You forget, emacs once (jokingly) stood for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping." You know how much memory emacs uses today? Eight megs. Now find an app that does everything that emacs can in less than tens times that much memory.
The third best is electric heat pumps, because you are burning something at the powerplant then converting that heat to electricity with less than 100% efficiency and then converting the electricity back to heat(again less than 100% efficiency).
Actually heat pumps have greater than 100% efficiency, usually called "Coefficient of Performance". This is because the heat energy you are putting into your house doesn't come from the electricity to run the pump but from the "free" heat in the air/ground outside. The pump just moves that energy from the outside in, and usually, 1 J of electricity will move more than 1 J of heat. Otherwise, you'd just convert that 1 J of electricity to heat directly since that would involve a cheaper machine -- a resistor vs. a compressor and large heat exchanger.
state sponsored nuclear terror was practiced live and in action on civilians by the USA (viz Nagasaki and Hiroshima)
The nuclear attacks by the US had the same (and in some cases fewer) casualties than conventional bombings. There were no such things as smart bombs. Wars were fought back then by killing as many people as you could. The atomic bombs were essentially a psychological weapon: no more destructive than firebombing, but a hell of a lot scarier. If anything, they probably saved lives compared to a full scale invasion of Japan.
Yes, but they still have to pay a "fair price" for the land. Apparently "Give us your home for whatever amount of money we decide to pay you" is reasonable seizure.
My point was that I was in the same general range. We're only using about 25% more electricity than you. As to why we're using more,
We have two computers that run full time. If each is using 200 watts, that's 1750 kWh per year, each.
I'd guess that our water heater uses quite a bit of power, since our electric bill actually went up in winter.
We have an AC in summer.
Since this is a rather cheap apartment, I'd be surprised if the appliances were high efficiency anything.
The big energy consumers in a house are hvac, refrigerators, and computers. Both of us have gas heat, so that's irrelevant. You have an extra fridge and a half, but ours may be low efficiency, so that's a wash. We have an extra computer, electric water heat, and an AC. For energy usage that would most increase with more people -- hot water and hvac -- you use gas.
I pay around $75 a month for electricity in a two-person apartment. At 10 cents a kWh, that's pretty close to the 11,000 figure. That's with electric water heater, oven, range. How the hell are you managing a $10/month electric bill? Unless your using candles and forgoing a fridge, that's damn impressive.
economy is not about money. Money is merely a score-keeper.
Money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a measure of accounting; all things that are quite important to any economy. I'm not sure what kind of score you'd try using money to keep.
I think your comment is wrong because economically it may be better to be green.
A clean environment is a Public Good. It makes little sense for an individual to try to clean up the environment alone. They will see very little of the total benefit, and all of the cost. The only effective way to achieve an efficient level of environmental protection is some type of government intervention.
What is the economic impact of complete destruction of the liveable ecosystem?
Well, now that's just being melodramatic. Since a clean environment is a public good, we need to government to step in. As people get richer and the environment gets worse, they will put a greater value on cleaning things up and enact tougher pollution mandates/taxes. See the Environmental Kuznet's Curve. Pittsburgh's a damn bit cleaner now than it was 70 years ago.
I'd put it at about $100 trillion, personally, perhaps even $1 quadrillion. Just a pittance, really.
Since $100 trillion is less than ten times US annual GDP, you're probably lowballing on "Complete Destruction." Of course, Complete Destruction is not going to happen, and measuring the actual damages that will occur both in total value and in "fairness" is probably just about impossible.
Honestly, I kind of felt like the response was a subtle jab at how silly and stupid the question was.
The idea doesn't really seem to far-fetched to me. It really sounds like the situation with privateers a few hundred years ago, where civilians were authorized to commit otherwise criminal acts against enemy possessions.
A soldier is a soldier, and one who isn't trained or able to help his fellow soldier when the crap hits the fan is being a poor soldier.
I doubt there'll be much crap flinging at an office building in Louisiana. Now if these guys are actually going to be stationed in a combat zone, then there's more reason for them to have the same PT requirements.
That's what I'm talking about, not code recompilation. That's fine and all, but don't confuse it with transparent portability.
You're right that languages like Java and Python are much easier to port than C, but porting is the developer's problem, not the user's. When the software is open source, it is highly likely that, for major applications, some developer has already ported it to whatever architecture you may be interested in using. Debian runs on 11 architectures. When I used gentoo (perhaps not the best example of user-friendliness though) on a PPC, there was no difference using the open source packages compared to x86. It was the same case when I used Debian -- a little more friendly -- on a couple of sparcs. Now you can download Ubuntu for x86, amd64 and SPARC (and previously PPC), and I don't think you'll find anything much friendlier than that.
I don't think there's any question that higher level runtimes make porting easier, but to say that, for the past ten or more years, it hasn't been possible and easy for a user to drop Debian or BSD on whatever hardware he would care to use is just wrong
If they do something like cast pointers in to a 32-bit integer (which for some reason some people do) you are screwed, barring doing some rewriting.
I was under the impression that you could compile sparc apps to run in 32bit mode and that this was commonplace for performance reasons due to shorter pointer lengths.
While it isn't going to happen tomorrow or anything, I could very well see in 10 years that there are multiple different architectures for desktop systems. Nobody cares about that because the OS handles all the details, your apps run on any of them. People simply buy on price and performance criteria.
If the OS is open source unix, it happened yesterday.
It makes execution a lot faster than bytecode interpreting, and it makes development a lot faster than static (c-style) compilation. So yes, having a native compiler as part of the runtime is a very nice feature. In fact, lisp even lets you do things like implement a natively compiled python without having to do any work on code generation.
The only way to compile such code statically would be to link against a Python compiler that can create the new opcodes from newly-generated source on the fly.
And that's what lisp was doing about 25 years ago.
It's true that the US could sacrifice a commodity here or there to poaching, but it's a slippery slope problem, do you permit some, and then say - that's enough? no, you fight against the tide of dumping at the first turn.
Dumping/predatory pricing is certainly bad, and I don't think any free trade advocate would support it. But allowing the unrestrained import of fairly priced goods that can be more efficiently produced abroad will absolutely benefit the US.
The US has decent farmlands, but labor is problematic (most is illegal now), and Brazil has presumably very low standards for labor (Think Chavez?).
Chavez is Venezuela; Lula is Brazil.
If we didn't protect farmers from under-regulated markets, we couldn't sustain the additional costs of post-chavez labor reforms.
Yes, eventually the rest of the world will catch up to the US in terms of standard of living and labor costs. I've seen the beginnings of this happening in India, and the dropping dollar is another indicator. However, this process won't happen overnight, ie it will not be an economic shock. Even afterwards, the problem will still be one of scarce resource allocation. Free markets solve this problem very well and will determine the most efficient producers better than government would.
The ramble on IP is an op-ed, I'm sure many share your opinions; however, I'm a little unconvinced that IP isn't as important as you suggest. I think it is work in the same way that sewing jeans is work, and deserves not to be stolen.
If I take your jeans, you no longer have them. If I build a copy of your jet engine, it has absolutely no effect on your ability to build your own jet engines (joint markets aside). That is the fundamental difference between tangible goods and information. No question that both tangible goods and information cost money to develop, but the marginal cost of information after it is initially created is negligible.
I am suggesting that an economy which trades in tangible goods, while "stealing" or otherwise free-riding less-tangible goods rather than participate in the free-flow of currency is "Hoarding" in the most classic meaning of the term, and this creates a moral dilemma which bears consideration.
There would certainly be benefit in global patents as the larger market could support a larger development investment. It's tough to call appropriation of patents stealing or hoarding since it doesn't deny the original holder their use, though.
if we stop practicing the art of farming in the US - I shouldn't even have to explain this.
Yes you should. What happens if we stop growing sugar and oranges in the US? Brazilian farmers collude to raise prices? We'll just ship more from Mexico or Indonesia. It's unlikely we'd stop all domestic food production. The US has some very good farmland, and mechanized production should be competitive with cheap labor for some crops. It's just foolish to try to domestically produce crops that can be grown much more cheaply in other nations.
Even if Chinese food were cheaper, permitting it to come in would drive domestic production out, and where would quality be then?
Health wise, any minimally reasonable food standards would apply equally to both domestic and imported foods. Taste wise, if I could buy stringy chicken for half price, I probably would.
If China were to pay for the IP it consumes from the US,
One cannot consume an idea. Patents and copyright exist for the singular purpose of recovering the fixed costs of development; they are decidedly not for the purpose of extracting perpetual rents. If a US patent was developed without thought of selling to the Chinese market, the US firm would lose nothing if the patent were used by a Chinese firm for Chinese sale only, because the proceeds from "lost" Chinese sales would not have been factored into the initial development investment. Of course, now that we are in a global economy, it is sensible for patents and copyrights to have global scope.
One area where the world is free-riding off the US is patented drugs. Other nations enact price controls putting prices barely above the marginal cost, while here in the US the drug companies are allowed to charge monopoly prices for the duration of the patent. Consequently, US consumers are left paying the vast majority of the development cost for the drug.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Go "States Rights!"
You forget, emacs once (jokingly) stood for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping." You know how much memory emacs uses today? Eight megs. Now find an app that does everything that emacs can in less than tens times that much memory.
M-x viper
Actually heat pumps have greater than 100% efficiency, usually called "Coefficient of Performance". This is because the heat energy you are putting into your house doesn't come from the electricity to run the pump but from the "free" heat in the air/ground outside. The pump just moves that energy from the outside in, and usually, 1 J of electricity will move more than 1 J of heat. Otherwise, you'd just convert that 1 J of electricity to heat directly since that would involve a cheaper machine -- a resistor vs. a compressor and large heat exchanger.
The nuclear attacks by the US had the same (and in some cases fewer) casualties than conventional bombings. There were no such things as smart bombs. Wars were fought back then by killing as many people as you could. The atomic bombs were essentially a psychological weapon: no more destructive than firebombing, but a hell of a lot scarier. If anything, they probably saved lives compared to a full scale invasion of Japan.
Well, according to Vint Cert, who actually did invent the Internet, Al Gore played no small part: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html
Hmm, so how old are C, unix, and the x86?
Yes, but they still have to pay a "fair price" for the land. Apparently "Give us your home for whatever amount of money we decide to pay you" is reasonable seizure.
($75/mo) * $(1kWh/$.10) * 12mo/yr = 9000kWh
My point was that I was in the same general range. We're only using about 25% more electricity than you. As to why we're using more,
The big energy consumers in a house are hvac, refrigerators, and computers. Both of us have gas heat, so that's irrelevant. You have an extra fridge and a half, but ours may be low efficiency, so that's a wash. We have an extra computer, electric water heat, and an AC. For energy usage that would most increase with more people -- hot water and hvac -- you use gas.
I pay around $75 a month for electricity in a two-person apartment. At 10 cents a kWh, that's pretty close to the 11,000 figure. That's with electric water heater, oven, range. How the hell are you managing a $10/month electric bill? Unless your using candles and forgoing a fridge, that's damn impressive.
Money is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a measure of accounting; all things that are quite important to any economy. I'm not sure what kind of score you'd try using money to keep.
A clean environment is a Public Good. It makes little sense for an individual to try to clean up the environment alone. They will see very little of the total benefit, and all of the cost. The only effective way to achieve an efficient level of environmental protection is some type of government intervention.
S/MIME requires going through a CA to get your key signed. PGP's web-of-trust makes more sense for individuals.
Well, now that's just being melodramatic. Since a clean environment is a public good, we need to government to step in. As people get richer and the environment gets worse, they will put a greater value on cleaning things up and enact tougher pollution mandates/taxes. See the Environmental Kuznet's Curve. Pittsburgh's a damn bit cleaner now than it was 70 years ago.
Since $100 trillion is less than ten times US annual GDP, you're probably lowballing on "Complete Destruction." Of course, Complete Destruction is not going to happen, and measuring the actual damages that will occur both in total value and in "fairness" is probably just about impossible.
I'm sorry. Are you chromatically challenged?
Pro/E supports Linux
The idea doesn't really seem to far-fetched to me. It really sounds like the situation with privateers a few hundred years ago, where civilians were authorized to commit otherwise criminal acts against enemy possessions.
I doubt there'll be much crap flinging at an office building in Louisiana. Now if these guys are actually going to be stationed in a combat zone, then there's more reason for them to have the same PT requirements.
You're right that languages like Java and Python are much easier to port than C, but porting is the developer's problem, not the user's. When the software is open source, it is highly likely that, for major applications, some developer has already ported it to whatever architecture you may be interested in using. Debian runs on 11 architectures. When I used gentoo (perhaps not the best example of user-friendliness though) on a PPC, there was no difference using the open source packages compared to x86. It was the same case when I used Debian -- a little more friendly -- on a couple of sparcs. Now you can download Ubuntu for x86, amd64 and SPARC (and previously PPC), and I don't think you'll find anything much friendlier than that.
I don't think there's any question that higher level runtimes make porting easier, but to say that, for the past ten or more years, it hasn't been possible and easy for a user to drop Debian or BSD on whatever hardware he would care to use is just wrong
I was under the impression that you could compile sparc apps to run in 32bit mode and that this was commonplace for performance reasons due to shorter pointer lengths.
If the OS is open source unix, it happened yesterday.
It makes execution a lot faster than bytecode interpreting, and it makes development a lot faster than static (c-style) compilation. So yes, having a native compiler as part of the runtime is a very nice feature. In fact, lisp even lets you do things like implement a natively compiled python without having to do any work on code generation.
And that's what lisp was doing about 25 years ago.
Tell that to all the starving brokers, bankers, and actuaries working on Wall St. They probably won't even hear you over their perpetual "Ka-Ching."
Dumping/predatory pricing is certainly bad, and I don't think any free trade advocate would support it. But allowing the unrestrained import of fairly priced goods that can be more efficiently produced abroad will absolutely benefit the US.
Chavez is Venezuela; Lula is Brazil.
Yes, eventually the rest of the world will catch up to the US in terms of standard of living and labor costs. I've seen the beginnings of this happening in India, and the dropping dollar is another indicator. However, this process won't happen overnight, ie it will not be an economic shock. Even afterwards, the problem will still be one of scarce resource allocation. Free markets solve this problem very well and will determine the most efficient producers better than government would.
If I take your jeans, you no longer have them. If I build a copy of your jet engine, it has absolutely no effect on your ability to build your own jet engines (joint markets aside). That is the fundamental difference between tangible goods and information. No question that both tangible goods and information cost money to develop, but the marginal cost of information after it is initially created is negligible.
There would certainly be benefit in global patents as the larger market could support a larger development investment. It's tough to call appropriation of patents stealing or hoarding since it doesn't deny the original holder their use, though.
Yes you should. What happens if we stop growing sugar and oranges in the US? Brazilian farmers collude to raise prices? We'll just ship more from Mexico or Indonesia. It's unlikely we'd stop all domestic food production. The US has some very good farmland, and mechanized production should be competitive with cheap labor for some crops. It's just foolish to try to domestically produce crops that can be grown much more cheaply in other nations.
Health wise, any minimally reasonable food standards would apply equally to both domestic and imported foods. Taste wise, if I could buy stringy chicken for half price, I probably would.
One cannot consume an idea. Patents and copyright exist for the singular purpose of recovering the fixed costs of development; they are decidedly not for the purpose of extracting perpetual rents. If a US patent was developed without thought of selling to the Chinese market, the US firm would lose nothing if the patent were used by a Chinese firm for Chinese sale only, because the proceeds from "lost" Chinese sales would not have been factored into the initial development investment. Of course, now that we are in a global economy, it is sensible for patents and copyrights to have global scope.
One area where the world is free-riding off the US is patented drugs. Other nations enact price controls putting prices barely above the marginal cost, while here in the US the drug companies are allowed to charge monopoly prices for the duration of the patent. Consequently, US consumers are left paying the vast majority of the development cost for the drug.