Couldn't you give three copies, each on a different batch/brand of mainstream DVD-Rs? Costs a fraction of the price and will probably last a long time. Ample warning of failure will be given, as all three will not fail at the same time.
I don't believe that legal automatically equals ethical or 'not wrong.' If an action brings substantial harm to the world, it's wrong, whether you got a congresscritter to suck your money-lined dick or not to make it legal. If this were not the case, than the Jews, Communists, and union supporters would rot in hell for violating Hitler's law and the SS would go to heaven for their close following of the law.
PS: I have written my senators and my representative over many copyright issues... hasen't changed a thing.
Find me one DRM'ed song or video that cannot be found on P2P.
As far as Itunes getting more respect from me because it's DRM-lite: Fat chance. Merely associating one's business to the RIAA or MPAA or their member companies greately reduces my respect. If a group like PBS suffers a major loss of respect for this (particularly their ties to Sony), why should I give Apple any slack? The respect they garner is probably because:
- Many people have some strange affinity to copyright... most definitely nurture and not nature because it runs smack against 99% of people's financial interests to support existing copyright laws, no less DRM.
- They are quite clueless about computers and the peculiar economics surrounding something where the marginal cost or production is 0.
I'm quite a puritan when it comes to IP, and only a handful of groups manage to garner my respect (and donations/purchases). To my mind comes GNU, Wikipedia, and other similar open projects.
Don't forget that the only reason anyone agrees to those contracts is because of the government granted monopoly that is copyright law. Like any acute businessmen, they realized that they can leverage copyright monopolies to get far more than just what the statute says. Very pro-business courts have set the limit as to what is an enforceable EULA extremely in favor of business (compare them to landlords vs. tenants, where far more reasonable terms are considered to be too anti-tenant and not allowed in lease contracts).
Remember that on each non-copyleft (or public domain) work, there is a monopoly on it and, as most people will admit, each individual work is pretty independant and they are pretty lousy substitutes for each other (ie., if you want 1 action movie, you won't license a different title just because it's 2% cheaper - whereas people will drive around town to save 2% on a gasoline fill-up.).
Furthermore, the movie+TV industry is organised as a trust of Gilded Age proportions (MPAA) and this allows them to act as if they were a single company controlling over 95% of the market. Considering the fraction of one's life spent in front of the TV, such control is extremely powerful with leverage rivaling that of Standard Oil.
While I grant you that there is nothing in our Constitution making such contracts or trusts illegal, it does violate the letter of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the spirit of copyright law.
This is a job for anti-fraud laws, not trademark laws. If you're selling a power transistor, it had better live up to the specs, either the specs given directly or the specs given indirectly by slapping a particular name onto it.
If it meets the appropriate safety and performance specs (say, Redbook for audio CDs or ISO standards for power cables), I could care less if it's a 'genuine' brand name part or an imitation and there would be no need for trademark laws, since the quality of the imitations would be regulated by the government and enforced by the police and customs.
This group would attack them. The unauthorized version could be better, safer, and cheaper than the authorized version and they would attack it. They are a pro-trademark group. Think of them as the RIAA.
Technically not, but in the special case of monopolies it is true.
If I design a car and it's a marketing success but an engineering nightmare and the assembly line keeps blowing up before a single car is produced, it will not be the dominant line of car.
What makes Microsoft is that it can go porta-potty diving, sell the crap, and the poor saps won't know the difference.
I beg to differ. There are some pretty clueless P2P users out there and they do manage to fill a large hard drive with ease and don't know about partitions. Fortunately for those who use corporate download websites, the price is too high and the quality too low to even fear filling up a modern hard drive.
FOSS was alive and well before the introduction of the PC. In fact, until around 1980 or so, it was widely assumed that computer programs could be neither patented nor copyrighted.
IBM was a hardware company. They didn't sell the operating system, only the hardware. Had they been smart they would have encouraged open source, not handed a monopoly to Bill Gates. That would have sold more systems and not eroded their margins one bit. Instead, they gave Bill a monopoly and they eventually lost the market they created.
PS: By most metrics (heck, any metric aside from market cap and hype index), Google is a small company. Under a billion in annual revenues. A small workforce. A market leader, but in a very small industry. And yet the 'do no evil' is but a myth. The roll out of G-Mail should have made that clear.
Don't forget that Bill Gates has caused immense harm for the world too. The difference between the current situation and having an open operating system and open software being dominant (along with the correspondingly higher penetration of technology in the world and a better quality of technology) is over 1% of worldwide production. Economic rents do nothing but slow down progress and add friction to the system, and the effect is often far larger than the rent extracted.
Like any robber baron, Bill can give all his wealth to charity and the damage will be less than a tenth repaired. (my estimate is 1/100th repaired, using a discount rate of 10%, a personal wealth of $50B, a world economic loss of $500B/year, and a charity of average efficiency).
Heavy armor will stop waves in the THz spectrum. It takes either hard x-rays or gamma rays to penetrate metal of any sizeable thickness. The best UWB could do is melt the target, but with the kind of equipment needed for that, a simple bazooka is far more practical. Also, superconducting armor will provide 100% reflection in theory (correct me if I'm wrong), so it could be countered.
"Since when is selling something in violation of a patent?"
Digital video is a patent minefield. Each modern format has several hundred acknowledged patents. It is very likely that there exists at least 1 patent that is not licensed, probably because it's existance or relevance is not yet know and won't until the patent is bought by a litigation company.
"And how can you say "You even have to provide your own bandwidth" for direct download and not P2P?"
Google isn't paying your ISP bill. Whether you use your upload bandwidth or not, the ISP bill is the same and you still need broadband.
"As for other pros and cons, how about with a direct download service you can be sure of what you're getting? That it's not mislabeled, a junk file, poor quality, etc."
How can you be sure that what you're buying from Google you're getting what you expect. The most likely let-down will be throwing in advertisements. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean there will be no adverts. Just look at movie theatres. Censorships, Wal Mart style, is also a possibility. Lastly, the encodes are often sub-par with problems like using telecined content (which has no place on a computer - give us the original 24 fps) or using transcoded material. The long supply chain, often involving processing done by several companies on different continents due to outsourcing, increases the odds of these blunders happening.
With P2P, I get what I'm expecting about 90% of the time and I can preview the file soon after the transfer begins. TV has one of the highest quality to junk ratios on P2P, probably because it's less underground than most other P2P and you have a pretty small number of highly skilled cappers inserting large amounts of material into the network.
"And as for a P2P network being resistent to nuclear attack killing 90% of the population? See...such a thing would probably destroy all the infastructure that allows the network to exist."
Infrastructure, yes. Data, no. 10 years later when society is somewhat rebuilt, most of the data will still remain and will be prized considering that new shows will likely be unexistant and the originals destroyed as data centers will be prime targets. Nuclear apocalypse is likely to lead to a lot of time indoors too because of safety issues.
Now why would I want to pay several dollars an hour to download DRM encumbered content that probably only plays once and definitely will only play on your computer(s). You even have to provide your own bandwidth. The only player that will play the content might or might not run under WINE, and will be sluggish if it does run.
Lets sum of the pros and cons of pay per view over internet (what Google is doing) and P2P:
Pros of P2P:
- Vast selection, including things intentionally kept out of circulation like many Disney films and WWII propaganda.
- Cheap. Costs only the cost of bandwidth and a little of my time. Since bandwidth is already paid for, the marginal cost is essentially zero.
- Redistribution is extremely easy. Many protocols (such as Bittorrent and Amule/Emule) do it automatically. Making hard copies and backups is as easy and cheap as burning DVDs.
- Will play on a vast array of hardware and software. Linux, MS Windows, Macintosh (each with dozens of available players), certain DVD players, and even game consoles if properly modded and loaded with Linux and a media player.
- High quality video, at least compared to the average download service. Quality available will slowly improve as computers and source media improve.
- Extremely labor and resource efficient. The only cost is the cost of bandwidth and some of your time, but no employees are needed. This has a knock-on effect on strongly reducing the GINI index and income disparity by reducing the fraction of GDP passing through corporations.
- Very resistant to attack. A nuclear strike knocking out 90% of the world's computers and population will knock out only a small fraction of the 'library' stored on P2P networks. The lost material will undoubtably be niche material of use to only a few people. The same goes with government edicts, McCarthyism, and witch hunts.
- Plenty of porn. Available in both straight and gay varieties. No financial record for the husband/wife/kids/parents to dig into. For those into porn that is less than legal in their country (or in countries banning it entirely), it is safer than getting it via other means (because of the volume and because it is legal in other jurisdictions - future encrypted and obfuscated P2P networks could make it far safer too).
Pros of pay per view over internet:
- It's mostly legal. You're still violating plenty of patents, but few if any copyrights.
Still, the punishment should match the severity of the crime. Pushing F5 is not going to take a server offline for more than a few minutes, as people will get bored fast. If it stays offline longer, then the server is so flakey that anything putting a sudden load will cause it to crash.
It's like with trespassing. If you walk onto somebody's lawn and there are no signs and you aren't told you're trespassing, the punishment will usually be nothing or a warning (if it's not, there's generally some racism or ageism involved). If you trespass into Fort Knox, the consequences will usually be much harsher.
The real ones getting the grilling should be the tech staff for having such a lousy server running. My home server can survive a bunch of F5 happy students, so why should a school server fare any worse? It also falls under the category of 'mostly harmless', and as such the school should take it very lightly, particularly considering that the kid most likely did it as a joke.
Safety violation at a large scale coal mine which may result in dozens of deaths: $60 Illegally copying 1 copy of Maya (or any media with a sticker price >= $1,000): 10 years, $1,000,000, and a felony on your record.
The law is littered with excessive punishment. It's just that the books are stacked against the little person.
Marajuana users and copyright violators include plenty of lower and lower middle class people. CEOs and pedophiles include plenty of rich and powerful people, hence the lighter punishment and the scandals (ie., Catholic Priests and Enron), despite widespread disgust at both.
Manufacturing onboard a ship is pricey. All raw materials must be loaded and stored on the ship, workspace will be cramped, and finished goods must be warehoused until a ship can offload the goods. All machinery must also be capable of withstanding the fairly harsh conditions on a ship (most industrial equipment is rated for land use only). Considering the razor thin margins in manufacturing, this is a no starter. Making hydrogen involves a very large loss of energy (anywhere from 1/2 to 4/5 of the energy is lost going electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity or motive power, depending on the techniques and engine/fuel cell used).
I really, really doubt that this thing is practical. Organic Rankine Cycle Turbines (which are proposed) are very expensive to operate on dry land, as has been shown by research into solar thermal power in California. At least in those cases the efficiency was around 20%. The best they can hope for with OTEC is about 1.5% efficiency. Theoretically they could get 3.25% (Carnot efficiency), but experience with Organic Rankine Cycle Turbines has shown that 300C solar plants (Carnot Efficiency ~50%) only get around 20%, so one could expect to get about 1.25% efficiency out of their OTEC setup.
On top of this, all the equipment must be marine grade (ie., pricey). Power must be transferred to shore. It also must be a functioning ship with all the expense associated with that.
But what makes me most suspect is the claim of making fresh water. Ordinary Rankine Cycle Turbines do produce fresh water via distillation, but the Organic Rankine Cycle is a closed cycle and no fresh water is produced. The only condensation you'll get are hydrocarbons, which are recycled to create more vapour.
How much are these converters really going to cost? I cannot even find HDTV converter boxes on ebay. The HDTVs are all selling for well over $1,000, and many are only "HDTV ready", which I believe means supply your own box. I really doubt we'll have $40 converters before 2009
Clueless? A HDTV set costs major bucks. I won't even consider a HDTV set, regardless of whether or not NTSC is turned off or not, until the price is under $500 (and not $499.99 - if the tax brings it over $500, it's not under $500). And I also won't be purchasing one at any cost if it includes DRM which appears to be coming in the next batch.
First off, you're probably just counting income tax. All poor people, even unemployed, pay sales tax. Almost all employed poor people pay social security taxes and a few other non-refundable taxes. Fees tend to be paid disproportionately by poor people because they're an equal dollar tax on everyone who uses the facility or lives in the state.
Second, the upper 1% control far more than 1% of the wealth or income. The only way to get the upper 1% to control only 1% of income is to have perfect equality. In practice, the number is more like the top 1% controlling around 50% of the wealth. Even under a flat tax, their fair tax burden would be around 50% of total taxes paid. Anything less is a regressive tax regime.
What happens is that the poor pay fairly high rates (probably around 20%-30% of income) because they are still responsible for the social security tax (11% or so once you include the employer portion), sales tax, tolls, and sin taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol). The middle class pay a similar amount, with a higher nominal rate being offset by fat mortgage deductions, better tax preparers, and far less sin taxes and tolls. Even without breaking any laws, rich people will pay less taxes because they essentially pay no sales, tolls, or sin taxes and they often shop around for lower tax countries to park their money. Capital is also favorably treated, and most of their income comes from capital.
I've never heard of building material companies accepting down payments. All the materials I've ever bought are either invoiced or bought in a store. They're paid with either a check or some greenbacks.
Assuming you already own the land (common among people I know who have built houses, as they generally are in the residential construction industry to begin with), building materials are all that you need to pay money for.
Or did you mean "downpayment for a house whose construction and engineering I was going to contract out?" Or was this just a poorly constructed troll?
When you approach the stock market in the fashion the poster said, yes, you lose in the long run. Buying Google stock is like gambling in that it will be worth a small fraction of the current price in the future, but you're betting that a greater fool will come before then and buy the stock for more than you paid. Looks a lot like tulip mania mentality to me.
If you want almost sure profits, diversify (say, put 1/3rd into an international fund, 1/6th into a small cap index fund, and 1/2 into an S&P 500 fund) and wait at least 10 years.
It has to do with the MS Windows community expecting extensions to be used to link files to programs exclusively. There is no execute bit in their filesystems. Linux users don't have that mindset. A text file might end in.txt, but it is just as often without an extension. Executables have no extension and anything with.exe is obviously a Win32, Win16, or DOS executable. Linux users also expect data to NOT be given execute priviledges.
I'm suprised virus writers waited until this millenium to finally exploit such a stupid flaw.
Creationism cannot be scientifically challenged because there is no way to prove or disprove it. People who trust creationism to be true must rely on faith (ie., wishful thinking).
The effects of a strong public domain vs. a strong private domain (ie., having harsh and strict IP laws vs. accomodating or nonexistant IP laws) can be scientifically measured. Economics is a social science and it isn't as 'hard' science like physics or chemistry, but nonetheless one can approach the subject scientifically. Generally politics and too little real science are the reason so little progress has been made in economics since the industrial revolution.
IP is also something that we mortals have control over. We cannot wish ourselves a creator if one in fact does not exist, nor can we wish away a creator if zero in fact exist. IP laws are the creations of us mortals and can be rewritten.
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Couldn't you give three copies, each on a different batch/brand of mainstream DVD-Rs? Costs a fraction of the price and will probably last a long time. Ample warning of failure will be given, as all three will not fail at the same time.
I don't believe that legal automatically equals ethical or 'not wrong.' If an action brings substantial harm to the world, it's wrong, whether you got a congresscritter to suck your money-lined dick or not to make it legal. If this were not the case, than the Jews, Communists, and union supporters would rot in hell for violating Hitler's law and the SS would go to heaven for their close following of the law.
... hasen't changed a thing.
PS: I have written my senators and my representative over many copyright issues
Find me one DRM'ed song or video that cannot be found on P2P.
... most definitely nurture and not nature because it runs smack against 99% of people's financial interests to support existing copyright laws, no less DRM.
As far as Itunes getting more respect from me because it's DRM-lite: Fat chance. Merely associating one's business to the RIAA or MPAA or their member companies greately reduces my respect. If a group like PBS suffers a major loss of respect for this (particularly their ties to Sony), why should I give Apple any slack? The respect they garner is probably because:
- Many people have some strange affinity to copyright
- They are quite clueless about computers and the peculiar economics surrounding something where the marginal cost or production is 0.
I'm quite a puritan when it comes to IP, and only a handful of groups manage to garner my respect (and donations/purchases). To my mind comes GNU, Wikipedia, and other similar open projects.
Don't forget that the only reason anyone agrees to those contracts is because of the government granted monopoly that is copyright law. Like any acute businessmen, they realized that they can leverage copyright monopolies to get far more than just what the statute says. Very pro-business courts have set the limit as to what is an enforceable EULA extremely in favor of business (compare them to landlords vs. tenants, where far more reasonable terms are considered to be too anti-tenant and not allowed in lease contracts).
Remember that on each non-copyleft (or public domain) work, there is a monopoly on it and, as most people will admit, each individual work is pretty independant and they are pretty lousy substitutes for each other (ie., if you want 1 action movie, you won't license a different title just because it's 2% cheaper - whereas people will drive around town to save 2% on a gasoline fill-up.).
Furthermore, the movie+TV industry is organised as a trust of Gilded Age proportions (MPAA) and this allows them to act as if they were a single company controlling over 95% of the market. Considering the fraction of one's life spent in front of the TV, such control is extremely powerful with leverage rivaling that of Standard Oil.
While I grant you that there is nothing in our Constitution making such contracts or trusts illegal, it does violate the letter of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the spirit of copyright law.
This is a job for anti-fraud laws, not trademark laws. If you're selling a power transistor, it had better live up to the specs, either the specs given directly or the specs given indirectly by slapping a particular name onto it.
If it meets the appropriate safety and performance specs (say, Redbook for audio CDs or ISO standards for power cables), I could care less if it's a 'genuine' brand name part or an imitation and there would be no need for trademark laws, since the quality of the imitations would be regulated by the government and enforced by the police and customs.
This group would attack them. The unauthorized version could be better, safer, and cheaper than the authorized version and they would attack it. They are a pro-trademark group. Think of them as the RIAA.
Technically not, but in the special case of monopolies it is true.
If I design a car and it's a marketing success but an engineering nightmare and the assembly line keeps blowing up before a single car is produced, it will not be the dominant line of car.
What makes Microsoft is that it can go porta-potty diving, sell the crap, and the poor saps won't know the difference.
I beg to differ. There are some pretty clueless P2P users out there and they do manage to fill a large hard drive with ease and don't know about partitions. Fortunately for those who use corporate download websites, the price is too high and the quality too low to even fear filling up a modern hard drive.
FOSS was alive and well before the introduction of the PC. In fact, until around 1980 or so, it was widely assumed that computer programs could be neither patented nor copyrighted.
IBM was a hardware company. They didn't sell the operating system, only the hardware. Had they been smart they would have encouraged open source, not handed a monopoly to Bill Gates. That would have sold more systems and not eroded their margins one bit. Instead, they gave Bill a monopoly and they eventually lost the market they created.
PS: By most metrics (heck, any metric aside from market cap and hype index), Google is a small company. Under a billion in annual revenues. A small workforce. A market leader, but in a very small industry. And yet the 'do no evil' is but a myth. The roll out of G-Mail should have made that clear.
Don't forget that Bill Gates has caused immense harm for the world too. The difference between the current situation and having an open operating system and open software being dominant (along with the correspondingly higher penetration of technology in the world and a better quality of technology) is over 1% of worldwide production. Economic rents do nothing but slow down progress and add friction to the system, and the effect is often far larger than the rent extracted.
Like any robber baron, Bill can give all his wealth to charity and the damage will be less than a tenth repaired. (my estimate is 1/100th repaired, using a discount rate of 10%, a personal wealth of $50B, a world economic loss of $500B/year, and a charity of average efficiency).
Heavy armor will stop waves in the THz spectrum. It takes either hard x-rays or gamma rays to penetrate metal of any sizeable thickness. The best UWB could do is melt the target, but with the kind of equipment needed for that, a simple bazooka is far more practical. Also, superconducting armor will provide 100% reflection in theory (correct me if I'm wrong), so it could be countered.
"Since when is selling something in violation of a patent?"
Digital video is a patent minefield. Each modern format has several hundred acknowledged patents. It is very likely that there exists at least 1 patent that is not licensed, probably because it's existance or relevance is not yet know and won't until the patent is bought by a litigation company.
"And how can you say "You even have to provide your own bandwidth" for direct download and not P2P?"
Google isn't paying your ISP bill. Whether you use your upload bandwidth or not, the ISP bill is the same and you still need broadband.
"As for other pros and cons, how about with a direct download service you can be sure of what you're getting? That it's not mislabeled, a junk file, poor quality, etc."
How can you be sure that what you're buying from Google you're getting what you expect. The most likely let-down will be throwing in advertisements. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean there will be no adverts. Just look at movie theatres. Censorships, Wal Mart style, is also a possibility. Lastly, the encodes are often sub-par with problems like using telecined content (which has no place on a computer - give us the original 24 fps) or using transcoded material. The long supply chain, often involving processing done by several companies on different continents due to outsourcing, increases the odds of these blunders happening.
With P2P, I get what I'm expecting about 90% of the time and I can preview the file soon after the transfer begins. TV has one of the highest quality to junk ratios on P2P, probably because it's less underground than most other P2P and you have a pretty small number of highly skilled cappers inserting large amounts of material into the network.
"And as for a P2P network being resistent to nuclear attack killing 90% of the population? See...such a thing would probably destroy all the infastructure that allows the network to exist."
Infrastructure, yes. Data, no. 10 years later when society is somewhat rebuilt, most of the data will still remain and will be prized considering that new shows will likely be unexistant and the originals destroyed as data centers will be prime targets. Nuclear apocalypse is likely to lead to a lot of time indoors too because of safety issues.
Now why would I want to pay several dollars an hour to download DRM encumbered content that probably only plays once and definitely will only play on your computer(s). You even have to provide your own bandwidth. The only player that will play the content might or might not run under WINE, and will be sluggish if it does run.
Lets sum of the pros and cons of pay per view over internet (what Google is doing) and P2P:
Pros of P2P:
- Vast selection, including things intentionally kept out of circulation like many Disney films and WWII propaganda.
- Cheap. Costs only the cost of bandwidth and a little of my time. Since bandwidth is already paid for, the marginal cost is essentially zero.
- Redistribution is extremely easy. Many protocols (such as Bittorrent and Amule/Emule) do it automatically. Making hard copies and backups is as easy and cheap as burning DVDs.
- Will play on a vast array of hardware and software. Linux, MS Windows, Macintosh (each with dozens of available players), certain DVD players, and even game consoles if properly modded and loaded with Linux and a media player.
- High quality video, at least compared to the average download service. Quality available will slowly improve as computers and source media improve.
- Extremely labor and resource efficient. The only cost is the cost of bandwidth and some of your time, but no employees are needed. This has a knock-on effect on strongly reducing the GINI index and income disparity by reducing the fraction of GDP passing through corporations.
- Very resistant to attack. A nuclear strike knocking out 90% of the world's computers and population will knock out only a small fraction of the 'library' stored on P2P networks. The lost material will undoubtably be niche material of use to only a few people. The same goes with government edicts, McCarthyism, and witch hunts.
- Plenty of porn. Available in both straight and gay varieties. No financial record for the husband/wife/kids/parents to dig into. For those into porn that is less than legal in their country (or in countries banning it entirely), it is safer than getting it via other means (because of the volume and because it is legal in other jurisdictions - future encrypted and obfuscated P2P networks could make it far safer too).
Pros of pay per view over internet:
- It's mostly legal. You're still violating plenty of patents, but few if any copyrights.
Still, the punishment should match the severity of the crime. Pushing F5 is not going to take a server offline for more than a few minutes, as people will get bored fast. If it stays offline longer, then the server is so flakey that anything putting a sudden load will cause it to crash.
It's like with trespassing. If you walk onto somebody's lawn and there are no signs and you aren't told you're trespassing, the punishment will usually be nothing or a warning (if it's not, there's generally some racism or ageism involved). If you trespass into Fort Knox, the consequences will usually be much harsher.
The real ones getting the grilling should be the tech staff for having such a lousy server running. My home server can survive a bunch of F5 happy students, so why should a school server fare any worse? It also falls under the category of 'mostly harmless', and as such the school should take it very lightly, particularly considering that the kid most likely did it as a joke.
Or how about looking at white collar violations:
Safety violation at a large scale coal mine which may result in dozens of deaths: $60
Illegally copying 1 copy of Maya (or any media with a sticker price >= $1,000): 10 years, $1,000,000, and a felony on your record.
The law is littered with excessive punishment. It's just that the books are stacked against the little person.
Marajuana users and copyright violators include plenty of lower and lower middle class people. CEOs and pedophiles include plenty of rich and powerful people, hence the lighter punishment and the scandals (ie., Catholic Priests and Enron), despite widespread disgust at both.
Manufacturing onboard a ship is pricey. All raw materials must be loaded and stored on the ship, workspace will be cramped, and finished goods must be warehoused until a ship can offload the goods. All machinery must also be capable of withstanding the fairly harsh conditions on a ship (most industrial equipment is rated for land use only). Considering the razor thin margins in manufacturing, this is a no starter. Making hydrogen involves a very large loss of energy (anywhere from 1/2 to 4/5 of the energy is lost going electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity or motive power, depending on the techniques and engine/fuel cell used).
I really, really doubt that this thing is practical. Organic Rankine Cycle Turbines (which are proposed) are very expensive to operate on dry land, as has been shown by research into solar thermal power in California. At least in those cases the efficiency was around 20%. The best they can hope for with OTEC is about 1.5% efficiency. Theoretically they could get 3.25% (Carnot efficiency), but experience with Organic Rankine Cycle Turbines has shown that 300C solar plants (Carnot Efficiency ~50%) only get around 20%, so one could expect to get about 1.25% efficiency out of their OTEC setup.
On top of this, all the equipment must be marine grade (ie., pricey). Power must be transferred to shore. It also must be a functioning ship with all the expense associated with that.
But what makes me most suspect is the claim of making fresh water. Ordinary Rankine Cycle Turbines do produce fresh water via distillation, but the Organic Rankine Cycle is a closed cycle and no fresh water is produced. The only condensation you'll get are hydrocarbons, which are recycled to create more vapour.
How much are these converters really going to cost? I cannot even find HDTV converter boxes on ebay. The HDTVs are all selling for well over $1,000, and many are only "HDTV ready", which I believe means supply your own box. I really doubt we'll have $40 converters before 2009
Clueless? A HDTV set costs major bucks. I won't even consider a HDTV set, regardless of whether or not NTSC is turned off or not, until the price is under $500 (and not $499.99 - if the tax brings it over $500, it's not under $500). And I also won't be purchasing one at any cost if it includes DRM which appears to be coming in the next batch.
First off, you're probably just counting income tax. All poor people, even unemployed, pay sales tax. Almost all employed poor people pay social security taxes and a few other non-refundable taxes. Fees tend to be paid disproportionately by poor people because they're an equal dollar tax on everyone who uses the facility or lives in the state.
Second, the upper 1% control far more than 1% of the wealth or income. The only way to get the upper 1% to control only 1% of income is to have perfect equality. In practice, the number is more like the top 1% controlling around 50% of the wealth. Even under a flat tax, their fair tax burden would be around 50% of total taxes paid. Anything less is a regressive tax regime.
What happens is that the poor pay fairly high rates (probably around 20%-30% of income) because they are still responsible for the social security tax (11% or so once you include the employer portion), sales tax, tolls, and sin taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol). The middle class pay a similar amount, with a higher nominal rate being offset by fat mortgage deductions, better tax preparers, and far less sin taxes and tolls. Even without breaking any laws, rich people will pay less taxes because they essentially pay no sales, tolls, or sin taxes and they often shop around for lower tax countries to park their money. Capital is also favorably treated, and most of their income comes from capital.
I've never heard of building material companies accepting down payments. All the materials I've ever bought are either invoiced or bought in a store. They're paid with either a check or some greenbacks.
Assuming you already own the land (common among people I know who have built houses, as they generally are in the residential construction industry to begin with), building materials are all that you need to pay money for.
Or did you mean "downpayment for a house whose construction and engineering I was going to contract out?" Or was this just a poorly constructed troll?
When you approach the stock market in the fashion the poster said, yes, you lose in the long run. Buying Google stock is like gambling in that it will be worth a small fraction of the current price in the future, but you're betting that a greater fool will come before then and buy the stock for more than you paid. Looks a lot like tulip mania mentality to me.
If you want almost sure profits, diversify (say, put 1/3rd into an international fund, 1/6th into a small cap index fund, and 1/2 into an S&P 500 fund) and wait at least 10 years.
I'll happily click on all the links I want, confident that Konqueror is immune to such silly wmf stuff.
It has to do with the MS Windows community expecting extensions to be used to link files to programs exclusively. There is no execute bit in their filesystems. Linux users don't have that mindset. A text file might end in .txt, but it is just as often without an extension. Executables have no extension and anything with .exe is obviously a Win32, Win16, or DOS executable. Linux users also expect data to NOT be given execute priviledges.
I'm suprised virus writers waited until this millenium to finally exploit such a stupid flaw.
Creationism cannot be scientifically challenged because there is no way to prove or disprove it. People who trust creationism to be true must rely on faith (ie., wishful thinking).
The effects of a strong public domain vs. a strong private domain (ie., having harsh and strict IP laws vs. accomodating or nonexistant IP laws) can be scientifically measured. Economics is a social science and it isn't as 'hard' science like physics or chemistry, but nonetheless one can approach the subject scientifically. Generally politics and too little real science are the reason so little progress has been made in economics since the industrial revolution.
IP is also something that we mortals have control over. We cannot wish ourselves a creator if one in fact does not exist, nor can we wish away a creator if zero in fact exist. IP laws are the creations of us mortals and can be rewritten.