't think that the actual information is one of those things.
I would agree with you that "stealing is never ok", except to agree with this you have to have a useful definition of "to steal."
Most definitions of stealing are centered around the concept of scarce resources and property. This means that stealing, applied to information, is a little complex because information is not scarce (in the economic sense). If I have a computer mouse, it's a scarce resource - (generally speaking) only one person can use it at a time. Information, on the other hand, is not scarce: if I know that one plus one is two, that doesn't prevent you from knowing one plus one is two. Computer software, recorded music, etc. is just information, and use of that information does not prevent others from using it. (Note that this is different from a CD - only one person can 'use' a CD at a time. It's a little tricky to see the difference between the CD and the music on it, but the difference is important! While many people can listen to the music (the information) at once, if I'm playing a CD in my player, someone else cannot use that same CD 100 miles away.)
So, if information isn't scarce, can information be owned? We know that there are laws that say information can be owned, but is this just an artificial construct? Would society be better off if "ownership" of information could not be protected? Note that this would be different from owning a physical record of information: that could (and probably should) be protected.
Of course, the laws are currently in place that give "information" proection, so they should be honored. I would posit, however, that those laws should be challenged.
You're right that their numbers don't make sense. The one assumption they have is that they could sell the entire volume out there at its current price to come up with the "value" of pirated software. This is fundamentally flawed, as the value of the software that is currently pirated isn't the price of the software, it's the risk involved with the piracy. I've said it before, but it's not possible to claim damages based on unpurchased resources - especially when the resources are not scarce.
I think software businesses need to go back to basic economics: the value of non-scarce resources is very low. I think that the only way for the software industry to remain viable is not to be strict on piracy but become a service industry: we will write programs and support it for a fee. Basically this means anyone can use the software, but new software won't be written and existing software won't be supported without payment. Because the actual executing code isn't scarce, it has very little value: the value is in creating that software and keeping it running.
This is very similar to the *IAA issues: the value isn't in the distribution of the art, but in the experience of listening to it and having new music created. This is why I think that software isn't a "real" commodity but a service. (Also why I think information should not be property - information is not 'scarce' and so cannot be effectively managed using concepts of property. There might be another way to manage it, but it's not with property protection laws).
Anyway, I could go on, but the fundamental thing here is that "unrealised sales" is not equivalent to "lost revenue". Lost revenue is simply poor accounting or "we got less than we did before". The software industry, even if piracy increases, will probably still continue to post revenue gains. So their complaint is "we won't have high enough revenue gains" not "we will have revenue contraction".
Ah, perhaps my memory failed on the Ravigneaux part (incidentally, it's not "fundamentally different" as a standard planetary gearset is a subset of Ravigneaux gearsets), though I knew it used certain properties of the planetary gear set.
The funny thing about the "innovation" of controlling the speed of the planets to vary the gear ratio is really borderline on the unobvious clause; if people look at the governing equations for a planetary gear this should be obvious. Unless the patents are wholly on the controls for this rather than the invariant physical dynamics...I might have to go dig those up.
What's really fun is to keep straight parallel mode versus positive split versus negative split versus series mode on that type of transmission - whoever named those didn't get good grades in "intuitive labelling".
And, if memory serves, Honda's CVT on the Civic is more their "traditional" CVT.
Slashdot Mirror
What is happening is that viewers of the [website] do not want the advertisement information, so they developed a tool to block it, or simply cease to visit the [website]. This supposedly reduces the "exposure" mentioned above, which would theoretically reduce ad revenue to the [website]. This means that revenue for the [website] maintainers must come from somewhere else or the [website] will cease to exist.
This is complete free-market behavior, and eventually there will arise some sort of dynamic equilibrium. However, if the [websites] have enough revenue to continue the site, the odd thing about [the internet] is that the number of people who can use it is not strongly proportional to the cost to maintain it - that is, a very small bit of revenue can provide information for a vast number of individuals. This is different than newspapers, because the cost of newspapers is much more strongly proportional to the number of newspapers.
Just like the entertainment industries, the advertising industry should have to adapt to changing market environments. The whole issue really does require a change of perspective, from "Everyone who uses [x] needs to pay me" to "As long as enough people continue to pay me enough to do [x], I will keep doing it." - It is a shift from "what can I get away with" to "what do I need."
The thing I think is funny is that commercial enterprises appear to believe they are entitled to advertise and that entitlement should be protected by the legal system.
I want to see something fundamentally different that makes a difference - not shinier, more complicated versions of centuries-old things. That run on a computer.
Instead of telling people they cannot use a technology, they should just be required to give proper recognition to where it is due. This does get complicated when a group of people develop an idea or product though - I don't pretend that it's not a complex issue.
However, I agree that all restrictions on ideas are actually a hindrance to society - patents are almost restricting the "free speech" of ideas. As I and others have said before, the problem with treating ideas as property is that ideas are not an economically scarce thing, so concepts like property rights do not naturally apply; the trying to force these things to apply is what causes all the drag on innovation.
Rather than complain that the system is broken, though, we ought to spend our efforts coming up with a proposal that will allow the free transfer and use of ideas but provide for appropriate compensation for the developer of those ideas. Note that this is very different in software versus hardware: software has almost zero reproduction cost while hardware is almost all reproduction cost - this is what patents were to protect, becuase the "backyard inventor" does not have a factory. The "backyard software" person *does* have the resources, so the difference between a big software company and a little one is not in production capacity but in talent. Patents were never meant to have anything to do with talent - only production capacity.
The interesting thing is that prices go down because there is an oversupply, not because of the innovation. Note that in my earlier post where the builder got a machine, he didn't lower the price - he just had to work less. With an oversupply, either the price has to come down (which means working longer due to less retirement savings or having to build more than one house per year to get enough to meet needs) or, in the case where even at zero price there will be no more demand (for instance, everyone already has all the item X they want) one of the suppliers will have to do something else to meet their needs and wants.
The concepts here are that, with a fixed demand, if the supply increases the price will tend to go down. With a fixed demand and a fixed supply the prices will probably stay the same but may go down or up. With a fixed supply and increasing demand, price may go down (mass production) or might go up (increased demand for a scarce resource like oil). You see, with competition, anything can happen, because competition is not just between producers but also between consumers.
Note also that producer competition for limited consumers benefits the consumers but puts a drag on the producers. Since all producers are also consumers, this is a complicated effect. However, the reduced "drag" on the consumer due to the lower-priced good gives them a bit of a lift. I would be willing to wager that this is less efficient than cooperation between all parties, just as some energy is lost when using a clutch to match speeds of two rotating bodies - friction results in a loss when bringing the slower body up to the equilibrium speed while slowing the faster one down. One of the major factors here, I believe, is that -generally speaking- the capability of those that are primarily consumers to produce is less than those who are primarily producers, so increasing the "free time" of the consumers by reducing prices for certain of their goods will not increase wealth as much as freeing up the free time of the producers. (Note that this is speaking ideally of course - it neglects such things as greed or corruption). The solution to that is mostly rooted in education and politics, but I don't have a firm theory on that yet - other than it's probably related to some form of oppression of the "haves" over the "have nots".
All in all, the interesting side effect is that lower prices aren't really all they're cracked up to be - just ask anyone around you in production industries. Sure, everyone loves Wal-Mart pricing, but someone somewhere has a slower increase in their quality of living because of it (and, since the wealthy in this world pull some odd strings, the drag actually goes back to the consumers who are paying lower prices. Very strange concept, but that's how things appear to be transpiring).
One thing to remember, though, is that if nobody's willing to buy what you produce, you either need to produce something else, somehow convince them to buy what you produce, or you have to go without.
Here's a situation: person A can build 1 house in 1 year, so he will charge the person to whom he sells the house 1 year's worth of "stuff" he needs and wants: payment for his house, food, savings, entertainment, some free time, etc. Now let's say person A builds a machine (using some of the 'free time' and 'etc.' included in the price he was charing) that allows him to make 1 house in half a year. If person A decides to still only build one house per year and take half a year off, he would probably still charge the original price to pay for his house, food, etc. Person A would probably tell you his quality of life has improved greatly, even though he doesn't have more money. Person A may decide to build 2 houses instead, in which case the price of each house needs to sum to what the person wants, but they don't necessarily have to go to half the original. Even if the person does take "full price" for each house, conceivably the person might not work for as many years and retire early (since he could have saved quite a lot) and the net production of houses he produced might be no greater than before - so there might not be more houses with the machine than without.
I hope this example shows that it is not clear at all how technology really affects the economy - it really depends on the individuals in that economy.
Ah, yes. The stuff of which android dreams are made... ;)
The universal format for documentation, I believe, is the printed hard-copy document. Think of it this way: If we received the Rosetta Stone, or bits of the Torah or Quran, on some electronic media, would we have been able to get the content off - especially if it was encrypted somehow?
I think the only universal format is the printed page, which requires no "special equipment" to read (it might not be interpretable, but it can easily be recognised as a document) whereas a computer-recorded pile of numbers, while perhaps recognisable has having meaningful content, will probably, in the future, have no context in which to extract its meaning. Consider this: you receive some piece of hardware in the future which you realise stores binary data. Is it numbers? Is it a program? Is it sample data from atmospheric noise collection? All you know is there is binary data. All you know is there is binary data, and you don't even know if it is stored in 8-bit blocks, 16-bit blocks, 3 bit-blocks, or whatever. You don't know if it's in ASCII or some weird encoding of, say, Farsi. You might try running some statistical analysis on it to see if it's some kind of language, but against what do you compare the 'glyphs' of the numbers? When you see a stone like the rosetta stone, it's obvious what you've got; when you've got a list of numbers, there is no way to tell what it is other than a list of numbers.
This is a great danger of the digital age, in my opinion, and it is good that there is still expertise floating around about the "old" equipment. But remember, the "old" equipment is still less than a century old: what will happen in 100 more years? 400? I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations. I think this is why I really don't like the idea of digitising the libraries, or even digitising photography.
Definitely something to consider for all those folks concerned with "the best data format" and if .DOC or .PDF or XML or whatever is better.
The best format is one that contains enough information to clue the interpreters how to interpret it rather than relying on something else. Right now, all digital documents are merely a string of numbers, and a string of numbers is not sufficient to contain meaning to interpret itself - those numbers rely on some interpreter to receive meaning (as an excersise to prove this, take any file on your computer and look at it in a debugger - on various systems, a hex-editor, and a program that will use the contents of any file as raw image or audio data. It might not be rendered sensibly (I don't know that I'd want to listen to the "song" that, say, Firefox would be), but there is no effective way to tell if the string of numbers has meaning by using trial and error.
A printed document unequivocally has more information than this - a schemaatic diagram is different than a picture of an apple is different than a poem... and while we may not know 'apple' or the language of the poem or have the capability to understand the diagram, we know that those things aren't, say, a random paint splatter.
So, again, while I applaud the efforts of these guys for writing down their knowledge, if they don't do it in a "universal" format, who will be around to interpret their blogs and digital records in 1000 years?
I guess I should clarify that what constitutes 'quality of life change' or 'cost of living change' is different per person. My personal assessment was correct though. True, if I was paying $65 for phone and could go to $25, that would be worth it. For my case, though, $25 instead of $35 is not worth the $10 / month, especially when I'd lose mobility and be tied in to my ISP. (Also, VOIP has the detractor that if power goes out I can't use VOIP; this is different than POTS/cells which have separate power grids. I suppose you could have VOIP over cell modem, but that's kind of silly isn't it?).
However, this discussion was about alternatives, and I used cell instead of POTS or VOIP. This does not mean that any of these technologies are not worth it (there was benefit, else I wouldn't have adopted the technology); my goal was to get people to really think about why they choose to adopt a given technology. (And yes, sometimes "cool factor" is a benefit for which some people will pay.)
This is actually a good question, especially in light of the security risk question. I think the only way to evaluate benefits of technology is to look at how much a technology reduces the cost of living and/or how much it improves quality of living. For instance, a plow greatly reduced the cost of living for farmers - they now had to spend less time plowing for a given amount of production. The invention of air conditioning increased quality of living quite a bit. It's a little more difficult to measure just what having VOIP, for instance, gives us. VOIP doesn't really reduce the cost of living, and it really doesn't improve the quality of living compared to POTS. Perhaps it does slightly reduce the costs, if VOIP is less expensive than POTS, because that means VOIP users spend less of their "time" paying for communications.
The risks need to be weighed against the benefit though. For instance, there's a greater risk of getting injured by a plow than by digging things by hand, but the benefit is huge. The way I think things should be examined is what is the added risk for added benefit?
My personal assessment is that VOIP or wireless hotspots, or whatever, are not going to improve my life quality over what it is now, nor will they reduce my cost of living significantly. So, if there is *any* added security risk, it's not even in my consideration.
I think what most people miss is that there are limited possible locations for the elevator, because you have to make it orthogonal to earth's rotation axis and, ideally, you want it on the equator - even better would be anchored to a mountain on the equator.
What's really interesting about the tensile stress is that it's possible to make the cable long enough so that zero anchor force is required at the surface of the earth :) You can also reduce the maximum tensile stress requirement if you allow compressive stresses at earth surface.
Oddly enough, it's effectively giving [the homeless] jobs through the use of taxes, without having too much bureaucracy in the middle. That is, instead of taxes going to the government to pay clean-up crews, the recycling fee goes to the store which holds it then gives it back out when the trash comes in.
I wonder how difficult it would be to add this to more products than just a limited selection of beverage containers? Of course, you'd still have to fix the law so that the [can deposit] is based on the container material and not the contents. I'm still amused that pop bottles are charged a deposit but water and juice bottles are not.
Some states have laws that a price must be displayed on an item, but there is no law that says that you can't pay less than that price (I think there are laws that say you don't have to pay more, assuming the label is for that item and not a "swapped" label).
That's why the whole concept is called "shopping" anyway - you look for the thing that you want at the price you're willing to pay. If you're willing to pay $100 to site A, then it's not site A's fault that you didn't go to Site B where they had it for $90.
This sounds like people not wanting to be responsible for their purchases. Gotta be careful there, giving up that responsibility...
As for the other signs, like "city in x miles", my favorite is when you have paired cities that seem to move along the highway:
Sign 1: City A 30 miles, City B 20 miles
Sign 2: City A 25 miles, City B 12 miles
Makes you wonder sometimes...
15 gallons x 6 lbm/gallon x 1 kg/2.2046 lbm = 40.8 kg
40.8 kg x 42 MJ/kg = 1713.6 MJ per tank of gasoline (at 42 MJ/kg enery content - a little on the low side but it's close).
Assume that an all-electric system is 60% efficient instead of 30%, so we'd only need 856.8 MJ instead of the amount we had to carry in gasoline; let's round to 860 MJ.
To get that 860 MJ in 15 minutes, you'd need an average of about 956 kW electrical input. I don't even care about volts or amps here, almost a megawatt is a daunting engineering challenge for mobile applications. I don't even care if you have good batteries, you're probably not going to be able to have 956 kW recharges; the only way to do this would be to have a swappable battery pack and have more reasonable charging at the stations. However, if you figure a station fills 1000 cars in a day, they still have to come up with 860 GJ in a day, which is an average of almost 10 MW continuous over 24 hours.
Hopefully this gives an indication of why we use fossil fuels: Even if biodiesel was 100% efficient from solar to chemical, 10 MW means that a field would have to be at least 100m x 100m (almost 2.5 acres) on a very high-solar load day (1000 W/m^2) to meet that power demand. Consider that sunlight is probably on average only available at that peak for 8 hours a day, you'd need almost 10 acres, and considering that you probably only get that output on average for a third of the year you'd need 30 acres. Add in some efficiency issues, and you probably need 100 acres just to catch the power you need from the sun - more would probably be required for processing, etc.. (You could also figure total energy required per year and how much land you'd need to meet that per year - likely a better estimate).
This is definitely why the biodiesel folks want it, though, as that's a lot of farming work that would become available. As for how that compares to the economics of the mine (which apply to pumping oil), I'll have to do some more research.
[offtopic]
I have that same book! That was an entertaining story - I love the picture of the guy in the little bean-shaped car yelling at the guy...
[/offtopic]
The reason, I believe, is that the speedometer gets a "speed value" from a computer, then moves an actuator. So if the actuator isn't calibated correctly, or weird filtering is applied, the analog dial will be off.
I have heard that on some vehicles you can boot the console into a mode where it will display "computer MPH" on the trip miles screen and compare against the analog. I should try this one day...
The best solution to this problem is to actually work to make the system place responsibility where it belongs, on the individual who did not make wise decisions regarding driving and current ability to drive. If the laws were written with responsibility in mind, instead of chemical tests, the scale would naturally slide with each individuals' tolerance and ability (as many mentioned, some sober folks would fail a vehicle control aptitude / skills test while some "drunk" people would pass).
Anyway, the thing that irritates me with these discussions is people are always looking to put responsibility on someone else; in this instance if the gadget didn't work, it would be "the gadget didn't work! It's Gadget Company's fault that I drove when I couldn't control my car and ran into that storefront and maimed myself!" instead of, more appropriately, "I made a poor choice. I shall have to humble myself and live with the consequences of my actions, and change my ways in the future."
Firstly, it puts the responsibility of feeding people onto the government. (Whether or not you think that should be the government's responsibility is another issue entirely.)
Secondly, such food programs cannot guarantee that people will spend the money on food. I have friends that work in the inner city (Detroit) and people use their foodstamps to get food and necessities (toilet paper, soap, etc.) which they then take and trade for various vices. While this isn't what everyone does, it's probably higher than 10%. It appears that when people have no responsibility for providing their basic needs, they will abuse the system that provides them.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by an increase in sales tax of 4 cents - is that 4 cents on each dollar (which is pretty big) or 4 cents per capita...I'm just trying to clarify.
(I should have clarified on the lightposts - 2 designer lamps in the median every 75 yds for 3 miles on a 50mph 6-lane heavy-commercial boulevard was less a 'safety' issue than an aesthetics issue - especially since other lights were there previously.)
Seriously, tax revenue should probably only go to things like infrastructure, education, emergency services, courts, and things that help the general public. Things like spending a million dollars on new lightposts (like the city to which I just moved did shortly before I moved here) is kind of a waste.
Where it gets tricky is when you have to define what "help the general public" means. For instance, what about small business grants? These produce jobs. What about government-funded programs? These produce jobs. It's not all that simple, to be sure, but there are some things that we can do by starting at the local level.
Just remember that, somewhere, all money eventually equates to man-hours of labor. Even being generous (in the US) at $30k per man-year, you can get an idea of how much things should cost and start to act accordingly.
But, the only way to get tax reform in any area is to be involved; that's the whole point of representative government. If you don't like the way your city / county is doing taxes, you're (probably) free to go to those meetings.
This is also evident in digitisation of music: it's the old sample rate issue. CD sampling at 44 kHz means a maximum resolvable frequency of 22 kHz, which some audiophiles notice. The same thing happens with images.
Now, we do have some tools that have high enough resolutions to prevent noticable pixelation of lines at angles, so the fact that these weren't used is important. However, there are differences between digital and analog that need to be acknowledged.
As far as how people taking [code] I wrote and using it without paying me is "stealing" my time, I'm not sure how to define that. I can see it as "taking advantage of me" or something of that nature, but I don't know about stealing. Of course, I think taking advantage of people is a different entity than stealing, but I will agree that, like real property protection, there should be some protection to prevent people taking advantage of others.
So, in a situation where a musician, say, makes music and performs at places and gets paid enough to make a living, but some number of people "steal" music by downloading it, is that taking advantage of the musician? It's a sticky area to be sure, and mostly it revolves around odd concepts like the right (or lack thereof) to survival.
Anyway, to summarise: I think I agree with you that there are some things about providing services like coding and performing music that should be protected, but I don't think that the actual information is one of those things.
Most definitions of stealing are centered around the concept of scarce resources and property. This means that stealing, applied to information, is a little complex because information is not scarce (in the economic sense). If I have a computer mouse, it's a scarce resource - (generally speaking) only one person can use it at a time. Information, on the other hand, is not scarce: if I know that one plus one is two, that doesn't prevent you from knowing one plus one is two. Computer software, recorded music, etc. is just information, and use of that information does not prevent others from using it. (Note that this is different from a CD - only one person can 'use' a CD at a time. It's a little tricky to see the difference between the CD and the music on it, but the difference is important! While many people can listen to the music (the information) at once, if I'm playing a CD in my player, someone else cannot use that same CD 100 miles away.)
So, if information isn't scarce, can information be owned? We know that there are laws that say information can be owned, but is this just an artificial construct? Would society be better off if "ownership" of information could not be protected? Note that this would be different from owning a physical record of information: that could (and probably should) be protected.
Of course, the laws are currently in place that give "information" proection, so they should be honored. I would posit, however, that those laws should be challenged.
I think software businesses need to go back to basic economics: the value of non-scarce resources is very low. I think that the only way for the software industry to remain viable is not to be strict on piracy but become a service industry: we will write programs and support it for a fee. Basically this means anyone can use the software, but new software won't be written and existing software won't be supported without payment. Because the actual executing code isn't scarce, it has very little value: the value is in creating that software and keeping it running.
This is very similar to the *IAA issues: the value isn't in the distribution of the art, but in the experience of listening to it and having new music created. This is why I think that software isn't a "real" commodity but a service. (Also why I think information should not be property - information is not 'scarce' and so cannot be effectively managed using concepts of property. There might be another way to manage it, but it's not with property protection laws).
Anyway, I could go on, but the fundamental thing here is that "unrealised sales" is not equivalent to "lost revenue". Lost revenue is simply poor accounting or "we got less than we did before". The software industry, even if piracy increases, will probably still continue to post revenue gains. So their complaint is "we won't have high enough revenue gains" not "we will have revenue contraction".
The funny thing about the "innovation" of controlling the speed of the planets to vary the gear ratio is really borderline on the unobvious clause; if people look at the governing equations for a planetary gear this should be obvious. Unless the patents are wholly on the controls for this rather than the invariant physical dynamics...I might have to go dig those up.
What's really fun is to keep straight parallel mode versus positive split versus negative split versus series mode on that type of transmission - whoever named those didn't get good grades in "intuitive labelling".
And, if memory serves, Honda's CVT on the Civic is more their "traditional" CVT.
The Prius still burns gasoline. It's not alternative fuel at all.
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