There are laws to cover the worst abuses. False advertising comes to the top of my mind. If the laws are inadequate, then a proper narrowly tailored law can be passed in the same bill that abolishes the trademark law.
That said, the party has a stupid name as using the same name as murderous thieves (ie., real pirates) isn't the best way to win votes.
Re:Which market is most important to us?
on
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· Score: 1
As far as I'm concerned, the great technical breakthroughs (HTTP, P2P, gargantuan secondary storage, wireless networks, laptops, etc) have already been discovered and quite well refined.
What needs to catch up are our legal and social systems. Copyright essentially makes most information not available on demand. What is available on demand generally must be done using proprietary and fragmented systems. Patents and DRM mean that many protocols and formats (such as DVDs and console video games) cannot be accessed in an open way.
As a society, we do not value open information enough. Creating a database (say, something like Lexis Nexus), should be an academic undertaking funded by the public (say, like wikipedia) and should be public domain or copylefted. A single P2P network should be capable of handling music, video, novels, programs, etc efficiently once legalized. Wikis could store repositories for engineering information, encyclopedic information, etc.
Probably coal or nuclear. The other two are in very limited supply with oil around peak production and natural gas within two decades of peak. But in making such a bet the renewables had better be ready by 2050, because by then all fossil fuels will be becoming quite scarce.
I bed to differ. The grid allows one to get the maximum bang out of the buck of renewable equipment. It allows extra power to be absorbed by the system. It allows people to forgoe expensive and polluting batteries. It allows people to install less than the total needs of their home to run.
Additionally, a grid with distributed generation can exceed 95% efficiency as energy doesn't have to travel far on average.
Large renewable generating stations would only be practical for powering factories and other massive consumers if it wasn't for a grid. For the most promising technologies (large scale wind, solar thermal), there are enormous efficiencies of scale.
Have you looked at natural gas prices in the US and in the UK. Both are running over $10/million BTU. The developed world is nearly out of their natural gas reserves worldwide production is likely to peak within two decades.
Those 4 Mbpd of stranged gas are very much needed in the form of gas and the market is likely to outbid what gas to liquid producers are hoping to pay for their gas. Right now in the USA, the margin is in favor of liquids to gas as the gas actually sells for more than crude oil. With US and European production expected to steadily drop over the coming years and decades, we will need all the LNG we can get.
On the economical (but not an ecological) side, coal is a more likely feedstock because of its price. It is also one of the cleaner ways to use coal, with CO2 being the only substantial emission.
These games are all or mostly non-gratis and non-free games. I'd be far more interested in the top 10 list of free-software games. Even if they're not stellar games, at least I can play them for free and without having to deal with the ever tempermental WINE. Having source code adds much more potential fun too once I start getting bored with the game (loads of cheating and modding opportunities).
How about this: Perhaps we (humans) would be better off if the market was flooded with duplicates until price = marginal cost of production? In an Elvis doll clock costs $1.25 to make and $3.75 to ship and retail, why should it be sold for any more than $5? At $5, everyone but the destitute could afford one. The rich can then try to find something else to throw their money away on. Same goes for the Apple I. If I can build a clone that looks and feels just like the real thing, why should nostalgic people be deprived when the thing can be made for a few hundred or less?
What people don't seem to understand in their greedy lives is that bringing prices to meet marginal cost usually benefits humanity as a whole. Whether this means dumping wasteful corn subsidies to bring prices up, or getting rid of artificial scarcity to bring the price of Yu-Gi-Oh cards down.
How right you are. To take this to an extreme, how often do you see people sporting aluminum crowns or silverware these days?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Natural_occ urrence, aluminum was once more valuable than gold. It is more than a coincidence that the prestige associated with aluminum is gone now that it costs a mere buck a pound.
Personally, I am very much a materialist (not to be confused with a hedonist) and I could care less if my diamond supplies come from a factory or the ground (actually, I do care, considering the human suffering associated with natural diamonds and the ecological damage done by any mining activity, but you get the point). At current prices, the only use I could see for diamond is specialized cutting equipment. Quite a shame too, because I can think of plenty of uses for cheap diamond because of it's scratch-resistanct properties such as the cover of LCD screens, windows, glass furniture, mirrors, etc. It's extreme rigitity could find use in precision analogue instruments. Diamond semiconductors have promise too if DeBeers could ever be eradicated.
The aluminum industry went the opposite way of the diamond industry, and it is now the second most important metal in the world behind steel. Aluminum has done a lot to help society by providing a cheap, light, and corrosion resistant metal used in everything from planes and cars to consumer goods and wiring. Diamonds have had a miniscule impact by slightly reducing drilling and cutting costs.
I wonder if online retailers would change their tune if there was a major crackdown on people evading paying their use taxes. When you buy something online, you are responsible to pay your state a tax equal to the difference between the local rate and the rate you paid (essentially the full sales tax for most online purchases). It isn't that hard to track violators. If ABC web shopping doesn't collect sales taxes AND a citizen of the state received a package from them AND said citizen filled in $0 for their use tax, one can deduce that said citizen underreported their use tax by at least that amount. A list of packages could be generated by forcing companies making local deliveries to report a list of all packages delivered (this would require a federal law as it falls under the Elastic Clause of the Constitution). If you cannot provide the receipts proving you accrued no more use tax than you declared, then you pay the tax with penalties and interest.
Personally, I feel it would be a lot easier and trample on far fewer liberties to just have the web retailer collect sales tax.
For photovoltaic cells, the heat is similar or somewhat less than the heat of combustion in the power plant it replaces and the effect is reversed at night. Both of these are negligible compared to the greenhouse effect caused by fossil fuel plants (inluding nuclear power, though it has less impact than the other 3 [coal, gas, oil]).
To put it in perspective, ten thousand square kilometers of photocells represents a peak power output of 1.5TW at 15% efficiency (enough to completely eliminate fossil fuel and nuclear plants if extra summer power can be stored or synthesized into fuel). Ten thousand square kilometers of trees fits within a small state and is not going to have much effect on global warming.
The transactional FS and a few other very important (and hyped) features were removed about a year ago from Longhorn (now Vista?) because Microsoft always promises the moon and delivers the contents of the campus portapotty.
Personally, even if I was running some version of Windows (WINE and cedega do not count), I wouldn't be too thrilled about being forced to use a very powerful CPU. My power bill is horrendous ($.225/kW*h) and I will be aiming for low power consumption for my next computer. This will limit the power of the CPU and the size of the graphics card I use, as they are the two biggest culprits for power draw. RAM and HDDs also factor in, though only about $10 a year of electricity per stick or HDD worth. It also means my next computer will probably be a laptop.
My current computer is running smoother on Fedora Core 3 (2004) than it was on Windows 98 (1998?). Knowing my brother's computer, Windows XP would have been even slower and about equally flakey (spyware, not the OS overhead, being the main source of problems for both Windows 98 and Windows XP). I don't expect Fedora Core 4 (2005) to be much slower, though I'll be installing Ubuntu and not Red Hat next time.
Water Vapour is reactive and only serves to amplify other climate forcings. It actually is going up in sympathy with other greenhouse gases as the Earth is getting warmer. It will also continue to increase for centuries after C02 stabilizes in the atmosphere as the ocean has a very long lag time. Unfortunately, the only practical way to reduce H20 levels in the atmosphere is to cool down the planet because H20 is generated in such huge quantities by evaporation from the oceans and plants. Any attempt to reduce evaporation by means such as cutting forests will actually increase temps more by decreasing evaporative cooling and convection.
PS: Why do so many people bring up the water vapour issue? If one is smart enough to know that water vapour is a greenhouse gas, wouldn't one be smart enough to have a basic understanding of the water cycle?
The difference between a cubic yard and a cubic meter is 25%-30% or so. That's no rounding error in my book considering that the numbers are given to 2 to 3 significant digits.
So would a business that deploys The GIMP on every computer because it's free and might be remotely useful have to pay tax on a full business copy of Photoshop? If every piece of software in a full Linux install were counted, the tax bill would be gargantuan.
I must say that this law actually looks good in all ways. If implemented, it will do everything from encouraging the spread of technology, increasing standards of living, saving natural and human resources, and even closing the trade deficit in France. Too bad I'm too cynical to actually think it'll stick.
Considering that the hard drive industry is already quite concentrated and that the largest company in the market is doing the buying, how can the justice department possibly approve this merger.
Then again, they approved of other such travesties as Exxon + Mobil, Viacom + CBS, Disney + Capital Cities, News Corp + Direct TV, and countless other clearly anti-competitive mergers throughout the last decade or two.
Allowing this merger will do nothing but slow down innovation and increase prices.
Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?
I do wonder what the mods are for? This post wasn't even intended to be controversial. Is it the word propaganda? Anything with spin is propaganda, and virtually all media has some level of spin. The EFF has its anti-software patent propaganda. Smokey Bear (actually, the agency behind it) has its anti-forest fire propaganda. General Motors throws their propaganda all over the place in the form of advertisements, product placement, their annual report, and other forms of marketing. Church sermons and holy books (Bible, Koran, etc.) are propaganda. This post itself is propaganda because I'm trying to advance my views. Whoever rated my post is also engaging in propaganda in their own little way.
My original post was just trying to say that the military would love a slashdoting because it means that their web site is so successful that they actually ran out of bandwidth or computer resources and that they'd be happy, not upset.
The army wants all the publicity they can get. It's a public server and its job is to disseminate propaganda that helps them meet their recruitment targets.
The ads are added to the email and the recipient sees it. I've never touched Gmail, but it is extremely annoying when people send me electronic mail from their accounts with Google.
Does anyone know of halfway decent alternatives to Google? I've done a quick look at the ones I can remember (Altavista, Yahoo, Microsoft Network), and they all suck (advertising, bais, and depth of results). Altavista's news section seems to be a shallow ploy to promote the New York Times and a handful of other major conservative papers. Microsoft holds no punches when you enter "Linux" as a search term. Yahoo has more advertisements than Times Square.
Google has been seriously pissing me off (censoring results, ever increasing ads, heavy duty monitoring and tracking) and I am looking for a decent alternative.
Buying used CDs does benefit RIAA member companies somewhat (probably around 25% of the used price, depending on the supply and demand curves for used CDs and how supplementary used CDs are to new CDs).
When you buy used CDs, you drive the price upwards and some fraction of buyers will switch to new CDs. Taken to the extreme, there can only be as many used CDs are there were new CDs originally sold. If a strong enough movement to buy used is formed, the record labels themselves can supply used CDs at new CD prices and still get their money.
If you don't want the RIAA getting any of the money, don't buy the music legally (share the music or buy bootlegs).
It's even funnier if the poor sap ever realizes that the cheaper silver (or copper) wires conduct better than the pricier gold ones. Gold is only useful for contacts, and if very tiny amounts (pennies per unit, if even that). It is useful because it is such a noble metal, not because of it's conductivity.
Silver is the absolute best conductor (skin depth and conductivity) that money can buy, and copper and aluminum are not much worse. Inside an insulator, all three are well protected and are not likely to break, corrode, or form oxide barriers.
Buses, and especially subways, pollute far less than autos. Buses get around 5 miles per gallon, so if they average 2 customers (including trips to/from depot), they break even with Hummers and 10 customers is needed to beat even the fuel mizing Prius. Perhaps in places where buses regularly run almost empty (like Binghamton, NY), buses are inefficient, but here where I live you have to squeeze yourself to get on board in the morning, and there must be at least 60, perhaps 80 people on each bus. About 20 buses per hour pass on the busier lines at rush hour.
Subways are even more efficient. One NYC subway train can hold 2,500 people (with plenty of crowding) during rush hour. If those same people used an average car (say, 25kW average power for city driving each), you would need 62.5MW (~100,000 horsepower) of power. A train uses closer to 1 MW of power. If it needed 62.5MW, then the trains alone would totally skew city power consumption statistics (which are not skewed, since cities use less kW*h per resident than suburbs).
This might be different in cities with totally useless mass transit systems, like Los Angelas, but in cities with decent systems, like NYC or Washington DC or most major European cities, power consumption (which is closely linked to pollution) is far lower for mass transit.
As far as cost goes, once again inefficient systems can lead to poor cost comparisons, but heavily used systems like NYC's subways are more cost effective than cars and highways. Do remember than insuring cars and building highways is extremely expensive in inner cities. Eminent domain must be used to clear land and cars are heavy valdalism/car theft targets. In my neighborhood, liability insurance alone runs $2,000/year for people under 25. My share of the subway system runs about $500-$1000 a year, split about equally in fares and subsidies. Around half of the transit load is done by mass transit judging by the car ownership rate being about half that of the 2.1 average cars per household over in New Jersey.
As far as crowding out roadways, subways get their own tracks and each subway track can take a shitload more passengers/hour than a road lane (a single jam packed full length subway train carries about the same number of passengers as an hour of single passenger autos on the freeway going either bumper to bumper or heavy but flowing traffic). Buses take about 1 to 3 cars of place (about 1 at highway speed, as much as three when stopped). Since rush hour is the crunch time, mass transit tends to be at its most efficient at the very moment that the greatest strain is put on the transit infrastructure. Cars actually get less efficient one congenstion slows down speed sufficiently, and it can lead to gridlock when it's severe enough.
Considering how cheap steel and copper are, how expensive can homebuilt audio equipment be? The raw materials should run under $2000/ton (assuming a generous amount of copper, the most expensive bulk raw material in speakers, and some money for power amps).
And I also doubt they'll sound too good unless he's an expert electrical and acoustical engineer. I'd just rather buy pre-built equipment than make it at home.
Even if it was for healthy food, how can one pay as much as $10,000/ton for cereal whose main ingredient costs only about $100/ton and is sold in such massive volumes. With the added marketing power and expense of this paper, I expect the price to easily break the $10,000/ton barrier that has long resisted and become even pricier. $15,000/ton?
Slashdot Mirror
There are laws to cover the worst abuses. False advertising comes to the top of my mind. If the laws are inadequate, then a proper narrowly tailored law can be passed in the same bill that abolishes the trademark law.
That said, the party has a stupid name as using the same name as murderous thieves (ie., real pirates) isn't the best way to win votes.
As far as I'm concerned, the great technical breakthroughs (HTTP, P2P, gargantuan secondary storage, wireless networks, laptops, etc) have already been discovered and quite well refined.
What needs to catch up are our legal and social systems. Copyright essentially makes most information not available on demand. What is available on demand generally must be done using proprietary and fragmented systems. Patents and DRM mean that many protocols and formats (such as DVDs and console video games) cannot be accessed in an open way.
As a society, we do not value open information enough. Creating a database (say, something like Lexis Nexus), should be an academic undertaking funded by the public (say, like wikipedia) and should be public domain or copylefted. A single P2P network should be capable of handling music, video, novels, programs, etc efficiently once legalized. Wikis could store repositories for engineering information, encyclopedic information, etc.
Probably coal or nuclear. The other two are in very limited supply with oil around peak production and natural gas within two decades of peak. But in making such a bet the renewables had better be ready by 2050, because by then all fossil fuels will be becoming quite scarce.
I bed to differ. The grid allows one to get the maximum bang out of the buck of renewable equipment. It allows extra power to be absorbed by the system. It allows people to forgoe expensive and polluting batteries. It allows people to install less than the total needs of their home to run.
Additionally, a grid with distributed generation can exceed 95% efficiency as energy doesn't have to travel far on average.
Large renewable generating stations would only be practical for powering factories and other massive consumers if it wasn't for a grid. For the most promising technologies (large scale wind, solar thermal), there are enormous efficiencies of scale.
Have you looked at natural gas prices in the US and in the UK. Both are running over $10/million BTU. The developed world is nearly out of their natural gas reserves worldwide production is likely to peak within two decades.
Those 4 Mbpd of stranged gas are very much needed in the form of gas and the market is likely to outbid what gas to liquid producers are hoping to pay for their gas. Right now in the USA, the margin is in favor of liquids to gas as the gas actually sells for more than crude oil. With US and European production expected to steadily drop over the coming years and decades, we will need all the LNG we can get.
On the economical (but not an ecological) side, coal is a more likely feedstock because of its price. It is also one of the cleaner ways to use coal, with CO2 being the only substantial emission.
These games are all or mostly non-gratis and non-free games. I'd be far more interested in the top 10 list of free-software games. Even if they're not stellar games, at least I can play them for free and without having to deal with the ever tempermental WINE. Having source code adds much more potential fun too once I start getting bored with the game (loads of cheating and modding opportunities).
How about this: Perhaps we (humans) would be better off if the market was flooded with duplicates until price = marginal cost of production? In an Elvis doll clock costs $1.25 to make and $3.75 to ship and retail, why should it be sold for any more than $5? At $5, everyone but the destitute could afford one. The rich can then try to find something else to throw their money away on. Same goes for the Apple I. If I can build a clone that looks and feels just like the real thing, why should nostalgic people be deprived when the thing can be made for a few hundred or less?
What people don't seem to understand in their greedy lives is that bringing prices to meet marginal cost usually benefits humanity as a whole. Whether this means dumping wasteful corn subsidies to bring prices up, or getting rid of artificial scarcity to bring the price of Yu-Gi-Oh cards down.
How right you are. To take this to an extreme, how often do you see people sporting aluminum crowns or silverware these days?
c urrence, aluminum was once more valuable than gold. It is more than a coincidence that the prestige associated with aluminum is gone now that it costs a mere buck a pound.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Natural_oc
Personally, I am very much a materialist (not to be confused with a hedonist) and I could care less if my diamond supplies come from a factory or the ground (actually, I do care, considering the human suffering associated with natural diamonds and the ecological damage done by any mining activity, but you get the point). At current prices, the only use I could see for diamond is specialized cutting equipment. Quite a shame too, because I can think of plenty of uses for cheap diamond because of it's scratch-resistanct properties such as the cover of LCD screens, windows, glass furniture, mirrors, etc. It's extreme rigitity could find use in precision analogue instruments. Diamond semiconductors have promise too if DeBeers could ever be eradicated.
The aluminum industry went the opposite way of the diamond industry, and it is now the second most important metal in the world behind steel. Aluminum has done a lot to help society by providing a cheap, light, and corrosion resistant metal used in everything from planes and cars to consumer goods and wiring. Diamonds have had a miniscule impact by slightly reducing drilling and cutting costs.
I wonder if online retailers would change their tune if there was a major crackdown on people evading paying their use taxes. When you buy something online, you are responsible to pay your state a tax equal to the difference between the local rate and the rate you paid (essentially the full sales tax for most online purchases). It isn't that hard to track violators. If ABC web shopping doesn't collect sales taxes AND a citizen of the state received a package from them AND said citizen filled in $0 for their use tax, one can deduce that said citizen underreported their use tax by at least that amount. A list of packages could be generated by forcing companies making local deliveries to report a list of all packages delivered (this would require a federal law as it falls under the Elastic Clause of the Constitution). If you cannot provide the receipts proving you accrued no more use tax than you declared, then you pay the tax with penalties and interest.
Personally, I feel it would be a lot easier and trample on far fewer liberties to just have the web retailer collect sales tax.
For photovoltaic cells, the heat is similar or somewhat less than the heat of combustion in the power plant it replaces and the effect is reversed at night. Both of these are negligible compared to the greenhouse effect caused by fossil fuel plants (inluding nuclear power, though it has less impact than the other 3 [coal, gas, oil]).
To put it in perspective, ten thousand square kilometers of photocells represents a peak power output of 1.5TW at 15% efficiency (enough to completely eliminate fossil fuel and nuclear plants if extra summer power can be stored or synthesized into fuel). Ten thousand square kilometers of trees fits within a small state and is not going to have much effect on global warming.
The transactional FS and a few other very important (and hyped) features were removed about a year ago from Longhorn (now Vista?) because Microsoft always promises the moon and delivers the contents of the campus portapotty.
Personally, even if I was running some version of Windows (WINE and cedega do not count), I wouldn't be too thrilled about being forced to use a very powerful CPU. My power bill is horrendous ($.225/kW*h) and I will be aiming for low power consumption for my next computer. This will limit the power of the CPU and the size of the graphics card I use, as they are the two biggest culprits for power draw. RAM and HDDs also factor in, though only about $10 a year of electricity per stick or HDD worth. It also means my next computer will probably be a laptop.
My current computer is running smoother on Fedora Core 3 (2004) than it was on Windows 98 (1998?). Knowing my brother's computer, Windows XP would have been even slower and about equally flakey (spyware, not the OS overhead, being the main source of problems for both Windows 98 and Windows XP). I don't expect Fedora Core 4 (2005) to be much slower, though I'll be installing Ubuntu and not Red Hat next time.
Water Vapour is reactive and only serves to amplify other climate forcings. It actually is going up in sympathy with other greenhouse gases as the Earth is getting warmer. It will also continue to increase for centuries after C02 stabilizes in the atmosphere as the ocean has a very long lag time. Unfortunately, the only practical way to reduce H20 levels in the atmosphere is to cool down the planet because H20 is generated in such huge quantities by evaporation from the oceans and plants. Any attempt to reduce evaporation by means such as cutting forests will actually increase temps more by decreasing evaporative cooling and convection.
PS: Why do so many people bring up the water vapour issue? If one is smart enough to know that water vapour is a greenhouse gas, wouldn't one be smart enough to have a basic understanding of the water cycle?
The difference between a cubic yard and a cubic meter is 25%-30% or so. That's no rounding error in my book considering that the numbers are given to 2 to 3 significant digits.
So would a business that deploys The GIMP on every computer because it's free and might be remotely useful have to pay tax on a full business copy of Photoshop? If every piece of software in a full Linux install were counted, the tax bill would be gargantuan.
I must say that this law actually looks good in all ways. If implemented, it will do everything from encouraging the spread of technology, increasing standards of living, saving natural and human resources, and even closing the trade deficit in France. Too bad I'm too cynical to actually think it'll stick.
Considering that the hard drive industry is already quite concentrated and that the largest company in the market is doing the buying, how can the justice department possibly approve this merger.
Then again, they approved of other such travesties as Exxon + Mobil, Viacom + CBS, Disney + Capital Cities, News Corp + Direct TV, and countless other clearly anti-competitive mergers throughout the last decade or two.
Allowing this merger will do nothing but slow down innovation and increase prices.
Has the Sherman Anti-Trust Act been repealed, or am I missing something here?
I do wonder what the mods are for? This post wasn't even intended to be controversial. Is it the word propaganda? Anything with spin is propaganda, and virtually all media has some level of spin. The EFF has its anti-software patent propaganda. Smokey Bear (actually, the agency behind it) has its anti-forest fire propaganda. General Motors throws their propaganda all over the place in the form of advertisements, product placement, their annual report, and other forms of marketing. Church sermons and holy books (Bible, Koran, etc.) are propaganda. This post itself is propaganda because I'm trying to advance my views. Whoever rated my post is also engaging in propaganda in their own little way.
My original post was just trying to say that the military would love a slashdoting because it means that their web site is so successful that they actually ran out of bandwidth or computer resources and that they'd be happy, not upset.
The army wants all the publicity they can get. It's a public server and its job is to disseminate propaganda that helps them meet their recruitment targets.
The ads are added to the email and the recipient sees it. I've never touched Gmail, but it is extremely annoying when people send me electronic mail from their accounts with Google.
Does anyone know of halfway decent alternatives to Google? I've done a quick look at the ones I can remember (Altavista, Yahoo, Microsoft Network), and they all suck (advertising, bais, and depth of results). Altavista's news section seems to be a shallow ploy to promote the New York Times and a handful of other major conservative papers. Microsoft holds no punches when you enter "Linux" as a search term. Yahoo has more advertisements than Times Square.
Google has been seriously pissing me off (censoring results, ever increasing ads, heavy duty monitoring and tracking) and I am looking for a decent alternative.
Buying used CDs does benefit RIAA member companies somewhat (probably around 25% of the used price, depending on the supply and demand curves for used CDs and how supplementary used CDs are to new CDs).
When you buy used CDs, you drive the price upwards and some fraction of buyers will switch to new CDs. Taken to the extreme, there can only be as many used CDs are there were new CDs originally sold. If a strong enough movement to buy used is formed, the record labels themselves can supply used CDs at new CD prices and still get their money.
If you don't want the RIAA getting any of the money, don't buy the music legally (share the music or buy bootlegs).
It's even funnier if the poor sap ever realizes that the cheaper silver (or copper) wires conduct better than the pricier gold ones. Gold is only useful for contacts, and if very tiny amounts (pennies per unit, if even that). It is useful because it is such a noble metal, not because of it's conductivity.
Silver is the absolute best conductor (skin depth and conductivity) that money can buy, and copper and aluminum are not much worse. Inside an insulator, all three are well protected and are not likely to break, corrode, or form oxide barriers.
Buses, and especially subways, pollute far less than autos. Buses get around 5 miles per gallon, so if they average 2 customers (including trips to/from depot), they break even with Hummers and 10 customers is needed to beat even the fuel mizing Prius. Perhaps in places where buses regularly run almost empty (like Binghamton, NY), buses are inefficient, but here where I live you have to squeeze yourself to get on board in the morning, and there must be at least 60, perhaps 80 people on each bus. About 20 buses per hour pass on the busier lines at rush hour.
Subways are even more efficient. One NYC subway train can hold 2,500 people (with plenty of crowding) during rush hour. If those same people used an average car (say, 25kW average power for city driving each), you would need 62.5MW (~100,000 horsepower) of power. A train uses closer to 1 MW of power. If it needed 62.5MW, then the trains alone would totally skew city power consumption statistics (which are not skewed, since cities use less kW*h per resident than suburbs).
This might be different in cities with totally useless mass transit systems, like Los Angelas, but in cities with decent systems, like NYC or Washington DC or most major European cities, power consumption (which is closely linked to pollution) is far lower for mass transit.
As far as cost goes, once again inefficient systems can lead to poor cost comparisons, but heavily used systems like NYC's subways are more cost effective than cars and highways. Do remember than insuring cars and building highways is extremely expensive in inner cities. Eminent domain must be used to clear land and cars are heavy valdalism/car theft targets. In my neighborhood, liability insurance alone runs $2,000/year for people under 25. My share of the subway system runs about $500-$1000 a year, split about equally in fares and subsidies. Around half of the transit load is done by mass transit judging by the car ownership rate being about half that of the 2.1 average cars per household over in New Jersey.
As far as crowding out roadways, subways get their own tracks and each subway track can take a shitload more passengers/hour than a road lane (a single jam packed full length subway train carries about the same number of passengers as an hour of single passenger autos on the freeway going either bumper to bumper or heavy but flowing traffic). Buses take about 1 to 3 cars of place (about 1 at highway speed, as much as three when stopped). Since rush hour is the crunch time, mass transit tends to be at its most efficient at the very moment that the greatest strain is put on the transit infrastructure. Cars actually get less efficient one congenstion slows down speed sufficiently, and it can lead to gridlock when it's severe enough.
Considering how cheap steel and copper are, how expensive can homebuilt audio equipment be? The raw materials should run under $2000/ton (assuming a generous amount of copper, the most expensive bulk raw material in speakers, and some money for power amps).
And I also doubt they'll sound too good unless he's an expert electrical and acoustical engineer. I'd just rather buy pre-built equipment than make it at home.
Even if it was for healthy food, how can one pay as much as $10,000/ton for cereal whose main ingredient costs only about $100/ton and is sold in such massive volumes. With the added marketing power and expense of this paper, I expect the price to easily break the $10,000/ton barrier that has long resisted and become even pricier. $15,000/ton?