There are numerous examples of books where the original text has passed out of copyright but the copy you buy in the shop is still copyright because copyright covers the layout, pagination, cover illustration, any changes to the text, additional commentary, etc etc. You could copy the text and submit it to Gutenberg but you can't just photocopy the book.
AIUI... The amount of work that went into a piece is a key measure as to whether it falls under copyright (at least in the UK). You can't, for example, typically claim copyright on the name of a record or book because not enough creative process when into it.
I'm seriously torn here about whether I support the museum or the little guy. I don't think anyone would argue that the original pictures are in the public domain but that isn't what is being shown on Wikipedia, what is getting shown there is a photograph of a public domain work. I think it's fair to argue that a non-trivial amount of work went into taking these photographs and therefore they fall under copyright legislation. If you think it was a trivial amount of work ask yourself how long it took a professional photographer to capture all these shots - I'll bet it ran to at least several weeks of work and probably more (at 20 paintings a day it would be 30 weeks work and I doubt they could do twenty a day).
On the other hand this museum is paid for by the people and presumably the payment to have the photographs taken was also public money. I would say, therefore, that there is a strong argument that these photographs should be in the public domain (at least for residents of the UK). Strengthening the freedom argument, to my mind, is the fact that the museum doesn't allow people to take their own photographs in effect causing a monopoly situation on public works.
I don't see how traffic shaping can really work over the long term especially if the main reason for it is to try to stop an activity like P2P which for the most part is in a legally grey area at best. I could understand the ISP offering to route certain types of traffic with a higher priority (assuming you can identify that type of traffic) but something like P2P traffic could be made to just hide amongst the other encrypted traffic.
I'm sure this is already being done but spotting probably P2P traffic should be fairly easy since the source and destination will probably be in residential netblocks. You could even use the IP address range filter used to stop spamming. Of course this would catch VOIP as well but I don't suppose most ISPs care all that much.
Damn you Linux hippes. On my Windows client I'm getting nothing but adverts to make up for all the ones you aren't getting. Yet another reason to hate the penguin.
Slow down cowboy. I make a good living writing webapps so if anyone should want everything to be delivered as a webapp it should be me but I just don't see it happening in the near future. On paper there is nothing stopping it from happening, we've been down the thin client road before and some of the new webapps are very feature rich. In reality though I think we will hit many of the same problems thin clients did. In fact in many respects I think we are starting from a worse position because network latency is much higher over the Internet than it is over a local network. Combine that with the fact that all the applications are developed in Javascript and presented through a multitude of browsers and you have a difficult target to hit.
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".
I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.
I think you are perhaps missing the point a little. It's not that people support Windows it's that they don't see any huge benefit to moving to another operating system. It's as if they are sitting at the top of a hill and you are asking them to walk down into a valley and back up another hill. Unless the view from the other hill is a LOT better they just aren't going to do it.
I switched to Linux because I'm a software developer and there are some real compelling reasons to switch but that isn't the case for the vast people.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of Chrome. I suspect that it will go absolutely nowhere fast. The only chance it has is OEM installs but unless it's amazingly well polished people will just choose MS because it's simpler to get all their applications working on it.
I've always wondered how useful these images really are. Perhaps to the trained eye they can reveal a lot about how a persons brain works but they have always struck me as being too abstract. We can point at a portion of the image and say that bit controls movement, for example, but if anything goes wrong we are stuck because at a fundamental level we don't understand how it controls movement. I suppose it's a bit like looking at a block diagram for a CPU and not understanding how each bit works.
It will be interesting to see how we achieve the next level of understanding of the brains functioning. I can't see that we will ever get there with MRI or electrode probes because, I think, they are simply too large to get a true understanding of what is going on. I suspect we will gain our understanding through modelling but I'm not sure I'll be around when we do.
I think this is really good news for Linux but I'm going to hold off on breaking out the party hats and balloons for a little while. My main reservation is that it sounds like Google is changing a lot of the basic infrastructure. I'm sure they have studied all aspects of their proposed changes in detail but I'd like to see their reasoning as to why it needs to change. What we have at the moment is not perfect but it's understood and has been shown to work fairly well for many years.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen them team up with Ubuntu and produce a truly world class operating system there. Starting almost from scratch and developing a completely new windowing system seems like a very hard way to enter the market. I suppose though is you are going to re-develop a major portion of a Linux distribution the windowing system would be the place to do it. I've got nothing particularly against X but it feels clunky and stuck in the past.
What I'm trying to say is that the brave folks colonizing the Americas could, if necessary, have picked up a stick and killed an animal to eat and then washed it down with water from the nearest stream. They needed nothing more than what their environment naturally provided to survive.
Contrast this with the moon where everything that you want, for the foreseeable future at least, will have to be flown from Earth. It might be possible to mine the Moon for minerals and even produce air eventually but we are a long long way from being able to do that. Just look at the difficulty we have keep the space station running and that's only a few hundred kilometers away.
I couldn't agree with you more. Sending humans to the moon just seems to be a willy waving exercise presumably to impress the Chinese. To be honest I'm not sure that going back to the moon is all that useful at all at the moment. There are far more interesting moons that we could be sending probes too.
About this point in the discussion of the space program we see the people who think we need to get the human race off this planet so that if / when something bad happens to Earth we have a "backup" for our species. They, of course, have not the slightest clue how difficult (probably impossible with current technology) it would be to live on the Moon or Mars. Just look at the attempts humans made at colonizing the Americas and Australia - it didn't go well at first and those places had air, water, soil, animals etc.
Those crazy US politicians are so slow with this sort of privacy infringing legislation, they need to get their act together and get into the big leagues like the UK politicians who proposed essentially this idea on or before 6th June 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4610755.stm). The people weren't over the moon at the idea so instead the government have supported building a nationwide ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system which is pretty much the same end result. What's really great is they are now talking about hooking up all the CCTV cameras in the street to facial recognition systems so they can track pedestrians too. I'm sure we'll get the sat nav system first though - eroding privacy and passing dumb legislation seems to be the only thing we're good at any more.
The stupid thing is that I think if this system could be put together in such a way that it wasn't the worlds biggest privacy problem it could be quite useful. For a start it would map all the drivable roads in the country. Every car could / would have sat nav and it could be used to route around road network problems. Road network designers would love the anonymous data on traffic loads and common paths and I'm sure people would find stacks of other good uses for this data.
I'm sure that you really truly want to be the first person to colonize Mars and that you 100% believe that you could stand the isolation. The problem is that the people that send you there are going to need a bit more than just your willingness. The last thing they want is to see you begging to come home after six months because you think it's been a huge mistake.
Long term isolation is extremely difficult for humans so cope with, if it wasn't they wouldn't use isolation as punishment. There are some people that can just about cope with it but when was the last time you saw a hermit portrayed as normal and well adjusted?
Think about the conditions the likely first inhabitants are going to experience (assuming they go for good). The people you go up there with are the only ones you will see for the rest of your life. It's likely there won't be very many of them, maybe ten or so. You will never be able to go outside again. You will never see a blue sky or feel the wind on your face. All ten of you will live in a clinical metal box probably not much bigger than the average house. There will be no popping out for a beer or a meal with friends. You won't even be able to hold a proper conversation with anyone back home as there is a transmission time of 5 to 20 minutes _each_way_.
He started to talk about one way trips to Mars. That last statement just made him sound like a crack pot loony. Even if we could find a few people willing to (say they will) live on Mars for their days, in conditions that would make your average prison look spacious and well lit, I don't think the general public would accept it. Most people would think we were sending nutjobs into space and a fair portion would demand that we have some way to bring them back.
As for the other stuff, sounds good. Ares I is shaping up to just a be rehash of what we already have. While it's certainly very expensive to build a new man-rated rocket are we really saying that it's so expensive it's not worth capitalizing on the advances of the last 40 years and sticking with the original craft?
I hadn't considered lens flare as a cause but having said that it doesn't look like any lens flare I've ever seen. I was wondering if it might be a form of chromatic aberration although that normally seems to result in a blue / purple edge to items. I suspect the camera they are using in the IIS is somewhat special though and it could have a weakness that causes it to record very bright tiny white points as green (e.g. the point covers less than one whole pixel and preferentially activates green). Of course none of that accounts for few fairly clear blue points of light.
Thanks for the link some of those pictures are amazing. Being a UKian I was quite interested in the picture of London at night (shame it's a little blurred). I downloaded the largest version of the image though (about 1.9mb) and noticed something strange. There are a surprisingly large number of green dots and a few blue dots. What I'm wondering is: are the green dots traffic lights and the blue emergency services?
I could maybe believe that the blue lights are emergency vehicles since they will typically have an uninterrupted path to the camera but traffic lights almost always have a cover which I would have thought would make them hard to spot from above. Perhaps they are just artefacts of low light photography. I'd be interested to know though.
I can't put out more carbon than has been absorbed or you would be creating matter. Charcoal is produced by carbonizing wood, all the energy for the carbonization process is provided by sacrificing some of the wood that is being carbonized (except for the match that started the process).
Roughly four tons of wood will produce a ton of charcoal. Most of the lost mass is water vapour. I admit some carbon dioxide is released but that would probably have been released anyway as the tree rotted when it died.
The primary advantage of the charcoal route to carbon removal is that the end material is very stable and we can just bury it or scatter it about. There's no messing around trying to make the oceans fizzy or what not. The other advantage is that we already have billions of collection towers in the form of trees.
While the deal that you were offered is totally nuts I don't think this deal is the same sort of thing. The impression I got was it simply acts as a base station for up to four registered phones. Personally, I think there is some scope for the system you describe if the pricing and technology are put together in the correct package.
For example, imagine you live in a remote area with no / limited mobile coverage, your mobile provider offers you this deal: you buy your broadband and a mobile contract off them at a reasonable price, the package comes with a femtocell which also acts as a wireless internet router. The router is promiscuous for mobile calls but locked down for data. Obviously you don't get charged for routing calls over your internet connection in fact you could even get credits for routing other peoples calls.
I agree that Vodafones coverage isn't what it could be but that is a criticism that could be made of any of the mobile providers. In my experience Vodafone isn't much better or worse than any other provider it really depends on where you are. What we really need is for some Government intervention to allow the mobile providers a bit more freedom in putting up masts. They have bent over backwards to placate pressure groups and it's left us with beautifully hidden but rather patchy mobile phone system. More pressure to force the big players to work together to carry each others calls would also be very welcome so that in remote areas we don't need half a dozen masts because they won't play together. Having lived in a house with very poor reception for a year I would happily welcome one of these femtocells into my home.
At the end of the day we have got to do something about the "carbon-in-the-atmosphere" problem and while this idea might not be fantastic it could be a step in the right direction. I actually think this is probably just the same carbon capture technology that they are planning on fitting to coal fired power stations (good overview in tabs - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8014295.stm) in which case it would make more sense to capture it at source and not waste energy in transmission.
Personally I would like to see more research into using charcoal to capture the carbon. The idea goes like this: grow trees (fast growing trees), carbonize them into charcoal, plough them into the nations fields. Carbonizing them is messy but a self powering step and it can produce industrially useful chemicals. Ploughing the charcoal into the fields will improve the soil quality.
Twenty steps to proper condom usage? I think I know where the problem might be. If you want widespread adoption you have got to get that down to at most three or four clear steps with cartoon drawings and a catchy slogan.
The subsidies thing always seems a little strange to me. I can understand subsidising a new industry (for example wind power) for a while until it gets on it's feet but subsidizing coal just seems plain crazy. It's crazy because the subsidy can't be providing any real benefit to country since there is minimal R&D and expansion follows market growth. There is only one pot of money and all the subsidy is doing is changing how that money is transferred from the people to the company and, in the process, distorting the market price of coal. If we stopped subsidizing power generation tomorrow all that would happen is bills would go up (and hopefully taxes down) and we might get a chance to produce some fairly clean power for once.
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There are numerous examples of books where the original text has passed out of copyright but the copy you buy in the shop is still copyright because copyright covers the layout, pagination, cover illustration, any changes to the text, additional commentary, etc etc. You could copy the text and submit it to Gutenberg but you can't just photocopy the book.
AIUI... The amount of work that went into a piece is a key measure as to whether it falls under copyright (at least in the UK). You can't, for example, typically claim copyright on the name of a record or book because not enough creative process when into it.
I'm seriously torn here about whether I support the museum or the little guy. I don't think anyone would argue that the original pictures are in the public domain but that isn't what is being shown on Wikipedia, what is getting shown there is a photograph of a public domain work. I think it's fair to argue that a non-trivial amount of work went into taking these photographs and therefore they fall under copyright legislation. If you think it was a trivial amount of work ask yourself how long it took a professional photographer to capture all these shots - I'll bet it ran to at least several weeks of work and probably more (at 20 paintings a day it would be 30 weeks work and I doubt they could do twenty a day).
On the other hand this museum is paid for by the people and presumably the payment to have the photographs taken was also public money. I would say, therefore, that there is a strong argument that these photographs should be in the public domain (at least for residents of the UK). Strengthening the freedom argument, to my mind, is the fact that the museum doesn't allow people to take their own photographs in effect causing a monopoly situation on public works.
...bow down to our giant blobby overloads.
Hey, someone had to burn some karma it might as well be me.
I don't see how traffic shaping can really work over the long term especially if the main reason for it is to try to stop an activity like P2P which for the most part is in a legally grey area at best. I could understand the ISP offering to route certain types of traffic with a higher priority (assuming you can identify that type of traffic) but something like P2P traffic could be made to just hide amongst the other encrypted traffic.
I'm sure this is already being done but spotting probably P2P traffic should be fairly easy since the source and destination will probably be in residential netblocks. You could even use the IP address range filter used to stop spamming. Of course this would catch VOIP as well but I don't suppose most ISPs care all that much.
Damn you Linux hippes. On my Windows client I'm getting nothing but adverts to make up for all the ones you aren't getting. Yet another reason to hate the penguin.
Slow down cowboy. I make a good living writing webapps so if anyone should want everything to be delivered as a webapp it should be me but I just don't see it happening in the near future. On paper there is nothing stopping it from happening, we've been down the thin client road before and some of the new webapps are very feature rich. In reality though I think we will hit many of the same problems thin clients did. In fact in many respects I think we are starting from a worse position because network latency is much higher over the Internet than it is over a local network. Combine that with the fact that all the applications are developed in Javascript and presented through a multitude of browsers and you have a difficult target to hit.
Long live the desktop application!
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".
I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.
I think you are perhaps missing the point a little. It's not that people support Windows it's that they don't see any huge benefit to moving to another operating system. It's as if they are sitting at the top of a hill and you are asking them to walk down into a valley and back up another hill. Unless the view from the other hill is a LOT better they just aren't going to do it.
I switched to Linux because I'm a software developer and there are some real compelling reasons to switch but that isn't the case for the vast people.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of Chrome. I suspect that it will go absolutely nowhere fast. The only chance it has is OEM installs but unless it's amazingly well polished people will just choose MS because it's simpler to get all their applications working on it.
I've always wondered how useful these images really are. Perhaps to the trained eye they can reveal a lot about how a persons brain works but they have always struck me as being too abstract. We can point at a portion of the image and say that bit controls movement, for example, but if anything goes wrong we are stuck because at a fundamental level we don't understand how it controls movement. I suppose it's a bit like looking at a block diagram for a CPU and not understanding how each bit works.
It will be interesting to see how we achieve the next level of understanding of the brains functioning. I can't see that we will ever get there with MRI or electrode probes because, I think, they are simply too large to get a true understanding of what is going on. I suspect we will gain our understanding through modelling but I'm not sure I'll be around when we do.
I think this is really good news for Linux but I'm going to hold off on breaking out the party hats and balloons for a little while. My main reservation is that it sounds like Google is changing a lot of the basic infrastructure. I'm sure they have studied all aspects of their proposed changes in detail but I'd like to see their reasoning as to why it needs to change. What we have at the moment is not perfect but it's understood and has been shown to work fairly well for many years.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen them team up with Ubuntu and produce a truly world class operating system there. Starting almost from scratch and developing a completely new windowing system seems like a very hard way to enter the market. I suppose though is you are going to re-develop a major portion of a Linux distribution the windowing system would be the place to do it. I've got nothing particularly against X but it feels clunky and stuck in the past.
What I'm trying to say is that the brave folks colonizing the Americas could, if necessary, have picked up a stick and killed an animal to eat and then washed it down with water from the nearest stream. They needed nothing more than what their environment naturally provided to survive.
Contrast this with the moon where everything that you want, for the foreseeable future at least, will have to be flown from Earth. It might be possible to mine the Moon for minerals and even produce air eventually but we are a long long way from being able to do that. Just look at the difficulty we have keep the space station running and that's only a few hundred kilometers away.
I couldn't agree with you more. Sending humans to the moon just seems to be a willy waving exercise presumably to impress the Chinese. To be honest I'm not sure that going back to the moon is all that useful at all at the moment. There are far more interesting moons that we could be sending probes too.
About this point in the discussion of the space program we see the people who think we need to get the human race off this planet so that if / when something bad happens to Earth we have a "backup" for our species. They, of course, have not the slightest clue how difficult (probably impossible with current technology) it would be to live on the Moon or Mars. Just look at the attempts humans made at colonizing the Americas and Australia - it didn't go well at first and those places had air, water, soil, animals etc.
Zero point energy has no downsides, I'm going to attach one to my flying car when the Government stops suppressing the technology.
Those crazy US politicians are so slow with this sort of privacy infringing legislation, they need to get their act together and get into the big leagues like the UK politicians who proposed essentially this idea on or before 6th June 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4610755.stm). The people weren't over the moon at the idea so instead the government have supported building a nationwide ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system which is pretty much the same end result. What's really great is they are now talking about hooking up all the CCTV cameras in the street to facial recognition systems so they can track pedestrians too. I'm sure we'll get the sat nav system first though - eroding privacy and passing dumb legislation seems to be the only thing we're good at any more.
The stupid thing is that I think if this system could be put together in such a way that it wasn't the worlds biggest privacy problem it could be quite useful. For a start it would map all the drivable roads in the country. Every car could / would have sat nav and it could be used to route around road network problems. Road network designers would love the anonymous data on traffic loads and common paths and I'm sure people would find stacks of other good uses for this data.
I'm sure that you really truly want to be the first person to colonize Mars and that you 100% believe that you could stand the isolation. The problem is that the people that send you there are going to need a bit more than just your willingness. The last thing they want is to see you begging to come home after six months because you think it's been a huge mistake.
Long term isolation is extremely difficult for humans so cope with, if it wasn't they wouldn't use isolation as punishment. There are some people that can just about cope with it but when was the last time you saw a hermit portrayed as normal and well adjusted?
Think about the conditions the likely first inhabitants are going to experience (assuming they go for good). The people you go up there with are the only ones you will see for the rest of your life. It's likely there won't be very many of them, maybe ten or so. You will never be able to go outside again. You will never see a blue sky or feel the wind on your face. All ten of you will live in a clinical metal box probably not much bigger than the average house. There will be no popping out for a beer or a meal with friends. You won't even be able to hold a proper conversation with anyone back home as there is a transmission time of 5 to 20 minutes _each_way_.
He started to talk about one way trips to Mars. That last statement just made him sound like a crack pot loony. Even if we could find a few people willing to (say they will) live on Mars for their days, in conditions that would make your average prison look spacious and well lit, I don't think the general public would accept it. Most people would think we were sending nutjobs into space and a fair portion would demand that we have some way to bring them back.
As for the other stuff, sounds good. Ares I is shaping up to just a be rehash of what we already have. While it's certainly very expensive to build a new man-rated rocket are we really saying that it's so expensive it's not worth capitalizing on the advances of the last 40 years and sticking with the original craft?
I hadn't considered lens flare as a cause but having said that it doesn't look like any lens flare I've ever seen. I was wondering if it might be a form of chromatic aberration although that normally seems to result in a blue / purple edge to items. I suspect the camera they are using in the IIS is somewhat special though and it could have a weakness that causes it to record very bright tiny white points as green (e.g. the point covers less than one whole pixel and preferentially activates green). Of course none of that accounts for few fairly clear blue points of light.
Thanks for the link some of those pictures are amazing. Being a UKian I was quite interested in the picture of London at night (shame it's a little blurred). I downloaded the largest version of the image though (about 1.9mb) and noticed something strange. There are a surprisingly large number of green dots and a few blue dots. What I'm wondering is: are the green dots traffic lights and the blue emergency services?
I could maybe believe that the blue lights are emergency vehicles since they will typically have an uninterrupted path to the camera but traffic lights almost always have a cover which I would have thought would make them hard to spot from above. Perhaps they are just artefacts of low light photography. I'd be interested to know though.
I can't put out more carbon than has been absorbed or you would be creating matter. Charcoal is produced by carbonizing wood, all the energy for the carbonization process is provided by sacrificing some of the wood that is being carbonized (except for the match that started the process).
Roughly four tons of wood will produce a ton of charcoal. Most of the lost mass is water vapour. I admit some carbon dioxide is released but that would probably have been released anyway as the tree rotted when it died.
The primary advantage of the charcoal route to carbon removal is that the end material is very stable and we can just bury it or scatter it about. There's no messing around trying to make the oceans fizzy or what not. The other advantage is that we already have billions of collection towers in the form of trees.
I saw one of those "Free Skype for Life" 3 adverts the other day and couldn't help thinking of the old classic:
While the deal that you were offered is totally nuts I don't think this deal is the same sort of thing. The impression I got was it simply acts as a base station for up to four registered phones. Personally, I think there is some scope for the system you describe if the pricing and technology are put together in the correct package.
For example, imagine you live in a remote area with no / limited mobile coverage, your mobile provider offers you this deal: you buy your broadband and a mobile contract off them at a reasonable price, the package comes with a femtocell which also acts as a wireless internet router. The router is promiscuous for mobile calls but locked down for data. Obviously you don't get charged for routing calls over your internet connection in fact you could even get credits for routing other peoples calls.
I agree that Vodafones coverage isn't what it could be but that is a criticism that could be made of any of the mobile providers. In my experience Vodafone isn't much better or worse than any other provider it really depends on where you are. What we really need is for some Government intervention to allow the mobile providers a bit more freedom in putting up masts. They have bent over backwards to placate pressure groups and it's left us with beautifully hidden but rather patchy mobile phone system. More pressure to force the big players to work together to carry each others calls would also be very welcome so that in remote areas we don't need half a dozen masts because they won't play together. Having lived in a house with very poor reception for a year I would happily welcome one of these femtocells into my home.
At the end of the day we have got to do something about the "carbon-in-the-atmosphere" problem and while this idea might not be fantastic it could be a step in the right direction. I actually think this is probably just the same carbon capture technology that they are planning on fitting to coal fired power stations (good overview in tabs - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8014295.stm) in which case it would make more sense to capture it at source and not waste energy in transmission.
Personally I would like to see more research into using charcoal to capture the carbon. The idea goes like this: grow trees (fast growing trees), carbonize them into charcoal, plough them into the nations fields. Carbonizing them is messy but a self powering step and it can produce industrially useful chemicals. Ploughing the charcoal into the fields will improve the soil quality.
Twenty steps to proper condom usage? I think I know where the problem might be. If you want widespread adoption you have got to get that down to at most three or four clear steps with cartoon drawings and a catchy slogan.
The subsidies thing always seems a little strange to me. I can understand subsidising a new industry (for example wind power) for a while until it gets on it's feet but subsidizing coal just seems plain crazy. It's crazy because the subsidy can't be providing any real benefit to country since there is minimal R&D and expansion follows market growth. There is only one pot of money and all the subsidy is doing is changing how that money is transferred from the people to the company and, in the process, distorting the market price of coal. If we stopped subsidizing power generation tomorrow all that would happen is bills would go up (and hopefully taxes down) and we might get a chance to produce some fairly clean power for once.