Should our entire economy be based on people who can only see point A to point B? I did work therefore it must immediately qualify as end product so that I can get paid? Many people contribute to products and services without immediate form of payment and yet these products and services exist because there is a need for other products or services that they enable. Our economy has even disconnected certain products from their prices, like cell phones for example. These were products one used to have to pay for and now they are not. This does not make them free.
Besides, you seem to suffer from the free as in beer paradigm, to borrow Stallman's phrase which will probably appear googolplex times here.
I'm glad that I finished my degree since I don't have to start interviews with a song and dance about why I didn't get my degree.
A great way for an employer to get a graduate without paying them a graduate's salary is to find someone who is willing to drop out of school several semesters short of a degree. This accomplishes several things for the employer. They know that they are basically getting a graduate for a lower salary, but they also know that this person will cost them less over time and that they are less likely to leave because their lack of a degree is a barrier.
Still, many educators worry there won't be enough workers when the industry rebounds, crimping growth.
Somehow, I don't think it's the educators who are doing the worrying. I mean what's the worst that could happen? Demand exceeds supply and wages increase. Sounds like an educators nightmare alright.
Employers are more likely to be concerned than educators. Sure enough, the next sentence reads:
Matthew Szulik, CEO of software firm Red Hat, says he's having trouble finding some highly skilled programmers.
but what he really means to say is that he's, "having trouble finding some highly skilled programmers at the salaries we offer"
The following shouldn't be all that surprising as jobs are easier to come by in those countries and educators won't be all that much concerned about this trend either,
New security regulations might be keeping these students from applying. In India, the number of students taking the Graduate Record Exam, the test required for most applicants to U.S. graduate schools, fell 56% this school year, vs. last, test administrators say. In China, test-taking fell 52%.
because grad students don't bring in the big bucks to universities.
By reducing the cost of owning a motor-monitoring system, the DOE hopes to accelerate adoption of the technology and enable nationwide energy savings. The effort is part of its $61 million Industries of the Future initiative to improve energy efficiency throughout strategic U.S. industries.
This is just another example of our tax money subsidizing large industry. If the US is really a market economy, then allow the market to correct for inefficient use of energy by simply increasing the cost of energy. Hey, this could even generate federal revenue! What a novel idea. Accomplish the same thing while actually lowering personal income taxes.
Besides, the focus is understandably across the board, but some industries use vastly more energy than others. Somehow this seems like almost trivial energy use compared to say aluminum processing.
Next time someone throws out "free market" when talking about jobs, it would be prudent to drag this example out.
If you don't like your choices at the voting booth, RUN FOR OFFICE YOURSELF.
Mr. Burns: "Homer, they're trying to shut us down. They say we're poisoning the planet! Can't the government just get off our backs?"
Homer tells Mr. Burns that he would do things differently if he was the governor. Mr. Burns replies, "Simpson, do you realize how much it costs to run for office? More than any honest man could afford."
Homer replies, "I bet you could afford it though."
Property rights ARE ridiculous
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In response, a lawyer has claimed the sun, 'to show how ridiculous a property-rights system in outer space would be'
As if property rights on earth are any less ridiculous. How can a person whose life spans 80 years own a valley, a mountain or a beach? There is no way to draw a boundary around a property and say that any evil shit you do to the earth will stay there, hence industrial zones polluting the communities around them, in effect messing up other people's "property".
The other problem is what happens to the land after you fscked it up and are long dead and gone? Now what?
In the V2G scenario, the cars do *NOT* generate electricity, they *only* buffer it.
The article focused on generation rather than energy caching or storage when talking about V2G.
"As electric-drive hybrids begin to penetrate the auto market, you now have distributed power generation on wheels," says Stephen Letendre
and
But if automakers were to make 1 million next-generation V2G vehicles by 2020, they could generate up to 10,000 megawatts of electricity
and
While vehicles could generate plenty of power - studies show they sit idle 90 percent of the time
and
Wide use of V2G electric-drive vehicles could generate enough power to cut the requirement for central generating station capacity by as much as 20 percent by the year 2050
The idea that only the batteries would be used to buffer peak power is briefly mentioned in this statement however:
Their main value would be in supplying spurts of peak and other specialty "ancillary" power for which utilities pay premium prices. It would be far cheaper for utilities to tap the batteries of thousands of cars, say, than the current practice of keeping huge turbines constantly spinning just to supply power at a moment's notice, studies show.
And there would be little risk of leaving the office to discover a car with a dead battery. That's because V2G cars would have on-board controls to prevent their batteries from being drawn below minimum travel needs set by the owner - say, a 50-mile trip.
But that's kind of like tossing all of the previously mentioned benefits out the window. Such usage also poses several major problems. The scheme suffers from transmission losses as the batteries are recharged off peak. Battery cycling would incur a cost on the vehicle owner as it reduces battery life. A vehicles battery complement should reflect trip distance. Anything greater than that and the vehicle becomes inefficient as it carries unused weight. Why not just have the extra batteries stored at home for this purpose? Peak electrical usage also corresponds closely with peak vehicle usage. A grid which can accomodate distributed power generation would result in stable electrical pricing. Min and max rates would be much narrower than they are today. With a narrow spread the scheme loses a lot of benefit to the vehicle owners. Finally, alternative mechanical systems like high momentum flywheels have much better efficiencies than batteries but are not suitable for implementation on moving vehicles.
Finally, you mention:
As an aside, large (300MW) CAES systems are already in operation in Germany and the US which store energy from off peak power generation for peak usage. There's also long running hydro storage and the heat storage system demonstrated by the Solar II system and then there's also the V2G concept. We're far from clueless.
What I know about CAES is that the 300MW German site is quite unique due to that particular geologic feature. Most of the other systems I've heard of can generate less than 100MW for a duration of at most a day or so. This would only be sufficient to cover peak demand in small towns and they do not appear to scale cost effectively although that could change. The problem is whether they could be scaled by an order of magnitude in order to be viable! If you do have information handy on CAES systems, I wouldn't mind reading more. Thanks.
I think you missed something in my post. Given that by 2050 fuel prices will make oil plants impractical, then how can small distributed systems which require the same fuel source hope to make money on this?
As an aside, in order to go to renewable sources on a wide scale, you have to solve the peak demand problem because most renewables like solar, wind, and tidal have generating peaks that don't coincide with present consumption patterns. The only way to avoid building ginormously massive renewable projects to cover peak demand with off peak production would be to invent a way to store energy on a scale required by an electric grid. This would allow peak production and peak demand to be matched across time. This technology is not only lacking at present but we don't even have a clue as to what that technology would look like. We're freaking clueless about the most basic aspect of energy use, storage.
the solution to gasoline, is probably going to be hydrogen, we'll never run out.
Hydrogen is not a fuel source like gasoline. As a matter of fact the source of most hydrogen today is fossil fuels.
The real solution lies in switching to existing renewable energy sources. Given that, you can even go back to running a transportation infrastructure on gasoline using thermal depolymerization.. Although ethanol would be preferred since it requires the same delivery infrastructure as gasoline but can be used by both internal combustion engines and fuel cells. It's also a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen not to mention that it can also be directly consumed by humans.
And if you actually believe that Farenheit 9/11 was in anyway truthful, or based on any facts at all...
Read Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud. He's the one interviewed by Moore in front of the Saudi embassy. The book is well researched and densely referenced to credible sources. F911 doesn't include much that hasn't already been documented. See Greg Palast's Best Democracy Money Can Buy about the 2000 election.
You don't even have to read much about the Iraq conflict to realize what an un-American clusterfsck that is. For extra credit, look up which congressmen actually voted against giving Bush a blank check to wage perpetual war for elite interests. This should reveal exactly how democratic the US political system actually is.
Wide use of V2G electric-drive vehicles could generate enough power to cut the requirement for central generating station capacity by as much as 20 percent by the year 2050, says the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry research center in Palo Alto, Calif.
Oddly enough this is beyond even the most rosy projections for the end of cheap oil. If it will not be economical to provide electricity from power stations which benefit from the efficiency of scale, then how will it be possible to make money providing power from the same energy source on a distributed basis?
It sounds like some qualifying statements were left out from this projection.
This seems to suffer from the frictionless pully/surface phenomenon that most highschool physics problems require for a solution.
It's main purpose would be to stop Blackouts from happening, not to be a real source of power.
Actually, it's main purpose would be to reduce the need to build power station capacity for peak power which is pretty expensive and something used only a fraction of the time. This way power station capacity can be built for supplying constant power with peak demand being met by off grid generation.
The previous poster has it right though. Efficiency of scale is a good idea for dirty technology. Clean renewable, however, fits the distributed model better.
Why should this be something that the FCC should be doing? I can understand that universal phone service can be justified by access to emergancy services in even the most isolated communities. What comparable requirement does having broadband access serve that can't already be met by dial-up?
If you are going to mimick what the Korean's did then there's really no alternative. The gov't did it. It's pretty much the same way that the US was electrified and hooked up with phone service. The question that could have been asked back then, would then be "why telephone when you can telegraph?"
Sometimes you just can't beat well applied public funding.
You hit upon the tip of the iceberg, bookmarks and Search/Index features. I would also add notes and links.
So far, few even mention loading readers with these features. Focus seems to be on book replacement rather than enhancement. Well, book replacement is not a viable strategy for acceptance because there's nothing in a reader that a person already can't get from a book. I constantly crave to grep the dead tree in my hand for that group of words that would lead me back to reread the idea the book presented but I'm stuck thumbing through the pages hoping my brain will recognize the paragraph format or some other group of words that were close to the object of my search.
So a "reader" would obviously need an input method for these extra features. The tablet format is the most natural fit. Perhaps there won't be any readers, but tablets will simply improve to the point where people will want to read books on them. But alas, there is another barrier, DRM. Expiring books won't work when you put in 2 weeks marking up your text for easy reference. Lack of sharing will also suck if the only way to see a colleague's notes is to borrow his tablet/reader.
These problems are not technical, they're social problems. You can't solve social problems by throwing more or better technology at them. Perhaps we're simply reaching the limits of what is possible in a capitalist system run by those few who control most of the wealth.
Think about it. We're not being limited by what humans can accomplish but what some humans think is good enough lest any better starts limiting their desires.
Is it really so surprising that as spam matures it gets better at impersonating real email? It would be useful to repeat such a test periodically to see it trend over time. Likewise, it would be interesting to see the nature of valid business email content change over time to adjust. Perhaps we can have an internet age Darwin elaborate on the mechanics.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the Crusades were caused by an Economic need for more lands to accomodate the rising numbers of European Knights-errant
It just so happens that elites will use any ideas which conveniently enable power that they can, whether those be nationalist, racist, classist, religious or some combination of these to achieve their goals.
Would the Holocaust have happened without nationalism and racism?
Would the genocide of native Americans have happened without manifest destiny and racism?
Would the Russian revolution have happened without classism?
Further examples are left as an excercise for the reader.
All of these have causes easily attributable to resources, economics, wealth and so on but which without ideologies uniting people would have left an altogether different historic record.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Christianity (or any other major religion today) doesn't kill anyone
Sure it does. You are confusing religious belief with religion which is an institution. Religious beliefs based on the teachings of Christ were not responsible for The Crusades, but Christianity was. It's kind of like the difference between the US Constitution and the government of the US. It is the US government that is responsible for the invasion of Iraq and not the US Constitution.
It just so happens that elites will use any ideas which conveniently enable power that they can, whether those be nationalist, racist, classist, religious or some combination of these to achieve their goals.
Religions are susceptible to this kind of manipulation based on their penchant for conformity to dogma regardless of the beliefs that they are actually founded upon. In this sense, religions are institutions of social control as much as state power. Try to embody that in a video game.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
You have to keep in mind that major games are commercial products and therefore they will have qualities which cater to their market. A game developer will go after the largest possible market for the game. The inclusion of any religious topic is most likely to reduce the potential market for that game. Therefore, actual religions will only be treated when the lack of doing so would be a glaring omission and then only at a superficial level.
This obviously doesn't apply for products which are directly aimed at religious markets. A paraller with Mel Gibson's Passion is appropriate here. Unless enirely funded without regard for a return on investment, this is still a commercial product, just one which has a specific market as its target. In this case, treatment may be deeper but along lines most accepted by its target market.
The problem then is that an authentic exploration of topics is likely to have little commercial value and when topics are explored, funding sources will set the agenda.
The rise of political correctness has also taken its toll on historical interpretation in games. My favorite example is the strategy game of conquest "Seven Cities of Gold" (of old C64 fame) which initially placed no value on the players violent acts in subjugating indigenous populations in the new world. When the game was re-released, suddenly players faced negative consequences as kings of old Europe frowned upon casualties to native populations that the player incurred. This is blatant commercial pandering to a new political correctness movement that would rather that a game present some revisionist view of history than offend any ethnic groups.
Watergate was a petty burglary compared to COINTELPRO. Which newspaper broke that? No, I'm serious. I would like to know because I'm only familiar with books on the subject.
This could also be the reason why the NYT is so irrelevant these days. Information most relevant to the middle class is also easiest to access through the web.
When a paper makes money in advertising, it is selling the advertiser access to its readership. In the case of the NYT print edition, that readership demographic is very well established and advertisers know what they get. That is not true with the online readership and could explain the NYT's and other publications' desparate need to assess their demography as quickly as possible through the use of registrations.
Papers don't make money, ads do. Hence the quote from the article:
But the dot-com makes a scant $11 per user, while the printed paper earns the Times a whopping $900 per reader (in subscription fees and advertising).
The advertisers are clearly squeamish about the online demographic.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, you seem to suffer from the free as in beer paradigm, to borrow Stallman's phrase which will probably appear googolplex times here.
Welcome to the job market.
Employers are more likely to be concerned than educators. Sure enough, the next sentence reads:
but what he really means to say is that he's, "having trouble finding some highly skilled programmers at the salaries we offer"The following shouldn't be all that surprising as jobs are easier to come by in those countries and educators won't be all that much concerned about this trend either,
because grad students don't bring in the big bucks to universities.Besides, the focus is understandably across the board, but some industries use vastly more energy than others. Somehow this seems like almost trivial energy use compared to say aluminum processing.
Next time someone throws out "free market" when talking about jobs, it would be prudent to drag this example out.
You're confusing realestate property with personal property.
Homer tells Mr. Burns that he would do things differently if he was the governor. Mr. Burns replies, "Simpson, do you realize how much it costs to run for office? More than any honest man could afford."
Homer replies, "I bet you could afford it though."
from:http://www.peacecoup.us/content/bush-is-mon ty-burns.html
The other problem is what happens to the land after you fscked it up and are long dead and gone? Now what?
Finally, you mention:
What I know about CAES is that the 300MW German site is quite unique due to that particular geologic feature. Most of the other systems I've heard of can generate less than 100MW for a duration of at most a day or so. This would only be sufficient to cover peak demand in small towns and they do not appear to scale cost effectively although that could change. The problem is whether they could be scaled by an order of magnitude in order to be viable! If you do have information handy on CAES systems, I wouldn't mind reading more. Thanks.As an aside, in order to go to renewable sources on a wide scale, you have to solve the peak demand problem because most renewables like solar, wind, and tidal have generating peaks that don't coincide with present consumption patterns. The only way to avoid building ginormously massive renewable projects to cover peak demand with off peak production would be to invent a way to store energy on a scale required by an electric grid. This would allow peak production and peak demand to be matched across time. This technology is not only lacking at present but we don't even have a clue as to what that technology would look like. We're freaking clueless about the most basic aspect of energy use, storage.
The real solution lies in switching to existing renewable energy sources. Given that, you can even go back to running a transportation infrastructure on gasoline using thermal depolymerization.. Although ethanol would be preferred since it requires the same delivery infrastructure as gasoline but can be used by both internal combustion engines and fuel cells. It's also a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen not to mention that it can also be directly consumed by humans.
You don't even have to read much about the Iraq conflict to realize what an un-American clusterfsck that is. For extra credit, look up which congressmen actually voted against giving Bush a blank check to wage perpetual war for elite interests. This should reveal exactly how democratic the US political system actually is.
The only thing left is to make converting grandma socially acceptable. Something tells me that religious leaders would have a problem with this.
It sounds like some qualifying statements were left out from this projection.
This seems to suffer from the frictionless pully/surface phenomenon that most highschool physics problems require for a solution.
The previous poster has it right though. Efficiency of scale is a good idea for dirty technology. Clean renewable, however, fits the distributed model better.
Sometimes you just can't beat well applied public funding.
So far, few even mention loading readers with these features. Focus seems to be on book replacement rather than enhancement. Well, book replacement is not a viable strategy for acceptance because there's nothing in a reader that a person already can't get from a book. I constantly crave to grep the dead tree in my hand for that group of words that would lead me back to reread the idea the book presented but I'm stuck thumbing through the pages hoping my brain will recognize the paragraph format or some other group of words that were close to the object of my search.
So a "reader" would obviously need an input method for these extra features. The tablet format is the most natural fit. Perhaps there won't be any readers, but tablets will simply improve to the point where people will want to read books on them. But alas, there is another barrier, DRM. Expiring books won't work when you put in 2 weeks marking up your text for easy reference. Lack of sharing will also suck if the only way to see a colleague's notes is to borrow his tablet/reader.
These problems are not technical, they're social problems. You can't solve social problems by throwing more or better technology at them. Perhaps we're simply reaching the limits of what is possible in a capitalist system run by those few who control most of the wealth.
Think about it. We're not being limited by what humans can accomplish but what some humans think is good enough lest any better starts limiting their desires.
Is it really so surprising that as spam matures it gets better at impersonating real email? It would be useful to repeat such a test periodically to see it trend over time. Likewise, it would be interesting to see the nature of valid business email content change over time to adjust. Perhaps we can have an internet age Darwin elaborate on the mechanics.
Would the Holocaust have happened without nationalism and racism?
Would the genocide of native Americans have happened without manifest destiny and racism?
Would the Russian revolution have happened without classism?
Further examples are left as an excercise for the reader.
All of these have causes easily attributable to resources, economics, wealth and so on but which without ideologies uniting people would have left an altogether different historic record.
It just so happens that elites will use any ideas which conveniently enable power that they can, whether those be nationalist, racist, classist, religious or some combination of these to achieve their goals.
Religions are susceptible to this kind of manipulation based on their penchant for conformity to dogma regardless of the beliefs that they are actually founded upon. In this sense, religions are institutions of social control as much as state power. Try to embody that in a video game.
This obviously doesn't apply for products which are directly aimed at religious markets. A paraller with Mel Gibson's Passion is appropriate here. Unless enirely funded without regard for a return on investment, this is still a commercial product, just one which has a specific market as its target. In this case, treatment may be deeper but along lines most accepted by its target market.
The problem then is that an authentic exploration of topics is likely to have little commercial value and when topics are explored, funding sources will set the agenda.
The rise of political correctness has also taken its toll on historical interpretation in games. My favorite example is the strategy game of conquest "Seven Cities of Gold" (of old C64 fame) which initially placed no value on the players violent acts in subjugating indigenous populations in the new world. When the game was re-released, suddenly players faced negative consequences as kings of old Europe frowned upon casualties to native populations that the player incurred. This is blatant commercial pandering to a new political correctness movement that would rather that a game present some revisionist view of history than offend any ethnic groups.
You might make less but you will live better.
This could also be the reason why the NYT is so irrelevant these days. Information most relevant to the middle class is also easiest to access through the web.
Papers don't make money, ads do. Hence the quote from the article:
The advertisers are clearly squeamish about the online demographic.