It's quite common for me to loose the original packaging (and the SN#) to a game, and then get a serial number from online. I still have the CD.
Now if my hard drive were trashed by such a program, I would sue (yeah, it's probably in the EULA that they can do that, but there's a good chance that such a clause will be neemed null and void).
In normal (non-internet) society, such an action would be the revenge a phycho would extract by killing the person sleeping with his girlfriend.
Also, the storage system might be idiotic, but it is a bona-fide Turing-powerful machine, making it a computer. The claim was that it runs with no substatial hit to performance on any machine. That's a very big claim, and easy to shoot down.
That is what Turing's Machine does on every step. It reads the value at the read/write head, decides what to do based on the value read and the state of the state machine. After deciding, it writes a new value on the tape at the same location, goes to a new state, and moves the tape left 1 or right 1.
Turing's Machine isn't very efficient, but it is a Turing-powerful machine, making it a computer by definition.
The tape can be infinite, but at any time only a finite amount is used.
Also, the claim was for that this works for all processors, as if they had developed a fundamental breakthrough in comptuting. When their is that much hot air in the balloon, it doesn't take much to pop it.
Just take Alan Turing's original Turing Machine. It can be proven that certain algorithms, like a binary search, will take an algorithmically longer time on a Turing's machine than on your standard x86 processor.
Binary search is logarithmic time on a normal processor, but it is at least quadratic time on Turing's machine.
Therefore, I have found a counterexample to their claim.
PS: Turing's machine used an infinite tape and that tape could only be moved 1 space per cycle. Most of the time spent in the binary search will be moving the tape around.
You know what, I don't care if the Romans used the term. It is what I consider a loaded term. One of its meanings (to hijack a ship without permission from the king - if you had permission you were a privateer) distorts another of its meanings (to violate copyright law).
What if fuck stood for both a sexual act and a game that soccer moms bring their kids to play at after school (ie., t-ball). Something tells me that fucking (meaning to play t-ball) would be far less popular among those uptight moms who would be offended at it's other meaning.
It's unnatural for such disparate meanings to be assigned to a work. Piracy got its second meaning because book publishers had a huge amount of political and media clout back in the day, and it keeps has kept its second meaning due to constant bombardment from the media and media shills.
Creating or maintaining such terms is childish name-calling, and it does seem to be about as effective and as crass as political name-calling. Therefore, I don't use the term, and try to steer people away from it when they say it to me.
Gravitation rippling only happens to accelerating objects, so it does not violate relativity. It works the same way as brensstrahlung (ie., breaking radiation). It is believed that accelerating objects emit gravitons (gravity particles) in the same way accelerating charges emit photons (electromagnetic particles). The braking is relative to the object causing the acceleration.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. While it would definately benefit the consumer in the form of free and legal P2P and $1 CDs at the store, it might not be so bad for the artists either. There are plenty of innovators who would be happy to make art either for no reward or with fame and recognition as the only potential reward.
Art like movies that requires some amount of cash to do would still be made as much of the budget is for overpaid actors (rates will fall if noone can or wants to pay them that much). A little philantrophy (perhaps straight from the fans) or government aid could go a long ways. A successful film would also allow the actors/director to make a decent amount of money off of the recognition.
IP makes it very hard for an independent artist to get heard, because it reinforces vertical integration and monopolistic control of distribution. New music artists must sell their souls to the music companies if they want to be heard, even if they already have their music 100% recorded and finished. The only 'service' that music companies provide is a stranglehold on distribution.
IP also encourages advertising and marketing of art, which is both wasteful of society's resources and once again embowers the big corporations at the expense of the little people. Advertising also means that success is based, to a large degree, on the skill of the marketing department, meaning that little people, who generally don't market at all, never have a shot.
IP also allows for the ownership of stories and characters, which generally created a large base of material for new writers to use in their stories (ie., fairy tales). The current system means that only the corporation that owns a particular character can make a sequel, once again strengthening corporations at the expense of artists and consumers.
Personally, my innovation has been stifled by IP, but it has given me exactly zero incentive to write (I have moral problems with charging for copies of artwork, so I wouldn't charge money even if I could, except for the cost of making copies and shipping if it's over a physical medium). It would have been far easier for me to write my RPG program, and would likely have finished it, if I could have copied the artwork (which I neither enjoy doing, nor am very good at) and just written the code and story.
There's plenty of reasons why people would like to re-use characters.
Humans are social animals, and they do like to repeat memes, stories, characters, and other things that they take in. Copyrights are a very artificial barrier and go against this natural tendancy.
Personally, it took me years of cognitive dissonance to even accept that copyright exists and that it's not just a bad dream. It just feels natural to me to extend upon prior material, particularly when I feel particularly attached to it, which is another common trend in humans, seeing how most people are fans of some TV show, movie, or book.
I generally would much better like to embrace and extend existing material than come up with my own pseudo-original material (truly new ideas are extremely rare, perhaps even non-existant). Other people can relate to it, and it just seems downright silly to change the Three Little Pigs to the Four Small Cows.
This is pretty much what the law forces game developers (and any artist) to do. If the people who made the Chrono Trigger remake called it "Legends of Time" and made up new character names and artwork, then it would likely have been legal, but in the gut, it sure seems like using extra resources (having to come up with new characters) to make a less likable game (since it has to stand along instead of being based on an existing and popular story).
To me, it seems pretty easy to just stick your head in the sand and imagine copyright is just a bad dream... until those shysters from Hades come knocking.
As far a 'Foxing' goes, there's plenty of reasons why corporations would NOT like to see a successful (measured in times played, not dollars) independant production, in the same way Microsoft does NOT want to see Linux succeed, and uses all means possible to try to stop it (like SCO).
By the same reasoning, it would be perfectly reasonable for the local water company to charge $.20/gallon for tap water in the city, or $3/kilowatt-hour. Monopoly markets can often bear a huge price. Oxygen could sell for $10/pound and find penty of buyers if a mega-corp could somehow get rid of or contaminate the Earth's natural supply and get a patent on it.
For a market to be at its most efficient, the price and marginal cost should be the same. There is real economic loss when this is not the case, which means a decrease in the total standard of living (that means that the company making super-profits is making less extra money than the rest of the world is losing). That (along with the common-sense outrage at paying 20 cents for a gallon of tap water) seems like more than enough to label it as immoral.
It would be much more efficient to write one book using government or university funds and then use it over and over against, at a cost of perhaps $3/copy for printing costs, or even less if books are loaned instead of given, and wrap the cost into the tuition bill. If a professor wants to use (or recommend) a book that is under copyright and not freely usable, the professor has to pay out of his/her own pocket for each student's copy (which he can loan, so the cost is one-time if (s)he doesn't switch to the latest edition). The effect would be that tuition would effectively be lowered by about $500/year, which would make college that much more affordable, particularly for community colleges and undergraduate schools.
1,000 different textbooks, which could be written for anywhere between $100M (probably on-par with today's low standards) to $1B (very good quality books, or the cost of fraud on a grand scale), would likely serve over 90% of all courses measured by attendance. If all the public US universities were in together, the costs would be recouped in a single year.
I feel that the moral argument is quite against the current state of textbooks.
You can't entirely blame them. Poor people do watch the most television, and what can you expect when you bombard people with several hours a day of messages saying "buy more crap, buy more crap". Poor people also tend to be less educated and to have poor parenting, so they have less resistance to that advertising.
Banning all subjective promotion, advertising, and packaging (essentially everything but price guides, business directories, some classifieds, some catalogues, and related stuff) would work wonders on getting the poor to spend money right. It would also benefit the rest of the country as people would base purchasing decisions on price and quality, not marketing, which would force manufacturers to raise quality or cut price.
TV and other media that rely on advertising could have their revenue streams replaced by eliminating (or at least gutting) copyright law, having the government pay per-eyeball to media companies, and having the government fund media [perhaps PBS style, perhaps using direct democracy - if people will vote about anything, it will be TV programming].
The problem is that speed limits are set locally. The benefits of a lower speed limit accrue disproportionately to the residents of a town, and the costs on outsiders. As it is, towns also get to choose how they enforce their laws (often that means targeting those with out of state plates).
Although speed limits might seem like a local issue, having the state or federal government set speed limits, fines, and enforcement procedures would get rid of the NIMBY attitude that towns have towards outsiders.
Which raises the question of why should some end-uses of a fuel be taxed, and not others?
If a tax is to generate revenue and discourage use, it should be applied to all uses. Planes, cars, industrial, and home use should be equally taxed. If you tax car fuel heavily but not home fuel, then while cars might become efficient, homes will wastefully use large amounts of oil.
Arguments could be made in favor of treating one fuel differently from another if there are enviormental or foreign dependancy problems with one, but the same fuel should be treated the same regardless of end use.
While there are benefits to having extra RAM, removing swap is not a good idea. Even if all currently loaded processes would fit in RAM, it might be a better idea (as decided by the CPU) to swap a few idle processes into swap and cache some commonly used files or pre-load some data. Without swap, all buffers and processes would have to fit in RAM, which would limit the ability of the operating system to cache stuff even if the processes stay within the available RAM.
If a swapless system beats a system with swap and the same RAM, it's because the operating system has a poor resource management.
IANAL, but could they start taking away your (meager) possessions?
Generally they can't (they can't take your primary residence, primary car, or personal belongings), but they can garnish your wages, so unless you're going to work off-the-books or be a bum the rest of your life, they can get at least some money from you.
With 1.3 billion people and a booming economy, they can be their own standard. The USA with.3 billion people manages to avoid being part of many standards (British units, NTSC television, MM/DD/YY data format, 12 hour + am/pm time format, and a host of others).
At least China has good reasons for breaking the standard (avoiding patents), instead of the USA's reasons (they're lazy).
What I'm more suprised is that a huge boiler can be heated up in 500 seconds and be generating 500 MW of juice. I know that coal and fission plants take much more than 500 seconds to turn on.
That or they figured out some other way of generating electricity than boiling water (I doubt it).
BTW, 500 MW is a lot of juice, especially if it can be used for baseline power (this won't, but it's experimental). If the fuel is essentially free, $2B for such a plant could be justified.
As long as it's not over a few hundred pounds, the smallest subcompact will be big enough for your plywood (I'm assuming ply means plywood). Tie it with string, and drive slow. It does look a little comical on the highway and probably messes up the paint job (but the cars that I see this done with don't have much of a paint job to protect), but I see it done often enough around here with stuff like mattresses.
If you do it often, then you can get a removable rack to put on the car.
This reminds me of the Emu pyramid scheme that happened a decade or so back in the USA.
One of my relatives bet the farm (literally) on raising them. They were supposed to be really healthy meat or something like that. Naturally, when all you do with an animal is breed it, since it's too expensive to butcher for food, the market is going to get saturated exponentially, and the price will plummet.
This is true even if Emus did displace cows for meat... it would just have taken a few years longer since Emus breed rather fast.
I agree. Usually I don't buy the slipperly slope argument, but banning all moral indecency seems to be the goal of the Christian right wing. Furthermore, here is a defense in favor of allowing underage porn (personally, I don't like child porn and regular porn doesn't register much higher. I'm not sure of my stance on the issue, but I can argue both sides.).
The line between abusing children and underage porn is deliberately blurred. It would be much harder to convince people that underage porn viewers are sub-human (which a bunch of posts seem to assert) if distinctions were made between making and viewing the stuff.
If the same reasoning were applied to the 11th of September, we shouldn't watch the video of the planes hitting the building because it gives us a craving to go out and do it for real and because it supports the terrorists.
Watching underage porn doesn't hurt children, and any indirect links are tenous at best. Certain types (generally anything not involving traditional or anal intercourse with an adult) could probably even be made without much harm to children (well, outside of social problems induced by our society's extremely harsh views, but then one could easily blame society, not the child or parent). And then you have the computer generated or animated stuff.
And then there is the extremely stiff punishment for being caught and the large amount of effort directed at fighting it. Morals will keep most people from making child porn. Remove copyright privilages from child porn (say, by making it technically illegal, but with a private warning being the only punishment) and the profit-hungry pornographers will go away. As far as the remaining people go, the benefit has to be weighed against the costs. Is locking up a thousand or so people in jail and making it impossible for them to get jobs because of the social stigma worth it in order to save a few hundred kids being filmed for porn? And then you have the use value of that porn. Maybe I don't like it, but the people who want it probably do like it.
Finally you have the First Amendment issues. Underage porn is speech, and it is not [in general] hate speech, fighting words, or speech that will cause public disorder (like yelling fire in a theatre), so it should be protected under the First Amendment. I made this point last because a law should never be used as a reason to approve or disapprove of something, but many people seem to believe in the constitution as having moral authority in and of itself, so I'll mention it.
Does it when you take into account the energy content of our imports. A proper accounting would credit us for energy spent making exports and debit us for energy spent by other countries for our imports. If we stopped importing manufactured goods, our energy consumption would rise and the exporting country's would drop.
Second, one should use purchasing power parity, not the market exchange rate, for converting remimbi or yuans or dongs or yen to dollars. This is because energy efficiency is properly measured in energy/goods and services, not energy/GDP.
I'll be suprised if the US is efficient at all after these two points are taken into account.
This program could probably be fooled by giving certain pointers to kids. It's probably very sensitive to spelling/grammer (so have the kid run it through the grammer/spell check and accept the first choice proposed... guaranteed to be gramatically correct).
If the program really was as good, some of its algorithms could be used for improving grammer and spell checks, since as part of the grading process it would have to identify faults and how to fix them (if it can't fix them, it couldn't handle having more than one fault in a paper). Since such grammer checkers don't exist, I believe that it's a crap program that mostly cares about spelling and grammer and perhaps average word length.
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
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I agree with you about oil running out, but about the standard of living having to go down, I see two paths for that.
If we continue along the capitalist track, it's inevitable that most people who are now middle class will become poor and many will starve, as the remaining energy will go to the rich. The ostrich-in-the-sand mentality of capitalism will also ensure that we don't see the problem until after it's happened.
However, a well-run communal system could handle the loss of all fossil fuels. Assuming that we can't get large amounts of fusion or renewable energy seeing the tail end fossil fuels approaching, I would propose the following:
- Build housing either underground or with metre-thick earthen walls. This way heating is optional and cooling is a non-issue.
- Shift towards high-versatility and high-density entertainment. Public parks (well designed), playgrounds, pools, and libraries would count. Shooting ranges, golf courses, and the likes would not count. A high-versatility facility can be used in many different ways so you can have many such facilities in a city. It's practical to have a park, a playground, a pool, and a library within walking or biking distance of every city resident. They also require very little energy per user, and in the case of playgrounds and parks, the maintenance energy is next to zero (so long as you don't have intensively-grown grass in the park).
- Decentralize workplaces. Make it so a worker can live in any part of the city and find nearby employment in their trade (ie., IT worker, or factory worker, or secretary). Less commuting means less energy and land devoted to transport.
- Make communal all things that are practical. A single communal playground takes a lot less land (and therefore energy, since sprawl requires more energy-wasteful transportation and infrastructure), capital, and maintenance (a communal structure will be better engineered and will be only a single facility to inspect), and whatever you lose in privacy is made up in social interaction, which is probably better for the kids anyway. Another big area for savings are driveways and garages. Eliminating cars would get rid of the problem, but even if we keep cars, a communal underground parking garage every block would free a lot space. Anything else that is currently build privately and get be communalized without too much inconvenience but with a great savings in efficiency should be done.
- Attack resource-intensive materialism. A ban on all commercial advertising (including packaging, obtrusive signs) would work wonder in this regard. Products could still be pitched by registering them in a registry which citizens could browse or search. Since this works by reducing desire, people won't even mind reducing their consumption and the effects will be mostly subconscious.
- Eat vegetarian. Grains, beans, and vegetables take far less land to grow than meat. This means that we can pack farms closer to the cities saving on transport or we can reduce the intensiveness of our farming, saving energy in that way.
- Electronic entertainment is OK. There's no reason that we can't maintain our electric lines and power them using biomass or solar power. 250 watts for a computer or TV setup is quite affordable (for comparison, a Hummer can burn about 1 MW of fuel producing about 250kW or power at the wheel). The internet should be kept too, since it allows for much more efficient commerce and government. Each e-mail or dozen mp3s traded is one less piece of paper or plastic disc shipped and the internet is much more efficient than paper catalogues and registries. Even if all it's used for is Starcraft of Everquest, the energy usage is quite modest for the utility.
- Either build cities near waterways or build a railroad system. Trucks are very energy intensive. Barges and trains are energy misers. Also, asphalt is made from petroleum (bitumen to be exact), and although we can switch to concrete when the bitumen runs out, concrete
Re:How many crops per year?
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Even with crop rotation we should be able to feed ourselves. It takes something like 16 calories of grain to make a calorie of beef, so we could just get rid of most of the livestock and feed the beans/grain/vegetables to people instead of animals.
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It's quite common for me to loose the original packaging (and the SN#) to a game, and then get a serial number from online. I still have the CD.
Now if my hard drive were trashed by such a program, I would sue (yeah, it's probably in the EULA that they can do that, but there's a good chance that such a clause will be neemed null and void).
In normal (non-internet) society, such an action would be the revenge a phycho would extract by killing the person sleeping with his girlfriend.
A machine with no memory is not a computer.
Also, the storage system might be idiotic, but it is a bona-fide Turing-powerful machine, making it a computer. The claim was that it runs with no substatial hit to performance on any machine. That's a very big claim, and easy to shoot down.
That is what Turing's Machine does on every step. It reads the value at the read/write head, decides what to do based on the value read and the state of the state machine. After deciding, it writes a new value on the tape at the same location, goes to a new state, and moves the tape left 1 or right 1. Turing's Machine isn't very efficient, but it is a Turing-powerful machine, making it a computer by definition.
The tape can be infinite, but at any time only a finite amount is used.
Also, the claim was for that this works for all processors, as if they had developed a fundamental breakthrough in comptuting. When their is that much hot air in the balloon, it doesn't take much to pop it.
Just take Alan Turing's original Turing Machine. It can be proven that certain algorithms, like a binary search, will take an algorithmically longer time on a Turing's machine than on your standard x86 processor.
Binary search is logarithmic time on a normal processor, but it is at least quadratic time on Turing's machine.
Therefore, I have found a counterexample to their claim.
PS: Turing's machine used an infinite tape and that tape could only be moved 1 space per cycle. Most of the time spent in the binary search will be moving the tape around.
You know what, I don't care if the Romans used the term. It is what I consider a loaded term. One of its meanings (to hijack a ship without permission from the king - if you had permission you were a privateer) distorts another of its meanings (to violate copyright law).
What if fuck stood for both a sexual act and a game that soccer moms bring their kids to play at after school (ie., t-ball). Something tells me that fucking (meaning to play t-ball) would be far less popular among those uptight moms who would be offended at it's other meaning.
It's unnatural for such disparate meanings to be assigned to a work. Piracy got its second meaning because book publishers had a huge amount of political and media clout back in the day, and it keeps has kept its second meaning due to constant bombardment from the media and media shills.
Creating or maintaining such terms is childish name-calling, and it does seem to be about as effective and as crass as political name-calling. Therefore, I don't use the term, and try to steer people away from it when they say it to me.
Gravitation rippling only happens to accelerating objects, so it does not violate relativity. It works the same way as brensstrahlung (ie., breaking radiation). It is believed that accelerating objects emit gravitons (gravity particles) in the same way accelerating charges emit photons (electromagnetic particles). The braking is relative to the object causing the acceleration.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. While it would definately benefit the consumer in the form of free and legal P2P and $1 CDs at the store, it might not be so bad for the artists either. There are plenty of innovators who would be happy to make art either for no reward or with fame and recognition as the only potential reward.
Art like movies that requires some amount of cash to do would still be made as much of the budget is for overpaid actors (rates will fall if noone can or wants to pay them that much). A little philantrophy (perhaps straight from the fans) or government aid could go a long ways. A successful film would also allow the actors/director to make a decent amount of money off of the recognition.
IP makes it very hard for an independent artist to get heard, because it reinforces vertical integration and monopolistic control of distribution. New music artists must sell their souls to the music companies if they want to be heard, even if they already have their music 100% recorded and finished. The only 'service' that music companies provide is a stranglehold on distribution.
IP also encourages advertising and marketing of art, which is both wasteful of society's resources and once again embowers the big corporations at the expense of the little people. Advertising also means that success is based, to a large degree, on the skill of the marketing department, meaning that little people, who generally don't market at all, never have a shot.
IP also allows for the ownership of stories and characters, which generally created a large base of material for new writers to use in their stories (ie., fairy tales). The current system means that only the corporation that owns a particular character can make a sequel, once again strengthening corporations at the expense of artists and consumers.
Personally, my innovation has been stifled by IP, but it has given me exactly zero incentive to write (I have moral problems with charging for copies of artwork, so I wouldn't charge money even if I could, except for the cost of making copies and shipping if it's over a physical medium). It would have been far easier for me to write my RPG program, and would likely have finished it, if I could have copied the artwork (which I neither enjoy doing, nor am very good at) and just written the code and story.
There's plenty of reasons why people would like to re-use characters.
... until those shysters from Hades come knocking.
Humans are social animals, and they do like to repeat memes, stories, characters, and other things that they take in. Copyrights are a very artificial barrier and go against this natural tendancy.
Personally, it took me years of cognitive dissonance to even accept that copyright exists and that it's not just a bad dream. It just feels natural to me to extend upon prior material, particularly when I feel particularly attached to it, which is another common trend in humans, seeing how most people are fans of some TV show, movie, or book.
I generally would much better like to embrace and extend existing material than come up with my own pseudo-original material (truly new ideas are extremely rare, perhaps even non-existant). Other people can relate to it, and it just seems downright silly to change the Three Little Pigs to the Four Small Cows.
This is pretty much what the law forces game developers (and any artist) to do. If the people who made the Chrono Trigger remake called it "Legends of Time" and made up new character names and artwork, then it would likely have been legal, but in the gut, it sure seems like using extra resources (having to come up with new characters) to make a less likable game (since it has to stand along instead of being based on an existing and popular story).
To me, it seems pretty easy to just stick your head in the sand and imagine copyright is just a bad dream
As far a 'Foxing' goes, there's plenty of reasons why corporations would NOT like to see a successful (measured in times played, not dollars) independant production, in the same way Microsoft does NOT want to see Linux succeed, and uses all means possible to try to stop it (like SCO).
However, you do have the right to go home and make yourself a milkshake, or have a friend give you one.
By the same reasoning, it would be perfectly reasonable for the local water company to charge $.20/gallon for tap water in the city, or $3/kilowatt-hour. Monopoly markets can often bear a huge price. Oxygen could sell for $10/pound and find penty of buyers if a mega-corp could somehow get rid of or contaminate the Earth's natural supply and get a patent on it.
For a market to be at its most efficient, the price and marginal cost should be the same. There is real economic loss when this is not the case, which means a decrease in the total standard of living (that means that the company making super-profits is making less extra money than the rest of the world is losing). That (along with the common-sense outrage at paying 20 cents for a gallon of tap water) seems like more than enough to label it as immoral.
It would be much more efficient to write one book using government or university funds and then use it over and over against, at a cost of perhaps $3/copy for printing costs, or even less if books are loaned instead of given, and wrap the cost into the tuition bill. If a professor wants to use (or recommend) a book that is under copyright and not freely usable, the professor has to pay out of his/her own pocket for each student's copy (which he can loan, so the cost is one-time if (s)he doesn't switch to the latest edition). The effect would be that tuition would effectively be lowered by about $500/year, which would make college that much more affordable, particularly for community colleges and undergraduate schools.
1,000 different textbooks, which could be written for anywhere between $100M (probably on-par with today's low standards) to $1B (very good quality books, or the cost of fraud on a grand scale), would likely serve over 90% of all courses measured by attendance. If all the public US universities were in together, the costs would be recouped in a single year.
I feel that the moral argument is quite against the current state of textbooks.
You can't entirely blame them. Poor people do watch the most television, and what can you expect when you bombard people with several hours a day of messages saying "buy more crap, buy more crap". Poor people also tend to be less educated and to have poor parenting, so they have less resistance to that advertising.
Banning all subjective promotion, advertising, and packaging (essentially everything but price guides, business directories, some classifieds, some catalogues, and related stuff) would work wonders on getting the poor to spend money right. It would also benefit the rest of the country as people would base purchasing decisions on price and quality, not marketing, which would force manufacturers to raise quality or cut price.
TV and other media that rely on advertising could have their revenue streams replaced by eliminating (or at least gutting) copyright law, having the government pay per-eyeball to media companies, and having the government fund media [perhaps PBS style, perhaps using direct democracy - if people will vote about anything, it will be TV programming].
The problem is that speed limits are set locally. The benefits of a lower speed limit accrue disproportionately to the residents of a town, and the costs on outsiders. As it is, towns also get to choose how they enforce their laws (often that means targeting those with out of state plates).
Although speed limits might seem like a local issue, having the state or federal government set speed limits, fines, and enforcement procedures would get rid of the NIMBY attitude that towns have towards outsiders.
Which raises the question of why should some end-uses of a fuel be taxed, and not others?
If a tax is to generate revenue and discourage use, it should be applied to all uses. Planes, cars, industrial, and home use should be equally taxed. If you tax car fuel heavily but not home fuel, then while cars might become efficient, homes will wastefully use large amounts of oil.
Arguments could be made in favor of treating one fuel differently from another if there are enviormental or foreign dependancy problems with one, but the same fuel should be treated the same regardless of end use.
While there are benefits to having extra RAM, removing swap is not a good idea. Even if all currently loaded processes would fit in RAM, it might be a better idea (as decided by the CPU) to swap a few idle processes into swap and cache some commonly used files or pre-load some data. Without swap, all buffers and processes would have to fit in RAM, which would limit the ability of the operating system to cache stuff even if the processes stay within the available RAM.
If a swapless system beats a system with swap and the same RAM, it's because the operating system has a poor resource management.
IANAL, but could they start taking away your (meager) possessions? Generally they can't (they can't take your primary residence, primary car, or personal belongings), but they can garnish your wages, so unless you're going to work off-the-books or be a bum the rest of your life, they can get at least some money from you.
With 1.3 billion people and a booming economy, they can be their own standard. The USA with .3 billion people manages to avoid being part of many standards (British units, NTSC television, MM/DD/YY data format, 12 hour + am/pm time format, and a host of others).
At least China has good reasons for breaking the standard (avoiding patents), instead of the USA's reasons (they're lazy).
What I'm more suprised is that a huge boiler can be heated up in 500 seconds and be generating 500 MW of juice. I know that coal and fission plants take much more than 500 seconds to turn on.
That or they figured out some other way of generating electricity than boiling water (I doubt it).
BTW, 500 MW is a lot of juice, especially if it can be used for baseline power (this won't, but it's experimental). If the fuel is essentially free, $2B for such a plant could be justified.
As long as it's not over a few hundred pounds, the smallest subcompact will be big enough for your plywood (I'm assuming ply means plywood). Tie it with string, and drive slow. It does look a little comical on the highway and probably messes up the paint job (but the cars that I see this done with don't have much of a paint job to protect), but I see it done often enough around here with stuff like mattresses.
If you do it often, then you can get a removable rack to put on the car.
This reminds me of the Emu pyramid scheme that happened a decade or so back in the USA.
... it would just have taken a few years longer since Emus breed rather fast.
One of my relatives bet the farm (literally) on raising them. They were supposed to be really healthy meat or something like that. Naturally, when all you do with an animal is breed it, since it's too expensive to butcher for food, the market is going to get saturated exponentially, and the price will plummet.
This is true even if Emus did displace cows for meat
I agree. Usually I don't buy the slipperly slope argument, but banning all moral indecency seems to be the goal of the Christian right wing. Furthermore, here is a defense in favor of allowing underage porn (personally, I don't like child porn and regular porn doesn't register much higher. I'm not sure of my stance on the issue, but I can argue both sides.).
The line between abusing children and underage porn is deliberately blurred. It would be much harder to convince people that underage porn viewers are sub-human (which a bunch of posts seem to assert) if distinctions were made between making and viewing the stuff.
If the same reasoning were applied to the 11th of September, we shouldn't watch the video of the planes hitting the building because it gives us a craving to go out and do it for real and because it supports the terrorists.
Watching underage porn doesn't hurt children, and any indirect links are tenous at best. Certain types (generally anything not involving traditional or anal intercourse with an adult) could probably even be made without much harm to children (well, outside of social problems induced by our society's extremely harsh views, but then one could easily blame society, not the child or parent). And then you have the computer generated or animated stuff.
And then there is the extremely stiff punishment for being caught and the large amount of effort directed at fighting it. Morals will keep most people from making child porn. Remove copyright privilages from child porn (say, by making it technically illegal, but with a private warning being the only punishment) and the profit-hungry pornographers will go away. As far as the remaining people go, the benefit has to be weighed against the costs. Is locking up a thousand or so people in jail and making it impossible for them to get jobs because of the social stigma worth it in order to save a few hundred kids being filmed for porn? And then you have the use value of that porn. Maybe I don't like it, but the people who want it probably do like it.
Finally you have the First Amendment issues. Underage porn is speech, and it is not [in general] hate speech, fighting words, or speech that will cause public disorder (like yelling fire in a theatre), so it should be protected under the First Amendment. I made this point last because a law should never be used as a reason to approve or disapprove of something, but many people seem to believe in the constitution as having moral authority in and of itself, so I'll mention it.
Does it when you take into account the energy content of our imports. A proper accounting would credit us for energy spent making exports and debit us for energy spent by other countries for our imports. If we stopped importing manufactured goods, our energy consumption would rise and the exporting country's would drop.
Second, one should use purchasing power parity, not the market exchange rate, for converting remimbi or yuans or dongs or yen to dollars. This is because energy efficiency is properly measured in energy/goods and services, not energy/GDP.
I'll be suprised if the US is efficient at all after these two points are taken into account.
This program could probably be fooled by giving certain pointers to kids. It's probably very sensitive to spelling/grammer (so have the kid run it through the grammer/spell check and accept the first choice proposed ... guaranteed to be gramatically correct).
If the program really was as good, some of its algorithms could be used for improving grammer and spell checks, since as part of the grading process it would have to identify faults and how to fix them (if it can't fix them, it couldn't handle having more than one fault in a paper). Since such grammer checkers don't exist, I believe that it's a crap program that mostly cares about spelling and grammer and perhaps average word length.
I agree with you about oil running out, but about the standard of living having to go down, I see two paths for that.
If we continue along the capitalist track, it's inevitable that most people who are now middle class will become poor and many will starve, as the remaining energy will go to the rich. The ostrich-in-the-sand mentality of capitalism will also ensure that we don't see the problem until after it's happened.
However, a well-run communal system could handle the loss of all fossil fuels. Assuming that we can't get large amounts of fusion or renewable energy seeing the tail end fossil fuels approaching, I would propose the following:
- Build housing either underground or with metre-thick earthen walls. This way heating is optional and cooling is a non-issue.
- Shift towards high-versatility and high-density entertainment. Public parks (well designed), playgrounds, pools, and libraries would count. Shooting ranges, golf courses, and the likes would not count. A high-versatility facility can be used in many different ways so you can have many such facilities in a city. It's practical to have a park, a playground, a pool, and a library within walking or biking distance of every city resident. They also require very little energy per user, and in the case of playgrounds and parks, the maintenance energy is next to zero (so long as you don't have intensively-grown grass in the park).
- Decentralize workplaces. Make it so a worker can live in any part of the city and find nearby employment in their trade (ie., IT worker, or factory worker, or secretary). Less commuting means less energy and land devoted to transport.
- Make communal all things that are practical. A single communal playground takes a lot less land (and therefore energy, since sprawl requires more energy-wasteful transportation and infrastructure), capital, and maintenance (a communal structure will be better engineered and will be only a single facility to inspect), and whatever you lose in privacy is made up in social interaction, which is probably better for the kids anyway. Another big area for savings are driveways and garages. Eliminating cars would get rid of the problem, but even if we keep cars, a communal underground parking garage every block would free a lot space. Anything else that is currently build privately and get be communalized without too much inconvenience but with a great savings in efficiency should be done.
- Attack resource-intensive materialism. A ban on all commercial advertising (including packaging, obtrusive signs) would work wonder in this regard. Products could still be pitched by registering them in a registry which citizens could browse or search. Since this works by reducing desire, people won't even mind reducing their consumption and the effects will be mostly subconscious.
- Eat vegetarian. Grains, beans, and vegetables take far less land to grow than meat. This means that we can pack farms closer to the cities saving on transport or we can reduce the intensiveness of our farming, saving energy in that way.
- Electronic entertainment is OK. There's no reason that we can't maintain our electric lines and power them using biomass or solar power. 250 watts for a computer or TV setup is quite affordable (for comparison, a Hummer can burn about 1 MW of fuel producing about 250kW or power at the wheel). The internet should be kept too, since it allows for much more efficient commerce and government. Each e-mail or dozen mp3s traded is one less piece of paper or plastic disc shipped and the internet is much more efficient than paper catalogues and registries. Even if all it's used for is Starcraft of Everquest, the energy usage is quite modest for the utility.
- Either build cities near waterways or build a railroad system. Trucks are very energy intensive. Barges and trains are energy misers. Also, asphalt is made from petroleum (bitumen to be exact), and although we can switch to concrete when the bitumen runs out, concrete
Even with crop rotation we should be able to feed ourselves. It takes something like 16 calories of grain to make a calorie of beef, so we could just get rid of most of the livestock and feed the beans/grain/vegetables to people instead of animals.