I'm going to agree with others - net metering doesn't scale beyond a point. Nevada has NOT hit that point by any reasonable measure, they'd still need 10X the solar installs for that.
Hawaii has hit that point. I think they're looking into time of use billing (which requires smart meters), and it's quite likely that night time power in Hawaii is going to end up more expensive than daytime due to the amount of solar. The electric company is having to adjust/update their distribution centers to allow backfeeding from them, because a few neighborhoods can actually go negative now.
Which can actually make batteries(which have been dropping cost too), and other storage solutions viable. When electricity is cheap/free, make sure your hot water tank is 'topped off'. Heck, have a cold water tank for what little AC homes there need, and chill that at that point. Etc...
Hawaii generates electricity by burning oil which has to be brought over by cargo ship. Consequently, they have the most expensive electricity in the U.S. 34 cents/kWh vs a national average of 9.84 cents/kWh.
That's what makes solar economically viable and so common there - not because solar is cheap/free, but because competing electricity sources are so expensive.
Fines shouldn't go to the government. That's what causes things like corrupt cities setting up speed traps when they have a budget shortfall.
Fines for violations against the public should go into a government fund. And every year when every taxpayer files their taxes, they get a proportional share out of that fund; either as a tax credit or a refund. That way the money goes back directly to the public.
About a quarter of that 20% increase is simply due to increased number of passengers. The 2015 data isn't completely tabulated yet, but it looks to be about 5% more passengers than 2014 (table 7).
The sanctuary idea works for shallow water species which live near shore, or in estuaries when they are young. Unfortunately, most of the staple food fishes (cod, pollack, anchovies, tuna, mackerel, herring, etc) are open-water fishes. They spawn in the open ocean, and move where the currents and temperature breaks take them. This has made both studying and regulating the fishery extremely difficult (especially for tuna, which travel around the entire ocean crossing dozens of countries' jurisdictions).
Long-term, as with farming and livestock on land, it looks like fish farming is the way to go. It still has a lot of problems which still need to be solved (pollution from fish excrement, loss of genetic diversity, etc). But several species (carp, tilapia) are extremely hardy and grow quickly in dirty and low-quality water. There will still be wild fisheries for species which don't grow well in captivity, but the bulk of the world's consumed fish will probably come from farms.
Fisheries are not a linear system where any negative pressure automatically results in a population decrease. Contrary to the adage, a "delicate balance" in nature is extraordinarily rare, almost unheard of. Any delicate balance by its very nature ceases to exist pretty quickly.
Most systems in nature are extremely stable, able to absorb huge variances in input forces without destabilizing. Anything less stable already self-destructed millions of years ago. Fish populations can absorb a substantial amount of predation while still being self-sustaining. But eventually you hit the limits of the system's ability to self-stabilize and the population begins decreasing. Simply fishing does not automatically lead to depletion; fishing beyond this point of sustainability does.
Actually, the program to see if the U.S. Navy could use biofuels began in 2003. It was successful enough that the Navy mandated that in 2005 all non-tactical vehicles use a blend of 20% biodiesel., which made the Navy the biggest user of biodiesel in the world. But it's nice to hear you think Bush was so forward-thinking.
And why I dislike framing the argument against this sort of thing as a right to privacy like the EU does. I tried bringing this up way back in the 1990s when rumors of Carnivore began circulating. If you frame this in terms of privacy, then this type of surveillance becomes legal. It's not a person searching your files (or sniffing network traffic) for pattern matches, it's a machine. Only matches are turned over, and the data of innocents remain private despite having been searched.
It's not privacy which is sacrosanct here; it's the right to be free from government searches without sufficient suspicion. The way this needs to be framed is in terms of the limits of government power. If the government has this type of surveillance power, you may joke about the word "bomb" in your post triggering the FBI's monitoring software, but the chilling effect it has on free speech is the same whether the search was carried out by software or by an authoritarian government trying to control the populace.
To put it another way if we've decided that individual freedom is more important than government control, then this is one of the tools we simply cannot allow government to have. It is incompatible with the notion of government for the people, by the people, of the people. If that leads to the downfall of democracy, then so be it. The sole reason for democracy's existence is as a bulwark against authoritarian government control. If democracy self-implodes in this fashion - because people are too scared of terrorism they democratically choose to give government that authoritative control - then we'll either just have to accept that democracy is conceptually a failure, or we'll have to come up with a new idea for a system of government which respects and protects individual liberty.
I did some tow tank testing at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Research Center in the mid-1990s. It's a secure facility which makes money on the side by renting time to companies wishing to model test their ship designs in one of the world's longest tow tanks. So we had to have be escorted by Navy personnel at all times. About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked our escort what they were.
"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked "What's their capacity?"
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse when you replaced them and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
A company can never pay you what you are worth because they'd never make a profit doing that.
While that's literally true, it's more complicated than that.
If you work at a company, you are able to devote 100% of your time doing what you are best at. Call it $100k worth of work. Your pay may be, say, 70% of that 100% productivity's value - $70k. So the company is "only paying you" 70% of what you are worth.
You say screw them and decide to work for yourself. You get bogged down doing a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork running your own business. Taxes, accounting, tracking down and wooing new clients, dealing with defective product returns, booking your own trips or scheduling vehicle repairs, etc. If that takes up 30% of your time, then you are only able to produce only 70% as much work as when you were working at the company. Consequently, you end up making... $70k. Same as when you were at the company.
When you worked at the company, you spent 100% of your time doing what you are best at. Someone skilled in taxes and accounting spent 100% of their time doing those things. Someone good at getting new clients spent 100% of their time doing that. etc. So the stuff that takes 30% of your time when you are self-employed, is done for only 10% of these people's time because they are much better at it than you are.
Consequently the net cost to the company to produce the same amount of work you did when you were self-employed is $70k + $10k = $80k (keep it simple and assume everyone gets paid the same per unit of productivity). The value of your work is $100k, they paid you $70k, other workers $10k (for the fraction of their work they do related to you), and the remaining $20k the company kept for operations and profit.
You were working just as many hours as when you were self-employed, but you were doing only what you were best at doing, thus you were more productive. You were getting paid just as much as when you are self-employed ($70k), but your higher productivity by putting you together with other employees is what allowed the company to make a profit. There's also synergistic effects. If you're a specialist in materials and another employee is a specialist is biochemistry, the two of you together may be able to come up with a great product which neither of you could've made alone.
Adjust these numbers a little and you could actually end up making more money working for a company than you could alone. It takes a special blend of someone with a trade skill, plus accounting skills, plus management and organizational skills, plus people skills (to woo customers) to succeed on their own. If you are deficient in any one of these skills, you are probably better off working for a company where people better at these tasks can handle it for you. (Or you can start your own company but hire or partner with someone skilled in the area you're deficient in - how Jobs and Wozniak complemented each other.)
The real benefit of working for yourself isn't that you make more money per hour of work you put in. Most self-employed people work more hours because they spend 8 hours doing their trade skill, then 2-3 more hours afterward doing all the management and paperwork. The real benefit is that if you succeed, the fruits of your success pass directly to you, instead of being absorbed by the company. (The flip side of course is that if you fail, you don't make money or even lose money, whereas working for a company you're guaranteed to make at least your salary. Employment is like a savings account at a bank - you can't lose money, but you pay for that safety with a very low interest rate. Starting your own business is like taking your money and investing it in stocks instead of putting it in a savings account - you could make a lot more money, but you could also lose money.)
Doctors just want fancy equipment so they can keep up status.
Doctors are lazy and entitled, and can't be bothered to do anything beneath them.
You've just broken the cardinal rule of User Interface design. The user does not exist to use the device; the device exists to be used by the user. If the user is unable or unwilling to quickly adapt to the device's UI, the fault is in the UI, not the user. It doesn't matter if they're lazy, entitled, stuck-up, whatever. If you want your device to be successful, you have to make them want to use it.
I've been helping several doctors set up and transition over the EHR systems. The thing I keep hearing over and over again is, why do they have to do this when paper records were working just fine? In other words, the cost of computerizing their patient records is exceeding the benefit they're seeing. And this isn't doctors and nurses who are trying to learn a new EHR system. Most of them have been using a EHR for 2-3 years now. They know how to use the systems, they systems are just so convoluted that it's impeding their workflow compared to paper records. That's a massive failure of user interface and software design.
Why do you think Apple is so successful despite selling technically inferior products? Because they get this - they make their devices dirt simple to use.
Lincoln: "Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that coins are starting to become too expensive to make, so one of us is going to have to go. And... why are all of you looking at me?"
I'd be overjoyed to get rid of the penny, probably the nickel too. But there's an idiot contingent within the population which fears that if we do, stores will just round up prices to the nearest 10 cents and they'll have to pay more. I call them idiots because they haven't yet figured out that the amount of time we waste dealing with pennies is far more valuable than the few extra cents we save. I was helping set up a food fair once, and the accountant who was responsible for stocking and emptying the cash registers was busy making sure all the prices ended in 9 cents. I pulled him over and asked him if he really wanted to deal with shuffling pennies back and forth between the various registers, as they collected too many or ran low. Because he needed to tally how much each station sold, he couldn't just move pennies from one register to another. He would have to count every single penny he transferred (e.g. trade 100 pennies for a $1 bill). The light bulb went on and he changed all the prices to end in 0 or 5 cents. In fact the next year, I noticed he'd made all the prices end in a multiple of 25 cents.
But you know what, it's all mind bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of dams is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast.
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines. And on a global aggregate, the number of deaths caused by wind turbines per MWh of energy generated far exceeds the number of deaths caused by nuclear, Fukushima and Chernobyl included. Nuclear is safer, its deaths are just more exotic radiation deaths which, like an airliner crash, happen all at once and grab headlines, not mundane falls by maintenance workers which don't even make the local news.
The global installed PV capacity is about 200 GW. But that's just peak generating capacity. Once you factor in night, weather, angle of the sun, maintenance, PV solar only has a capacity factor of about 0.125. So that 200 GW of capacity only generates 200*0.125 = 25 GW on average throughout the year. Fukushima Daiichi I had a capacity of 4.7 GW, and nuclear's capacity factor worldwide is about 0.9. So its average generation had it remained operational would've been 4.2 GW. In other words the combined power generation of every PV solar installation in the world is slightly less than just 6 Fukushima-sized power plants.
That's the huge difference in scale we're talking about when comparing these technologies. How many people died installing and maintaining all those PV installations throughout the world? If it's more than 1/6th what Fukushima killed, then PV solar in regular operation kills more people than half-century-old nuclear technology on its worst day.
Unless you're doing something storage-intensive with very large files (e.g. real-time video editing), there's very little benefit. The problem is we perceive computer speed in terms of how much time we have to wait, and MB/s is the inverse of wait time (sec/MB). So each doubling of MB/s only results in half the decrease in wait time of the previous doubling. Imagine you needed to read 1 GB of sequential data.
See how the decrease in wait time is halved with each step? And how even an infinitely fast SSD can never save you as much time as the jump from a HDD to a SATA2 SSD? We've already achieved most of the time savings there is to get from SSDs. The rest is mostly dick-waving to come up with a bigger MB/s number which means very little in actual use.
(Same thing goes for MPG - it's the inverse of fuel consumption. So the higher the MPG, the fuel each additional 10 MPG saves. The rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km for this reason. Each person you convince to switch from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan saves 1.33x more fuel than each person in a 25 MPG sedan you convince to buy a 50 MPG Prius. And improving a tractor trailer's efficiency from 6 MPG to 7 MPG saves more fuel per mile than switching from a sedan to a Prius, despite the "improvement" being 1 MPG vs 25 MPG.)
On top of this, the predominant cause of delays when accessing a SSD are the small file (4k) read/writes. And this drive less than doubles those (140-210K IOPS, vs about 100-130K IOPS with current SATA3 SSDs).
No, the problem is loans. The top 1% aren't amassing wealth by stealing it from the other 99%. The 99% are willfully agreeing to hand it over to them in the form of interest on all sorts of loans.
Productivity gains haven't translated into increased real income for two main reasons: Increased cost of housing, and increased cost of education. The market price for homes is determined almost entirely by how much people are willing to pay, not by how much it costs to build. If cost were the predominant factor, homes would depreciate as they got older, like cars. Instead they appreciate because of widespread availability of credit (loans) and increased demand (population is increasing, land area is not).
Look at the long-term inflation-adjusted home prices. From the 1890s to 1930s the average real home price decreased as you'd expect from technological progress making them cheaper to construct. But in 1934 the National Housing Act was passed, then Fannie Mae was created in 1938, then the GI Bill after WWII. Real home prices began climbing until they stabilized at nearly double what they were pre-1930 (the graph is a log scale). All of these programs allowed people to cheaply borrow money. If you double the amount of money people are able to use to bid on a home, of course the price of a home is going to double. It happened again during the housing bubble of the 2000s. Extremely low interest rates and relaxed lending standards meant a lot of money was borrowed cheaply, and when lots of people can borrow lots of money, they bid up the price of large purchases like houses.
The same thing has been going on with college education. People wring their hands over the increasing cost of college tuitions which have been vastly outpacing the rate of inflation, asking why is this happening? It's damn obvious why it's happening - the widespread availability of college loans. We've got a perverse positive feedback loop where college gets expensive, people argue that students need assistance to pay for it so we make programs to provide them low-interest loans. That borrowed money allows students to bid up the price of tuition (the school raises the price beyond a point where the student would normally decline to attend because of the high tuition, but instead they get a student loan and pay the higher tuition). That allows tuition to increase even more, leading to people arguing for more student assistance.
So it's the loans which are causing the rise in price of these non-commodity big-ticket items, which are eating up a huge portion of our productivity gains since the early 1900s. The next question is, who is the beneficiary of all these loans? Well to loan someone money, you have to have money. In other words, the 1%. You get a 30-year mortgage whose amortization means half of your total payments will go to principal, half to interest. Basically you're buying a house, and agreeing to pay for an identical house for a 1%er. (Slightly less due to inflation, but we're in a low-interest rate period. At an 8% interest rate, it's 62% interest, 38% principal. At the 16% interest rate of the early 1980s, its 79% interest, 21% principal.)
You want to stop the transfer of wealth to the 1%? Get rid of the loans. Ratchet back the maximum duration of a loan to 15, then 7 years, and make it harder to roll over balances from end of one loan to the start of another. Cap the interest rate so the percentage that's paid to interest over the life of the loan can't exceed 25% or 33%. Yes this will make it harder to buy a house or get an education - that has to happen if you want the price of those things to drop. People will have to learn to save first, buy later; instead of buy now, pay for it later. If you want to assist low-income people trying to buy a home or go to college, do it with supply-side subsidies. Build more government-funded or government-sponsored housing to increase the supply of housing. Create more public universities with capped tuitions to increase the supply of education. Don't do it with things like loans which create more demand.
Historically, unless the countries are at war, these things are returned. When Cuban defectors flew MiGs to the U.S., the planes were returned. Completely disassembled and shipped back in crates, but they were returned. Same thing with the U.S. EP-3E which landed on Hainan Island. China returned it to the U.S., in crates after they'd completely taken it apart, but they returned it. The U-2 plane which the Soviets shot down was also returned, minus the film and a few pieces of the plane which are still on display in a Moscow museum.
If Cuba won't return the missile, that puts them in the company of Iran, who flaunted International law and precedent by not returning the U.S. spy drone which landed in their country, and North Korea, which still holds the USS Pueblo.
Companies that don't have the notion of aliased accounts or special account types for this purpose are just asking for issues.
And how exactly is a company supposed to make an aliased email account to register its domain, if it doesn't yet own its own domain?
A lot of us older IT folk were forced to register the company's domain in our name using our personal funds because our managers were clueless about the Internet at the time. It was either spend (waste) dozens of hours over several weeks or months trying to explain the importance of a domain to them, during which time someone else or even a competitor could grab the domain. Or pay $5-$7 out of pocket and grab the domain immediately, and deal with reimbursement later.
So you take the most powerful hurricane ever to be evidence AGAINST a prediction of super hurricanes?
Actually, yes. It was the most powerful hurricane, but it wasn't the most powerful tropical cyclone. Not by a long shot. There were 4 to 7 more intense cyclones, all in the West Pacific during the 1950s-1970s. (A lot of the early measurements were in inches of Hg, while recent measurements are in mm of Hg. The uncertainty in the measurement of the early "880 mmHg" storms overlaps with the uncertainty in Patricia's 879mm, so they could in fact have been more powerful than Patricia.)
But the media was so busy tripping over themselves to present Patricia as evidence of global warming, that it was commonly misreported as the "most powerful" hurricane ever. Apparently when something happens which supports the hypothesis of global warming, it's ok to abuse a linguistic curiosity to manufacture a story (tropical cyclones are called typhoons, hurricanes, or cyclones depending on which part of the world they happen in, even though they're all the same thing). Thus it becomes evidence of pro-global warming bias in the media rather than evidence for the prediction of super hurricanes.
As for evidence of super hurricanes, of the 77 cyclones on Earth measured to have reached 900 mmHg pressures or lower (arbitrary cutoff, I picked it because that's the highest the West Pacific data on that Wiki page goes, feel free to crunch the numbers yourself):
1935 = 1
1950s = 11
1960s = 15
1970s = 13
1980s = 15
1990s = 8
2000s = 6
2010s = 8 (projects to 13 by the end of the decade)
Bear in mind that before the 1970s, we didn't have global weather satellite coverage, so there were probably a lot of powerful storms in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s that aren't on that list because they were too far from shore for us to measure or even know about. Looking at that list, not only does it look like the super hurricane hypothesis is wrong, but that the opposite has been happening. We've been getting fewer powerful storms than in the past, not more. And what's really going on is probably just temporal bias - the tendency for you to remember recent events more strongly than events which happened in the distant past.
BTW, typhoon Tip (1979) was a monster - nearly half the size of the continental U.S. Not only was it the most powerful storm, it was biggest. Patricia, Wilma, Katrina, Rita were all wild storms. But they're like little children compared to Tip.
It's worth pointing out that the U.S. became the industrial powerhouse it is by ignoring European patent and copyright law during the late 1800s/early 1900s, and illegally building tools and products based on European designs.
I'm of the opinion that IP holders have gotten fat and lazy by manipulating the legal process to extend IP law and duration far, far beyond the point where it's helpful to the economy. And if China can build this stuff cheaper and better by flaunting IP law, then the world will be better for it even if it screws over the IP holders. That's not to say IP is useless. Just that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, and it needs to be swung back to return us to the point where IP law is benefiting society.
But it's more like a souped up socialist paradise where everybody has a guaranteed minimum quality of life and if they want to improve their life they can but if they don't then they won't starve to death or freeze or even have to worry about money. There are no shitty jobs, they've all been automated or replaced by replicators.
It's important to realize that such an economy is highly dependent on cheap energy. Replicator technology basically uses as much energy as a 6 megaton nuke to create a cup of Earl Grey tea (excluding the cup, saucer, and spoon). That's roughly the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear reactor operating for 9.5 months. Or $750 million worth of electricity at the average U.S. price of $0.12 per kWh.
If you look at our modern culture, it's basically the same thing. Higher standard of living is a direct result of access to cheap energy. We don't have to spend 2/3rds of our waking lives working in the fields just to grow enough food for us to eat because we have cheap energy to power machines to do the work for us. If you want to grow a garden for some of your food for entertainment, by all means do so. But don't fall for the fantasy that you can become self-sufficient by doing so. At least not with a lot of manual labor or access to cheap external energy sources to do that labor for you. (The graphic assumes about 2300 kcal/day per person. If you work the fields yourself, you're looking at more like 3500-5000 kcal/day.)
Let's see... Typical refrigerator has a volume of approx 16 cubic feet on the refrigerator side, or 453 liters. Figure 1/3 of that is take up by food or held in drawers. That gives approx 300 liters of chilled air which falls out as you hold the door open looking at the contents.
Figure room temperature is 20 C and the refrigerator is 2 C. At this temperature range, air has a density of about 1.25 kg/m^3, and a heat capacity of 1.005 kJ / kg*K. We have (1.25 kg/m^2) * (0.3 m^3) = 0.375 kg of air. (0.375 kg) * (20C - 2C) * (1.005 kJ / kg*K) = 6.784 kJ of energy which is lost every time you open the refrigerator door (well, added to the interior of the refrigerator). Since the air is chilled via a heat pump, this isn't its actual energy use. The best refrigerators typically have a real-world COP (coefficient of performance) of about 3, or 1 Joule of electricity us used to pump out 3 Joules of heat. So 6784 Joules of heat represents 2261 Joules of electricity used.
If the camera and associated circuit board use 2 Watts while active, then opening the refrigerator door uses as much energy as keeping the camera powered up for (2261 Joules) / (2 Watts) = 18.8 minutes. If the screen uses 20 Watts, then the total 22 Watts consumption means you'd have to stare at the screen for 1.7 minutes to use as much energy as opening the door once. If it uses 0.1 Watts while idle (around what a smartphone uses), then opening the refrigerator door once is enough to power it for 6.3 hours.
Based on these back of the envelope calcs, I'd say the camera + monitor uses less energy than opening the refrigerator door. I should note though that 2261 Joules is 0.000628 kWh, or about 0.0075 cents worth of electricity. So we're really picking over minutiae (unless you're in a habit of holding the refrigerator door open long enough for food to start warming up). The convenience of the camera and remote monitoring is a bigger factor, though I'd probably lose the built-in screen (the most expensive part of the system) and rely on a phone or computer to view the contents.
Glass doors work in the oven because the inside his hotter than the outside. In a refrigerator, the inside is cooler. If the glass does not provide enough insulation, it will allow more heat to enter than the rest of the refrigerator surface, resulting in the glass being cooler. In certain climates, this will cause condensation to form on the glass. (The same thing happens in reverse in ovens - if you're baking a particularly moist meal like a turkey for a long time, condensation will form on the glass on the inside).
The insulation in refrigerators has become incredibly efficient - able to keep the contents cool for over a day without power if you don't open the door. To match that with glass would probably require some sort of transparent vacuum vessel. Ask anyone in their 40s or older about vacuum thermoses (modern ones just use insulation and are not as good). They frequently cracked and compromised the vacuum, making them useless. If it cracks in a refrigerator, you don't have the option to stop using it until you can replace the broken part. This would cause it to bleed energy until you got it replaced.
So although a glass window would be simpler in construction, it's actually more complicated in terms of functionality. Given that CCD cameras have dropped to a few dollars in cost, it's actually the simpler solution. What makes it expensive is the huge-ass 21.5" 1080p monitor they decided to stick on the door. If they'd left that out and just let you view the video stream on your phone or computer, this would be a really cheap and simple upgrade.
I noticed the same thing as Derakhshan. When I first learned about the Internet in 1988, I was astonished at the possibilities. Yeah my email address was set up by my school and my ftp site ran on my school's servers. But at the time my long-term goal was to set up my own server to do all this stuff on my own. Likewise, your finger profile was yours to make, and your server responded to finger requests. Tools like talk allowed point-to-point communication. When the world wide web rolled out, you could create your own web page all under control of your own web server.
But doing all these things required learning new skills and effort. Most people are lazy. Sites like GeoCities and then MySpace allowed you to create these things with minimal effort. All you had to do was give up control over where your content was hosted. Same goes for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and eventually Facebook.
Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.
Complexity is what let the marketing assholes win. Open source programmers enjoyed and encouraged the class stratification it created between programmers and users. No longer were they hidden in the basement keeping the world's infrastructure running, suddenly they were in the spotlight with users begging them for features and bug fixes. So instead of making the tools for running your own email server or website dirt simple to set up and use, they reveled in the complexity of the software they wrote and dismissed the calls for user friendliness from "luddites."
Consequently, when some clever marketer set up a service which was easy to use, regular non-programmers flocked to them. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. all emphasize simplicity and ease of use, almost to a fault. Faced with a choice between giving up their privacy, vs giving up their time to read through reams of Howtos to learn how the hell to compile and configure Apache and PHP, most regular people opted for the former. The money these companies make is just icing on the cake - Google and Facebook didn't make a dime until after they were successful.
Craigslist is a good example of what can happen, what could have happened, if someone interested in open source and free services actually puts effort into making their service easy for the lay person to use. Unfortunately most open source projects are too full of themselves, seeing themselves not as bettering mankind, but controlling a tool which they "magnanimously" allow luddite users to use. Go ahead. I dare you. Go to any open source project site, say you're not a programmer and then dare to suggest that maybe they could make their software easier to use or set up. Most people working in open source demand payment, just not in the form of money. They demand gratitude, acknowledgment, and worship. Given a choice between increasing their userbase by 10x or 100x by making their software easier to use and set up, they'd rather keep it difficult to use as a way to maintain their position of power over the users'. Hell, Linux never rose about 1% of the end-user market until Google prettied it up and made it easy to use in the form of Android.
Marketers just seized upon an opportunity. That opportunity was created by the arrogance of open source developers in not understanding the laziness of users.
That's not really where TFA errs. It errs in assuming that " the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner" is directed "toward women." Ask any non-programmer who has asked for help or requested a feature in an open source project. They're usually met with a boorish, condescending, objectifying response even if they're male.
Basically Perens wrote a critique of the Open Source culture. He unnecessarily cast it in terms of misogyny instead of making it a general treatise on behavior among programmers.
Secretary Clinton unknowingly received it on her unclassified email system.
Which would be fine if someone else had set up the unclassified email system, and she happened to use it because she didn't know better. That would make her the innocent victim you're trying to cast her as.
But she directed the (illegal) unclassified email system to be made. She was in charge of making sure that even though it was skirting the law, it would be set up in such a way that at least the spirit of the law was fulfilled if not the letter. She did not. That makes her culpable for having received classified emails on the system she ordered be created. Basically, she wanted the ability to CYA by withholding her government emails from the public record, and willfully scarified the security of state secrets to obtain that ability.
It's the flip side of the Android OS fragmentation issue. Yeah if you force all your users to upgrade to the latest OS, there's less fragmentation. But it creates these types of usability problems. (Which the press mostly chooses to ignore because they're in love with Apple. "Upgrade to a newer Android phone" is not viewed as a solution to the Android fragmentation problem. But "Upgrade to a newer iPhone" is viewed as an acceptable solution to these OS-induced performance issues.)
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Hawaii generates electricity by burning oil which has to be brought over by cargo ship. Consequently, they have the most expensive electricity in the U.S. 34 cents/kWh vs a national average of 9.84 cents/kWh.
That's what makes solar economically viable and so common there - not because solar is cheap/free, but because competing electricity sources are so expensive.
Fines shouldn't go to the government. That's what causes things like corrupt cities setting up speed traps when they have a budget shortfall.
Fines for violations against the public should go into a government fund. And every year when every taxpayer files their taxes, they get a proportional share out of that fund; either as a tax credit or a refund. That way the money goes back directly to the public.
About a quarter of that 20% increase is simply due to increased number of passengers. The 2015 data isn't completely tabulated yet, but it looks to be about 5% more passengers than 2014 (table 7).
The sanctuary idea works for shallow water species which live near shore, or in estuaries when they are young. Unfortunately, most of the staple food fishes (cod, pollack, anchovies, tuna, mackerel, herring, etc) are open-water fishes. They spawn in the open ocean, and move where the currents and temperature breaks take them. This has made both studying and regulating the fishery extremely difficult (especially for tuna, which travel around the entire ocean crossing dozens of countries' jurisdictions).
Long-term, as with farming and livestock on land, it looks like fish farming is the way to go. It still has a lot of problems which still need to be solved (pollution from fish excrement, loss of genetic diversity, etc). But several species (carp, tilapia) are extremely hardy and grow quickly in dirty and low-quality water. There will still be wild fisheries for species which don't grow well in captivity, but the bulk of the world's consumed fish will probably come from farms.
Fisheries are not a linear system where any negative pressure automatically results in a population decrease. Contrary to the adage, a "delicate balance" in nature is extraordinarily rare, almost unheard of. Any delicate balance by its very nature ceases to exist pretty quickly.
Most systems in nature are extremely stable, able to absorb huge variances in input forces without destabilizing. Anything less stable already self-destructed millions of years ago. Fish populations can absorb a substantial amount of predation while still being self-sustaining. But eventually you hit the limits of the system's ability to self-stabilize and the population begins decreasing. Simply fishing does not automatically lead to depletion; fishing beyond this point of sustainability does.
Actually, the program to see if the U.S. Navy could use biofuels began in 2003. It was successful enough that the Navy mandated that in 2005 all non-tactical vehicles use a blend of 20% biodiesel., which made the Navy the biggest user of biodiesel in the world. But it's nice to hear you think Bush was so forward-thinking.
And why I dislike framing the argument against this sort of thing as a right to privacy like the EU does. I tried bringing this up way back in the 1990s when rumors of Carnivore began circulating. If you frame this in terms of privacy, then this type of surveillance becomes legal. It's not a person searching your files (or sniffing network traffic) for pattern matches, it's a machine. Only matches are turned over, and the data of innocents remain private despite having been searched.
It's not privacy which is sacrosanct here; it's the right to be free from government searches without sufficient suspicion. The way this needs to be framed is in terms of the limits of government power. If the government has this type of surveillance power, you may joke about the word "bomb" in your post triggering the FBI's monitoring software, but the chilling effect it has on free speech is the same whether the search was carried out by software or by an authoritarian government trying to control the populace.
To put it another way if we've decided that individual freedom is more important than government control, then this is one of the tools we simply cannot allow government to have. It is incompatible with the notion of government for the people, by the people, of the people. If that leads to the downfall of democracy, then so be it. The sole reason for democracy's existence is as a bulwark against authoritarian government control. If democracy self-implodes in this fashion - because people are too scared of terrorism they democratically choose to give government that authoritative control - then we'll either just have to accept that democracy is conceptually a failure, or we'll have to come up with a new idea for a system of government which respects and protects individual liberty.
I did some tow tank testing at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Research Center in the mid-1990s. It's a secure facility which makes money on the side by renting time to companies wishing to model test their ship designs in one of the world's longest tow tanks. So we had to have be escorted by Navy personnel at all times. About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked our escort what they were.
"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked "What's their capacity?"
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse when you replaced them and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
While that's literally true, it's more complicated than that.
If you work at a company, you are able to devote 100% of your time doing what you are best at. Call it $100k worth of work. Your pay may be, say, 70% of that 100% productivity's value - $70k. So the company is "only paying you" 70% of what you are worth.
You say screw them and decide to work for yourself. You get bogged down doing a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork running your own business. Taxes, accounting, tracking down and wooing new clients, dealing with defective product returns, booking your own trips or scheduling vehicle repairs, etc. If that takes up 30% of your time, then you are only able to produce only 70% as much work as when you were working at the company. Consequently, you end up making... $70k. Same as when you were at the company.
When you worked at the company, you spent 100% of your time doing what you are best at. Someone skilled in taxes and accounting spent 100% of their time doing those things. Someone good at getting new clients spent 100% of their time doing that. etc. So the stuff that takes 30% of your time when you are self-employed, is done for only 10% of these people's time because they are much better at it than you are.
Consequently the net cost to the company to produce the same amount of work you did when you were self-employed is $70k + $10k = $80k (keep it simple and assume everyone gets paid the same per unit of productivity). The value of your work is $100k, they paid you $70k, other workers $10k (for the fraction of their work they do related to you), and the remaining $20k the company kept for operations and profit.
You were working just as many hours as when you were self-employed, but you were doing only what you were best at doing, thus you were more productive. You were getting paid just as much as when you are self-employed ($70k), but your higher productivity by putting you together with other employees is what allowed the company to make a profit. There's also synergistic effects. If you're a specialist in materials and another employee is a specialist is biochemistry, the two of you together may be able to come up with a great product which neither of you could've made alone.
Adjust these numbers a little and you could actually end up making more money working for a company than you could alone. It takes a special blend of someone with a trade skill, plus accounting skills, plus management and organizational skills, plus people skills (to woo customers) to succeed on their own. If you are deficient in any one of these skills, you are probably better off working for a company where people better at these tasks can handle it for you. (Or you can start your own company but hire or partner with someone skilled in the area you're deficient in - how Jobs and Wozniak complemented each other.)
The real benefit of working for yourself isn't that you make more money per hour of work you put in. Most self-employed people work more hours because they spend 8 hours doing their trade skill, then 2-3 more hours afterward doing all the management and paperwork. The real benefit is that if you succeed, the fruits of your success pass directly to you, instead of being absorbed by the company. (The flip side of course is that if you fail, you don't make money or even lose money, whereas working for a company you're guaranteed to make at least your salary. Employment is like a savings account at a bank - you can't lose money, but you pay for that safety with a very low interest rate. Starting your own business is like taking your money and investing it in stocks instead of putting it in a savings account - you could make a lot more money, but you could also lose money.)
You've just broken the cardinal rule of User Interface design. The user does not exist to use the device; the device exists to be used by the user. If the user is unable or unwilling to quickly adapt to the device's UI, the fault is in the UI, not the user. It doesn't matter if they're lazy, entitled, stuck-up, whatever. If you want your device to be successful, you have to make them want to use it.
I've been helping several doctors set up and transition over the EHR systems. The thing I keep hearing over and over again is, why do they have to do this when paper records were working just fine? In other words, the cost of computerizing their patient records is exceeding the benefit they're seeing. And this isn't doctors and nurses who are trying to learn a new EHR system. Most of them have been using a EHR for 2-3 years now. They know how to use the systems, they systems are just so convoluted that it's impeding their workflow compared to paper records. That's a massive failure of user interface and software design.
Why do you think Apple is so successful despite selling technically inferior products? Because they get this - they make their devices dirt simple to use.
We've been trying to for decades. Back in the late 1970s there was a comic with the front of all the U.S. coins in a row. It was captioned:
Lincoln: "Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that coins are starting to become too expensive to make, so one of us is going to have to go. And... why are all of you looking at me?"
I'd be overjoyed to get rid of the penny, probably the nickel too. But there's an idiot contingent within the population which fears that if we do, stores will just round up prices to the nearest 10 cents and they'll have to pay more. I call them idiots because they haven't yet figured out that the amount of time we waste dealing with pennies is far more valuable than the few extra cents we save. I was helping set up a food fair once, and the accountant who was responsible for stocking and emptying the cash registers was busy making sure all the prices ended in 9 cents. I pulled him over and asked him if he really wanted to deal with shuffling pennies back and forth between the various registers, as they collected too many or ran low. Because he needed to tally how much each station sold, he couldn't just move pennies from one register to another. He would have to count every single penny he transferred (e.g. trade 100 pennies for a $1 bill). The light bulb went on and he changed all the prices to end in 0 or 5 cents. In fact the next year, I noticed he'd made all the prices end in a multiple of 25 cents.
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines. And on a global aggregate, the number of deaths caused by wind turbines per MWh of energy generated far exceeds the number of deaths caused by nuclear, Fukushima and Chernobyl included. Nuclear is safer, its deaths are just more exotic radiation deaths which, like an airliner crash, happen all at once and grab headlines, not mundane falls by maintenance workers which don't even make the local news.
The global installed PV capacity is about 200 GW. But that's just peak generating capacity. Once you factor in night, weather, angle of the sun, maintenance, PV solar only has a capacity factor of about 0.125. So that 200 GW of capacity only generates 200*0.125 = 25 GW on average throughout the year. Fukushima Daiichi I had a capacity of 4.7 GW, and nuclear's capacity factor worldwide is about 0.9. So its average generation had it remained operational would've been 4.2 GW. In other words the combined power generation of every PV solar installation in the world is slightly less than just 6 Fukushima-sized power plants.
That's the huge difference in scale we're talking about when comparing these technologies. How many people died installing and maintaining all those PV installations throughout the world? If it's more than 1/6th what Fukushima killed, then PV solar in regular operation kills more people than half-century-old nuclear technology on its worst day.
Unless you're doing something storage-intensive with very large files (e.g. real-time video editing), there's very little benefit. The problem is we perceive computer speed in terms of how much time we have to wait, and MB/s is the inverse of wait time (sec/MB). So each doubling of MB/s only results in half the decrease in wait time of the previous doubling. Imagine you needed to read 1 GB of sequential data.
125 MB/s HDD = 8 sec
250 MB/s SATA 2 SSD = 4 sec
500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD = 2 sec
1 GB/s PCIe SSD = 1 sec
2 GB/s NVMe SSD = 0.5 sec
4 GB/sec SSD = 0.25 sec
See how the decrease in wait time is halved with each step? And how even an infinitely fast SSD can never save you as much time as the jump from a HDD to a SATA2 SSD? We've already achieved most of the time savings there is to get from SSDs. The rest is mostly dick-waving to come up with a bigger MB/s number which means very little in actual use.
(Same thing goes for MPG - it's the inverse of fuel consumption. So the higher the MPG, the fuel each additional 10 MPG saves. The rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km for this reason. Each person you convince to switch from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan saves 1.33x more fuel than each person in a 25 MPG sedan you convince to buy a 50 MPG Prius. And improving a tractor trailer's efficiency from 6 MPG to 7 MPG saves more fuel per mile than switching from a sedan to a Prius, despite the "improvement" being 1 MPG vs 25 MPG.)
On top of this, the predominant cause of delays when accessing a SSD are the small file (4k) read/writes. And this drive less than doubles those (140-210K IOPS, vs about 100-130K IOPS with current SATA3 SSDs).
No, the problem is loans. The top 1% aren't amassing wealth by stealing it from the other 99%. The 99% are willfully agreeing to hand it over to them in the form of interest on all sorts of loans.
Productivity gains haven't translated into increased real income for two main reasons: Increased cost of housing, and increased cost of education. The market price for homes is determined almost entirely by how much people are willing to pay, not by how much it costs to build. If cost were the predominant factor, homes would depreciate as they got older, like cars. Instead they appreciate because of widespread availability of credit (loans) and increased demand (population is increasing, land area is not).
Look at the long-term inflation-adjusted home prices. From the 1890s to 1930s the average real home price decreased as you'd expect from technological progress making them cheaper to construct. But in 1934 the National Housing Act was passed, then Fannie Mae was created in 1938, then the GI Bill after WWII. Real home prices began climbing until they stabilized at nearly double what they were pre-1930 (the graph is a log scale). All of these programs allowed people to cheaply borrow money. If you double the amount of money people are able to use to bid on a home, of course the price of a home is going to double. It happened again during the housing bubble of the 2000s. Extremely low interest rates and relaxed lending standards meant a lot of money was borrowed cheaply, and when lots of people can borrow lots of money, they bid up the price of large purchases like houses.
The same thing has been going on with college education. People wring their hands over the increasing cost of college tuitions which have been vastly outpacing the rate of inflation, asking why is this happening? It's damn obvious why it's happening - the widespread availability of college loans. We've got a perverse positive feedback loop where college gets expensive, people argue that students need assistance to pay for it so we make programs to provide them low-interest loans. That borrowed money allows students to bid up the price of tuition (the school raises the price beyond a point where the student would normally decline to attend because of the high tuition, but instead they get a student loan and pay the higher tuition). That allows tuition to increase even more, leading to people arguing for more student assistance.
So it's the loans which are causing the rise in price of these non-commodity big-ticket items, which are eating up a huge portion of our productivity gains since the early 1900s. The next question is, who is the beneficiary of all these loans? Well to loan someone money, you have to have money. In other words, the 1%. You get a 30-year mortgage whose amortization means half of your total payments will go to principal, half to interest. Basically you're buying a house, and agreeing to pay for an identical house for a 1%er. (Slightly less due to inflation, but we're in a low-interest rate period. At an 8% interest rate, it's 62% interest, 38% principal. At the 16% interest rate of the early 1980s, its 79% interest, 21% principal.)
You want to stop the transfer of wealth to the 1%? Get rid of the loans. Ratchet back the maximum duration of a loan to 15, then 7 years, and make it harder to roll over balances from end of one loan to the start of another. Cap the interest rate so the percentage that's paid to interest over the life of the loan can't exceed 25% or 33%. Yes this will make it harder to buy a house or get an education - that has to happen if you want the price of those things to drop. People will have to learn to save first, buy later; instead of buy now, pay for it later. If you want to assist low-income people trying to buy a home or go to college, do it with supply-side subsidies. Build more government-funded or government-sponsored housing to increase the supply of housing. Create more public universities with capped tuitions to increase the supply of education. Don't do it with things like loans which create more demand.
Historically, unless the countries are at war, these things are returned. When Cuban defectors flew MiGs to the U.S., the planes were returned. Completely disassembled and shipped back in crates, but they were returned. Same thing with the U.S. EP-3E which landed on Hainan Island. China returned it to the U.S., in crates after they'd completely taken it apart, but they returned it. The U-2 plane which the Soviets shot down was also returned, minus the film and a few pieces of the plane which are still on display in a Moscow museum.
If Cuba won't return the missile, that puts them in the company of Iran, who flaunted International law and precedent by not returning the U.S. spy drone which landed in their country, and North Korea, which still holds the USS Pueblo.
And how exactly is a company supposed to make an aliased email account to register its domain, if it doesn't yet own its own domain?
A lot of us older IT folk were forced to register the company's domain in our name using our personal funds because our managers were clueless about the Internet at the time. It was either spend (waste) dozens of hours over several weeks or months trying to explain the importance of a domain to them, during which time someone else or even a competitor could grab the domain. Or pay $5-$7 out of pocket and grab the domain immediately, and deal with reimbursement later.
Actually, yes. It was the most powerful hurricane, but it wasn't the most powerful tropical cyclone. Not by a long shot. There were 4 to 7 more intense cyclones, all in the West Pacific during the 1950s-1970s. (A lot of the early measurements were in inches of Hg, while recent measurements are in mm of Hg. The uncertainty in the measurement of the early "880 mmHg" storms overlaps with the uncertainty in Patricia's 879mm, so they could in fact have been more powerful than Patricia.)
But the media was so busy tripping over themselves to present Patricia as evidence of global warming, that it was commonly misreported as the "most powerful" hurricane ever. Apparently when something happens which supports the hypothesis of global warming, it's ok to abuse a linguistic curiosity to manufacture a story (tropical cyclones are called typhoons, hurricanes, or cyclones depending on which part of the world they happen in, even though they're all the same thing). Thus it becomes evidence of pro-global warming bias in the media rather than evidence for the prediction of super hurricanes.
As for evidence of super hurricanes, of the 77 cyclones on Earth measured to have reached 900 mmHg pressures or lower (arbitrary cutoff, I picked it because that's the highest the West Pacific data on that Wiki page goes, feel free to crunch the numbers yourself):
1935 = 1
1950s = 11
1960s = 15
1970s = 13
1980s = 15
1990s = 8
2000s = 6
2010s = 8 (projects to 13 by the end of the decade)
Bear in mind that before the 1970s, we didn't have global weather satellite coverage, so there were probably a lot of powerful storms in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s that aren't on that list because they were too far from shore for us to measure or even know about. Looking at that list, not only does it look like the super hurricane hypothesis is wrong, but that the opposite has been happening. We've been getting fewer powerful storms than in the past, not more. And what's really going on is probably just temporal bias - the tendency for you to remember recent events more strongly than events which happened in the distant past.
BTW, typhoon Tip (1979) was a monster - nearly half the size of the continental U.S. Not only was it the most powerful storm, it was biggest. Patricia, Wilma, Katrina, Rita were all wild storms. But they're like little children compared to Tip.
It's worth pointing out that the U.S. became the industrial powerhouse it is by ignoring European patent and copyright law during the late 1800s/early 1900s, and illegally building tools and products based on European designs.
I'm of the opinion that IP holders have gotten fat and lazy by manipulating the legal process to extend IP law and duration far, far beyond the point where it's helpful to the economy. And if China can build this stuff cheaper and better by flaunting IP law, then the world will be better for it even if it screws over the IP holders. That's not to say IP is useless. Just that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, and it needs to be swung back to return us to the point where IP law is benefiting society.
It's important to realize that such an economy is highly dependent on cheap energy. Replicator technology basically uses as much energy as a 6 megaton nuke to create a cup of Earl Grey tea (excluding the cup, saucer, and spoon). That's roughly the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear reactor operating for 9.5 months. Or $750 million worth of electricity at the average U.S. price of $0.12 per kWh.
If you look at our modern culture, it's basically the same thing. Higher standard of living is a direct result of access to cheap energy. We don't have to spend 2/3rds of our waking lives working in the fields just to grow enough food for us to eat because we have cheap energy to power machines to do the work for us. If you want to grow a garden for some of your food for entertainment, by all means do so. But don't fall for the fantasy that you can become self-sufficient by doing so. At least not with a lot of manual labor or access to cheap external energy sources to do that labor for you. (The graphic assumes about 2300 kcal/day per person. If you work the fields yourself, you're looking at more like 3500-5000 kcal/day.)
Let's see... Typical refrigerator has a volume of approx 16 cubic feet on the refrigerator side, or 453 liters. Figure 1/3 of that is take up by food or held in drawers. That gives approx 300 liters of chilled air which falls out as you hold the door open looking at the contents.
Figure room temperature is 20 C and the refrigerator is 2 C. At this temperature range, air has a density of about 1.25 kg/m^3, and a heat capacity of 1.005 kJ / kg*K. We have (1.25 kg/m^2) * (0.3 m^3) = 0.375 kg of air. (0.375 kg) * (20C - 2C) * (1.005 kJ / kg*K) = 6.784 kJ of energy which is lost every time you open the refrigerator door (well, added to the interior of the refrigerator). Since the air is chilled via a heat pump, this isn't its actual energy use. The best refrigerators typically have a real-world COP (coefficient of performance) of about 3, or 1 Joule of electricity us used to pump out 3 Joules of heat. So 6784 Joules of heat represents 2261 Joules of electricity used.
If the camera and associated circuit board use 2 Watts while active, then opening the refrigerator door uses as much energy as keeping the camera powered up for (2261 Joules) / (2 Watts) = 18.8 minutes. If the screen uses 20 Watts, then the total 22 Watts consumption means you'd have to stare at the screen for 1.7 minutes to use as much energy as opening the door once. If it uses 0.1 Watts while idle (around what a smartphone uses), then opening the refrigerator door once is enough to power it for 6.3 hours.
Based on these back of the envelope calcs, I'd say the camera + monitor uses less energy than opening the refrigerator door. I should note though that 2261 Joules is 0.000628 kWh, or about 0.0075 cents worth of electricity. So we're really picking over minutiae (unless you're in a habit of holding the refrigerator door open long enough for food to start warming up). The convenience of the camera and remote monitoring is a bigger factor, though I'd probably lose the built-in screen (the most expensive part of the system) and rely on a phone or computer to view the contents.
Glass doors work in the oven because the inside his hotter than the outside. In a refrigerator, the inside is cooler. If the glass does not provide enough insulation, it will allow more heat to enter than the rest of the refrigerator surface, resulting in the glass being cooler. In certain climates, this will cause condensation to form on the glass. (The same thing happens in reverse in ovens - if you're baking a particularly moist meal like a turkey for a long time, condensation will form on the glass on the inside).
The insulation in refrigerators has become incredibly efficient - able to keep the contents cool for over a day without power if you don't open the door. To match that with glass would probably require some sort of transparent vacuum vessel. Ask anyone in their 40s or older about vacuum thermoses (modern ones just use insulation and are not as good). They frequently cracked and compromised the vacuum, making them useless. If it cracks in a refrigerator, you don't have the option to stop using it until you can replace the broken part. This would cause it to bleed energy until you got it replaced.
So although a glass window would be simpler in construction, it's actually more complicated in terms of functionality. Given that CCD cameras have dropped to a few dollars in cost, it's actually the simpler solution. What makes it expensive is the huge-ass 21.5" 1080p monitor they decided to stick on the door. If they'd left that out and just let you view the video stream on your phone or computer, this would be a really cheap and simple upgrade.
But doing all these things required learning new skills and effort. Most people are lazy. Sites like GeoCities and then MySpace allowed you to create these things with minimal effort. All you had to do was give up control over where your content was hosted. Same goes for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail, and eventually Facebook.
Complexity is what let the marketing assholes win. Open source programmers enjoyed and encouraged the class stratification it created between programmers and users. No longer were they hidden in the basement keeping the world's infrastructure running, suddenly they were in the spotlight with users begging them for features and bug fixes. So instead of making the tools for running your own email server or website dirt simple to set up and use, they reveled in the complexity of the software they wrote and dismissed the calls for user friendliness from "luddites."
Consequently, when some clever marketer set up a service which was easy to use, regular non-programmers flocked to them. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. all emphasize simplicity and ease of use, almost to a fault. Faced with a choice between giving up their privacy, vs giving up their time to read through reams of Howtos to learn how the hell to compile and configure Apache and PHP, most regular people opted for the former. The money these companies make is just icing on the cake - Google and Facebook didn't make a dime until after they were successful.
Craigslist is a good example of what can happen, what could have happened, if someone interested in open source and free services actually puts effort into making their service easy for the lay person to use. Unfortunately most open source projects are too full of themselves, seeing themselves not as bettering mankind, but controlling a tool which they "magnanimously" allow luddite users to use. Go ahead. I dare you. Go to any open source project site, say you're not a programmer and then dare to suggest that maybe they could make their software easier to use or set up. Most people working in open source demand payment, just not in the form of money. They demand gratitude, acknowledgment, and worship. Given a choice between increasing their userbase by 10x or 100x by making their software easier to use and set up, they'd rather keep it difficult to use as a way to maintain their position of power over the users'. Hell, Linux never rose about 1% of the end-user market until Google prettied it up and made it easy to use in the form of Android.
Marketers just seized upon an opportunity. That opportunity was created by the arrogance of open source developers in not understanding the laziness of users.
That's not really where TFA errs. It errs in assuming that " the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner" is directed "toward women." Ask any non-programmer who has asked for help or requested a feature in an open source project. They're usually met with a boorish, condescending, objectifying response even if they're male.
Basically Perens wrote a critique of the Open Source culture. He unnecessarily cast it in terms of misogyny instead of making it a general treatise on behavior among programmers.
Which would be fine if someone else had set up the unclassified email system, and she happened to use it because she didn't know better. That would make her the innocent victim you're trying to cast her as.
But she directed the (illegal) unclassified email system to be made. She was in charge of making sure that even though it was skirting the law, it would be set up in such a way that at least the spirit of the law was fulfilled if not the letter. She did not. That makes her culpable for having received classified emails on the system she ordered be created. Basically, she wanted the ability to CYA by withholding her government emails from the public record, and willfully scarified the security of state secrets to obtain that ability.
It's the flip side of the Android OS fragmentation issue. Yeah if you force all your users to upgrade to the latest OS, there's less fragmentation. But it creates these types of usability problems. (Which the press mostly chooses to ignore because they're in love with Apple. "Upgrade to a newer Android phone" is not viewed as a solution to the Android fragmentation problem. But "Upgrade to a newer iPhone" is viewed as an acceptable solution to these OS-induced performance issues.)